THE CHINESE CRISIS

The Hyde Lectures given during this week and next on "The Present Crisis in the Chinese Empire" by Rev. A. H. Smith, of Tientsin, should prove interesting to a great number of men. That we are today able to witness the stages by which one of the largest nations of the world is in the process of changing a medieval form of government for representative institutions of the most modern type, is perhaps hardly due to our own efforts. Yet we should not therefore fail to realize our good fortune. The movement may not be successful, but it is an event which can not fail to be considered by future generations as an epoch in the history of China.

It is so easy for us to pick up a newspaper and learn just what is going on at any one moment, that we are prone not to take the trouble to develope real interest in large affairs. Twenty years hence, perhaps, when we are reading an interesting history of China, we may regret our indifference. History is being made next door, yet the interests of many of us are little more than wide enough to contain the football "dope" of the hour.

Mr. Smith is a well known writer on the characteristics and habits of the Chinese. He knows the situation in the Celestial Empire from first-hand experience. His lectures should be very valuable as an interpretation of the day to day events of the present crisis, that to so many are but unconnected facts about unpronounceable names.