We congratulate Mr. Lo Feng-lo on his recent appointment to St. James's, a position in some degree commensurate with his high ability and desert. The post is less valuable for its emoluments and influence, than for the assurance gives of high territorial office on the Minister's return, provided always he has proved neither too utter a failure nar too pronounced a success, As Mr. Lo combines wariness with ability, he will doubtless so regulate his conduct as to strike the happy mean, which will farther i jate him with the Peking bureaucrats, The new Minister has a good record. he most brilliant alumnus of the Naval College founded in Foochow by the late M. Prosper Giqnel, he was chosen to proceed to Europe to continue his studies.
He mastered the English language and became thoroughly conversant with our economic science and philosophy as well as international la he also acquired colloquial French and some German. On his return to China he twas appointed Secretary to the Chinese' Admiralty by Li Hang-chang, for whom he acted as interpreter and adviser in all important matters relating to foreign affairs, Lo was not only the great satrap's fides Achates, but his very eyes and ears towards the Western world: with all his astuteness Li only saw the external world through Lo's spectacles, and that he constantly saw not only without distortion and prejudice but with clear sane vision is very much to his Secretary's credit. To the usual intrigue which attends Chinese official life, the Tientsin yamen added the con-j stant plots and counterplots of foreign schemers. 'I'hither as if to a Mecca went wily diplomatists, designing eapitalists and syndicates, cranks, faddists, wise and foolish philanthropists. That they all got ready admission and a fair hearing was chiefly due to the catholic-minded interpreter; with the opportunity of doing infinite harm and of setting the Peiho on fire, he walked circum-spootly, and won always the respect and often the gratitude of the European and American pilgrims. The brilliant suees of the Into Mission to Europe, especially the favourable impression it created in England, was largely due to Mr, Lo's tact and sagacity, qualities which augur well for success in his new sphere.
The appointment of Mr. Lo, interesting as it is on personal account, has other claims on our attention: it marks a stage in China's sluggish advance. Mr. Lo and his colleague Huang, simultaneously appointed to Berlin, are the first Chinese thoroughly conversant with foreign thought and language who have been advanced to such high office. Deep down in the roots of Chinese nature, fixed by the heredity of sixty generations, lies a conviction of the essential superiority of their own i morals, philosophy, and scholarship aught else to them is but dross. Their philosophy and ethics have drugged the national intellect into such lusting coma that the country has all but lost the power to vary in the presence of a new environment. This is the inevitable precursor to disappearance in the struggle for survival. Defeat by a despised foe has partly aroused China from her sleep, and we may depend that neither poppy nor mandragora nor any of the drowsy syrups of the world will ever medicine her to slumber again. Had the Western sword penetrated China's vitals, the result would have been either death or nil; it would have been ascribed to our contemptible supremacy in mechanical science; but the whole sting in the national mind lies in the fact that the despised Wojén, their dwarfish neighbours, have been the means of humiliation. The obtusest Confugian in the myriads of China's scholars is not so obtuse as to fail to see the disgrace of this, and to suspect that there 1s something rotten in the state of Denmark. Japan has been revivified by Western thought, science, and att; then possibly there is something
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.