13th October.
From one point of view the persistence of the foreign demand from the Chinese of the right of navigating by steam vessels the inland waters of the Chinese Empire is indefensible and extortionate. Not one of the Powers eager to secure this concession would for a moment think of granting it to the others, or to any one of; them. It is not surprising therefore, if to those Chinese who know enough about the matter to have any opinions at all, it often presents itself in the light of one more of those exactions based upon the universal dictum that Might makes Right, to which the Chinese have been accustomed—even before they made the acquaintance of the Western Barbarian.
Something is undoubtedly to be said for this contention, and it is at least important to take account of it as a psychologic fact, for such ideas not infrequently prove to have a dynamic force manifesting itself at times and in ways little anticipated. Some few centuries back there lived an Englishman who advanced the proposition that "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players," a theorem, by the way, never better nor more persistently demonstrated than in the Chinese Empire.
If Shakespeare were alive to-day itis not unlikely that he would so far modify his generalization as to make it read: "All the world's a mart, and all the men and women merely traders." Even to us under whose observation this all-prevailing fact has become all-prevalent, the transformation within two generations seems extraordinary, and but for its persistence in consciousness quite incredible. Steam and electricity, as we often remind ourselves, have done it all, but they have not as yet fairly began their great work, which goes on alice whether we sleep or wake.
An incidental consequence is that every group of people on the surface of the earth is impelled by a set of forces which they can no more resist than the tides can hold back against the pull of the moon, They must all liveer at least so it appears to them. To achieve this increasingly difficult result they must have the ever-expanding means of living, and this involves the whole complex phenomena of Commerce, intercourse of Nations, and all the rest of it that we now know so_well. If there is somewhere a Hippy Valley" not as yet penetrated by any but its native Prince Rasselas and his Court, the moment it became known as an objective fact, half-a-dozen Trade Expeditions would be set on foot, and the isolation of that particular vale would be atanend. Ifit chanced to have a navigable river it would never have been secluded at all, or like China, would have had to give up its policy of exclusion at the sam-mons of greater guns and stronger fleets than its own. Steam navigation of the inland waters of China under some conditions is, we take it, certain, The impelling force is felt all over the world—the resisting force is mainly confined to China; and China has found herself no match for the world as a whole, if indeed she is equal to any single Power taken separately. But before this concession can be of any practicable value to the extension of that trade which forms so much of the life blood of the great nations, radical improvements must take place in the waterways on which the steam-vessels are to ran, Ifthe Chinese' had been wise enough to take time by the forelock (as they never are), and had opened their own waters to their own vessels exclusively, and set such in motion on some system, the foreign demand might have been made to appear unreasonable, just as the Chinese themselves consider it. But they did, they do, they never will do anything of the sort. They will stand out as long as they can—and then give way. But the embarrassments to which foreigners will at once be subjected are serious, and already sufficiently obvious. Not to wander all over the empire for illustrations, let us glance at some of the streams in the province where the capital of China is situated, and see how much is necessary before they can be used for anything other than that variety of gunboats of which President Lin-coin remarked that they seemed able to "run wherever there had been a heavy dew." The Peiho between Tientsin aad the Taku Forts (called by the Chinese the "Sea River") has been getting more and more intractable, and but for the Boxer business there is no knowing when foreigners could have got hold of the nub end of. the problem as the Tientsin Provisional Government seems t" have done, The Bends and the Bir—* Heave: sent barriers" both—may ere long have to give way to Western learning practically applied. Between Tientsin and T'ungchou this imports
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.