After the Mexican war, came the tremendous developments on the Pacific coast, and the wide expansion of commerce that gave the American clipper ship an imperishable fame--an expansion of commerce that reached out to every nation of the globe but one. That one was the rich island-empire of Japan. A most remarkable and a most interesting people were the Japanese. In the sixteenth century, a band of Christian missionaries penetrated the empire, and found there a civilization really far higher than that they had left in Europe. With wondrous zeal and self-sacrifice, and arrogant confidence in their own superiority, these missionaries set about converting this people to the Christian faith and subverting the government to their own ends. They succeeded in proselyting and in politics just far enough to throw the whole empire into a turmoil that ended at last in much bloodshed and the total expulsion of all the devotees of the Christian religion. [Illustration] [Illustration: A Japanese Portrait of M. C. Perry, with a poem dedicated to him. _From a lithograph presented to the Navy Department by William Elliott Griffis, Esq._ TRANSLATION OF THE POEM “When in the Land of the Morning, I came as Ambassador, aiming to reach the Eastern Capital, many days passed while the ships lay at anchor in a place called the harbor of Yokohama. One day, in order to beguile the tedium of waiting, we gathered on board and feasted. After sunset the moon rose resplendent, and, in playful mood, I sang this verse: On Musashi’s bright sea, The rising moon, In California Makes setting gloom. “Taira Hiraki [Sakuma Shozan] composed this, putting himself in the place of the American Envoy.” Translated by T. Harada and Wm. Elliot Griffis.] So painful had been the experience of the Japanese that they determined that thereafter no Christian should ever have a foothold in their country; and for nearly three hundred years they were very nearly faithful to this resolve. The Dutch did, indeed, manage to establish something of a trading station at Nagasaki. The Dutch were from the early days adroit and enterprising traders, but the conditions to which they submitted were so humiliating that the Japanese held them in the heartiest contempt. In fact, the Japanese during the nineteenth century had come to believe that the Christian world had really no thought unconnected with the greed of material gain; and when the clear-eyed historian looks over that world as a whole he cannot escape the feeling that the Japanese were almost justified in their faith. A people who worship Beauty and Art are justified in their contempt for those who worship the twin gods of Utility and Profit.