PREFACE THIS is a study of a career and of an enterprise that were misconstrued by their own generation. They demand requital from generations that are to come. As a romance in the stirring period of American history the life of Anson Burlingame deserves a biographer capable of giving its epic movement lasting literary form. My purpose in these pages has been less ambitious. So far as the character of the man is concerned I have tried to show that it was justly estimated by few even of those who admired him; that the work he set out to perform was left uncompleted but did not end in failure. Yet the real importance of Anson Burlingame lies not so much in the man or in the endeavour as in the use of an idea which he made the guiding principle of his service abroad. He believed in the practical application to the business of diplomacy of one of those commandments upon which hang all the law and the prophets: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." With this precept in control I have endeavoured to show how he secured first a hearing, then attention, and at last the conversion of the most disdainful group of civilised officials in Asia. Once won to a belief in his adherence to the Confucian maxim of trying to place one's self in the other side's position, these self-opinioned statesmen determined to engage his co-operation in setting their country right before the world, while they addressed themselves to the herculean labour of bringing a recreant court to reason and of leading the Chinese Empire out of its isolation. The far-reaching wisdom of the Burlingame policy of awaiting a natural reversal in China instead of pressing her refractory people by force of arms is acknowledged by the great powers to-day. As a policy it appears to be the only provident prophylaxis against the evils involved in the alternative of interference and subjection. Fifty years ago, when the white man recognised no limit to the prevalence of newly perfected weapons which he alone employed, this was not generally perceived. With such advantages on their side it was natural that representatives of the Western world should clamour for a physical conquest that seemed easily within their reach. I have tried to treat the exponents of this element of our own civilisation with justice and even with consideration. It has been shown, I think, that their attitude was the same among all the Nationals represented in the Far East. But the fact must not be obscured that the cupidity of this group of foreigners, when alarmed for the safety of their commercial profits, was the chief cause of the defeat of the Burlingame doctrine and its relegation for a generation to the limbo of exploded theories. The begetter of this great idea has suffered in reputation under its eclipse. A worse thing has befallen. Though his plan has been revived the dignity of his name has never been vindicated. His idea has become the professed policy of the nations during China's present turmoil, but his clear right to its authorship and the splendid spontaneity of his championship of a discredited people in the hour of their abasement has been obscured and even denied. It was he who first declared abroad the necessity of assisting China to find herself, and of elevating the diplomacy of Western powers in Asia to something higher than securing for their traders the largest possible advantages in a sec ular struggle for profits. He recognised, what the merchants themselves could not comprehend, that there was danger to China in summarily accepting the materialism of the West; and danger to China meant and still means the cancellation of every political equation in the arrangement of civilised society. In this sense it appears to me that Mr. Burlingame can properly be called the father of the open-door principle which Mr. Hay proposed as a symbol for the unification of outside interests when China threatened, in a moment of aberration, to become a derelict among nations. The power of urbanity, its importance as an international asset, especially when dealing with exotic peoples, is not sufficiently realised by Western states. Mr. Burlingame's credit in China, secured by the exercise of his unfailing courtesy, needs to be studied as a lesson by the men of our race. His personal popularity was too lightly dismissed by his countrymen as a thing apart from the real work of diplomacy; his affability and his enthusiasm led them to underrate a quick inventive brain. And while he was not taken seriously enough by contemporaries during life, after his untimely death he was dis |