ABSTRACT
Could it possibly be otherwise ? Fourteen years' experience of representative government on a franchise as restricted as that of England before 1832-is it possible that any fixed principles or any settled practice —principles or practice to which poor China, oppressed by a disease of dimension, might fly as to a panaceacould emerge from this trifling flutter with institutions which not seven hundred years of an established and recognised status has rendered more than convenient in Great Britain ? Those who would have China recast her polity in a mould imported from Japan should wait a little-say two hundred years or so.
