This happy spirit of resignation explains why the Chinese, notwithstanding their poverty, are one of the most contented people in the world, and, consequently, one of the happiest; but, unfortunately, they are exposed from time to time to dreadful calamities: an inundation, an epidemic, or a bad harvest, which brings about inevitable misery and famine to the entire population, who are left without any resources because their work has not been sufficiently remunerative to enable them to put anything by for a rainy day. Not a year passes without a dreadful calamity occurring somewhere or other in the immense Celestial Empire, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, so that, notwithstanding the astonishing number of children born, the population apparently does not increase. Here, then, we have a striking application of the doctrines of Malthus; for in this society, into which no ray of progress is admitted, men multiply quicker than their means of subsistence, but natural calamities re-establish the balance by annually overwhelming a prodigious number of men, women and children. The exaggerated sense of conservatism and the improvidence of the administration are in part responsible for the occurrence of these grave calamities, which are generally accompanied by a recrudescence of that chronic piracy and brigandage which is peculiar to China, being the sole means of gaining a livelihood left to many ruined wretches. Sometimes, however, the agents of the Government, after having done nothing either to prevent a catastrophe or to mitigate its consequences, increase it in times of famine by their avidity in seizing the rice, and thus provoke a rebellion, as happened in 1898 at various parts of the Yang-tsze-Kiang. But beyond these cases, in which the authorities are manifestly guilty, the Chinese people submit with the utmost resignation to calamities which they foresee and consider as merely natural, and which, when they happen, barely ruffle their habitual placidity. Death to such a people cannot have the same terrors it has for us.