been duped into consigning his father to prison, was fine acting. He tore his hair, and swore hideously. The old man was taken off to the Fleet, and Shadrach, by way of completing the farce, went to the brother-in-law, and vituperated him furiously for writing the very note Shadrach had forged, and for thus betraying the poor old man. Then he came to me for his money, and got it, and I had got old Abrahams for three hundred and sixty pounds. Then for a month, I had pretended friends of Abrahams coming to me every day to beg me to let him out on easier terms than my claim. He was very old, he was very poor, they could raise a little-a very little-would I kill the poor old man by confining him in a dungeon, and so on. I had one answer for them all He dies in gaol, or I'm paid in full. Where's the three thousand pounds you swore to? So first they offered me twenty pounds, and then fifty, and then a hundred, and so forth, but I would not take off one farthing, and at last, when the old fellow had been in gaol for a month, and they saw I was determined, a most respectable tailor called on me, and paid me every shilling."

Mr. Kether speedily took leave, promising immediate attention to Paul's affairs, and Bernard followed him, after advising Paul to keep up his spirits, as he was now likely to set himself right with the world, and to go on pleasantly for the future. And he sent him in a number of books of a class suited to Mr. Chequerbent's literary taste, which was not severe. And even when Paul heard himself locked into his bed-room, for fear he should make any nocturnal effort to depart from the custody into which he had fallen, he only laughed, and if his studies had led him among the older poets, he would probably have quoted the line which gives a title to our chapter, but as it was, he contented himself with apprizing the person outside, that he was to mind and let him out if the house caught fire. And then he went to sleep and dreamed of Angela Livingstone.

245

LUTHER IN CHINA.

ONE might dogmatize, and say a great many fine and sweeping things about Asia, if, unfortunately, China did not make a part One could say of it, that it knew nothing but despotism, and never could invent anything but despotism, because it could never give security to property, or, indeed, never could discover or admit any kind of property save land, and the precious metals or jewels. Wealth therefore was impossible, except by enslaving, and being possessed of the labour of men. Whereas the true, fructifying, and interminable wealth, is that which employs man, without enslaving him, and advancing the artizan his yearly provend, without taking his freedom as a guarantee. This last social feat has never been performed by any Asiatics, at least to any extent or universality, save by the Chinese.

There is scarcely a valuable principle such as we consider exclusively European, which the Chinese have not invented before any Europeans thought of it. They discovered movable letters to print with, they discovered gunpowder, the compass, decimal arithmetic. They subjected the military to civil authority, and whilst admitting wealth to descend from father to son, they ordained that power and authority should not so descend, with the grand exception of the royal or imperial family. Revelation was not vouchsafed to them. But, independent of such a boon, Confucius made the best attempt, that ever was made by man, to erect a national and rational religion. It was their singular fate, however, to invent these things, and go with them, as it were, a first stage. But more than this they could not go. They could push none to its most active use and perfection. All great ideas budded with them, even anterior to the time they did with us, but they did not grow above a certain stature. They remained dwarf.

The boldest original thing that the Chinese have achieved, and which, as a national law, they founded so strongly, that even their Tartar conquerors could not subvert it, was the rule that all places, and authority, and public emolument, should be given to those who answered best at a public examination, without any regard to birth, power, or propinquity. This is a principle which the English Parliament has just thought fit to apply or to try in the year 1853, and, singular to say, it is with regard to the East that England has resolved to try it. A certain proportion of places in India is to be given to the best answerers at a public examination. Every one has still in his ears or in his mind the clever attack upon this principle by Lord Ellenborough, in the debate on the India Bill, with the eloquent answer given to that attack by Mr. Macaulay in the Commons.

The Chinese have been practising this law for a great many centuries, with many marvellous and marked results. One of

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these results, is the uniting of the vast empire, which by no other instrumentality is so powerfully held together. No man of any talent or authority remains in his own town or village. If he obtains office, he may be sent to the Great Wall, or to the sea of Canton-possibly to both of these extremities of the empire in succession. There are, consequently, no authorities or magnates, with local authority or hereditary, or even propertied influence. The great become so in the first instance by their talents, and, secondly, by their holding a place in a vast national hierarchy, which, like a huge network, binds the immense empire together.

The great secret of the Tartar or Mantchoo subjugation of the Chinese, or, rather, the secret of the latter's submitting to it, not only at first, but during such a lapse of time, is no doubt that the Tartar princes adopted Chinese laws and habits of administration and of advancement to office. They compelled the Chinese to alter their costume, and shave all of their head, save the only lock, which is the cherished symbol of Turk and Tartar. But they did not extend their tyranny to more serious things. Thus the Tartars introduced their own religion, that of Buddhism, with the Llama of Thibet for its chief. But they did not force their religion down the throats of the people, although they favoured in some measure the priests and establishments of Buddhism. The Mantchoos, indeed, monopolized to themselves chiefly that profession, which the Chinese themselves despised, the military. And they had the good sense, at the same time that they did this, to leave in force the old Chinese regulation and law, which renders a military functionary always subordinate to a civil one. Such tolerance and obsequiousness as this, shown by the victors to the vanquished, have enabled the latter to maintain their ascendancy for two hundred years, that is, from the year 1644 to our time.

We were wrong in saying that the Tartars or Mantchoos introduced Buddhism into China. This was, in truth, the work of Koubla Khan, the Great Mogul, who, about the year 1300, adjoined China to the empire which he had raised in Central Asia. He was called in by the Chinese against the eastern Tartars, whom he completely succeeded in subduing, but whose remains grew silently into the Mantchoos, under which name they, at a later period, recovered their supremacy. The Moguls did not retain this ascendancy above sixty years. The Chinese Emperors of the Ming dynasty, and of a purely native race, drove out the Moguls, and reigned for nearly three centuries.

It is very remarkable that the revolution which rendered the Mantchoos masters of the Chinese and their empire, was, like the one at present in operation, not so much the result of a great battle, or of a campaign, as a gradually winning over of the inhabitants. This the Mantchoos began by taking possession of the provinces of Honan, from whence they extended their power, year after year, killing all the Chinese Mandarins that fell into their power, but sparing the common people, and even exempting them from tribute. So that, in fact, it was a replacing of one

government, and one set of functionaries by another, whilst the people who gained by the change, looked on and did not interfere. It is very singular to find this great revolution, or conquest, as it is falsely called, taking place in 1643 precisely in the same manner, under the same circumstances, and by the same tactics which the insurgents of 1853 employ. The last prince of the Ming dynasty, when certain of defeat, slew his only daughter, and then hanged himself.

So long-lived have been the Tartar princes, one cause of the duration of their dynasty and power, that only six sovereigns have occupied the Chinese throne from 1643 to 1850. Kanghi, the second of that dynasty, and the great hunter, reigned in 1689, and was succeeded in 1736 by Yong-Touang. He undertook to reduce the rebellious mountaineers, called the Miao-Tse, who have raised and carried to success the present insurrection. YongTouang boasted to have conquered them, but the extent of his conquest is to be doubted, from the admitted fact of his never having been able to make them consent to adopt the Tartar tail. Kien-Long, who succeeded Yong-Touang, reigned sixty years. He was the Emperor who received Lord Macartney in 1793. His son, Kia-kin, who gave himself up to gluttony and dissoluteness, was the Emperor who made the difficulty of receiving Lord Amherst. Kia-kin left the throne, in 1820, to his second son, Tao-Kouang, who had earned this preference by liberating his father from a band of insurgents, who had got possession of the palace, and who intended his dethronement. It was with TaoKouang that England had its opium quarrel. His son, Hienfoung, succeeded at nineteen years of age to the throne in 1850.

The length of time during which this Tartar dynasty has reigned almost undisturbed, is inexplicable, on the supposition of the government being a closely centralized and oppressive tyranny. The Chinese or the Tartar régime is not this. It is not like the autocracy of Russia, or the sovereignty of France, a system which makes all revenue flow to a great centre, and all authority emanate from thence. The provinces have, indeed, at the head of their administration a chief chosen by the emperor from out the higher rank of functionaries, but his government is very much under fixed rules, and with a view to local, not imperial interests. Thus it is not the custom, as in France and Russia, to transmit to the capital the provincial revenues, and to have a great finance department, which first absorbs, and then distributes revenue and expenditure. The taxes raised in a province are spent in a province, all, save a surplus which, part in money, part in kind, is sent to Pekin; it is variously estimated, but it is not enormous. It is more the emperor's civil list and court expenses, than anything resembling an imperial revenue. There is a certain Tartar force at Pekin paid no doubt out of such revenues. But the Chinese army seems no more centralized than the finances. The force at Pekin suffices for the tranquillity of the people, but when there is a need of troops in the southern or in the remote provinces, they are

raised on the spot by the viceroy or governor, and their pay and expenses levied by local taxation, as has been seen several times at Canton. With such a system, China cannot be other than extremely weak and inefficient as a military power.

The truth is, that for a long lapse of centuries, the only frontier on which China was menaced by a foreign foe, and on which it required its sole means of defence, was the frontier of Tartary. The mode, in which a great Chinese Emperor hoped to provide for this defence, without continually raising and keeping up a formidable military force, is well known and celebrated, as the Great Wall. But a great wall, inspiring a government or a dominant race with the idea that they can dispense with soldiers, with military experience, science and virtues, has proved in general a source of weakness, not of strength. And at length the Chinese, not being able to keep out the plundering Tartars, were obliged to get Tartars and Moguls to do this for them. But those intrusted with such a duty invariably become the masters of those who so trust them. And the Tartars became the imperial and the military, if not altogether the dominant race in the empire. To fulfil his duty of defending the empire, the Tartar monarch resided in the north, at Pekin, however barren the region, and however strange that the metropolis of a great empire should be situated at one of its extremities. Even to the last, the great Tartar monarchs spent their summers in Tartary, beyond the Great Wall, engaged in the great hunts, which form the fashion of their race. By these means the emperors kept themselves, and the Tartars attendant on their persons, warlike and formidable, awing at the same time as well as conciliating the pastoral tribes, which so long menaced the power, and plundered the agricultural wealth of China. Whatever the Chinese may have suffered in pride, and in power, and in supremacy, by their obedience to Tartar princes, and subjected to a capital at the most remote and barbarous point of the empire, they were repaid by the security and repose thus procured, and by their being rid of all enemies, and of all fighting necessities and disbursements. Such, even so late as the close of the last century, was the tacit agreement and arrangement between Tartars and Chinese. But since that period, immense changes. have been taking place, not on one side of China, but all around its frontiers.

First of all the Russian empire has immensely increased, and not only increased, but organized its authority. The Czar has extended his power over the most remote of the Tartar tribes, or, at least, he has extended his power over so many of them, as to fix and separate them, and prevent a renewal, unless at Russian suggestion, and under Russian auspices, of any of those great movements of the pastoral tribes, one of which, not many centuries back, subdued all Asia, not excepting India. China, although thus menaced by a more formidable conqueror at some distant time, has been released from any annual ravages, or immediate fears. The Emperor has not for a long time felt the necessity, or undergone the fatigue of a summer's expedition into