but the missionary would be able to write about it, which is very rarely done--it may be granted that an opinion in some definite form is at least justifiable. My purpose was to make the subject a special study. In most of the country where these {247} tribes people, ordinary foreign travellers are not allowed to enter. Officials at the _fus_ or the _hsiens_ where escorts are supplied, refuse to allow you to start if you are foolish enough to let them know that you intend starting. But it is only by actually travelling in these areas that an accurate impression of existing conditions can be gathered. Because a man has travelled from end to end of China by the main road does not justify him in giving an opinion on the subject; quite easy it is to travel along the main roads anywhere, but here one sees comparatively little of the tribal element. Some may speak of the patriotism which has grown in China of late years, and ask if it is possible for any such menace to continue while this spirit of patriotism thrives. I admit that a peculiar patriotism has certainly sprung up among the people of China, but in the places I have in mind, in the wind-swept savage country of China Far West, patriotism is not known. Those who have been watching the trouble in Szechuen, started long before the Revolution broke out, have been able to see what sort of patriotism has existed. It is merely a common spirit of hooliganism among the common multitudes, and a spirit of alarming omnipotence among the scholars--little less, little more. This exists among the Chinese in these regions, but I speak here more particularly of the tribal races, among whom this hatred towards the Government is infinitely more bitter. These aboriginal races, or most of them, were, almost without exception, at one time in the occupation of vast kingdoms, and their first idea is that the Chinese Government has been built up by a succession of excessively wicked and unscrupulous men, great commandment breakers, a peculiarly dangerous type of mankind to which it is unfortunate to belong. They know nothing about revolutions or reforms. They have it in strong for the Chinese, and are boiling over with a spirit of revenge. It is with these people that China will have to deal during the {248} next decade. If China were to be engaged in an altercation with any other Power, this tribal danger would be formidable; if all becomes peaceful, when the Revolution shall have passed onward, the task of putting all men and things in China underfoot of the Government will not be accomplished without effort. As things stand at present, there looms before China a problem that will not find solution in being continually shelved. In conquering the tribes in her own country, China faces a danger more momentous than she knows of and greater than the Western world ever dreamed of.