WE may be quite sure that no nation is more anxious than Great Britain to see peace restored between China and the world, and trade resuming i's normal course. At the sane lime we note with great pleasure the reoccupation by British troops of the Summer Palace as an indication that we are not going to make peace on inadequate terms. The shiftiness of Li Hung-chang has not succeeded in imposing on Sir Ernest Satow, who has given the old Pleni-poten'iary a gentle hint, in the shape of a battery of artillery and two companies of Rajputs, that Chinese promises are not to be as lightly treated now as they have been in the inst. 1 is impossible to sly, until the Emperor returns to Peking and assumes government of the the countr, istence from without any a the reactionaries who still have the ear of the Empress Dowager, whether the lesson that the Court has received is a sufficient one. Tt has no doubt been brought home to them that their armies as at present organised and armed cannot snecessfilly withstand the troops sent against them by the Allies, but it is a very gray. question whether the Court really repented, or whether is merely bending to the storm and planning a fresh attack when it has been given time to make better preparations. This is the real reason fur our anxiety to see the Emperor in power with his reforming friends round him. He is distinctly not anti-foreign, we wre sure thit he would not countenance—another attack on foreigners, and his reaccession wond quiet the tarbnlent elements throughout the Empire, The older provincial officials who reengnise that they owe the positions and honours that they have achieved to the Emp Dowager feel themselves bound in honour to take no part in her deposition; but the educated s recognise that it is to her misgovernment and her choice of ignorant and incompetent advisers that the humiliations which have befallen China since 1894 are due.
Our correspondents in the interior who have now retura! to their posts tell an almost ideurica' tale of the welcome they have received from the people, the same people who hounded them away last year as if'they had been mad dogs. Glad'y as the missionaries have "accepted the weeome tendered them, we cannot suppose they have accepted it without some underlying suspicious of its sincerity. The Chinese people are essentially peace-loving; even when they were carried by a wave of excitement and joined for the time in the excesses perpetrated by the Boxers, they were suffering themselves from those very excesses; and it is not strange that they should welcome the return of the missionaries as an indication of the restoration of peace, They know too that they will have to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.