possessed little or none, by talent, perseverance, patience, tact, exercised year after year,—in a word, by first-rate diplomacy, they gained a complete victory over their adversaries, and at last avenged on the West the violence which it had committed in breaking open Japan a generation before.
From the point of view of patriotic Englishmen, the residents in Japan (that is, the class which possesses the best knowledge of the state of the case) almost unanimously regard the British Foreign Office with contempt, for having allowed itself to be so grossly misled and roundly beaten. But what avails that? It is a hundred years since Nelson noted the humiliating fact that "England seldom gains anything by negotiation, except the being laughed at," and still the Foreign Office slumbers and blunders on as in Nelson's day. Diplomacy is not our talent. We must continue to endure British ineptitude in counsel, as we endure war, pestilence, and American journalism.
Sacrificed, as they have been, on the altar of la haute politique, the only sensible course for the foreign residents to pursue is to make the best of a bad bargain, and that is what they have set themselves to do by arranging for the execution of trustworthy English versions of the codes, such as may acquaint them with the details of their new position under Japanese laws, and by other endeavours to ensure the harmonious working of the new machinery. Down to 1899, their settlements in Japan had formed—as Shanghai still does to-day—a sort of little republic, without political rights, it is true, but also without duties. They paid few taxes, carried on their business free of police inquisition, printed what they liked in their newspapers, and, generally, did what was right in their own eyes. Now all that has been changed, and they must learn to jog along under less favourable conditions. Such miscarriages of justice as the "Kent case," the "Kōbe Water-works case," and the "Clifford Wilkinson case"[1] have not been calculated to reassure their minds as to
- ↑ We cannot here touch the very grave issues of the "Kent case" and the "Water works case." But the "Clifford Wilkinson case" was so grotesquely amusing that not
