The same tactics were observed by the envoys in Europe. When the mission reached London and had laid their case before the same Foreign Secretary who had instructed the Minister in Japan to "make no concessions without equivalents," he at once conceded the whole of the Japanese demands unconditionally, for the nominal conditions were merely that the rest of the treaty should stand. A detailed memorandum of the agreement was drawn up and formally signed by Earl Russell and the three Japanese envoys on June 6, 1862. Having succeeded beyond all expectation in their demands, the Japanese envoys evidently concluded that the Foreign Office was of plastic substance, and within two days they had formulated a list of nine further concessions which they desired to discuss. This, however, was too much for Lord Russell's patience, and as the envoys had "completed their business and taken their leave," he declined to enter on any fresh questions. The effect of Lord Russell's concessions could not be otherwise than detrimental, the only open question being whether his insistence on opening the ports on the agreed dates would have been a greater or a lesser evil. Mr Alcock points out the family likeness between the Japanese pleas for suspension of treaty rights and those with which we had so long been familiar in China. "The time," he says, allowed to the authorities of Canton to "soothe the people and prepare the way" was deliberately used by them to "create the very difficulties which they alleged already to exist, and make it each year more and more impossible to admit the foreigners,"--a comment on the Japanese proposal which leaves little doubt as to his opinion of that transaction. Yet there were cogent reasons for the course actually adopted, if the premisses be granted that the ports could only be opened by force, and that England would have been left alone to employ the necessary force. The most that can be said, then, for the concessions to the Japanese is that they represented the choice of evils. No one was benefited by them. They did not help the Tycoon or avert the catastrophe to his dynasty. They did not lessen the friction, or the danger to foreign life and interests, or interrupt the long series of assassinations of foreigners in Japan; nor did they obviate the necessity of using force in that country, to avoid which was the principal inducement to her Majesty's Government to violate its own principle. The analogy with China was, in fact, complete; the old lesson was once more driven home, that there is no safety in doing wrong. As Sir Rutherford Alcock puts it, "To retrograde safely and with dignity is often more difficult for nations and their governments than to advance."