Another of the great satraps of China has submitted to the Emperor his views on always. This is Huang P'eng-nien, Acting Governor of Kiangsu. He says position vis.a-vis the world from apy which she has occupied during the last 4,000 years. Europe and Asia are now united in a way that they have never been before, and thi union has been effected by no sudden exertion of force, but by a natural and gradual development of events. To return to her old isolation would be now a hopeless task for China, and while preserving thuse great principles which have given her pre-eminence in the past, she must now assimilate to herself, circumspectly and discriminate ingly, so much of the spirit of the age as will prevent her from being outwitted and exploited by her astute Western competitors.
(2) OF material results of the working of this spirit of the age, she has already equipped herself with four:—steamers, telegraphs, machinery, and schools of technical education. According to Western views, steamers, railways and telegraphs form a triad, the omission of one member of which oes far to nullify the advantages conferred.
ly the other two. The three are inseparaconnected in the Western mind as the conquerors of time and space, the benefactors of peoples, and enrichers of States. To say that China should go without rai ways while England, France, and Russia have them, simply shows ignorance of what is going on in the world around on England holds Burma in her gras France clutches Annai j our outer hedges are broken down, and suspicious characters are in our compound looking at our doors and windows with measuring eye. But the most immediate danger lies not south, but north and east, Although we are raising the New Dominion to a Province, we have still only a. telegraph in Kirin, while in the New Dominion we have not even that, Russia overlaps us to the north round the New Dominion, Mongolia, and Hei Lung Kiang, to the east round Kirin, for 10,000 li. Her left eye looks covetously at' Corea, her right Mongolia, She crouches ready to spring on our Central Land, and the three Eastern Provinces, (Feng-tien, Kirin, Hei Lung Kiang), lie nearest to her extended claws. Her Siberian railway reaches through to Petropan (2) which enables her to move troops eastward in case of war, with a rapidity which is a striking contrast to our own slowness.
(3) The first railways that China should build, therefore, should be one from Tien sin to Shan Hai Kuan, th Lung Kiang, another to Ninguta in Kirin, (Lat. 44° 20°, Long. 129° 10'], a third north west from Shenst and Kansu to Ili in the north part of the New Dominion (Lat. 43° 46, Long 82° 30], and a fourth to Kashgar in the Nan-lu. "We shall then be able to send troops, money, ete., anywhere in our Empire within ten days, and besides that, we shall be able to found prosperous colo: nies, in these outlying regions, of people who in China proper are only " starving roletariate and a source of trouble to the jovernment, but who, once transplanted thither, will be able to find a fruitful field for their now unemployed labour, and will turn the desert into a garden.
(4) At present it is indeed a desert, and builders of a railway will find none of the opposition which they meet from owners of houses, fields, and graves in the Riverine or Maritime Provinces. Let us, for this last reason as well as for the other more important one which I have mentioned, begin with our great North and West, and then cautiously extend our railway system southwards to Yunnan, Kuangei, and other provinces where we have mines, (3) Attention has lately, in consequence of the experience gained during the Host ties with France the last your when rice was treated as contraband of war, been directed anew to the Grand Canal, as a channel of ice transport more secure at all times than the comparatively inexpensive sea-route. The difficulty, however, of retaining the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.