For several days past domestic economy has been completely upset. The house wears Jdishevelled appearance, paper and string bestrew chairs as wel jas tables, there is feverish, eleventh-hour rushing after purchases for people who have een s0 inconsiderate as to send us unexpected presents; and th master of the house, who ha: his stated times and fixed places for sitting back and meditating, feels like Noah's dove, without rest for the sole of his foot.
All of which is the usual accompaniment of Christmas and perhaps no bad analogy for China in her present state. Today polities are, by excellent! tradition, barred, at least from that particular column which strives to dignify " ponderous thought or give substance to a Jean one, by the use of large type. We are all wishing each other a merry Christmas and a happy New Year with all the heartiness we can, uneasily con-scouts that again, as too often in previous years, there does not appear -over-much justification for merriness.
But while politics refuse to be altogether ignored by those who live in China, it is neither wholesome nor accurate to take habitually sloomy view of em. The incurable optimism of human nature by which we liv: and move and have our being, even though we deny it in speech, is founded, at the last, on solid fact. It often appear incomprehensible to outsiders that the Chinese people themselves seem so indifferent to the antics of their politicians. But the Chinese people have an extraordinary historical sense and, in the long story of rheic they can quote you in which conditions have been far worse than toulay. And always, excepting the Mings, they have had rulers Imposed upon them from without, whom in due course they have vanquished and absorbed. What toatter that the new admission is lit, than it will arm to Chinese ts pre decessors.
The waste paper, the dust and confusion of conflicting parties and fantastic formulae are largely sure: fieial. Something of the new ideas th: Chinese people have begun to accept, when it accords with their sense of fitness; for the rest, they are content to wait theft opportunity. Even now it seems {10 be coming to then. The Republican experiment has ended in an apparent equilibrium of irreconcilable forces when it would seem that only the people of China can decide what shall survive; and only to-day a northern correspondent speaks of the signs now becoming visible, that the people are slow beginning to assert themselves as, in their own inscrutable way, they have always done when their lords of misrule go too far.
Doubtless the cirenicon is not to-morrow nor next week.
Not impossibly, though "one sould not divell on such painful notions, a year hence we shall still be toying to find reasons for hopefuinsss in even more, discouraging efreumstances than those of to-day. But there is too much depression and mor-yirn the world to-day and it is no bad thing to make much of the moments which, not only forbid pessimism, but in their every aspect proclaim the ultimate triumph of jo}
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.