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Rh literati who under the influence of John Smith's Anglo-Saxon ideals is clamouring for a constitution, is likely to become an intolerable and dangerous nuisance. In the end I fear John Bull Senior will not only find his Manchester goods trade ruined, but he will even be put to the expense of sending out a General Gordon or Lord Kitchener to shoot his poor old friend John Chinaman who has become non compes mentis under the civilising influence of John Smith's Anglo-Saxon ideals. But that is neither here nor there.

What I want to say here in plain, sober English is this. It is a wonder to me that the Englishman who comes out to China with his head filled with all the arrant nonsense written in books about the Chinese, can get along at all with the Chinese with whom he has to deal. Take this specimen, for instance, from a big volume, entitled "The Far East: its history and its questions," by Alexis Krausse.

"The crux of the whole question affecting the Powers of the Western nations in the Far East lies in the appreciation of the true inwardness of the Oriental mind. An Oriental not only sees things from a different standpoint to (!) the Occidental, but his whole train of thought and mode of reasoning are at variance. The very sense of perception implanted in the Asiatic varies from that with which we are endowed!"

After reading the last sentence an Englishman in China, when he wants a piece of white paper, if he