It needs only a few words to summarize this period which includes the final days of the two-edged policy of exclusion and inclusion, which forbade not only foreigners to enter, but also Japanese to leave, the country. It would not even allow Japanese ship-wrecked on other shores to be brought back to their native land, as several futile attempts mentioned above attest. Nagasaki was the only place where foreign trade was allowed, and there only in a slight degree with Chinese and Dutch. The events of this period are almost all vain attempts to open Japan. Two important events concern the Loo Choo Islands, then independent, and later visited also by Commodore Perry on his way from China to Japan. Ronald McDonald was an Oregon boy, who, “voluntarily left adrift, got into Yezo, and thence to Nagasaki.” He is reported to have puzzled the Japanese authorities by stating that in America “the people are king and the source of authority”! This period of seclusion came to an end on July 14, 1853, when the Japanese, _contrary to their own laws_, received from Commodore Perry the letter from President Fillmore to the Emperor of Japan.[85] II. _Period of Treaty-Making_ (1854-1858). CHRONOLOGY. 1854. Perry’s treaty of peace and amity. British treaty of peace and amity. 1855. Russian treaty of peace and amity. Terrible earthquake. 1856. Fire in Yedo; 100,000 lives lost. Dutch treaty of peace and amity. Townsend Harris, United States Consul, arrived. 1857. Harris in audience with the Shōgun. 1858. Harris treaty of trade and commerce. Elgin treaty of trade and commerce. [Illustration: PERRY MONUMENT, NEAR URAGA] This is the era which was opened by Commodore Perry, and was almost entirely devoted to the persevering attempts of Perry, Harris, Curtius, Lord Elgin, and others to negotiate treaties, first of friendship and amity, and afterwards of trade and commerce, with Japan. It is rather interesting that the only events chronicled above, besides treaty-making, are terrible catastrophes, which the superstitious conservatives believed to have been visited upon their country as a punishment for treating with the barbarians! It is again a matter of peculiar pride to Americans that the first treaty of friendship and amity was negotiated by Perry; that the first foreign flag raised officially in Japan was the Stars and Stripes, hoisted at Shimoda by Harris on September 4, 1856; that Harris was the first accredited diplomatic agent from a foreign country to Japan; that he also had the honor of the first audience of a foreign representative with the Shōgun, then supposed to be the Emperor; and that he negotiated the first treaty of trade and commerce. III. _Period of Civil Commotions_ (1858-1868). CHRONOLOGY.