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""GENERAL SURVEV.IItorrent inundating whole counties. A year ago hundreds of boatmen were stranded at T ungchou unableto get anywhere. Yet this is w thin an hour s ride ofthe Imperial Palace ! The Grand Canal, throughout ^large part of its northern course, is a venerable and amelancholy ruin. In northern Kiangsu the choking ofits channels for drainage to the sea directly caused thefloods which ended in the terrible famine of 1906-7.Yet nothing is anywhere undertaken, or if work isbegun,it is isolated, sporadic, and fruitless. According to thebest foreign opinionit can be but a matter of a decademore or less before the ancient foe of China (whichmight be converted into its staunch friend) the YellowRiver will once more break away by reason of thesilting up of its bed, and we shall have a repetition ofwith wails about the will ofthe scenes of 1887-8,heaven and the helplessness of man against fate.After protracted squabbling between the rulers of twoadjacent provinces (as if they had been rival Europeankingdoms instead of constituent parts of one empire)we have atlast thepromise and potencyof practicalsteam navigation of the Upper Yangtze. When therail andImperial province of Szch uan is joined bysteamboat to the rest of China, and likewise with thevast almost unpenetrated regions beyond, there will bea new world for the whole empire.Nothing has so showed the temper of the newChina as her treatment of the opium reform, to whicha few sentences must be devoted. It is important toremember that the avowed object is to "make Chinastrong."Five years agoit was something of a riskto assume (as some of us did assume) that the Chinesegovernment was in earnest. This is now everywhereadmitted by those whose opinion is of any value. Thegreat opium conference in Shanghai in 1909 may be saidto have focused the sentiment of the world against thisdeadly drug, and seems to have been the means of a slowbut definite change of view among the journals of the