But one thinks as one sees, far away in one corner of that deep, dense, disordered flaming mass, one small, straight line of smoke going up to the heavens, that that is the fitting sacrifice to the hand of Destiny henceforth to guide this downtrodden people into happier channels. That, however, will come with the years; now the fire is with us. In our own way, we who watched the war had talked about the burning of the city. After all, it is nothing much to burn a city of five hundred thousand souls to the ground. In China one walled city is hardly to be reckoned; and what, pray you, is it for five hundred thousand human beings among four hundred and thirty millions to be without home or shelter? When China burns, when she kills, when she does anything that people who call themselves civilised shrink from dreaming of, she shows the world that she is the past mistress in all things that we call savage. It is, to us, an act of cruellest {84} savagery. To us it is a sin against God and man wilfully to burn a city to the ground, wantonly to destroy hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of accumulated wealth; to us it is all a crime unthinkable. To China it is a good thing that by such acts of so-called savagery, of realest barbarism, of grossest, inhuman tactics the people, the common people, the hewers of national wood and the drawers of national water, are taught to know that they must keep their place, that the hand of the Government is strong, that the place in which Heaven has placed them must honourably be filled, and that towards Revolution they should have no leanings. To China the sweeping into eternity of thousands of fellow-mortals is for the benefit of those who remain, and the destruction of property in their national hysteria matters not a moment of passing thought. So to those of us who know China, and who cannot believe that all that we see and hear is true of the bewildering reform that is alleged to have caught the country and its people into its arms, it was not a great surprise to see the Imperialists carrying out their threat to burn the city to ashes. And it is fortunate that scores of thousands of people, who knew the national spirit and who expected the horrors of former rebellions to be repeated, packed up what little belongings they could and cleared out of gunshot by either land or water.