1910.] DUBOIS— JAPANESE EMBASSY OF i860. 259 



The two young under-assayers were the schoolboys of i860, 

 Jacob B. Eckfeldt (the present chief assayer) and the present 

 writer, whose recollections of the envoys of the Shogunate were still 

 vivid in their memories. 



In a very real sense, then, Ito had become the connecting link 

 and the effectuating successor of the envoys of i860, anti-Shogu- 

 nate as he had been, and now under the new Imperial regime, as he 

 was. Notwithstanding the great break with the past on the incom- 

 ing of the Meiji or " Enlightened Rule," the restoration to power 

 of the Mikado-Emperor, there was an efficient continuity of the 

 westernism inaugurated officially by the Shogun. The treaties of 

 Perry and Harris and the Washington ratification still held in spite 

 of various attempts to discredit and revise them, even in the 

 seventies. Not until 1894 did such revision take place. To the 

 credit of the Shogunate in its later days of the sixties be it said, the 

 degenerated condition of its antiquated and heterogeneous monetary 

 system and coinage was realized. It was seen with alarm that 

 western commerce under the treaties was suffering and would suffer 

 unless there was reform in the coinage. Hence the capital im- 

 portance of the visit of the embassy of i860 to the mint at P'lila- 

 delphia. ' 



The story revealed in these last few paragraphs, however, shows 

 that the spirit of the Shogun and the impressions carried home by 

 his now almost forgotten embassy remained as a wholesoriie and 

 permanent leaven. Under Ito, Matsukata, Iwakura and others, the 

 impressions carried home by the first embassy came to fruitage not 

 only in an Americanized monetary and coinage system but in what 

 lies deeper than these — the moral standard of a trustworthy pre- 

 cision in the manufacture of coin in which the Philadelphia mint has 

 led the world. That this principle and achievement had become an 

 ambitious scientific and commercial motif in new Japan is further 

 evidenced in other ways. For instance, in 1875 sample coins were 

 sent from the imperial mint at Osaka to our Department of State 

 with the request from the Japanese government that these coins 

 be carefully tested at the Philadelphia mint. The result of the test 

 (in which I myself had an active part) was very satisfactory. 



