aroundworldortra00peebiala-1

172 AROUND THE WORLD.
The spirit of progress, whicli flashes up in the political
heavens of the West, has touched with intellectual intensity
our antipodal kinsmen of the East. Commerce, whitening
all seas, is a great civiUzer. " Transition " is the great word
now in China and Japan. Europeans and Americans are
not only flocking into the original " five treat3^-ports " of
China, but are exploring the interior and the highlands
of the Mongolian regions. The central government, in
admitting foreign ministers to Pekin, in sending an embassy
to Western nations, in establishing a university and schools
with European teachers, and treating other nations with the
respect becoming the fraternity of humanity, is taking a
step in the right direction. Bating a national egotism, and
a certain innate reserve, I place a much higher estimate
upon the China races, intellectual and moral, since seeing
the better classes in their native country.
Mandarins and officials, so far as I heard, spoke in great
commendation of the Hon. Mr. Burlingame, our former
minister to the capital. It may not be generally known,
even in America, that he was a Spiritualist. This writer in
the Atlantic Monthly, however, must have known it —
:
" As an example of the influence of a single man, attained over an
alien race, whose civilization is widely different, whose religious belief
is totally opposite, whose language he could not read nor write nor
speak, Mr. Burlingame'scarcer in China will always be regarded as an
extraordinary event, not to be accounted for except by conceding
to him a peculiar power of influencing those with whom he came in
contact; a power growing out of a mysterious gift, partly intellectual,
partly spiritual, largely physical ; a power whose laws are unknown,
whose origin can not be traced, and whose limits can not be assigned ; a
power which we designate as magnetism."
When the Chinese government received official notice of
Minister Burlingame's death, they gave him a tablet in a
Pekin temple, thus preparing the way to deification.