Politics & Power Quote by Townsend Harris

A backhanded compliment dressed up as diplomacy, Harris’s line performs a familiar 19th-century maneuver: praise the “brave” foreigner, then quietly rank them below the supposedly enlightened West. The opening nod to courage reads generous, even respectful, but it’s immediately fenced in by hierarchy. Courage is “useful” only under the limited, almost primitive category of war; “knowledge of arts” is framed as the higher human achievement. The word “hence” does the real work here, converting a cultural preference into a moral verdict: bravery without Western-coded refinement “is not to be highly esteemed.”

The subtext is transactional. Harris, a businessman turned America’s first consul general to Japan, operated during the forced “opening” of Japan in the 1850s, when U.S. and European powers treated access as entitlement and “civilization” as a yardstick. By invoking “the President,” he borrows state authority to make an aesthetic argument feel like policy. It’s soft power in sentence form: we acknowledge your valor, but legitimacy, respect, and equal standing require adopting our standards of culture, taste, and learning.

What makes the quote work - and sting - is how it wraps condescension in the language of improvement. “Arts” isn’t just painting and poetry; it’s shorthand for institutions, education, and the broader civilizational script America wanted Japan to follow. Harris isn’t merely describing Japanese character. He’s setting terms for admiration, and by extension for partnership: prove you’re “modern” in our image, or your virtues will be treated as quaint.