Everything is great in China, especially misfortunes. It is not
many years since a famine struck two of her Northern pro- vinces, the two Shang, and killed eleven millions of people through hunger and its consequent fevers; and now two millions more have been rendered homeless. The ancient dykes of the gigantic Hoang-ho, or Yellow River, gave way on September 28th, 1887; and it is now known that ten thousand square miles of the great province of Ronan have been submerged, that the dead can be counted only by the hundred thousand, and that two millions of people are in despair. Three thou- sand villages in only two districts were engulfed, says the Shanghai correspondent of the Standard, in a few moments, and in them all scarcely any escaped with their lives. The Govern- ment is doing what it can, and is evidently in earnest ; but the work of repair will cost millions, which it does not possess, and may prove, it is feared, beyond the capacity of modern Chinese engineering. Is it an additional horror, or is it an alle- viation, to hear that thousands of the inhabitants of the most prosperous plain in China met their fate with that resignation or stolidity which, in extreme cases, imparts a kind of grandeur to the Chinese character, refused to fly, and standing there silent looking at their ruin, accepted their deaths without fear P There will come terrible armies out of China some fine day, and try our boasted "resources of science" to their very end.
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