e had won a great battle on land or sea. His victory
was not unlike that of those British orators who made a reputation
out of the impeachment of Lord Clive or Warren Hastings, save that
with him a trenchant pen took the place of an eloquent tongue. I
knew Chunghau both before and after his disgrace. In 1859, when
an American embassy for the first time entered the gates of Peking,
it was Chunghau who was appointed to escort the minister to the
capital and back again to the seacoast--a pretty long journey in
those days when there was neither steamboat nor railway. During
that time, acting as interpreter, I had occasion to see him every
day, and I felt strongly attracted by his generous and gentlemanly
bearing. The poor fellow came out of prison stripped of all his
honours, and with his prospects blighted forever. In a few months
he died of sheer chagrin.

The war with Japan in 1894-1895 found Chang established in the
viceroyalty of Hukwang, two provinces in Central China, with a
prosperous population of over fifty millions, on a great highway
of internal
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traffic rivalling the Mississippi, and with Hankow, the hub of
the Empire, for its commercial centre. When he saw the Chinese
forces scattered like chaff by the battalions of those despised
islanders he was not slow to grasp the explanation. Kang Yuwei, a
Canton man, also grasped it, and urged on the Emperor the necessity
for reform with such vigour as to prompt him to issue a meteoric
shower of reformatory edicts, filling one party with hope and the
other with dismay.

Chang had held office at Canton; and his keen intellect had taken
in the changed relations of West and East. He perceived that a
new sort of sunshine shed its beams on the Western world. He did
not fully apprehend the spiritual elements of our civilisation;
but he saw that it was clothed with a power unknown to the sages
of his country, the forces of nature being brought into subjection
through science and popular education. He felt that China must
conform to the new order of things, or perish--even if that new
order was in contradiction to her ancient traditions as much as
the change of sunrise to the west. He saw and felt that knowledge
is power, a maxim laid down by Confucius before the days of Bacon;
and he set about inculcating his new ideas by issuing a series
of lectures for the instruction of his subordinates. Collected
into a volume under the title of "Exhortations to Learn,"[*] t