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two sides to the picture. I have laid myself open, I fear, to the charge of quoting somewhat freely from Imperial decrees; but a tone of thought which is altogether peculiar can be best exhibited, at times, in the thinker's words. Remembering how directly the Empress can speak when she wishes, let the reader place himself in the position of a Governor, and try to draw from the following edict a conclusion as to the category in which the Society that is disturbing Shantung should be enrolled.

Recently cases of robbery and violence have been becoming daily more frequent in various provinces, and missionary cases are of frequent occurrence. These are all regarded as the work of seditious societies, and it is demanded that they be severely punished. But there is a distinction in these societies. Those reckless fellows who' band together and create riots are without excuse under our law. But if submissive and loyal subjects learn gymnastic drill for the protection of their families, or unite the villages in their districts for mutual protection, their object is merely mutual assistance, and quite right. But the local authorities sometimes make no distinction, and, mistakenly listening to groundless rumors, treat them all as seditious subjects, and recklessly put them to death, so that there is no distinction drawn between the good and the bad, and the people become excited with fear. This is like trying to stop a pot boiling by adding more fuel; or making a pool to drive out fish. It is not that the people are not quiet, but that the officials' action is to blame. The government of Our Dynasty is known to be kind and generous, and has cherished the people more than two hundred years. The food of the people and the ground on which they tread are the gifts of Heaven. How can they be ready to turn rebels and court punishment? It depends entirely on the Viceroys and Governors to engage worthy officials to govern the country rightly, and to secure the people rest.

When they have law cases between the Christians and the people, they should settle them justly and without any partiality. If at ordinary times they have the people's confidence, when unusual circumstances occur they will naturally have the confidence of the public, and turn great matters into small and deeds into no deeds. The strength of the country depends upon this, and the amicable relations of all rest on this. The Viceroys' and Governors' instructions to the local officials should be precise, that in all cases of this kind they should only inquire whether the men are rebels or not, and whether they have created riots or not; and not consider whether they belong to a society or religious sect. The people also ought to have no thought beyond the protection of their villages, and not to commence hostilities and create a disturbance, or be agitated by rumors. They should not presume on their influence to oppress their neigh'bors. We trust the different districts will become quiet and relieve our anxiety.

A later edict declared, certainly in less ambiguous terms, the illegality of organizations which conduct themselves as The Boxers have done, and authorized the Governors of Shantung and Pechili to "issue a plain proclamation and give clear notice of prohibition," in order that they may "cease their habits and become law-abiding and loyal."

If they persist in their foolish ways without reform they ought to be strictly punished, and no leniency should be shown them. In regard to the divisions between the converts and common people, all are alike Our subjects, and when there are law disputes the local authorities should adjust them carefully, and irrespective of class or religion, seeking only to discover who is really in the wrong, and showing no partiality, in order that the people may realize the fatherly sympathy of the Throne.

But either the words have failed to carry conviction, or the movement has gained too much headway to be easily stopped; for it is spreading, evidently, in Pechili, and we hear of outrage and massacre within fifty miles of Peking.

If the North has its own form of unrest, it is peculiar only in that respect. The Yangtze Valley is seething with discontent, born partly of Imperial exactions and partly of loyalty to Kwang Su and antagonism to the Empress's régime. The Kwang provinces, always turbulent, are a prey to brigandage ashore and piracy afloat. The dangers indicated last year appear to have grown greater, therefore, rather than less. The anti-foreign attitude, which the Empress and her advisers are adopting, may encourage an outbreak of anti-foreign feeling that would occasion intervention; or their domestic policy may excite disaffection leading to insurrection on an extensive scale. The only road of escape from the twofold danger seems to lie in reverting to a policy of reform; whereas the only thought of the clique which has usurped power, at Peking, seems to be to accumulate soldiers to protect itself against the consequences of the dissatisfaction it inspires. One consideration might induce the Empress to desert the Reactionary cause and throw her influence into the opposite scale. It has been suggested that she is being carried farther than she intended, having had no conception of the forces that are at work. The last thing she desires is to endanger the dynasty. If it could The Fortnightly Review.

be brought home to her that the present Reactionary policy constitutes a danger for the dynasty and the Empire, she might be induced, yet, to change her course and support the Emperor in a policy of Reform. Her halt on the threshold of what was intended, clearly, to be a fresh coup d'état, two months ago, goes to prove that she is not impervious to manifestations of popular sentiment; but many well qualified to form an opinion are persuaded that she is kept in ignorance of the real import and magnitude of the crisis by which the Empire is assailed. She is impressed, for the moment, by the volume of remonstrance her project has evoked; although she wreaks, womanlike, her spite on those whom she singles out as opposing her will. The present advice of the Emperor's friends at Peking to their partizans in the Provinces is said to be not to press her too hard, but to let her escape, if she will, by the loophole which the protests have left her in laying the blame on her advisers. The primary object is to save Kwang Su. The great fear of the Reform party is that he may be made away with. So long as he is alive they are contending for their rightful sovereign; but his death would undermine that standpoint of objection to the Empress's régime. To oppose her if she were ruling legally as Regent for a new Emperor would be to rebel; and rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft; the Chinese have it in superstitious dread.

R. S. Gundry.

ON THE MERITS AND DEMERITS OF THRIFT.

There are plentiful maxims in reference to this subject scattered broadcast through the pages of the moralists, and dwelt upon constantly in the greatest book of all. In every form of precept, allegory and illustration we have all learnt, we have all been taught that it is wicked to be rich. I am not quite sure whether we all believe it, judging by the unflinching determination with which the attainment of that supreme wickedness is set before us as a potent factor in choosing a career, a given line of conduct. While with one tongue, so to speak, we tell our youths it is wicked to be rich, with another we dissuade them with all our might from the callings, the marriage, which might prevent them from being So. On one day in the seven we listen to the solemn words which assure us that the wealthy will eventually be visited by so horrible a fate that, if there were any listening who actually and literally believed it, it is inconceivable that they should ever keep a spare sixpence in their pockets again. And yet, miracle of miracles! the very people who, on the first day of the week, appear to acquiesce in the idea that the rich man shall be eternally damned, can forget during the rest of it their conception of what those tremendous words may mean, and go on gaily qualifying themselves during five and a-half sevenths of their lives (I am assuming the Saturday half-holiday) to be forever lost. It is an unnecessary complication of the difficult problems of existence, to have to solve them alternately by two diametrically opposite codes. It is as though on one day in the week we committed to memory tables of arithmetic that inculcated that twice two are three, and three times two are seven; and then, having those

maxims absolutely by rote, we had, when it came to practical working, to admit that twice two come to four and three times two to six, in order to square them with the practical duties of life. Solomon says "A good name is better than riches;" and he almost invariably assumes, influenced, perhaps, by his nationality, that only one of these two alternatives can be adopted. I am no economist; I do not propose to discuss here why it appears to be inevitable that, as society is at present constituted, there should be inequalities in possession, and accumulations in individual hands. Let us simply recognize that such accumula. tions do take place, and admit that they are not generally, strange though it may seem after recalling the maxims we have been considering, in the hands of the criminal classes. There may be, and no doubt there are, many among the wealthy who use their means in a way unworthy of commendation, but, on the whole, I should imagine that a large proportion of them, whether they have inherited their riches or assembled them themselves, would-in accordance with the aforesaid weekday moralists, that is not deserve to be lost at all, but quite the contrary.

What, after all, does money mean? merely golden sovereigns? do we, if we have it, sit all the time in our cellar running our skinny hands through the glittering pile? No, that is not what money means. It does not, to be sure, mean, either, the biggest things in life, for only inward grace can give those; but it can supplement the biggest, in that it may give us the means of using them to the best advantage. Money cannot give the gift of making the friends worth having, or of deserving those friends; but it means

greater and more agreeable possibilities of frequenting them. It cannot give the power of understanding books; but to those who can understand, it gives the power of buying books to read, without stint. It cannot give the heaven-sent rapture in pictorial or musical art, but it gives the possibility of enjoying it more often. It cannot give us good and gifted children, but it may help us to train them to advantage. The best is not to be bought with money, but the setting of the best is. For this reason is the possession of it a crucial test, especially when newly acquired; and for those who have no gentle tastes to gratify a dazzling light suddenly shed on their barren existence, revealing with unsparing conspicuousness the vulgar channels in which alone it occurs to them that wealth should run. It is, no doubt, good that wealth should be spent and not hoarded; the purpose of any currency is that it should ultimately be exchanged for something that it will buy. That the something should be worth having is, of course, essential. But what people spend their money on generally does, at the moment, appear to themselves to be worth buying. It is other people who feel it is not. What money brings us should add to the adornment, the beauty, the seemliness of life, whether we buy with it things or ideas. That is the thing to grasp. Let us recognize as sanely and wisely as we can that the defects incidental to the possession of wealth need not be inevitable, if we are on our guard against them. The limitations of taste and character which, as we have already said, wealth so unsparingly gives us an opportunity of displaying, are not caused by it, any more than a limelight shed on to an unprepossessing object creates the ugliness it reveals. Let us not fear to say that in itself it is not wicked to be rich, any more than it is estimable to be poor; but let us

keep unsparingly before our eyes the deterioration of character that may be brought about by either the lack or the excess of means, and be on our watch against it. This is an insidious and a great danger. For there are two qualities which most of us agree are fine and good, and to be desired, that are liable to be modified and distorted by the variations in our means. One is the large-hearted impulse to part with what we have, not for our own good only, but for that of the community or of individuals; the other is the spirit of a sober self-denial opposed to selfindulgence. This, the spirit of temperance; that, the spirit of magnificence. But we cannot, in the perfunctory teaching of morals, which is all we have time for in these days, make it clear to ourselves and to others how important it is that these finer impulses should not be at the mercy of our varying conditions. We are apt, in the hurry of material life, to lose sight of this main point at issue; to confuse enforced, distasteful acts of economy with a noble impulse of sober simplicity; we are misled into attributing the constant and cruel necessity, forced on the great majority of mankind, of spending and of buying less than they would like to spend or to buy, to a fine spirit of self-denial, and we gradually grow into considering the mere act of saving as a virtue in itself. But it is not there that virtue lies.

There are certain qualities necessary to a complicated social organizationThrift is one of them-which, encouraged at first entirely on grounds of expediency, become through the ages so indispensable to the state of society which calls them forth, that they are erected into virtues necessary to the ideal character, and taught to one generation after another, indelibly impressed on them. And that quite indiscriminately; for we are obliged to embody our teaching of morals in a

series of rough-and-ready uncompromising maxims, that we impart to all alike, whatever the circumstances of the learner. There is no leisure, in the evil days we have fallen upon, to expound with care to reverent disciples how infinitely varying are the canons and obligations of what we may call the lesser virtues-to point out and to distinguish, in a dignified, exhaustive and philosophical fashion. The result is that we attempt to guide the whole of our kind by precepts fitted for one portion of them and absolutely unfitted for another. The terse and pithy maxims in which the experience of generations finds its final form, although they may serve crudely enough as a working basis of conduct, are unavoidably apt to lead us astray by not presenting alternatives. It is obvious that there must be a want of half-tones, so to speak, about such definite utterances; for if a proverb were to attempt to qualify its own authority by pointing out the cases in which it may be modified, it would cease to be so portable a piece of wisdom, and would more resemble a speech or a sermon. We are, therefore, driven into the constant and, immense mistake of inflicting the same ordinances on every one alike. And in the particular subject we are discussing, we commit the absurdity of laying down for rich and for poor the same rule; and instead of admitting that there is a certain line of conduct, not wicked, but only highly inexpedient and unadvisable for those who are poor, and entirely allowable in those who are the reverse, we lay down the same precept for all indiscriminately, and call it a virtue. Since, therefore, there are more people, unfortunately, in the world with little money than with much, since there are more who are under the obligation to provide for their necessaries only, and not for the superfluities, we must needs-so we are told-adopt the

maxim which should govern the majority; and the minority must hobble through existence cramped by the ordinances made to fit the narrowly circumstanced, until the minds of the easy become inevitably crippled and narrowed, too. "A penny saved is a penny gained"-"Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves"-"Turn a penny in your pocket before you take it out"-such are some of the stultifying maxims we learn and repeat until, upon my soul, they can never quite be unlearnt again. "Penny wise and pound foolish,"-one of the few utterances on the other side of the question-sometimes arises to stagger and confuse us by confronting us with an admonition entirely opposite to those we have the acquired habit of obeying.

I recall a saying I used to hear in my youth-we were expected to allow it reverently to sink into our minds until it became part of our code of morals "When you are going to buy a thing, think first if you want it, and secondly, if you can do without it." Do without it? Why, all the beautiful and most of the agreeable things of life can be "done without" in the sense that we do not die of renouncing them-we only become stupidly resigned and limited human beings if we carry that principle to its extreme limit and never get anything we can do without. Here, again. we encounter the absurdity of trying to make such a proposition of universal application, with the monstrous result that, framed for those who could only afford to buy the necessaries of life, it has been adopted by many others who could have afforded very much more, and who actually think they are being praiseworthy in keeping their lives as barren and unadorned as possible. There are characters with regard to whom such a system as this combines the evil influences of both poverty and riches, and

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