The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-03-12

ed. It is more than doubtful whether
 his majesty realizes his exalted situa-
 tion and his power. He has been hem
 med in and fooled all his life. He knows nothing of modern civilization, and, in spite of the recent war, next to nothing of modern warfare. He has l never reviewed, and Is not capable of reviewing, his army, and his common | amusement Is to shoot with a bow and
 arrow. If he ever had in him the mak- ipss of character they must have been ruined long since by his mode of life and his surroundings.
 The supreme bodies which, by the
 grace of the empress dowager and the favorite eunuchs have the direction of
 the country's affairs, are the grand | council, the ministry of war, and the tsung -li-yamen. The first, which is er- roneously confounded with the last, corresponds to our cabinet, and con- sists of five members-Prince Kung, the emperors uncle, whose principal aim in life now appears to be to thwart the empress dowager, with whom he has many stormy scenes; Shi To, better known to us as Prince Lii, who has | no knowledge of foreign affairs and hates all foreign barbarians:" Weng Tung-ho, the emperor's private tutor, | who is equally conpicuous for his dis | like of the barbarians that he is credit | ed with having taken to the custody of foreign affairs since the trouble with 1 Japan; Kang Vi, an official who gained | his high office by presenting the em- | peror, for the purposes of the late war, with large sum of money, which he | had no doubt obtained by eXtortion of one kind or another, and whose appre- 1 citation of modern conditions in warfare
 may be judged by the fact that he pre- | fers bows and arrows to guns, and has ordered that those of his companies
 which are provided with the murderous
 rifle shall use clay bullets, so as to save | the expense of leaden ones; and Chien
 Ying-pu, president of the board of
 works, who is singularly free from
 prejudice against foreigners, in spite of the fact that experience has never | brought him into proper contact with | them. The ministry of war consists of
 Prince Kung (presidenD. Prince Ching | (vice- -president), Weng Tung-ho, and
 Jung Lu With two of these gentlemen | we have already made acquaintance. Pcince Ching q Kuang) was promoted | from the third to the second order of | princes four years ago. He has held
 many offices in the capital, among oth- | CTS that of president of the tsuns-li-
 Ken, to which he still belongs, and is
 reported to be a fair-minded man-rel-
 atively that is, for he has never been
 far from home. Jung Lu is Manchu,
 and airs advanced views which are l crude. His long connection with the 1 war department may or may not ac- | count for his insistence upon the neces-
 sity of showing a bold front to foreign | aggression. The tSung-li-yamen con-
 sists of Prince Yung, Prince Ching, Weng Tung-ho, Kang Vi and Jung Lu,
 in addition to our estimable old friend,
 Lii Hung Chang and Ching Fsin, a
 stiff and bigoted nominee of Prince
 Kung; Ching Lii, a very old man from
 whose mature lips drop words of an-
 tiquated wisdom; Hsu Ying-wei a Cantonese who was once literary chan
 cellor in Kansu, but who has remained in Pekin for good 20 years past; Liao | Shaoheng, elder brother of the govern
 or of the Che-Kiang; Chang Yin-huan,
 who spent 12 years as minister to the
 United States, Spain and Peru, and was
 special ambassador at the diamond ju-
 bilee, and Wu Ting-fen, the leader of ] the reform party. The men most cap- | able of offering good counsel in the
 present emergency are the two last
 named, but Chang Yin-huan is of toe low rank to possess any real influ- ence, and it is stated that Wu Ting fen, desparing of any reform While the countrys affairs are in the hands of
 the prejudice fossils of corrupt ser | wants, recently applied for two months
 leave of absence to repair his ancestral | tombs--a preliminary to retirement
 In the multitude of counsel offered by
 these various officials there is much
 guile but little wisdom, and there is
 much plotting on the part of each
 member of the three boards against
 each and every one of his fellows. Pe- riodically the empress dowager comes
 out, rates them soundly from behind
 her screen, and if they have done some
 thing unusually foolish, boxes all their
 ears And between one and another of
 them the unhappy son of heaven comes
 a cropper.