Without ship or soldier, overcoming craft and guile, and winning his way by simple honesty and perseverance, Mr. Harris obtained audience[23] of “the Tycoon” in Yedo, and later from the Sh[=o]gun’s daring minister Ii, the signature to a treaty which guaranteed to Americans the rights of residence, trade and commerce.  Thus Americans were enabled to land as citizens, and pursue their avocation as religious teachers.  As the government of the United States of America knows nothing of the religion of American citizens abroad, it protects all missionaries who are law-abiding citizens, without regard to creed.[24]

Japan Once More Missionary Soil.

The first missionaries were on the ground as soon as the ports were open.  Though surrounded by spies and always in danger of assassination and incendiarism, they began their work of mastering the language.  To do this without trained teachers or apparatus of dictionary and grammar, was then an appalling task.  The medical missionary began healing the swarms of human sufferers, syphilitic, consumptive, and those scourged by small-pox, cholera and hereditary and acute diseases of all sorts.  The patience, kindness and persistency of these Christian men literally turned the edge of the sword, disarmed the assassin, made the spies’ occupation useless, shamed away the suspicious, and conquered the nearly invincible prejudices of the government.  Despite the awful under-tow in the immorality of the sailor, the adventurer and the gain-greedy foreigner, the tide of Christianity began steadily to rise.  Notwithstanding the outbursts of the flames of persecution, the torture and imprisonment of Christian captives and exiles, and the slow worrying to death of the missionary’s native teachers, inquirers came and converts were made.  In 1868, after revolution and restoration, the old order changed, and duarchy and feudalism passed away.  Quick to seize the opportunity, Dr. J.C.  Hepburn, healer of bodies and souls of men, presented a Bible to the Emperor, and the gift was accepted.

No sooner had the new government been established in safety, and the name of Yedo, the city of the Baydoor, been changed into that of T[=o]ki[=o], the Eastern Capital, than an embassy[25] of seventy persons started on its course round the world.  At its head were three cabinet ministers of the new government and the court noble, Iwakura, of immemorial lineage, in whose veins ran the blood of the men called gods.  Across the Pacific to the United States they went, having their initial audience of the President of the Republic that knows no state church, and whose Christianity had compelled both the return of the shipwrecked Japanese and the freedom of the slave.

This embassy had been suggested and its course planned by a Christian missionary, who found that of the seventy persons, one-half had been his pupils.[26]

The Imperial Embassy Round the World.