(1.) To begin with, there is the relation of _neighborhood_. Sailing up the Pacific, near our coast, one summer evening, Yung Wing, leaning against the steamer guards, and looking across the level waters to the westward, said, “Yonder lies my country, next land to this.” Between us and China, between our two realms, the one so old, the other so young, for a thousand miles of coast on either side, nothing intervenes but the sea, which no state owns, and that is contiguity. Along so great a boundary America and China may be said to touch, yet without possibility of territorial dispute. And this nearness is one feature of our special opportunity. (2.) A second and more pregnant feature of it is to be noted in the _good-will_ that in a peculiar degree characterizes the relations of our two countries in the past and in the present. This may seem a strange thing to say just now, but the truth of it will appear on a brief survey of facts. Probably it is less our merit than our fortune, but it is certainly the latter, that through the whole stage of that unhappy, though largely unavoidable collision of China with the foreign powers, by which she was forced off from her intolerable policy of exclusion, our Government was the least conspicuous of the principal aggressors,—less so than France, less so than England, less so than Russia. To the several treaties in which the collision issued, that with the United States, and that alone, contained the express provision that the parties to it, and their peoples respectively, should “not insult or oppress each other for any trifling cause, so as to produce an estrangement between them.” There has been, and is, less bitter remembrance of us on the score of that conflict than of the other belligerents engaged in it. Again, while we have subsequently had men in the various ranks of our diplomatic service in China who have hurt us there, and have them still, we have probably given least offence on _that_ score. No thanks to our civil service want of system; but in the providence of God, we have had more than our proportion there of men who have helped our good fame. Eighteen years ago we sent thither an ambassador, one result of whose six years of official life there was, that at the end of that time jealous Pekin had come to recognize in him, what he truly was, a friend to China. I mean, of course, Anson Burlingame, of Massachusetts. For his friendship, China offered to his acceptance honors never before or since conferred on a foreigner. She freely committed to his hands a trust of supreme magnitude. She made him her ambassador to all the western people. In that capacity he came home to his own country, and framed with us the first of that new series of treaties in which China gave and received the pledge that made her a member on equal footing of the family of nations. And that treaty, the work of our own citizen, large minded enough to value the capabilities of that great people, large