The reason for the preference is appreciated at once by those who have had experience of both. If you call on the American Consul, there is no one to bar your way; you walk straight through into the office and sit down; if you speak English, no other passport or introduction is required, and you start right in and talk to a man who does understand your position, does know what you want to do, for he knows men, and the world, and life, and has not been reared in a cold storage establishment grappling all his days with Mandarin Chinese and fine print. And being a man, he is interested in you and in what you say. Then he says: “I can’t advise you, because you are a British subject; but if you were an American citizen, I should tell you to do what you want to do, and you would get through, because, if any Chinese official wanted to stop you, I should see he didn’t.” If you call upon a big British Consul on business, it is as well to be sure that you have all your identification papers on your person, for you are liable to want them before you reach an inner door. At the Consulate you are confronted by an array of stalwart Chinese in gaudy uniforms, and flaunting the red cockade of official employ. There are corridors and passages, and boards with printed notices thereon; and doors painted “Private,” and “Judge’s Entrance,” with other legends forbidding your progress; there is a real British constable, and men in khaki, and a waiting-room like that of a club doctor’s surgery. You wait. The place suggests in turn a petty sessions court, a railway station waiting-room, and the vestry of a Nonconformist Chapel. You expect to see horse-hair wigs, and horse-hair furniture, and wonder which is the way to the cells, and whether the Consul has the “Black Cap,” and if so, where that is kept. After the usual formalities you may see the Consul; as likely as not he will seem old and careworn, and look as though it were Sunday and he was not where he ought to be, but you had caught him. He will fidget with a monocle and shuffle papers, and gaze round at the plainest of plain official furniture as though searching for the logograms which his eyes love. And you will see that his hours of sunshine have been spent under an umbrella poring over books, and his evenings in gazing at the dust a few feet in front of a bicycle wheel. And the man will be stiff, and frigid, and metaphorically covered with the dust of ages, but only metaphorically, for from the way of him you know that he washes in cold water many times a day. You know that he goes to bed early, and to most things has a conscientious objection, and to all enterprise is a passive resister. You will bore the consul--and he will bore you, for he knows not your world, nor is he acquainted with the age you live in. He awes you. It may be 120° F. outside in the sun, but this office and its occupant produce a soul-chill; you get up and steal silently away