Western nations, taken as a whole, do not impress educated Chinese with a sense of the superiority of such nations to China. This feeling was admirably exemplified in the reply of His Excellency Kuo, former Chinese Minister to Great Britain, when told, in answer to a question, that in Dr. Legge's opinion the moral condition of England is higher than that of China. After pausing to take in this judgment in all its bearings, His Excellency replied, with deep feeling, "I am very much surprised." Comparisons of this sort cannot be successfully made in a superficial way, and least of all from a diplomatic point of view. They involve a minute acquaintance with the inner life of both nations, and an ability to appreciate the operations of countless causes in the gradual multiplication of effects. Into any such comparison it is far from being our purpose now to enter. It is now well recognised that the Literati of China are the chief enemies of the foreigner, who, though he may have sundry mechanical mysteries at his disposal, is held to be wholly incapable of appreciating China's moral greatness. This feeling of jealous contempt is embodied in the typical Chinese scholar, "with his head in the Sung Dynasty and his feet in the present." It is men of this class who prepared and put in circulation the flood of bitter anti-foreign literature with which in recent years central China has been inundated.
It was once thought that with Western inventions China could be taken by storm. Knives, forks, stockings, and pianos were shipped to China from England, under the impression, that this Empire was about to be "Europeanised." If there ever had been a time when the Chinese Empire was to be taken by storm in this way, that time would have been long ago, but there never was such a time. China is not a country, and the Chinese are not a people, to be taken by storm with anything whatsoever. The only way to secure the solid and permanent respect of the Chinese race for Western peo-
