e coinage is to be brought more into line with commercial
requirements. The administration of the law is to be so improved that
an honest demand may be made--as Japan made it some years back--for the
abolition of extra-territoriality, a treaty obligation under which China
gives up all jurisdiction over resident foreigners, and agrees that
they shall be subject, civilly and criminally alike, only to their own
authorities. The old patriarchal form of government, autocratic in name
but democratic in reality, which has stood the Chinese people in such
good stead for an unbroken period of nearly twenty-two centuries, is
also to change with the changes of the hour, in the hope that a new era
will be inaugurated, worthy to rank with the best days of a glorious
past.

And here perhaps it may be convenient if a slight outline is given of
the course marked out for the future. China is to have a "constitution"
after the fashion of most foreign nations; and her people, whose sole
weapon of defence and resistance, albeit one of deadly efficiency, has
hitherto been combination of the masses against the officials set over
them, are soon to enjoy the rights of representative government. By an
Imperial decree, issued late in 1907, this principle was established;
and by a further decree, issued in 1908, it was ordered that at the
end of a year provincial assemblies, to deliberate on matters of local
government, were to be convened in all the provinces and certain
other portions of the empire, as a first step towards the end in view.
Membership of these assemblies was to be gained by election, coupled
with a small property qualification; and the number of members in each
assembly was to be in proportion to the number of electors in each
area, which works out roughly at about one thousand electors to
each representative. In the following year a census was to be taken,
provincial budgets were to be drawn up, and a new criminal code was to
be promulgated, on the strength of which new courts of justice were
to be opened by the end of the third year. By 1917, there was to be a
National Assembly or Parliament, consisting of an Upper and Lower House,
and a prime minister was to be appointed.

On the 14th of October 1909 these provincial assemblies met for the
first time. The National Assembly was actually opened on the 3rd of
October 1910; and in response to public feeling, an edict was issued a
month later ordering the full constitution to be