We will never willingly allow an instance of the gross barbarity of Chinese criminal law to pass by unnoticed. A conse lias lately appeared in the Peking Gazette of n singularly flagrant type, and, to on thinking, almost uneurpassable for cruelty and injustice. Is apponrs that n certain woman, whose parents and grandparents are dead, and who has neither uncles nor brothers to defend hor, married, when girl, n man named Li Ma-@rh. Li became mixed up with an insurrectionary movement, greatly to the distress and anxiety of his young wife, who did all in her power to dissuade Lim from his evil octices. In spite, Lowever, of her opened protests," Li persevered, antu he sas captured by the authorities and put to death in accordance with the Iowa of the country, The wife seems to have been kept in custody, and, apparently, tortured—for we know what "cross-questioning" means in China—in order to force her to ackuowledge hor complicity with the couspirators, Nothing, however, has been able to shake her statements, which are to the effect we lino alrendy summarised nor is there the slightest particle of ovidance against her, But she is neverthe-Jess amenable to the stringent law that "the wives and daughters of criminals guilty of treasonable and seditious acts shall be given as slaves to the officers or soldiers of one of the provincial garrisons and, to quote the Memorial in which this disgraceful business is detailed, "os the woman has been found not to have been associated in the seditious schemes of Ler husband, or to huve aided and abetted him in their execution, the Memorialist proposes to deal with her in the manner prescribed in the Inw above quoted." to say, because the woman is proved to the satisfaction of her own authorities to have been entirely innocent, she la to be rewarded by being made over to some brutal soldier as his "slave." If the mawkish palaver of this most benevo-Jont and paternal Government meant anything at all, and if human feelings had any place whatever in the methods of the Manchus in dealing with their Chinese subjects, we should have pected, rather, that the Memori would have implored the Imperial recognition of the woman's loyally to her sovereign, and that the Emperor would have been advised to confer upon her such marks of honour and*approval as would have shown to the people generally that he could be grateful for the steadfastness, under vei trying circumstances, of even 1] poor woman. But no, All her vere sonal virtue and subsequent sufferings go for nothing; they are ignored in face of the bare fact that her husband was a rebel, and instend of being rewarded for her constancy she is to be cold into a disgu The matter, we read, is "referred to the Board and there is only one way in which the Board can deal with it cording to the Institutes of the present: dynasty. From the wording of the Memorial, clear that the sentence is regarded us a lenient one: an apt illustration of the saying that even the tender mercies of some people are cruel. Well did Confucius exclaim: " A harsh Government is more savage than a tiger."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.