THEN VERILY you surely need CURRENT HISTORY, VERILY you can afford to give your days to full, accurate, non-partisan, unbiased monthly reading newspapers exclusively. review of the world's news. which can be seen at a glance have long been known to be multifarious, immense, and inextricably entwined with the roots and organized in the history and habits of the nation. Still there has been and is the hope that the united Christendom of to-day, with the heightened moral endowment and the amazing increase of material power which the last half-century has given it, might avail itself of the present crisis to aid the better elements in China in leading their nation to enter an upward path. No. 3. as the two viceroys who rule the five great central provinces in the lower Yang-tse Kiang region, who, though not coveting the character of reformers, have shown loyalty to treaties, and were stigmatized as "friends of foreigners” because they stemmed the bloody tide of anti-foreign fury which in the last summer swept over the capital and its whole surrounding region under the special influence of the Empress-Dowager and the blind reactionaries of her court. The issue of edicts which had been prepared for removal of both viceroys was postponed by representations then made by Great Britain and Japan. The viceroys saw the result of their courageous stand-which till so recently as in January endangered the head of at least one of them, and except for the resistless foreign seizure of Peking and the flight of the court would doubtless have brought death to both-when they saw their two viceroyalties with a population exceeding 120,000,000 free from the invasion which had swept with such frightful ravage through the north. These two great viceroys, Liu KunYi at Nanking, and Chang Chih-Tung at Wu-chang, are understood by many observers who have looked beneath the surface of events to be representatives of a not numerous but strong company of leaders who expected and desired the allied powers to insist on Not utterly unreasonable is such a at least some preliminary steps of inhope. The governor of Shan-tung nas ternal reform in the government. No shown welcome to reformatory influ- reference to this subject is found in There are men in power, such the peace protocol. Copyright, 1901, by Current History Company. ences. THE YANG-TSE VICEROYS. |