The Sun.
London, England, 1858-11-01 00:00:00

Japanese Minister, after which we ref tatted to our
"During our stay
at ledfie we made excursions
into the country several miles. The scenery was
charming and the land highly cultivated. The
houses and persens of the people are extremely clean ;
in the villages are bathing boluses. The people
exhibited much curiosity, but no incivility, At a
spot *diem there is a pretty waterfall and stream
tea and reireshnictits may be had, served by young
women who are far from ugly; being unmarried,
they exhibited a set of beautifully white teeth and
black arched eyebrows ; some whiten their faces,
neck, and upper part of the chest by means of
chalk. The appearance of the married women with
blackened teeth and their eyebrows removed was in
ungainly contrast to them. At an entertainment
there was introduced a strong frothy tea, made by
pulverising a teaspoonful of a very superior kind
and whipping it into a frothy beverage, but it was
too strong to be agreeable; the remains of former
served sweetmeats, &c., were served a second time,
the names of the parties having been placed on the
boxes containing them. The servants who brought
in these things each wore a sword, made a low bow
on placing them before us, and retired placing the
palms of their hands upon the upper parts of their
thighs. Presents of silk, lacquer-ware, porcelain,
&c., were made to the different persons of the
embassy and officers of the ships. Among the
former were some pieces of silk that may only be
worn by the Japanese nobles, no inferior person
being allowed to buy or possess it ; it is said to be
made by banished nobles. It is not better in quality
or handsomer than Chinese silk. The easy, affable,
kind manner of the Japanese officials as compared
with the self-conceited airs of the Chinese is remark-
able, and impressed us greatly in their favour.
They were jolly, too ; drinking to the Queen, the
Emperor, and the Commissioners in Champagne as
if they liked it, with a hip-hip, hoorah ! They ex-
pressed their feelings of satisfaction at the visit of
the Ambassador, and hoped that one of them as
Ambassador from the. Court of Japan-might meet
him in England, Moriama being the secretary.
"On the 16th of July the treaty was formally
signed by Lord Elgin and the six Commissioners.
At an interview held for the purpose some dais
previous Lord Elgin delivered to the Prime Minis-
ter the letter of Lord Clarendon presenting the
steam yacht to the Emperor of Japan from her
Majesty the Queen of England; preliminary ar
rangements were made for transferring her, and ii

was proposed that her name should be changed to
any other that they might suggest. Accordingly,
after the treaty was signed the party went on board.
A salute of 21 guns was fired, in excellent time,
from the fort, and the British colours were hauled
down and the Japanese hoisted, the Retribution
and Furious each saluting the flag with
21 guns. The name of Dragon was then
given to the yacht by request of the Commmis-
sioners. They expressed great pleasure at
the beautiful fittings and furniture, and gave
Lord Elgin a letter to Lord Clarendon in reply to
the one they had received from him. They visited
the Retribution while steam was getting up on
board the Dragon, and after steaming about until
lark the parties returned to their respective ships
and homes, the Japanese firing rockets and exhibit-
ing bluelights at the yardarms of the yacht.
" On the following day (27th) we left Jeddo Bay
for Shanghai, and arrived here on the 2d of Sep-
tember, after a most delightful and satisfactory trip.
"We saw the Fusiama mountain, said to be
12,000 feet high, which is represented on their por-
celain and in many of their picture books. The
population of Jeddo is about 2,000,000, the streets
of the city are wide, and the people kept in good
order by numerous police and military attendants.
" The medium of communication is the Dutch
language, which is spoken fluently by the Japanese."

THE SURRENDER OF THE CHARLES

ET GEORGES.

LISBON, OCT. 25.
The Portuguese Government has addressed the
following note to the French minister :
"1. The Portuguese Government, being unable
to resist the violence of France, will deliver up the
vessel.

"2. The French Government having rejected
the arbitration of a third power on the question of
right, the Portuguese Government also rejects arbi-
tration on the question of indemnity.
"3. Let the French Government present the
claim for the indemnity and it will be promptly
paid."

The following are the remarks of the lornal do
Commercio, and may be taken as a reflex of the
opinion entertained and expressed by the press and
by the whole of the population of Lisbon:--
" It is said that the French minister will be much
disappointed by our rejection of arbitration in the
question of indemnity, for it is supposed that the
French Government wished ours to entertain the
matter of arbitration, in order afterwards to cede it
with a show of generous disinterestedness, thus
putting a further affront upon Portugal. In
this case, the hopes of the French Govern-
ment are vain. The wrong is now consum-
mated, and Portugal has yielded to brute force,
but she is not alone ; by her side yields a power-
ful nation and a generous people. England, which
was the leader in the abolition of the slave trade,
did not care to maintain the Found she had taken;
she did not wish to maintain the justice of the
cause of her ally, who has made so many sacrifices
to comply loyally with the terms of the treaty
which she ratified with her ; a treaty whose end
is for the best interests of Christianity and civilisa-
tion. England has beheld passively this insult to
her dignity and honour. The organs of the impe-
rial Government have spoken haughtily enough.
The Presse says :—' To use violence towards Por-
tugal would be to give her importance and to de-
feat the ends intended. Sufficient will be the pro-
sence of the French flag in the Tagus to obtain all
the satisfaction demanded, and the Portuguese
Government will not in this case be the most humi-

Hated, it will be the British squadron which is ac-
customed to work upon the anchorage of Lisbon as
a port of Great Britain.' We wished at the same
time to transcribe here an article from the Journal
L'Ami de la Religion, which speaks in almost the
same terms of England. The Emperor Napoleon
has also declared himself the friend of religion,
and, to leave no doubt respecting his evangelical
sentiments, he is proceeding in Portugal as we now
see. England has abandoned the cause of right—
the lion has crouched before the eagle, who a second
time wishes to plunge her talons into Portugal.
Does the English Government imagine that in the
balance of public opinion the criminal indifference
will not in future weigh against her ! The eagle
begins his flight without opposition, but after-
wards it may be too late to drive him back to his
eyrie. We, however, bend our neck to this great-
est violence which a strong power can practice
upon a weak one, and we see that treaties and jus-
tice in international relations are a pure farce. Let
all our treaties and conventions be burnt in public,
and once for all let it be declared that law is the
power of the strongest arm. We have been vio-
lated and spoiled by the French Gorvenment.
Why, then, must we keep up diplomatic relations
with them ? Let the Portuguese ambassador retire
from Paris, and let a consul for commercial relations
be only kept there. Does not the imperial press
call us a power without any importance ? At such
a powerful court there should only be represented
such nations as can contemplate without complete
eclipse the brilliancy of so much glory. Govern-
ments which exist by despotism and violence always
fall amid the curses of the nations. Glory will not
suffice to save a despot. The sun of Austerlitz set
on St. Helena ; but this, when it disappeared from
the eyes of man, was still glorious, for it illumined
the world with the memory of great deeds. It now
only remains for England and Portugal to declare
that the French Government has the right to traffic
in slaves ; thus, at least, something may be saved
in this shipwreck of treaties. The cause is lost,
but our honour is saved, and Portugal may still
lift her head proudly before her oppressor. Shame
and infamy recoil upon those who abuse their
power, tread under foot the sacred rights of treaties,
and then boast of justice."

ROYAL FREE HOSPITAL, GRAY'S-INN -ROAD.—
The number of patients relieved at this hospital during the
week ending Oct. 30 is 2,360, of which 00 were new cases.
A MUSICAL AND CRITICAL CAT.—Mademoiselle
Dupuy, of the French opera, whose playing upon the harp
was the wonder of Parts, was convinced that she owed her
artistic excellence to her favourite cat. As soon as she sat
down to practise upon the harp, her cat assumed an at-
titude of intense attention. At any passage of peculiar
beauty puss went into an eestacy ; and so well measured
was this sensibility, according to the excellence of the
playing, and the pathos of the composition, that Mdlle.
Dupuy was able to judge of the music by the manifested
emotions of her cat. She believed puss an exact prophet,
foretelling precisely how music would affect an audience.
She was grateful accordingly to her friend, to whom she
thought she owed mainly her artistic success. In her last
illness, at the approach of death, Mdlle. Dupuy sent for
the notary to make her win. She had accumulated a for-
tune, and the first item of her will gave her town house
and her country house to her cat. To this she added an
annuity, sufficient for the support of the four-legged mew-
sician during its life. And to make sure that this, her
last will and testament, should be fulfilled, she gave seve-
ral legacies to friends on the express condition that they
should see to the fulfilment of her wishes. It was also a
condition that they should take turns, during each week,
in going to see and keep company with the orphan cat.
The relatives of Mdlle. Dupuy disputed the will, and a
lawsuit was the consequence. But the cat gained the
cause, and lived out her day with genteel alternation be-
tween her elegant town house and the tasteful country
house,—Merrys Museum,

LORD ELGIN'S MISSION TO CHINA:

(From the Times.)

It would seem to have been reserved to the era
of Mr. Disraeli's Chancellorship of the Exchequer
to dissipate the last nebulous fragments of the great
Asian mystery. Lord Elgin's mission has already
made Chinese Mandarins as familiar to us as Marl-
borough-street police magistrates, and events already
promise that we shall soon know rather more of
the habits and belief of a Japanese bonze than we
do of those of some Church of England curates. In
the interval between signing the Treaty of Tien-
sin and settling its details in Shanghai and Canton
Lord Elgin utilizes his leisure by a visit to the
islands of the Japanese Empire, and within two
months of the accomplishment of the Treaty with
China sends us home an unlooked-for, or, at any
rate, an unhoped-for, Treaty with Japan. Nothing
could have been more apparently hopeless than the
attainment of any such object. We had no ground
of quarrel with the Japanese, or even cause of com-
plaint against them; and we were even expressly,
and by our own recent act, forbidden to ask any
new privileges. Admiral Sir James Stirling—a
name which in future generations, when the history
of events in these seas has been truly written, will
o
call a glow into the face of every Englishman--had,
in 1854, made a treaty wherebsyhi
s lie obtained r
the
might
great concession that English
go into two ports to water ; and in return for this
great privilege the English undertook to respect
the monopoly of the Dutch, and never to seek to
alter the treaty then granted. The only excuse
which Lord Elgin could have under these circum-
stances to go to the Japanese Court was to present
a steam yacht, which, as an acknowledgment of
the Stirling Treaty, the Admiralty had sent out to
the Emperor. But, inasmuch as this yacht was
confided to the Admiral, and not to Lord Elgin, and
under strict instructions to deliver it up at the dis-
tant port of Nagaski, the yacht offered no great fa
cility for negotiation. Moreover, it soon appeared
that the present of aPleasure yacht to a Japanese
Emperor is like the present of a pair of spectacles
to a blind man—the first and most fundamental
law of the Empire being, that the spiritual and
temporal Emperors of Japan shall never pass the
outer gates of their palaces. With a curious felicity
we had thus hit upon the only movable thing in the
whole world which an Emperor of Japan could have
no chance, not only of ever using, but also of ever
seeing. The Admiral, finding no one at Nagasaki
able to receive this present, and perhaps a little
disgusted with the ridiculous position his instruc-
tions and the character of his present placed hint
in, handed over "the Emperor" to Lord Elgin and
went his way towards Canton. Our Ambassador-
errant was now, probably to his great satisfaction,
left alone to his own devices, with two steamers of
war and a gunboat as a guard, and his little toy
steamer, the name of which was now judiciously
changed from " the Emperor" to "the Dragon," as
a bait, or bribe, or peace-offering.
Fortune favoured the boldness of the enterprise,
and American astuteness helped us. Lord Elgin
reached Nagasaki on the 3d of August, and found
no one there but some Japanese underlings and
some Dutch officials, who naturally, gave him
small hopes. Thence he went, staggering through
one of the tremendous gales that vex these seas,
to the wretched harbour of Simoda, where the
Americans are in power, and at this place he
for the first time discovered the workings of
the echoes of his own doings on the Peiho.
It seems that as soon as the-Tien-sin Treaty was
arranged the American Commodore rushed off
to Japan to take advantage of the consterna-
tion certain to be created by the first news of
recent events in the Peiho. It was smartly
imagined. He found at Simoda the American
Consul-General just returned from Jeddo, whither
he had been upon a six months' mission, vainly
importuning for some commercial privileges. The
Commodore immediately took him on board his
ponderous steamer the Powhattan, and steered
right away for Kanagawa, a station well kno cvn
to the American men of war since Commodore
Perry's time, about 15 miles below the capital
city of Jeddo. Terrible stories and frightful anti-
cipations had for some time possessed the minds
of the Japanese. Japan, like other countries of
ancient institutions, has its conservative and pro-
gressive parties. The Prince of Boringo had stood
stoutly for the ancient Japanese constitution and
no foreign competition. But when the American
ship of war appeared, and when the American ver-
sion of the warlike operations in China circulated,
a strong feeling gained ground in favour of the
progressive party. Prince Boringo retired, and
Prince Bitsu took his place. Under the new Ad-
ministration Mr. Harris, the Consul-General, was
admitted to an interview with the Emperor ; ports
were opened, and commercial tariffs agreed upon
pretty much as is set forth in the statement we
borrow from the North China Herald. When
Lord Elgin arrived at Simoda he found Mr. Harris
in high spirits at having completed this treaty, and
the precedent gave him an opportunity whereof he
sadly stood in need. We must here—having re-
cently spoken in terms of complaint to our Ameri-
can friends for sending their silliest men upon im-
portant embassies—s ck n owl e dge that Mr. Harris
acted throughout these transactions with a frank-
ness and courtesy worthy of the representative of a
great friendly Power. Mr. Harris acted like a
man who was strong in his own knowledge of the
interests.of his country. Lord Elgin departed at
once for the anchorage below the capital, where he
found the American, and also the Russian war
steamers. The neutrals had been quick to scent
the game from afar ; they had run a race against us
to gather not only the spoils won by our arms, but
even the contribution 4 to be exacted by terror of
our deeds. Beyond this anchorage of Kanagawa
were rocks and whirlpools and perils innumerable,
all faithfully deposed to by Japanese pilots. Capt.
Sherard Osborn, who has the reputation of being
confident, and not unreasonably confident, in his own
seamanship, believed in none of these things.
Steaming over the anchorage he held on up the
Bay of Jeddo, and, stimulated by the sight of
Jeddo city, which slowly unrolled itself in the
north-west angle of the gulf, he pursued his
course, undeterred by a full gale of wind, until
he could cast anchor within gunshot of
a series of well constructed batteries, which run
across the shoals facing a portion of the city. Lord
Elgin's well judged confidence in his captain was
thus rewarded by a position which, considering he
had to deal with Asiatics, insured his success. It
was a bold move made at a timely moment, for he
could have done nothing at a distance. Since Mr.
Harris obtained his Treaty there had been a reac-
tionary movement in Jeddo, directed by the inde-
pendent Princes and hereditary nobles. They had
outed the Minister who signed the Treaty, and
Prince Boringo ruled again. But the apparition of
the British steam frigates Furious and Retribution,
intruding even upon the sacred seclusion of the
capital, spread consternation throughout the camp
of the obstructives. We made no menaces and use I
no threats, but we fear there was something like
the pressure of a force which was not altogether
moral put upon these gentle Japanese. Our ex-
cuse must be that if the Americans had obtained
concessions upon the strength of the terror areated
by the roar of the lion it would have been hard
that the lion should get nothing on his own ac-
count. We need not tell how
shore in due state and livedin a gaudy temple, an
Lord Elgin went ond
1-irivsiitthe di
tsman two
negotiated for fourteen days, andy
payllitsonof tohfatinmliiaglihittayntcsi,t3ornodf Jeddo,itshundred square
mi
miles of inhabitants ; the result has been a Treaty
which gives us all we can require for the present.
It gives us free commercial access to anreingitoernesitninga
charmingountry rich in coals
beautiful
iutiful amiableclimate, peoplae,nd to toa
ae
and minerals. As we improve or abuse these op-
portunities so will the event be to our profit or
our shame.
We do not entertain the hopes which have been
expressed in some quarters as to the great com-
mercial value of a trade with Japan, and we are
sorry for the anguish of mind which must fall
upon Mr. Bright when he conies to contemplate a
set of estimates swollen by a salary for a resident
Minister at Jeddo. But we must, nevertheless,
congratulate the country upon this accession of the
Japanese Empire to the comity of nations. They
are a people who differ altogether from the Chi-
nese. They are not only industrious and inge-
nious, but they are also inquiring and most desi-
rous of civilisation. Two hundred years ago they
were upon the point of becoming a Christian
people. They have what the Chinese have not—
the capacity of a fervent faith, and it was a poli-
tical necessity and not a barbarous intolerance that
suggested the prohibitive and exclusive character
of their modern policy. The conspiracy of the
Portuguese missionary priests occasioned and
almost justified the cruelties that are recorded in
the Romish Martyrology ; but if our dealings to-
wards them are conducted with as much good
faith as is almost certain to appear in their deal-
ings with us, we may hope to base upon this treaty
new friendships and new connections in the East,
of a different character, but scarcely less important
in their results than those which,Europe expects
from the Treaty of Tien-sin.

LETTERS'TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA.
—On Saturday last the Cunard steamer Asia sailed from
Liverpool for New York, with the United States mails, a
large number of passengers, and a full cargo. Owing to
the winter arrangements there will be no steamer for Ca-
nada before the 17th Nov. On Saturday next, the British
and North American mail steamer Niagara leaves for Hali-
fax and Boston with the American letters, &c. Letters will
be received at the General Post-office till 7.30 a.m., and
finally, with late fees, at 8.30 a,m.