the cost of the furnishings of which Lord Elgin estimated at $5,000,000; and who, instead of asking, like the British, for a slice of Chinese territory, insisted on indemnification for "all such churches, schools, cemeteries, lands, and buildings as were owned by the persecuted Roman Catholic missionaries generations before; an order which doubtless intensified the animosity that resulted in the Tientsin massacre of French missionaries in 1870, and produced such general revolt among property-holders that the project had to be quietly abandoned by French consuls and ministers. We may note, in passing, a sad exhibition of French jealousy of "perfidious Albion," in standing out last year in a world-convention to settle on a prime meridian because it was proposed that that meridian should run through the Greenwich Observatory!

Nevertheless, it would seem that we should look for some higher motive in a brave, intelligent people like the French than mere jealousy of a rival power. France might have a laudable ambition to provide homes abroad for a surplus population, if like her insular neighbor she were overcrowded at home. France has not had need, like Britain, to send out ten millions of colonists. France is one of the armed camps by which the surface of continental Europe is held. Every male must serve in the army twenty years; and by the time he is forty he is fixed at home, and all the inducements held out to young couples beginning life to begin it on foreign soil, have vanished, and he grows old where his youth and middle life have been spent. Passion for official life is universal in France, and "one half the populace is heavily taxed that the other half may wear shoulder-straps." In the colonies the "officials are ten to one of the resident French population." Laws remanding prisoners from distant colonies to France for judicial trial are out of joint with the times and subversive of the growth of independent governmental policy in the colonies themselves, The humane governor of Saigon would have had the Black Flags taken in war sent to Saigon for trial, but the naval commanders made pirates of all prisoners, and hung and shot and beheaded on the spot all that fell into their hands. Norman insists that France, like Spain in the fifteenth century, knows no modes of propagating the Roman Catholic religion in heathendom except by slaughter and conquest.

In possession of a magnificent navy, her crews and commanders naturally prefer action to repose. They would rather be at war than rotting idly in quiet harbors at home or dull stations at foreign ports. Crews get exercise as well as pay, and officers get experience and gloire. When opportunity offers to raid a semi-barbarian's summer palace all get "loot," the cheerful oriental designation of the fruits of spoliation and robbery, called among us "plunder," not by any means in the innocent western sense of personal luggage.

China and Annan waters are the training ground for a navy that by its magnificent equipments, splendid service, and formidableness is already exciting the jealousy, if not the fears, of England, who proudly remembers how she swept France from the seas in 1805, as her confederate cruisers did our merchant marine in 1863, '64. The terribly unequal contest between this well-appointed fleet and the ill-manned and worse officered Chinese vessels suggests to the imagination the picture of a future possibility of the collision of two such squadrons, French and English or French and German, with like armaments and similarly experienced and determined crews. The volcanic Paris commune, ever ready to burst into lurid eruption, needs constant vent. The attention of the mob needs to be distracted from Paris and home matters and fixed on the "glory" of French arms and French successes abroad.

Compte de Gasparin wrote, in 1881, of the French people:

We

War amuses us, sons of ancient Gallic sires, who knew no pleasure superior to that of fighting; who burned the [Roman] capitol, and left their name in distant Galatia [Gaul-Asia]. demand excitement! We have reached the reputation of enfants terrible [fearful fellows], dreaded as a source of constant danger! [A standing menace to the peace of Europe, the world inquires,] "What will France do next?" "What is she getting ready for now?" "Where will she attack?" "What is she most desirous of ?" There are not fifteen minutes' peace, any way! Now, it is war, and Europe, armed to the teeth, asks each morning if France is not about to give the signal and begin the fray? Anon, it is revolution, and neighboring States ask anxiously if anarchy is about to run riot and infest the whole body politic? When a French dynasty has lasted fifteen years its days, as every body knows, are numbered. Paris will be in a blaze, and incendiary torches will light up the whole horizon! I have heard grave men seriously propose that Europe, jaded to death with

these constant alarms, should put France under bonds to end these ever-recurring dangers.

Revolutionary France is even more troublesome than warring France. France does not merely endure a revolution, she enjoys it; goes into it on a grand scale. The entire people take a hand in, and, under pretext of liberty, scatter its fires to the four quarters of the globe. Let us not deceive ourselves. A volcano is not a pleasant neighbor to any body.

While England, as a limited monarchy, and the United States, as a republic, have pursued the even tenor of their way for a century, uneasy France, an absolutism under Louis XVI., became a sort of republic in the first days of the Revolution; an imperialism under Napoleon I.; a Bourbon monarchy under Louis XVIII. and Charles X.; an Orleans dynasty under Louis Philippe; a republic in 1848; an imperialism under the third Napoleon, and a republic for the third time from 1870!

The national craze of the hour seems to be for "protectorates." Civilized governments and the Caucasian race assume that the semi-civilized and dark races are unable to take care of themselves, and generously proffer their protection. England has recently proclaimed a "protectorate protectorate" over the immense island of New Guinea; Germany a "protectorate" over Zanzibar; France over Tunis, with proffer of a rejected "protectorate" over part of Madagascar; another in the valley. of the Congo; and another over the peninsula of Annan.

China is no match for France-has no adequate protection against the "armed intervention" so dear to military Europe. Her only sure protective policy is, that which she has pursued for centuries, the turtle hiding within its shell-a policy of isolation and exclusion. The allied world-protectors have beaten down her walls, broken open her barricaded gates, and forced their way into the presence of the yellow throne of the "son of heaven," a sacrilege like that of which Italy has been guilty in reducing the god of the Vatican to the status of a mortal and a citizen. They have said to the emperor, "Put iron-clads and steam frigates and corvettes in place of your clumsy, lateenrigged junks; substitute breech-loading rifled cannon, Hotchkiss revolving and immense Krupp guns for the rusty smooth bores with which the Jesuits manned your fortresses two hundred years ago." China took the advice because she was

compelled to; built half a dozen arsenals, under the direction of French engineers, the same nation that helped Annan to the forts and defenses a hundred years ago, and later, that has rendered the resistance in that country so much more stubborn than any as yet encountered in China itself. Now, when China has expended millions, wrung from her half-clothed, half-starved, opium-stupefied populations, and equipped arsenals that are a wonder and admiration with foreigners, at Canton, Ningpo, Foochow, Shanghai, and Peking, comes the very nation that helped her to these "modern improvements," and knocks them about her ears as French cannon knocked the bricks out of the old wall of Shanghai in 1856! The demand for "indemnity" to pay for the expense of giving China these lessons in Christian tactics has risen, in the minds of her assailants, to sixteen millions, now talked of as a proper offset to her stubbornness in declining to pay five! Soon a slice of territory will have to be added to the pecuniary compensation, and it would not be surprising if, in addition to Tonkin, China were called on to surrender Yunnan (the Cloudy South), with her immense territory and millions of inhabitants.

The Christian world of the nineteenth century has expended millions in the far East to introduce a religion that professes to be a religion of peace. Through that semi-political organization, Jesuitism, it has brought the Annanites nothing but disturbance, dismemberment, and chronic war. To China and India the proffer has been like that of the Arabs, the "sword or the Koran," bomb-shells and Bibles, Krupp-shot and crucifixes, priests and torpedoes, oratories and opium. Consistency is nothing to Caucasian ideal progressives, shouting "free country" and "free trade" with one breath; at the next, our politicians adopt China's own antiquated exclusion policy, and impose a tariff on labor, taboo "free labor" altogether, and give a monopoly of high wages and excessive "protection" to its own favored white citizens. Governmentally, China and France, like America, are Augean stables of official corruption. When and by whom these filthy purlieus of their respective capitals are to be purged does not clearly appear. How long must Christianity and pure civilization be disgraced and retarded by unscrupulous national ambition and sordid commercial interest?

ART. III.

SOME

OBSERVATIONS ON THE GREEK ARTICLE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.

THE doctrine of the Greek article has attracted the attention. of New Testament critics for generations, and is still an unsettled problem. An inquiry into its nature and the application of it to some disputed points in exegesis is not unworthy of attention. Some of the best grammarians hold that no definite rules can be laid down in relation to it, the exceptions being so numerous as almost to exclude the idea of a well-defined law. Buttman ("New Testament Grammar ") says:*

In reference to the definite article the rules and regulations given in the grammars hold good, so far as in a subject so delicate we can talk of rules. For the endeavor to lay down fixed laws respecting the use of the article many a learned and laborious inquiry has already come to naught; and the intention ought at length to be abandoned of forcing the use or the omission of the article under precise regulations which find the proof of their nullity and uselessness in the throng of exceptions which it is necessary to subjoin straightway to almost every rule laid down.

Such a statement practically excludes the article from any positive service, in disputed cases, to the exegete, by making it a matter of impossibility to show that the writer under consideration had any positive reason for its use or omission.

Language, however, is so subtle and, when employed by the careful writer, so accurate that such a view would be destructive of all satisfactory interpretation of the article. Every body almost involuntarily employs and omits the article, if not with a definite object, yet with a definite result. It is practically impossible that a writer, especially in an argumentative production, should use the article or any other element of speech so loosely as to create embarrassinent on the part of the reader as to the true meaning intended to be conveyed. We shall in this discussion consider first what is the distinguishing feature of the employment or omission of the article in the New Testament, and then apply it particularly to some passages which may serve as illustrations.

It is conceded that it was originally a demonstrative pronoun, and that in the development of the Greek language it natu*Thayer's translation, p. 85.