NEWS OF THE WEEK.
MUCFI the most important intelligence received this week from the Far East comes oddly enough from an English- man, now in London. Captain F. E. Younghnsband, the soldier-diplomatist recently in charge at Chitral, says, in a letter to the Times, that he traversed Manchuria in December, 1886; that he found the province entirely in the possession of the Chinese, the Manchus now forming only 5 per cent, of the population ; and that the winter, though terribly severe, will facilitate instead of interrupting Japanese operations. The roads are hard, the rivers are frozen, and the busi- ness of transport is, in fact, done only in the winter. He counted eight hundred and twenty carts on a road near Moukden in a single day's march. As for the cold, though it is terrible, it is Canadian cold, not English cold, and the absence of wind enables travellers to protect themselves with clothing, with which the invading soldiers are sure to be provided. The Japanese can therefore attack Moukden at will, and it must be taken, for it is protected only by a wall, and their armies could then converge upon Pekin within a month. The winter, therefore, will be no friend to China ; and Captain Younghusband's remark upon the population of the vast province—Manchuria is eighty thousand square miles larger than France—has perhaps a deeper significance than he records. All recent intelligence indicates that the Chinese in Manchuria are in a way friendly to the Japanese, and inclined to prefer them to their Manchu rulers. That does not affect the fighting, but it does greatly affect the submis- siveness of the population.
