'THERE were onl. one or two great statesmen in China, ud ths greatest is now gone. The death of Lit Kan-yi, which occurred in his yamen at Nanking at ten o'clock yesterday tuarning, is a calamity for China whose importance it is impossible to exaggerate. Emphatically a gentleman, a true patriot, and a good friend to foreigners, it is mainly to him, as {we all know, that the maintenance of peace in the Yangtze Valley in the troublous times two years ago was due. The forces of disorder were only waiting for the slightest sign of weakness on his part; but old man as he was and even then physically feeble, he never faltered for a moment.
He was overwhelmed with offal for the real government of China was in his hands, and the repr at Shanghai of the Fore kept him busily engage kept a clear heal and a strong will through it all, and thanks mainly to him, the lower river was kept. tree from Boxers, and the South of China repudiated the madness of the North. He was not only an able Viceroy, but he was a man of honour and integrity, while faithful to what he felt to be his obligations to the Empress Dowager. Wren may the flags on the men-of-war in port, the Consulates, and the Custom-house, etc., be half-masted to-day.
ELE. Liu Kun-yi was a native of Hunan, the mother of statesmen in China, and was born in the year 1828. He never attained high literary rank, having only reached the grade of Hsiutsai, licentiate. Men of action were wanted in the stirring times of the Taiping Rebellion, not students, and action comes naturally to the Hunaness, Accordingly in 1854 the young Lin joined the sta
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.