these questions should be given, because the same causes, if not removed, will in all likelihood produce similar effects in the future. And what these effects have been during the last forty years, since the gates of China were forced open by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 at the conclusion of a war with Great Britain, when foreigners of all nations were for the first time free to trade and reside at five ports, we have now seen. Riots, popular violence, massacres, and pillage, in which the Roman Catholic missions and their converts have in most cases been the objects of attack and the first victims. Disturbances so serious that they have constituted a real danger to the maintenance of peace, and in 1856-60 did actually lead to a war most disastrous and humiliating to the Chinese Government. And the French cause of quarrel (not the British) was the execution in the interior of M. Chapdelaine, a French missionary bishop. With such dire consequences we cannot be surprised if the rulers of China. and the people look upon all missionaries, and those more especially of the Roman Church under French protection, with profound distrust and hatred, as the teterrima causa of all their troubles with foreign Powers and a permanent source of danger and further disasters, threatening their national independence and security. With this ever-present menace and source of anxiety preoccupying the minds of the responsible members of the Government, the Prince of Kung's parting words to me when I was leaving Peking no doubt expressed the thought which was uppermost and most constantly present in his mind: 'If only you could relieve us of missionaries and opium, all might be well!'1

For though the Prince coupled the missionary and the opium questions together, as the two we had most frequently discussed, there could be no doubt to which of these he attached the greatest importance. The missionary trouble was constant and urgent. At any moment some terrible massacre (as that of Tientsin which occurred a very few months later) might bring a question of peace or war upon them, as it had already done once. The opium was more a question of finance and social morality, on which, as an academic question, there was always much to be said by censors and literati, who were often themselves consumers of the drug. the missionary question, which still remains, now as then, without any visible hope of a satisfactory solution-unless, indeed, a change in the policy of the French Government should take place, with a corresponding modification in the proceedings of the French missionaries themselves, as we shall presently see.

Not so

The opium question, I may say here, received a solution some years later, which even then I had foreshadowed, by the action of the Chinese themselves, in the more extensive cultivation of the poppy in their own territories; and the effect is now shown by the reduced importation of foreign opium; China becoming the largest poppy-growing country in the world, probably.

II.

The outbreak of popular violence which took place at Tientsin in June 1870 was characterised by so much barbarity and atrocity that it called the attention of all the Treaty Powers forcibly to the precarious tenure of their relations with China, and the supreme importance of the missionary question. The attack was on the French settlement, separated from the British by the whole breadth of the city of Tientsin, and on opposite sides of the river. This, in fact, accounts for the fact that the destruction of buildings and the massacre of the inmates was in a great degree limited to the one Settlement. The mob, organised beforehand, with leaders exciting them to destroy and kill, had been presaged some days before by many threatening notices; and the French orphanage, cathedral, and consulate were the first destroyed.

After forcing an entrance to the orphanage, they proceeded to murder all the Sisters in charge (nine), with every kind of brutality, and to fire the premises, throwing their victims, dying or dead, into the flames; and the cathedral and consulate shared the same fate. The French consul, his chancelier and interpreter, were all killed, and several members of the French community. Three Russians—a merchant, his wife, and clerk-were mistaken for French and butchered in the streets, and their bodies stripped and thrown into the river. And, no force being sent to check them in their work of pillage and murder, they proceeded subsequently to destroy three Protestant establishments situated in the city. All this to take place in open day at a Treaty Port the nearest to Peking (not ninety miles distant, and with a large arsenal not a mile off, where many Europeans were employed), gave to the event a most sinister aspect.

Much correspondence followed; money indemnities were paid; of the superior officials, the prefect, intendant, and magistrate were sentenced to penal servitude; and thirteen of the rioters executed at the demand of the French Government. Still the question remained more urgent than ever-What could be done to prevent similar fearful outbreaks? Redress for the past was of little value if it brought no security for the future; and it was very evident this was unaccomplished.

And now, while this article is in the press, recent intelligence has been received of a wholesale massacre of missionaries and their converts in Cochin China, in which it is reported seven hundred of the latter were killed and thirty villages burned. And by the same telegram the news came of a similar outbreak at Ch'ungking, in Szchuen, a province in China, beginning with an attack on the French cathedral and residence of the Vicar Apostolic, and extending, as usual, to all other foreign establishments, and threatening death to all foreigners. The British and French consular officers, among

others, barely escaped with their lives, as fortunately did the missionaries this time.2

These last proofs of unabated hostility and unchecked violence in the populations where missionaries have a base of operations and erect buildings, whether hospitals, churches, or mission-houses, were scarcely needed to demonstrate how many elements of danger continue to exist, and the obligation of the Treaty Powers and the Chinese Government alike to devise some better means of dealing with the missionary question, and of establishing a less unsatisfactory and precarious footing for them and for all foreigners in the country.

And the first step towards this object requires more knowledge of the people and the classes who influence them, their habits of thought, their national prejudices and superstitions, and though last not least, the estimates they have formed of the motives of foreigners for coming among them, and their claims to respect or consideration, which are rated very low by all classes, literate and illiterate, as there is abundant proof.

It will, then, be found that not one, but many causes combine to move the people to hostile action towards missionaries as a class, and the French missions' (so called by them) more especially. A general distrust and dislike of foreigners, as such, the common result of differences of race and creed in all countries, is always present; but in this religion has little part. The Chinese educated class only look upon the superiority claimed for Christianity over Confucism with supreme contempt. Spiritual questions have no interest for them; and the odium theologicum has no part in their dislike or their scepticism. Buddhism, the only religion very widely accepted, though of foreign origin as much as Christianity, sits very lightly on the majority of the Chinese population.

The late Abbé Huc, one of the most talented of the missionaries 'de la Congrégation de Saint-Lazare,' after long years devoted to missionary work in Mongolia and China, bore strong testimony to this effect. He tells us in his work entitled The Chinese Empire:

The religious sentiment has vanished from the national mind, the rival doctrines have lost all authority; and their partisans, grown sceptical and impious, have fallen into the abyss of indifferentism, in which they have given each other the kiss of peace. Religious discussions have entirely ceased, and the whole Chinese nation has proclaimed this famous formula, with which everybody is satisfied— San-Kiao-y-Kiao-that is, 'The three Religions are one.' Thus, all the Chinese are at the same time partisans of Confucius, Laotze, and Buddha-or rather they are nothing at all.

2 The eccentric originality of the Protestant missionaries' in their building was telegraphed to Rome as the cause of the riot, but the real provocation and immediate object of attack was the Roman Catholic cathedral, roofed with the yellow tiles strictly reserved for Imperial use-an offence to the military students, collected in large numbers for their examination, and the populace. In Annam and Tonquin, exclusively in French hands, of course there are no Protestant missionaries to be found.

It was a saying of Dr. Arnold's, that universal tolerance was often very much akin to universal indifference'; and certainly their formula of politeness, in which they are apt to close all discussion, after a panegyric on their neighbour's religion, as the Abbé tells us, is an edifying commentary on the text, 'Religions are many, reason is one; we are all brothers'—which goes far to confirm the correctness of his conclusion.

But they do believe in tutelar deities, in the duty of ancestral worship-in these and many other things that we deem superstitions, such as the Fung Shui, in occult powers and geomantic influences, and witchcraft. And perhaps we should remember, as Sir Thomas Wade remarks, that after we ourselves had had the Bible a century and a half, we still continued to condemn witches on charges at once as horrible and ridiculous' as those laid to the charge of the Sisters of Charity and to Christians generally. And the Jews even at this day in Christian countries are murdered and pillaged by evil disposed and fanatic mobs, just as the missionaries and their converts are in China on similar charges, and with quite as little help or sympathy from the constituted authorities, civil or military. The Chinese of all classes believe in the existence of such influences, and the calamities they may bring upon individuals or communities if offence is offered them. And partly from fear of this, and partly from anger and dislike of the foreigner, the populace burn their churches, pillage their houses, and murder their occupants.

Practical statesmen will not treat these national feelings and superstitions as M. Jules Ferry was disposed to treat the opposition he encountered, as une quantité négligeable,' which later on he found was both a constant and a very formidable power, backed by a spirit of national resistance. It is not wise, and it cannot be safe, to regard this feeling of hostility to missionary proceedings on the part of the Chinese with contempt as something that may be met by force, or left to expend its violence in vain efforts to resist religious propagandism and foreign influence.

It is in no sectarian spirit, or disposition to invoke any antiGallic feeling, that attention is so pointedly called to all these tragic and fearful missionary riots, so generally directed against the missions under special French protection; but because I regard certain of the proceedings both of the missionaries and their protectors as the chief causes of disturbance. Nor is this charge of modern date, or of Protestant origin. Kang-hi was the liberal patron of Roman missionaries of all nationalities-French, German, Dutch, and Italian. They were well received, and many were employed by him in important scientific work for the State. And in his reign large and flourishing

The kidnapping of children and natives, to take out their eyes and other organs to use as medicines or for ceremonial rites and sacrifices; and also cf giving drugs to bewitch the native victims.

Christian communities grew up in various parts of the Empire. But before the end of his long reign, we are told, he ceased to regard them with the same favour. Disturbed by the disputes between the Dominicans and the Jesuits about ancestral worship, and the resistance of converts under the missionary influence, he issued an edict in 1718 limiting the freedom previously enjoyed, and restricting the number of missionaries to those only who had his special permission. And later, on the representation of his officers that the tendency of the new religion was to undermine his authority, further steps were taken. And at this time, Father Ripa tells us, the personal conduct of the missionaries had much to do with this unfavourable change. He observes, that

If our missionaries would conduct themselves with less ostentation, and accommodate their manners to persons of all ranks and conditions, the number of converts would be enormously increased. Their garments (he goes on to say) are of the richest materials, they go nowhere on foot, but always in sedans, on horseback, or in boats, and with numerous attendants following them.

We might have expected that such warnings would have averted a precisely similar mistake in like circumstances. At the present day the missionaries have hardly followed the counsel of their Master; for they have neither been wise as serpents nor harmless as doves, however devout and well-intentioned they may be. Over-zeal and bad judgment are often quite as injurious to a good cause as a lack of virtue or any other defect. And how grievous an offence it has been to the authorities and the people to see foreign teachers of a new religion assuming the insignia and distinctive marks of office and Imperial authority, the foreign Powers have had ample evidence in numerous complaints and grave remonstrances, as will presently be seen. But the extent to which this assumption has gone can hardly be realised without reading the following description from the pen of a French bishop, writing from a missionary station in the interior, far from any Treaty Port or consular authority either to control such vagaries or to protect him and his coadjutors from the consequences. The letter was published in the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, dated from the Mission of Kouy-Tchaou-Ching, and addressed to the Directors of the Society by Mgr. Faurie, the vicar apostolic at that place. After describing himself as exercising the powers of life and death, of imprisoning and setting free,' and how he moves from place to place in making a tour through his diocese, with the ceremonies in use by the mandarins, attended by a retinue that might follow a high authority, he describes his approach to a town in the following

terms:

Besides the red parasols consisting of three tiers of shades, the cavalcades and the cannonades, there was added before my palanquin an escort of three little children dressed in red and green, and carrying crowns composed of precious