These interminable interviews and voluminous memoranda were wholly unproductive, owing, no doubt, to the fact that the ideas of the parties ran on parallel lines destined never to come to any point of fertile contact. The burden of the cry of the Western people was "progress," a word without equivalent in the language, and expressing an idea which had no place in the conception of the Chinese. Incessant repetition with varying illustrations were to the Chinese as flowers of rhetoric wasted on a deaf man, and that simply because the basis of the Chinese political thought lay at the opposite pole from that of the European. On one occasion a distinguished American promoter was expatiating to the governor of Formosa on the advantages of railway communication, his most telling example being his own experience in being rushed along after an early breakfast from his house in Albany to New York, where he spent the day transacting important business and got wheeled back again to Albany for dinner. The governor stopped him, and asked what in the name of sanity possessed him to lead such a wearing life, as the last thing he (the governor) would dream of doing would be to live a hundred miles from his work. Though the earliest public advocate of railroads in China, the governor regarded their utility from a far different point of view.
[Illustration: WÊNSIANG. _From a photo by J. Thomson, Grosvenor Street, W._]
So eager were the foreigners for progress, which in their mind included the regeneration of the Chinese empire and the development of its full capacity for self-defence, that they were wont to rejoice over the slightest indications of a beginning being made. Thus the mission of a man of no standing as a secretary of the Tsungli-Yamên, who was sent to Europe in 1866 to take observations, was hailed as the beginning of the new era, and commended so warmly by the foreign Ministers to their Governments that the emissary was received like the Queen of Sheba by King Solomon, and shown--at least in Great Britain--everything that was admirable from the Western point of view. He was as far, however, from appreciating the triumph of science as was Cetewayo, the Zulu, whose admiration of England focussed itself on the elephant "Jumbo" at the Zoological Gardens, or the Scotswoman who, after being shown over the British Museum, had carried away from it one impression, and that of the "graund mat" at the door. The Chinese Government's appreciation of Western progress was by no means increased by the mission of Pin, which rather indeed produced a contrary effect. China soon began to put forth fresh claims to go her own way, her own way being directly opposed to the kind of progress which was being pressed upon her.