The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 1900. IN CHINA.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXII, Issue 170, 27 June 1900, Page 2

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 1900. IN CHINA.

The prospects of trouble between Japan and Russia have been dwarfed into insignificance by the preponderant seriousness and increasing gravity of the situation in Obina. The social and political atmosphere of the great stagnant nation is being permeated with noxious gases, the effects ui whieh have already proved them to bt> the swift and cruel agents of death. What dire possibilities of peril are now finding vent from the sealed-up eorruptien of centuries it is impossible to imagine ; only this we know: that nowhere in the wide world exists there * nation so susceptible to the influences of evil than that which has dignified itself, but degraded thiDgs celestial, by assuming the title of " The Celestial Kingdom." To change the metaphor, the Spirit of the Fast has been busily sowing, craftly,relentlessly, unceasingly, its seed of dragons' teeth, and now has come the time of a terrible harvest to stamp down which the resources and courage of the Western World are likely te be taxed to their utmost. To the Empress of China is commonly credited the present outbreak against Western influence as represented by tbe .missionaries and other European agencies prosecuting their aims in that land, but that one woman, no matter how powerful her influence over her people or how vindictive and inveterate her hatred of all aliens, could never inspire or bring about such an outbreak as has now begun. She is but a prominent unit i amongst ur.numbcred millions of lesser degree in whom hatred of the foreigner is only the expression of demoniacal antipathy to the dawning of the day, for nations whose deeds are evil hats the light even as do individuals. With all the faults and shortcomings that may justly be laid to the charge of the Western nations, they are centuries nearer the goal of the human race than is the empire of darkness and delay, and the contrast made vivid by even the slight measure in which the West has sought to influence the East has startled the powers of reaction and darkness into malignant opposition and fatal activity. The "-White Man's Burden " contains no other element so weighty and cruel as that part he is now about to shoulder by takiag in hand the Chinese Empire and sottiag straight the crooked things therein, A people such as these form a hideeui excrescence on the face of civilisation — an eruption pf evil tkat calls fer the prompt and thorough use of the surgery of the sword and the cauterising power of gunpowder,