So it came about, when we were in China, that His Majesty's Consul, with all the might of England at his back, was unable to buy a suitable site to erect a house where he could bring his wife. He was living in a temple, and temples in China are not very comfortable. I should explain to the uninitiated that every Buddhist temple has guest-rooms attached to it--Chinese rooms largely composed of wooden screens; and these temples are let out as residences by a people whose faith has less hold upon their affections than their purse. Now, ladies are not as a rule prepared to live in a house with paper partitions in a climate where the winters are extremely cold; so the Consul asked a missionary to buy a piece of land on which he could erect a suitable house, and he had almost succeeded when the Chinese Government found out that the land was not to be used for missionary purposes and refused to allow the sale. This does seem a strange situation when one remembers that had that Consul resigned his appointment and joined a missionary body, he could have bought the land and settled his wife comfortably in four solid stone walls, but because he was England's representative and not a missionary he had to shiver between wood and {46} paper screens, and this in a country which is supposed to hate missionaries. The explanation of this curious situation is really twofold. First, the hatred that the official bears for the missionary is not of such an intense character as to induce him to offer a very strenuous resistance to the missionaries who desire to buy land; and secondly, missionaries have peculiar and special rights secured to them by a series of treaties among the most curious in the history of diplomacy. In 1844 the Americans got by treaty a right to the free exercise of the Christian religion in the open ports. This right, sufficiently remarkable in itself, has often been stipulated by a State for its own nationals resident in a foreign country, but I doubt if it has ever before been known for a country to insist on the right of preaching a religion to somebody else's citizens. This was obviously an interference of the sovereign rights of China.