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institutions are often glaringly defective in foreign eyes, it does not by any means follow that their defects are always invisible to Chinese eyes. Sometimes they are purposely left in a state of partial inanition because to vitalise them might be to endow them with dangerous potentialities. That is the case with a large section of the army. China has owed much of her domestic tranquillity in the past to the weakness of her provincial troops. She has kept them just strong enough to cope with what may be called the normal in- cidents of local life, such as petty riots, fiscal dis-turbances, and raids of bandits, but she has never suffered them to grow so strong as to be a formidable factor of insurrection. Thus when the Taiping rebellion, an affair of quite abnormal dimensions, broke out, the first essential was to organise troops to quell it; and the ultimate suc- cess of these levies, together with the éclat attaching to the "Ever-victorious Army" led by a British officer, Gordon, suggested a respectful estimate of China's military capacities. Then, in the immediate sequel of these events, the great Viceroy Chang Chih-tung set up iron works at Hanyang and an arsenal at the Pagoda anchorage of Foochow; the still greater Li Hung-chang

founded naval and military colleges at Tientsin, and organised under foreign instructors in Chili an army which seemed to possess all the attributes of strength, while the Viceroy Liu Kun-yi at Nanking took similarly enlightened steps, having