The foreign settlement is simply a polyglot cluster of nationalities, each with its "concession" or allotment of land wrung from a browbeaten empire, each with its separate municipal government ruled by its own consul-general, and the whole combined, for purposes of defense and aggression, into a loosely knit city of seven or eight thousand whites under the general direction of a dozen consulates. The British have their polo, golf, and racing grounds; the French have their wealthy church orders and their Parisian moving pictures; the Germans have their beer halls and delicatessen shops. The Japanese, the Russians, the Italians, the Austrians, all the powers, in fact, excepting the United States--which holds no land in China--contribute their lesser shares to the colour and the activity of this extraordinary place. And only a mile or two away, further up the crooked river, lies the huge, sprawling Chinese city, where nine hundred and fifty thousand blue-clad celestials--nearly a round million of them--ceaselessly watch the squabbling groups of foreigners, and by means of newspapers, travelling merchants, and the thousand and one other instruments for the spreading of gossip, tell all Northern China what they see. Tientsin, then, like Shanghai, is a potent, an electric, force in its influence on China. Whatever the Chinese are to become in their struggle towards the light of day will be in some measure due to the example set by these two cities, the only samples of Western civilization which the Chinaman can scrutinize at close range. The missionary tells him of the God of the Western peoples, and of how His Spirit regenerates humankind; the Chinaman listens stolidly, and then turns to look at the samples of regenerated peoples that fringe his Coast. What he actually sees will stick in his mind long after what he merely hears shall have passed out at the other ear. And these impressions that stick in the Chinaman's mind are precisely the highly charged forces that are revolutionizing China to-day.