“In selecting your officers, pray be careful in choosing them of a subordinate and gentlemanlike character. We shall be obliged to govern in some measure, as McKeever says, by _moral_ suasion. McIntosh, I see by the papers, has changed with Commander Pearson and leaves the _Congress_, and is now on his way home in the _Falmouth_. We shall now learn how the philanthropic principle of moral suasion answers.” The reference is to the state of things consequent upon the abolition of flogging. Perry was to gather and lead to peaceful victory, the first American fleet governed without the lash. ----- [24] See complete list, vol. II. of his official Report. CHAPTER XXIX. PREPARATIONS FOR JAPAN. AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE. THE charts used in the Japan expedition came mostly from Holland, and cost our government thirty thousand dollars. Perry does not seem to have been aware that Captain Mercator Cooper of Sag Harbor, Long Island, had brought home fairly good Japanese charts of the Bay of Yedo, more accurate probably than any which he was able to purchase. Captain Beechey of the B. M. S. _Blossom_, had surveyed carefully the seas around Riu Kiu. The large coast-line map of Japan, in four sheets, made on modern scientific principles by a wealthy Japanese who had expended his fortune and suffered imprisonment for his work, which was published posthumously, was not then accessible. Intelligent Japanese have been eager to know, and more than one has asked the writer: “How did Perry get his knowledge of our country and people?” We answer that he made diligent study of books and men. He had asked for permission to purchase all necessary books at a reasonable price. Von Siebold’s colossal work was a mine of information from which European book-makers were beginning to quarry, as they had long done from Engelbert Kaempfer, but the importer’s price of Von Siebold’s _Archiv_ was $503. The interest excited in England by the expedition caused the publication in London of a cheap reprint of Kaempfer. By setting in motion the machinery of the librarians and book-collectors in New York and London, Perry was able to secure a library on the subject. He speedily and thoroughly mastered their contents. So far from Japan being a _terra incognita_ in literature, it had been even then more written about than Turkey. Few far Eastern Asiatic nations have reason to be proud of so voluminous and polyglot a European library concerning themselves as the Japanese. On the subject about which information was as defective as it was most needed, was the political situation of modern Japan and the true relation of the “Tycoon” to the Mikado.