WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS
Our first consul-general was Townsend Harris, merchant, and President of the Board of Education in New York City. In accepting President Pierce’s nomination, he changed his skies, but not his constant mind, and hardly his chair of instruction. This founder of the institution that became the College of the City of New York, during twenty-two months at Shimoda and in Yedo, taught Japan’s leading men the practical details of modern civilized intercourse. The hermits yielded, and opened five seaports and two cities to trade, residence, and the work of teachers, missionaries, and experts who made labor honorable. It was Harris who lifted the flood-gates of modernism, set the precedents, and fixed the limits of the later treaties with twenty nations. Even more, despite diplomatic limits, he discerned in the Japanese character a frankness and honesty that some of our newspapers have not yet discovered. Hence in Yedo, with a courage born of faith that fails not the true discerner, Harris, without a soldier, marine, or sailor, kept the stars and stripes flying over the American legation—the only one left in Yedo—when all the foreign envoys, despite big battalions and artillery, had struck their flags and fled to Yokohama, thus insulting a proud nation by their absence from its capital for nearly a decade. The popular Japanese title of Townsend Harris is “the nation’s friend.”
CELEBRATION IN HONOR OF THE OPENING OF THE FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOL IN JAPAN
Having committed herself by treaty, Japan then had to make trade and toil honorable and develop the resources of the country, or else go the way of India, be prostrate like China, or fall into the maw of Russia.
Where look for wealth? The soil was already worked to its full capacity as then known. Despite artificial checks to population, which had stood stationary for a century, the land seemed to cast out its human occupants. Famines, often carrying off two millions of people a year, desolated the land with appalling regularity. They were obliged to look to the mines and the precious metals, despite the double danger of a social revolution sure to be wrought from honoring men of pick and tools rather than of swords, and of the wrath of the gods and dragons that guarded jealously the treasures of the underworld.
It was as Nicodemus by night that high-bred men, shuddering at the necessity of it, came to Mr. Harris to ask for American mining engineers to prospect for gold. In 1861, with appalling promptness, arrived Messrs. William Phipps Blake and Raphael Pumpelly. Then the frightful problem of etiquette at once upreared itself. Should they be received as mechanics in overalls or as subalterns in an embassy? The answer to the question referred to Mr. Harris was startling: “In America the President of the United States would receive them as his equals.”
That settled it. The monetary equilibrium of the world was not disturbed then or since by Japan’s output of gold. Social and economic conditions, as well as lack of lodes prevented, but Pumpelly taught blasting, and incidentally lighted the fuse that blew up feudalism. Later, Professor Benjamin Lyman, with Harry Smith Monroe and others from America, explored, surveyed, and mapped Japan’s treasure-lands, saving the waste of millions in wild delusions.
Pumpelly builded better than he knew, healing an age-long breach between honor and toil. Without knowing it, he ushered in a new industrial era. Townsend Harris was the glad sponsor of the missionaries, who for ten years were in effect the sole teachers of the nation in science, history, medicine, and statesmanship; for of Christianity, until 1872, the Japanese, knowing only the Portuguese and Spanish type, and refusing to jest at their scars, would have none.