magnificent idea. His successors
in modern times have but too often availed themselves of force divested
of all ideas, except the idea of bullying or outwitting the Asiatics in
a trade.

As to China, this conduct aroused an insurrection of Chinese conceit
against European conceit. The Chinese were guilty of the offence of
calling the representatives of the proudest and most supercilious of all
civilizations, "outside barbarians"; illustrating in this that too
common conservative weakness of human nature, of holding fixedly to an
opinion long after the facts which justified it have changed or passed
away. It certainly cannot be questioned that at a period which, when
compared with the long date of Chinese annals, may be called recent, we
were outside barbarians as contrasted with that highly civilized and
ingenious people. At the time when our European ancestors were squalid,
swinish, wolfish savages, digging with their hands into the earth for
roots to allay the pangs of hunger, without arts, letters, or written
speech, China rejoiced in an old, refined, complicated civilization; was
rich, populous, enlightened, cultivated, humane; was fertile in savants,
poets, moralists, metaphysicians, saints; had invented printing,
gunpowder, the mariner's compass, the Sage's Rule of Life; had, in one
of her three State religions--that of Confucius--presented a code of
morals never become obsolete; and had, in another of her State
religions--that of Buddha--solemnly professed her allegiance to that
equality of men, which Buddha taught twenty-four hundred years before
our Jefferson was born, and had at the same time vigorously grappled
with that problem of existence which our Emerson finds as insolvable now
as it was then.

Well, sir, after all this had relatively changed, after the Western
nations had made their marvellous advances in civilization, they were
too apt to exhibit to China only their barbaric side--that is, their
ravenous cupidity backed by their insolent strength. We judge, for
example, of England by the poetry of Shakespeare, the science of Newton,
the ethics of Butler, the religion of Taylor, the philanthropy of
Wilberforce; but what poetry, science, ethics, religion, or philanthropy
was she accustomed to show in her intercourse with China? Did not John
Bull, in his rough methods with the Celestial Empire, sometimes
literally act "like a bull in a China shop"? You remember, sir, that
"intelligent contraband" who, w