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of Japan resented by displays of rudeness and even truculence entirely strange to their disposition. It was thus that there came to be witnessed in the settlements and their vicinity a state of affairs differing from that observable in the interior, and the writings of men like Medhurst, Gutzlaff, Stanhope, Hunter, and Davis show that this was doubly true of China in times immediately prior to the treaty-making era. The natives in and about Canton and Macao reviled the foreigner whenever he ventured among them, stoned him or belaboured him with bamboos, whereas the natives in places which he had not previously frequented, received him with a smiling welcome, shared their frugal fare with him, and showed him uniform civility. The story of events at Canton and Macao from the beginning of the sixteenth century until nearly the middle of the nineteenth offers an easy explanation of the temper gradually educated among the Chinese in that region, and it will be seen by-and-by that a similar retrospect presents itself at the beginning of the twentieth century.