order to gratify their sensual inclinations, as the poor to procure food. To call a man a liar is, in England, and in the European world generally, the surest way to provoke anger; but such an epithet has but little weight attached to it in China. This is partly owing to the fact that “white lies” have there a recognised and reputable existence not openly accorded to them elsewhere. In the eyes of a Chinese, as in the code of the Jesuits, a lie in itself is not absolutely criminal, and it may, on the contrary, be very meritorious. According to Confucius, a lie told by a child to benefit a parent is deserving of praise; and a Jeannie Deans, or the stern old father in Mr Warren’s _Now and Then_, so far from being held models of religion, would be regarded, the one as a stubborn fanatic, and the other as the most heartless and unnatural of parents. But another, and, we suspect, a much more powerful cause of this want of veracity among the Chinese, is their system of government. Here, as throughout Asia generally, Despotism—or, in other words, an Executive power from which there is no proper appeal—generates mendacity in the people, as their sole refuge from irresponsible Power. Duplicity is the resource to which Weakness naturally betakes itself; and it is universally adopted wherever the decrees of Government officials are felt to be unjust as well as unappealable. Everywhere the result is the same; and in this, as in many other respects, a perfect parallel might be drawn between those two vastest empires of modern times, the Chinese and the Russian. In the latter empire, as in the former, the vastness of the country and consequent impossibility of an efficient surveillance over the host of officials, joined to the absence of municipal institutions and a free press to act as checks upon local tyranny, render it most difficult to detect or repress abuses of power on the part of the Government officers. And the consequence in both countries may be told in the words of Alison, applied to Russia:—“So universal is the dread of authority, that it has moulded the national character. Dissimulation is universal; and, like the Greeks under the Mussulman yoke, the Russians have become perfect adepts in all the arts by which talent eludes the force of authority, and astuteness escapes the discoveries of power.” And we suspect we ought to add, in justice to the Chinese, that this disposition has been impressed upon them, as upon the Russians, by the invasion of the Tartar hordes, which in both countries reduced the native race to subjection for three long centuries.