armies and fleets, able to keep the field and the seas year after year against the government forces, that very palpable and substantial fact joined to all they are told by their own history and by their codified legislation of 2000 years' standing makes it impossible for the Chinese authorities to see in the tsih anything but what they really are, political opponents. And the ignorant ridicule of occidental foreigners would, even if it reached their ears, have small effect in preventing them from treating with these political opponents in the manner dictated at once by expedience and by the principles of their national civilization.

The reader will perceive from my definition of civilization that the Chinese civilization has from the earliest ages been the highest in kind, whatever it may have been in degree, or in the extent to which it has been practically attained. It is mental more than material. It has always taught distinctly in words and in books that man should struggle with man by moral and intellectual agencies rather than by physicalshould gain him, by subduing his heart and his head rather than his body. Hence the frequent and liberal use on the part of all authorities, from the Emperor to the lowest mandarin of moral and argumentative proclamations; another of the peculiar features of Chinese political life ridiculed by occidental ignorance. Even those mandarins who are least disposed by their individual natures to persuasive and peaceful measures are compelled by national opinion to issue proclamations the text of which is the stereotyped formula: "Puh jin puh keaou urh choo-I cannot bear to withhold instruction and yet to destroy!" or "Destruction without instruction is insufferable!" In this feature of their mental civilization the Chinese are practically more Christian than the Christians of the west.

Chinese history shows us one other kind of forcible change of dynasty: the prætorian, or such as have been suddenly effected by the army, whether for the gratification of its own wishes, or to check tyrannies against the country generally. These have, however, not been frequent, and

cannot operate to effect the expulsion of the Manchoo family, whose prætorian guard and the germ of whose army consists of its own countrymen settled in China.

The reader, who has mastered the above, necessarily tedious, exposition, will I hope now be able to understand the nature of Chinese rebellions, whether originated directly by the Triad Society, by robber bands, or by a religious community.

I have indicated above (pp. 32, 33) the downward course of the Manchoo dynasty before and after the British war. This downward course had become so apparent to me within four years after that contest, that in a work I then (June, 1846) wrote, I did not hesitate to point to the circumstance in the following terms:

"The very unfair proportion of Manchoos employed by the present dynasty in government posts is a deviation from the fundamental principle of Chinese polity; and, as might be expected, it constantly nourishes a feeling of dissatisfaction among the Chinese, which, though they are obliged to be at some pains to conceal it, occasionally escapes them. The selling of government posts, which has recently been carried to a great extent, is another deviation from it, dangerous in the highest degree for the present rulers. Hitherto the dread of the more warlike Manchoos joined to the partial operation allowed to this principle has been sufficient to repress or prevent the general rising of a quiet loving people; but if the practice of selling offices be continued, in the extent to which it is at present carried, nothing is more likely, now that the prestige of Manchoo power in war has received a severe shock in the late encounters with the English, than that a Chinese Belisarius will arise and extirpate or drive into Tartary the Manchoo garrisons or bannermen, who, during a residence in China, twice as long as that of the Vandals in Africa, have greatly deteriorated in the military virtues; while they still retain enough of the insolence of conquerors, to gain themselves the hatred of the Chinese."

In less than three years after that, I had marked enough to

convince me that some such event was actually approaching; for in a letter of the 25th January, 1849, addressed to a gentleman who had occupied an eminent position in China, after telling him of the (then) recent promotion to still higher office of the well known mandarin Ke ying,* I observed that "there was indeed great need of able men at the head of affairs," adding, that though we had rather scanty data at command, yet, "judging from what we do know positively, we are entering on a period of insurrection and anarchy that will end sooner or later in the downfall of the Manchoo dynasty." I then showed that "for the last five years robberies by bands of men often numbering hundreds had become gradually more common, while the sale not of titles merely, but of offices, together with the financial difficulties, had been steadily increasing," and concluded, "Everything in short seems hastening to a worse state, and I look in vain for any active principle of conservation, for anything to stop the downward career."

This was, observe, written fully eighteen months before the outbreak of the religious-political rising, the "Kwang se rebellion" proper; and nearly a year before the bandit rebels in Kwang se assumed a distinctly political character; and commenced that open contest with the existing government, which was the immediate cause of the far more dangerous religious political outbreak.

* Reality is said to beat fiction, and the mention of this mandarin reminds me of the "Syrian Prince" whom Mr. Titmarsh encountered in his journey from Cornhill to Cairo as a vendor of pocket-handkerchiefs. The mandarin Ke ying is a Prince of the Imperial family, the cousin I believe of the last Emperor. He held more than one of those very important posts of Governor General which I have described in foregoing pages, and was afterwards one of the two chief ministers; a man uniting in his own person in China the birth, rank and official power of the late Duke of Cambridge and Lord Aberdeen in England. Judge therefore of our disgust and our astonishment at the ignorance and gullibility of John Bull when we learned that an illiterate Chinese of low station, who could not sit in the presence of English gentlemen in China, had been accompanying ladies of some standing in their Park drives and eventually figured at the opening of the first Crystal palace as the "celebrated mandarin Keying," on which occasion he walked in the procession between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the "Duke"!!

CHAPTER XI.

CONVERSATIONS OF THE OLD EMPEROR TAOU KWANG WITH A HIGH MANDARIN RESPECTING BRITISH PROJECTS AND THE STATE OF SOUTHERN CHINA.

ABOUT the time that the transformation of the bandit rebels into distinctly political rebels took place, viz.—in the last months of 1849, some conversations took place between the old Emperor Taou kwang and one of his high officials, which the reader will, I believe, not blame me for inserting here.

I did not get the manuscript record of these conversations till two years later, in March 1851, when I handed a translation of them to my then official superior Dr. (now Sir John) Bowring, who transmitted them to the Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston. I appended to my official translation a note in which I examined the probabilities of the authenticity of the conversations. The substance of that note I here reproduce with some additions deemed necessary for the information of the home reader; but which were not requisite for Dr. Bowring, with whom I was in personal communication and to whom I was therefore able to give verbally such further information and explanations as his unacquaintance with the language and the peculiar institutions of the Chinese rendered necessary.

There are two official rules in the Chinese administrative system of special importance, one that no officer shall remain in one and the same post longer than three years, the other that on each promotion he shall travel to Peking and appear at a levee; which latter-the Emperor being the chief admi

nistrator is in China necessarily something more than a court ceremony. The Chinese government has the practical wisdom not to be the slave of mere routine; and hence it interrupts the operation of these rules whenever exceptional circumstances demand it. They are however enforced to an extent that, viewing the long journeys many of the provincial mandarins are thereby compelled to perform, seems to occidental ignorance extremely absurd, comically Chinese. But the fact is both of these rules are, like most Chinese administrative forms, based on a profound knowledge of human nature, and on a long experience of their fitness to the national government system. They are the means by which autocratic centralization guards against local tendencies to feudalism. The frequent changes of posts usually cause changes of locality; and prevent such intimate personal regard between the people and the better mandarins, as would give the latter the power of great vassals; while the frequent visits of these same mandarins to the court keep directly alive a feeling of dependence on the autocrat. It is the rule that the Emperor shall avail himself for administrative purposes of these appearances of his mandarins before him, by questioning them as to the state of affairs in the country they have held office in, &c. This rule, it will be observed, gives him a constant means of exercising a surveillance over the proceedings of the Governors of his eighteen provinces, the only officials with whom, as stated at page 9, the system permits him to communicate on paper. Again, it is evident that precisely on this account the Governors of the provinces must be anxious to know what passes on such occasions between their sovereign and their subordinatesespecially those of the latter who are nearest in rank to themselves and it is further evident that the promoted subordinate, must, on his return to his new post, be prepared with a narrative to give the Governor and any other provincial superordinates, or expect to draw on himself their jealousy and enmity. To falsify anything that passed