Tue great Viceroy, the shiest statesman in China, has died in burness. with an unsigned Manchurian Convention on his desk. It is stated that the latest decision of the Dowager Empress to denounce the Manchurian Convention, and thus frustrate the consummation of the arrangement which Li made with Russia five years ago, threw him) into such a rage that he burst a blood-vessel, and has been sinking physically ever since, though his message on Wednesday to Prince Ching shows that he retained his mental vigour almost to the last. He has for very many years been the protagonist in the Chinese political drama; it seems too soon to criticise his performance at the moment that he has made his last exit, and it is very d ficult to foresee how the play will go on without him. At any rate he was too large a man for the trite maxim "de mortnis nil nisi bonus'" to be appropriate to his case.
Ti Hung-chang's father wasa man of the people whose real name was Ts'no, and who was adopted into the Li family of Hofei_in Anhui, and rose to the rank of Chihhsien. The late Viceroy, like his brothers, studied in his father's yamen and so consoientionsly that he became " Hanlin at the age of twenty-four, Daring the Taiping Rebellion he was one of the secretaries of the great 'I'séng Kuo-fan, among his colleagues being the justly celebrated 'f'so 'Tsung-tang and Pen, tin, He volunteered to raise and command a corps of Volun teers from his native province Anu' and his success in this direction, though he was primarily a literary man, brought him into prominence; and his corps was the seed from which sprang the Huai Chun brigade of Anhui troops, which is always relied on—not always satisfactorily—in times of trouble in China. While! the rebellion was in progress he was appointed Taotai in Fukien and Provineial Judge of Kiangsi, but he never took up these posts, his first substantive appointment of iniportance being that of Governor or Futai of this province, Kiangsu, in 1862. For years he was known to foreigners here as! Li Fatal. It is not necessary to} repeat how with the assistance of the Ever Victorious Army under General Gordon he took " large share in crushing out the Taipings, nor how! nearly his career was ended Soochow by the indignant British General. In 1867, he was appointed Viceroy of the Hukuang, and in 1870! he was transferred to Chihli, holding that post through many vicissitudes, for 25 years, At Tientsin, he was virtually the Chinese Foreign Secre-! tary. The failure of China in the war with Japan being largely due to the rottenness of the Chinese army and navy for which Li was mainly responsible, he was sent to Japan to conclude peace in 1895, and nearly fell a victim to the assassin's bullet at Shimonoseki. In the same year; he was transfered to Peking, and inj 1896 was sent to St. Petersburg to/ represent China at the coronation of the present Czar of Russia. From St. Petersburg he continued his voyage round the world, being! received with the highest honours by nations anxious to obtain his patronage of their manufactures. Or his return to Peking he was made Minister of the Tsungli Yaméa, but was removed thence, at the instance, it is said, of the British Minister, in 1898. The next year he went to! Canton as Viceroy, and in 1900 was appointed by the court to be one of the two Peace Plenipotentiaries. While he has been often denounced to, anil once or twice degraded by, the) Throne, he has throughout been a very staunch adherent of the Em-} press Dowager. In his later years he hugged his ties with Russiv first formed in 1896, butit is quite possible thet he had persuaded himself that it was necessary for China to seek the protection of Russia at any cost. There is little doubt that had he had the same en-} couragement from, our Government, he would just as readily have formed those ties with Great Britain. Li Hung-chang was born in the spring of 1823 and would been 79 years old by our reckoning on the fifth day of the first moon of the next Chinese year. His weal-h has, it seems certain, been enormously exaggerated; the Chinese call him ten-million-tael_ man, and believe that to bean excessive estimate; at any rate he was by no means the richest man in China. He was head} of the Li family in Anhui, and his successor is the son of his late elder brother, Li Han-chang, a man of! Taotai rank who has made no mark in the world.
Li Hung-chang will not. be mourned by the Chinese nation, but his place. which was a very large one, cannot be easily filled. He was a strong} man, as the order he maintained wherever he ruled shows: he was a) very able man, if unscrupulous: and he did not live ina world of unrealities as most Chinese statesmen do, but} he did appreciate facts, and had a} good working knowledge of the real relation between China and the/ outside world. The love of money and power was in his natn: e, but he was not so meanly avaricious as his elder brother; had he not had too great a love of money he might have been a really great statesman and wrought his country lasting good. There has never been published a truer estimate of Li than that given by Mr. Valentine Chirol in his "The Far Eastern Question," published 1896
Gifted with no mean intelligence and with a double dose of Chinese cunning, he is too much of a sceptic to allow prejudices or principles of any kind to stand in his way. ought more often than most of his fellow-countrymen into contact with Europeans, especially during his five-and-twenty years' residence at Tientsin as Viceroy of Chihli, he has rubbed up acquaintance with Ww nodes of th and he has ned with some success, the art of turning towards every European whom he meets which is most likely to impress h On proper occasions he will shed crocodile's tears over the iniquity of the opium Unde, yet nowhere does the cultivation of the native poppy receive more encouragement. than In the province which he rules, nowhere does the noxious plant thrive more luxuriantly than on his own vast estates. He will pen with the same unction a memorial to the throne on the sacredness of Chinese traditions and a preface toa book published for China by the Society of Christian Literature. He will deplore' the lament able periodicity of famines in China, nod eager assent when he is told that only to build railways) which shiah districts the surplus of other provine utterly tv cope with the famine brok out last winter in his own province. Within six on the only one village, while a lo was being. engineered in the Viceroy's yamen, and Gown, the line, s-luads of rice were constantly passing, ler the very eyes of a starving population, to fill not so much the stomachs of the soldiers as the pockets of the generals encamped at Shuahaikyan, With the best spirit of modern civilisation chang has probably—less even than Chang Chih-tung.
wants of itis only. the pons and picked up haphazard ar ty make an army, ironclad ships and heavy guns make "navy, OF the complex" adminixtrative machinery required to set modern armies and_navies in motion, of the honesty and ability which keep that machinery in constant working order, of the internal discipline which maintains its cohesions, he xrtainly appears to have had no concep: tion, at least until the war, for no one wax more amazed than himself at the total collapse of his picked troops and costly ships. doubted whether he has even now realised it, when 0. those who urge that China must take a leaf out of petulantly chinese are expect Japan's hook his only reply is* to ingaire ed to we pean hats and clothes like the Japan That cmraption on the west and mest minblash ale pret ex who fo his social entourage and politico ters, even his admirers do not deny: a it is dificult to believe that his own are clean when he is known to have massed in the course of a long official carver a colossal fortune reported many to be the largest possessed by any ingle individual in the whole world, and certainly in Chin: Yet with all his shortcomings he still the man whose inence is believed to re] resent the best held throughout the place in the confidence of the Dowager. He lias been more or Jess
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.