He expected no such welcome in England as he had received in America. Not only was there a difference in national temperament between the two halves of the Anglo-Saxon race, but Englishmen entertained exaggerated ideas of the significance of this Mission, and were disposed to indulge in assumptions about its immediate purpose which the occasion could not warrant.1 The new treaty was pronounced by the man in the street in London to be an American success obtained from China at the expense of Great Britain. There was not much love lost at that time between Englishmen and Americans; responsibility for the Trent affair, for the Alabama captures, and for paralysis in the cotton industries was still laid at the door of the Yankees while awaiting adjudication in the courts or in the minds of men; and, apart from a general sentiment against America that prejudiced the upper classes in England, the honest

1 This was the case, indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic. The editor of the Eclectic Magazine (New York, September, 1868) hails Mr. Burlingame as the "head of a Mission the most important, perhaps, in the annals of diplomacy, . . . the herald of a new epoch, the inaugurator of a revolution the most momentous the East has seen for two thousand years." A writer in the October number of the Westminster Review describes it as "one of the most irrevocable steps that the Chinese Government has ever taken." Again, "A Resident of Seventeen Years in China" appeals to the London Times (July 8, 1868) against “the attempt on the part of Mr. Burlingame to reverse our policy in China. If Mr. Burlingame succeeds, then, sir, we shall, without a doubt, be involved in wars, though not in the direction indicated by Mr. Burlingame."

1

Englishman was devoutly convinced that China owed everything to his countrymen. To the public at large, mindful of their past achievements, and of the enormous preponderance of their interests in the Far East, Asia as a continent in need of reclamation appeared to be Britain's particular province for exploitation and control. The new treaty seemed to imply a preposterous concession; it recognised the equality of Asiatics with Europeans, and the prospect of the upstart American in a leading rôle, challenging at once the adequacy of the accepted theory and the rationale of British primacy in the East, was repugnant in the extreme.

In contrasting the attitude of America and Europe at this period no inference need be drawn as to the moral superiority of either in its policy toward China. Substantially the same standards obtained on both sides of the intervening ocean. The same arrogance of dominant materialism, slightly mitigated by the gospel of charity, alike controlled all the nations of Christendom, and it controls them still. In the new world, however, where the forces of society were absorbed in repairing the losses of the Civil War and in developing the great resources of the country, Asiatic affairs presented only remote and speculative interests that touched the per

sonal concerns of scarcely one in a hundred thousand of the population. A few moralists and men of ideas could readily arouse audiences to the crying needs of pagan China, and the duties of Christian governments toward a derelict empire that threatened no Western power and even offered prospective advantages of commerce. To common men and politicians who represented them in their legislatures, China was another world. But when their interests at home seemed to be menaced by the presence of a few thousand competing Asiatic labourers in California and elsewhere, the "heathen Chinee" instantly ceased to be the harmless representative of an outworn and necessitous nation, and Americans in their new-found fears arose to denounce him in terms as illiberal as any that had been invented in England. All that can be urged in behalf of the United States at this juncture is the fact that its government resolutely sustained its honour against the attacks of Congress and the politicians by enforcing treaty protection, and that a sturdy minority of thoughtful men there remained true to the Burlingame doctrine of laissez vivre toward China.

In Europe the problem of China was of more pressing importance. England's stake in the Oriental trade, being greater than that of any

other nation, gave her a sort of primacy in ordering the policy of the West toward the East. Her success in this great business had bred up a considerable number of men whose wealth, accumulated in dealings with Asiatics, brought them prominence at home and prestige as experts in an obscure and difficult process. They were accustomed to be consulted in all matters involving Eastern peoples. Their authority was thought to be justified by the prudence and skill with which they had won prosperity under anomalous conditions. They cannot, on the whole, be accused of impropriety so far as their personal transactions with the Chinese were concerned. But merchants, as a class, are never idealists, or the best representatives of the highest ethical standards of their country, nor are they apt to be progressives. Men of this very proper sort, having spent the best years of their lives in amassing fortunes amongst alien peoples in whose institutions they had no concern, kept aloof from the "natives" while residing in the East, but confidently aired their opinions upon Oriental subjects on returning home where there were few to dispute their claims to wisdom. "There is perhaps no country in the world frequented by the English-speaking race," writes one of the ablest British consuls of this period,

"in which merchants are so lamentably ignorant of the customs and resources of the locality in which they live as they are at this moment in China, and this is entirely to be attributed to a want_of familiarity with the language.” Yet this was the class with which England took council - a class inheriting traditions formed under the old East India Company régime, with such enlargements as their wider opportunites suggested. Successful collisions with the Chinese authorities had taught them that any object might be attained in that land if a European government could be induced to support it by a show of force. They were much too limited in their political insight to perceive that this method of promoting trade operations involved such loss of prestige to the Chinese state as to bring about the series of rebellions that had already devastated two-thirds of China and sapped its resources. These rebellions, moreover, opened the way to a new species of Europeans, sheer adventurers whose presence in the empire stul

1 W. H. Medhurst, "The Foreigner in Far Cathay," London, 1872, p. 30. 2 A memorial of Messrs. Jardine, Matheson & Co., to the governor of Hongkong acknowledges that "the privileges conceded by the treaty, the enforcement of which we now advocate, were at the time of their concession calculated, perhaps, to throw broadcast upon the empire a lawless body of men, unacquainted with restraint and amenable to no authority; for not only was the general temper of the foreign mind then exultant and unruly, but the common desire of both imperialists and rebels to avail of them for military purposes had attracted to the shores