Peppuixc is a notorious characteristic of the Chinese race, but may be said to attain its culmination in the mandarin: ate. We are all more or less aware of the amount. of chaffering necessary to bring the ordinary Chinaman to terms, and the thousand and one, excnsos'he will make subsequently to wriggle out of' his bargain, should he be at all disappointed in its results. Nor, although the large extent of the trade with foreigners necessitates the conduct: of general business with them on more off-hand terms, is the ordinary foreign-trading Chinese a whit less disposed to chaffer, should he for one moment be taken out of his daily groove. Practically, we have experience of this disposition on the part of the officials, every day. It is not for want of asking information, nor for that matter for want of gigantic schemes of their own, that nothing really has been done in China, Time after time, till the presence of a mandarin's envoy becomes almost nauseous, have enquiries been made of the cost of railways, the price of dredgers, the expenditure necessary to put up a line of electric telegraph. What it would cost to open coal mine, what to erect machines for manufacturing ivan, what to build ships on the most approved models; all these are familiar questions to those who have business relations with the native officials, yet to what have they come? Absolutely nothing. That there is another reason for this, independent of the natural chaffering disposition of the native, is true. The official is appointed to his station and expected to make as much as possible out of it. Improved methods require a large expenditure of capital in the first instance, and as there is no source except his private income to supply this capital, he haggles ind puts off the evil day. It may be that he has been directed to perform some public works; he probably feels himself that foreign methods are best, and would like to make use of them, but the question of first cost will int rage itself. He holds office nominally for three years; suppose! ho orders, out. machinery, its arrival cannot be looked for under at least one;, he finds it difficult to believe that he can save its first cost in the remainder of his term, and he knows that there are no funds forthcoming to repay him the capital expended, on his retirement or removal. He has in fact invested in a white elephant, which will press on him for the rest of his natural life. Meanwhile ho keeps reporting to his superior that, he is in treaty for the requisite articles; and that official in turn, having many peccadiloes of the same sort to answer, for, does not care. to. stir up ti dirty water round his' subordi There is but one method of getting over. the difficulty; financial reform must begin from' above,. but, unfortunately for China, it is when we get to the summit of the, mandarinate that we find corruption most rampant. The provincial administrations are models of fiscal morality when combat with the Court and.the Boards: at Peking. A high official is expected, on his appointment, to visit the Emperor; and visiting the Emperor, he finds, bat another name forranning the gauntlet of a pack of highway robbers. He comes back to his office poorer if not wiser man, and finds he -bas' to pat his own subordinates through: the same process. Hoi much "the recent pro-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.