Tur news which we publish elsewhere that Prince Bismarck signed the revised treaty with Japan on the 11th instant,—news which we should have thought that Baron Reuter would have found at least as important as the fact that the Duke of Cambridge had been summoned for assaulting a joumnalist—must have been yerv distasteful to all Englishmen who read it. Not on its own merits, for we do not believe that there is. an Englishman in China who has considered the question at all who is not glad to note the great step that Japan has made; but that the hand that has led her up that step is German and not English. Nothing is more humiliating to the self-respecting mind than for a rival to forestal him in an action—whatever it may be which ho has seen is inevitable, which is advantageous in itself, but which he has put off doing until too late, The leading journals in the East have been urging Great Britain for years to take her own ground in Treaty Revision, and give notice that she would no longer attempt to get the unanimous consent of the seventeen discordant treaty powers in Japan, but the idea of such an independent course was horrifying to the precedent-led minds of the Legation at Tokio and the Foreign Office in London; and while we continue to talk sweetly to the Mikado, and promise him that we will think about revising his treaty when he has erected all the safeguards that we consider necessary, the news comes that the United States and Germany have
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.