Though necessarily less active by reason of advancing age than he was a quarter of a century ago, when he succeeded in forcing the hand of the Government of the day to the extent that he extracted a promise of the establishment of a Diet in 1890, and though nominally he has retired from active political life, Count Itagaki Taisuke is still a power in the land of his birth, highly respected for his strict integrity of purpose, absolute sincerity, and wide philanthropy. As one of the leading spirits in the development of the project of Restored Imperial Rule he was particularly energetic in the years immediately preceding the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and displayed military ability of a high order in the War of the Restoration.

Born in the province of Tosa on the 17th of April 1837, of Samurai parents, he applied himself as a youth with much ardour to martial exercises, and was proficient in all the arts that the youth of the warrior caste was, in the palmy days of the Tokugawa Administration, expected to excel in. At Kochi, the chief town of Tosa, he devoted himself to military studies, and devoured such works on strategy as were then available, with the result that when the stupendous struggle of 1868 took place between North and South he was given the command of a division, in the army of the Imperialists, and displayed invincible talent in the leadership of his men throughout the campaign under Prince Arisugawa Taruhito and Marshal Saigo Takamori. The Tosa men were conspicuous for their steadiness, and were pronounced, in respect of drill and discipline, to be in the front rank of the forces that overcame the adherents of the Shogunate and made practicable the entire abolition of that long-cherished feudal system which so greatly retarded Japan’s progress.

As a reward for the eminent services rendered by him in the war, Itagaki Taisuke was made a Sangi in the new Government, this being a position comparable to that of a Cabinet Minister at the present day. When, in the discussion of Korean affairs a sharp divergence of opinion was manifested in 1873-4 among the members of the Dai-jo-kwan or Governing Council, and the war party led by Saigo Takamori was outvoted, those who sided with him, one of whom was Itagaki, resigned office, and from that time forward Tosa, whither Itagaki promptly returned and vigorously applied himself to the formation of a democratic party, became known as the nursery of advanced political aspirations and the primary source whence sprang an irresistible undercurrent of opinion tending towards representative government.

As a matter of fact Itagaki had himself sent up a memorial to Government at the time he quitted the Council, urging the institution of a national assembly, and when he retired from the capital he found ready to his hand the nucleus of the political association that he had it in mind to form in the shape of the Ri-shi-sha, a Society which had been organised for the purpose of promoting the interests of those who espoused the popular cause. Though the Government rejected his memorial, Itagaki had reason to think that his plea had not been wholly unnoticed, inasmuch as an edict appeared summoning the Local Governors to consult at headquarters on matters of provincial administration, the improvement of communications, the regulation of public meetings, and so on, and in 1875 the Gen-Ro-In, or Senate (lit.: Congress of Elders), was established and discharged its functions as a legislative body until it was superseded by the Diet in 1890. The Local Governors met again in 1878, and meanwhile the Satsuma clan had revolted and the country had been plunged into civil war. Itagaki and his friends had seized the right moment to point out how beneficial in allaying internal dissensions would be the institution of a Parliament which should voice the opinions and hopes of the nation. A memorial addressed by them to the Emperor urged that there could be nothing that would more directly lead to the welfare of the people than for the sovereign to signify once for all his disapproval of despotic measures and to emphasise his wish that public opinion should be consulted in regard to the conduct of affairs of State. The effect of this action on the part of the Emperor, pleaded the memorialists, would be that concurrently with the establishment of a representative assembly the people would show greater zeal in regard to the country’s vital concerns and would be able to take a genuine interest in its affairs, while with the disappearance of all traces of despotism the aspirations of the masses would rise to a higher plane and civilisation would be advanced simultaneously with the increase of national wealth and the cessation of internecine jealousies and antagonism.

The leaven had been introduced into the mass of the more reflective section of the population, it was clear, and Itagaki, in his retired home at Kochi, became the acknowledged head of the Jiyuto, or Party of Freedom, a term which has come into general use as signifying the Liberal Party as distinct from the Progressive Party originated by Count Okuma some fifteen months later. Tosa had long been the centre, in fact, of an agitation which in 1881 assumed truly formidable proportions, and its endeavours bore fruit in the autumn of that year in the form of an Imperial Rescript, dated the 12th October, in which his Majesty announced the grant of a constitution, to take effect in 1890, and his intention of convoking a Diet for the discussion of national affairs.

Throughout the preceding period of eight years the party headed by Itagaki Taisuke had never wavered in its resolute advocacy of the popular cause, though its members were often the objects of violent opposition from reactionary zealots, whose antagonism in the case of Itagaki himself took the form of a desperate assault, perpetrated by a youth whose imagination had become fired with a mistaken notion of serving his country, and who at Gifu stabbed, almost to death, the Jiyuto leader who at the time was engaged in making his first tour of the provinces after the establishment of the party on a definite basis. Fortunately the intending assassin’s aim was disturbed, for he failed to strike in a vital spot, and after a time Itagaki recovered, but he was perilously near sharing the fate of so many of his fellow-countrymen who have at various times suffered for their prominence in national politics. As has often been the result of political crimes, too, the foul deed had precisely the opposite effect to that which its perpetrator doubtless intended, for the exclamation of Itagaki as he fell to the ground,—“I may die, but freedom never!”—rang through the land, and did more to knit together the bonds of Liberalism than even floods of oratory could possibly have achieved.

The following year Itagaki journeyed in company with his life-long friend and fellow-clansman, Goto Shojiro, to America and Europe, and his subsequent career was inseparably connected with the spread of Liberal ideas among his countrymen, and of preparation for the exercise of those rights and privileges guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Eventually the control of the Jiyuto passed in great measure to Count Ito, and the party was dissolved, to be resuscitated on a new footing in connection with the Constitutionalists. But this did not occur until various attempts had been made in the direction of Government by party, a system which, from one cause or another, seems in Japan to be doomed to failure. Itagaki was Home Minister in the Third Ito Cabinet, which fell in August 1896, and when in June 1898 Marquis Ito went out of office, he recommended that a trial should be given to party Government, and that the formation of a Cabinet should be entrusted to Counts Itagaki and Okuma. The experiment was in no sense to be regarded as satisfactory, and the rivalries that had formerly existed, and had merely been temporarily suppressed, were revived in an aggravated form. In less than six months the internal disagreements found vent in an open quarrel, and the idea of establishing Government on a party basis was abandoned if not for ever at least for an indefinite period. There was a brief repetition of the experiment in 1900-1, extending over seven months in all, when Marquis Ito headed his fifth Cabinet, but the result was no better, and save for that short interval the administration has been for the past seven years avowedly conducted on non-party lines.

The Jiyuto formed by Count Itagaki (who received his title in 1887) no longer exists, for it was abolished, to all intents and purposes, in 1900, and its place has been occupied more or less by the Sei-yu-kai, or Constitutional party, which was headed until July 1903 by Marquis Ito, and since that date has had as its president the Marquis Saionji. Count Itagaki has ceased to figure on the political stage in anything approaching the degree to which he at one period of his career filled the public eye, but there is ample ground for the conviction that his influence is yet very appreciable in Liberal circles, albeit many younger men than himself have recently come to the front. Close upon seventy years of age, he surely has earned the right, after a strenuous life, to retire from the political arena, and it is indisputable that he enjoys the respect and confidence of the entire nation in those minor enterprises which have of late received a large share of his attention, and which have as their object, for the most part, the amelioration of the lot of the poor of his own province, or are kindred efforts in the cause of humanity at large.