SirRuthorford Alcock remarks of Japanese temples, that they much resemble negroes th are very unlike the men of the north, and once discriminated, they are never again mistaken for each other. The Chinese habit, hereditary for ages, of reverting to one's native province and native village, considering that alone to be home' where one's ancestors are buried, has crys-tallised different types of Chinese character into tines rigid as ant. There is a character in one of Richter's novels, who assumes the first meridian to lie through his own skull. Every Chinese unconsciously oes the same. His own village, his own district, his own prefecture, province and mild, but we must believe that what we already know of China, and what is every day more and more coming to light, tends to show, that what the Chinese people, as a whole, take for granted, is the same. If this view of China be the correct one, of which we have not the least doubt, it suggests important inferences bearing m the future of this great race. China is in urgent need of reforms; of this there can be no possible doubt. is beginning to seem, even to those of by no means optimistic habits of thinking, that reforms may be possible—even in China, country are his, all others are outside.' The ement thitherward is in the air. (What' possible objection by the way can It can not be stopped. Perhaps within the there be to the Chinese terming foreigners present century, China may have passed outside countrymen,' when this is the through transformations greater than any idiom by which they speak of their since the days of Ch'in Shih Huang the own countrymen in relation to every unifier of her petty states, Will she hold territorial division less than a country, together? Will she move as a whole, or and by which they themselves are spoken like sume huge iceberg, break up into of by other Chinese?) But the Chinese fractions and disappear? We have faith do not simply regard other provincials to believe that the cohesive forces of China as outsiders, they treat them with undis-are stronger than the disruptive ones, and used contempt. The shrewd trader and that as n vast unit China will yot take her skilful artificer who lives in Canton, thinks place among the mighty nations of the earth. of those who come from the northern part f the Empire as northern barbarians, but his contempt is returned in overflowing
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.