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Rh chat of the people, who each and all are in the position of one who has no care or responsibility for what is done with the public property so long as he personally is not the loser. In fact, the very conception that a road, or that anything, belongs to "the public" is totally alien to the Chinese mind. The "streams and mountains " (that is, the Empire) are supposed to be the property in fee simple of the Emperor for the time, to have and to hold as long as he can. The roads are his too, and if anything is to be done to them let him do it. But the greater part of the roads do not belong to the Emperor in any other sense than that in which the farms of the peasants belong to him, for these roads are merely narrow strips of farms devoted to the use of those who wish to use them, not with the consent of the owner of the land, for that was never asked, but from the force of necessity. The entire road belongs to some farm, and pays taxes like any other land, albeit the owner derives no more advantage from its use than does any one else. Under these circumstances, it is evidently the interest of the farmer to restrict the roads as much as he can, which he does by an extended system of ditches and banks designed to make it difficult for any one to traverse any other than the narrow strip of land which is indispensable for communication. If the heavy summer rains wash away a part of the farm into the road, the farmer goes to the road and digs his land out again, a process which, combined with natural drainage and the incessant dust-storms, results eventually in making the road a canal. Of what we mean by "right of way" no Chinese has the smallest conception.

Travellers on the Peiho River between Tientsin and Peking have sometimes noticed in the river little flags, and upon inquiry have ascertained that they indicated the spots where torpedoes had been planted, and that passing boats were expected to avoid them! A detachment of Chinese troops