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for family ties than Western nations. The custom of worshipping their ancestors, though one of the chief stumbling-blocks to the Christian missionaries, probably exercises a greater moral influence than the reverence for genealogy here. But no audience in England or America would accept these virtues as rebukes to the shortcomings of the Anglo-Saxon civilisation. So deep is the gulf between Occident and Orient that the pride of neither will learn from the other, and both are indifferent to the warnings of prophets who foretell the triumph of the Caucasian in the Flowery Land or the submergement of Europe by the yellow flood of immigration. All Western notions are regarded in China with a contempt which even the travels of Li are not likely to dispel; and No. 40 Portland Place can never recover that prestige of harmless nonentity it enjoyed before the pranks of the Chinese Embassy made it a centre of the ludicrous.

The following is a copy of the letter I sent to the newspapers thanking the Government and the Press for what they had done for me:

To the Editor of the

,—Will you kindly express through your columns my keen appreciation of the action of the British Government in effecting my release