any transaction is, if the want of equity be sufficiently proven, to the full as effective, if not more so, than a similar exposure of an Englishman in a newspaper. Bullies seem to be kept in check by the force of public opinion, and the Chinese neither fight duels, nor, though murders occur as in England, can they be said to assassinate or poison. Finally, we may round off this _précis_ of Chinese character in the words of Mr Lay:—“It is an abuse of terms to say that they are a highly moral people, but we may affirm that the moral sense is in many particulars highly refined among them. Respect to parents and elders, obedience to law, chastity, kindness, economy, prudence, and self-possession, are the never-failing themes for remark and illustration.” No people in the world consume so little butcher-meat as the Chinese; and, unlike the Eastern nations—such as the Jews, Hindoos, Parsees, and Mohammedans generally—their favourite meat is pork. In fact in China, as in other parts of the world, the cottar-system of land-holding is found unfavourable to the rearing of horses, cattle, or sheep, but quite adapted (as witness Ireland) for the rearing of pigs. The national system of agriculture, like almost everything else in China, is based upon the strictly utilitarian principle of turning everything to the greatest account. We do not pretend to settle off-hand here how far the stimulating diet of animal food is necessary or advantageous to mankind. We would simply remark that butcher-meat is matter in a more highly organised form, and more nearly assimilated in composition to our own frames than vegetable food. It is in diet what alcohol is in drink; and the nations who most indulge in it—such as the British, the Anglo-Americans, and savages who live by the chase, (we beg pardon for the unflattering conjunction!)—are generally as remarkable for gloomy strength and perseverance, as the more vegetarian nations are for cheerful quickness and volatility. But the preference which from time immemorial has been accorded to grain-crops in China is based upon the principle (of which our free-trade authorities are too forgetful in their admonitions to “plough less and graze more”), that grain is the cheapest form in which food can be produced, and that a much more numerous population can be maintained in comfort by tillage than by pasturage. Sheep have been justly styled “the devourers of men;” and the Chinese monarch who first turned the people from pastoral life, and taught them the civilising science of agriculture, is still, after the lapse of more than four thousand years, venerated throughout the empire by the title of “the divine Husbandman.” Fish, which abound in the numerous lakes with which the country is studded, and rice and other kinds of vegetable produce, form the staple of the national diet. From stern necessity, as well as from a wise and unparalleled economy, everything is turned to full account, and even hair-cuttings and parings