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world, if the nations of Europe were to fall upon her once more and destroy the reigning dynasty. Convinced that he was right, he volunteered his service to a great state that no one in authority was willing to befriend, because he was, in the words of Prince Kung, "a man of honour and peace."

D

THE MISSION IN AMERICA

URING the voyage of thirty days across the Pacific to California, Mr. Burlingame

enjoyed abundant opportunity for discussing with his associates the problems of the Mission and of resolving the policy likely to bring them to a successful issue. There is, so far as is known, no minute of his own upon this supreme affair of his life. He pondered deeply; he discussed freely with those who could aid with their experience or suggestions; he did not write. Discussion with him was a means of clearing the mind and of approaching conclusions. He had little patience for inditing letters and none at all for that laborious relegation of thoughts and impressions to note-books or diaries which characterises some men of action.1 He had been charged to exercise his discretion in representing the case of China before the civilised world, but, as we have seen, he had received no instructions directing or limiting him in the execution of this large order. The

1“Writing was labour and weariness to him," says Senator Blaine. "It seemed impossible for him to establish a rapid transit between his brain and the end of a pen." ("Mr. Burlingame as an Orator," Atlantic Monthly, November, 1870.)

Chinese commissioned with him were present in the rôle of "learners" rather than as coadjutors; from them nothing was to be expected except the service of communicating with their government. It speaks well for the dignity of that government and for the regard in which the members of his suite held him, that no criticism of his policy seems to have either come from Peking or reached the Tsung-li Yamên through the private correspondence of any one of them. ! No diplomatic venture of similar importance in modern times has left so meagre a record of authentic documents or been aspersed by its detractors with a slighter basis of proofs upon which to establish their objections. It is the absence of documentary material that makes it difficult to meet these aspersions by the categorical denial which is fairly justified by every reasonable inference from known facts.

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Such measure of success and failure as re'sulted from this experimental embassy was due to the temperament of its chief, who was at once its origin and conclusion. His graciousness and his fine assurance of better things prevailing not only made converts to his ideas wherever he went but conveyed a conviction of sincerity. There are few public careers in recent history which exhibit such powers of win

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ning the minds of others. Some such quality as his is found at rare intervals among great religious leaders, the force of whose appeal rests its divine sanction. The Methodist prayerleader's son had developed in the school of politics a gift of persuasion like that which his father had employed in another sphere, and the same idealism marked them both. It is a faculty that always wins its audience; but fifty years ago men cared for their intuitions rather than for academic learning, and responded to their preachers and orators rather than to logic. In the case of Mr. Burlingame where there was no pretence, of course, of spiritual dignification this magnetic quality of converting to his own opinion those before whom he stood face to face rose to something higher than the art of the orator; it was an emanation of genius. It is not surprising that a character of this sort should be often misunderstood or that the enemies of his great idea should take advantage of its apparently illogical processes. Its success in prosecuting a plan depended upon personal contact, and it had the inevitable drawback that when that personal contact was removed further accomplishment lagged or became impossible. By keeping in mind the elements of what we nowadays call the "personal equation,"

it will be easier to comprehend how the ideals of its advocate stirred the minds of those to whom this Mission was presented, and why, when his voice was stilled, the generous impulses of Western nations were smothered by the outcry from many whose selfish interests the realisation of these ideals seemed to threaten.

Mr. Burlingame was not unaware of some hostility to his Mission. He could meet opposition, but he was sensitive to criticisms which endeavoured to discredit his enterprise by imputing unworthy personal motives. In a sketch of his career, printed in "Appleton's Annual Cyclopedia" for 1870, an old acquaintance describes in the following anecdote the state of his mind upon arriving in America in an unprecedented rôle: "Just before he left the shores of Asia he saw a newspaper which bitterly denounced him for renouncing his American allegiance, as it charged, to take a lucrative appointment from a foreign power. In the weeks of his long journey across the Pacific, it often oppressed him with gloomy forebodings. Before he reached the Golden Gate they became at times almost unendurable. 'Is it not possible,' he reasoned to himself, 'that Americans may regard my acceptance of this foreign trust as a selling out of my birthright?' He knew he had been con

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