ILL, 29th Dee.
A RECENT correspondent pointed out Hart's prophecies have not been previous cases in which Sir Robert
verified, and there is little reason to expect a better fate for the sinister prophecy in his "Fortnightly Review" article. He has always been haunted by the fear that if China ever got moved from the position of repose she assumed centuries ago, she would become a Frankenstein's Monster, and he repeats once mot Wen Hsiang's remark in the early sixties: " You are all too anxious to }awake us and start us on a new road, and you will do it; but you will all; regret it, for, once awake started. we shall go fast and th you thin! than you want!" repeated this so often*that it become an article of faith with him, and even in this article he says, after quoting Wen Hsiang: "His words are very true." They are not true at all, and never have been true. China has had to be poked and prodded along every step of progress she has made since the early sixties, and without the constant use of the spur she would have gone to sleep again long ago. Conservatism that has lasted thousands of years is not to be dissipated even ina century. Lord Hammond who was for so many years permanent Under Secretary in the Foreign Office at home never thought it worth while to bother about China because he had made up his mind that in a few years the Chinese would oust foreigners from the foreign trade of China, and the treaty ports would soon decay and become Chinese towns again, This utterly unfounded opinion prevailing at the Foreign Office did a. great deal of harm to British interests in China, widespread is the injury that opinions formed on insufficient knowledge may do. Sir Robert is now expecting a vast change of which there is no trustworthy indication. "The episode of to-day," he says, "is not meaningless—it is the pre-Inde to a century of change and the keynote of the future history of the Far East: the China of the year 2000 will be very different from" the China of 1900!" If it is, the difference will be imposed from without, it will not come from within, Sir Robert does not see how completely be contradicts himself; he goes on to say: "National sentiment is a constant factor which must be recopuised, and not eliminated, when dealing with national facts, and the one feeling that ig universal is pride in Chinese institutions and contempt for foreign: treaty intercourse has not altered this—if anything, it has deepened it, and the future will not be uninfluenced by it." This being so, why should we expect China to suddenly adopt a radical change and become very different in a century To make peace with China, Sir Robert says, there is a choice between three courses—partition, change vf dynasty, or patching up the Manchu rule. He is against partition as we all are; there is no one who stands prominently enough to found a new dynasty, "and for a dynasty to be established by a concert of Foreign Powers would be an earmark of weakness and disgrace for ever after." He would accept the existing dynasty us at going concern and in a word make the best of it. If by this he means restoring the Emperor, we are with him, but we hold that there will be no permanent peace or prosperity in China if any other Manchu is ploced on the throne, or if the Empress Dowager is allowed yo remain the-ruler of the empire. She has been tried in the balance and found wanting and must now step down and out, As we said in the first of these three articles all Sir Robert really knows now of China is Peking and its immediate vicinity. Looking over Chibli and Shantung he sees them full of Boxers, and the Boxers have done him a lot of harm and made him pass two very uncomfortable months, and accordingly he has Boxers on the brain and sees Boxers everywhere in China. Except in the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.