"A Censor has impeached the new Hanlin Reform Club (Ch'iang Hsii Hui), and it has been closed by Imperial rescript." Thus briefly does our Tientsin have been seized and confiscated, so that there is not even the wherewithal to stop a bung hole. Mr. Gilbert Reid has planted, and Mr. Richard has watered, but the Son of Heaven has given no increase.
Nhe Chiang Hsii Hui tried to minister to a polity diseased, but we have heard through occult channels that the physicians themselves were tainted with the virus they sought to eliminate but doubtless after all the primary cause of its premature death is the influence of the reactionaries. We have also a suspicion that as the Society was intermeddling with Li's following, possibly that able and astute official brought his occult and still powerful influence from behind the throne to hasten the downfall.
The suppression of the Society is in itself an insignificant fact but it is pregnant with meaning when looked at in its collateral bearings. It strengthens the conviction that things are irremediable at the capital and that responsible officialdom has quite failed to profit by recent bitter experience. We have known for years that the Chinese character is intolerant of variation, and by this very intolerance is debarred from progress; that authority has killed ori-finality; that nothing short of mental cataclysm or complete foreign conquest will ever free the mind celestial from hackles. Still we have had int arridre pense and hope that we might happily be wrong, that by the wonderful recuperative power of nature a way out of all her troubles might be disclosed to China. 'I'he brief history of the Ch'iang Hsti Hui reveals the all but hopelessness of the whole thing, Reform is poisoned at ite source; variations in morals and intellect are either strangled at their birth, or if allowed to grow up, like the American-educational mission, they die from want of the sunshine of official patronage, Is there any conceivable method of levering China out of the intellectual and moral ruts into which she has descended during ages of unbroken custom Wherein lies the secret of her immobility? A very complex question, and one requiring great analytical power in moral and social statics to answer. If there be one key. which will open more doors than any other, itis found in the word education, Any human being passing through the terrible mill of the Chinese degrees in series is bound to have his mind and probably his morals paralysed. The mould is inflexible and reduces to acommon denomination every intellect forced into it. Mr. Lowell's humorous lines ea England might be altered to exactly describe the Chinaman's mind Of all th that I kin call to mind The Chinese the the most on-pleasant Our gods are devils, Kung's the only saint all his'n, all that isn't te When we have to deal with minds like this we fail if we use ordinary methods: the Chinaman's intellect is impregnable to the whole artillery and siege train of our thought; neither the logic of events nor the logic of pure reason can disabuse his mind of the conviction that he is the heir of all the sages and all the ages; hence wars, missions, diplomacy, conquest, common sense and uncommon sense all batter away at him in vain. He really seems hopeless case, Thomas Huxley once wrote that "with wisdom and uprightness even a small nation might make its way worthily; no sight in the world is more saddening and revolting than is offered by men sunk in ignorance of everything except what other men have written, and seemingly devoid of moral belief and guidance, yet with their sense of literary beauty 80 keen and their power of expression so cultivated that they mistake their own caterwauling for the music of the spheres," The Professor had far other objects of satire than the Chinese in his mind when he wrote this, but it is nevertheless peculiarly apposite fo China's rulers, The bigots "hold the key to reform and won't give it up: they embody the worst form of ignorance, viz. the ignorance that they are ignorant, and there is no getting at them, The policy which the
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