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Rh system, narrow but stable, with a population overcrowded on the coast, but possessing in the interior peace and comfort, as Abbé Hue has testified. Alone, this development might have gone on. When steam brought English and American competition, China would have reorganized its industrial system if it had had courts and a judicial system possessing integrity and an efficient government to enforce judicial decrees; but competition destroyed its industries, and the absence of the foundation of all economic systems, justice, prevented China from advancing. First, in the south of China, earliest affected by European competition, came the Tai Ping Rebellion, and the new European arms of precision gave the central tyranny of the Manchu a new power. Later, North China broke out in the Boxer revolt, economic in origin. For fifteen years past, the interior has been aflame, rising first where the great rivers bring closer European trade. China is to-day a derelict, a hulk adrift on the ocean of history, where it has weathered so many storms, its industries, two centuries ago giving lessons to Europe, to-day deteriorated or destroyed.

This is the history of all Asia and of all North Africa, of much of Latin America. So long as the