ship, and, unless my memory greatly deceives me, he sailed in this employment while I was still in the port.  Similarly, when my service on the station was ended, I went from Yokohama to Hong-kong, prior to returning home by way of Suez.  Among my fellow-passengers was an ex-Confederate naval officer, whose business was to negotiate for an immigration of Chinese into, I think, the Southern States—­in momentary despair, perhaps, of black labor—­but certainly into the United States.  We all know what has come in our own country of undertakings which then had attracted little attention.

It is odd to watch the unconscious, resistless movements of nations, and at the same time read the crushing characterization by our teachers of the press of those who, by personal characteristics or by accident, happen to be thrust into the position of leaders, when at the most they only guide to the least harm forces which can no more be resisted permanently than can gravitation.  Such would have been the role of Nicholas, guiding to a timely end the irresistible course of events in the Balkans, which his opponents sought to withstand, but succeeded only in prolonging and aggravating.  He is honored now by those who see folly in the imperial aspirations of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and piracy in Mr. Cecil Rhodes; yet, after all, in his day, what right had he, by the code of strict constructionists of national legal rights, to put Turkey to death because she was sick?  Was not Turkey in occupation?  Had she not, by strict law, a right to her possessions, and to live; yea, and to administer what she considered justice to those who were legally her subjects?  But men are too apt to forget that law is the servant of equity, and that while the world is in its present stage of development equity which cannot be had by law must be had by force, upon which ultimately law rests, not for its sanction, but for its efficacy.

We have been familiar latterly with the term “buffer states;” the pleasant function discharged by Siam between Great Britain and France.  Though not strictly analogous, the term conveys an idea of the relations that have hitherto obtained between Eastern and Western civilizations.  They have existed apart, each a world of itself; but they are approaching not only in geographical propinquity, a recognized source of danger, but, what is more important, in common ideas of material advantage, without a corresponding sympathy in spiritual ideas.  It is not merely that the two are in different stages of development from a common source, as are Russia and Great Britain.  They are running as yet on wholly different lines, springing from conceptions radically different.  To bring them into correspondence in that, the most important realm of ideas, there is needed on the one side—­or on the other—­not growth, but conversion.  However far it has wandered, and however short of its pattern it has come, the civilization of modern Europe grew up under the shadow