not invoking such artificial sanction, aspired to the dominion of China because their ancestors of the Golden Horde had ruled over the northern half of the empire.  The Norman conquest, growing out of a family quarrel, was decided by a single battle.  The Manchus’ conquest of a country more than ten times the extent of Britain was not so easy to effect.  Yet they achieved it with unexampled rapidity, because they came by invitation and they brought peace to a people exhausted by long wars.  Their task was comparatively easy in the north, where the traditions of the Kin Tartars still survived; but it was prolonged and bloody in the south.

Both houses treated their new subjects as a conquered people.  Each imposed the burden of foreign garrisons and a new nobility.  Each introduced a foreign language, which they tried to perpetuate as the speech of the court, if not of the people.  In each case the language of the people asserted itself.  In Britain it absorbed and assimilated the alien tongue; in China, where the absence of common elements made amalgamation [Page 269] impossible, it superseded that of the conquerors, not merely for writing purposes, but as the spoken dialect of the court.

Both conquerors found it necessary to conciliate the subject race by liberal and timely concessions; but here begins a contrast.  In Britain no external badge of subjection was ever imposed; in process of time all special privileges of the ruling caste were abolished; and no trace of race antipathy ever displays itself anywhere—­if we except Ireland.  In China the cue remains as a badge of subjection.  Habit has reconciled the people to its use; but it still offers a tempting grip to revolutionary agitators.  Every party that raises the standard of revolt abolishes the cue; would it not be wise for the Manchu Government to make the wearing of that appendage a matter of option, especially as it is beginning to disappear from their soldiers’ uniform?

The extension of reform in dress from camp to court and from court to people (to them as a matter of option) would remove a danger.  It would also remove a barrier in the way of China’s admission into the congress of nations.  The abolition of the cue implies the abandonment of those long robes which make such an impression of barbaric pomp.  Already the Chinese are tacitly permitted to adopt foreign dress; and in every case they have to dispense with the cue.  The Japanese never did a wiser thing than to adopt our Western costume.  Their example tends to encourage a reform of the same kind in China.  A new costume means a new era.