Ir is much to be feared that the Count de Bezaure, the Consul-General of France and one of the most justly popular of the French representatives in the Far East, must have come under some disturbing influence that he should have been induced to make the demands' at Nanking which the Viceroy, ELE. Liu, has so firmly re-ley element, the commercial element, jected. It is very certain that the
in the French colony has no desire for the particular form' of extension that M. de Bezaure has been demanding; but we get the key when we notice that while there are no French commercial interests at Pootung or in the suburb between the native city and the river, the religious societies have very large interests in these districts. It is an old complaint in China: that there is a é deal too much that is political about the Roman Catholic proj da in China; and the dislike in the interior to the Roman Catholic Christians is not entirely due to dislike of the religious side of the work done by the Roman Catholic organisation. A recent writer in the Specta~ for says, in reference to the workin; of the Roman system in Europe: "It is precisely the intense worldliness of 1166 the hierarchy which shocks the conscience the Curia seems Policy of the Roman ly to turn on considerations secular policy, even of financial advantage; the Church of Christ, in the Romian presentment of it, shrivels into a. mere earthly polity, striving by. the. means of earthly diplomacy, and even, when that was possible, by earthly force, to extend a temporal power' and an earthly skill with which the Teligious organi-realm:" e worldly prudence and tions in China "add house to house and field and field" have a good end in view undoubtedly, but the means j used are sometimes open to question, and, as is occasionally the case with inappropriate means, sometimes defeat their own end.
We have consistently sympathised with M. de Bezaure's attempt to make the property known es the Ningpo Joss-house of the greatest value to the French Settlement, for the benefit of natives as well s foreigners, by making roads and building institutions for the Chinese on the disused cemetery; but when the Taotai brought forward the formal and final agreement made twenty years ago by the French Minister at Pekin; there was nothing more to be saic and we cannot understand why M. de Bezaure did not then gracefully withdraw from what had become—by no fault of his—an untenable posi-ition. It is always disagreeable to jeonfess that one has been in the wrong, but there is no disgrace in it when one has been put jin the wrong by an agency of whose existence the unintentional "wrong-doer was ignorant. It seems to us, therefore, a mistake to base a claim for the extension of the French Settlement on the Ningpo Joss-house affair, and to make that claim a presterous one in. extent, so that it lees not enlist the sympathies of other Powers, who also entirely object: to any expansion of the exclusive jurisdiction which the French enforce in the Settlement they have now, and have been allowed to enforce although it has no foundation in right. M. de, Bezaure cannot get any adequate force to coerce the Viceroy. We do not know the reason, but we do know that no-one knows better than the French Admiral now on this station that the French are entirely in the wrong in the Ningpo Joss-house matter.
Meanwhile, we are assured that no display of force will move Viceroy Liu to grant anything to French demands, as long as they insist on their assumed right to treat any additions to their present settlement, as a Concession; that is, as longa,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.