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leading traits in the Chinese estimate of foreigners from their first acquaintance with them, and the latter have done little to effectually disabuse Orientals upon these points." One part of this dictum does scant justice to the small foreign mercantile community that carried on business at Canton and Macao during the period (1826 –1856) immediately antecedent and subsequent to the conclusion of the first treaty with China; a community of which a recent writer, Mr. A. Michie, pens the following appreciation, over-sympathetic perhaps, but certainly true in the main: "They exemplified in a special degree the true temper and feelings of gentlemen—a moral product with which local conditions had also, no doubt, something to do. They lived in glass houses with open doors; they could by no means get away from one another or evade a mutual observation which was constant and searching. Whatever standards, therefore, were recognised by the community, the individual members were constrained to live up to them in a society where words and deeds lay open to the collective criticism. And the standard was really a high one. Truth, honour, courage, generosity, nobility, were qualities common to the whole body; and those who were not so endowed by birthright could not help assuming the virtue they did not possess and, through practice, making it eventually their own. Black sheep there were, no doubt, but being never whitewashed, they did not infect the flock, as