potential. Now, in respect to military strength, ignorance of physical science is weakness. If the Chinese, possessing organisation, intelligence, experience, patience, and character, but lacking science, should be put under European rule, it could be only temporary — they would thus, perforce, get science and be strong. They will enter the syndicate of those who rule the weak. And these, the weak, we shall ever have among us because of certain ineradicable climatic race-differences which will always cause certain races to be subject to their neighbours of sterner mould. The great moral and intellectual qualities which have made the Chinese Emperor to be the " Elder Brother" to all Eastern Asia sufficiently mark the potentialities of this powerful people. Until these larger movements, shall have taken place it is profitable to the occasional Western traveller to study the dignity, the poise, the civilisation of such a man as the Taotai of Kashgar.
To this worthy official we paid due visit, interpretation being done by Colonel Miles's cultivated moonshee, a Mohammedan gentleman from Lahore, who tabulated his ancestry through the Prophet to Adam's self. Conversation ran in well-worn ruts—health, age, number of children, nativity,—present objective. When I pointedly asked that we might have letters of safe-conduct to Khotan and Polu, the old gentleman simply did n't answer, and soon began sipping his tea, a decorous signal that the interview was closed. We felt "in our bones" that the cautious Mandarin wanted to hear from M. Petrovsky before committing himself. We were, in a measure, under Colonel Miles's wing, yet, as we
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