Nor were other far-eastern peoples any more hospitable. China, save for a few port cities, was as impenetrable as when in 1552 the dying Xavier had cried--``O Rock, Rock, when wilt thou open!'' Siam excluded all foreigners until the century's first quarter had passed, and Laos saw no white man till 1868. A handful of British traders were so greedily determined to keep all India as a private commercial preserve that, forgetting their own indebtedness to Christianity, they sneered at the proposal to send missionaries to India as ``the maddest, most expensive, most unwarranted project ever proposed by a lunatic enthusiast,'' while as late as 1857, a director of the East India Company declared that ``he would rather see a band of devils in India than a band of missionaries.'' Korea was rightly called ``the hermit nation'' until 1882; and as for Africa, it was not till 1873 that the world learned of that part of it in which the heroic Livingstone died on his knees, not till 1877 that Stanley staggered into a West Coast settlement after a desperate journey of 999 days from Zanzibar through Central Africa, not till 1884 that the Berlin Conference formed the International Association of the Congo guaranteeing that which has not yet been realized ``liberty of conscience'' and ``the free and public exercise of every creed.'' Even in America within the memory of men still living, the lumbering, white-topped ``prairie schooner'' was the only conveyance for the tedious overland journey to California. Hardy frontiersmen were fighting Indians in the Mississippi Valley, and the bold Whitman was ``half a year'' in bearing a message from Oregon to Washington. The Hon. John W. Foster tells us in his ``Century of American Diplomacy'' that ``General Lane, the first territorial governor of Oregon, left his home in Indiana, August 27, 1848, and desiring to reach his destination as soon as possible, travelling overland to San Francisco and thence by ship, reached his post on the first of March following--the journey occupying six months. At the time our treaty of peace and independence was signed in 1783, two stage-coaches were sufficient for all the passengers and nearly all the freight between New York and Boston.'' It is only seventy years since the Rev. John Lowrie, with his bride and Mr. and Mrs. Reed, rode horseback from Pittsburg through flooded rivers and over the Allegheny Mountains to Philadelphia, whence it took them four and a-half months to reach Calcutta.