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and mean nothing. If a consul proposes to call upon a Tou-tai, or Mandarien, they “will sweep their mean thresholds clean in honor of your presence, engrave your words upon their hearts, escort you back to their doorways and there wait weeping until your glorious return,” &c. Notwithstanding these hurried words they both hate and dispise you, although near the coast, where the power of outside barbarians is seen and realized, their dislike is tempered by a wholesome fear of foreign gunboats and bayonets.
Leaving the Prime Minister to recover from his “colic” the Seward party penetrated fifty miles further north to the great wall, that famous type of Chinese greatness and feebleness. The Shanghai News Letter gives a full report of the speeches made by the venerable statesman and the gallant Admiral while standing on this interesting spot, “surveying on one side the vast plains of Chins, teeming with population, on the other the desolate wilds of Tartary.” The English newspapers in their account of the affair take occasion to speak of the American mania for speech-making on all and every occasion, and under the most adverse circumstances. They delicately hint at the slightly absurd aspect of these two old gentlemen standing open a ruined wall, shivering in the keen blasts sweeping down from the plains of Tartary, and firing off a pair of formal speeches at each other. As the gallant old sailor was never before in his life known to make a speech, they intimate that these extended “remarks” were “cooked” by reporters for homes consumption. But such ill natured feelings at one of our most cherished national characteristics is no more than we ought to expect from an Englishman.
After visiting the great wall and the Ming Tombs, where the Emperors of the Ming, or native Chinese dynasty were buried for thousands of years before the Tartars overrun and subjugated the Empire, the party returned to Peking, where in the meantime some pressure had been brought to bear on the government, and the Prince consented to invite the august visitors to an entertainment. There overs banquet of shark fins, birds’ nests, and other Chinese delicacies, the best of feelings were mutually expressed, and compliments tossed back and forth between “China’s best friend and treaty maker,” and the head of a Ministry that rules one third of the whole human race.
