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When the news of this disaster reached Rome the Senate refused to ratify the peace, and resolved that the two Consuls and all the officers who had sworn to the peace should be delivered up to the Samnites as persons who had deceived them. They were conducted to Caudium by a Fetialis; and when they appeared before the tribunal of C. Pontius, Postumius, with superstitious folly, struck the Fetialis with his foot, saying that he was now a Samnite citizen, and that war might be renewed with justice by the Romans, since a Samnite had insulted the sacred envoy of the Roman people. But Pontius refused to accept the persons who were thus offered, and told them, if they wished to nullify the treaty, to send back the army to the Caudine Forks. Thus Postumius and his companions returned to Rome, and the 600 knights were alone left in the hands of the Samnites.

Throughout the reservation those most deeply affected by the messiah belief have been appointed spies over the others. If any persist in the use of old medicine paraphernalia, they are reported at once and harassed by threats of plague, sickness, ill-luck, disaster, and even death, which Das Lan claims to be able to cause or to dispel at pleasure. Once the threat is made, nothing unwelcome can happen to one under the ban that is not immediately attributed, by all the medicine-man's disciples, to the disfavor of the gods; and nothing more potent is necessary to convert the unbeliever, for there is no Indian reared in the wilds who is not steeped in the belief that his gods are all-powerful in both causing and eradicating every ill.

These ideas, first formulated in secret by scholars, gradually filtered down, still in secrecy, and were accepted by a large number of the samurai, the military literati of the land. Their opposition to the actual rulers of the land, aroused by the individual-crushing absolutism of the Tokugawa rule, naturally allied itself to the religious sentiment of loyalty to the Emperor. Few Westerners can appreciate the full significance of this fact. Throughout the centuries loyalty to the Emperor has been considered a cardinal virtue. With one exception, according to the popular histories, no one ever acknowledged himself opposed to the Emperor. Every rebellion against the powers in actual possession made it the first aim to gain possession of the Emperor, and proclaim itself as fighting for him. When, therefore, the scholars announced that the existing government was in reality a usurpation and that the Emperor was robbed of his rightful powers, the latent antagonism to the Tokugawa rule began to find both intellectual and moral justification. It could and did appeal to the religious patriotism of the people. It is perhaps not too much to say that the overthrow of the Tokugawa family and the restoration of the Imperial rule to the Imperial family would have taken place even though there had been no interference of foreign nations, no extraneous influences. But equally certain is it that these antagonisms to the ruling family were crystallized, and the great internal changes hastened by the coming in of the aggressive foreign nations. How this external influence operated must and can be told in a few words.

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