To the Editor of the In the Peking Gazette of the 30th August, we lately perused a long memorial from the Viceroy of Chibli to the Emperor, describing the flooded condition of the province and, in the usual mandarin style, informing His Majesty that the mandarins in power within the inundated districts should be punished &c., &e., &e. During the last three years we have seen, iti the Peking Gazettes, other memorials in a similar strain; but what has struck every one who has paid any attention to Chinese affairs, og remarkable, is the absence in the Viceroy's memorials of any statesmanlike plan to arrest, by efficient work based on hydraulic engineering principles, future inundations, Even the Emperor and his advising ministers must have lately become disgusted with the annual twaddle on the subject of degrading subordinate mandarins because of the flooded condition of their districts. But with what bitter feelings must, we can picture to ourselves, the breasts of the population of the inundated districts be filled, when they read the barren memorials in which they cannot find one word to make them hope that efficient and permanent measures for their Protection in future will be undertaken, it consequently does not astonish us to hear that they bitterly abuse Li Hung-chang; and foreigners, who witness the misery and sufferings of the poorer classes, cannot help being inclined to forgive their superstitious feelings int believing that personal presence causes the yearly calamities to this province. Foreigners of course know that Li personally does not attract the watery elements to the province, ax the lower orders of the Chinese here superviously believe, but we are perfectly certain that, if he as Governor of the province of Chili had, during Inst winter, spring, and summer, adopted and executed efficient and stable' works, based on hydraulic engineering plans as carried out by Western enginecrs,—the inundations of the autumn would have been averted; and thousands of people would have been preserved from misery, and very probably many hundreds from death by starvation. The reply to any suggestion to the Chinese officials, about making hydraulic works capable of keeping the province free from inundations, lias been: "We have no money to do the work." But foreigners, being witness to large sums of mone thigh have been pressed out of the hard: working population of the province in the form of Lekim taxes, being uselessly squandered on the paying of troops numbering we are told "nearly three hundred thousand men; on the buildin, of new forts on the tientsin river an around Tientsin; and on the purchase of foreign cannon and rifles—have had no diffidence in replying that the large sums which are being now expended monthly on those warlike matters would, if laid out in the making of hydraulic works, be much more beneficially and profitable employed for the welfare of the population, than as employed at present.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.