Victor Huco assures us that man has three enemies—Nature, Society, and Superstition. The proposition may be questioned; and it is quite possible that some will incline to the belief that the one paramount foe of man is himself; still, the three hostile influ ences suggested by the author of the oilers of the Sea, Les Miserables, and Esmerelda supply peculiar reflect tions to the observer of the conditions that encompass Chinese humanity. For a Chinaman labours under the fierce and special anger of the three powers we have alluded to. He is, we admit, apparently the inheritor of a fertile and goodly land; yet "huan Nature" is really not by aay means so luvish of her gifts as we at frst suppose. For though recent explorers make our mouths water when they expatiate on the exceeding wealth' and fertility of the province of Szechuen, for instance, we must not lose sight of the formidable drawbacks that appear on the other side. The floods that periodically waste and ruin the land, are visitations against which, it seems, the utmost exertions of the unhappy people are powerless, The inundation of August 1869 was a specimen of these calamities. The crops were destroyed, the inhabitants driven from their homes or drowned; their Louses dismantled or in ruins, their personal
4,000,000 persons were sent forth as Property, in many cases all lost; and bego: to faint and die from priv: tion. This is no exaggerated picra of the practical meaning of that curio ous geographical occurrence, an overflowing of the Great River, What miseries have, for many centuries, been connected with the historic stream, which has earned for itself the ominous name of "China's sorrow," we need not say. The popular designation tells the ead tale all too plainly. The frequent droughts in the north must not be omitted, in the gloomy catalogue of natural visitations to which Chinese flesh is heir. The oppress sive heats of summer under which we are now languishing, (he iti tation occasioned by nuisume insects, compared with which the hornet of Deuteronomy, if a real insect at all, was probably a beneficent child of the vespide, are trials of health, temper and patience, that begin when a native opens his eyes on the land of flowers, and do not forsake him until he is laid in his Lintin coffin, under a grassy mound.
Society, the second inexorable tyrant, fetters the poor creature all through life. Ifa female, custom binds and distorts her most useful members, and turns a healthy woman into a tottering cripple. Ifa boy, the memory is loaded with a weight of useless and barren learning, and no play allowed for the fancy, the imagination, or the more graceful faculties. Ceremonies mako every gesture formal and precise, and the precepts of the Master do all that can be done to expel nature with a fork. Constrained and unreal in manner, a Chinaman soon becomes warped in mind, and succumbs to the tyranny of a vicious education. His daily life is hedged in by ceremonies; he is fed with husks instead of wholesome mental food; and therefore becomes, almost of necessity, a queer stunted being, never so happy as when he gets clean away from Truth and Reality, and can assimilate himself most thoroughly to the likeness of one of his artists grotesque creations. We have only time in our present limits to hint at this subject; but a keen observer might throw much light on China
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.