ointed Inspector General, to superintend
this collection of duties. He introduced system and honesty, where
before there had been only disorder and peculation. From twenty to
thirty million dollars are in this way collected every year. Swatow is
the third port in the amount thus obtained, itself furnishing two to
three millions of the aggregate result. But this putting her collection
of customs into the hands of foreigners, though it has taught China her
own wastefulness and the superiority of Western finance, is a burden so
humiliating that it cannot always continue. When China fully awakes, she
will realize her strength and will reclaim what her weakness ceded to
Great Britain.

Our mission compound is one of the noblest in the East. It is due to
the foresight and executive ability of Dr. William Ashmore, Senior. He
began his missionary work in Bangkok, Siam, but was transferred by our
Missionary Union to Swatow, with the view of opening China to our
missionary efforts. He had Irish blood in his veins. He was witty and
eloquent, fervid and passionate. But he was also a man of grit, and a
hero of the faith. He wanted a quiet base of supplies from which he
could send out expeditions into the heart of China. He had no means of
any account. But he saw the possibilities in these steep and barren
hillsides opposite Swatow, and for six hundred dollars he bought a tract
which he gradually turned into a garden, with twenty mission buildings
and residences so thrust into the rocks and so overhanging one another,
that the whole plant seems a miracle of engineering. Like a fortress, it
commands the city of Swatow across the bay, very much as Governor's
Island commands New York. From its church and its schools have gone out
a score of evangelists and native pastors, to turn Swatow and the whole
country within a radius of a hundred miles into a present seed-plot and
a future garden of the Lord.

William Ashmore, Senior, died seven years ago. But he left a son of the
same name, who is a Chinese scholar of wide reputation, a sound
theologian, and a leader greatly beloved. He has nearly completed a
translation of the Bible into the colloquial Chinese--a felt need of
many years. At his house, so wedged into the rocky hillside that a
typhoon might seem equal to washing it down into the bay, we were most
hospitably entertained. Here we spent a memorable Sabbath Day. At the
church service, at least five hundred church-members and pupils