China is making a real effort to get abreast of the times. But never was a nation brought more directly before the judgment-bar on the plain test of character. Upon the capacity of the race for private sacrifice and public honesty rests primarily her salvation. Whether China can or cannot rise to the task depends upon her own manhood, and no one can be prophet of the issue; for all estimate of Chinese character is perplexed by that curious Eastern subtlety of contradictions which baffle understanding. The inability of the Chinese to keep fingers out of the public till is proverbial; yet the very high standard of business integrity is universally conceded. [Illustration: SUMMER PALACE OF THE EMPEROR] The quality of Chinese honesty is attributed by some to the local idea of good form, and the obvious mercantile maxim that future credit depends upon present performance. Bourse operators may be scrupulously exact as to obligations which the mere lifting of a finger imposes, while engaged in campaigns diverting to their private speculations the funds of a chain of banks, or looting the values from the minority owners of a street-railway. Chinese business integrity is said to be due to the fact that her merchants are of the upper class; cowardice in war, to the fact that her soldiers are of the lowest caste. In Japan the condition is exactly reversed: hence the prowess of her Samurai, and the peccability of her clerks--such that Japanese bankers employ Chinamen to handle their money. Since the Japanese have built up an effective public administration, it is fair to give the Chinese the benefit of faith, and to assume that in time they too will rally to the task, and make a modern state. With this should come the Trans-Mongolia Railway: opening to the plainsmen of Central Asia a prospect of civilization and advance. Equally or more important, looking at things broadly, it would give to the world the best of the great Asian trade-routes. Examine a globe and see what, in the shortening of distance, this land-route to Peking signifies. Note the enormous circumnavigations that must be made in going around by India and Suez, and measure then the direct overland route by the Urga Post-Road and the Trans-Siberian Railway. The bulky freight from the Asian Coast to western Europe will still pay tribute to the sea. To compete with vessel-transportation, which carries a ton from Shanghai to London for seven dollars, the railroads over the 7283 miles from Vladivostok to Paris would have to make a rail-rate of one tenth of a cent per ton-mile; this is impossible when one remembers the average American rate of eight tenths of a cent. But North China, all North Asia, and Europe west of Moscow, are within the railway radius of an Urga-Peking line.