Ar last the Yellow River is to be placed under control, and the people are to be allowed to expect that something will be done to limit the devastation from which they have for more than a quarter of a century been suffering, It was in 1855 that-the river buret its banks at Lan-yi Hsien, But it is only on the 10th May of this year that a definite plan for opening out now channels to the sea as a provision of rehoe for the greatly increased volume of water brought down by the river after heavy raius,-was published in the Gazette, Vu Po.ch'uen, the Memorialist, blames severely the Governors who neglected the river when the disaster was fresh, and allowed the evil to grow to its present vast pro portions, He and the new Governor of Shantang have consulted together, and the result has been no allusion to the two nations. Whether this would prove their better policy must be for them and for them alone to decide. If they go to war in the south, they will receive much credit, doubtless, from a section of the Chinese people. But they will also give an opportunity to other countries to harass them elsewhere, Japan, Russia, and even Portugal may, as has a, take advantage of China' to press their respective claims. There are dangers, too, to be apprehended from sedition, and it is not too much to say that in the event of the Chivese Empire becoming the object of attack its worst foes may prove to be they of its own household. If on the other hand China should elect to agree with her adversary quickly while she is in the way with him, it will tax the resources of her diplomacy very sorely to obtain "pence with honour,"—her standard of honour being of course the maintenance of her claims to suzerainty over the Kingdom of Annam, in spite of the Standard's sumed partisanship, will never be recognised by France, and all at. tempts to base negotiations upon such a recognition with prove worse than futile. The Chinese must not, as they are apt to do, jump to the conclusion that the opinion of even a prominent London paper reflects the general feeling of the country, much less that it foreshadows any possible action on the part of the Government. The strictest neutrality will be preserved by all other Powers, so long at least as the integrity of foreign trade is respected. The French papers are in most instances clamorous for the prosecution of an aggressive policy; they demand that fresh reinforcements should be sent to Annam in order that the Protectorate foreign dredging-machines, worked by steam, or to the importance or otherwise of obtaining the assistance of foreign engineers. The scene of the first disaster has been visited, the whole extent of the river banks on both sides from Lan-yi Hsien in Honan to the shore of the Pechili Golf (about 250 miles on the map) has been traversed, the idons of local magistrates and native gentry lave been required into, books on the changes in the course of the river have boon read, and the result is before the public ina long Memorial which fille two daily numbers of the Gazette, The like other great rivera entered the sea by one embouchure and at other times by sov-eral, and this subject has been well discussed by Hu Ming-ching ently in the present dynasty in his work called Yii Kung Chui Obib. When the Great Yii was engineering at the Emper command he arranged that the n should have nine branches in what is now the Chibli and Shantung plain, and that they should unite to enter the sea at some one point. The river then passed from Honan in a direction about sixty miles north-west of its present course and perhaps nearly parallel to it. Ab that time our author says the coast east of Taka trended south into the sea, making a long spit of land there. On the south, opposite to it, there was also land where there is now sea, The enclosed bay was then the Yellow River's mouth, into which the niue mouths of the Great Yii's time emptied themselves, before arriving at the soa, In this way Ha Ming-ching explains the phrase " the nine rivers" found in the Book of History. The other term "resisting river" given in the same history this author supposes to refer to the tide meeting
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.