At first the Jesuits were made welcome in China, but a reaction against all western people seems to have taken place when the Manchu emperor was firmly established on his throne. Japan also set her face against the new trade that was carried out in Dutch and Portuguese vessels. Moreover, in 1662 the Dutch suffered a heavy reverse in being driven out of the island of Formosa, after long and hard fighting. The beginning of the eighteenth century really saw the doors of the far East more firmly closed to the West than they had been fifty years before. The far East therefore was, for the time being, even less in the world story than it had been. But it had its own story, which sufficed for itself, and it was a story in which very many actors played a part. The western lands were still what we should reckon very thinly populated. Our England, for instance, nearly certainly did not have a population of more than five millions and a half at the end of the seventeenth century. But already there must have been a relatively dense population in China. In Pekin, in an appalling earthquake that happened in 1661, it is said that 400,000 people lost their lives. Now the total population of London in 1685 is put at only a little more than half a million, and London was already far and away the largest town in our country, seventeen times larger than Bristol, which then was second to it in numbers. North of the Trent, the country was still scarcely civilised or settled at all. But after nightfall the unlighted streets of the cities were probably more dangerous than any part of the country. Near London even, at a much later date, it was the law that all the covert near the high roads should be cut away so as to leave less shelter for the lurking highwaymen; but still the picturesque Dick Turpins abounded. And high roads, roads along which a coach might go, ever so slowly, sometimes drawn by oxen, were few, and these few were bad. Great men {108} travelled with six horses to their coach and a large following, not for honour and glory but because it was likely that the pulling power of six horses and even more might be required to draw the coach through the marshy places of the road--and in the undrained and unenclosed country the marshy places were many. Nor were the numerous retainers for vain show: they were for necessary protection, and at any moment might have to use their arms. When the fields began to be enclosed and drained, they would grow more corn or pasture and so help to support a larger population; but the enclosing meant that much of the waste, where the poor people had picked firewood and perhaps caught or killed some game, were taken from them. And as it was in England, so too was it in other European countries as they advanced in civilisation.