which Japanese astuteness sought to place in his way, Perry delivered to the representatives of the Shōgun the letter of President Fillimore demanding the establishment of international relations. Then he steamed away to Luchu and China. Next spring he returned for an answer. The answer took the shape of Japan's first foreign treaty, which was signed at Kanagawa on the 3ist March, 1854. By this treaty the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate were opened to American trade, and good treatment promised to shipwrecked American mariners. Such were the first-fruits of the triumph over Japan's stubborn refusal to recognise the existence of the outside world. Treaties with the other nations of Christendom, and a revolution which, after plunging Japan into confusion and bloodshed, has regenerated on Western lines all her institutions, ideas, and aims, this, which it takes so few words to say, but which implies so much, is the result of what Perry was instrumental in doing. Many things precious to the lover of art and antiquity perished in the process. For Old Japan was like an oyster:—to open it was to kill it.
Perry being thus a hero, fancy and myth have already begun to gather round his name. Patriotic writers have discoursed on "the moral grandeur of his peaceful triumph," and have even gone so far as to try to get people to believe that the Japanese actually enjoyed knuckling under to him. The erection in 1901, amid international rejoicings, of a memorial on the spot where the Commodore landed, will assist the mythopœic process, if memory lets slip the circumstance that this memorial was proposed, not by the Japanese, but by an American survivor of Perry's expedition, and that the Japanese government's share in the matter was but a courteous following of American official lead. Perry's was a peaceful triumph only in a catachrestical sense, analogous to that of Napoleon's maxim that "Providence is on the side of the big battalions." To speak plainly, Perry triumphed by frightening the weak, ignorant, utterly unprepared, and insufficiently armed Japanese out of their senses. If he did not use his cannon, it was only because his preparations for using them and his threats
