over

of

amounts, and would depart with their cash, leaving behind them, we are assured, no tangible assets whatever. As sure, however, as the passes were safe they would reappear bringing wool, skins, dyes, shawls, turquoises, jewels, dried fruits, drugs, or whatever they had promised to bring, in quantities which amply repaid the risk the firm had run, a risk great in times of violence, but in many years inapprecl. able, for men of this kind knew well that to "fail the Sassoons" would be to lose the very possibility of trading again, and unless killed or whelmed by unavoidable misfortune they never failed. The profit, course, on a trade of this kind, which in the aggregate amounts sometimes to £350,000 a year, is very great, and the wealth thus accumulated is lent out at high interest to traders or nobles or princes in ways which Asiatic bankers know how to make secure. Indeed the insecurity, when the business is controlled by men with adequate nerve, information, and judgment of personal character, is less than Englishmen imagine, for it is one of the mysteries of the Asiatic character, with its low morale, that in certain kinds of business nobody ever cheats. They have been taught by centuries of experience that, if they do, business must stop, and consequently, as the carriers of Asia have carried boxes of specie for centuries without ever stealing a box, so the traders in certain branches of their business resolutely keep faith. Asia, for instance, is covered with bills of exchange, usually written on a kind of hard tissue paper, which can be wrapped up almost to invisibility, or carried in a quill, couched in words often unintelligible except to bankers, and sometimes, we have been assured, unsigned. Nevertheless, unless the world stops, those bills will be paid. In ten years, during which he received some two thousand of these flimsies a year, often Irom places and men whose names he did not know, the writer of these worus never knew a bill of the kind dishonored, and repeatedly knew them to be

cashed by firms upon which they were not drawn. A fidelity based on intellectual, not moral, considerations marks the whole of Asiatic trade, among Asiatics-it is not so conspicuous when they are dealing with Europeans-and is one reason why the banker is almost invariably either an individual, or the dictator of a firm composed of relatives. No joint-stock coparcenary could have either the energy or the personal character required, and as a matter of fact, we believe, some attempts made by ordinary European banks to obtain the high interest paid on loans in Asia have resulted in annoying failure, and declarations that all Asiatic borrowers are scoundrels.

There are two puzzles connected with Asiatic banking of which we have never yet seen a clear solution. Why does Surajah Dowlah not plunder Omichund? The prince is often a scoundrel who would rob his mother, he has practically absolute power to seize and torture the banker, and he wants the banker's wealth dreadfully, but as a rule he does not touch it. He borrows, it is true, on inadequate se. curity, and at inconvenient times, but he always pays back, if not in cash, then in privileges, agencies, monopɔlies, or rights of trade which the banker knows perfectly well how to turn into money. Omichund is not raised to high office, and not externally honored; but he is left alone, is constantly consulted by the prince and his great servants, and often, being of necessity both intelligent and specially well-informed, acquires quite extraordinary influence, and can protect travellers as no other man in the State can do. We are not sure that a safe conduct from the Sassoons would not be more valid at Teheran, or even on the Steppes, than any similar document from any European power save the czar or the Indian viceroy. The truth is, we suppose, that ruling Asiatics have been taught by the experience of ages that it does not do to quarrel with the bankers, that the richer the individual is the more valuable he is

as a friend, that the class never forgives an outrage on one of its members, and that to be boycotted by financiers is, if you have mutinous troops to pay, whims to carry out, and a harem to keep contented and in luxury, too inconvenient. The other puzzle is what the bankers in States outside British protection do with their reserves. Most of their wealth is in motion, in bills of exchange, in advances, in loans, but they are compelled by the necessities of credit and other causes to keep large reserves, and where, in places where stocks and shares are unknown or unsalable, do they keep them? Sir Walter Scott believed that the Jewish trading-bankers of the Middle Ages, whose position was almost exactly that of Asiatic bankers now kept stores of wealth in vaults guarded by trustworthy dependants, and we suspect, without absolutely knowing, that his imagination guided him aright. That is certainly the plan adopted by Asiatic princes, as witness the well-known Scindiah case, when four millions in cash was found within the house, and it may well be the plan adopted by the bankers also. They probably keep .off ordinary thieves, as the late Mr. Jennings asserted that his "millionaire" hero in New York did, by paying blackmail, just as their subordinate

traders pay blackmail to the, dangerous chiefs of the Passes, but the fidelity of their dependants remains a marvel. Besso, as Mr. Disraeli called the banker in "Tancred," will have a quarter of a million in gold and jewels hidden away somewhere, twenty persons will know or suspect the hidingplace, and the treasure will be as safe as if stored in the Bank of England or the corridors of one of the Safe Deposit Companies. There are banking firms in Asia which have lasted for two centuries and have never been betrayed, though they have never during that period enriched a dependant not of their own blood. We dare say there are bankers in England who could say the same, but think, in lands where all power is non-moral and is always seeking money, what that says for the class. There is not a great mercantile "house" in Asia, the continent of violence, chicanery, and wrong, without clerks and servants whom neither terror nor bribery would tempt to betray the firm. When Europeans understand the reason of that they will be able to build up native administrations which will not betray them, or desert them, or prostitute the irresistible power of the white men for purposes of private gain. They do not understand it yet.

The Bicycle in Japan.-The lover of Oriental strangeness may now give up Japan in despair. It was bad enough when the mikado's army took to torpedoes and trousers; it was worse when his subjects descended to common journalism; but with the advent of the bicycle the most fatal link with the unpicturesque West has been forged. The Tokyo Post Office officials now ride with impunity, and, according to latest information, the "Metropolitan Police" are sending extensive orders to two local workshops. For not only does Japan ride; the deft fin

gers of her craftsmen are busy making machines. Moreover, they make them well; for it sounds incredible, but the statement comes on good authority-the Yokohoma Bicycle Works have lately received an order for one hundred machines from America! and the American machinists are supposed to be licking creation in the bicycle business. There is a melancholy sense of disillusion about it all. No more graceful, posing, diagonal attitudes; those three little maids now "scorch" home from school on pneumatic tyres. Mr. Gilbert must recast his opera.

Saturday Review.

From The Contemporary Review. THE PROGRESS OF MANKIND.

i.

The most serious of all questions which present themselves to our mind is the improvement of the human race. Comparing ourselves with primitive peoples and with those still existing savage races which have succeeded in keeping apart from the "civilizers"-too often destroyers

what sure advances have we made, what undeniable recoils must we admit, in this long succession of centuries? Is it possible to measure with any accuracy the gains and losses of humanity during its long history?

re

We ought, first of all, to recognize that some great minds absolutely deny progress, and reject all idea of a continuous evolution for the better. So great an historian as Ranke sees in history nothing but "a succession of periods, each having its peculiar character, and manifesting diverse tendencies which give a special, unexpected, and even piquant life to the different pictures of each age and of each people." According to this conception the world would be a sort of museum. If there were progress, said the pietistic writer, then, assured in the course of successive ages of an amelioration in his lot, man would not be in "direct dependence on the Deity," who gards with impartial eye all the generations that follow each other in time as if they were exactly of equal value. On the other hand, fixed institutions -monarchies, aristocracies, all official and formulated religions, established, and as it were walled up by men who claim to have realized perfection itself-presuppose that every revolution, every change, will be a fall, a return towards barbarism. The fathers and the grandfathers, panegyrists of by gone times, contribute, with gods and kings, to disparage the present as compared with former times, and to foresee in new ideas a fatal tendency to retrogression. Children incline naturally to consider their parents as su

perior beings, as those parents themselves did their fathers; and the result of all these sentiments settling in men's minds, as alluvial deposits on the banks of a river, is to make a veritable dogma of the irremediable fall of man. In our days is it not still the general custom to discourse in prose and in verse upon the "corruption of the age"? By an absolute but almost unconscious want of logic, even those who vaunt the irresistible progress of humanity, readily speak of a fin de siècle decadence. Two contrary currents cross each other in their thoughts.

The fact is that the old conceptions clash with the new. The weakening of religions, caused by the pressure of theories which explain the formation of the world by a slow evolution, a gradual emergence of things out of the primitive chaos, rather than by a sudden creation-what is this phenomenon but progress itself, whether we admit it implicitly as Aristotle admitted it, or recognize it in exact and eloquent language, as did Lucretius?

However, it is very necessary to have a clear understanding as to the meaning of the word "progress," for with regard to this there might be unfortunate misconceptions. Thousands are the definitions that the Buddhists and the interpreters of Buddhism give of Nirvana. In like manner, philosophers, according to the ideal they place before themselves, treat as forward movements evolutions the most diverse and even contradictory. There are some for whom repose is the sovereign good, and who wish, if not for death, at least for perfect tranquillity of body and mind. Progress, as these men understand it, is certainly quite other than it is or valiant souls who prefer a perilous liberty to a tranquil servitude. For the one as for the other the conception of happiness takes precedence of all other conceptions in the ideal dreamed of; but whether progress brings happiness or not, it ought above all to be understood as a complete development of the individual, compre