During the month of July, 1863, issues of the same newspaper—then established at Shanghae—contained the following statements; and statements that no person with the slightest knowledge of the position and history of China can deny:—
"Our local readers must be as able as ourselves to form an opinion on passing events; and hardly one of us, we think, but must be satisfied that we are on the eve of a crisis in the affairs of the great nation on whose borders we dwell. Let us take a hasty glance at the position. A little over two hundred years ago, the Manchoos, under an ancestor of the present incumbent of the throne, overran the country. The cruelties which these savages perpetrated were of the most horrid description—in Kwang-tung alone over seven hundred thousand people—man, woman, and child—being massacred within a month.
"The Chinese, prior to this inroad, were a rich people, the houses of the better classes being buildings of convenient formation and durability. There is not much apparent wealth among the Chinese now, any sign of it being a temptation to government officers to extort from the holders. From the day these Tartars came into the country, China has been steadily deteriorating, and now the people may best be likened to herds of grovelling swine, living merely for the day, stultified in intellect by the most degrading superstition. Under the Manchoos, in fact, China exhibits to the world the saddest of all spectacles—the spectacle of a people unable to raise themselves in the social scale, to attain the full stature of man. To keep themselves on the throne, the Manchoos determined on three courses:—
"First. To make every Chinese shave the front of his head, and wear a tail. Those who would not do this were deemed rebels, and decapitated.
"Second. They declared it treason in all those who met secretly.
"Third. They vested all elevation to civil office in the sovereign himself, at Pekin, making the language of the court the official medium, and guarding against local faction by permitting no one to hold office in the district in which he was born. Every civil officer of the Manchoo government, in short, is a stranger to the people he rules over; he knows none of the ties of friendship for his flock. And, further to widen the breach between ruler and ruled, the sovereign allows his officers little or no salary; but, in its place and stead, sanctions—directs—as full a bleeding of the people's purses as said people can bear without open revolt.
"And these three courses have been as effectual as could be possibly anticipated.
"It was a long while before the Manchoos succeeded in the head-shaving and tail arrangements, especially about Shou-shing, in Che-kiang, and down south, in Kwang-se, where there are people (Miau-tze) who have never submitted to the badge.
"The secret meeting interdict, again, has met but small favour, and it was only last week that the Chinese newspaper, published at the N. C. Herald Office here, had a notice in it of the apprehension, by the Manchoos, of Messrs. Quan, Wan, and others, within the British concession, ostensibly because they were in league with the Soo-chow rebels, but really because they are leading men of the San-hoh-hwae (Triad Society, sworn to put down the Manchoos).
"The office-granting scheme has met the greatest success. The ambition of every petty farmer in the country is to train a son who is clever at his books, and, aided by his richer clansmen with the means to travel to the capital, has a chance of becoming one of the country's grandees; and, by a far-seeing device, the emperor grants antecedent honours; so that if a son is honoured, the father is honoured—that is to say, if a Chinese, by merit and skill, succeeds in raising himself to a mandarinate of the highest class, becomes, to speak equivalently, an earl or a duke, the father of that fortunate grandee, although performing on the homestead the functions of a cow-herd, becomes ennobled also; the honours, in short, are retrospective from the son to the father, not forward, hereditarily, from the father to the son.
"And it has been by these means that the system of Tartar rule has become to be liked by the people. They overlook the villanous extortions which the sons have to practise on the people to elevate themselves. They are blind to all, and simply determine that the end justifies the means. There is a general fling around of stolen sugar-plums, he being happiest who, in the scramble, gets the largest handful."
The enormous multitude of victims slaughtered during the progress and maintenance of the Manchoo dynasty will never be known by Europeans; though—judging by all authentic records of their invasion of China, its constant rebellions against their authority, and the murderous rule they have exercised—the destruction of life considerably outnumbered the hosts sacrificed in the track of the greatest destroyers of the human species upon record, from Alexander the Great to Genghis-Khan. The barbarity of the Manchoo rule is unparalleled in ancient or modern history; while the fiendish nature of their punishments by torture—especially those for treason—and the records of the "board of punishments," instituted by them, constitute the blackest spot in the annals of mankind.
Upon the character of the last great rising of the Chinese against their oppressors, the Ti-ping rebellion, the Bishop of Victoria, in 1854, wrote:—
"The finger of Divine Providence appears to us signally conspicuous in this revolution. The moral, social, and political condition of China was almost hopelessly wretched and debased. Its whole system of government, of society, and religion, was to be broken up, remodelled, reconstructed, and renewed. In looking about for an agency available for such an end, the mind was depressed and perplexed. The government was corrupt, the scholars were feeble and inert, the gentry were servile and timid, the lower classes were engrossed in the struggle for subsistence, the whole nation seemed bound hand and foot, with their moral energies paralyzed, their intellectual faculties stunted, and their civil liberties crushed beneath the iron gripe of power and the debasing influence of sensuality. Political subjection to an effete despotism, and addiction to opium, had enervated the national mind, and rendered the Chinese helpless as a race.
"From themselves no reformer seemed likely to arise. Their canonized virtue of filial piety was perverted and abused as the grand support of despotism. But it is in this state of perplexity and despondency that we turn to survey the present movement, its chief actors, and its accomplished results; and beholding we admire, and admiring we thank God for what our eyes are privileged to see."
FOOTNOTES:
4. This strong tendency of the Chinese to combine and organize is well noticed in "Impressions of China," by Captain Fishbourne, at pages 415 to 418.
5. Alluding to the establishment of the Tartar Budhism.
6. The badge of slavery imposed by the Manchoo Tartars upon their conquest of China.
7. The form of head-dress and insignia of nobility introduced by the Manchoos.
8. Referring to the elaborate and merciless laws of treason and disaffection established by the Manchoos.