10th November.
Sunpay was the birthday of King Edward VIL of Great Britain and Ireland and all the Britons Over Seas, and Emperor of India. He was born on the 9th of November 1841, and every year has added to our estimate of his virtues as a King, and our respect for him as man, A more loyal sovereign, a rul more devoted to his subjects a, ¢ more observant of the grave duuwes that sovereignty imposes on a King in the twentieth century, it would be impossible to find, and the wishes of a'l his people for his long life, health, and prosperity are sincere. A good son, a good father, a wise statesman, a warm lover of his fellow-men and women, he is a King to be proud of.
But it was not in honour of King Edward that the ships were dressed with flags yesterday; the Chinese dragon at the main showed that the perfunctory honour was being paid to the Dowager Empress, whose birthday fell this year on the 9th of November, when she completed her 68th year. It we could only believe that the conversion forced on her by the events of 1900 was genuine, we could join heartily in the official Chinese expressions of joy that she is still preserved to keep the sceptre out of the reforming hands of her loving nephew H.M. Tsai Tien; but we cannot believe this as long as she retains as her chief adviser Yung Lu, the generalissimo of the troops who attacked the Legations in 1900, But even if her.real attitude is that of the tiger who is wont reculer pour mieux sarter, every year's postponement of the second spring makes the attempt more unlikely. The leaven of enlightenment and reform is working everywhere in China, and with that enlightenment the desire to drive out the foreigner by force will grow weaker until it fades away altogether. It must be allowed that the Empress Dowager with all her faults, is a ruler of poked sagacity, and she has shown this@ver and over again, and in nothing more than her choice of Viceroys and Governors. They have, of course, to Pay for their promotion, but no payment has induced her topromote incompetent men. She showed her sagacity again in her recent difference with the Grand Council on the subject of sending Chinese young men abroadtobeeducated. The Grand Council opposed the movement on the solid ground that in every youth who obtained a foreiga education the Conservative party was creating for itself an opponent of the old regime, and it was the duty therefore of all who stood for the ancient order of things to crush all attempts to strengthen the Reform party. "I have given my promise," said the Empress Dowager, "to have it done, and opposition is therefore useless," Wittiogly or not then, the Empress Dowager whose supporters are Conservative Manchus, is sowing fresh seeds of the Reform which she crushed with such an unsparing hand in 1898. She is supporting, too, the movement for including Western learning in the curriculum of every student in China, thus, as Dr. Timothy Richard tells us, creating an intellectual army of 1,500,000 with their faces turned westward, These are the future rulers of the I'mpire, and when they try to oust us it will be by their brains, not their arms, a fiir contest.
The Queen of Sheba went to see and learn from Solomon, the greatest civilised ruler of her time; it would be a grand thing for China if the Empress Dowager would go to see and learn from King Edward how a great Empire should be ruled.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.