Perry.  Say the distance of seven Japanese miles in any direction from the centre of the city of Simoda.

Japanese.  Very well.  A few miles will make no difference.  You are requested not to leave agents until after you have experienced that it is necessary.

Perry.  I am willing to defer the appointment of a consul or an agent one year or eighteen months from the date of the signing the treaty; and then, if my Government think it necessary, it will send one.

In fact, not an article of the treaty was made without the most serious deliberation by the Japanese.  In answer to a question from Captain Adams, in the very first stages of the negotiation, they replied:  “The Japanese are unlike the Chinese; they are adverse to change; and when they make a compact of any kind they intend that it shall endure for a thousand years.  For this reason it will be best to deliberate and examine well the facilities for trade and the suitableness of the port before any one is determined on.”  Probably nothing but the exercise of the most perfect truthfulness and patience would ever have succeeded in making a treaty with them at all; and from the language of one of their communications, it is obvious that, with characteristic caution, they meant that their present action should be but a beginning of intercourse, which might or might not be afterward made more extensive, according to the results of what they deemed the experiment.

This, it must be remembered, was the first formal treaty they ever made on the subject of foreign trade, at least since the expulsion of the Portuguese, and they evidently meant to proceed cautiously by single steps.

There is observable throughout the negotiations the predominating influence of the national prejudice against the permanent introduction of foreigners among them.  The word “reside” is but once used in the whole treaty, and that in the article relative to consuls.  The details of conferences, already given, show how anxiously they sought to avoid having consuls at all.  Indeed, Commodore Perry says, “I could only induce the commissioners to agree to this article, by endeavoring to convince them that it would save the Japanese Government much trouble if an American agent were to reside at one or both of the ports opened by the treaty, to whom complaints might be made of any malpractice of the United States citizens who might visit the Japanese dominions.”  They wanted no permanent foreign residents among them, official or unofficial.  This was shown most unequivocally in the remark already recorded in one of the conferences—­“We do not wish any women to come and remain at Simoda.”