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, when asked his opinion of an offending white brother, delicately hinted his distrust by replying:  “Sar, if I was a chicken, and that man was about, I should take care to roost high.”  Well, all that we can say of China is, that for a long time she “roosted high”—­withdrew suspiciously into her own civilization to escape the rough contact with the harsher side of ours.

But, by a sudden inspiration of almost miraculous confidence, springing from a faith in the nobler qualities of our Caucasian civilization, she has changed her policy.  She has learned that in the language, and on the lips, and in the hearts of most members of the English race, there is such a word as equity, and at the magic of that word she has nearly emerged from her isolation.  And, sir, what we see here to-day reminds me that, some thirty years ago, Boston confined one of her citizens in a lunatic asylum, for the offence of being possessed by a too intensified Boston “notion.”  He had discovered a new and expeditious way of getting to China.  “All agree,” he said, “that the earth revolves daily on its own axis.  If you desire,” he therefore contended, “to go to China, all you have to do is to go up in a balloon, wait till China comes round, then let off the gas, and drop softly down.”  Now I will put it to you, Mr. Mayor, if you are not bound to release that philosopher from confinement, for has not his conception been realized?—­has not China, to-day, unmistakably come round to us?