28th April.
Tne series of articles on the Sources of the Anti-Foreign Disturbances in China that we have been publishing, from the pen of the Rev. Gilbert Reid, deserve to be carefully read and considered. Mr. Reid is a man of observation, penetration, and strong common sense. He has lived for some time in the interior of Shantung, wears commonly the Chinese dress, and has an excellent knowledge of the language. He has shown peculiar ability in dealing with Chinese officials, and at the last annual meeting of the Presbyterian Mission to which he belongs, a mission which began its work in China fifty-five years ago; he was specially designated for this work. His tact, combined with native shrewdness, has enabled him to interview, generally with success, in the course of his career more than a hundred officials from those in a subordinate ary position to the Grand Secretary, the Viceroy Li, and the sungli Yamen. Yo him has been entrusted with success the settlement of difficulties in counection with the acquisition of land and buildings by missionaries in Chinan Fu, Chiningchow, and other places, and so well have his services been appreciated by the Chinese officials as well as by his own colleagues, that when he was leaving Chiningchow ten of the leading mandarins gave him a farewell banquet, and presented him with a silken bauner embroidered with their names and ranks. This power to discern both sides of a question, which the successful nego-fiater must possess, makes his views on the relations between the Chinese and the foreign missionaries, which form the subject of the papers we are now publishing, of such special value, We sometimes hear it incidentally remarked that the North-China Daily News and North-China Herald. devote too much space to missionary matters but those who make the remark forget at the moment what a large space in the foreign microcosm in China the missionaries occupy. Shanghai is itself a centre of missionary effort, though it is even more a depot for the stations scattered all over the empire; but Shanghai is so large and has such multifarious and extended interests that the jon aries do' not perhaps come so prominently before the public eye here as they do in smaller ports. To take a low ground, the retail trade of Shanghai, which is by no means an unimportant element in our prosperity, and the steamer interest would feel it very considerably if, and the cynical suggestion is sometimes made, all the missionaries were turned out of China. We may differ in opinion as to the propriety of trying to convert the Chinese, but. few of us doubt the propriety of educating them, wherever it is possible, in Western knowledge; and this task is left almost exclusively to the missionaries, as is the introduction in the interior of Western medical science and practice. More than that, most of our knowledge of what is going on in the interior of China comes from the missionaries. Of the three classes of residents in the interior, the officials, the merchants, and the missionaries, it is generally the last on whom the Press has to rely for current news, for it is very difficult to get members of the other two classes to write, We say nothing of the evangelising work that the missionaries do; but it is well known how much the world has been indebted to them from the first for its knowledge of the country and its language. They may not farther foreign trade directly but they send down a great deal of information which can be and is utilised by the wide-awake foreign trader.
return from missionaries in general to Mr. Gilbert Reid in particular, the high opinion that is had of him by high officials in China is shown by the fact that he is now at Washington on a semi-official mission to the United States' Government. He has gone to represent to the President the unfairness of the Geary Exclusion Act. "You in America," he said to an interviewer at San Francisco, " won't have anything to do with the Chinese here, and over there the better class, that isthe literati, won't have anything to do with us missionaries, but long ago I was in lientsin and said something about coming to Aimerica before a great while. 'Well, you better go home and stay there,' was the response; ' tell those Americans that they ought to be be as fair with us as they are with other nations.' I got to thinking it over, a subject I had given much thought to before, and as I am on friendly terms with officials, especially in the department of Li Hung-chang, the Chinese Prime Minister, I have conferred with them
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.