China, save for a few port cities, was as impenetrable as when
in 1552 the dying Xavier had cried--``O Rock, Rock, when
wilt thou open!'' Siam excluded all foreigners until the century's
first quarter had passed, and Laos saw no white man till
1868. A handful of British traders were so greedily determined
to keep all India as a private commercial preserve that,
forgetting their own indebtedness to Christianity, they sneered
at the proposal to send missionaries to India as ``the maddest,
most expensive, most unwarranted project ever proposed by a
lunatic enthusiast,'' while as late as 1857, a director of the
East India Company declared that ``he would rather see a band
of devils in India than a band of missionaries.'' Korea was
rightly called ``the hermit nation'' until 1882; and as for
Africa, it was not till 1873 that the world learned of that part
of it in which the heroic Livingstone died on his knees, not till
1877 that Stanley staggered into a West Coast settlement after
a desperate journey of 999 days from Zanzibar through Central
Africa, not till 1884 that the Berlin Conference formed the
International Association of the Congo guaranteeing that which
has not yet been realized ``liberty of conscience'' and ``the
free and public exercise of every creed.''

Even in America within the memory of men still living, the
lumbering, white-topped ``prairie schooner'' was the only
conveyance for the tedious overland journey to California.
Hardy frontiersmen were fighting Indians in the Mississippi
Valley, and the bold Whitman was ``half a year'' in bearing a
message from Oregon to Washington.

The Hon. John W. Foster tells us in his ``Century of American