The concession made by the Japanese, in the first place--of kind treatment of shipwrecked voyagers, and of facilities for the refitting of disabled vessels--was no more than we had a right to exact; perhaps, also, we may be justified in having urged them to admit a resident official agent to protect those interests. But if a nation deems it politic to isolate itself from all others, has any state the right to compel that nation to abandon its exclusivism, and to receive offensive strangers as residents? No publicist will answer this in the affirmative, nor do statesmen advocate such a claim; yet practically Christian nations have uniformly acted on the assumption that they might rightfully force themselves upon an unwilling people. It is however from the corollary involved in this assumption that weak peoples are made to suffer. It would avail the aggressive power little if its subjects were required to comply with all the laws of the country into which they had thrust themselves, for in that case the laws could be made to operate so as to thwart them in every important undertaking. Hence to the right of residing in a country contrary to the will of its government is joined the correlative, that of compelling the feeble state to abdicate its sovereignty to the extent of exempting the intrusive foreigner from local jurisdiction--of according the advantage of extra-territoriality. The pliant Chinese readily yielded to this new order of things on discovering that foreign nations possessed the will and the power to enforce it; but the intractable Japanese must have their spirit cowed by violence ere they can become resigned to the national degradation. It was soon discovered that the measure was highly unpopular: the functionaries who acceded to the demands of the hated foreigner forfeited their lives or their posts. Nobles who were intensely hostile to the regime, succeeded to the administration; and on them devolved the task of inaugurating a new era, of accommodating the institutions of their country to what they could not but regard as the first stage of a revolution.