might have felt a pardonable pride in the Up to the Japanese war the Chinese fortifications protecting this important harbour, and had reason to regard them as impregnable, And if the strength of fortress depended on its earthworks, ramparts and guns, Weihaiwei could reasonably have been expected to offer effective resistance to a first-class power. But the comparative ease with which the Japanese, in spite of an exceptionally severe winter, took fort after fort, is only another proof of the oft-proved fact that it is not the gun so much, as the man behind it, that decides the issue. "Fried Krapp* can plainly be seen stamped on the now useless cannon of the largest calibres and very recent pattern, All that German military science and experience could give was placed at the service of the Chinese Gov ernment.
China has unlimited supplies of cheap labour and the mass of raw material to draw upon for " standing army is boundless, but even with the assistance of the greatest military power on earth you cannot make leaders of officers who Tefuse to lead, nor soldiers of men allowed to consider their umbrellas and bird-cages as indispensable as their rifles. The island, Liukungtao, a rock that divides the eastern entrance to the har-dour, important pos on the mainland commanding the approaches from the sea, and other sites, guarding the roads running inland, were crowned and crowded with batteries of heavy siege artillery. Whether sufficient attention was paid to the possibility of attacks from inland point for the military engineer to discuss. Te is easy to be wise after the event. The visitor will be interested in the ruins, the broken embankments, the damaged cannon, some almost intact, some hopelessly spoilt. He will, perhaps, be reminded of what China was among the nations, and he will think of what she is. The piled up earthworks on their massive stone founda tions should surely excite in him some sympathy, some pity, as typical of a people with a great capacity for labour, with much of sterling worth latent and potential, whose ruin has been the dry-rot of official corruption, and to whom the greatest barrier to progress has been the blind worship of a dead past.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.