BORN AT BIRCHILL'S Hall, near Walsall, Staffordshire, in 1828, Sir Hany Parkes was left an orphan at the age of five, and came out to Canton, when still a lad, to be under the charge of his kinsman, the Rev. Charles Gutzlaff, a missionary and consular interpreter well-known for his writings on Chinese subjects. Sir Harry thus acquired at an early age that intimate knowledge of the Chinese language and of the Oriental character, which helped to make of him England's most trusty and able servant in the Far East for a period of forty-three years, that is, until his death as British Minister to the Court of Peking, in 1885.

Beginning as what would now be termed a student interpreter on the staff of Sir Henry Pottinger during the first China War of 1842, he occupied in turn most of the Chinese consular posts, notably that of Canton, where he was appointed Commissioner during the occupation of the city by the British troops. He was also instrumental in negotiating a treaty with Siam. But the most striking episode of his life was his capture by the Chinese during the war of 1860, when, together with a few companions, he was sent by Lord Elgin under a flag of truce to sign a convention of peace with Prince Tsai, the Chinese Emperor's nephew, but was treacherously seized, cast into a dungeon, and put to the torture. Most of the party fell victims to Chinese barbarity; but Sir Harry's unflinching resolution triumphed equally over torture and over diplomatic wiles, and he was eventually set free.

In 1865 he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Yedo, which post he continued to hold till 1883, when he was promoted to Peking. His career in Japan coincided with the most stirring years of modern Japanese history. He even helped to mould that history. When, at the beginning of the civil war of 1868, all his diplomatic colleagues were inclined to support the Shogun, Sir Harry, better informed than they as to the historical rights of the Mikado and the growing national feeling in favour of supporting those rights, threw the whole weight of British influence into the loyal side against the rebels – not only so, but. he carried his reluctant colleagues with him.

THE SUBJECT OF treaty revision was for so many years the hinge on which Japanese foreign policy turned, the working of the new treaties is still such a burning question to the foreign residents, that the new-comer desirous of peeping below the surface and learning something of the inner springs of local politics, will perhaps find an interest in details that might otherwise be condemned as ‘ancient history’ In effect, is not the recent past our only trustworthy guide to the present and the near future?

Japan's first treaty with the United States was that wrung from her, in 1854, by the terror which Commodore Perry's ‘black ships’ had inspired. Others, dating from 1858 to 1869 inclusive, followed with Russia, Great Britain, France, and the rest of the European powers great and small, the chief features in these documents, which were practically merged in one by the insertion of the most favoured nation clause, being (I) the opening of the ports of Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, Nagasaki, Niigata, and Hakodate to foreign trade and residence, with a radius of 10 ri(about 24 1/2miles) round each, termed ‘Treaty Limits,’ wherein foreigners might travel without passports; (II) the establishment of ‘exterritoriality’, that is to say, the exemption of foreigners from the jurisdiction of the Japanese law-courts; (III) a very low scale of import dues, mostly five per cent ad valorem.

Such, in barest outline, were the old treaties, their tacitly assumed basis being the unequal status of the two contracting parties—civilised white men on the one hand, Japan but just emerging from Asiatic semi-barbarism on the other. How to get them revised on more favourable terms, long formed the great crux of Japanese diplomacy. The matter was a complicated one, involving, as it did on the foreigner's part, the surrender of commercial and legal privileges that had been enjoyed for a long term of years—involving, too, the extremely delicate question as to the fitness of Japan for admission into the family of Christian nations on equal terms. Legally, Japan had a claim to the revision of the treaties as far back as 1872; and the long tarrying of Prince Iwakura's embassy in the United States in 1872-3 was avowedly caused by the desire to conclude a new treaty then and there.