CHINA.

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 11, 1 August 1900, Page 83

CHINA.

Of all rebellions the most blood-thirsty and destructive have ever been those occasioned by religious fanaticism. The most horrible atrocities and barbarities have been committed by those who consider it their highest religious duty to avenge the insults offered to their respective deities. Lashed to madness by their estimate of the enormity of the offence, they forget for the time that it argues very ill for the almighty power of their particular gods to imagine that they are not able to avenge themselves sufficiently ; and they perform this imagined religious duty with infinitely greater zeal than they exercise over others. The hatred to the missionaries in particular, and foreignei'S in general, appears to have been the origin of the disastrous state of affairs in China at present. Here we Lave a nation whose industrial resources are enormous, allowing herself to be utterly disorganised and worked up to such a pitch of suicidal fury as to practically fit herself in the battlefield against the rest of the world, by bands of rebels, whose boast is that they are sworn to <l protect the Heavenly Dynasty and drive the devils into the sea." That the result, as far as the nation herself is concerned, cau only be her partition between the Powers if she persists in this course, is generally conceded, but the destruction of life and property, and the complications which must accrue before peace and order can be again restored are not pleasant to contemplate. The comparatively easy defeat of China by Japan in the recent war caused the Powers to set a very low estimate on the military resources of

these teeming millions, and drew attention completely off them. They, however, with the imitative faculty which is strong within them, have not been slow to take advantage in the meantime of the costly lessons they learnt, and have busied themselves unremittingly iv acquiring greater proficiency in military matters, and the latest improvements in arms and ammunition.