"It's an ill wind that blows nowhere," as a Shanghai worthy of Oriental extraction who has long since passed away used to say: but few people would have expected, if the subject had been suddenly broached to them, to find the probable return of the Court to Peking blowing a blast of business into the agencies of the large Life Insurance Companies. Our Peking correspondent writes us that quite a number of high officials at Peking, including Li Hung-chang, Chou Fu, Li Vu-shen, Prince Ssu, a son of Prince Ting, a Hanlin secretary of Li Hung-chang, and several others have been rushing to take out policies during the last month. The Chinese re an essentially practical people, with a great love of sport in their composition, and this mode of hedging that they have adopted is as suggestive as it is amusing. When Lewis Ca wrote "Alice in Wonderland" he, it would seem from unconsciously prefigured the Empress Dowager of China, whom her faithful officials at Peking evidently expect to go about crying out "El with his head like the Red Queen, as soon as she gets back to her gardens in the Forbidden City. But she differs from Alice's Queen, in that when she says "Of with his head:" the head comes off.
This is the amiable old lady to whom Chang Chih-tung is so devoted, and yet if Chang Chih-tung himself were to go up north to meet his Imperial mistress, it would possibly be a wise precaution on his part to take out a policy of insurance before he started.
Things Chinese generally have a humorous side, and. there is a great deal of humour in the idea of some of the highest officials in the realm, who have been working hard to restore peace tu their distracted country, arming themselves with a policy of insurance against the home-coming of their revered Empress. They must chuckle too at the thought that the maxim "Who breaks, pays" does not apply in Peking. The Empress Dowager breaks their golden bowls, and British or American shareholders will have to pay. What are the consol lations of philosophy to the consolation that a Peking official must derive, as he kneels with his neck bared for the executioner's knife, from the thought of the policy that his family will encash on proof of death?
Populus me sibilant, milli plawlo Ips domi, simul ae numuos contenyplor in ured.
But the real consolation must be that the Empress Dowager, while apparently striking at her own subjects and servants, is really striking at the hated foreigner. She calls the tune, but Broadway, New York, or the City of London pays the piper.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.