City to incur an additional and heavy expense to promote especially the education of any particular class, it should not be the apt in study, the brilliant, the eminently proficient, who should be selected as the subjects of its experiment;-- the recipients of its bounty,-- but rather the step-children of Nature and of Fortune, the outcast, the benighted, the brutalized, the homeless, and the miserable. The cost of this Free Academy, judiciously expended, would suffice to rescue, annually, at least one thousand destitute and sorely afflicted children from our Citys lanes, courts and cellars, where they are daily sinking deeper and deeper into the bottomless gulf of vagrancy, want, beggary, theft, prostitution, disease and death, and place them in virtuous and happy, though humble homes, where the blessings of wise guardianship, assured plenty, education, industry and proficiency in the useful arts, would be secured to them. For these and kindred reasons which I will not here require shall be set forth, I protest against the existence of the Free Academy, and demand its termination.
Three years later, Townsend and his brother John dissolved their business partnership. Harris continued in the porcelain import business and sailed to the Far East to buy items to sell in New York. He considered pursuing a career in the diplomatic service. While traveling in China on a buying mission, Harris received the news of Commodore Matthew Perry's (1794-1858) 1853 expedition to Japan and of the treaty allowing for the exchange of diplomatic representatives.
Townsend Harris returned to the United States and sought a diplomatic post in the East where he had extensive trade experience.
He was dubbed the American Consul at Ningpo, China, but he subsequently obtained the more prestigious appointment of Consul General to the Empire of Japan, on August 4, 1855, and was later confirmed in this post by President Franklin Pierce (1804-1869) in July 1856. He was also charged with negotiating a trade treaty with King Mongkut, Rama IV of Siam (reigned 1851-1868). Harris successfully negotiated this treaty in 1856.
