Show JAPANESE ARISTOCRACY Give Up Their Powers to Strengthen a Central Government Cincinnati Enquirer Undoubtedly the most powerful and at the same time exclusive aristocracy was that of the Dalmos or territorial lords of Japan prior to the great social revolution of 186S There were fewer than 300 of these great lords Their power within their own provinces was almost absolute and they owed merely a nominal allegiance to the sovereign Yet in 1S69 241 out of less than Or Daimos voluntarily surrendered their powers and their possessions Into the hands of the emperor In order that iJ centralized government might conduct the affair of the empire in a manner more in accordance with those western ideas which the nation was then making mak-ing up its mind to adopt and from this surrender the phenomenal progress of Japan as a world power undoubtedly dates A somewhat similar case maybe may-be found In the history of Russia when in the year 13P4 the boyar believing that the tsar Ivan IV afterward known as the Terrible was about to leave them to their own intrigues anti domestic strifes = laid all the privileges of their order at his fet to induce him to return I was from this act of selfabnegation that the traditional autocracy au-tocracy of the Russian empire practically prac-tically begins |