At this moment Japan and Great Britain are the only nations striving, and, if necessary, probably ready to fight, to keep China independent and undivided, open to the trade of all the world on equal terms, without selfish reservations on the one hand, and without trembling before party recriminations on the other. The Far Eastern Question, however, holds the stage at this moment by its third aspect. China, the eternally unoriginal, has repeated herself once more, as every student of the Far East has foreseen she would. This time the repetition is extraordinary exact, as a reviewer of the new edition of Lord Loch’s ‘Personal Narrative’ of 1860 has just pointed out. ‘It is impossible,’ he says, ‘to read it without being struck by the resemblance, down even to details, between the situation in China and that of exactly forty years ago. Then, as now, a war party led by an Imperial Prince was in the ascendant; a war was forced on European Powers by a gross breach of a solemn treaty, two Ambassadors on their way to Peking being fired on and obliged to return; the armies of those Powers had to march on the Chinese capital; the Chinese authorities in the provinces were frantic in their eagerness to negotiate so as to stop the advance of the allied army on the capital. Li, then only a provincial Governor, had his little proposals for settling everything to his own satisfaction. The Emperor had fled from the capital, and the lady who is now Empress Dowager had fled with him, and in many other respects history is just now repeating itself with curious fidelity.’[2] But forty years ago there was no occupation by eight nations, and no five great Powers endeavouring to checkmate one another’s plans. Indeed, there was then no Far Eastern Question at all. But though we have changed, China remains the same. Her rooted hatred of foreigners, her treachery, her lies, her sickening cruelty, her utter inability to reform herself, to eradicate corruption, to form an army or a navy—to be, in a word, a nation—remain precisely as they have always been. Writers with no first-hand knowledge of China have not unnaturally fallen into the error of thinking that because small-bore rifles and Krupp guns have been found in the hands of the Chinese troops, who have used them with effect in beating back for a time foreign forces, therefore China has at last laid to heart the lessons of her defeat by Japan, and has become a military Power to be reckoned.[3] It is a complete misapprehension. The Boxers fought recklessly, like the Mahdists, from a belief in their own magical invulnerability; but the regular troops hardly even attempted to withstand a foreign attack in anything like equal numbers, except from behind strong walls, and not always then. Describing the capture without a shot or a blow of several forts and magnificent guns, that had never been fired since they were bought, an eye-witness says: ‘Only the most complete demoralization,