Page:American Diplomacy in the Orient - Foster (1903).djvu/281

 associated Kweiliang, who had conducted the negotiations at Tientsin in 1858, where he had exhibited much skill and fitness for diplomatic duties. The third member of this board, as at first organized, was Wensiang, a Manchu mandarin, a man of marked ability, sagacious and enlightened, who realized better than any other of its public men the real situation of the empire. For fifteen years, until his death in 1875, he was the controlling spirit in the Foreign Office, the foremost Chinese statesman of his day, and his country's most useful public servant. With these men the diplomatic representatives of the Western nations had to do, and they proved worthy compeers in urbanity, astuteness, and capacity for public affairs.

The American representative who was to enter upon this new field of diplomacy, and who was destined to a career greatly distinguished above his colleagues, received his appointment to the post through a chance turn in political affairs. Anson Burlingame, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, a man of accomplished manners and possessing considerable oratorical gifts, had come prominently into public notice during the exciting period preceding the Civil War in the United States. He was best known for his ready acceptance of the challenge to a duel sent him by Brooks, of South Carolina, because of his denunciation of the latter for his brutal assault upon Charles Sumner in the senate chamber. When President Lincoln came to allot the offices to his adherents, Mr. Burlingame was appointed minister to Austria. Reaching Paris on his way to his post at Vienna, he was detained by notice that the