The question is: Are we British, who opened up Chins, by three wars, to our-now jockeyed out of our posit of the courage to fight for our just rights It we are no longer willing to Hight for the open door, as Sir Michael Hicks-Beach promised we should do, then nothing remains but to fall back on our sphere of influence—the Yangtze Valley. This can be patrolled and, if necessary, held by our fleet. Why, then, does our Govern-meat hesitate, and' expose the country to one slap in the face upon another? If Russia objects to Englishmen financing railways in her reputed sphere of influence, why do we allow her to build railways la our sphere? I sny our Government
worth a big war. But is it not evident will reply, that the China, trade is not to them that, with Russia o our flank and controlling the immense resources, in men and money, of the Chinese Empire, Burma and India would be untenable? We are putting off the evil day and respectively ruining our Empire in the East for the want of a little firmness now. As I said before, we are at the parting of the ways, and it is a cruel deception to us who live in the East to find that our Government is choosing the wrong way.
We do not want to go to war; no more does Rus-la; but it is suicidal to shrink from it when we have right and justice on our side. And if we are firm, there need be no war, although we may Ue compelled to threaten it. What does Mr. Arnold White, who knows his Russia well, say upon this point in his article in Inst month's National Revieto? He writes 2 The future of Russia, as long as she keeps and th other nations to the field of diplomuey, may possibly be prosperous and bright but if her unwieldy empire should be plunged into the hazard of war, the ignorance and superstition of her people, the corruption and inebriety of her administration, the absence of a master-mind in the Czar, or ofan educated middle-class, the alienation of the Jews, and her slipshod unreadiness for most combinations at a distance, are more likely to result in a humiliating and perhaps ridiculous collapse.
We in China know Russia's weakness, and that she is only playing an impudent game of bluff. Are the English people such fools as to allow themselves to be bluffed by her 7—Pall Mall Gazette.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.