native cultivation as to render it no longer profitable to the foreigner to import the Indian produce. That they have the power to do this there is very little room for doubt. Native opium now produced in large quantities-equal, probably, in amount to the Indian importation-is already sold at half the price in the open market. It is possible that the Indian ryot could work as cheaply as the Chinese coolie, and that the actual cost of production might be pretty nearly equalised, while the superior quality of the Indian drug, or its greater potency, might still give it a preference at a higher price. But this equalisation of cost could only be secured in India by foregoing all the profit, and taxation which now constitutes the 7,000,000l. of net revenue derived from it by our Indian administration. And even if the trade were maintained, after sacrificing all that makes its continuance an object of interest to the Indian Government, the Chinese have the power by treaty to surcharge the Indian produce with any amount of excise or inland duties they may see fit; so that it rests with them completely to turn the scales, and to any extent they please, in favour of the native growth. At least the only limit to their power of taxation-is the point beyond which the duty levied would afford so high a premium to smuggling that no preventive service can prove an efficient check.

The writer then proceeds to discuss the question of coal mines, and traces very clearly the need we feel for cheap and abundant supplies in the Chinese Seas. He no less succinctly states the objection of the official mind to the extensive working of mines. 'The opening of a mine,' he says, 'necessitates the assemblage of hundreds and thousands of people; and those, though they are easily collected, may be difficult to disperse. All criminals, rebels, and bad charac

ters would harbour in their midst and be beyond the reach of the law. For this reason mining has been considered a breach of the laws prohibiting it, while the enactments of former Emperors, even the State, cannot lightly sanction mining operations. An assemblage of nations called together by the merchants of their own country would serve to collect refugees of a doubtful character; and to allow the foreigner to open mines at his good pleasure is the very way to bring about rebellion. Eventually they would not only collect bad characters, but, supposing them to harbour mischievous designs, they could make their mining operations a pretext for gatherings: that is to say, they would have in occupation the vital points of the Empire with the mass of desperadoes under their absolute control.'

The writer proposes-if nothing better may be done, if the worst comes to the worst'-that the Government should work some coal mines under an organised system, selling the coals to foreigners at the ports at one-half or one-third less than they now pay, the foreign merchants raising the two or three millions of taels necessary to set the working operations on foot.

To the Anglo-Chinese communities and their local press such objections are of course entirely futile, and they are scoffed at as vain pretexts-mere puerile impediments, which a bold and vigorous policy on the part of Great Britain should at once and without hesitation sweep aside as unworthy of consideration. Our Government has evidently not taken this view of their sovereign or international rights, to the great displeasure of its commercial subjects. No doubt coal mines might be seized by force, and worked by intimidation, or other coercive means; but so might a whole province, if it were thought either justifiable or politic.

Space fails us; but we trust that in the papers already analysed and described, enough has been produced to awaken some interest in the people, and abundantly to prove that among their leading men, and some of those the highest placed, there are many capable of forming very rational views of their relations with Foreign States, and advising a reasonable, if not a very rapidly progressive, policy for the country if only they could make their counsels prevail, and were not overborne by numbers, and the weight of a strong national party too much disposed to identify love of their own country with hatred of the foreigner, we might have some hope. Unfortunately nothing tends more to the triumph of this party than clamour and violence on the part of those foreigners with whom officials are brought more immediately in contact, and imperious demands for sweeping changes and Western innovations. Whether these proceed from the small mercantile communities located in China, or their Governments, and whether commerce, religion, or civilisation be the pleas for such exigence, the result must be the same. None of these, we are persuaded, can be promoted by such a course. The farther we penetrate into the mind and learn the habits of thought and action common to the Chinese as a nation, the deeper the conviction becomes that such objects are not to be advanced by compulsory action of foreign Powers, or any dictatorial interference with the internal administration of the country.

How far it may be possible to induce the Chinese to advance more rapidly than they have hitherto shown any inclination to attempt in the path of progress, as that is understood in Europe or America, is a doubtful question. The best interests of both countries are more or less involved in it;

and although rapid and sweeping changes are not generally the safest or the most permanent in their effects, we have seen in Japan an example from which many will draw favourable conclusions. It may in any case contribute to a knowledge of the conditions under which great innovations and reforms must be undertaken, if they are really to take place in this generation, to read these, so far unguarded opinions of leading statesmen in China that they were certainly not given with any thought of communication to foreigners. Nor can it be in other respects time lost to regard such questions as arise from our relations with China, for a brief space, from a purely Chinese point of view. If European statesmen and others who take interest in international affairs cannot put themselves in the place of those whose destinies they seek to influence or control, and to some extent understand their modes of appreciating foreign diplomacy and its objects,-it is quite certain no progress will ever be secured by peaceable means. It has been truly said that a nation does not for a slight cause allow the deepest and oldest of its traditions to be set aside, and still less can it be expected to do so at the dictation of foreigners, who, as a rule, show little knowledge of the wants of the people, and less sympathy. If we would exercise any great or lasting influence over the Chinese mind, we must first begin by understanding it; and without some spirit of sympathy with the objeets of our study, little progress can be made even in that. This alone can make the study of the character, temper, and aspirations of a people fruitful in true knowledge, or the conclusions that we draw from it trustworthy as guides to a national policy. It is an English failing to persist in regarding everything from

Our

own stand-point, resolutely refusing to put ourselves even

momentarily-in another's place, so as to look at any subject which concerns us from any other stand-point. But it is not thus that we can ever obtain either comprehensive views or wide influence. Truth is manysided, and not to be grasped by men with one idea, or who maintain the habit of regarding the various objects presented to their view only from one side.

Whatever may be our conviction as to the undoubted advantage it would be to China if all modern appliances of railroads, telegraphs, and steam machinery were suddenly naturalised or transferred to their soil under foreign direction, we may well make some allowance for hesitation-or even downright opposition on the part of Chinese officials when, casting their eyes across the wide space which separates them from Europe in the map of the world, they get a vision of what is now going on in the most advanced and civilised States of Europe. Some thought may not unnaturally arise in their minds how little all this boasted Civilisation and Christianity which France and other Powers have been so eager to press upon them

have done for the humanising of mankind.

The sanguinary war,

scarce yet concluded, between Germany and France, provoked in the first instance by a mere contention for supremacy and the irrepressible tendency of France to dominate and intervene in the affairs of other countries (of which China has had some painful experience), must have sorely shaken the faith of the best disposed Chinese in the humanising or peace-inspiring influences of either of these two great agencies of progress. And if they look a little farther, and see what is now passing in and around Paris-how Frenchmen are butchering each other in deadly conflict about forms of government and theories of social and national life-shall we utterly condemn them if they inwardly thank the 'spirits of their ancestors' that they have hitherto been preserved from Western progress, and think they may still dispense with any more advanced theories of life, social, religious, or political, than those which they inherit from Chinese sages who lived 500 years before the Christian era?

on

Jeene (Genoa) and the Jeneneys; of the kingdom of Poll, and of the disposicion of the people;' of Gulik and Lewke' (Juliers and Liege), and base and high Almayne, and so forth. The said notes were from personal observation, for Boorde 'had trauayled thorow and round about all the regions of Christynte;' and were put together at Montpelier in 1542. Who was Boorde? Mr. Furnivall has published his book of travels, his Dyetary of Helth, and Barnes's answer to his lost Treatyse upon Berdes, along with his own learned Forewords' and 'Hindwords,' in the last extra volume of the Early English Text Society. Boorde was born at Borde's (now Board's) hill in Holmdale, not far from the Hayward's Heath station, in Sussex. The family makes a figure in Lower's Worthies of Sussex: by the time the Armada came it had split into two branches, the heads of which, occupying Board's Hill and Paxhill, gave 30l. a-piece towards the defence of the country.

In 1570 one of them, an Andrew, was a nativus or 'villein regardant,' of Lord Abergavenny's manor of

Ditchling, near Cuckfield; and him, Georgius Nevile Dnus. de Bergevenny,' manumits, so that he no longer has to 'regard,' i.e. to be on the watch, what service may be required of him. But this cannot be our Doctor; for he had been got hold of by the Charterhouse monks while he was under age, according to their practice of drawing boys into religion with hooks of apples, whom, having professed, they do not instruct in doctrines, but maintain them to go upon beggarly excursions.' So Boorde became a monk; but he was 'dispensyd with relygyon,' first by the Pope's bull that he might be suffragan to the Bishop of Chichester-a man of mark in the county he must have been-and afterwards three times over by his Carthusian superior, that he might go abroad and study medicine. After this he reckons himself (as well he might) clearly discharged from religion, and able to settle quietly at Montpelier, then the chief transalpine school of physic.

There was nothing of the martyr about Andreas Parforatus, as he calls himself. If he writes a book of Sermons in 1532, he takes the oaths to Henry VIII. in 1534. The Prior Houghton and several of his monks were put into the Tower, and afterwards hanged, for refusing to take these same oaths. But

Boorde was already something of a courtier; when he was 'a young doctor' (of full forty years old) he, just home from his travels, was sent for by the Duke of Norfolk. He did not like to prescribe without consulting the Duke's old physician, Dr. Butte. But Butte did not come; so Boorde prescribed, made