tell him, Lecky, to-morrow, that it's all right."

They did not speak again that night, although a couple of hours later when the Boy came in, Electa's hand found her sister's and held it silently for a minute.

Ralph was not at breakfast the next morning. He had gone out quietly at six o'clock, leaving a note behind him to the effect that, as it was his last day in the downtown office, he wanted to finish up a lot of work and must get in as much extra time as he could. "I will be back for dinner, though," he ended.

He kept his word. He knew that he must. He would not let them think he was a coward, at all events. He was going to face it out and have it over with.

-

The little room which he had occupied for two years seemed strangely empty as he entered it. His trunk had gone. The narrow white bed, the fresh cover on the washstand, the dustless chiffonier a feeling like homesickness came over him as he looked about him, and a sort of regret for the days when he had been able to live there without being ashamed. It did not occur to the Boy that he might seek to recall the past into being. Having undertaken to live a man's life, he had no thought of giving it up. But the old times seemed suddenly very sweet, and in the presence of the fresh little room with its muslin curtains, he looked back upon them with longing.

"Ralph, dinner is ready." It was Miss Electa's voice from the other side of the door.

To walk out into the dining-room just as if this night were like other nights cost an effort. He succeeded pretty well. He sauntered up to the table with his usual gayly-formal "Good-evening, ladies," and seated himself.

All three bowed their heads for a silent moment, and then Electa brought from the refrigerator a large pitcher of lemonade in which several strawberries floated blithely. "Something very special," she said, with a little laugh, "for the last night."

They all tried to laugh, but it sounded queerly; and then the conversation failed. Nobody seemed to know quite what to say next. The Boy noticed out of the corner of his eye that Miss Rosie's cheeks were pink and that she hardly touched herfood; only now and then she would take a little sip from her glass of lemonade and then smile nervously, as if sharing with passive politeness in the ordinary small-talk of the dinner-table.

Miss Electa busied herself ostensibly with preparing some French dressing for the lettuce. The small business of an ordinary meal-the serving of the dishes, the passing of plates, the filling of the glasses- assumed undue conspicuousness from the fact that it was the only bulwark against a silence which every one dreaded.

"Rosie," said Miss Electa anxiously, "you look ill. Don't you think you'd better go and lie down a while in our room ?"

The Boy had not looked at her directly before; but now his eyes met hers involuntarily, and he noticed two tears quivering on their lids. She rose hastily from her chair and hurried out of the room without a word. He felt the blood burning up to his temples.

There was a moment of intolerable silence. "Ralph," began Miss Electa at last, looking at him very bravely, “I've got to speak to you some time, and I suppose this is my chance. Sister and I are planning to go back to Sharon in two weeks. We did n't tell you before because we - because it seemed easier somehow not to. But we want to ask your pardon for keeping it to ourselves."

The Boy started. "Why, Miss

"That 's not all," she interrupted. Her voice was beginning to tremble; but she felt that it was her duty to speak. "There's something else."

Then she looked at him helplessly and lost her words. Before the Boy's mind flashed the picture of the previous night,

the two timid little women hurrying down the path under the trees, the sudden

look of recognition in Rosie's face, and the way she had shrunk back against her sister. All day long he had kept hearing that little gasping sob of hers, and had said to himself in the pity of self-accusation, "She's always done so much to make a fellow happy, it must have been pretty tough to find out all of a sudden he was that sort!"

But Electa had found her voice again. "Yes, there's something else," she was saying. "It seems to us as if we had n't quite understood each other, Ralph, and we can't bear to have you go off-like this, and everything, without having you know that we do understand

now

and that

that we're very glad indeed and we hope you'll be so very, very happy together."

For a second the Boy's mind groped blindly; then in a flash he saw what she meant and his lips said, “Thank you, Miss Lecky."

"And now," she went on tremulously, "that we do know about it, we're so sorry that we 're not going to be in the city any longer-because-Don't you see, Ralph, if you'd only told us, we could have asked her in to dinner sometimes

THE newly aroused sense of nationality, of feeling that they belong to one common fatherland, which is at present seen to pervade the masses of China, has taken many aspects. Now it seems to be directed against the alien dynasty, now it manifests itself by resentment against local misgovernment, now, notably in 1900, it takes an anti-foreign form; but of any organized movement, sooner or later, the Asiatic instinct of strong government gets the upper hand, and agitation which might devastate the country is kept within restraining banks. The latest development of nationalism in China is the present movement against those privileges reserved for foreigners, to which the native can lay no claim; and foremost among these is the right of extraterritoriality, against which the battle will be long and stoutly contested. It will be well to inquire what it is.

In the earliest times the traveler was protected by no law: the Tyrian voyager along the coasts of the Mediterranean secured only such rights as he could buy or enforce; but he neither carried with him his own law, nor was he entitled to claim the protection of the law of those among whom he sojourned. With the extension of the Roman dominion went the рах Romana also, and every citizen who traveled was under the ægis of the jus Romanum. The principle established was that the Roman elsewhere than in Rome was extraterritorialized, — he was not required to submit to the territorial laws of the "foreign" country, but remained outside them and continued to enjoy the protection of his own laws. As an echo of this privilege we find that in the constitution of A. D. 824, imposed upon the people of Rome by Lothair, acting as vice-gerent for his father Louis the Pious,

each inhabitant of the city was required to choose the code, Roman, Frankish, or Lombard, by which he wished to live, and was then judged according to the law selected. The underlying principle is obvious. It was recognized as inequitable that, for example, the Frank, who was entitled by his native law to compound for a homicide by payment of Weregeld, should by the accident of residence in what-though the capital of the empire

was still to him a foreign city, be compelled to pay the penalty of death, a penalty which from his point of view must appear cruel and vindictive. And while he wished to preserve for himself his own law, he did not wish to impose it on the Roman people or on the Lombards who less than a century before had been masters of the city. The Frank in Rome was fully extraterritorialized, but of Rome the Frank was titular sovereign.

When the West first met the East on equal terms at shorter range than a lance's length, it was found that their laws were incompatible; that no Venetian or Genoese, the pioneers in commerce in those days, would willingly or could in reason be expected to submit himself to Moslem law, based on the stern requirements of the Koran; and that no follower of the Prophet could yield obedience to a code whose leading exponent was the Pope. There was no thought of requiring either to conform to the law of the other: as between one country of Europe and another the lex loci might be applied; but to assimilate the legal procedure of two diverse civilizations was the mingling of oil and vinegar. The question was onesided, since no Moslem ever strayed from the fold, and the Padishah settled it offhand by bidding the Giaours judge, control, — and protect, — their own na

tionals according to their own customs. While the trading states were weak and the Moslem power strong, the imperium in imperio thus created caused no more trouble than the old protection which the Roman citizen carried with him everywhere; but in the course of years the Turkish realm lost its old-time force, the more powerfully organized nations of Europe entered the field, and the obligation of extraterritoriality became a right, claimed by all strong enough to enforce it, enjoyed by all in the comity of nations, and ultimately sanctioned by the Capitulations. These are the charter of extraterritoriality in the Turkish Empire, and in the states now or formally vassal to it. At first the natural assumption was, that the traveler carried his law with him, in so far as he was entitled to the protection of any law; but by degrees in the history of those countries whose government is based on law and not on the will of the governors, law became paramount, and the law of the locality was never set aside to pleasure a chance visitor. This is now the rule, the Capitulations in Turkey being merely survivals of the middle ages. When the European first came to the Far East, he had no thought that he was entitled to carry his law with him, and submission to the lex loci was merely an incident in his adventurous career, duly provided for in his profit and loss account. The Black Hole of Calcutta was typical of the treatment of the English in India at the time, when once removed from the protection of the British flag; the Portuguese in China enjoyed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness only on condition of remaining safely in the tiny peninsula of Macao; and the Dutch in Japan, cooped up in Desima, made money, but were otherwise subject to the whims of the Japanese. At the opening of the nineteenth century the English and Americans resident in China were restricted to the "Factory" or trading post of Canton, privileged for exercise to walk a hundred paces in one direction, and then a hundred paces in the

other. They were in general well treated, since the trade so profitable to them was equally profitable to the Chinese, and, so long as they were law-abiding, were not molested, but law-abiding in the sense of abiding by the law of China. It was irksome to them to have no lawyer to instruct them in the law of the land, to have no fixed and certain law to appeal to, to be doubtful of the application of the law to any particular case, and to have no doubt whatever on the course likely to be followed by the administrators of the law; but this was all an incident of their position, and the rapid accumulation of fortune enabled them to shake the dust of the country from their shoes after a very short stay. So the position was endured, and the lex loci submitted to, - probably, from what we know of the English and American character, with many murmurs, but without overt opposition.

It is no part of my purpose to describe the state of the prisons of China, or, the methods by which testimony and confession are elicited, or to demonstrate the insistent need to the Chinese people, of the article in King John's Magna Charta, "to no freeman will we deny or sell justice." The incompatibility of laws based on diverse civilizations is nowhere more marked than in China. There no bankruptcy law is possible: if a debtor's own estate will not suffice to pay his debts, the deficiency must be made good by his father, brothers, or uncles; if a debtor absconds, his immediate family are promptly imprisoned; if the debtor returns, he is put in prison and kept there indefinitely, so long as he can find money for his daily food, until released by payment in full or by death;-this is the law. When, in 1895, Admiral Ting found himself forced to surrender Weihaiwei and his fleet, he committed suicide; by this courageous step, technically dying before surrender, he saved his immediate family father, mother, sons and daughters from decapitation, and their property from confiscation, the penalty when a commander surrenders an Im

perial fortress; this is the law. When in the old days, an English gunner caused the death of a Chinese by firing a salute from a cannon, from which, by oversight, the ball had not been removed, he was seized, tried, and executed; and in 1839, when in the course of a disturbance with English and American sailors at Canton, a Chinese was killed, the authorities demanded that, if the guilty person could not be detected and executed, the whole party should be handed over for execution; this is the law. Intention is never taken into account. A dollar for a dollar, an eye for an eye, a life for a life, and all for the Emperor and his representatives, this is the law of China.

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The feeling against continued submission to this law and to its arbitrary and inequitable application had been growing; and when the Chinese authorities committed an overt act of aggression in seizing and destroying the property of the English and American merchants at Canton, burning their "Factory," in which alone, as in a Ghetto, they were permitted to reside, and forcibly expelling them from Chinese soil, the British took the cudgels and the war of 1842 followed. The movable property destroyed consisted mainly of opium. and consequently the war is in common parlance called the "Opium War." This is an ill-chosen designation for the Americans, as for the English, since, as the direct result of the war, the American government secured a treaty containing even more favorable terms than the British treaty. In fact the direct cause of the war was the growing sense of the need for better protection to life and property, though behind this was the ground cause of the need for better relations generally. In the words of Dr. Hawks Pott's Sketch of Chinese History, “The first war with China was but the beginning of a struggle between the extreme East and the West, the East refusing to treat on terms of equality, diplomatically or commercially, with Western nations, and

the West insisting on its right to be so treated."

As has been the rule from the outset, England bore the brunt of the battle in securing the rights of the West; and the privileges secured to her as the result of the war became the heritage of all the Western powers coming later into the field. Equality of treatment was conceded in 1842 on paper; but the execution of the concession in practice left much to be desired, and friction continued. There were, of course, faults on both sides, as is always the case where a bold, aggressive race comes, especially in matters of trade, in contact with a weaker race given to supplement its want of strength by methods of chicanery and indirectness; but underlying everything were the demand for equality of treatment and extraterritorial rights on the one side, and on the other, a stubborn disinclination to yield either. A second war became necessary, in which the French joined hands with the English; and a second time America and other interested powers came in and secured treaties simultaneous and identical with those signed by the British and French envoys. These treaties, signed independently by Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States in 1858, by Prussia and the North German Confederation in 1861, and by other powers in later years, are still the charter of liberty of the foreigner resident in China; and in each of them, in addition to a "most favored nation' clause, is contained the stipulation of extraterritoriality.

The earliest treaties with China were made by Russia, whose envoys came by the Siberian route, and whose colonists and armed forces were in constant conflict with the Manchus and the sons of Han on the long frontier of the Amur and in Central Asia. The earliest of these treaties, that of Nipchu (or Nertchinsk) signed in 1689, contains (Art. VI) the following provision:

If hereafter any of the subjects of either nation pass the frontier and commit crimes of