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without any backing of national support, they conducted themselves in China with the utmost circumspection, entertained no idea of claiming exemption for her laws, and deferred fully to her manners and customs. It was natural, indeed, that such should be the case, for in many of the essentials of civilised progress China then stood at least on a level with European countries. But from the fourteenth century new products of inventive genius and new impulses of expansion commenced to grow in the European atmosphere of inter-state competition from which China was completely segregated, while, at the same time, commerce, becoming a matter of public concern in the Occident, began to be pushed eastward by agencies of unprecedented potency which the Chinese were wholly unprepared to encounter or even to appreciate.

These gradually changing conditions did not, however, make themselves practically sensible during the first century and a half of the Ming dynasty's sway. Throughout that time China appears to have been almost wholly cut off from intercourse with Europeans. The records say that the founder of the dynasty sent (1371) to Europe in the capacity of envoy a "Frank" named Niekulum (Nicholas), who had arrived in Peking for purposes of trade four years previously, and who was now entrusted with the duty of announcing to the Western world the fact that the whole of China had been brought under the