A warren in the Geographical Maga-xina for March, not inaptly speaks of China as the "Dead Sea of Hu-inanity." Speaking of the mineral resources of the empire, the writer, Mr. D. Ker, adds, "All these treasures are rendered useless by the dog in the manger policy adopted by the Government, To leave their possessions unimproved, to repel indignantly all offers of improvement by others, to shut out foreign enterprise atid foreign capital, like some virulent epidemic—such has been the stereotyped policy of the Celestial Conservatives from time immemorial." China, in fact, is not unlike the drying up seas which form a considerable portion of her nominal territory, which once were surrounded by comparatively prosperous cities, but which have now become reduced to salt lagoons, to the very edge of which the desert, uninhabited and uninhabitable, now asserts its sway. Yet China was not, as Mr. Ker says, always in this condition. In fact, if she were, it is inconceivable low the Empire could have been established. It needed genius of no ordinary type to weld into one whole the vast extent of the eighteen provinces; and looking at the result merely, without a knowledge of the means, we should be forced to conclude that other councils than those that now prevail were once paramount in the Celestial Empire. But we have further proof of this in the early literature of the Empire. China, two thousand years ago, was as anxious to extend her connexions with the outer world, as she is now to be allowed, like the Central Asian lake to which Mr. Ker compares her, to gradually fade off the surface of the earth, leaving nothing but the salt desert behind. Then her complaint was that ber Turkish neighbours, bent on plunder, and careless of the acts of civilised life, continually stopped her caravans on their road to the West. One expedition after another was started to open up communications; failures only seemed to add zest to the desire for foreign intercourse; the spirit of the nation was fairly aroused, and the straggle for existence with the Turkish hordes who swarmed upon her North-west frontiers, became finally a war of ex terminal The Turks were driven back to their fastnesses in the Altais, or precipitated on other more or less rude nations, who one after another poured down upon the fertile plains of Europe, temporarily blotting out the ancient civilisation of Greece and Rome. It has always seemed strange that a race so apathetic as the Chinese should have, at intervals, been able to show such marked determination of character; and modern researches seem rather to prove that to external rather than internal influences, are to be attributed the great curred. It has been the case that in markedly one of depression. Still the awakenings which have at times oc- year, which, however, had been China, as in India, the native races have ever been dominated over by their more energetic neighbours, and hence at intervals we have seen glimpses of activity, followed, as the superior race became diluted in blood, by long periods of the most helpless stagnation. It is, however, strange to mark how long external influences will subsist in Asia, even when possessing little in common with the mass of the population. Probably the Kingdom of Bactria, founded by the Greek Satrap Diodorus, is one of the most remark. able instances of the survival of the outer forms of culture. From its very commencement shut out by Parthia from communication with the Greeks of the West, it still continued to main tain in the heart of Asia a likeness of European manners and civilisation. Indeed, were it not that the pressure of the nomadic tribes from Northern Asia eventually destroyed the monarchy, there seems no reason to believe that it could not have continued to drag on an existence, however inglorious, for centuries. Yet the Greeks in Bactria must ever have been in a small minority, and their influence was still farther decreased by the mutual dissensions which, true in one sense to their original stock, they introduced into the country of their adoption. It would seem, indeed, as if the nations of Asia have never been thoroughly leavened by contact with civilisation. Culture with them has been an external matter, forced upon them by conquest or other circumstances. The ivilising races have never succeeded in establishing themselves in such numbers as to constitute the bulk of the population; and hence reversion and stagnation, after intervals of brilliant progress, have been the characteristic of Eastern as opposed: to European States. In the one case, the civilisation was a thing originating in the mass of the people, and growing upwards through all the ranks of society. In the other, it was for the most part an exotic planted in an uncongenial soil, to struggle for existence amidst a tangled mass of inactivity and superstition. Those periods in China when the Empire has appeared greatest, have been exactly those when it was least Chinese, Had not the conquering state of T'sin, which, whatever it was, was not Chinese, overcome the scattered states constituting the old Chinese dominions, the eighteen provinces would probably have remained in a somewhat similar condition to the closely allied petty principalities of the Indo-Chinese pen insula.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.