progress, enlightenment, and humanity is
concerned, might very well take upon her-
self this duty, and there can be no doubt
that she would have the grateful co-opera-
tion of the Chinese government and people
in the undertaking, as well as the sympa-
thy of other nations interested in the satis-
factory solution of the problem.
W. H. MEDHURST.

the population a hundred or even fifty years hence. One thing, however, it would seem allowable to assert without risk of mistake. The Chinaman is by tradition and education a monarchist, regarding autocracy as the only reasonable form of government; and he thrives best under its sway, so long as his just rights are respected. For the elective franchise he is entirely unfit, nor would he care for the privilege of exercising it if thrust upon him. After generations of association with white races and experience of the advantages of freedom of thought, the case might be different; but until his nature is materially modified, and the scope of his aims and wants becomes more extended, he progresses more safely led than lead. ing. It follows that, whatever may be the political changes that may transpire in the countries to which Chinamen resort, their condition will be the happiest for themselves and the safest for the country concerned if they are dealt with as a subject people, and, as has already been remarked, as a community possessing abnormal characteristics, and therefore needing other-ing, were matters of frequent mention, and wise than ordinary treatment.

The preceding remarks represent the opinion of many who have been able to judge of the Chinese merely from observation of them in their own country, and apart from foreign associations and influences. But, as a matter of fact, little or no attention has been given to their condition and character as colonists abroad beyond the one-sided and sweeping condemnation of them which it has been the purpose of this paper to deprecate; and until full information upon these heads can be obtained, it may be to a certain extent unsafe to come to a definite conclusion as to the proper course to be pursued in dealing with the case. A very effective method of acquiring this information, and one that would have a most happy effect in conciliating and satisfying the Chinese immigrants themselves, would be to appoint a public commission of responsible persons, some of whom should speak and write the Chinese language, to visit all the places resorted to by Chinese, and to make it their duty to ascertain from the people themselves what grievances they have to complain of, what difficulties lie in the way of their harmonious incorporation with other colonists, and generally what remedial measures the circumstances of the case demand. Great Britain, as having an important interest in the results of such an inquiry, and as a power which is always found in the van where a policy of

From The Spectator. THE RELATION OF MEMORY TO WILL. AMID all the varied general interest of the great cause célèbre of our day — the Tichborne trial - perhaps the most distinct and important was the light thrown by it on people's different ideas of what it was possible to remember and to forget. When the trial was under general discussion, the contrast, or possibly the resemblance, between the powers of oblivion demanded for the claimant, and those which A and B were conscious of possess

most of us gained some knowledge of the different distance to which the past recedes in different lives. Hardly any knowledge can be more interesting or more fruitful, whether we consider its bearing on the moral atmosphere of the persons thus differently affected, or on the suggestion so expressively conveyed in the German name for memory, - Erinnerung (the inward faculty). Plutarch, in an attempt to vindicate the possible knowledge of the future, by showing the mysterious element in our knowledge of the past, calls memory "the sight of the things that are invisible, and the hearing of the things that are silent; and a thinker, whose great metaphysical achievement was almost avowedly the obliteration from our mental inventory of all those powers which are supposed to deal with the invisible, recalls this description, in his confession that the analysis which reduced every other source of apparently ultimate knowledge to a trick of associa tion was checked when we came to that within us which bore witness to a real past; and the concession that in this case we do know what we cannot prove, seems to us a pregnant one. How we know that these dim pictures on our walls at once faint and indelible — are the work of another artist than imagination, must, J. S. Mill allows, be a question as vain as how we know that the things around us are real. But it is under its personal aspect that we would speak of memory to-day.

at hand. Yet it is likely enough that for all practical exigencies one of the last class may have a good memory, and one of the first a bad one.

la profondeur." We are apt to make mistakes both ways. Sometimes we take the silence of oblivion for the silence of profound and overpowering recollection, sometimes our mistake is in the opposite direction; and it is impossible to say which error is the commonest, for the one occurs when the deep mind judges the shallow, and the other when the shallow mind judges the deep. At all events, this misconception is one of the many causes which hide from us the meaning of memory in one mind and in another, and thus curtain off from us the moral background of every life.

Apart from some such test as the Tichborne trial, we are curiously ignorant of the different aspects of the past to different minds. One would have expected, perhaps, that we should discern any idiosyn- In this region our very silence is miscracy in this region clearly enough. A leading. We are silent about what we good memory may be avowed without have forgotten. We are silent also about vanity, and a bad one confessed without what we remember most profoundly. shame, while the exigencies of practical" Rien ne se ressemble comme le néant et life are continually confuting or confirming the claim or the confession. But as for the test at all events, and we suspect as to the self-revelation, it belongs exclusively to the recent past, and concerns rather what we should call the materials for memory than memory. A man would say he had a bad memory if he forgot to call for an important letter at the post-office, but there is nothing in such a fact as this to throw any light on his relation to the past. While he is chafing at his forgetfulness, the words - even the insignificant words - of those who have been for more than a generation unseen among men, may be distinct in his inward ear; he may see the We could be far more nearly just to each flower-beds whence he plucked nosegays other, if we realized that with some perwith tiny fingers, and feel again the push sons the past years remain, and with othof a door that taxed his childish strength, ers they depart. Take, for instance, the on the threshold of a house whose very new light thus thrown on the sin of which, bricks and mortar have long since been perhaps, we can least bear to believe ourmingled with the dust. And on the other selves guilty. Ingratitude, in the sense of hand, the most unique and one of the long- an opportunity deliberately neglected to est lives we ever knew the life richest in repay a great benefit, we should hope was material of the knowledge that would have a crime as rare as it is repulsive, but in found an eager listener - was obscured by the sense of a half-voluntary oblivion of the profusion of detail in the near past; small benefits, of the importance of which far off, moved figures known to the histo- it is possible to take very different views, rian, but close at hand there were so many we do not think it is at all uncommon. of the doings and arrangements of con- Now look at it in the light of this intellecttemporaries, remembered with a really sur ual difference between man and man. prising accuracy, that a glimpse at the You are surprised that So-and-so shows giants who moved on our sphere when the no recollection of the kindly dealings century was young was hardly discernible which, having happened at a time when he through the cobwebs. Of this memory was nobody, and you were somebody, surefor the distant, we may almost say, in the ly deserved to be remembered. No intelexaggeration permissible to any short utter- lectual explanation can exonerate one who ance on such a subject, that it differs, with has forgotten a kindness; still it makes a different persons, as a window by day dif- great difference, surely, if the ungrateful fers from a window by night. To some person has forgotten everything else that persons, hardly anything within the room happened at the same time, wrongs to himis so distinct as its prospect. Those far- self included. To him, the long-ago off hills, that winding road, that distant means something it is an effort to see. indication of busy life attracts their eye To you, it may mean something it is an from open book, or pressing letter, or pic- effort not to see. You, perhaps, are imagture of some far fairer scene within. Toining him to see these past actions of yours, others, the past is much what the outlook becomes when the candles are lit. A hasty glance in that direction reveals nothing but the reflection of the observer on the window-pane, and if he opens the window, and makes an effort to look out, still nothing is visible but the dim outline of things close

and choose to ignore them, while it needs as great an effort on his part to recall them (to return to our first figure) as to look out from a lighted room. And his loss is not pure loss. His short memory may improve his relations with his fellow-men as often as it injures them; indeed, men and

women being what they are, it is to be feared rather more often. A generous person dismisses the slight of yesterday to oblivion and recalls the kindnesses that enriched his far-off youth, whatever be the medium through which he habitually views the past. But we shall never know the difficulty in either action without some reference to this medium, and by the same principle, we cannot, without such a reference to it, rightly judge him who forgets what he ought to remember, or who remembers what he ought to forget.

however ardently we may wish that such and such things had not been, it is wonderfully difficult even to desire that they should be forgotten. Whilst the past seems a part of oneself, that clinging to life which belongs to our whole being makes itself manifest in the recoil from oblivion, even with regard to what we would so gladly have avoided altogether. Oblivion is near enough; we approach that time, to borrow the fine, though rather confused, image of Locke, when our memory, is to resemble the tombs to which we are hastening, in which, though the marble and brass remain, "yet the inscriptions are effaced, and the imagery withers away." We will not go half-way to meet the chill shadow; even pain is less an object of dread than the loss of something that has become a part of our intellectual being.

Nevertheless, the "ought "remains. The very illustrations which bring home to us the difficulty of discarding or retaining the past, impress on us also its aspect as a part of duty, and while we shall best understand other lives by realizing its difficulty, it is a constant sense of its possibility which we need in order to mould our Own. That any one ought to remember, It is true, there is in the effort to forget, indeed, and that recollection therefore is, something that seems a sort of intelto some extent, a matter of will, we admit lectual suicide. Nevertheless, there is a every time we blame a child or a servant sense in which forgetting, we believe, is for forgetting a message, whatever diffi- as much of a duty as remembering. There culty we may find in carrying out our own is such a mental attitude, however difficult view consistently. But can we say that it be to describe, and though it is imposthe possibility of remembering at will in- sible to give it a single name, as turning volves the possibility of forgetting at will? our back on the past, or on part of the Because we may make a successful effort past. Duty has no more despotic claim to resist sleep, does it follow that we may on any part of our being than on that make a successful effort to resist wakeful- faculty which surrenders its possessions ness? There is a natural fitness in effort to oblivion. Doubtless it is impossible to to produce recollection, is there not also a put into words the kind of effort a man natural fitness in effort to prevent obliv- makes when he wills to do something which ion? Does not the very desire to forget, will, apparently, has no tendency to imply that we are doomed vividly and per- achieve. Or rather, perhaps, the effort to manently to remember? This question move the will is a thing indescribable in was, in fact, one of the great points of words. How can I make myself cease to interest in the famous trial to which we wish what I do wish? It must be possihave alluded. The possibility of obliter- ble, for it is sometimes the demand of ating a painful past from the mind was the conscience. The past must remain, but plea put forward on the part of the person we may open the door to something that who had, it was asserted, voluntarily re- hides it. The well-known and often reduced certain parts of his life to a blank. peated condemnation of the Bourbons, "This possibility," said the chief justice, that they had learnt nothing and forgotten in that masterly summing-up which most nothing, commemorates the general imof its readers must have wished they had pression, which we believe to be a promade their exclusive source of knowledge foundly true one, that a man must forget of the history, "will not be confirmed by in order to remember. There are some the experience of most people." How things in the history of every man which many, indeed, must have wondered that he must cease to contemplate, in order to any other suggestion had not been made in preference to one that defied all their most vivid experience, — that any one should forget a part of his youth because it was painful. You might as well suggest that a speech had been unheard by him because of the loud voice of the speaker. And what is surprising is that,

see anything else. We remember hearing the biography of one eminent lawyer by another criticised by a third as rendered nugatory by the constant reminder, "I have been very much ill-used by him." The biographer needed to forget one fact about his hero, in order to state clearly anything else about him. The necessity

is seen most clearly in the lives of the ❘tures. This is what he says of a gardengreat, but it is common to them and their party, in the "hot, bright days" towards humblest fellow-men. the end of June:

and how she gives us a charming glimpse sprinkling of tall schoolboys, and two or

Or we may take, as even more to the pur-
pose, a few lines from Mr. Morris, who
excels in painting such sweet summer pic-mer afternoon?

We begin to doubt when we remember | bores, they do nothing of the kind, and many summer afternoons which we have even the pleasant people seem less pleasspent indoors, even, it may be, with ant than usual. There is nothing to do feet on the fender, for it must be con but to talk, which would be very well infessed that our climate is not to be trusted. deed, if it were not impossible to talk There is a touch of shy caprice about the while standing on a lawn in the midst of seasons, something of March and April a continually shifting crowd. Every one underlying our summer weather. A "wet, knows this who has made the attempt. bird-haunted English lawn" has a loveli- Every sentence is broken by greetings ness of its own, but on a chilly August from fresh arrivals, every body is anxious day it is not exactly the spot where one to make a remark about the weather, and would choose to linger, even though a to ask whether you have seen everybody brass band from the county town should else; the people you like best are going do its best to make up for the autumnal as you come or coming as you go, and the silence of the birds by playing a set of time slips away in a succession of glimpses quadrilles. And our doubts increase if we of faces, and tantalizing snatches of conleave the poets altogether, and attempt a versation. sketch in more appropriate prose. We Yet this is a garden-party under comcan easily make a study from the life, for paratively favorable circumstances. Who garden parties do not seem likely to go does not know what it is when circumout of fashion. In spite of wind and rain, stances are unfavorable? There have they show themselves in our grounds year been three or four wet days in succession, after year, like shrubs that put forth and the morning comes with threatening blighted leaves and blossoms, but will not clouds. Still it does not actually rain, and die. Garden-parties are flowers which some one who is weather-wise says the will not flourish in our chilly air, and glass is going up, and even if there should since doubt, once admitted, spreads ever be a shower, it will be nothing of any imfaster we may question whether they portance. There is one, of course, just to would be worth very much if they did. give a final touch of wetness to the grass; They do not harmonize well with the tra- but after that it clears up more decidedly, ditions of old-fashioned country-houses and at the appointed time you start, hopand English hospitality. There is some-ing for the best. You are not one of those thing hollow and pretentious about them. fortunate but unsympathetic people who A man might be dull, and his entertainment poor, yet you felt that he had done what he could when he welcomed you to his home. But there is something not quite so cordial about the hospitality which stops to shut the house-door before unfastening the garden-gate. It is true that the welcome, such as it is, is widely diffused. People do not send out invitations to dinner without considering a little how their friends will suit each other, but they deal in a more haphazard fashion with the guests who are to stay out-ofdoors, and be refreshed with tea and thin bread-and-butter. There is plenty of room, and "The more the merrier" is a proverb of hopeful sound, so why should any one be excluded? Unluckily there is nothing to be done with these miscellaneous crowds when they arrive. The host and hostess can only walk about in smiling helplessness, devoutly hoping that all will go well, and that the pleasant people will come together and enjoy them selves. They are secretly aware that they have invited a great many who are not particularly pleasant. If the bores would but fasten on each other, there might not be much harm done; but of course, being

do not care about the color of their weather, and the dull, grey sky oppresses you with a guilty sense of melancholy. As you drive up to the house, however, you remark on the pleasant animation of the scene, sorely as it needs a gleam of sunshine; and you hasten to join the groups that come and go, with a certain briskness of movement, along the paths and underneath the trees. You understand it better a few minutes later, when you have ascertained that the garden is bleak and exposed, and that the wind (which is decidedly getting up) is either north or east, or that delightful mixture of the two which has found a poet of its own. There is lawn-tennis, of course, but the greatest happiness of the greatest number was never more deliberately ignored than when lawn-tennis was introduced at garden-parties. For every four who play, there are forty who must stand out, either because they cannot play, or because there is no room for them. It is not very amusing to look on, especially when an old lady at your elbow wants the game explained to her, but cannot get rid of the impression that it is very like battledore and shuttlecock, and that they might keep the ball up