of Hué, too weak to resist, again and again memorialized the Chinese government, and each time a strong protest was made by China, who naturally objected to a foreign power holding the trade-keys of some of her richest provinces. These remonstrances have been ignored, and the frank statement of Dr. Hammand, the French civil commissioner in Tonquin, is not calculated to commend Christian ethics to the Buddhists of Southern Asia. "When a European nation," he affirms, "comes in contact with a barbarous people, and has begun to spread around its civilizing influences, there comes a time when it becomes ipso facto a necessity to extend its boundaries. There is no country more favorable to our development than the kingdom of Anam. The Anamese recognize that we are incontestably their superiors. It is necessary to force Anam to accept our rule." This has been done.
An able writer in the London Quarterly (October, 1883) says: "The railroad route from Maul-*mein across the Chino-Shan frontier being assured, an upland cross-road of some seventy or eighty miles north-east would lead to Yuan-Kiang on the main stream of the Songkoi, whence a road would lie open to the capital, Yunnan-fu, or south to the mart of Manhao, which is the head wharf of the Songkoi River navigation within the province of Yunnan, and thence to the Gulf of Tonquin. . . . Siam, the Laos prov-
