comfortable village and happy families, the grey dawn beholds desolation and ashes, charred rafters and blackened corpses. It may be asked whether the Government exercises no control over these local feuds; but in those districts where they exist the mandarins rarely interfere, except by way of mediation and advice. Their power is not so great that they can afford to do more; and, besides, it is not in accordance with Chinese ideas that they should do so. Notwithstanding its nominally despotic form of government, China is really one of the most self-governing countries in the world. Each family, village, district, and province is to a very great extent expected to regulate or “harmonise” itself. In order to this end, great powers are allowed within these limits. The father, or the head of a family, can inflict most serious and even very cruel punishments on its members, without his neighbours thinking they have any right to interfere with him; and, on the other hand, he is held responsible for the misdeeds of his children, and when these have offended against public justice, and are not to be got hold of, he often suffers vicariously in their place. In like manner, villages are allowed great power in the settling of their internal affairs through their elders. Within certain wide limits the district is left to preserve its own peace, without troubling the higher authorities of the province; and if it choose to indulge in the expensive luxury of clan-fights, why that is its own loss. The mandarin of Nam-taw, the capital of the district, had told both the Ma-hum and Schan-tsun people that they were very foolish to go on fighting as they were doing, and he had ordered the latter, as the aggressors, to desist, but there his interference ended: there ought to be virtue enough in the district to put down such a state of matters, but there was not; and by late news from China it appears that the warlike inhabitants of Schan-tsun have been continuing and flourishing in their career of violence; for about a couple of months ago their “young people”—the frolicsome portion of the population—made a night-attack upon the neighbouring village of Sun-tsan, sacked every house, carried off provisions, destroyed the whole place except the temple, and killed at random men, women, and children to the number of 150, no less than 75 of the latter having been destroyed. It is, in fact, this local weakness of the Government which causes the rebellions that devastate the country. A gentleman thoroughly acquainted with the language, writing to me by last mail from the centre of China, truly remarks on this subject: “The causes of the rebellion are, so far as I can see, the overpopulation of the country, the inefficiency of the mandarins, and the indifference of the people. The Chinese enjoy an amount of freedom and self-government which, I suppose, is nowhere surpassed, if equalled; and their social system, which is the result of so many centuries’ experience of what