that even when I am seriously ill, when I cannot move from my bed, I still keep working as usual at reading and writing documents and various government papers. . . . If my hands and feet cannot move from my bed, I can still go on moving my tongue to give orders to those about me, and tell them what I wish to be done. . . . I never feel tired, because I am so fond of work and labor." This love for work he owes to God Himself, for it is a matter of Divine inspiration. The true ideal and desire of my life is to look after the flock of human beings whom God has intrusted to me as humble slave."

HIS DREAM.

Long before he became Amir, Abdur Rahman dreamed a dream, which he published and dis.

ABDUR RAHMAN.

(Amir of Afghanistan.)

tributed about the country. That dream was that before his death he should finish making a strong wall all around Afghanistan, for its safety and protection.

"The more I see of the people of other nations and religions running fast in the pursuit of progress, the less I can rest and sleep; the whole day long I keep on thinking how I shall be able to run the race with the swiftest, and at night my dreams are just the same. There is a saying that the cat does not dream about any thing but mice. I dream of nothing but the

backward condition of my country, and how to defend it; seeing that this poor goat, Afghanistan, is a victim at which a lion from one side and a terrible bear from the other side are staring, and ready to swallow at the first opportunity afforded them."

The Amir is a great dreamer, and many other dreams of his, all of which he tells to his courtiers, have come true. And so, having his lifework marked out before him in dreamland, he is able to go ahead and work with untiring energy to complete his task. It is curious, he says, that the harder he works, the more anxious he is to continue working.

"UNEASY LIES THE HEAD.

He usually goes to sleep about five or six in the morning, and gets up at two in the afternoon. During the whole of that time when he is in bed, his sleep is so disturbed that nearly every hour he wakes, and keeps on thinking about improvements. Then he goes to sleep again. As soon as he wakes, he sends for his doctor, who prescribes the medicine which he has to take that day. Then comes the tailor, bringing with him several plain suits in European style. After he has selected the one he will wear, he washes and dresses and has tea; but during the whole of that time his officials stand looking at him, saying in their minds, "Oh, be quick! Let us each put our work before you.' As soon as breakfast is over, he is worried to death; for no sooner does he appear at work than officials, sons, household servants, come in for instructions. Every page-boy, of whom there are hundreds, and men of the detective department, walk in upon him, with letters in their hands whenever any suffering person requires help or assistance. In this way he is pretty crowded. None of his subjects have one-tenth part of his work to do. He only gets a few minutes for his meals, and none at all for his family; and even at meal-times his courtiers and officials keep on asking him questions!

HIS RECREATIONS.

In addition to all these officials, who are always in attendance upon him from the time he wakes until he goes to sleep, and in addition to the half a hundred persons who are thus surrounding him, he has always near the durbar-room, to be ready when required, a company of professional chess players and backgammon players, a few personal companions, a reader of books, and a story-teller. Musicians of several nationalities attend at night; and although I am never entirely free, yet the courtiers enjoy the music, and I listen in the intervals." When he rides out,

66

every one of his personal attendants and servants starts with him. Altogether, with the cavalry, infantry, and artillery of the body-guard, he is always ready as a soldier on the march to a battle, and can start without delay at a moment's notice. The pockets of his coat and trousers are always filled with loaded revolvers, and one or two loaves of bread, for one day's food. A considerable number of gold coins are sewed into the saddles of his horses, and on both sides of the saddles are two revolvers. Several guns and swords are always lying by the side of his bed, or the chair on which he is seated, within reach of his hand, and saddled horses are always standing in front of his office. All his attendants go to sleep when he does, with the exception of the following, who keep awake in turn: the guards and their officers, the tea-bearer, the water-bearer, the dispenser, the hubble-bubble bearer, the valet, and the tailor, who has always to be at hand in order to do any repairs or to have instructions when the Amir thinks of them.

The Amir maintains that he has cleared out and abolished the cruel system of slavery, although he keeps the word slave to describe persons who are more honored and trusted than any other officials in the kingdom. If a slave is badly treated and the cruelty is proved, the slave has his liberty-by my orders, because God has created all human beings children of One Parent, and entitled to equal rights."

HIS HOME LIFE.

He then goes on to describe his sitting-rooms and his bedrooms, and the way in which he furnishes them and pays allowances to his wives. He does not mention the exact number of his wives, although there seems to be an allusion to seven. My wives," he says, "come and pay regular visits to me ten or twelve times in the year for a few hours at a time." If there are seven of them, and each comes ten times, the husband and wife meet about three times a fortnight. He opens all the letters with his own hand if they are addressed "not to be opened by any one excepting by the Amir," and he also writes the letter with his own hand. He tells us he has always loved beautiful scenery, flowers, green grass, music, pictures, and every kind of natural beauty. All his palaces command beautiful views. He is also very religious; for he has appointed directors throughout the whole country, who first of all advise people to attend the mosque five times a day for their prayers, and to fast in Ramadan; and then, if the people will not listen to their advice, they administer a certain number of lashes, "because a nation which is not religious becomes demoralized, and

falls into ruin and decay, and misbehavior makes people unhappy in this world and the next."

The Amir tells us that he writes books himself, but that he likes better to have them read to him, and that he likes his information in the form of fiction-from which it may be seen that the Amir is an intensely modern man. At the same time, his reasons for preferring to be read to are not very complimentary to the authors. He says:

"I do not go to sleep directly I lie down in bed, but the person who is specially appointed as my reader sits down beside my bed and reads to me from some books-as, for instance, histories of different countries and peoples; books on geography, biographies of great kings and reformers, and political works. I listen to this reading until I go to sleep, when a story-teller takes his place, repeating his narratives until I awake in the morning. This is very soothing, as the constant murmur of the story-teller's voice lulls my tired nerves and brain."

FIELD-MARSHAL COUNT WALDERSEE.

THE

as

HE Deutsche Revue for October brings a short sketch by a German officer of the career and antecedents of Field-Marshal Count Waldersee, the commander-in-chief of the allied forces in China. The scion of an old, aristocratic family, which since the eighteenth century has given many eminent officers to the Prussian army, the count began his military career artillery officer, celebrating last spring the golden jubilee of his service. As aid-de-camp of Emperor William I. he took a very prominent part in the Franco-Prussian War. With the exception of Prince George and the King of Saxony, he is the only living German general in active service who has taken part in that war in a high responsible position, and who possesses the military experience that can only be gained in such a position to such an extent. . . . The count is in his sixty-ninth year-one year younger than Blücher was in the campaign against Napoleon, in 1813, or General von Moltke in the FrancoPrussian War. He shows traits of both. With Blücher he has in common the fearless rider's spirit that hesitates at no obstacle; from Moltke he has learned the calm weighing' of both sides of a question. Although an enthusiastic advocate of offensive action on a large scale, which alone is really decisive, and which aims to make the victory complete by energetic pursuit of the enemy, Count Waldersee knows that defensive action also has its place; and that he is never guided by preconceived opinions, he abundantly proved thirty years ago. Adding the diplomatic tact of which he has given abun

dant proof, one must admit that among all the allied armies there is no other leader who brings to the solution of the present difficult and manifold tasks the same qualifications and the same experience as Count Waldersee."

HOW SHALL CHINA BE PUNISHED?

"THE

HE Taming of the Dragon" is the sug gestive title of an article in the November Forum by the Rev. L. J. Davies, whose residence of several years at the capital of Shantung Province enables him to speak with authority of present conditions in China.

After relating a number of historic incidents of China's duplicity and perfidy in her foreign relations, Mr. Davies sums up the whole matter in the following paragraphs:

"The case of the foreigner in China is not primarily against the people, but against the gov ernment. From the beginning the governing classes, the officials and literati, have fostered the anti-foreign prejudices of the people; and at frequently recurring periods they have played upon the ignorance and superstition of the masses, instigating the riots in which so many foreigners have lost their lives and so much property has been destroyed. Dr. Martin, after fifty years' intercourse with the Chinese, asserts that if the people were unwilling to have missionaries live among them, we should have to count many more than twenty riots during this quarter of a century. That they are not incensed at the introduction of foreign goods is manifest from the vastly increased sale of foreign merchandise. The Chinese people are easily controlled by their officials when the latter act in good faith and in accordance with law and custom. Had the Chinese Government entered freely and heartily upon the obligations assumed when the treaties were signed, anti-foreign outrages would have been so few as to form a very unimportant element in diplomatic affairs.

Primarily, the so-called 'missionary question' is occasioned neither by the rashness nor unreasonableness of the missionaries, nor by the unrestrained antipathy of the people, but by the insincerity and duplicity of the Chinese Government. Sporadic instances of rashness on the part of missionaries may, perhaps, occur, and some of the Chinese people are bitterly antiforeign; but if the imperial edicts regarding Christianity and foreigners had been the spontaneous expression of the imperial will,' the irreconcilables of both classes would have been in a hopeless minority. The Chinese Government has fostered and developed the anti-foreign feeling both by its manner of punishing offenses

against foreign citizens and by its method of intercourse with the representatives of sovereign sister states. It is the chief criminal, and the one upon whom punishment can and should be visited."

THE RATIONAL METHOD OF PUNISHMENT.

Admitting that the purpose of punishment should be to make it either morally or physically impossible for the criminal to continue his wrong course, this writer holds that vengeance, in the sense of retaliation, is equally barbarous, whether sought by a Chinese mob or by the German Emperor"; that the Chinese are keenly alive to moral distinctions, and that any attempt to divide the country into small sections dominated by forces of foreign troops would in the end prove of advantage to neither Chinese nor foreigners.

"To punish the Chinese Government, to make it the administrator of its own punishment, and to render by moral means the repetition of outrages against foreigners increasingly impossible-this should be the policy of the powers in the settlement which must end the present disturbance. The mind of the Chinese nation will never be changed by physical force. William of Germany having planted his banner on the walls of Peking, may raze them and destroy the whole city, and, granting no quarter, may slay his tens of thousands. But in doing so he will but intensify the anti-foreign bitterness. In the elimination of this spirit lies the only hope for satisfactory intercourse. This hatred of foreigners in China, as in other lands, is chiefly due to ignorance. The government at Peking has fostered and perpetuated it by insincerity in its dealings with foreign nations. A settlement of the claims growing out of this war, ending with the payment of indemnities and the granting of additional commercial rights to foreigners, will leave the root of the difficulty untouched, and but comparatively short time will be required to produce a fresh crop of outrages. To the above must be added reforms in the government, besides privileges and opportunities granted not alone to foreigners but to the Chinese people as well."

REFORMS TO BE DEMANDED.

The United States, in the opinion of the writer, is in a position to make demands on the Chinese Government for specific reforms. We have seized no Chinese territory, and our reputation for good faith is high. Among the reforms most urgently needed the following are sug gested:

(1) The abolition of the k'otou, which would lead to a freer intercourse between the Emperor

and his officials, and would result in placing the Emperor in position to judge and act independently; (2) the sifting from the mandarinate of vast numbers of supernumeraries, who exist only for the purpose of drawing their salaries and of acting as drags to retard progress; (3) the pay. ment to all officials of salaries sufficient for the conduct of the affairs committed to them, thus removing the present virtual necessity of levying unjust and irregular taxes or 'squeezes'; (4) the reform of the internal revenue system, by the honest administration of which the government might greatly increase its income; (5) the extension of the postal system; (6) a free press; (7) the establishment of a modernized system of education, open to poor as well as to rich; (8) the opening of the country to freer trade with foreigners; (9) navigation by steam vessels of all suitable waters, etc.

"Before any such programme can be suggested to the Chinese two important steps must be taken by the powers. The first of these is to dispose permanently of the Empress Dowager and her anti-reform advisers. She is the archenemy of all foreigners as well as of progress and reform. If she is left in Peking, and if the men through whom she effected the coup of 1898 and instigated this present outrage are allowed their liberty and are retained in office, no hope of honest reform can be entertained. ond step is to reëstablish Kuang Hsu, and to guarantee the integrity of his empire, and, moreover, the world-wide discussion of the partition of China must cease. If these things are done, there is every ground to expect a peaceful revolution in China, which will be of the greatest advantage to the whole world. Only as such internal changes are wrought will the anti-foreign spirit of the Chinese be dissipated and permanent peace be secured."

CAR

The sec

WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN CHINA? APTAIN F. E. YOUNGHUSBAND contributes to the National Review for October an article entitled "A Plea for the Control of China." Captain Younghusband is convinced that some form of partition or control of China is inevitable, and he thinks that the proper policy of the powers is not, as they are doing at present, to accentuate the importance of the central government, but to deal separately with the local viceroys as far as possible:

"Those who have lived all their lives in European countries, and are accustomed to centralization of authority, hardly understand how loosely on empire like China is held together, and how lightly the provinces are bound to the

capital. And before committing ourselves to a policy of emphasizing the central authority we should be wise to mark how very little power that central authority has. We obtained, e.g., from the Peking Government the right to navigate the inland waters, but we cannot yet navigate them. We ought to be clear in our minds whether, in this and similar cases, our general trend of policy should be to enforce our rights through the central authority or through the viceroy of the particular province in which our rights have been infringed."

LOCAL CONTROL AND AN OPEN DOOR.

Each power should contribute to the control of the capital, and at the same time assume its special sphere of action. The open door should be preserved in each sphere.

"It is quite ridiculous to suppose that, when there are anti-foreign risings in Manchuria, all of us can go there to suppress them. That task would obviously be much more effectively carried out by Russia alone. Similarly, if the Yangtse region, where 64 per cent. of the foreign trade is in our hands, is rendered insecure, the task of settling it would be most easily carried out by us with our sea-power and our troops from India and Hongkong."

A BREAK-UP INEVITABLE.

To such a policy Captain Younghusband thinks there is no permanent alternative. Though no empire has ever held together so long as that of China, the indications are plain that it is now breaking up:

And

"The outlying dependencies have been falling away one by one. Annan, Tonquin, Siam, Burma, Sikkim, Hunza, the Pamirs, the Amur region, Formosa, Hongkong, all have been broken away, and pieces even of China itself-Port Arthur, Wei-hai-Wei, Kiaochau Bay, Kowloon -have passed into the hands of others. many other instances besides those I have already given could be quoted to show how loosely what remains is held together. While the Emperor has little authority over the viceroys, the viceroys on their part, as they freely acknowledge, have but slight control over the people. Patriotism is practically unknown. Mid-China and South China were perfectly callous as to what the Japanese did in North China."

CHINESE AND EUROPEANS.

Captain Younghusband thinks that the antipathy of the Chinese to foreigners is a radical trait of their character. European antipathy to the

Chinese is no less natural :

In traveling through a strange country for

one's own pleasure, one naturally tries to think the best of the people; and most of the people (except the Mashonas and Matabele) among whom I have traveled I have formed some attachment to. But between me and the Chinamen there always seemed a great gulf fixed, which could never be overcome. The Chinese gentlemen I met during my three months' stay in the Peking Legation and the year I spent in Chinese Turkestan were always very polite, and often cheery and genial; but even then I could always detect a vein of condescension and superciliousness. They were polite because they are bred to rigid politeness; but I never felt drawn towards a Chinese gentleman as any one would be towards a Rajput, a Sikh, or an Afghan gentleman."

Russia's Attitude.

The Fortnightly Review contains three articles on The Far Eastern Crisis." The first of these, which is anonymous, is entitled "Why Not a Treaty with Russia?" Briefly, the writ er's points are, first, that Russia does not want China, which she could not assimilate; secondly, that Russian policy is against the acquisition of unassimilable populations; and, thirdly, that so far from Russia's advance in Asia being directed against British India, four-fifths of Russia's territory in Asia was acquired before Great Britain's Indian empire was even in its birth.

BRITISH POLICY.

As to British policy, the writer says:

"We proclaim the integrity of China without any intelligent or merely obstinate effort to reassert the primacy of our diplomacy at Peking or even to maintain its parity with that of Russia. We consecrate the Middle Kingdom to an integrity of putrescence without any more lucid conception than in the case of Turkey, that the propping up of a decaying despotism necessitates a liberal indulgence of its crimes. On the other hand, with inexplicable complacency, we reserve our right in the last resort to an almost impossible share of China, without taking the least steps towards the preparation of the masterly plans and the enormous forces which would be required to vindicate that claim."

RUSSIA'S EXPANSION.

England's pretensions to the hegemony of the Yangtse Valley have been already destroyed by the action of the other powers in landing troops; while, as to Northern China, no sane politician could have hoped to prevent the last stage of the Siberian railway from becoming Russian.

"It is excessively rare to find, even among educated Englishmen, a perception of the simple

fact that the landward expansion of Russia has been as natural, gradual, and legitimate as the spread of British sea-power, and that the former process has been infinitely the less aggressive and violent of the two. Russophobia in this country rests upon the assumption that the devouring advance of the Muscovite has been exclusively dictated by a melodramatic and iniquitous design upon our dominion in India. There never was a stranger fallacy of jealous hallucinations. If our Indian empire had never existed; if the continent-peninsula had disappeared at a remote geological epoch beneath the waves, and if the Indian Ocean had washed the base of the Himalayas for ages, Russian expansion would still have followed precisely the same course it has taken at exactly the same rate."

The trail of the frontal attack, says the writer, has been all over British diplomacy, and unless some prolonged equilibrium between England and Russia can be established there will be small hope for British interests in China.

"Is Russia to preponderate in China?" asks Mr. Demetrius Boulger, who bases his article on the proposition that any suggestion "emanating from Russia would arouse suspicion," and that "Russia will never be pulled up in the far East except by the absolute opposition of this empire." Mr. Boulger is an extremist; and though he does not repeat his proposition of a few months back, that England should land 200,000 men at St. Petersburg and capture the city, he goes pretty far in that direction by pleading that England should oppose Russia merely for the sake of opposition. England must not negotiate with Li Hung Chang, because he is the friend of Russia; and she cannot negotiate with any one else, because there is no government in China. Instead, she is to define and assert our claim to the Yangtse Valley, and at the same time support it by sending 29,000 British troops to Chusan. At the same moment we should notify Japan, Germany, America, and France that we will respect and support similar claims to a material guarantee' on their part in Korea, Shantung, Chekiang, and Kwangsi, respectively. would be necessary also to take the precaution of mobilizing the fleet. If these steps were taken promptly, quietly, and firmly, there would be no war, the prestige of England would be raised to a higher point than ever; and the powers, agreed on their own position and relative claims, could attack the Chinese problem with the genuine intention of solving it. There will, indeed, be no place in such an arrangement for Li Hung Chang; and we might even entertain the hope that the Dowager Empress and her satellites would before long receive their deserts. It

It