ism' is generally de it of being governed by the conditions and nece s and necessities of the time being, in distinction fron pie vision, which endeavours to guard by all available means against unknown and possibly maleficent contingencies. It is an example of the latter to take out insurance policies against the occurrence of fire, flood, loss, or damage by any one of numerous agencies On the other hand opportunism merely awaits each one of these events without effort to prevent them, trusting to the inspiration of the moment, or to luck' to deal with them in such a way as to suffer as little injury possible. It isa common critiism of foreigners on the Chinese as individuals, and especially upon them as a corporate, social, and national organism that they are in some lines destitute of prevision, and almost wholly under the dominion of opportunism. This we believe to bea true statement of an important fact, and it is our presen: purpose to point out some of the reasons for it. The Chinese is a born trader, and he is perhaps as well able to forecast the probable future as any other human being with his limitations. Yet the latter are obvious, and asa bar to the exercise of wha' we might call reasonable prudence,' they are often fatal. In the first place every Chinese dealer large or small finds himself in the condition of a sampan caught in a circle of eddies where he cannot determine the direction or the force of the current. Of the management of his crate as such he is quite capable, but when a big steamer makes a "wash" by which his little boat is violently rocked and as a consequence of which it ships a quantity of water, frightening his pa-sengers and damaging the cargo, he navuralexclaims on mature reflection: "What could I do' about it?" If he deals in articles imported from abroad the Chinese dealer becomes aware of the fact thit they are subject to serious fluctuations of price for no perceptible reasons, He may have his own notions as to foreign exchange, which plays an important part in the final balance of his account, but if he understands it he does more than most of us are able to do, and in either case he is ike chip on the tide. Perhaps, on the other hand, he may be an obscure individual in the deep interior, who simply buys up native evtton cloth woven in the damp cellars of the villages of some pati of the great plain of Uhina, shipping it to regions where cotton will not grow. This business he has followed for generations, and he supposes that he thoroughly understands i, and by it he has always made a living, Bab it falls on a day that the native +ot on cloth fois to find the expe ket, for the reason that a better cle has mppesred at a somewhat cheaper price. It is woven of "yarn" spun in Bombay, or in Osaka." The dealer loses money, he no longer frequents the market. His numerous fellow dealers act in like manner. Trade is shifting into new channels to the manifest advantage of the great cotton industry of the industrial world (of the West) and to the ruin of tens of thousands of native weavers and spinners. What. good would "prevision" do any of them, supposing they had been ale to exercise it? 'These instane might be indefinitely multiplied, bue we have now indicated a triplet of important fac.ors in the case to which we beg the reader' attention. They are (1) The i herent incomprehensibility of many of the phenomena involved; (2) The intricate nature of the plexus of simple and compound causes and effects frequently ramifying to the uttermost parts of the earth; and (3) The helplessness of the individual in the presence of the unknown and the irresistible forces in the grasp of which he finds himself.
Thus far we have spoken of the Chinese individual, but the same conditions prevail on the wider scale of social and national conditions, Almost every Western land (except Russia alone) has frequent occasion to complain that its rulers have
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.