Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 90

1350.

Letter from B. J. Bettelheim.

67

ape the partridge's simplicity, supposing it will be taken for sincerity, or perhaps for a mistake. As they well know the only ground on which to base a request for our removal is their law prohibiting residence to foreigners (more than which really the whole dispatch means nothing); so that, if you yield, they boast they know how to force their old law, unmitigated by any collateral plea, even upon nations like England and France. You may be assured that this is the drift of their diplomacy.

Except one question, raised at the conference, either by Captain Matheson of the Mariner, or by Mr. Robertson, the vice-consul at Shinghii, Whether they had any complaint to bring against me?—all went well. And even to this question, the hypocrites, in the full sup- position that we were to leave, thought it becoming the joyful occasiou to answer by all rising and unitedly holding out their arms as if to embrace me. We met every argument they urged, some being suf- ficiently answered by a general laugh, and concluded by telling them plainly, we did not feel called upon to acknowledge a law by which a peaceable man was forbidden to reside in any country.

Their disappointment at this result was great, too unexpected to be concealed, and I took good care not to add my complaints to their already sufficiently bitter chagrin. I begged Captain Matheson not to produce the letter I had addressed to him recounting my grievances, and except a few trifling points orally mentioned, I thought the con- ference had better be broken up, which, as I was the interpreter, was easily done, though I saw they wished to prolong it.

How little advantage Christian nations can promise themselves to obtain from Japan, by yielding, temporizing, gentlemanly, appeals, has already been many times shown; and how little, on a minor scale, we gained here by the intercessions of the Mariner was soon seen; for a passage across the river in the public ferry-boat was refused me, as heretofore, and still more unmistakably in another pelting at noonday, which I received before March ended, while addressing a few people in the streets, at their open shop doors. On my repeated com- plaints, I got only a verbal message, that a boy, wishing to drive off some fowls, had missed the birds and struck the wall, from which the stone rebounded and hit me on the inside of the fore-arm, a place to which no missile taking such a ramble could possibly find its way, and still less retain force enough to inflict a considerable wound.

I come now to an epoch in our history, which may be peculiarly in- teresting to you, namely, the visit of the American sloop of war Preble, Commander Glynn. No sooner had I rowed near her, than the officers

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