y to the revenue, will be sufficient to meet all the requirements of
the case. The results so far attained by the more limited scheme of
supervision do not appear to have been satisfactory. Herr Rump was
appointed auditor to the German section of the Tientsin-P'ukou Railway,
but Mr. Bland tells us that "the auditorship on this railway has proved
worse than useless as a preventive of official peculation." On the other
hand, the system of collecting the revenue is in the highest degree
defective. It violates flagrantly a principle which, from the days of
Adam Smith downwards, has always been regarded as the corner-stone of
any sound financial administration. "For every tael officially accounted
for by the provincial authorities," Mr. Bland says, in words which
recall to my mind the Egyptian fiscal system under the regime of Ismail
Pasha, "at least five are actually collected from the taxpayers."

It is, therefore, earnestly to be hoped that the diplomatists and
capitalists of Europe will--both in the interests of the investing
public and in those of the Chinese people--stand firm and insist on
adequate financial control as a preliminary and essential condition to
the advance of funds.

As to whether the recently established Republic is destined to last or
whether it will prove a mere ephemeral episode in the life-history of
China, there seems to be much divergence of opinion among those
authorities who are most qualified to speak on the subject. Mr. Bland's
views on this point are, however, quite clear. He thinks that
Confucianism, and all the political and social habits of thought which
are the outcome of Confucianism, have "become ingrained in every fibre
of the national life," and that they constitute the "fundamental cause
of the longevity of China's social structure and of the innate strength
of her civilisation." He refuses to believe that Young China, which is
imbued with "a doctrinaire spirit of political speculation," though it
may tinker with the superstructure, will be able seriously to shake the
foundations of this hoary edifice. He has watched the opinions and
activities in every province from the beginning of the present
revolution, and he "is compelled to the conviction that salvation from
this quarter is impossible." He thinks that although in Canton and the
Kuang Provinces, which are the most intellectually advanced portions of
China, a system of popular representation may be introduced with some
hope of