Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 December 1884 — Chinese Indecision. [ARTICLE]

Chinese Indecision.

Arminius Vamberry, the Hungarian traveler and Orientalist, has explained the queer irresolution of the Chinese Government, which will probably enable the French adventurers to play a Billy Walker game. Like the image of Nebuchadnezzar, the Chinese colossus has an iron head, which, in case of a general commotion, threatens to dissolve the coherence of the compound. In the highlands of Yunan, at the southwestern extremity of the Chinese empire, there are millions of headstrong Mohammedans, who have more than once expelled the representatives of the General Government, and who for a couple of years have only awaited a favorable opportunity to rise in a general rebellion. They not only defy the Emperor’s envoys, but deny his competence in toto, and question the legality of all feudal statutes. In 1868 these Nihilists flayed the Stadtholder of Tunglan, and impaled some 60,000 of his subjects before their progress was stopped by the fortified towns of Kwertschan, garrisoned by feudal chiefs and their Mongol retainers. After a few indecisive skirmishes the General Government, as usual, tried to temporize. They opened negotiations in the name of a provincial government. They made several attempts to get up a counter revolution. They tried to bribe the rebel chieftains, and at last purchased a temporary peace by the most humiliating concessions—anything rather than to risk a direct encounter with the forces of a superior race. A thousand years ago the same policy prompted th6m to build their “Northern Bulwark,” equivalent to a continuous stone wall from Cincinnati to Salt Lake City. Their Know-Nothing methods, too, were inspired by the instinct of self-preservation, and hope to conceal the fatal secret of their national impotence.— Prof. Felix L. Oswald.