asion of meeting the Embassy sent from the oldest Empire
in the world to the youngest Republic. All share the surprise and
pleasure when the venerable oriental dynasty, hitherto a romantic legend
to most of us, suddenly steps into the fellowship of nations. This
auspicious event, considered in connection with the late innovations in
Japan, marks a new era, and is an irresistible result of the science
which has given us the power of steam and the electric telegraph. It is
the more welcome for the surprise. We had said of China, as the old
prophet said of Egypt, "Her strength is to sit still." Her people had
such elemental conservatism, that by some wonderful force of race and
national manners the wars and revolutions that occur in her annals
proved but momentary swells or surges on the Pacific Ocean of her
history, leaving no trace. But in its immovability this race has claims.

China is old not in time only, but in wisdom, which is gray hair to a
nation, or rather, truly seen, is eternal youth. As we know, China had
the magnet centuries before Europe; and block-printing and stereotype,
and lithography, and gunpowder, and vaccination, and canals; had
anticipated Linnaeus's nomenclature of plants; had codes, journals,
clubs, hackney coaches, and, thirty centuries before New York, had the
custom of New-Year's calls of comity and reconciliation. I need not
mention its useful arts,--its pottery, indispensable to the world; the
luxury of silks; and its tea, the cordial of nations. But I must
remember that she had respectable remains of astronomic science, and
historic records of forgotten time, that have supplied important gaps in
the ancient history of the western nations.

Then she has philosophers who cannot be spared. Confucius has not yet
gathered all his fame. When Socrates heard that the oracle declared that
he was the wisest of men, he said, it must mean that other men held that
they were wise, but that he knew that he knew nothing. Confucius had
already affirmed this of himself: and what we call the Golden Rule of
Jesus, Confucius had uttered in the same terms, five hundred years
before. His morals, though addressed to a state of society utterly
unlike ours, we read with profit to-day. His rare perception appears in
his Golden Mean, his doctrine of Reciprocity, his unerring insight,
putting always the blame of our misfortunes on our selves; as when to
the governor who complained of thieves he said: "If you, sir, were