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obeisance whenever an European envoy visited Peking or an Occidental traveller or trader came into contact with their own officials; and if they found envoys, travellers, or traders willing to submit to such humiliation—as the Dutch and the Portuguese were willing—they made capital out of this complaisance by giving the utmost prominence to it. The theory may be at once dismissed that the Peking rulers regarded kneelings and head-knockings as ordinary forms of polite salutation. Their own envoys invariably refused, alike in mediæval and in modern times, to observe such ceremonies in a foreign country, and thus there can be no doubt about the significance attaching to them.

The exactions of the Manchu rulers of China in this respect, supplemented by their general exclusiveness and hauteur, have been commonly attributed to an absorbing belief in the superiority of their own civilisation, their own customs, and their own philosophy. But although the Chinese proper may perhaps be imbued with such a conviction, and though in their case the mood would have some basis of reason, nothing of the kind can be justly alleged of the Tartars, whose claims to a high place among the nations of the Old World, whether from an intellectual, an ethical, or a civilised point of view, are absolutely intangible. The Tartars sought to keep China as they found her because the permanence of their own sway might be endangered by a spirit of progress, in