his dollars sent to Calcutta and melted down, and from stamped ingots we may yet in time come to an universal dollar. The attempt to introduce the use of English money into the English colony, Hong-kong, was a failure; perhaps it is for the best that we should be led on in this manner rather than start a new coin at once. But we are digressing from our subject. Trade in China is full of risk, and replete with trouble, but the fortunes with which China merchants retire shew that it pays, and with a prospect of gain English merchants fear nothing.

Now for the manners and customs, not that in going to China we need adopt them, but that we may know what we have to expect; perhaps if we find them less barbarous than we fear, that we may not utterly ignore them.

First of all human institutions comes marriage, and as the most interesting it is the first that shall occupy our attention. In making a match, the first thing to be regarded is that the families are on a par one with another, the next to engage a professional matchmaker to conclude it. The Chinese are a practical people, and object to wasting time on any thing from which they are to derive no profit, and if love is labor lost what then is wooing. The Chinese vote it a nuisance, and hire some one to do it for them. The matchmaker goes to the father of the young lady and tells him that Mr. So-and-So, a youth of surpassing talent and sufficient means, desires to pluck a peach blossom from his tree; the stern parent replics gravely that he will ask a friend to manage the affair for him, and the friend and the matchmaker settle between them what shall be the amount of the betrothal presents. If the bridegroom is dissatisfied with the appearance of his perhaps unlovely bride, he can send her back, but he forfeits these presents, otherwise they are returned to him when his wife comes home. Few matches once concluded are broken off. A man being, we read, one day in a great passion with his wife got an immense stone, and shattered the pride of her kitchen-an enormous saucepan. Why did you not' said the neighbours, 'rather break her head.' Too much expense,' was the philosophical reply. A kettle costs only 100 cash, a wife two or three hundred dollars.

Love rarely enters into Chinese interiors, their system of crushing the affections-the shutting up of the women prevents it. One who has never been abroad cannot feel that yearning for one's native land, that when we have a moment's release from the affairs of our business, chokes us here. One who has not flirted cannot love, but these Chinese households are not so unhappy as one would suppose, the wife knowing that if she gives loose to her tongue and temper, if she neglects her household or ordinary duties, her husband can turn her out of doors; the husband think

ing that if he drives her to suicide, and little will make a Chinawoman do so, he will have the expense of getting another wife, so they generally manage to rub on tolerably well together. Sometimes indeed the men take, as the law allows them, a complement of secondary wives; then unless they can afford each a separate house, they are convinced that neither Mormonism nor Islamism is a pleasant, even if a true creed; they soon learn that however charming one fair lady may be, with the exception of black eyes, she will soon possess no beauties when she gets a companion. Wise men will be content with one.

Weddings in China-although the ceremony of marriage is simple, the two merely pledging each other in a cup of wine, the symbol of the cup of bliss or misery they are henceforth to quaff together-are grand affairs. Plays and lanterns, gongs and bagpipes, feasting and drinking, are all called in to dull sense, dazzle the eye, and drown reflection even in the poor family. Cooke describes the bride dressed in borrowed finery, seated on a barrel, the husband and his friends drinking samshee, and the bag-pipe screeching at the door.

The other ceremony of life, or rather the ceremony of death, is equally noisy, equally jolly., Chinamen like to have their coffins in their houses ages before they die; it is pleasant to look on the handsome dress, for they are richly carved, they are to wear below, when finally they are put into it. If it be convenient to bury them, they are carried to their grave amid the crash of gongs and the banging of crackers; if not they are laid bye for a convenient season, the Chinamen hiring people to wait for them as they do to woo, and consoling themselves for the loss they have sustained by calculating the wealth, the dear deceased or, as they would say, the revered ancestor, has left behind him, and drinking samshee.

But if we are to go to China it will be better for us to seek out these customs there, only remembering to believe but onehalf of what we see, scarcely anything, perhaps nothing, of what we are told. And speaking of this we have yet to allude to the difficulties in the way of acquiring the language. Dictionaries there are many, but the sinologue to whom you refer says, 'Oh they are all useless, wait till mine comes out'; grammars there are too, but you read the language has no grammar; you disbelieve it, but what are you to do?

Nor will the people help you out of your difficulty. They have an objection to barbarians speaking the flowery language at all. If you make the slightest error in pronunciation, they will affect to misunderstand you, and how are you to learn the accent from books. You must defer it till you get there, and then give yourself up to Cooke's abomination-the Chinese teachers.

With one of these, you learn from Cooke, you may possibly be able to speak after two years' study. If one wishes to go to China to study the Chinese, and not one's own countrymen settled there, one must make up one's mind to sacrifice two years. We have not patience to do this, so leave the subject of China in disgust. If we had thought of the language earlier, we should have been saved all our trouble. Echoing Mr. Cooke's sentiment that if we would do anything in China we must abolish Chinese, we sit down to wait until this is done for us.

ART. IV.-1. Report on the Criminal Administration of the Punjaub for 1857.

2. The Punjaub Darogah's Manual. Compiled by LIEUT. COLONEL CLARKE, LATE OFFICIATING COMMISSIONER OF THE LAHORE DIVISION.

.3. Report of the Inspector of Prisons in the Punjaub, for the year 1857. By Authority. Lahore. 1858.

4. The Jail Manual for the use of District Officers in the Punjaub. By C. HATHAWAY, M. D. Published by Authority. Lahore. 1858.

5. Circular Orders of the Judicial Commissioner, Punjaub. 1853-1856 (inclusive.) Lahore. 1858.

In

WE propose to give a short account of crime in the Punjaub, and the means taken for its prevention and punishment. Those, who make Blue Books their special study, and who look with greater interest for the publication of official returns and Government reports, than for the next Quarterly or the newest novel, cannot fail to have informed themselves that, in the Punjaub, crimes are divided into four general classes, not according to the nature of the offences, but with respect to the degree of atrocity which attends their commission. The first class embraces the most heinous offences, all murders and crimes in which wounds have been inflicted with murderous intent. the second class are comprehended culpable homicide and crimes accompanied with serious injury to the person, but in which no intention to commit murder is apparent. Common felonies constitute the third class; while the crimes of fourth class atrocity include the whole catalogue of misdemeanours. By this arrangement, an assault may be classified under any of these divisions, and dacoity, burglary, cattle-stealing, and a variety of other offences may appear as crimes of highest or medium atrocity, if the circumstances under which they are committed be aggravating or otherwise.

Heinous offences are uncommon in the Punjaub. Thuggee is almost extinct. Not a single case was reported during the whole of last year. Dacoity, formerly a national and somewhat chivalrous crime, is now scarcely known. No bands of armed marauders patrol the roads, and plunder the houses of the rich. The Lattial is a stranger in the land of the five rivers. Between the prince and the ryot, there are no landholders with wide local influence to rouse an idle peasantry at their call for the defence of an imaginary boundary or the redress of a fancied wrong. Riots and affrays there are. But even these are

few, and spring from impulse and passion, not from premeditation and revenge. It is the pride of the Punjaub Government, that under its vigorous rule gang crime has disappeared. Desperadoes have fled before the face of law, administered without rigid formalities, by men of strong common sense and manly English honesty. The police may be corrupt-where in India are they immaculate ?-the physical aspect of the country affords many facilities for crime, the people are restless and impulsive, yet` atrocious crime has been put down with a rapidity elsewhere unknown. Within the last six years, it has diminished onehalf. In 1852, the crimes of first class atrocity numbered 415, while in 1857, notwithstanding the excitement of that memorable year, they amounted to only 195. There is a similar, though somewhat smaller, decrease in the second class of offences. In both classes, the decrease has been gradual, not sudden, and is therefore to be attributed to the vigour and efficiency with which inflexible law has been dispensed, and not to a combination of casual circumstances.

Probably the most common among the more heinous crimes is that of murder, not the deliberate crime of avarice, but murder from passion, impulse, jealousy, pride—a crime not inconsistent with much that is generous in the offender. All along the northern frontier and down the Derajat, where impetuous mountain blood warms in the veins of a people keenly sensitive to injury and swift to resent it, passion partakes much of the character of chivalrous impulse, and the victim of the law is not unfrequently a man of high and ardent feeling. But even among these tribes the force of law has asserted itself, and men of note among the mountains, whose hands were reddened in the older times with more than one murder, have been heard to lament over the loss of what they termed the sports of bye-gone days. The next fertile source of bloodshed is woman. How many victims have been sacrificed at her shrine, since first the fatal charms of Helen sowed discord between the East and West. The rape of Io, we are told by the Father of History, was the beginning of wrongs. But the oriental character must have become radically changed since the days when Herodotus recorded that "the Persians 'consider that, while none but wicked men carry off women by 'violence, fools only trouble themselves about them when they 'are once taken away, because they could never have been carried off, unless they had been consenting." (Clio. 4). A return to the philosophical indifference of the old Persian worthies is, in this country where the marriage tie sits so lightly, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Murders arising from social causes are the most difficult of all to suppress, because they are committed under the influence of momentary uncontrollable ex