be traced. Within recent years the province of Hunan has been flooded with streams of anti-foreign literature full of malignant calumniations, and designed to cause riots which shall drive the foreign devil out of the Celestial Empire. From the Chinese point of view the impulse which leads to these publications is as praiseworthy as we should consider resistance to anarchists to be. The charges are partly due to misapprehension, and in part also to that race hatred from which Western nations are by no means free. Probably many Chinese consider these attacks thoroughly patriotic. But that any considerable body of Chinese are actuated by a desire to serve their country, because it is their country, aside from the prospect of emolument, is a proposition which will require much more proof than has yet been offered to secure its acceptance by any one who knows the Chinese. It need not be remarked that a Chinese might be patriotic without taking much interest in the fortunes of a Tartar Dynasty like the present, but there is the best reason to think that, whatever the dynasty might happen to be, the feeling of the mass of the nation would be the same as it is now—a feeling of profound indifference. The key-note to this view of public affairs was sounded by Confucius himself, in a pregnant sentence found in the "Analects": "The Master said: He who is not in an office has no concern with plans for the administration of its duties." To our thought these significant words are partly the result, and to a very great degree the cause, of the constitutional unwillingness of the Chinese to interest themselves in matters for which they are in no way responsible.
M. Huc gives an excellent example of this spirit. "In 1851, at the period of the death of the Emperor Tao Kuang, we were travelling on the road from Peking, and one day when we had been taking tea at an inn, in company with some Chinese citizens, we tried to get up a little political discussion. We spoke of the recent death of the Emperor, an
