We have frequently called attention to the influence of Voltaire in forming that popular view of China and the Chinese which prevailed up toa very recent date in Europe. It suited the great sceptical philosopher's purpose to elevate China in order that he might depress and degrade Christian civilization. He delighted to point to the antiquity of the Middle Kingdom. "There is no house in Europe," he says, "the antiquity of which is so well proved as that of the Empire of China." He delighted to rebut the charge of Atheism brought against the dark-haired race "at the other end of the world," and denounced it as "the meanest excess of our follies and pedantic inconsistencies." The medical practice of the Chinese seemed to Voltaire on a par with that of France: "their physicians do not cure mortal diseases any more than our own, and minor diseases both bore and in China are cured by nature alone." Very different was the view of China taken by a contemporary of Voltaire, whose works are now seldom read, but who filled a large place in the literary history of the Revolution epoch. Few students open that vivid and eloquent volume, crowded with glowing sentences and fautestic paradoxes, "Ruines on Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires," yet there are many pages which would repay the reader for the time spent over them, and many truths to be picked out from between the showy mosaic of fact and fancy with which every chapter abounds. In the notes, we find some remarks on China, which will bear reproduction. Volney did not for a moment regard China as a model for Europe. He had no sympathy with the view Voltaire had endeavoured too successfully to promulgate. He took a despairing and a low view of the state of Asia. The abuses of European systems might be numerous, but it seemed to him that the state of the venerable - Oriental Empires was far worse than the condition of matters in Europe. Volney, who lived through and shuddered at the excesses of the Reign of Terror, still regarded China' as having attained a lower depth: "All Asia is buried in the most profound darkness. The Chinese, subjected to an insolent despotism, dependent for their fortune on the decision of lots, and held in awe by strokes of the bamboo, enslaved by the immutability of their code, and by the irremediable vice of their language, offer to my view an abortive civilization and a race of automata"—these sentences are of course over-hasty generalizations. Volney, with all his brilliant qualities, was unable by intuition to penetrate the secrets of the Chinese policy, and to comprehend how much real freedom there is in the Eighteen Provinces. He quotes a translation of a narrative of two Mahommedan travellers in the ninth century, and deduces from the story the fact that "the Emperor calls himself the Sou of Heaven, that is of God; for in the opinion of the Chinese, the material heaven, the arbiter of fatality, is the Deity Himself." He in. forms us that the aforesaid Emperor only shows himself once in ten months, lest the people, accustomed to see him, might lose their respect; for be holds it as a maxim, that Power can only be supported by force, that the people have no idea of justice, and are not to be governed but by coercion. He persists in believing that all the abuses which were rife in the year 877 were rife in the year 1791; and adds, " Notwith. standing what is asserted by the Mis. sionaries, this situation has undergone no change. The bamboo atill. reigns in China, and the Son of Heaven bastinodes for the most trivial fault the mandarin, who in his turn bastinades the people. The Jesuits may tell us that this is the best governed country in the world, and its inhabitants the happiest of men, but a single letter from Amyot has convinced me that China is a truly Turkish Government." Here, of course, there is a strange mixture of truth and suggestion. It was impossible for Volney to give an ncourate idea of the complicated system of Chinese Government, and it is possible that prejudice wade him write the lines we have quoted. But he possibly grasped the truth in his utterance ov the Iaugunge of Ohina: "As long as the Chinese shall in writing make uso of their present characters, they can be expected to make no progress in civilization, The necessary introduc. tory steps must be the giving them an alphabet like our own." Many thonghtful students of this mysterious nation hold the view which Volney was the first to express.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.