LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
admiring ally, and yet they are well worth observing. For although already unable to digest what she has acquired, France is bound to go forward as long as she is split into so many parties, none of which any Government of late years has been strong enough to overlook. All these parties have supporters needing official places for themselves and friends, and what matter if the taxes be increased, she must extend her dominions for ever fresh posts to be created. The part of Siam she acquired some years back was quite valueless to the King of Siam. It has cost France so far a• million and a half francs a year, but it has supplied posts. At the same time, Frenchmen acquainted with the East—and when a Frenchman knows his subject no one knows it more thoroughly—have deplored its worthlessness, and have been for some time on the look out for fresh territory that would replenish the exhausted coffers of Tonquin. Four years ago• Lyons sent out a commercial mission to explore the riches of China, all the other leading commercial cities of France combining with Lyons. Posts on the mission were eagerly sought after, and the ten young men who eventually came to, China might be considered as the fine flour of the French commercial world. Of the two years they spent in China nearly half was spent in Szechuan, China's most silk-clad province, as well as its largest and westernmost. Even before they arrived, Chungking, its commercial capital, was in the French Chamber described as another Lyons in wealth,. population, and silk exports. After they arrived, we in China began to hear that Szechuan was the Hinterland of Tonquin. Fingers were airily moved across maps, and it was indicated that if you went inland from Tonquin in a certain direction,. you necessarily arrived at Szechuan—six or seven interposing mountain ranges being, of course, no obstacle—and that the commerce of the future should be diverted into this channel instead of pursuing a more direct course, as heretofore, down. the Yangtse River. "And what about the British sphere of influence P"—" It stops here at Ichang," finger on map as• before. "The rocks and rapids of the Yangtse gorges bar England's sphere of influence, as they bar steamers."
Since then a steamer has surmounted those rapids, and penetrated into the heart of Szechuan, thus making one more effort to strengthen England's influence,—an effort, be it noted in passing, made, as is England's way, by a private individual,. not by Government. But before that steamer had even got there, a French official mission, this time armed, was already on its way up river. The Resident of Tonquin, with some fifteen or so armed Annamites, had gone to Szechuan with the avowed intention of spending a year or two there. It must be remembered that whatever are the duties of a Resi- dent of Tonquin, it is an official post that he occupies, and that he could get to Paris from Tonquin some three or four weeks quicker than he could get to Chungking, whose postal and telegraphic communications also leave sadly much to be- decked. Nothing was heard of this intended journey in China before it was an accomplished fact. Indeed, so quietly was the whole thing managed, that the expedition was in Szechuan before even one of the Shanghai newspapers got wind of it.
It is the Missions Etrangeree that tries to convert Szechuan to Roman Catholicism, a mission that is altogether and ex- clusively composed of Frenchmen, certainly many of them very devout, good men, but equally certainly all devoted to the interests of France, and with a knowledge of the inner affairs and the official life of the province unequalled, by any other body. For these French Fathers live like Chinese amongst the Chinese, do not go on furlough every seven years, and have huge properties and wealth to administer, so that they are a power throughout the province,. and a very awkward power to deal with, as foreigners, as well as Chinese, have found before now. France claims to be the protector of all Roman Catholic missions in China, thus con- stituting under extra-territoriality an imperium in imperio throughout the country, outside its ordinary law, and above its ordinary Tribunals. This being so for all missions, it may be imagined what a strong imperium in imperio the wholly French Missions Etrangeres in Szechuan constitutes. And now of a sudden we learn that the Fathers are teaching French throughout the province, a wholly new departure, and that the French Government at its own expense is sending out to the Fathers a doctor and a chemist, so much solicitude does this Government, that discourages Christian effort at
;home, feel for the Christianising of poor China. A com- mercial mission, an armed official mission, and now Govern- ment support of the wholly French converting mission.
It is difficult to eliminate all colour from individual opinion, and to decide how much even of what we observe is affected by the old spirit that said :- " That ship there is a Frenchman, and if we don't take she, 'Tie a thousand bullets to one, that she will capture we."
But it must be remembered that when we annexed Burmah there was a French Consul there. And the story goes that he used the same Italian interpreter the English officials used, and one day the Italian interpreter betrayed the one to the -other, and a State paper was seen with all arrangements cut and dried for the annexation of Burmah to France. And so we annexed it first ! The story may be somewhat legendary, -although well known and generally believed. Anyway, that -same French Consul is now representing France, and very ably, in Szechnan. He has reinstated the French Fathers in Thibet, from which they have been for so many years driven out. And every one must rejoice at this, for if there be a vile religion, a religion over converts from which every man of any decency must rejoice, it is the form of Buddhism now practised in Thibet. We may all be thankful the French Fathers are once more able to teach and to preach on the Thibetan mountains. But it is not for that a Frenchman of Protestant descent as well as most Chauvinistic tendencies has allowed himself to be banished to Chungking, fifteen hundred miles up the river Yangtse. Of all Chinese provinces it would seem as if England ought to show most interest in Szechnan. We have for years past sent young men of great ability to travel through it as Consuls, and to report upon its capabilities. The Blue-books, the outcome of their exile and their labours, have been open to all the world to study. And those Blue-books, which it would seem have been more studied in Germany and in France than in England, speak for themselves. Szechnan, the border country -of China, its land of legend and song ; Szechnan, of the • wondrous Sacred Mountains, with mile-deep precipices from their summits, is also a land of oil-wells, and salt-springs, and ooal-mines ; a land of silk, and vegetable wax, and rhubarb, and innumerable other drugs; a land of a prodigally luxuriant vege- tation. It is also the outlet for the wool and musk of Thibet and of the minerals of Yunnan. If France annexes it—and that France is hankering after it is surely clear enough—that means that English merchandise and English merchants will be shut out as they are shut out of Tonquin. Lord Salisbury has once more spoken brave words in the last instructions he has sent to H.B.M. Minister in China. God grant he do not .eat his words ! For it would puzzle even such a great states- man to prove that Szechuan and Szechnan's commerce are
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