The China consulates were a new creation, a venture into the unknown, a voyage without landmarks or chart, where success depended on the personal qualities of the pioneer navigators--their judgment, resourcefulness, and faculty of initiative. Great issues hung upon the opening of the new world of the Far East, the success of which was largely in the hands of the agents who were employed, for they were practically beyond the reach of instructions. There was no telegraph, and the so-called Overland Route to India was just beginning to be exploited for the conveyance of mails and passengers. Nor was it possible for even the wisest Government to frame general instructions providing for eventualities out of the range of common experience. The conditions of service were therefore such as to constitute an ordeal under which a bureaucratic official would shrivel into uselessness or worse, while to a strong man they were a powerful stimulant, the very breath of life. It was therefore a matter of serious consequence who should be intrusted with the actual inauguration of the new relations with China; and in the course of the present narrative it will probably appear that it was a happy accident by which the country lost one distinguished surgeon among many and gained in exchange a political representative whose services must be considered unique. FOREIGN RELATIONS WITH CHINA. To understand fully the state of our relations with China created by the treaty of Nanking, the whole history not only of our own commercial intercourse, but of that of the nations who were our forerunners in the Far East, would have to be kept in mind. For much as we tried and hoped then, and ever since, to confine the international question to a few bald propositions respecting trade, personal protection, and so forth, it is impossible to eliminate the historical, the human, and the general political elements from the problem. For both good and evil we are the necessary outcome of our own antecedents, as are the Chinese of theirs, and if we had acquired a stock of experience of the Chinese, no less had they of us; indeed, if we fairly consider the matter, theirs was the more comprehensive. For to the Chinese we represented not ourselves alone, nor the East India Company, nor a generation or two of timid traders, but Christendom as a whole--our Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch precursors, the Romish propaganda, and all the abortive missions to Peking.