THE EMPRESS OF CHINA.
prARDLY any fact in the relations between Europe and Asia is more notable than the ignorance in which Europe is content to remain as to the characters,. histories, and policies of the great Asiatic personages. Most men are interested in persons, if they are not in systems, and. the dynasts and Ministers of Asia are often among the most interesting of human beings ; but Europe cares about them so little, that the greatest of them is usually, to the Western world, nothing but a name. This does not result entirely from want of the means of in- formation. Every Asiatic Court is closely watched by many competent Europeans, diplomatists, soldiers, speculators, doctors, or spies ; they cross-examine natives without number ; they hear, or can hear, everything that passes ; and they must form opinions, more or less definite, as to the personality of each depositary of power. Their reports ought to be as full, and probably are as full, as those of diplomatists in Europe, but they never get out ; and as Eastern Ambassadors are silent about their masters, and Asia publishes no memoirs, and permits to her public men no indiscretions in print, the veil of darknesa which hides Asiatic idiosyncrasies is. never lifted except by war. Western commentators do not understand even the Sultan as a human being with wishes, fears, and views ; they write contradictory nonsense about the Shah ; and about Sovereigns like the Emperor of China and the Mikado, and the King of Siam, and the statesmen who surround them, they admit themselves to be ignorant to bewilderment. The Empress-Regent Tsze Chi, for example, who in February of this year laid down the sovereignty of China, was probably one of the most remarkable women who ever lived, far greater than the Empress Catherine II., and better worthy of study than any Queen who has reigned in the last two centuries in the West ; yet Europe has known nothing of her, has never studied her character in the slightest, and except on the occurrence of some great ceremonial, has scarcely noticed her existence. Yet she has governed a fourth of the human race successfully for twenty-eight years, and has overcome difficulties, political, financial, and social, which might have overtaxed states- men like Cavour, Bismarck, or Pope Leo XIII. The position of an Emperor of China is not one which even a modern Czar need envy. He is exempt, it is true, from the danger of assassination, except possibly by poison ; but not only is he the ultimate referee on all subjects con- nected with government from three hundred millions of people singularly liable to colossal disasters from famine, flood, earthquake, and epidemics, and liable also, for all their submissiveness, to the maddest bursts of insurrec- tionary fury ; not only has he to satisfy these millions as if he were in some sense a divine being, and to control them without a standing army ; not only has be to resist a permanent menace of invasion from the North, and inter- mittent threats of invasion by the coast ; not only has he to control a huge Civil Service, the most corrupt in the world, and the one in which the great men are the most powerful ; but he has to remember that he is Mantcheou Emperor, and to maintain the ascendency of his house and clan against millions upon millions of subjects who, deep as is their reverence for his office, have never forgotten that the dynasty is a dynasty of intruders. "Out with the Tartar !" is the cry for which every Emperor of China listens ; and there are men in the Empire with whom he must deal cautiously, because they attract Chinese as opposed to Tartar loyalty. To hold such a position might strain the abilities of the ablest, and the Empress Tsze Chi has so held it that the throne was never so powerful • that overt insurrection has disappeared ; that the national patriotism —using that word for want of another to describe Chinese content with themselves—is distinctly higher than ever ; that a Treasury which was a morass of debt and fraud, raises money at 6 per cent. and pays the interest like a European State ; that the Militia has developed into a dangerous though slow-moving army ; that the power of the Mussulman sectaries, five millions of them, has been pulverised ; that the Mussulman Kingdom of Kashgar has been made a Chinese province, filled with Chinese peasants ; that Russia has been driven back from Kuldja, and France arrested in Tonquin ; and that Chinese Ambassadors are treated throughout Europe as the repre- sentatives of one of the Great Powers of the world, a Power not to be neglected, much less affronted, without the gravest reason. China is more solid and contented at home, and immeasurably more powerful abroad, than when the Empress, a lady, probably with crippled feet, who has never since girlhood been outside the park-wall of the palace in Pekin, took up the jade sceptre, which she has wielded through a generation with so firm and skilled a; hand ! And yet Europe has known nothing of her, not even her name. That, in this era of com- munication, when every newspaper knows everything, and news even from China arrives instantaneously, when correspondents are as numerous as languages, and the Far East is not only watched through a microscope, but swept of its treasures with a small-tooth comb, is surely a strange fact.
The usual explanation, so natural to the British mind, will, of course, be given,—that Europe knows nothing of the abdicated Empress because there was nothing to know ; that, surrounded as she was with almost religious respect, she was but the Imperial Standard round which a group of strong men disposed themselves, governing in her name the myriads of China. That explanation is not true, and those who accept it as sufficient miss one feature in these great despotisms—the worst feature as well as the most impressive—the indestructibility of the autocrat's personal responsibility. If all depended on the group around the throne, history would be persistent through generations, as in early Rome or Middle-Age Venice; but invariably in these great despotisms, in Russia or Turkey as in China, if the Sovereign is strong the Empire prospers, if the Sovereign is weak the Empire wanes. Be the counsellors never so powerful, certain ultimate duties, the duty of choosing them, the duty of reconciling them, the duty of com- pelling them to pull together, the duties of sanctioning the grooves of policy which they dig, and of allowing no deviation from them, devolve on the central figure, in whom alone, in extreme cases, the people and the soldiers confide. But for the Sovereign and the irre- sistible power which, when roused, he can exert, the statesmen would quarrel for ascendency, every depart- ment would be at war with every other, and every quarrel in the Cabinet would involve general confusion. There must be an ultimate referee, and power would apper- tain as of course to that referee, even if he did not possess, as he almost invariably does, the control alike of the soldiers and the people. These latter know nothing of Burghley ; they look to Elizabeth ; and they will see that an order once given by the head of the State is obeyed. So far was this Empress Tsze Chi from being a mere standard-bearer, that, as the well-informed con- tributor to the Times told us on Monday, she in 1865 struck down her strongest Vizier, Prince Hung, at the very height of his power, by a mere decree in the Gazette, and avowed in the order itself that her reason was that he "overrated his importance." If the order had been for his execution, he would have been executed at once, for in a true despotism like China, there is no resisting power except in insurrection ; and why, when all is going well, should either populace or soldiery rise, and bring on themselves unknown risks of vengeance, for an individual statesman, concealed through all his life by the use of the Sovereign's name ? The weakest Roman Cmsar, West or East, was never disobeyed except by a General in arms ; and the powerlessness of the individual subject always throws back responsibility on the throne. The Empress Tsze Chi must have chosen the strong men of whom Europe has intermittent glimpses, must have held them together, must have accepted great lines of policy, and must have enforced adherence to them by steady attention and inflexible will. It may be said that no lady, bred in secluded luxury, and shut out from the world by a rampart of etiquettes, could possibly have had the necessary knowledge to govern as well as reign ; but that is an illusion. The present Sultan is a nervous invalid, bred in the harem, without original knowledge of any one thing it concerns a Sovereign to know, with nothing in himself to help him except a fair intelligence and an apprehensive temperament ; and it is the universal testimony that he alone rules throughout his dominions, that no Amurath or Selim or Mahmoud ever exercised a more lonely and perfect despotism than the weak little man whose heart flutters under an un- expected salute. Sex has never made much difference to Sovereigns, and the greatest Mandarin in China would probably face the Emperor Kwangsu, who now reigns, far more readily than the secluded lady whose firmness had been so often tried and had never given way. Her imaginary ignorance would have been no ihield to him, for, in truth, on all that he wishes to know and has the mental grasp to understand, a despotic Sovereign is rarely ignorant. Too many people are interested in telling him the facts, and the oligarchs round him distrust each other too much, and the factions within the palace are too bitter to be silent. Every Sovereign leads, and must lead, a more or less secluded life ; and a quick-witted, strong-willed woman, possessed of absolute power, even though buried in the Palace of Pekin, would probably hear much more than any single Minister, and could apply her maxims of state policy to all affairs at least as resolutely and consistently as if her mind were distracted and her will weakened by the daily reading of speeches, and irresponsible comments thereupon. Her ability may have been as great as that of any of the dozen Asiatic ladies whom history has pronounced competent to rule; and as to the seclusion, is it greater even in form than that of Pope Leo, or greater in reality than that of the Emperor of Austria ? We find no difficulty in believing in the Empress Tsze Chi, and only find it wonderful that after a glorious reign of twenty-eight years over the most numerous people in the world, Europe, so hungry for knowledge of persons, should know so little about her.
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