The Century Volume 90 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ...hour. Teach me, 0 my lover, as you taught me of love in a day, While the river of stars is rolling-Rolling away to the darkness, Teach me of death, and forever, and set my feet on the way. The Peril By GARDNER of China L. HARDING Author of " What is to become of Kiao-chau P" etc. SOME fifteen years ago Lord Charles Beresford paid a short, but breezy, visit to the far East, and when he went home he wrote a book about his trip that he called "The Break-up of China." It was a book that expressed and confirmed the settled mood of the time. In the shadow of the Boxer terror, and the hardly less shameful reprisals that avenged it, the dissolution of China did seem very near. Subtler minds than that of the impressionable British admiral thought of that flabby old empire, and the image at the back of their minds was one of helplessness baited all about by clutching foreign hands. In the intimacy of the crushing experiences of I900 they forgot, as we are forgetting to-day, that the weakness of China is a very old and a thoroughly matured problem. They might have read to advantage, as we might read it now, what was said in the sixties by Anson Burlingame, that strange, quixotic American genius who went on a mission to Europe half a century ago to save China from a dissolution which he feared to see in his own lifetime. How wholly modern it seems to hear him say, "I hope to procure some mitigation of those aggressive steps and tendencies which are rapidly bringing nearer the parcelling-out of China among the greedy monarchies of Europe" Since Burlingame's day waves upon waves of the aggression in which he foresaw immediate ruin have rolled ever nearer to Peking. China has been stripped of the fortress-harbors on her coast; prov...