China

China will again soon be free to resume the task of carving out her own destiny, in which task she is entitled to our cordial sympathy.

Prior to the Boxer movement, Chinese patriotism was either a thing unknown or unappreciated in the West. The unity of the North and the difficulty with which the viceroys restrained the South during the national outbreak of 1900 gave evidence of the existence of a strong love of country in the Chinese breast. The conduct of the Allies in Chi Li has intensified the hatred of the natives for things Western. Defeat established Chinese inability to meet modern armies with unorganised mobs, and modern ordnance with the tools of husbandry. The English have demonstrated that the yellow man, capably led, is excellent military material. Eradication of native prejudice against the profession of arms and creation of well-drilled regiments are vital to China's existence. Foreign greed, which manifested itself prior to the Boxer outbreak, will renew its assault when the Chinese government resumes power in Pekin. Suffering from Western avariciousness and awakened to the need of foreign innovations by the lash of Western enterprise, who can doubt, however, that China will engraft the civilisation of the West upon the trunk of what for centuries was the glory of the East, and under the influence of modern institutions return to the position of power and culture which she held in the halcyon days of the Han dynasty? Thus, by God's hard but moulding hand, through the selfishness and the strife of men and nations, through greed and outrage on the one hand and prejudice and encrustation on the other, through the fierce drive for gain and adventure, the trader more a factor than the missionary, the slow welding of old empires, peoples, and institutions upon new and better ones goes cruelly and brutally, but progressively on. China as a name, a form of government, an entity, is nothing, as every other nation as a name, a form of government, an entity, is nothing; but China as a people-one-quarter of the human

race

- is henceforth, as is every other people, under whatever name or form of gov. ernment it may be, sure to share in the better things of that coming progress and civilisation of the world, when "the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law," and fifty years of Europe shall be one with fifty years of Cathay.

JOHN D. LONG.