With what the ages have produced for the West--the old guild spirit reviving, if you please, in the modern trust--the West can meet the East. The true ministers and ambassadors to China are the merchant-adventurers of the Western nations, bearing their goods, their steel and tools, their unique engineering skill and works. It was not for what the _entrepreneurs_ "could get out of" China, nor yet for what China could get out of us, that my policy as American minister was directed to this complementary meeting of two civilizations. It was because I saw millions perishing wretchedly whose birthright in the higher arts and amenities of living is at least as rich as our own--perishing for lack of an organizing skill which it is the province of the Western peoples to supply. It was because I knew, with their admirable family life and local democratic institutions, it needed only trunk-line railways to link together these close-set communities, comprising one quarter of the earth's population, into as admirable a central democracy. But how the West was then meeting the East came home to me on the second morning of my stay in Peking. I entered the breakfast room, where I found Doctor Hornbeck in a state of annoyance. He handed me the morning copy of the _Journal de Peking_, a sheet published in French and known to be subservient to Russian and French political interests from which it got subventions. The article in question was a scurrilous attack on me personally, and on American action in China generally. A Chinese journal in Shanghai had published a laudatory article in which had been cited extracts from my published books. One of these, taken from "World Politics," had happened to speak of French subserviency to Russian policy in the Far East. The French journal repeated these expressions as if they had been given out by me in an interview upon arriving in China. As they were in fact taken from books published more than ten years before, which had run the gauntlet of French critical journals without ever having been taken as hostile to France, I did not have any reason to worry, and the fume and fury of the local journal rather amused me than otherwise. I could, however, not help noting the temper of these attacks, their bitterness and the utter rashness and lack of inquiry with which the charges were made. It gave me early warning, considering its gross lack of courtesy to a newcomer, who had entered the field in a spirit friendly to all, as to what might be expected from some of our friendly rivals. When several years later one of the ministers whose legation stood sponsor for this sheet approached me with a request to use my influence to suppress a Chinese paper which had attacked him, I regretted that it was not in my power to be of assistance.