But apart from the fact that this new Government might perhaps be very hostile to foreigners and difficult to bring to reason, the Manchus are not yet stripped of all power, and their overthrow would not be effected without a devastating civil war, lasting probably many years. Europe is now too much interested in China to encourage such a catastrophe. On the other hand, nobody desires the partition of the Celestial Empire. To begin with, the chief eventual rivals are not ready: Russia has not completed her Trans-Siberian Railway; England is hampered with her interminable war in South Africa; the United States, with a large portion of its population opposed to outside extension, insists that no part of the Middle Kingdom shall be closed to them—in other words, that it shall not be dismembered; Japan has not completed her armaments; her finances require careful attention, and she feels, besides, that she cannot act alone. France has every reason for averting a partition, in which her share (the provinces adjoining Tongking) would be a very poor one; and finally, the present insurrectionary movement should prove to the world—including Germany, who took so indiscreet an initiative at Kiao-chau—that it would not be easy to govern the Celestials after European methods, and that the mere task of establishing order in a large colony carved out of China might be beyond the strength even of the European Powers. This being the case, the only policy possible for all countries is to abandon for the present their personal aims, and to endeavour in unison to patch up the Manchu system. To depart from this line of action is to proceed to disaster. But the Powers will have to display some wisdom for a few years to come if this bolstering process is to have the least chance of success. The Court and the populace of the capital should be given a not-easily-forgotten lesson: let the instigators of the proposed murders of the ministers be delivered up and made to pay for their cowardly conduct; if necessary, even let their bodies be left unburied, which, in the eyes of the Chinese, is the most terrible of all punishments; let the old Empress be exiled if it should appear necessary to remove her from power. But after all this is done, let the legal order of succession be respected. While putting pressure on the Court to appoint moderate or even slightly progressive men to the head of affairs, avoid a too direct and a too evident interference in the selection of rulers, which would be perilously inadvisable. On the one hand, the Powers would soon cease to act in unison, each considering such and such a grand mandarin more or less its friend and such another its enemy; and on the other hand, the men chosen would lose all authority, as they would be looked upon as agents of the foreigners. Against this, it is absolutely indispensable that Peking and Tien-tsin should be occupied during several years by a strong garrison, otherwise