VOLCANO, 23th May.
THE attention of the whole world has lately been riveted on Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean Sea. A terrific volcanic eruption has suddenly blotted out one of its towns beneath a rain of fire, So perished "the cities of the plain," or to take a more modern instance, Pompeii. But death came to these latter comparative euthanasia, for they were simply buried under successive showers of ashes which hid them away till the spade of the archacolagist removed the ashes and laid bare the ancient city, History records that Martinique was visited by a severe earthquake in 1837, but the memory of this had faded and the people dwelt securely, until without a moment's warning St. Pierre was buried in a gehenna of fire. In the language of the law, that was an "act of God." But what shrill we say of those mighty throbbings of popular resentment in China always to be felt somewhere in this vast chaldron, and occasionally in some terrific explosion overleaping local boundaries and pouring its more terrible than lava-stream over fair provinces, while millions are swiftly sent down to death. After all, the convulsions of a nation, many-millioned as China, are even more terrible than the convulsions of Nature. The question now on the lips of every Chinese is:—Will the Province of Kuangsi give birth to a second Taiping rebellion? We do not ordinarily hear much of Kuangsi, It isa small nnd poverty-stricken region, yet i give birth to one of the most baleful upheavals which a land accustomed to turmoil had ever witnessed. Will it repeat the feat in our own day? Already rumour has it that the leader of this rising isa grandson of Hung Hsin-chuan, the author of the Taiping rebellion.
The merchant doubtless finds these things very disturbing tu trade and perhaps wishes that the peop'" would bear their!virdens wu greater equanimity. J' it have the people noting to say in d fence of themselves? In the absence of representative institutions the only possible protest against tyranny is insurrection. As long as an Emperor rules well and justly, giving peace and plenty to all under Heaven, so long does the Divine Commission rest on him and his line. But when he ceases to fulfil these just expectations, the Divine Commission pisses from him as weighed and found wanting. Rebellion, says Thomas Taylor Meadows, is in China the old, often exercised, legitimate and constitutional means of stopping arbitrary and vicious legislation and administration. It is monstrous to deny that the people have a right to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.