The children of the high-class families in China are betrothed very young, often when four or five years old, and never later than fifteen. The parents get a third person to negotiate, and if a union is considered desirable between the two families (they never marry out of their own social position in China), the parents meet and more or less settle the future line of education for their offspring, and sign letters officially agreeing to the betrothal. Nothing more happens. The wife, however, sometimes sees her future son or daughter-in-law. When these children reach fifteen or twenty years of age their final marriage takes place. They never meet until the wedding-day, and the property settled on the girl by her father is her own by the law of China. After her marriage she belongs to her husband’s family, and goes to live in the house of her father-in-law. If by the time a woman is thirty she has no son to continue the traditions of the family—and family counts for everything in China—the husband is legally allowed to take unto himself a mistress. She is not well born. He chooses her from the people, and she is officially accepted by the house, allowed to sit at the table, and if she bears sons, the first belongs to the legal wife, the second to herself, and if there is only one son, both wife and mistress share him, and, strange as it may seem, they generally get on quite well. We had a long and interesting talk on the future of China. “We are going to be the greatest country in the world in the middle of this century, but now there are troubled days ahead for us,” he said. “We are far more conservative than Japan. It has taken us longer to adopt Western civilisation, but when I went back from England some years ago, after serving many years in this country, I was one of a number of young men who tried, and in some cases succeeded, in making reforms. Those were early days, but boys like my son, now at Cambridge, are being educated in Europe in 1910; and they will go back with even stronger and more modern ideas. Indeed, I can see perfectly well that in the next twenty years there will be many reforms attempted in diplomatic and other circles in China, before we settle down. Every country must broaden and widen if it is to keep pace with the march of civilisation, and China must not be behind. We have a great past, and we must make a great future.” Then he spoke with the utmost enthusiasm of the late Empress.