Besides the Blue Book, recent events have produced a plentiful crop of letters to the newspapers, many of them written with great ability and knowledge of Chinese affairs. The deposition of the undoubtedly guilty Empress, and the restoration to power of the Emperor, with a Government composed of the progressive party to which he is inclined, are with most of the writers a sine qua non. To this I say Amen. “The murderer Tuan must be executed” is a favourite cry. By all means; but we know what is the first postulate in the cooking of a hare. Prince Tuan will hardly be more easy to catch than was Nana Sahib in 1857. If the Emperor, a weakling at best, be left at Peking in a hotbed of harem intrigues and secret societies, how can he be protected? Will his life be worth many days’ purchase? Will a progressive ministry be able to exercise any authority over the great provincial satraps? The foreign representatives will be locked up in the old death-trap, and in ten, twenty, thirty years history will repeat itself. The inviolable sanctity of Legations with such surroundings becomes a most miserable farce.
The return to the status quo ante, with all its possibility of tragic repetitions, is just the sort of lame and impotent conclusion to which we have accustomed the Chinese, and in their dealings with us they count upon a moderation which, like all Asiatics, they construe into fear, and despise accordingly. A barren conquest like that of 1860, which left things as they were, is something which they cannot understand. When Li Hung Chang, who knows exactly what string it is best to harp upon, sweetly urges us to arouse “the gratitude of millions” by abstention from revenge, be sure his gentle mind sees its way to turn such magnanimity to good account. The horrors of to-day were begotten of the mistakes of 1860 and 1870. Let us hope that 1900 may be the parent of a less ill-omened brood.
Those who desire to study the political problems of the Far East will find admirable instruction in Mr. Chirol’s the Far Eastern Question (Macmillan), in Mr. Colquhoun’s Overland to China, and in the same writer’s more recently published The Problem in China and British Policy.
My best thanks are due to the proprietors of the Times newspaper for permission to reproduce here their admirable plan of Peking.
LETTER I
Hong-kong, 23rd April 1865.
Life at sea may be a very pleasant one for those who like it, but I doubt whether any one ever arrived at the end of a voyage of a month and a half by one of the P. and O. Co.’s steamers without uttering an expression of thanksgiving, hearty and sincere. The monotony of the ever-recurring daily occupations is killing. However,
Be the day weary or be the day long,
At length it ringeth to evensong,—