With both China and Japan her relations had long been intimate and friendly.

American merchants had traded ginseng and furs for China silks and teas ever since the United States had been a nation.

In 1786 the Government had appointed a commercial agent at Canton and in 1844 had made one of the first commercial treaties with China.

In 1854 the United States had been the point of the foreign wedge that opened Japan to western civilization and inaugurated that amazing period of national reorganization and assimilation which has given the Japanese Empire her place in they world today.

American missionaries had labored long and disinterestedly for the moral regeneration of both China and Japan with results which are now universally recognized as beneficial, though in 1900 there was still among the Chinese much of that friction which is the inevitable reaction from an attempt to change the fundamentals of an ancient faith and long-standing habits.