Mr. Seward to Mr. Van Valkenburgh.
Sir: Your dispatch of the 15th of August, No. 83, has been received. I learn from it that the Mikado’s decree heretofore mentioned in this correspondence for the punishment of four thousand and ten native Japanese, by banishment from their homes with hard labor, for the offense of adhering to the Christian religion, has been carried into execution in regard to one hundred and twenty of those unfortunate persons. You further inform me that sixteen of those one hundred and twenty persons were, in the first instance, sentenced to death, but were reprieved in consequence of the representations which were made to the Japanese government by the foreign representatives, and that you have reason to believe, further, that the delay which has taken place in the execution of the sentence upon the remainder of the native Christians is chiefly due to the same influence.
I thank you for showing me how very strong and universal is the popular prejudice which prevails in Japan against the Christian religion. I think I fully apprehend the strength of the Japanese traditions, influences, and customs, and also the formidable strength of the existing pagan hierarchies. While I give full weight, however, to these [Page 828] considerations, on the one side, I feel very sure, nevertheless, that it is not in this age that the dissemination of the principles and sentiments of the Christian religion is to be arrested or even interrupted or hindered by any possible ecclesiastical or political national combinations in Japan.
You express with emphasis an opinion that it would not be prudent to do more in regard to this Japanese religious persecution than has been done already, and you add that your colleagues and yourself are of opinion that the duty to be enjoined upon the representatives of the western powers for the present should not go beyond urging the authorities persistently, in a firm and friendly manner, to adopt a more humane policy and to revise the laws in a more liberal sense.
This subject has been already discussed to some extent between the United States government and the other western powers. The governments of Great Britain and France have substantially agreed in approving the line of policy which you have thus indicated. I now cordially concur in that approval, and therefore you will not be expected in any case to go beyond it, without the full assent and concurrence of your colleagues. Nevertheless, you may make known to them that I am oppressed with a painful apprehension that if the present persecutions shall be continued, then it must happen that in some, perhaps merely accidental way, the sympathies which foreign Christians residing in Japan cannot fail to feel and manifest may bring those foreign Christians themselves into conflict, either with agents of the domestic government or with an infuriated people. When one foreign Christian shall have suffered martyrdom in Japan for his faith, Christendom will be shocked to its center, and it may demand that the policy of forbearance and encouragement which the treaty powers have hitherto practiced in Japan shall be reversed.
Influenced by these apprehensions, I sincerely hope that the representatives of the western powers in Japan, besides urging the Japanese government, as they propose persistently and in a firm and friendly manner, to adopt a more humane policy, and to revise the laws in a more liberal sense, may find it neither unsafe nor imprudent to seek and obtain the restoration of the natives now suffering under the existing persecution to their freedom and their homes. I am, sir, your obedient servant,
R. B. Van Valkenburgh, Esq., &c., &c., &c.