20th November.
Or the little paper-covered volume of 63 pages with the above title, published by R. Brimley Johnson, London, we can only say that it would be better worth reading if the writer had a better practical knowledge of his subject. It is an endes-your in eight letters, four of which, we are told, have previously been published in the " Saturday Review," to consider last year's troubles in China from the point of view of an educated and patriotic Chinaman but the writer, to judge from internal evidence, however much he may have read about his subject, has' so little personal acquaintance with it, that his picture of China and the Chinese more like the reality, than is the sketch of a Vhinaman on the cover, One quotation wil! prove this; it is from the writer's picture of his home in China which, he says, " never ceases to haunt my memory as I walk in these dreary winter days the stree's of your black' Metropol Far away in the East, under sunshine such as you never saw (for even such light as you have you stain and infect with sooty smoke), on the shore of a broad river stands the house where I was born, It is one among thousands; but every one stands in its own garden, simply painted in white or grey, modest, cheerful, and clean. For many miles along the valley, one after the other, they lift their blue or red-tiled roofs out of a sea of green; while here and there glitters out over a dum of trees the gold enamel of some tal pagoda. The river, crossed by frequent ridges and crowded with barges and junks, bears on its clear stream the traffic of thriving village-markets. For prosperous peasants people all the district, owning and tilling the fields their fathers owne and tilled before them. The soil on which they work, they may say, they and their ancestors have made. For see! almost to the summit what once were barren hills are waving green with cotton and rice, Sugar, oranges and tea. (All, we presume, growing at once.] Water drawn from the river-bed girdles the slopes with silver and falling from channel to channel in a thousand bright cascades, plashing in cisterns, chuckling in pipes, soaking' and oozing in the soil, distributes freely to all alike fertility, verdure, and life.
This beautiful picture bears as much likeness to a real Chinese village as does the writer's account of the government, laws, manners, and customs to the reality as we who live among the Chinese see them. We cannot but sympathise to a certain extent with the endea-your of the writer to present the Chinese in a much better light than that in which they exhibited themselves last year, but they should be painted in reasonable, not in trans-cen dental colours. The following extract shows the writer'saim:—
Our civilisation is the oldest in the world. It does not follow that it is the best; but neither, I submit, does it follow that it is
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.