point they would stand fast. As the late German Minister to China said on his return, the action of England has been consistent in nothing except its vacillation. Now a determined and consistent policy must be based upon certain accepted truths, as essential to the resolution of our Chinese question, as the axioms are to the solution of a problem in Euclid. What, then, are the axioms founded in fact or inculcated by experience, of a British Far Eastern policy? I put forward the following as affording a basis for discussion:

1. There is no such thing as "China." -We are accustomed to speak of "China" and "the Chinese people" as if they were distinct entities. This is an error at the bottom of many of our mistakes and confusions. We may use the word China as a convenient expression to connote a certain vast portion of the earth's surface, but in no more exact sense. What figures as China on the map is a number of districts, often separated from each other and from the centre by immense distances, differing widely in climate, resources and configuration, inhabited by people of largely varying race, temperament, habit, religion and language. The Mohammedans, of whom there are thirty millions, regard the Buddhists as irreligious foreigners. "The inhabitants of the central and northern provinces," says Mr. Keane, "scarcely regard those of the extreme southeast districts as fellow-countrymen at all." A native of Shanghai was heard to say, "There were seven Chinamen and two Cantonese." A man from Tientsin and a man from Canton can no more talk to each other than can a Frenchman and a Dutchman. Moreover, there exists between them a virulent race-hatred. lost the best Chinese servant I ever had because, being from the north, nothing would induce him to accompany me in the south of China where his speech would have betrayed him. "Cantonese

I

velly bad man, master," he said to me; "I go home." This curious inter-hatred is conspicuous where Chinese from different parts of China meet together, as, for example, in Bangkok, or on the plantations in Malaya or the Dutch Indies. Savage faction-fights are of constant occurrence. Consequently it is easy to raise a force of Chinese in one place to fight Chinese in another. It is because there is no such thing as "China" that the military caste of the Manchus, comparatively infinitesimal in numbers, have been able to impose their rule upon the enormous masses of Chinese. Thus it is unwise to predicate anything of China as a whole, or to believe that what suits one part will necessarily suit another. To this extent the partition of China would rest upon a scientific and practical basis.

2. "China" will not reform itself in any way. This axiom arises naturally from the preceding. Over the heterogeneous and conflicting masses of China there has never been any effective central control, and what control there has been has steadily grown weaker. The "Vermilion pencil" makes a faint mark in the south, while in the southwest and extreme northwest it has little but an academic influence, and on the Tibetan borders none at all. "Respect this!" appended to every imperial rescript in the Peking Gazette, is as far from actuality as the "Oyez" of the usher with us, or the challenge of the Queen's champion at the Coronation. There is, therefore, not the slightest possibility of the establishment by Chinese authority of a national army, or navy, or civil service. And the corruption which is the fatal curse of China is directly due to the fact that there is not, and cannot be, any central authority to exercise control over local officials, in the absence of this, to pay them. The Chinese people in the language of physics, is a mechanical mixture and not a chemical compound, and

therefore it is irresponsive to the action of any single re-agent, and incapable of exhibiting any common property.

It follows that the bogey of the "yellow peril," the conquest of Europe by the Chinese, and such-like anticipations, have no basis in fact. The late Mr. Charles Pearson started this in recent years, and the present Commander-inChief is said to share his view. When horses and dogs mutiny, and harness and muzzle men, China will invade Europe, and not before. The same fundamental misconception which invented this nightmare has led other writers into similar errors of predication. For instance, when war broke out between China and Japan, Mr. Curzon, at the end of two long and carefully reasoned letters to the Times, reached this imposing conclusion:

China pours upon the enemy an inexhaustible volume of men; her resources are almost illimitable; her patience is both colossal and profound. In a war in which her entire prestige and her continued domination of Eastern Asia were at stake, she would fight on and on, through defeat to victory, and would sooner perish than capitulate.

The war, it will be remembered, did not proceed along these lines. This misconception, however, is very widespread, and Mr. Curzon again fell a victim to it in his interpretation, in his well-known work upon the Far East, of the sudden enthusiasm for a complete railway system professed a few years ago by Chinese statesmen, for he wrote:

The entire scheme, in fact, is China's reply to the Trans-Siberian Railway of Russia to Vladivostok-the prodigious effect of which upon the future of Asia, at present but scantily realized in this country, is clearly realized by a few Chinese statesmen-and is a warning to the Tsar that China does not mean to let Manchuria and the Sungari River

slip from her grasp quite as easily as she did the Amur and Ussuri Channels, and the provinces upon their northern and eastern banks.

Recent events add a pathos to the striking inaccuracy of this forecast.

Under the present régime what is true of the Chinese Government is true also of individual Chinamen. Many will recollect the remarkable paper signed (not written) by the Marquis Tsêng, in the Asiatic Quarterly Review, about fourteen years ago, called "The Awakening of China," in which he declared that the feet of China were at last upon the path of progress. When I was in Peking, Tsêng himself was regarded as little better than a "foreign devil," and he had not enough influence to procure me admittance to an ordinary temple. That arch-humbug, Li Hung-chang, after throwing dust in the eyes of generations of foreigners, is probably found out by everybody at last. If Russia succeeds in establishing herself in Peking, his day of reward will have dawned. His former secretary and interpreter, the remarkably able and accomplished Chinaman who now represents the Son of Heaven at the Court of St. James, is doubtless rejoicing that he is not in Peking at this moment, since, except under the wing of his old patron, his head would not be safe on his shoulders. For-and this might almost stand as an axiom by itself-every Chinaman who professes Liberal ideas and sympathy with Western nations is either assuming a convenient mask for a time, or else he has cut himself off so completely from his own people that they distrust and dislike him almost more than they do the foreigner himself. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the former is the case. Generations of education in China, combined with a strong hand and just treatment, will produce a class of Chinese as loyal to Western methods

as the Chinese of Singapore, who regard the British flag as their greatest asset-political, not commercial-but until then the attitude of the Chinese will be that of the coolie on the labor ship in Hong Korg harbor, who made an obscene remark about the Protector of Chinese as this official passed, and who, when the latter turned and gave him a sound rating in faultless Chinese, remarked to his neighbor with genuine surprise, "It talks like a human being!" Any and every "reform" in China must draw its motive power and its guidance from outside.

3. Russian ambition has no limits.This is an important axiom-and not alone in the Far East-for we have hitherto acted in the belief that if Russia were conceded her immediate objects she would rest and be thankful. You might as well expect only half the stream to run down hill. Not until all peoples that on earth do dwell are safe within the fold of the Orthodox Greek Church, and the gaze of the doubleheaded eagle of Byzantium encircles the equator and the meridian of St. Petersburg, will Russian ambition be gratified. For her an imperative Divine command and a congenital territorial ambition point the same way. Nobody can have studied Russian diplomacy for years without conceiving a profound admiration of the skill and the patriotism which inspire it. And no contemporary sentiment is so foolish as that blind Russophobia unhappily not yet extinct among us. Russia will take all she can possibly get, and, like the rest of us, what she cannot get she will do without. Instead of abusing her it would be wiser to emulate her qualities and so seek to put a barrier in her way at the points where the interests of our own country become imperative. It is easy for a strong nation to come to a durable understanding with her-witness Germany and Austria. But we shall never do it by writ

ing sarcastic despatches and making rude speeches, and then meekly accepting her fact accomplished to our injury. That is the policy of the boy who puts his finger to his nose and runs awayand it has been ours for too long.

There is no mystery whatever in Russian ambition in the Far East. It is to become the protector of China-to begin with. Given twenty years of that and she would be irresistible. This ambition was plainly announced by the great Muravieff-Amurski himself, the wonderful man who gave Russia the Amur and led her to the Pacific, almost in spite of herself. And a prohibitory tariff towards the trade of other countries follows her flag, wie die Thräne auf die Zwiebel. British trade she has deliberately destroyed wherever she has come in contact with it. A very frank utterance on this point relieves anybody else from the need of making assertions about her objects in China. Prince Ukhtomsky, head of the last Russian Commission in Peking, director of the Russo-Chinese Bank, editor of the St. Petersburg Viedomosti, travelling companion and intimate friend of the Tsar, has stated that the policy of Russia is, first, to absorb China, under the ægis of the present dynasty; second, to exclude British trade; and third, to form a continental alliance with the object of crushing England." Dignity demands that we should deceive ourselves no longer. If it be indeed our lot to be wiped out by the "glacial movement" of Russia, let us, at least, like the soldier who desires to be shot with unbandaged eyes, perish looking steadily upon our fate.

4. Japan is face to face with a lifeand-death issue in the Far East.-The future of Japan rides upon a dial's point at this moment, and well she knows it. If Russia once consolidate her position in northern China, and in

2 Quoted by Mr. Geoffrey Drage, M. P., in an interesting speech in the House of Commons.

another year this will be done, Japan has lost the future of her brightest hopes and may await the fulfilment of her worst fears. For a year to come Russia will do everything to conciliate her-even, I believe, going so far as to promise her the domination of Korea. If Japan strike at all, the blow must be delivered not later than six months hence. Then, with an army admirable in equipment, warlike in spirit, and half a million strong, and a fleet beginning with six battleships as powerful as any in the world, six new first-class cruisers, the best that European shipyards can turn out, and an ample supply of second-class cruisers, destroyers and transport, she may reasonably hope for victory. But the crisis is a terrible one for her, and a truly fearful responsibility rests upon her statesmen. It is needless to point out what an opportunity this situation gives to the statesmen of any Power on terms of cordial friendship with Japan, whose objects in the Far East are sure beforehand of Japanese sympathy.

These axioms, hastily and inadequately as they are set down here, must underlie, I venture to submit, any successful British policy in the Far East. And if this be so, it should not be difficult to deduce from them the broad outlines of such a policy. How the fast-rising flames of anti-foreign fury are to be subdued, and the old semblance of order re-established in China, is a problem past my solving. But when this is accomplished, be the time near or far, a more difficult task will await the statesmen of the West. So far as I can see, the solution will have to be sought along some such lines as these:

1. China can only be ruled through the Chinese. Therefore, the Empress Dowager being deposed and deported, the Emperor must be replaced upon the throne, to rule by the advice of a Council of Chinese Ministers acting

under the control of a Council of representatives of the Powers. The suggestion that the capital should be removed to Nanking is probably a wise one, but Russia would exert all her influence to prevent it.

2. The whole of China must be thrown open to the foreign trade.

3. This can only be done when foreign troops, or foreign-led Chinese troops, are prepared to defend foreign merchants from molestation. Therefore, the open door policy being dead beyond resuscitation, and the partition of China in a limited sense inevitable, each Power should undertake to keep order in its own sphere. These spheres are already overtly or tacitly agreed upon. Korea would form the sphere of Japan, and any Power unwilling to accept this would have to make a different arrangement by force of arms. 4. Every Power would enter into a formal engagement with all the others that no duties beyond those agreed upon by all should be levied, that no preferential or differential railway rates should be imposed in its sphere, that no force should be raised beyond that necessary to keep order, and that all matters of intercommunication should be decided by the Council of foreign representatives.

5. England should invite the United States to address a communication to the Powers simultaneously with herself in this sense. The United States would probably not desire a sphere of their own, as there would be no advantage in having one under this scheme, except the prevailing use of one's own language in it, and the United States would find this advantage in the British sphere and be in the same position as other nations in all the other spheres and in the general control. As the American elections would be over by the time this proposal would be under discussion, there would be less difficulty in inducing an American administration

to take action. Moreover, if America should ever desire to relieve herself of special responsibility in the Philippines, these islands could be included in this Chinese union as the American sphere. 6. As there is nobody at the Foreign Office or in the diplomatic service with any expert knowledge of China, as our Consuls, who are experts, are far away, and as British dealings with the Far East have formed an almost unbroken series of blunders for some time past, a number of gentlemen possessing special qualifications for the task, beginning, I would suggest, with Professor Douglas, should be invited to form an advisory committee to be consulted when necessary by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

The idea at the bottom of these proposals is that they would compel every nation to show her own hand, and place in the position of the common enemy the Power that would not co-operate for the equal common good. I am well The Nineteenth Century.

aware of the difficulties in the way of such a policy as is here outlined, especially in the working of a condominium on so large a scale, and in the fact that Russia, apart from the sincerely pacific and conscientious aspirations of the Tsar himself, would rather keep China corrupt and weak than have her reformed and strong, and I am under no illusion as to my own lack of claims to formulate it, but I see no other alternative to international quarrels, and what I have written may, perhaps, serve as a basis for discussion, for only by open discussion and the consequent growth of a strong public opinion will anything be accomplished and British interests saved from the wreck which inept statesmanship has made of them. At any rate, even this cursory glance at our miserable record should be enough to show that something must be done by us at once, and something totally different from what we have done hitherto.

Henry Norman.

Does any one now read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in her windy corridors listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, and shielding the flame of a lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker out, and leave me in darkness? People know the name of "The Mysteries of Udolpho;" they know that boys would say to Thackeray at school, "Old fellow, draw us Vivaldi in the Inquisition." But have they penetrated into the chill galleries of the Castle of Udolpho? Have they shuddered for Vivaldi in face of the sable-clad and masked Inquisition? Certainly Mrs. Radcliffe, within the

memory of man, has been extremely popular. The thick, double-columned volume in which I peruse the works of the Enchantress belongs to a public library. It is quite the dirtiest, greasiest, most dog's-eared and most bescribbled tome in the collection. Many of the books have remained during the last hundred years, uncut, even to this day, and I have had to apply the paper knife to many an author, from Alciphron (1790) to Mr. Max Müller, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill's edition of Bozzy's "Life of Dr. Johnson." But Mrs. Radcliffe has been read diligently, and copiously annotated.