oth May. TuERE is no doubt that if we tell the same story or make the same assertion often enough, it reacts on ourselves and we get to believe it, even if it were not true at first. It is then very refreshing to come across a writer who contradicts our story or our assertion altogether, who introduces us to a new view, and sets us thinking whether he is right and we have been wrong all along or vice versa, For very many years residents in China and writers on China have been unanimous in saying that China is a country with an ancient and effete civilisation, which has made no progress in the last two thousand years, and is dying of old age and internal corruption. This is a commonplace which no one thinks of disputing, an axiom on which we base our proposals, when we make them, for the regeneration of China. It is quite refreshing then to come across, not directly but in the pages of a Japanese magazine printed at Tokio and called "The Register," a pamphlet on the Chinese question' by the well-known German traveller Dr. Albrecht Wirth, published this year at Bonn, in which a perfectly novel view of Chinese civilisation is taken. China, Dr. Wirth holds, is a country that is progressing with marvellous rapidity, whose civilisation is very far from being stationary, and that is perfectly able to defy all attempts at partition or dismemberment.
Dr. Wirth, we learn, "begins by pointing out that in ancient times it was Asia that conquered Europe,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.