10.—The national result is that, although recent events have hastened forward the completion of a telegraph system, there is throughout the Chinese Empire but one short railway, no proper road communication, and defective attention to the unrivalled waterways, no uniform system of taxation, no reliable administration of justice, no Chinese currency (other than brass cash), no postal system, and little regard for the public health and welfare; yet, wherewithal, there is great respect for private property and the due transmission of the small holdings into which the land is divided.
Prospect of Reform.
11.—That a people sometimes accounted "the active race of mankind"; as keen and reliable in business as any in the universe; the reputed first inventors of the mariner's compass, of gunpowder, of ink, printing, and paper (which have contributed so much to England's greatness), should be content with such a condition of things may well pass belief. Ambassadors have of late been sent to Europe, Diplomatists, consuls, traders, and missionaries have endeavoured to show the light. The example of Japan is at hand. Yet no man can say, upon any foundation of actual fact, that a change is probable or imminent.
It is true that fully two millions of industrious Chinese emigrants can testify to their speedy acquirement of comparative wealth under happier conditions, despite laws of exclusion in America. The majority are said, however, to return quietly home and settle down (awaiting interment in one of the family burial places which cover the surface of the country and much prevent the sale of land) to that worship of ancestors, filial obedience, and veneration for authority, which are quoted with pride as contrasting favourably "with a society where each generation despises the one which immediately preceded it, and strains after the future without respect to the past."
Want of Leaders.
12.—There is also an undoubted want of men willing to champion, or capable of leading, a party of reform.
The two most conspicuous statesmen in the Empire—and, indeed, the only ones—are the Viceroy of the Metropolitan Province of Chilhi, and the Viceroy of Hupeh.
The former is His Excellency Li Hung Chang, who, for 40 years, has possessed a great and beneficial influence. To the viceregal functions are united those of Grand Secretary of the Empire and Commissioner for Northern Trade, in which capacity His Excellency is consulted on all foreign and naval matters. He has the forts on the Peiho in good order, the troops well trained and armed—not with matchlocks or bows and arrows, as in other viceroyalties, but with modern weapons, replenished from arsenals at Tientsin, under foreign direction. A railway[4] runs, moreover, under English management, to the Gulf of Pechilhi, and its extension to within 14 miles of Peking was once authorized, but subsequently disallowed.
Unfortunately, Li Hung Chang, who has given not a few proofs of his good-will and preference for England, is over 70 years of age, and his brother, the Viceroy of Canton, who also vainly seeks to build a railway to Kowloon, opposite Hong Kong, is still older.
His Excellency Chang Chili Tung, Viceroy of Hupeh and Houan, is a different stamp of man, in the prime of life, and energetic. But the regeneration of the Chinese must be, he contends, by the Chinese, and not by foreigners. To carry out his project of a railway from Hankow to Peking, he was transferred from a superior viceroyalty, and to this end an iron foundry has been established at Hanvang. The rails and the plant are all, however, to be of Chinese make, so that the commencement, not to say the opening of the line, is still in the Greek Kalends.