Ashburton Guardina. Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1909. THIS AND THAT.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXiX, Issue 7730, 25 February 1909, Page 2

Ashburton Guardina. Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1909. THIS AND THAT.

Settlement of -the trouble that has arisen m Europe m consequence of Austria s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of Bulgaria s assumption <m independence m spite of Tiu'kev's suzerainty and the Treaty of li.'Hin, is still m the distance. No doubt, the acceptance by I urkey oi £12 500,000 as 'compensation tor the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina removed one of the risks oi war, but there still await settlement such important issues as compensation tolurkey by Bulgaria for the seizure of the railw'siv leased by the Ottoman Government to an An.stro-German company; compensation to Turkey by Bulgaria for depriving the Ottoman Government of the sitwraintv over Eastern • Itoil-meli-.i' niv.l satisfaction of the demands of Servia and Muilenegro, who seek territorial concessions from Austria that will release Servia from her enelavc —the position of a territory enclosed entirely -within the territories of another Power—unite the two Slav States by a strip of land and give access to the Adriatic. Montenegro also demands the cession of Spizza, which dominates the harbour of Antivsiri on the Adriatic. Then Bosnia and Herzegovina demand administrative autonomy, and are supported m their demands" by Servia and Montenegro; •md finally, Crete appeals to be re-lie-od of the Turkish suzerainty and ni!»le part of the Greek kingdom. Truly, a very perplexing international tangle.

An Imperial Vilt.VGO.

Tzu-hsi, the late Empress-Dowager of China, was sixteen years of age when, m *185 L, .she was one of the Manolni maidens selected as worthy to enter the Tmpenal 1 Jalace, and before she was twenty she had borne the Emperor Hsien Feng a son, and was the most powerful woman m China. The Empress-Consort, nominally her superior, was a nobody, and from the first it is Tzu-hsi who decides m all the crises, facer, all the dangers meets plots witli punishment and traitors with execution. She is _ the woman who counts; the great Ministers lay traps for her, the great soldiers are ready to die to save her; she decides who shall be and who shall not bo; and so, through all the fifty-two years while she rules and others are named rulers, it goes on. Her son, the Emperor T'ling Chih, weak, vicious, and diseased, dies before he is a man; she chooses his successor, and sees that he shall bo no more of a man than his predecessor. He, m turn, too weak to originates a plot himself, foolish enough to enter into another's, conspires.with a party leader to surround her palace and to seize her person. Her Com-mander-in-Chief informs her of the plot, and it is the Emperor, not she, who is caught and imprisoned. She does not kill him; she keeps him m case she may want him, or until she can find a successor. Perhaps it should be remembered that, m China, the life of a human being counts for nothing if it stands m the way of the authority or ambition of a ruler like Tzu-hsi; m such a case such a life is regarded merely as a thing that can be ended. The British and other Western peoples call this murder, but perhaps Tzn-hsi looked upon it as merely an act of removal ; for m such matters, she not only did not shrink from cruelty, but indulged every barbarous whim and every feminine spite. When it seemed likely that her son's widow, m 1875, would boar a posthumous child who might be inconvenient to his grandmother, the young widow " died of grief." She was almost certainly poisoned. Earlier m her career, when she discovered a plot by two Princes and a Minister against her person, Tzu-hsi perhaps did less than many Western Sovereigns have done when she executed the Minister, but was merciful enough to the Princes of the Blood to allow them to commit suicide, lint she could punish with the ferocity of a savage. When she had decided, m conclave with her nobles and Ministers, that the " Boxer" movement should be encouraged to the point of open war, she ordered a telegram to be sent to the provinces decreeing that "the foreigners are to be decapitated." Two of her Ministers, wise with a statesmanship that brought them instant martyrdom, had the bravery to change the telegram into " the foreigners are all to be protected." Their names were Hsu Ching-Cheng and Yuan Ch'ang, and when the Empress-Dowager discovered what they had done she ordered them to be sawn asunder, adding with an Imperial aloofness that they would be thus executed "m order to purify the standard of our officials and as a warning to traitors."And it was of tliis monstrous creature, of tins sbedevul, that the present Regent of China, the father of its baby Emperor, said, when she was lying dead a few months ago, that he shrank from approaching her corpse, on account of the heavenly sacred ness of her person.

Affairs m Tiik Balkans.