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they had not lost those qualities when they first came into collision with European troops. The defence of Chinkiang on the 21st of July, 1842, was a fine example of enduring courage when twenty-three hundred Manchus resisted, almost successfully, the assault of nine thousand well-equipped and highly disciplined English troops, to whose weapons and manner of fighting they were strangers, and finally, after having shown admirable bravery, chose suicide rather than surrender, their general perishing in flames kindled by his own direction. In recent times it has been insisted by some eminent writers that the Tartar and Mongol banner-men have not maintained their military virtues; that their robust simplicity and manliness are things of the past, and that they have "degenerated into idle, flabby, and too often opium-smoking parasites." But such assertions are difficult to reconcile with the proofs given at Chinkiang in 1842 and at Taku in i860. There has been nothing in the history of the past half-century to account for the degeneration so often predicated of Tartar and Mongol manhood. The men have not changed, and the most reasonable explanation of their inefficiency as fighting units in modern times is that the rapidity of the age's progress has rendered their old-fashioned ways more or less paralysing. Assuredly it is not accurate to describe the whole Chinese army as " simply a rabble, provided with bags of rice, gay flags, umbrellas, fans and (quite