call the pictures of the French Revolution. It is somehow
natural in such circumstances that there should occasionally be dramatic
outbursts with the blood of offenders bitterly demanded as though we
were not living in the Twentieth Century when blood alone is admittedly
no satisfaction. The presence of armed House police at every door, and
in the front rows of the strangers' gallery as well, contributes to this
impression which has certain qualities of the theatre about it and is
oddly stimulating. China at work legislating has already created her
first traditions: she is proceeding deliberately armed--with the
lessons of the immediate past fully noted.

This being the home of a literary race, papers and notebooks are on most
Members' desks. As the electric bells ring sharply an unending
procession of men file in to take their seats, for there has been a
recess and the House has been only half-filled. Nearly every one is in
Chinese dress (_pien-yi_) with the Member's badge pinned conspicuously
on the breast. The idea speedily becomes a conviction that this after
all is not extraneous to the nation, but actually of the living flesh, a
vital and imperative thing. The vastness and audacity of it all cannot
fail to strike the imaginative mind, for the four or five hundred men
who are gathered here typify, if they do not yet represent, the four or
five hundred millions who make up the country. You see as it were the
nation in profile, a ponderous, slow-moving mass, quickly responsive to
curious sub-conscious influences--suddenly angry and suddenly calm again
because Reason has after all always been the great goddess which is
perpetually worshipped. All are scholarly and deliberate in their
movements. When the Speaker calls the House in order and the debate
commences, deep silence comes save for the movement of hundreds of
nervous hands that touch papers or fidget to and fro. Every man uses
his hands, particularly when he speaks, not clenched as a European would
do, but open, with the slim fingers speaking a language of their own,
twisting, turning, insinuating, deriding, a little history of
compromises. It would be interesting to write the story of China from a
study of the hands.

Each man goes to the rostrum to speak, and each has much to say. Soon
another impression deepens--that the Northerners with their clear-cut
speech and their fuller voices have an advantage over the Southerners of
the kind that all public perform