However, Mr. Alcock came well through the ordeal, showing great courage and determination, and never allowing any affront to England to pass unnoticed. Never perhaps did he show more moral courage than he did when one fine day in writing to the Japanese Government he signed himself Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary instead of Consul-General, with the intimation to the British Foreign Office that they might accept or reject what he had done, but that it was necessary in the event of his rejection that whoever should be appointed should, in order to hold his own both with the Japanese Government and with the foreign colleagues, hold that rank. It was a most audacious stroke and it succeeded, because he was quite right, but it probably is the one and only case of a man accrediting himself as minister to a foreign Power. Whether he also named himself K.C.B. history records not. But at any rate the honour was most deservedly bestowed upon him. Sir Rutherford Alcock was a man of great ability and high courage. During his official life in the Far East he had plenty of opportunities to give proof of both. In early life he had been a surgeon, and had been attached to the British Legion in Spain, where he earned no little reputation for a skill which stood him in good stead when the temple occupied by the British Legation at Yedo (Tokio) was attacked by Rônins in July, 1861, and poor Laurence Oliphant and others were so badly wounded. Oliphant, who had nothing but a hunting-crop to ward off the cruel sword-cuts, must have been killed had it not been for the merciful beam of the low, narrow passage in which he was fighting, which caught the worst blows. For long years afterwards the deep cuts on the woodwork were still visible, but the last time I was in Japan, in 1906, I went to see the place, and found that the temple authorities had removed the tell-tale beam. When he returned from the Peninsula he went back to his profession as a lecturer; but rheumatism, due to exposure, had crippled his hands and hindered him as an operator; moreover, he was bitten with the spirit of adventure, and in 1844 he accepted an appointment as Consul at the newly-opened port of Fu Chou. But it was at Shanghai a year or two later that he made his mark, and there it was that he achieved what was the most successful work of his life in the establishment of the municipality, a new and original venture, needing great tact and judgment in order to avoid international and other jealousies, besides involving a distinct talent for organization. It was altogether a formidable undertaking, but it succeeded, and laid the foundation of similar institutions throughout the Treaty Ports of the Far East.