excuse was made for dismissing him from the service, and he had to wait until Kiaking's death before he emerged from the obscurity of an official out of favour and without a post.

The last four years of Kiaking's reign were not made noteworthy by any remarkable occurrence. The Emperor had no hold on the respect of his subjects, and it followed of necessity that they could not be very warmly attached to his person. But for the moment secret societies had been crushed into inaction, and the remotest quarters of the Empire continued to enjoy tranquillity. The capital, or, indeed, the palace, alone revealed practical evidence of disunion and internal dissension. The princes of the Manchu family had increased to such proportions that they numbered several thousand persons, each of whom was entitled by right of birth to a certain allowance and free quarters. They purchased the possession of the right to an easy and unlaborious existence at the heavy price of exclusion from the public service. They were the objects of the secret dread of the Emperor, and they were only tolerated in the palace so long as they appeared to be insignificant. No matter how great their ambition or natural capacity may have been, they had no prospect of emancipating themselves from the dull sphere of inaction to which custom hopelessly consigned them. It is only in the present day that a different practice is coming into vogue, and that only through there having been two long minorities.

Whether Kiaking's fears got the better of his reason, or whether there were among his relatives some men of more than average ability, certain it is that an outbreak was organized among the Manchu princes, and that it very nearly met with success. The details remain a palace secret, but the broad fact is known that a rising among the Hwangtaitsou, or Yellow Girdles, as they are called, was repressed with great severity. Several were executed, and many hundreds were removed from Pekin to Moukden and other places in Manchuria, where they were allowed to employ themselves in taking care of the ancestral tombs and other offices of a similar character. About this time the country, or a large part of it, was visited by a severe famine; and the

PUBLIC SPIRIT.

33

river Hoangho proved another source of trouble by overflowing, as it had often done before, its banks, and breaking through the dams constructed to confine its waters. The most interesting circumstance in connection with this visitation of a periodical calamity was the fact of voluntary contributions being invited towards defraying the expenses of the necessary works. The Emperor bestowed honorary rewards and titles on those who showed any public spirit in this way; and the impulses of benevolence were developed by the conferring of titles in a country where rank in our sense has no meaning. It would be instructive to know what measure of success this experiment in the sale of unmeaning titles had ; but the archives are silent, and the promptings of curiosity have to rest satisfied with the knowledge that it has not been repeated. There is consolation in the reflection, that even in the stress of pecuniary embarrassment a Chinese ruler refused to put up public offices for sale, or to vitiate the system of public education by affording to wealth a golden key of admission.

Under such circumstances the reign of Kiaking drew to its close, and, bowing to the decree to which all men must equally submit, the Emperor made his will, and nominated as his successor his second son Taoukwang, the Prince Meenning who was the hero of the conspiracy attack in the palace. Kiaking died on the 2nd of September, 1820, in the sixty-first year of his age, leaving to his successor a diminished authority, an enfeebled power, and a discontented people. There is generally some mitigating circumstance to be pleaded against the adverse verdict of history in its estimation of a public character. The difficulties with which the individual had to contend may have been exceptional and unexpected, the measures which he adopted may have had untoward and unnatural results, and the crisis of the hour may have demanded genius of a transcendent order. But in the case of Kiaking not one of these extenuating facts can be pleaded. His path had been smoothed for him by his predecessor, his difficulties were raised by his own indifference, and the consequences of his spasmodic and ill-directed energy were scarcely less unfortunate than those of his habitual apathy. So much

VOL. II.

D

easier is the work of destruction than the task of construction, that Kiaking in twenty-five years had done almost as much harm to the constitution of his country, and to the fortunes of his dynasty, as his father had conferred solid advantages upon the State in the course of a reign of sixty years of unexampled brilliance.

It must not be supposed that, because the available records of Kiaking's reign are few, and refer to detached events rather than to the daily life and continuous political existence of the country, the Chinese people had no other thoughts save for the foibles of their ruler, and for the numerous efforts made by the outside peoples to establish with them relations of intimacy and equality. Although we have not the means of describing it, the great life of the nation went on less disturbed than would commonly be supposed by the disquieting events of Kiaking's tenure of power, and the people, as ever, were resolutely bent on performing their mundane duties after the fashion and precepts of their forefathers. The effect of the secret societies on public opinion was unquestionably great, and the people, fond of the mysterious, and ingrained with superstition, turned with as much eagerness to the latest propagandum as they did to the predictions of the village soothsayer. Had these societies remained secret, and consequently peaceful, there is no saying whither their limits might not have stretched; but the instant the Water-lily sect threw off the mask, and resorted to acts of violence, a different condition of things came into force, and the majority of the people held aloof from open rebellion.

In no country in Asia, and perhaps in the world, do the people themselves form the national strength more incontestably than in China. It is not a question of one class, or of one race, but of the whole body of the inhabitants. The administering orders are recruited from and composed of men who, in the strictest sense of the phrase, owe everything to themselves and nothing to birth. They gain admission into the public service by passing a series of examinations of more or less difficulty, and, having entered the venerable portals of the most ancient Civil Service in the world, there is no office

A HAPPY PEOPLE.

35

beyond the reach of the humblest-even though it be to wield almost despotic power in a great province, or to stand among the chosen ministers round the Dragon Throne. The interest of every family in the government of the kingdom is a matter of personal concern. There is a sure element of stability in such an arrangement as this. A people does not quarrel with its institutions when the best brains in the land form the pillars by which they are supported.

Kiaking's

errors of judgment were a source of grief and anxiety to experienced ministers like Sung, who knew how easily the provincial officials neglected their duties when they perceived apathy at the centre; but they interfered in a very slight degree with the daily life of the nation at large. The people were not contented, but they were still able to obtain their own subsistence; and thus occupied they felt no inclination to disturb the tranquillity of the country by denouncing the shortcomings of the executive.

Although causes of coming trouble were beginning to reveal themselves, the material prosperity of the people * was probably higher during the first fifteen years of Kiaking's reign than it had ever been before or since in modern times. A greater portion of the country was undisturbed, and consequently a larger extent was under cultivation. The Chinese have never neglected any means of developing their agricultural resources, and, if left in security to themselves, they till every kind of land, and raise on it one crop or another. They drain the valleys, which become rich pastures, and on the slopes of the mountains they grow in successive terraces rice and opium, alternating the crop with the period of the year. Nor are they less skilful and energetic as traders. The deficiencies of one province are supplied by the abundance of another; and the necessities and luxuries of the capital are provided for by the numerous productions of a country which, in size and varied features, might rank with a continent. The great rivers connect the Western provinces with the Eastern; and the omission of Providence is supplied by the magnificent

A census held by order of the Emperor Kiaking in the year 1812, gave the population at 362,447,183.

canal that should, if kept in repair, afford a highway for all between the South and the North. Nature was bountiful; its one oversight has been repaired by the enterprise and sagacity of man.

Revolts among the savage tribes of the remote frontier, an unsuccessful campaign in the interior, disturbed the daily life of the bulk of this fortunate people as little as the impact of a pebble thrown into a stream checks its course. Kiaking's misfortunes had only a small effect on the existence of his subjects, who, engrossed in the struggle of life, paid no heed to the mishaps or the blunders of the sovereign. A dearth in Shansi, an overflow of the Hoangho, or a block in the passage of the Grand Canal, these came home to the people with the force of a real affliction. It mattered nothing to the inhabitants of seventeen provinces and many tributary kingdoms that an insurrection should have broken out in the eighteenth province -only, as they felt fully persuaded, to be repressed with severity. In estimating the significance of Kiaking's misfortunes, and of the greater disasters that were to follow, too much importance must not be attached to their supposed effects. They tended to show the incapacity of the ruler, the weakness and corruption of the Government. But the great mass of the people were almost unaffected by them. Not until the Taeping rebellion, which with its imitators had for its sphere the greater portion of the Empire, were these seditions felt by the people as a grievous calamity; and, although the origin of that revolt may be discovered in the secret societies and other organizations of disaffected persons in the reign of Kiaking, it must not be supposed that either the country or the people felt or thought themselves to be suffering from any irreparable malady during the life of that ruler.