We may have done right, after all, in allowing these Taepings time to show by their acts how little they intended to fulfil their promises. In ten years they have utterly wrecked the richest portion of China. All the wonders of Chinese art and industry are levelled with the dust and destroyed. The Porcelain Pagoda—the Iron Tower—the Ming Cemetery of Nankin—the beautiful temples and valuable libraries of Golden Island, exist no longer. A district once teeming with hamlets and farms, rich in silks and teas, and all the products of the Flowery Land, is now a wilderness; and the Englishman who looked upon the wondrous scene of Asiatic civilisation and industry, as spread before him in the valley of the Yang-tsze in the year 1842, would never recognise it again in the famine-stricken desolation of to-day. Lest we should allow our indignation at such unchecked barbarism to carry us away, we will quote from two recent visitors, the one a soldier, the other a clergyman. Colonel Wolseley, in 1862, says: “Having had some little experience of the imbecility of the Imperial Government, I went to Nankin strongly prejudiced against it, and only too anxious to recognise any good which we might discover in its rival.... The Imperial Government, with all its weakness, is as far removed above that established at Nankin, as the true religion of our Saviour is above that set up by the impostor Tien-wang.” He confirms the fact that no man of worth or station in China has joined the movement; and after describing all the ruin, crime, and nastiness of the interior of the Taeping stronghold, he urges his countrymen to assist the better classes of Chinese in sweeping away the abomination, because it is the barrier to true progress in China. Mr Holmes, whose zeal for the spiritual welfare of the Chinese subsequently led to his being slain by some rebels in Shan-tung, bears the following testimony to the hopelessness of anything good from Taepingism. After visiting Nankin in the end of 1861, he says:—