with his own weapons, or, seizing the weak point of his antagonist, he angles with him until he wearies him into acquiescence. As a rule, the Asiatic has the advantage. His patient equanimity, and heedlessness of the waste of time, are too much for the impetuous haste of the European. This characteristic of the Russian trading classes has enabled them to insinuate themselves into the confidence of the Chinese; to fraternise and identify themselves with them, and as it were make common cause with them in their daily life; while the European holds himself aloof, and only comes in contact with the Chinese when business requires it,--for all the rest, a great gulf separates them in thoughts, ideas, and the aims of life. The Russians and Chinese are equally low in their tastes; intellectual and manly recreations are equally foreign to them, while eating and drinking, play-going and gambling, are the congenial amusements of both alike. I have been told that the Russian merchants of Kiachta, when they wish to treat each other to something worthy of a highly cultivated mind, order a Chinese dinner in Maimachin, a feast that most Europeans would rather undergo the incipient stages of starvation than come within the smell of. But in this and other things the Russians pay tribute to the superior civilisation of the Chinese, all the more genuine that it is unconsciously done. That the Chinese are the more civilised of the two, I am thoroughly convinced. Their notions of civilisation certainly run in a different groove from those of Christian nations, but it is a spontaneous growth, and genuine of its kind. But the Russians, after all that they have borrowed from their western neighbours, remain barbarians at bottom; and their living in large houses, and drinking expensive wines, serve merely to exhibit, in more striking colours, the native barbarism of the stock on which these twigs of a higher order of life have been engrafted. This does not, of course, apply to the educated gentlemen of Russia, the _nous autres_, who constitute a higher caste, and who have been largely leavened with foreign blood, but only to the middle and lower ranks. There is no middle class in Russia, as we understand the term, but there is a pretty large number of merchants who have risen from the condition of serfs, many of them very rich, and who must be taken to represent the middle class, but between whom and the gentlemen in uniform there is as impassable a barrier as between a merchant in Japan and a daimio. The Chinese far outstrip the Russians as a nation of shopkeepers, and in commercial matters generally have more enlarged and liberal ideas. Much of this is due to the non-interference of Government with trade. The restrictions of shops to one locality in Russian towns has its advantages and disadvantages; but the licence fees required for admission to the guilds, and for permission to open a shop in the bazaar, are so onerous as to exclude that class