rovinces makes it his seat of government. The chief point of
contact between these Northern Provinces and Western civilization, it is
through Tientsin that the new ideas which are stirring the sluggish
Chinese mind to new desires and to a new purpose filter into one hundred
million Mongoloid heads.

The foreign settlement is simply a polyglot cluster of nationalities, each
with its "concession" or allotment of land wrung from a browbeaten empire,
each with its separate municipal government ruled by its own
consul-general, and the whole combined, for purposes of defense and
aggression, into a loosely knit city of seven or eight thousand whites
under the general direction of a dozen consulates. The British have their
polo, golf, and racing grounds; the French have their wealthy church
orders and their Parisian moving pictures; the Germans have their beer
halls and delicatessen shops. The Japanese, the Russians, the Italians,
the Austrians, all the powers, in fact, excepting the United States--which
holds no land in China--contribute their lesser shares to the colour and
the activity of this extraordinary place. And only a mile or two away,
further up the crooked river, lies the huge, sprawling Chinese city, where
nine hundred and fifty thousand blue-clad celestials--nearly a round
million of them--ceaselessly watch the squabbling groups of foreigners,
and by means of newspapers, travelling merchants, and the thousand and one
other instruments for the spreading of gossip, tell all Northern China
what they see.

Tientsin, then, like Shanghai, is a potent, an electric, force in its
influence on China. Whatever the Chinese are to become in their struggle
towards the light of day will be in some measure due to the example set by
these two cities, the only samples of Western civilization which the
Chinaman can scrutinize at close range. The missionary tells him of the
God of the Western peoples, and of how His Spirit regenerates humankind;
the Chinaman listens stolidly, and then turns to look at the samples of
regenerated peoples that fringe his Coast. What he actually sees will
stick in his mind long after what he merely hears shall have passed out at
the other ear. And these impressions that stick in the Chinaman's mind are
precisely the highly charged forces that are revolutionizing China to-day.

While still at Peking, I had picked up more or less gossip which seemed
to indicate that the Tientsin foreign concessions were s