In Earope we talk much of the gulf between wealth and poverty. That gulf is as a ditch to the Grand Canyon compared with the chasm between those tame extremesinChina. One shudders at the appalling narrowness of the line hich in millions of lives divides bare subsistence from blank starvation. At Home there are at least work houses, refuges, soup kitchens, Lord Mayors' fands, even charity bazaars, Here it seems that if the people cannot work they must die. The gods withhold the blessed rains, and processions go from shrine to shrine about the country beating upon drums and gongs if haply the careless gods will be moved to hear their prayers.—the while the suppliants stay their wretched stomachs with leaves and grass. Rains descend and floods rise, and those villages which happily are not washed away become islands on banks of mud set about with a waste of waters. But where all this time is the Government, vice-gerent of the capricious gods, and why are there no reservoirs to protect the land from floods and to save it in the time of drought?
It is easy to judge the lives of other people by our own standard and to find them miserable; easier still to fall into the gratuitous fallacy of prophesying. The onlooker in China hesitates to draw deductions from what he hax seen, remembering what dangerous ground he treads upon. of himself he nobling of trade, to profit by the material advantages of Western thought, (hich they can see daily), how shall they care about such advantages (which they exunot suffrage and members of Ps Andif the solution of the Chinese Emnpire is to be found at all, surely it must be by the mare weight of its own cnormone nuinbers—asa damphaystack burstsinto ieoux combustion—in the natural Which conclusion ix excellent sophy, if not souud reason, for both empires and individuals: and shows that upon the new-comer China hax begun to impress the lesson of anti
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.