Celestial ox gores the Yankee bull.
Indemnity, swift and condign, does what mortal hand can do to heal the
hurt. A Chinese court, upon Chinese soil, is not allowed to try a Chinese
for an injury done to the Christian stranger within Chinese gates.
Treaties imposed by the strong arm reserve practical jurisdiction to our
own representatives; and it is the peers of the alleged sufferer, not the
peers of the accused, who virtually try the cause. Similar rules obtain in
the other Mongolian empire. We all possess, as still quite a fresh
sensation, a memory of the account published a few years since of the
committing of harikari by a Japanese official of high social standing, at
the bidding of a native court, in atonement of an affront offered to an
American officer--how the representatives of the United States were
formally invited, in full uniform, to witness the bloody self-immolation
of the proud but to the law submissive Mongol; how everything went off _en
regle_, from the theatrical preparation of the stage with seat, sword and
red carpet to the climax of decapitation of the culprit by his
body-servant; and how our representatives in gilt and blue filed out
shocked, but vindicated, and satiated with more than the full measure of
justice pressed down and running over.

Harikari has not begun, nor is it likely soon to begin, to thin the ranks
of our Californian office-holders. Few die, none resign, and absolutely
none are got rid of in that way. They have no treaty-courts to make them
afraid. Their lives are their own, and we hope may always be. But we
trust, also, that they will accord a like privilege to their neighbors
from over the way, and cultivate the impression that life may be dear as
well to a man with a lemon complexion, oblique eyes and a pig-tail. As an
evidence of a dawning disposition to accept this view we may be permitted
to hail with satisfaction the disappearance for twenty-seven years and six
months of a Californian who declined adopting it.

E. C. B.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Peru. Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the
Incas. By E. George Squier, late United States Commissioner to
Peru. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Mr. Squier does not give us the date of his explorations in Peru, but he
tells us that they occupied him two years, during which he "crossed and
recrossed the Cordillera and the Andes from the Pacific to the Amazonian
rivers, sleeping in rude India