466.
had seen for herself that people condemned her action. But to be slighted, treated with cruel rudeness by this hideous old Chinawoman, an old barbarian as she mentally called her-this was insufferable.
"The race feeling came up, stronger in this girl than in many others, because she had seen so little of foreigners and foreign countries, and until the infatuation for this handsome China- | man had had a contempt for all things not English. The dislike she had for Mrs. Beecher and Mrs. Sandilands paled before the white glow of the passion of anger she felt now,-a rage coupled with remorse for having put herself in such a position, that this hateful and insolent old woman could trample on her.
"It was the same racial feeling which leads to lynching, and which in some countries makes it a orime punished by death for a black man to strike a white.
"If the old woman, as she hobbled in front, on her son's arm, could have seen into the heart of the whitefaced English girl, she would have seen some dreadful things written there. This girl, once placid tempered and sweet, and possess ing neither more nor less than the ordinary temper of a well brought up young lady, had in the last few months developed passions, which she had, till now, forced herself to control, but which might at any moment bec me absolutely terrible." We must not disclose the tragic end of it all, but refer the reader to the book itself, Lew Ching treated his wife with respect and affection, in his way, and seems to have been altogether a decent sort of a fellow, but the Chinese way was not the English way nor the English way the Chinese way, and it was impossible that the two lives could run in the same current. Mr. Woodroffe tells his tale well and is true to nature, and his local colour ing, we should say, is accurate, though not being familiar with Hankow or its surroundings we are hardly in a position to pronounce on that point. The only exception we have to take to the tale is that it is too sombre and tragic from beginning to end, with hardly a touch of humour or any secondary interest to relieve it.
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{June 20, 18 95. (London). Also a Preface and a Sequel by Sir HENRY MEYSEY THOMPSON, Bart, M.P. London: Effingham Wilson.
THE preface contains the best review that could be written of this valuable collection of papers, and we will content ourselves with quoting from it:
THE HONGKONG WEEKLY PRESS AND
including the Loop portion now known as the Ordous country. The Tartars were driven away to the north of the Great Desert; enormous numbers of criminals and other unfortunate peo- ple were drafted northwards, in order to con- struct a military road and do garrison duty; over forty citadels or fortified towns were built along the line of the frontier; and, finally, the so-called "Fifteen years ago,” says Sir H. M. Møysoy- Great Wall was carried continuously from the Thompson, “I had come to the conclusion that sea to a point near the modern provincial capital if the value of gold, as measured by silver and of Lan-chou Fu in Kan Suh. This Great Wall commodities, were to continue to rise, the inevit- still exists in a more or less complete stateable consequence must be the banishment of all throughout nearly its entire length; and; as it our great manufacturing industries from Eng. is distinctly marked upon almost every modern land, to find a home in the silver-using countries map of China, the reader of the following pages of the East and elsewhere. This theory. I and will find his task much facilitated if he keeps others proclaimed from the housetops, but we this line well before his mind; for it not only found that we might as well have been crying in enables us to dispense with the necessity of in the wilderness; no one would listen to us. Yet troducing multitudinous strange Chinese names the theory is very simple, and seemed to us quite of places, names, too, which often vary as to conclusive.
The public would not stop! locality with each succeeding dynasty, but it to listen; but 'dogged does it. We hammered marks in a vivid way the blood-line along which away, making a convert here and there, until millions of human skeletons are to lie bleaching now even Sir William Harcourt admits that the without intermission during a thousand year's professors of Political Economy are on our side, struggle. It is proper, however, to remark that During the last two years I have had informa Mêng Tien with his half million of slaves did tion sent me from many parts of the world, that not do more than improve and consolidate already the manufacturing and agricultural industries existing walls; for we are told that the Chinese in silver-using countries are advancing by leaps king who adopted Tartar costume had already and bounds; while in England and other gold- built a Great Wall from north-east Shan Si to using countries they are mostly stagnant and the westernmost extremity of the Loop country, declining. Now, I said to myself, we have ]DO and a little before that the rising power of Ts'in longer to rely on theory; we have hard practical had built another wall still further west. To facts to point to. Someone should put these the east, again, the frontier state of Yon, which facts in a way in which our great industrial po- roughly speaking may be taken to represent the pulation can understand them. Let them once plain of modern Peking, had constrnoted a Great grasp the fact that employment is slipping from Wall from about the longitude of Peking to the their hands into those of Chinese and Japanese, sea, so that it is evident very little remained for and the thing is done. The hour has come : can Mêng Tien to do but to improve and strengthen we find the Man? It was in order to find the the already existing fortifications. In later Man that I offered my prise.. I hope that the times, too, various northern dynasties added to readers of these Essays will agree that in Mr. or laterally extended the line of the Great Wall Jamieson, H.B.M.'s Consul-General for China, in the east, more especially near Peking; so that excellently supported as he is by Mr. Croal and the magnificent and almost perfect structure Mr. Box, the man is found." which modern visitors make a point of going to see at a distance of about thirty miles from that capital is very far from being the ancient Great Wall of two thousand years_ago.
In book VII., chapter I.. dealing with the Empire of the Cathayans, Mr. Parker says:-
The Ghei and some at least of the Cathayans cannot well be anything but the ancestors of the various Mongol tribes that now occupy their old quarters; and it is also difficult to imagine what the western Mongols can be other than the frag. ments of the old Hiung-nu and Turkish Em- pires dished up, so to speak, in a new shape, after having been reduced or raised by Genghis Khan and his successors to one monotonous level bear ing a Mongol tinge, and after having their originally fierce character softened by the in- fluence of Buddhism. There was, it is true, a Shirwi tribe called Mungwa and there was the petty tribe, more akin to the Tunguses than the Turks, called Tatur, from either of which the Mongols proper may possibly have sprung. But extensive nationalities must either immigrate or breed: they cannot suddenly spring into ex- istence. We know that the tribe of Genghis Khan did not come in large bodies from the north, south, east, or west; but, beginning in the humblest way, grew as it rolled over the plains like a huge snow-ball, absorbing almost everything in its way. Any one who has lived amongst the modern Mongols must see that they correspond exactly in appearance and very much in manners to the descriptions given of the ancient Hiung-un and Huas. In other words, things remain largely as they always
A Thousand Years of The Tartare. By E. H. PARKER, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul, Kiungohow. Shanghai, Hongkong, Yokohama, and Singapore: Kelly & Walsh, Limited. Mr. PARKER is well known for his monumental industry, of which the book before us is a strik- ing example. It is, he says, "intended to give, in (it is hoped) readable form, the substance of all the Chinese have to say about the Nomad Tartars previous to the conquests of Genghis Khan." Here and there interesting passages are to be found, but to wade through the book from beginning to end must, in the case of any ordinary reader, be regarded as a feat of en- durance and patience. Mr. Parker says he has translated, word for word, all the original Chinese authorities he could find; but literal trans- lations of Chinese records a thousand years old are not the pabulum to attract a large circle of readers. We have in Mr. Parker's book all the material for an interesting history of an important epoch, and the student will find it extremely useful in aiding him in his researches, though others than students may find the undi- gested mass of minute detail rather too much for them. But detail is Mr. Parker's strong point. He collects the material; others may if they please throw it into shape and give it to the world in the form of graphic narrative. Between the covers of Mr. Parker's look, how ever; those who have the patience to search for them, will find passages of general interest.
Having completed his history of the Tartars A universal custom, he tells us, "which ex-
up to 1203, Mr. Parker brings his work to an tended for a thousand years over the whole end with the following words. From 1368 to of Tartary, was for the son to take over 1643 China was once more ruled by Chinese. his deceased father's wives (with the exception Since then she has been in the competent hands of his own natural mother), and for younger of the Manchus, as already explained, an brothers to take over the widows of their obscure tribe affiliated to the Nuchens, who elder brother. It does not appear quite spoke a similar language." In view of recent certain whether the son or the brother had events the phrase "competent hands of the first choice: perhaps the brother only took when Manchus" reads almost like satire. there was no son: possibly vice versa." should think either would have been very glad to get out of it. The following is Mr. Parker's account of the Great Wall:-
We
"After Ts'in had amalgamated this state to- gether with the others, the celebrated general Mêng Tien was sent at the head of several hundred thousand men to attack the Tartars; the whole line of the Yellow River was recovered,
were.
The Silver Question. Injury to British Trade and Manufactures. The Paper by GEORGE JAMIESON, Esq. (H.B.M. Consul General at hanghai, China), which won the Bimetallic Prize offered by Sir Henry Mersey-Thompson in 1894; together with Two other Papers on the same subject by THOMAS HOLTOAKE BOX (Yokohama) and David Octavius CROAL
The Kyoto Industrial Exhibition of 1865. Written at the request of the Kyoto City Government. By F. BRINCKLEY. THIS is a guide to Kyoto. written for the assist- ance of visitors to the Exhibition, and no more competent writer of such a book could have been found than Captain Brinckley. The exhibition is being held to celebrate the eleven hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the city, but it is as a city of art manufactures and indus- trial enterprise that the Kyoto of 1895 desires to introduce itself to the outer world." Captain Brinckley's remarks on art manufactures are particularly interesting and valuable. We may quote the following from the section on Cloisonné Enamel
་་
The Cloisonless School has only one master in Japan, its inventor, Namikawa Sosuke. Con- noisseurs have not yet made up their minds whether enamel in which the cloisons are hidden should be regarded as an anomalous curiosity or an artistic triumph. It is the farthest develop- ment of the pictorial school. To enclose a design in copper cloisons is to surround it with outlines having no existence in nature. Nami- kawa Sosuke conceived the idea of abolishing the cloisons-removing them at a certain stage of manufacture or concealing thom--and limning veritable pictures with coloured enamels upon monochromatic enamel surfaces. For many years the public paid no attention to this singularly bold essay. An exquisite snow scene sent by Namikawa to the Fisheries Exhibition in London hung skied and unnoticed throughout the show. If people looked at it all, they passed it by as a painting with no special claims to consideration." But at last a French con- noisseur-the French are always first in such matters-discovered Namakawa, and now he is counted the prince of Japanese enamellers."
3
The Federation of Greater Britain. By CHARLES WADDIE, Honorary Secretary of the Scottish Home Rule Association. Edinburgh: Waddie & Co., Limited. MR. WADDIE is an advocate of “home rule all ound". with ran Imperial Parliament repre- sentative of all sections of the Empire. In the pamphlet of sixteen pages now before us he briefly but lucidly sketches bis scheme, and he reo gnises the difficulties in the way. We cou- fess," he says, “that while a British Parlia- ment, like the above, would be constiinted on reasonable and just principles, we have
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