Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/52

 tion. She asked that all foreigners within her borders, without distinction of nationality, should be subject to her laws and judicable by her law courts as foreigners found within the borders of every sovereign State in the Occident are subject to its laws and judicable by its tribunals of justice, and she supplemented her application by promising that its favourable reception should be followed by complete opening of the country and removal of all restrictions hitherto imposed on foreign trade, travel, and residence in her realm. From the first it had been the habit of Occidental peoples to upbraid Japan on account of the barriers opposed by her to full and free international intercourse, and she was now able to claim that the barriers were no longer created by her intention or maintained by her desire, but that they existed because of a system which theoretically proclaimed her unfitness for free association with Western nations and practically made it impossible for her to throw open her territories completely for the ingress of strangers.

A large volume might be filled with the details of the negotiations that followed Japan's proposal. Never before had an Oriental State sought such recognition, and there was extreme reluctance on the part of Western Powers to try the unprecedented experiment of entrusting the lives and properties of their subjects and citizens to the keeping of a "pagan" people. Only the outlines of the story can be sketched here, though several