accusers are heard. Then he is barbarously tortured to confess the guilt he knows not. "The terrible injustice of this procedure is to be seen in that a magistrate or chief officer never visits that punishment upon any one who has Imperial influence. Yet any man who has influence with the magistrate or is in any way a creature of his, can arrest, by his own will, any person against whom he has a grievance, choose any crime he likes to name for the purpose, drag the person before the magistrate, accuse him, and ask that he be punished. Again, the accused person has no appeal, no defence. He is merely faced with the accusation, and if he denies it, is put under torture for three days. If at the end of three days the accused refuses to confess himself guilty, punishment is meted to him in severity according to the influence of the accuser, and the necessity the magistrate feels of appeasing him. The punishment {204} for every offence charged, from petty larceny upward, is almost invariably beheading. Beheading saves prison expense, and effectually silences the accused. So much aloof do the Mandarins keep from the people that many are usually ignorant of this terrible work of the officers of the Dynasty, and when told of it, refuse to believe. Some Mandarins refuse to believe, out of fear of incurring the displeasure of officers. The unhappy masses know the truth too well. The intelligent, the most enlightened, know of it. Exiles in all other parts of the world know of it. Bitter hatred of the Dynasty and of the Imperial officers prevails in every province of the Empire. There is a great democracy in the Empire, waiting and praying for the moment when their organisation can be made efficient and the Dynasty removed and replaced by a constitutional government. "Our conspiracy to seize Canton failed, yet we are filled with hope. Our greatest hope is to make the Bible and education, as we have come to know them by residence in America and Europe, the means of conveying to our unhappy fellow-countrymen what blessings may lie in the way of just laws, what relief from their sufferings may be found through civilisation. We intend to try every means in our power to seize the country and create a government without bloodshed. I think we shall, but if I am doomed to disappointment in this, then there is no engine in warfare we can invoke to our aid that we will hesitate to use. Our four hundred millions must, and shall, be released from the cruel tyranny of barbaric misrule and be brought to enjoy the blessings of control by a merciful, just government, by the arts of civilisation.