Photo from Rev. B. St. John 
PLACE WHERE THE PEKING~TIENTSIN RAILWAY GOES THROUGH THE OUTER WALL 
OF THE HATA GATE: PEKING, NORTH CHINA 
China as Chinese when he exclaimed: 
“China is not a power; China is an old 
ash-barrel, held together by the powers, 
and with a hen inside—goose if you 
will—sitting on golden eggs.” As _ be- 
tween the Chinese ash-barrel and the 
Manchu goose, there is some choice and 
it is not disadvantageous to the Manchus. 
China has had her reformers~always. 
Kuang-hsi was the latest of them. The 
ruins and solitudes of the palace seem 
more in keeping with his life than the 
grandeur of the surroundings of the au- 
gust aunt, his Empress Dowager. China’s 
emperors have been the first reformers 
in connection with modern civilization, 
and at last the problem of civilization or 
reform for China has come back to them; 
and, owing to the great prosperity and 
increased power of ‘the Chinese and the 
parsimonious, inhospitable, and corrupt 
treatment meted out by them to the 
throne, China has struck the Manchu 
dynasty at its unlucky hour, when weak- 
est, when at the lowest ebb of its imperial 
vitality, relative race strength, wealth, 
and influence. The Manchu dynasty and 
the Manchu race has been in a position 
of being slowly strangled by the Chinese 
giant. 
CHINA IS A VAST DEMOCRACY 
China is a vast democracy under nomi- 
nal control or surveillance of a liberal 
despotism in the form of the Manchu 
imperial house, its liberality representing 
the wisdom of the Manchus in acquiesc- 
ing in the self-governing disposition of 
the Chinese, and the despotism repre- 
senting the ferocity that ages of civiliza- 
tion have not educated from the Asians 
in the Chinese Empire, the nearly total 
weight of whom is Chinese. 
Seeing the coming of great changes 
through | foreign ideas, the Manchus, in 
1907, granted to the people provincial 
