MR. MAYOR:--I suppose we are all of one opinion on this remarkable occasion of meeting the Embassy sent from the oldest Empire in the world to the youngest Republic. All share the surprise and pleasure when the venerable oriental dynasty, hitherto a romantic legend to most of us, suddenly steps into the fellowship of nations. This auspicious event, considered in connection with the late innovations in Japan, marks a new era, and is an irresistible result of the science which has given us the power of steam and the electric telegraph. It is the more welcome for the surprise. We had said of China, as the old prophet said of Egypt, "Her strength is to sit still." Her people had such elemental conservatism, that by some wonderful force of race and national manners the wars and revolutions that occur in her annals proved but momentary swells or surges on the Pacific Ocean of her history, leaving no trace. But in its immovability this race has claims. China is old not in time only, but in wisdom, which is gray hair to a nation, or rather, truly seen, is eternal youth. As we know, China had the magnet centuries before Europe; and block-printing and stereotype, and lithography, and gunpowder, and vaccination, and canals; had anticipated Linnaeus's nomenclature of plants; had codes, journals, clubs, hackney coaches, and, thirty centuries before New York, had the custom of New-Year's calls of comity and reconciliation. I need not mention its useful arts,--its pottery, indispensable to the world; the luxury of silks; and its tea, the cordial of nations. But I must remember that she had respectable remains of astronomic science, and historic records of forgotten time, that have supplied important gaps in the ancient history of the western nations. Then she has philosophers who cannot be spared. Confucius has not yet gathered all his fame. When Socrates heard that the oracle declared that he was the wisest of men, he said, it must mean that other men held that they were wise, but that he knew that he knew nothing. Confucius had already affirmed this of himself: and what we call the Golden Rule of Jesus, Confucius had uttered in the same terms, five hundred years before. His morals, though addressed to a state of society utterly unlike ours, we read with profit to-day. His rare perception appears in his Golden Mean, his doctrine of Reciprocity, his unerring insight, putting always the blame of our misfortunes on our selves; as when to the governor who complained of thieves he said: "If you, sir, were not covetous, though you should reward them for it, they would not steal." His ideal of greatness predicts Marcus Antoninus. At the same time, he abstained from paradox, and met the ingrained prudence of his nation by saying always: "Bend one cubit to straighten eight."