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and foreign-drilled troops, and a sum of 2 millions for public works (including the Yellow River embankment, etc.). But such appropriations have now to be reduced in the face of the indebtedness contracted by China on account of various loans floated abroad to pay for public works or to discharge the indemnity exacted by Japan in 1895. Of these loans ten were contracted between 1887 and 1898, their total amount being 61½ million pounds sterling^[1] in round numbers, and the whole will be paid off, according to the present programme, by the year 1949. In addition to these debts she became liable for an indemnity of 450 million taels to the various Powers with whom she fought—or, to speak more accurately, who fought with her—in the sequel of the Boxer uprising of 1900, so that the annual charges upon her revenue on account of the service of her foreign loans and her latest indemnity are altogether 41 million taels, approximately. It has been a matter of some perplexity to find means of defraying such a sum, but the task has been achieved by diverting to the central treasury moneys previously appropriated to defray local expenditures—notably the proceeds of the salt gabelle and the native customs—and inasmuch as the provincial officials are adopting measures to compensate this loss by fresh exactions, a sense of keen dissatisfaction is growing throughout the country.