Viceroy Chang has been derided, not quite justly, as possessing a superabundance of initiative along with a rather scant measure of finality, taking up and throwing down his new schemes as a child does its playthings. In these enterprises the paucity of results was due to the shortcomings of the agents to whom he entrusted their management. The same reproach and the same apology might be made for the Empress Dowager who, like the Roman Sybil, committed her progressive decrees to the mercy of the winds without seeming to care what became of them. Next after the education of his people the development of their material resources has been with Chang a leading object. To this end he has opened cotton-mills, silk-filatures, glass-works and iron-works, all on an extensive scale, with foreign machinery and foreign experts. For miles outside of the gates of Wuchang the banks of the river are lined with these vast establishments. Do they not announce more clearly than the batteries which command the waterway the coming of a new China? Some of them he has kept going at an annual loss. The cotton-mill, for example, was standing idle when I arrived, because in the hands of his mandarins he could not make it pay expenses. A Canton merchant leased it on easy terms, and made it [Page 232] such a conspicuous success that he is now growing rich. It is an axiom in China that no manufacturing or mercantile enterprise can be profitably conducted by a deputation of mandarins. Chang is rapidly changing the aspect of his capital by erecting in all parts of it handsome school-buildings in foreign style, literally proclaiming from the house-tops his gospel of education. The youth in these schools are mostly clad in foreign dress; his street police and the soldiers in his barracks are all in foreign uniform; and many of the latter have cut off their cues as a sign of breaking with the old régime. In talking with their officers I applauded the prudence of the measure as making them less liable to be captured while running away. Chang's soldiers are taught to march to the cadence of his own war-songs--which, though lacking the fire of Tyrtæus or Körner, are not ill-suited to arouse patriotic sentiment. Take these lines as a sample: "Foreigners laugh at our impotence, And talk of dividing our country like a watermelon, But are we not 400 million strong? If we of the Yellow Race only stand together, What foreign power will dare to molest us? Just look at India, great in extent But sunk in hopeless bondage. Look, too, at the Jews, famous in ancient times, Now scattered on the face of the earth. Then look at Japan with her three small islands, Think how she got the better of this great nation, And won the admiration of the world. What I admire in the Japanese Is not their skill in using ship or gun But their single-hearted love of country."