into China. The older faith there is peaceful, tolerant ; the younger faith, like its rival in Europe, is virile, militant, intolerant ; whence great wars in China proper, and revolt here in Turkestan, where bloody deeds were being enacted in the self-same epoch with Gettysburg and the Wildernéss. The forty years that have passed since those great days seem to have worked out, in Western China, a status for the Mussulman fairly satisfactory to him and to his neighbour. Doubtless this might also be said of the Turki Mussulman (for his subjection to China is of long date), but that here the situation is again made complex by the "Russian advance." The importance and the sensitiveness of affairs in Kashgaria, as they are viewed in Pekin, seem clearly manifested by the fact that China has built and maintains a telegraph line from Pekin to Kashgarmore than two thousand miles. We were astonished to learn this, more astonished on reflecting that this work, quite stupendous for China, had been completed without blowing of trumpets —indeed, so quietly that many well-informed Europeans have never given the matter a thought. It seemed to me most significant as to the unheralded development of material strength which may go on in China when her own scientifically educated people, or the headlong Japanese, shall be running in multitudes to and fro in the land.
Invention's great miracles—telegraphy, telephony —are thus made an offering by America, the youngest to China, the oldest among great nations. Over this desert-spanning line, and from its terminus at Pekin, through the great submarine lines, the
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