28th Jaly. WE are glad to know that the Chin Association is not trusting entirely to Mr. Dudgeon's being at home ani reminding the Foreign Office now and then that there are British interests in China which ate in danger, For Mr. Dudgeon, willing and enerahs as he is, cannot be expected to devote his holiday to public business, and Lord Salisbary's neglect of our interest and our prestige in China is becoming a scandal. To Britishers in Peking it seems that their Government has entirely abandoned them, and what we are writing is cold, sober truth without a word of exaggeration, They are being left to defend the position as best they can with no aid from the Foreign Office: and Great Britain and the British—distasteful as it is to us to have to confess it—are ely an open laughing-stock in the Tsungli Yamen and the Foreign Legations at Peking. This is no figure of speech puta literal fact. Mr. Kinder is making a good fight, but he has been practically thrown over by Lord Salisbury and told that he must rely only on himself. The present British Charge @ Affaires, Mr. Bax-Ironside, is not responsible for this condition of affairs: it is generally understood that he recognises as keenly as anyone the wretched and intolerable position into which we are drifting, cee or rather have already drifted. It and most corrupt section of Society is easy to see, as our friends write with a big S at home is personally us from Peking, that he is powerless interested in the Transvaal. If the to act: his advice is met with re-china Association at home could commendations to temporise, his pro-! only persuade by some means Mr. tests and wan are treated with Rhodes and Mr. Chamberlain to take silence: there is nothing before him up China, Lord Salisbury would soon but to. become callous and half-' follow. Is it not enough to make us hearted, or to break down altogether despair to see our great country as Sir Claude Macdonald did. The with boundless wealth and an in-inaction of our Government in the exhaustible supply of men, easily the matter of the application for the dis- mistress of the seas, humbling herself sal of the Governor of Kueichow, before the Power which, great as it and in the difficulty about the North-is in extent, is the latest European ern Railway, is producing an. effect convert to civilisation, fights only on the Chinese the mischief of which with the pen and the tongue, and cannot be exaggerated. Under these jhas such limited resources that, in circumstances, is it to be wondered the words of one of its most trusted at that British advice is treated with representatives, it finds it difficult derision at the Yamen, and that the enough to finance the Siberian and Ministers of that institution are pre-other railways which it already has in paring to surrender themselves com-hand pletely and unresistingly to every demand of Russia, so that anything whatever we now obtain is due not to Reviews. our own prestige, but to the forbearance of Russia? The Kueichow
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.