As an illustration of the actual procedure take the case in which Chang first achieved a national reputation.  Chunghau, a Manchu of noble family and high in favour at court, had been sent to Russia in 1880 to demand the restoration of Ili, a province of Chinese Turkestan, which the Russians had occupied on pretext of quelling its chronic disorders.  Scarcely had he reported the success of his mission, which had [Page 224] resulted in recovering two-thirds of the disputed territory, when Chang came forward and denounced it as worse than a failure.  He had, as Chang proved, permitted the Russians to retain certain strategic points, and had given them fertile districts in exchange for rugged mountains or arid plains.  To such a settlement no envoy could be induced to consent, unless chargeable with corruption or incompetence.

The unlucky envoy was thrown into prison and condemned to death (but reprieved), and his accuser rose in the official scale as rapidly as if he had won a great battle on land or sea.  His victory was not unlike that of those British orators who made a reputation out of the impeachment of Lord Clive or Warren Hastings, save that with him a trenchant pen took the place of an eloquent tongue.  I knew Chunghau both before and after his disgrace.  In 1859, when an American embassy for the first time entered the gates of Peking, it was Chunghau who was appointed to escort the minister to the capital and back again to the seacoast—­a pretty long journey in those days when there was neither steamboat nor railway.  During that time, acting as interpreter, I had occasion to see him every day, and I felt strongly attracted by his generous and gentlemanly bearing.  The poor fellow came out of prison stripped of all his honours, and with his prospects blighted forever.  In a few months he died of sheer chagrin.

The war with Japan in 1894-1895 found Chang established in the viceroyalty of Hukwang, two provinces in Central China, with a prosperous population of over fifty millions, on a great highway of internal [Page 225] traffic rivalling the Mississippi, and with Hankow, the hub of the Empire, for its commercial centre.  When he saw the Chinese forces scattered like chaff by the battalions of those despised islanders he was not slow to grasp the explanation.  Kang Yuwei, a Canton man, also grasped it, and urged on the Emperor the necessity for reform with such vigour as to prompt him to issue a meteoric shower of reformatory edicts, filling one party with hope and the other with dismay.

Chang had held office at Canton; and his keen intellect had taken in the changed relations of West and East.  He perceived that a new sort of sunshine shed its beams on the Western world.  He did not fully apprehend the spiritual elements of our civilisation; but he saw that it was clothed with a power unknown to the sages of his country, the forces of nature being brought into subjection through science and popular education.  He felt that China must conform