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when it was regarded as the very beau idéal of style, that it should resemble fashionable conversation. Fortunately, the feel→ ing now-a-days is very different. We claim for conversation a freedom greater than it once enjoyed, and for writing a freedom greater than we yield to conversation. We allow the writer to consult his own taste as to the colors and the fashions in which he shall present himself before the public. We do not regard even language itself as a thing inflexible and immutable, which all are to accept and use exactly alike. We acknowledge in the writer, especially in the man of genius, a certain power over language; a right of origination, not to make himself unintelligible, but to make himself more intelligible; a right to share actively in that progress, which spite of all conservative resistance, is the inevitable condition of a living language, and the cessation of which proves a language to be really dead, unfit for the living use of living men.

ART. III.-THE MIDDLE KINGDOM.

The Middle Kingdom: A Survey of the Geography, Government, Education, Social Life, Arts, Religion, &c., of the Chinese Empire and its inhabitants. With a new Map of the Empire, and Illustrations, principally engraved by J. W. ORR. By S. WELLS WILLIAMS, author of Easy Lessons in Chinese,' 'English and Chinese Vocabularies.'

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THESE Volumes are a valuable addition to the library, which our American Missionaries are creating. The originators of the modern missionary enterprise probably did not imagine the messengers of the gospel among the heathen would enlarge science by their researches, and adorn literature with their writings; yet such is the fact, and it is by no means the least important of the many incidental benefits resulting from the attempt to spread the gospel through the world.

We always welcome such publications as Perkins's Residence in Persia, Bingham's Sandwich Islands, and the volumes now before us, because we know that the authors have had better opportunities than any other foreigners-diplomatic functionaries not excepted-for learning the real condition of the people whom they describe. Respecting China, above almost every other country, we need just such information as none but missionaries can give or acquire. With that, strange country the whole civilized world has long been connected, directly or indirectly, in commercial relations; and yet to the world China has

been for ages a land of mystery, walled in and guarded against the profane approach of strangers, and tolerating foreign commerce only at single point of contact with the outside world.

The Chinese appear as a distinct race, not only opposite to us in place, but in almost every characteristic. They write, speak, sing, and, we are half inclined to believe, think and feel in ways so diverse from our own and those of every occidental people, that if we doubted the biblical account of creation, we should take China for the strongest proof that mankind had not a common origin. Mr. Williams quotes an amusing account of their peculiarities, from a sketch in the Chinese Repository. We give a few sentences of the description.

"On inquiring of the boatman in which direction Macao lay, I was answered, west north; and the wind, he said, was east south. We do not say so in Europe,' thought I, but imagine my surprise when in explaining the utility of the compass, he added that the needle pointed south.

"In my way to the hotel, I saw a group of old people, some of whom were grey beards; a few were chiruping and chuckling to singing birds which they carried perched on a stick or in cages, others were catching flies to feed them, and the remainder of the party seemed to be delightfully employed in flying fantastic paper kites; while a group of boys were gravely looking on and regarding these innocent occupations of their seniors with the most serious and gratified attention.

"On going abroad, I met so many things contrary to all my preconceived ideas of propriety, that I readily assented to a friend's observation, that the Chinese were our antipodes in many things beside location.' 'Indeed,' said I, 'they are so; I shall expect shortly to see a man walking on his head: look! there is a woman in trowsers, and a paity of gentlemen in petticoats; she is smoking a segar, and they are fanning themselves; but I was taught not to trust to appearances too much, as in passing, I saw the latter wore tight under garments. We soon after met the steward of the house dressed in white, and I stopped to ask him what merry-making he was invited to; with a look of the deepest concern he told me he was then returning from his father's funeral. Soon we passed where we heard sobbing and crying, and I inquired who was ill; the man suppressing a smile said, 'It is a girl about leaving home to be married, who is lamenting with her fellows.""-Vol. II, pp. 92–94.

But China has higher claims upon our attention than those which mere curiosity creates. As the oldest existing repository of civilization; and as having possessed for ages many of those discoveries and inventions which have done more than any thing save the gospel to promote our own progress, that country demands respect. We are not indeed inclined, with our author, to remove the deluge some centuries farther back, to accommodate the chronology of the middle kingdom; though we confess that the Chinese countenance, in its uniform cast-iron expression, might seem to have come down unchanged from the ages before the flood. Nor can we admit, with some who can believe any thing rather than the Bible, the reality of those dynasties which are said to have reigned in that country before the days of Noah ; although a remarkable flood is mentioned in their annals, nearly

simultaneously with that in the Scriptural account. Nor are we less skeptical as to the notion which some dreamers have propounded, that the Chinese language was the language of Paradise; for it does appear to us that such a language must have been altered into a better one, by some enterprising descendants of our first mother, long before the first brick was laid in the tower of Babel. Our incredulity on all these points is fortified by the fact that Chihwangti, who is represented as the most distinguished of Chinese Emperors, caused the records of the past to be destroyed, so far as he was able, about 250 B. C., in order to make himself the first on the pages of Chinese history. Yet we can not but reverence the nation which was old when Romulus founded Rome; whose classic writers were contemporary with Ezra; which has maintained its distinct national character, not merely for centuries, but for milleniums; and which has continued to increase, until its empire extends over a larger surface than any other, and its population is numbered by hundreds of millions. There is something to be honored in a people whose history reaches to the building of the Pyramids; and whose great teacher, having compiled the knowledge then ancient, died a century before Socrates, while his mausoleum, still reverenced by his countrymen, remains in the midst of a forest, that has many times decayed and been renewed since he was buried. We can hardly avoid feeling some romantic interest in a government whose Monarch was called Peace, when that babe was born at Bethlehem, who was the Prince of Peace, and by the side of which the oldest empire of the European world is only a thing of yesterday. Mr. Williams has satisfied the craving to know something more of this singular portion of the human family. He has opened China by giving its statistics in all the accuracy of numbers, and by revealing the details of that patriarchal administration.

We have little fault to find with his arrangement, except that the larger part of the first volume, containing the geographical descriptions, might perhaps have been better compressed into tables, or at least arranged as a Gazetteer and thrown into an appendix, where it could have been referred to alphabetically. A few pages of letter press, with the excellent map which accompanies the work, would have given a clearer idea of the features and condition of the country. Few readers will plod through the enumeration of the boundaries, population and productions of provinces, and capitals, and chief towns, when the constant repetition of most unpronounceable or unrememberable. names is added to the general sameness.

An editor, himself a distinguished writer, recently remarked, in a newspaper article, that every author ought to serve an apprenticeship to the printer's trade, in order to acquire the habit of accurate and concise expression. Our author may be referred to as

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illustrating the faults in style which too long attention to this art may produce; and his composition, from its rigidity and mechanical structure, seems to have been set up without copy. Nor is it until we are nearly through his volumes, that the composing stick is fairly transformed into a goose quill, and the angularity of the letters changed into a running hand.

We may give our readers some idea of the value of these volumes, by attempting to exhibit, from the information which they contain, some view of the causes which have produced the isolation, permanence and prosperity of the Chinese empire, and some thoughts which have occurred to us in regard to the probabilities of their future.

We begin with saying that in our opinion, Mr. Williams has conclusively established the credibility of the census made in 1812, which enumerates the people of China at about three hundred and fifty millions, who have a higher cultivation, and are better secured in their personal rights, than any Pagan nation which has ever existed. A partial explanation of the fact that this great people has been so little affected by the causes which have been continually revolutionizing Europe and a large part of Asia, may be found in the configuration of the country. Unlike what we see on our own continent, the mountain ridges in that land are parallel to the equator, while a single chain stretches from North to South on the Western boundary, so that almost the whole of China is environed by this natural wall, except the eastern coast, whose bulwark is the Pacific. Ranges within this enclosure divide the empire into three basins, through which mighty rivers flow into the ocean. When it is remembered what protection has been afforded to Italy by the Alps, and that to pass over that great barrier with an army was the greatest achievment of Hannibal, not to say of Napoleon, some conception can be formed of the seclusion which this belt of snowy peaks must have secured to a people, whose coast was washed, not by the waves of an inland sea, navigable by fishermen's boats, but by the vast ocean that separated continents inhabited by races that for ages never dreamed of each other's existence. Thus fenced in by God, this natjon dwelt apart, undisturbed by the contentions and commotions that were stirring the kingdoms. Alexander marched beneath their gates, but heard no sound of the busy multitude within. Babylon was built, conquered, and ruined, yet the Chinese remained unmolested. Even the Roman Empire had spread to the outposts of the known world, and was declining, before its fame crossed the celestial mountains, and reverberated through the Middle Kingdom.

The Chinese language, too, has been a barrier almost as effectual as the everlasting hills, excluding the people who use it from all acquaintance with foreigners. Its forms, constructions

and pronunciation are so essentially different from those of any other tongue, that it is the work of a life time to master it completely. The labors of Morrison, and the present efforts of our own missionaries, attest the difficulties with which it is acquired by foreigners. The Missionary Herald for February of the current year, gives an able exhibition of the obstacles to the acquisition of the Chinese language.

While living in such isolation, walled in by mountains, guarded by the ocean, and separated by the most difficult peculiarities of language, the Chinese have had very little inducement to go abroad themselves, or to attempt any improvement of their condition by intercourse with foreigners. Their civilization, so far as those arts are concerned which minister to human subsistence or luxury-has been, from immemorial ages till a very recent date, far in advance of the nations with whom it would otherwise have been most natural for them to be in habits of intercourse and mutual influence. Their own country including every variety of climate and production, has afforded them in the form of internal trade the advantages of foreign commerce. Their own "middle kingdom" has been the world to them, as the "orbis terrarum" of the Roman empire was to the people of Rome. All who dwell beyond their boundaries are barbarians to them— as to a vulgar Englishman all foreigners are Frenchmen, and are detested accordingly.

Thus the prejudice against foreigners which is natural to men of every language and of every race, having had nothing to counteract it, has been in China one of the most powerful of causes which have operated upon the institutions and the history of the empire. The propensity of human nature which in the Greek language identified the foreigner with the barbarian, and which in the Latin made every stranger an enemy, is the key to all Chinese ideas of "foreign relations."

The agriculture of the Chinese and their modes of living explain the possibility of a population so enormous as that which exists upon their soil.

"The greatest part of the cultivated soil in China is employed in raising food for man. Woolen garments and leather are little used, and cotton and mulberry occupy but a small proportion of the soil. There is not, so far as is known, a single acre of land in the empire sown with grass seed, though the sedge in the marshes and grass on the hills are collected for fodder or fuel, and therefore almost no human labor is employed in raising food for animals, which will not also serve to sustain man. Horses are seldom used for pomp or war, for traveling or carrying burdens, but mules, asses, and goats are employed for transportation and other purposes in the northwest. Horses are fed on cooked rice, or chopped straw and beans, and in Kirin on oats. In the southern and eastern provinces, all these animals are rare, the transport of goods and passengers being done by boats or by men. The natives make almost no use of butter, cheese, or milk, and the few cattle they employ in agriculture easily find their living on the waste ground around the fields and

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