When Sir Rutherford returned to China as Minister he was far more in his element as a diplomatic agent than he had ever been in Japan. He had an intimate knowledge of Chinese affairs, which it is in no way derogatory to say that he had not of Japanese politics. In Japan he, like everybody else, was under the influence of the old Dutch fallacies, and he did not fully realize the relations between the Mikado and the Tycoon. The great scholars, such as Satow and Aston and others, had not yet pricked the bubble and babble about spiritual and temporal Emperors, and all the other nonsense of those days. Sir Harry Parkes had the luck to profit by the new-born knowledge. Sir Rutherford was the victim of the old tradition. But when he arrived in China he was master of the situation. He was thoroughly at home and up to every move on the board. He was a kind and considerate chief, and we all liked him except in the neighbourhood of mail-day. Sir Rutherford’s weakness was the idea that he was essentially a writer—he would have been a greater man if he had never written a book about a country which he did not understand, or a grammar of a language which he could neither speak nor read nor write. But we all have our weaknesses; his was authorship. The despatches which he used to write contained excellent stuff, but they were spoilt by being spun out to interminable lengths of impossible verbiage. To copy those effusions with the thermometer at 108° in the shade, with a double sheet of blotting-paper between my hand and the foolscap, and a basin of water to dip my fingers in from time to time, was like being private secretary to Satan in the nethermost regions. At the Tsung Li Ya-mên, the ministry of foreign affairs, Sir Rutherford was perfect. However knotty might be the point which he had to argue, however patent the trickery which he had to resent, he was always calm, always courteous, and so the Chinese liked him as much as we did. He certainly was _persona grata_ with the Regent, Prince Rung, who was the very real head of the Tsung Li Ya-mên.[55] The Prince Regent was at this time a tall, well-favoured man, shortsighted and pitted with smallpox, which in Chinese eyes would be no hindrance to his good looks, for indeed a Chinaman hardly thinks of himself as complete until he has “put forth the heavenly flowers.” Messrs. Bland and Backhouse quote a decree of the wretched Emperor Tung Chih in which he announces “we have had the good fortune this month to contract smallpox”—in the next month he ascended the Dragon and was wafted on high.[56] The Emperor’s edict might serve as a text for the anti-vaccinationists, nor would his death in the following month have injured their cause, for he was such a mass of disease that he was already foredoomed, so the “heavenly flowers” were not by themselves accountable for his end.