kaong; some by strangulation. These unfortunate offenders preferred capital punishment at the hands of the elders of their respective villages, and in the presence of their families, to falling into the hands of the mandarins by whom they would have been first tortured, and then decapitated. In one instance which came under my own notice a woman named Mak Shee, who resided in the village of Laong-hoo, which is in the vicinity of the market-town of Sinnam, so reviled the elders of the village in question for putting her husband, whom they had found guilty of sedition, to death-calling upon them, now that they had taken away the support of her life, to supply her and her children with bread-that eventually they ordered her to be bound hand and foot and cast into the waters of a neighbouring river. When visiting the silk districts of Kwang-tung in 1862, I learned on reaching the market-town of Koon-shan, that, only a few days before, the gentry and elders had ordered twenty-one men who had attacked and captured two large cargo boats heavily laden with silk, to be put to death by drowning. These unfortunate wretches were, it appeared, all bound together before they were plunged into the stream.

Although the penal code of China is extremely severe, especially in cases which touch the safety and stability of the throne, or the peace of the empire, it has many very humane traits. Thus it is in accordance with the tenor of the laws for a judge to grant a free pardon to an only son who has been sentenced to undergo transportation for a definite or indefinite period of time. This pardon is, of course, granted to the delinquent for the sake of his parents. Again, should three brothers, the only sons of their parents, combine in committing a crime deserving of decapitation or transportation, the two youngest would on conviction be punished according to law, whilst the first-born would be pardoned, though equally guilty. Should a father be transported, the law allows his son to accompany him into exile. Wives, also, whose husbands are convicts, are, by the same merciful consideration, allowed to sojourn with their husbands in the penal settlements. The imperial clemency is also extended to all offenders who are idiots, or who have mutilated or crippled bodies, and are

thereby rendered unequal to labour. Further, the law does not admit of convicts being sent into banishment during the first month of the year, which is regarded as a month of rest and indulgence to all; nor yet during the sixth month, as the heat of summer is then supposed to have reached its height, and travelling is in consequence attended with much personal risk and inconvenience.

In this and the preceding chapter I have described much that must have filled the reader with pain and indignation. No one can read unmoved, of courts of justice where iniquity and reckless cruelty prevail-of officials whose venality is a pit in which many an innocent family has perished-of gaols in which human beings are penned in dens of noisome filth and squalor, with, in too many instances, barely such necessaries as suffice to keep life in their emaciated bodies-of barbarous punishments which recall the darkest pages of European history. It is a very obvious reflection, but I cannot close without remarking how profoundly grateful we ought to be that our heritage has fallen to us in a land whose judges are incorrupt, and whose laws are imbued with the spirit of that Word which teaches rulers and people alike "to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God."

CHAPTER IV.

RELIGION.

FROM various passages in the writings which the Chinese regard as canonical, it may be gathered that they were at one time favoured with a knowledge of that Being whom to know spiritually is life eternal, and that in Him, whom they worship as Wang-Teen, and whom they speak of as Shang-Te, they worshipped God. The Shoo-King and the She-King ascribe to this Being the attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and immutability; and the worship once rendered to Teen seems to have been in many respects similar to that of the patriarchs under the Old Testament dispensation. At the earliest period when we have any account of it, this primitive religion was associated with an idolatrous worship of the spirits of departed ancestors, and of spirits supposed to preside over the various operations of Nature. In this corrupt development the Chinese almost entirely lost sight of that God whom they had acknowledged as the Creator of the universe and its Supreme Ruler. With this religion, which still holds its place as the national or established religion of the land, the name of Confucius is associated. It is to him as the compiler and editor of what have been termed the canonical books of the Chinese, and the most illustrious and influential teacher of morality they have produced, that its permanence as a distinct system and its supremacy in the state over the religions by which it is surrounded are mainly due.

Confucius flourished in the latter half of the sixth century before Christ-a century remarkable in the East for its spiritual