dge of the sword, disarmed the assassin, made the spies'
occupation useless, shamed away the suspicious, and conquered the nearly
invincible prejudices of the government. Despite the awful under-tow in
the immorality of the sailor, the adventurer and the gain-greedy
foreigner, the tide of Christianity began steadily to rise.
Notwithstanding the outbursts of the flames of persecution, the torture
and imprisonment of Christian captives and exiles, and the slow worrying
to death of the missionary's native teachers, inquirers came and
converts were made. In 1868, after revolution and restoration, the old
order changed, and duarchy and feudalism passed away. Quick to seize the
opportunity, Dr. J.C. Hepburn, healer of bodies and souls of men,
presented a Bible to the Emperor, and the gift was accepted.

No sooner had the new government been established in safety, and the
name of Yedo, the city of the Baydoor, been changed into that of
T[=o]ki[=o], the Eastern Capital, than an embassy[25] of seventy persons
started on its course round the world. At its head were three cabinet
ministers of the new government and the court noble, Iwakura, of
immemorial lineage, in whose veins ran the blood of the men called gods.
Across the Pacific to the United States they went, having their initial
audience of the President of the Republic that knows no state church,
and whose Christianity had compelled both the return of the shipwrecked
Japanese and the freedom of the slave.

This embassy had been suggested and its course planned by a Christian
missionary, who found that of the seventy persons, one-half had been his
pupils.[26]

The Imperial Embassy Round the World.

The purpose of these envoys was, first of all, to ask of the nations of
Christendom equal rights, to get removed the odious extra-territoriality
clause in the treaties, to have the right to govern aliens on their
soil, and to regulate their own tariff. Secondarily, its members
went to study the secrets of power and the resources of civilization in
the West, to initiate the liberal education of their women by leaving in
American schools a little company of maidens, to enlarge the system of
education for their own country, and to send abroad with approval others
of their young men who, for a decade past had, in spite of every ban and
obstacle, been furtively leaving the country for study beyond the seas.

In the lands of Christendom, the eyes of ambassadors, ministers,
sec