CHINESE JUSTICE. Scenes in a Canton Court-room. TT was in Canton, a city like no other Chinese city I have seen, a colossal human ant-hill, an endless labyrinth of streets a dozen feet wide and a score high, crowded from daylight to dark with a double stream of men and women, exactly like the double stream between an ant-hill and a carcass. All this mass of humanity is presided over by the most foreigner-hating viceroy in China, and therefore it may be imagined what is the temper of the populace, espe cially as the Cantonese are the most turbu lent people of the Flowery Kingdom. During the day the streets of Canton are in semi-obscurity, as they are closed in at the top by broad strips of cloth and long ad vertising streamers, but at night they are as black as Tartarus. Public safety and order are supposed to be preserved by occasional posts of soldiers, with a collection of weap ons and instruments of torture hung up out side to strike terror into the evilly disposed. But, as may be imagined, crime of every kind is rife in Canton; and so bad is the rep utation of the place that very often a servant from another part of China, travelling with Jiis master, will rather forfeit his situation than accompany him there. And where the crime is, there is the punishment too. It by no means follows in China that the per son punished is the criminal, but there is enough cruelty in Canton to glut an Alva. Respect for the presence of an occasional foreigner causes a good deal of it to be hid, and the spectacle of a man hung up in a cage to starve to death in public is not a common one there, as it is in other parts. But I think I can describe enough to satisfy you. The magistrate sat in his yamen, dispens ing justice. He was a benevolent-looking man of perhaps forty, with an intellectual forehead and an enormous pair of spectacles.
He glanced up at us as we entered, visibly annoyed at the intrusion and hardly return ing our salutation. But as we were under the wing of a consul for whom Chinese offi cialdom has no terrors whatever, a fact of which the Cantonese authorities have had repeated experience, we made ourselves quite at home. There was little of the pomp of Western law in the scene before us. The magistrate's own chair, draped with red cloth covered with inscriptions in large char acters, was almost the only piece of official apparatus, and behind it were grouped half-adozen of the big red presentation umbrellas of which every Chinese official is so proud. Before him were a large open space and a motley crowd, in which the most conspic uous figures were the filthy blackguards in red hats, known as " Yamen runners," whose business is to clear a way before their master in the streets, and do anything else that he wishes, down to the administration of tor ture. The magistrate himself sat perfectly silent, writing busily, while several persons before him gabbled all at the same time. These were presumably the plaintiff, the de fendant, and the policeman. After a while the magistrate interrupted one of the speak ers with a monosyllable spoken in a low tone without even raising his head, but the effect was magical. The crowd fell back, and one of the little group in front of the chair wrung his hands and heaved a theatrical sigh. Be fore we could realize what had happened, half-a-dozen pairs of very willing hands were helping him to let down his trousers, and when this was accomplished to the satis faction of everybody he laid himself face downward on the floor. Then one of the "runners " stepped forward with the bam boo, a strip of this toughest of plants, three feet long, two inches wide, and half an inch thick. Squatting by the side of the victim,
