The delicate undertaking, of reconciling the antagonistic principles of an encroaching commerce and of a feudal despotism, was committed to two diplomatists eminently fitted for its proper performance. Mr. Townsend Harris, who by long and patient study had conciliated the people and won the confidence of the Government, as United States consul general at Simoda, was appointed as American minister to Yedo; and Sir Rutherford Alcock, whose experience as a British consular officer in China dated from the period of the treaty of Nanking in 1842, was delegated as his country's ambassador to that metropolis, the capital of the Tycoon. Several difficulties were to be encountered at the threshold. First came a question of currency. Commodore Perry's treaty allowed foreign coins to be taken at only a third of their value, and under the new treaties our merchants found that by the rate of exchange the price of native products had been raised fifty to seventy per cent.; on the other hand, they were able to purchase gold with silver, weight for weight. The correspondence on this subject, written and verbal, plainly disclosed that the free extension of trade was not contemplated by those islanders. Next we find the Japanese gaining a diplomatic victory in the location of the foreign factories, having managed to have them placed at Yokuhama, instead of Kanagawa, the site stipulated for in the treaties, an arrangement which serves to isolate and almost imprison the foreign settlement; but as Yokuhama was the choice also of the mercantile community, the ambassadors could not well press their point--it went by default. It is the misfortune of Orientals generally, that in all their controversies with the English, the latter have been the historiographers, and therefore, in almost every step of their aggressive career, appear as disinterested champions of justice, seeking the improvement of semi-civilized peoples, by inflicting upon them wholesome and merited chastisement. Let it be conceded that the charges against the Japanese which we find in the Blue Book and in Sir Rutherford Alcock's 'Capital of the Tycoon,' are all well founded, and the resort to strong measures on the part of the British will be admitted to be justifiable.