PEASANT ORGANISATIONS AND LAND REFORM 41 conditions similar to those existing under the feudal system predominant before the Tokugawa regime fell in 1868. Formation of Agricultural Cooperatives Officials and certain groups of landlords later began to be concerned about the threat to social stability arising from the tendency towards increasing landlessness. Around 1890 efforts were undertaken to regulate tenancy through legislation. Cooperative associations to protect small farmers and to maintain a ^'stable rural society"'0 were initiated. From 1891 appropriate cooperative legislation was under consideration until in 1900 the Industrial Cooperative Law was promulgated (dealing mainlv with agricultural cooperatives). A little earlier in 1899, an Agricultural Association Law had been passed to create associations designed to improve agricultural methods. It his^ however, been noted that none of these measures sought to tackle agricultural problems by means which would be in any way inimical to the interests of the landlords. The Agricultural Association Law, in fact, helped to confirm and organise the power of the landlords in the villages. The most that such measures could hope to do about the tenancy system was to check its spread by strengthening the position of the peasant proprietor who still owned his own land and by saving him from the indebtedness which might end in its loss. The influence of the landlords was at this time sufficiently powerful for there to be no question of the bureaucracy taking any action detrimental to their interests.4 In this period about one-third of the members of the Diet (National Congress) directly represented the agrarian landed class.6 It was more or less in the same period that the Public Order Police Law was promulgated (March 1900), prohibiting organised action by the workers on the grounds that this would constitute a disturbance of public peace. The cooperatives were generally a federation of buraku (hamlet) organisations. Burakus are clusters ot 30 to 40 farming households, representing extended families. The structure of government administration introduced after the Meiji Restoration was designed to control such local organisations from above.6 A group of burakus together constituted a village and the villages were integrated into prefectures. The national government exercised authority over the prefectures and through these down to the village and buraku levels. A similar heirarchy existed in the agricultural association also. "Both... had government stimulation and encouragement, and both were made up almost exclusively of landlords. Since there was little horizontal association among farmer-cultivators— no sense of unity had developed among them—the landlords, through their mutual associations operating as village level organisations, were the bases for prefectural and national federations."7