unfortunate people will spare his Majesty | present, it is to be feared that the latter a day of pangs.'

duty will prove no easy task. Terrible indeed are the difficulties that beset these workers, of whom we learn that four thousand have been swept away in the endeavor to form a breakwater to arrest the further progress of the flood.

The emperor and empress-mother head the subscription with one hundred thousand taels from the privy purse, and two million taels (about £500,000) from the imperial treasury, and command that the whole revenue of Honan be devoted to The idea at present seems to be, to enthe task of building banks and dykes for deavor to induce the river to return to the the restraint of the waters. Thirty two channel in which it flowed prior to 1852, million pounds of rice were stopped on and doubtless, by dint of perseverence and their way to Peking, and sent to the starv-energy, the work will be accomplished, and ing sufferers a good beginning, but it is the province will once more be converted evident that both private and public char-into a smiling garden, and for one or two ity must do their utmost to meet such generations all will go fairly well, till the great need, and that the strain will be next flood, when the story will be relong continued. For when the waters do peated. So long as the system of artifi subside, a considerable part of the land cially banking up the raised bed of a river will probably continue to be a malarious is adhered to, there must always be the swamp, giving birth to wide-spread sick- same danger. It has been suggested that ness; fever and ague will assuredly fol- the only hopeful solution of the difficulty low as the natural result of miasma and would be to cut a broad and deep canal for pestilential smells of decaying animal and three hundred miles to the ocean. Such vegetable matter. Famine too, seems in a channel, once made, might, by continual evitable, for even were the land now dry dredging, be kept in order, and prove the and ready for sowing, there is literally no salvation of the country, but as yet there seed-corn left, the whole harvest, which seems no hope of the Chinese governhad just been safely garnered, being all ment undertaking so radical an improve

lost.

ment.

floods by very extensive forestry - that is to say, by planting largely all over the ranges of the watershed, and all along the course of rivers, thus binding the soil and diminishing the quantity which the waters carry with them, at the same time enriching the empire by producing a fresh supply of timber, to repair the cruelly wasteful destruction of forests which for centuries past has been has been suffered to go on unchecked.

Amongst the devices for raising the It has also been suggested that much necessary funds for bridling the river,might be done to check the origin of these there is one official announcement which strangely recalls recent revelations in Paris. There we have heard much of the sales (sub rosa) of honorary decorations. The Chinese have, at least, the merit of being above board, for they openly announce that the imperial treasury being short of means to defray sundry urgent expenses, the government has decided to raise the required amount by opening of fices to sell official rank. Divers decorations- official buttons and feathers - will each be offered at a given price, but the largest sum is expected to be derived from the sale of a new title devised for this occasion. As we can scarcely suppose the most ancient civilization to have borrowed the idea from the barbarians of the West, we can only assume the existence of a spontaneous inspiration.

In order to carry on the work at the smallest possible cost, the entire military force of the province is placed at the command of the officials, all the soldiers becoming engineers and navvies in this emergency. All survivors who are capable of work must lend a hand, not for pay, but for food, and the governor of the province is desired to select officers of ability, who will take care that no corruption is practised. From all experience, past and

In the present instance it appears that the probability of danger has for some time been foreseen, for not only has the enormous deposit of silt at the mouth of the river gradually changed and considerably raised the bed of its estuary on the Gulf of Pe-chi-li, but the same deposit has been so serious along its course that some months before the disaster the Chinese officials in charge suggested that it might be well to endeavor to relieve the pressure by cutting the embankment near Kaifungfu (i.e., about forty miles above the spot where the breach has occurred), and to guide the escaping waters back to the channel which they forsook thirty years ago.

Well may all concerned wish that this happy suggestion had been carried out. The government now seems to ignore that

it was ever made, for a very characteristic | torting the natural progress of things. But feature in this matter is the manner in for that influence, he says, the closing which such a calamity is visited on the years of the century would probably have unfortunate officials in whose district it seen the abolition of the English slavehas occurred. Though such an unprece- trade, the reform of Parliament, and the dented flood would probably have swept repeal of the Test Act. The question of away the mightiest embankments that hu- the precise degree of vitality in sectarian man skill ever constructed, all the chief pride, and of tenacity in a great material men in the inundated part of the province interest, a hundred years ago or at any have been degraded. Some have been time, is not very easy to settle. It is quite deprived of the much-valued button denot- possible that the slave-trade and the Test ing honor, which is worn on the cap, and Act might have died nearly as hard, if a considerable number, including the sub- there had been no French Revolution. In prefect, the mayor, the assistant depart- any case, it is a curious implication that ment magistrate, and others, are con- underlies all writing in this familiar vein, demned to be exposed in the cangue along that France ought to have gone on with a the banks of the river. The cangue, or bad government, in order to secure to Enwooden collar, is a large heavy square of gland the advantages of a good one. wood, opening so as to allow the prisoner's neck to enter, when it is again closed. From the time it is put on it is not removed till the term of sentence has expired - perhaps for three months - during which time the luckless prisoner cannot lie down in any attitude of comfort and cannot touch his own head with his hand, so he is dependent on the mercy of others to feed him. As part of the punishment is that he is to spend the livelong day in some public place exposed to the gaze of all men, and with his name and his offence written in large letters on his wooden board, we can understand that barbarous little boys are apt to find considerable pleasure in tormenting the helpless culprit by such playful jests as tickling him with a straw, or similar devices. These cangues are of various construction, in some cases being affixed to the summit of a wooden cage in which the luckless victim is kept standing upright in a painfully constrained position. Altogether it can scarcely be desirable to occupy a position of high responsibility in a Chinese district watered by such a stream as the Great Yellow River.

A

From The Nineteenth Century. FEW WORDS ON FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY MODELS.

BY JOHN MORLEY.

Numquamne reponam,

Vexatus toties rauci Theseide Codri?

As to one disservice, however, there can be no doubt. The French Revolution has furnished the enemies of each successive proposal of reform with a boundless supply of prejudicial analogies, appalling parallels, and ugly nicknames, which are all just as conclusive with the unwise as if they were the aptest arguments. Sydney Smith might well put "the awful example of a neighboring nation" among the standing topics of the Noodle's Oration. The abolition of rotten boroughs brought down a thousand ominous references to noyades, fusillades, and guillotines. When Sir Robert Peel took the duty off corn Croker warned him with great solemnity that he was breaking up the old interests, dividing the great families, and beginning exactly such a catastrophe as did the Noailles and the Montmorencis in 1789. Cobden and Mr. Bright were promiscuously likened to Babœuf, Chaumette, and Anacharsis Clootz. Babœuf, it is true, was for dividing up all the property, and Chaumette was an aggressive atheist; but these were mere nuances, not material to the purposes of obloquy. Robespierre, Danton, Marat, have been mercilessly trotted forth in their sanguinary shrouds, and treated as the counterparts and precursors of worthies so obviously and exactly like them as Mr. Beales and Mr. Odger; while an innocent caucus for the registration of voters recalls to some well-known writers lurid visions of the Cordeliers and the Jacobin Club.

A recent addition has been made to the stock of nicknames drawn from the terriHISTORIANS are only too fond of in- ble melodrama of the last century. The sisting on the effect of the French Revolu- chancellor of the exchequer at Dublin detion in checking English reform. One of scribed the present very humble writer as the latest of them dwells on the fatal_in-“the Saint Just of our Revolution." The fluence of this great event in our own country, in checking, blighting, and dis

* Lecky, vi. 297.

description was received with lively ap-| models in the heroes of the French Revoplause. It would be indelicate to wonder how many in a hundred, even in that audience of the elect, had ever heard of Saint Just, how many in five hundred could have spelt his name, and how many in a thousand could have told any three facts in his career. But let us muse for a moment upon the portrait. I take down the first picture of Saint Just that comes to my hand. M. Taine is the artist:

66

lution," and "looks for his methods in the Reign of Terror "? It would be equally logical to infer that because I have written, not without sympathy and appreciation, of Joseph de Maistre, I therefore find my model in a hero of the Catholic reaction, and look for my methods in the revived supremacy of the Holy See over all secular and temporal authorities. It would be just as fair to say that because I pointed out, as it was the critic's business to do, the many admirable merits, and the important moral influences on the society of that time, of the "New Heloïse," therefore I am bound to think Saint Preux a very fine fellow, particularly fit to be a model and a hero for Young Ireland. Only on the principle that who drives fat oxen must himself be fat, can it be held that who writes on Danton must be himself in all circumstances a Dantonist.

Among these energetic nullities we see gradually rising a young monster with face handsome and tranquil· Saint Just! A sort of precocious Sulla, who at five-and-twenty suddenly springs from the ranks, and by force of atrocity wins his place. Six years before, he began life by an act of domestic robbery; while on a visit at his mother's, he ran away in the night with her plate and jewels; for that he was locked up for six months. On his release, he employed his leisure in the composition of an odious poem. Then he flung himself head foremost into the Revolution. Blood calcined by study, a colossal pride, a conscience completely unhinged, an imagination haunted by the bloody recollections of Rome and Sparta, an intelligence falsified and twisted until it found itself most at its ease in the prac-ers of that century in particular. His essay tice of enormous paradox, barefaced so phism, and murderous lying-all these perilous ingredients, mixed in a furnace of concentrated ambition, boiled and fermented long and silently in his breast."

It is, no doubt, hard to know ourselves. One may entertain demons unawares, and have calcined blood without being a bit the wiser. Still, I do not find the likeness striking. It would have done just as well to call me Nero, Torquemada, lago, or Bluebeard.

Whether the present writer does or does not deserve all the compliments that history has paid to Saint Just, is a very slight and trivial question, with which the public will naturally not much concern itself. But as some use is, from time to time, made of the writer's imputed delinquencies to prejudice an important cause, it is perhaps worth while to try in a page or two to give a better account of things. It is true that he has written on revolutionists like Robespierre, and destructive thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire. It is true that he believes the two latter to have been on the whole, when all deductions are made, on the side of human progress. But what sort of foundation is this for the inference that he "finds his

The most insignificant of literary contributions have a history and an origin; and the history of these contributions is short and simple enough. Carlyle with all the force of his humoristic genius had impressed upon his generation an essentially one-sided view both of the eighteenth century as a whole, and of the French think

on Diderot, his lecture on Rousseau, his chapters on Voltaire, with all their bril liance, penetration, and incomparable satire, were the high-water mark in this country of the literary reaction against the French school of Revolution. Everybody knows the famous diatribes against the Bankrupt Century and all its men and all its works. Voltaire's furies, Diderot's indigestions, Rousseau's nauseous amours, and the odd tricks and shifts of the whole of them and their company, offered ready material for the boisterous horseplay of the transcendental humorist. Then the tide began to turn. Mr. Buckle's book on the history of civilization had something to do with it. But it was the historical chapters in Comte's "Positive Philosophy" that first opened the minds of many of us, who, five-and-twenty-years ago, were young men, to a very different judgment of the true place of those schools in the literary and social history of western Europe. We learnt to perceive that though much in the thought and the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolu. tion laid them fairly open to Carlyle's ban. ter, yet banter was not all, and even grave condemnation was not all. In essays, like mine, written from this point of view, and with the object of trying to trim the bal

than perished in Paris through the years | political organizations and the encourageI. and II. But the retort does us no good ment of arrangements based on the minor beyond the region of dialectic. Some of peculiarities of race or dialect." Was the opinions of Chaumette were full of en- there ever in the world such prodigious lightenment and hope. But it would be nonsense? What French sources, what far better to share the superstitious opin- French models? If French models point ions of a virtuous and benignant priest, in any one direction rather than another, like the bishop in Victor Hugo's Misé- it is away from disintegration and straight rables,' than to hold these good opinions towards centralization. Everybody knows of Chaumette, as he held them, with a that this is one of the most notorious rancorous intolerance, a reckless disre- facts of French history from the days gard of the rights and feelings of others, of Lewis XI. or Cardina! Richelieu down and a shallow forgetfulness of all that to Napoleon Bonaparte. So far from great and precious part of our nature that French models encouraging "arrangelies out of the domain of the logical un-ments based on the minor peculiarities of derstanding. . . . In every family where race and dialect," France is the first great a mother sought to have her child bap- example in modern history, for good or for tized, or where sons and daughters sought evil, of a persevering process of national to have the dying spirit of the old consoled unification, and the firm suppression of all by the last sacrament, there sprang up a provincial particularismus. This is not bitter enemy to the government which had only true of French political leaders in closed the churches and proscribed the general; it is particularly true of the Jacopriests. How could a society whose spir- bin leaders. Rousseau himself, I admit, itual life had been nourished in the solemn did in one place point in the direction of mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly confederation; but only in the sense that turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The for freedom on the one hand, and just common self-respect of humanity was administration on the other, the unit should outraged by apostate priests as they filed before the Cenvention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold with which they had once served their holy

office."*

Where is the effontery, the search for methods in the Reign of Terror, the applause for revolutionary models? Such inexcusable perversion of a writer's meaning for an evanescent political object and a very shabby object too - is enough to make one think that George III. knew what he was talking about, when he once delivered himself of the saying, that "politics are a trade for a rascal, not for a gentleman."

Let me cite another more grotesque piece of irrelevancy with a similar drift. Some months ago the present writer chanced to express an opinion upon Welsh disetablishment. Wales, at any rate, would seem to be far enough away from "Emile," "Candide," the Law of Prairial, and the Committee of Public Safety. The Times, however, instantly said that it would be affectation to express any surprise, because my unfortunate "theories and principles, drawn from French sources and framed on French models, all tend to the disintegration of comprehensive

• Misc. i. 77-79.

† Nov. 3, 1886.

not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If the Jacobins had not been overwhelmed by the necessity of keeping out the invaders, they might have developed the germ of truth in Rousseau's loose way of stating the expediency of decentralization. As it was, above all other French schools, the Jacobins dealt most sternly with particularist pretensions. Of all men, these supposed masters, teachers, and models of mine are least to be called separatists. To them more than to any other of the Revolutionary parties the great heresy of Federalism was most odious; and if I were a faithful follower of the Jacobin model, I should have least patience with nationalist sentiment whether in Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, and should most rigorously insist on that cast-iron incorporation which, as it happens, in the case of Ireland I believe to be equally hopeless and undesirable. This explanation, therefore, of my favor for Welsh disestablishment is as absurdly ignorant as it is far-fetched and irrelevant.

The logical process is worth an instant's examination. The position is no less than this, that to attempt truly to appreciate the place and the value in the history of thought and social movements of men who have been a hundred years in their graves, and to sympathize with certain sides and certain effects of their activity under the