led down on board the
French mail steamer _Nera_, bound for Shanghai. My friends, good
fellows, in reluctantly speeding me on my way, prophesied that this
would prove to be my last long voyage to a last long rest, that the
Chinese would never allow me to come out of China alive. Such is the
ignorance of the average man concerning the conditions of life and
travel in the interior of this Land of Night.

Here, then, was I on my way to that land towards which all the world was
straining its eyes, whose nation, above all nations of the earth, was
altering for better things, and coming out of its historic shell.
"Reform, reform, reform," was the echo, and I myself was on the way to
hear it.

At the time I started for China the cry of "China for the Chinese" was
heard in all countries, among all peoples. Statesmen were startled by
it, editors wrote the phrase to death, magazines were filled with
copy--good, bad and indifferent--mostly written, be it said, by men
whose knowledge of the question was by no means complete: editorial
opinion, and contradiction of that opinion, were printed side by side in
journals having a good name. To one who endeavored actually to
understand what was being done, and whither these broad tendencies and
strange cravings of the Chinese were leading a people who formerly were
so indifferent to progress, it seemed essential that he should go to the
country, and there on the spot make a study of the problem.

Was the reform, if genuine at all, universal in China? Did it reach to
the ends of the Empire?

That a New China had come into being, and was working astounding results
in the enlightened provinces above the Yangtze and those connected with
the capital by railway, was common knowledge; but one found it hard to
believe that the west and the south-west of the empire were moved by the
same spirit of Europeanism, and it will be seen that China in the west
moves, if at all, but at a snail's pace: the second part of this volume
deals with that portion of the subject.

And it may be that the New China, as we know it in the more forward
spheres of activity, will only take her proper place in the family of
nations after fresh upheavals. Rivers of blood may yet have to flow as a
sickening libation to the gods who have guided the nation for forty
centuries before she will be able to attain her ambition of standing
line to line with the other powers of the eastern and western worlds.
But it seems that