a fifth afterwards ran ashore and was
blown up. Two of the Japanese ships were badly damaged, but none were
lost, while the total loss in killed and wounded was two hundred and
eighteen, nearly half of them on the flag-ship. The Chinese lost far
more heavily, from the sinking of a number of their ships.

Thus ended the typical battle of modern naval warfare, one whose result
was mainly due to the greater speed and rapid evolutions of the Japanese
ships and the skill with which they concentrated a crushing fire on the
weak points of the enemy's line. The work of the quick-firing guns was
the most striking feature of the battle, while the absence of
torpedo-boats prevented that essential element of a modern fleet from
being brought into play. An important lesson learned was that too much
wood-work in an iron-clad vessel is a dangerous feature, and naval
architects have since done their best to avoid this weak point in the
construction of ships-of-war. But the most remarkable characteristic of
the affair is that the battle was fought by two nations which, had the
war broken out forty years before, would have done their naval fighting
with fleets of junks.

It may be said in conclusion that the Chinese fleet was annihilated in
the later attack on the port of Wei-hai-wei, many of the vessels being
destroyed by torpedo-boats, and the remainder, unable to escape from the
harbor, being forced to surrender to the Japanese. Thus ended in utter
disaster to China the naval war.

[Illustration: THE PEKIN GATE.]

_PROGRESS IN JAPAN AND CHINA._

We have in the preceding tales brought down from a remote period the
history of the two oldest nations now existing on the face of the earth.
There are peoples as old, but none others which have kept intact their
national organization and form of government for thousands of years.
Invasion, conquest, rebellion, revolution, have kept the rest of the
world in a busy stir and caused frequent changes in nations and
governments. But Japan and China lay aside from the broad current of
invasion, removed from the general seat of war, and no internal
convulsion or local invasion had been strong enough to change their
political systems or modes of life. And thus these two isolated empires
of the East drifted down intact through the ages to the middle of the
nineteenth century, when their millennial sleep was rudely broken and
their policy of isolation overthrown.

This was due, as has be