around the city were about thirty miles in length, consisting of strong forts, stockades, and deep ditches. These fortifications were so constructed as to protect the besiegers, who were about 80,000 in number, from any attack from the outside; and though the pay of some of these troops was considerably in arrear, they were well fed and contented. The besieging army was about to be reinforced by Colonel Gordon's late corps of artillery under Colonel Doyle, and also by Bailey's artillery, which had operated under the late General Ching; while Gordon himself took occasion of a flying visit to select the best point for attack, choosing the north-east angle of the wall, which in most parts of its circuit was about 40 feet high and 50 feet thick.

Before matters had got quite to this pass, some of the Tai-ping leaders escaped with their troops and fled into Kiangsi; but the poor Faithful King remained true to his name and to the Tai-ping cause. He had lost heart, however, and regarded the Rebel movement as virtually defunct. Even then the Heavenly Monarch would not listen to his advice, and trusted the management of affairs to the Shield King alone. He still continued his policy of ignoring the actual state of things, and of discoursing grandiloquently on the mysteries of heaven and earth. Inside the doomed city matters were daily becoming worse and worse. The Faithful King says that starving men and women were constantly clinging round him, beseeching relief which was no longer in his power to afford. As the Tien Wang refused to allow any of the famished people to leave the city, the Faithful King issued secret orders enabling them to do so; and so about 3000 women and children were allowed to go out to the Imperialist General, Tseng Kwo-tsun, who had established a provident fund for their relief. On

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the other hand, the Cantonese soldiers of the Shield King plundered and murdered as they chose, so that complete anarchy and confusion reigned in the beleaguered capital of the Great Peace. "Thieves and robbers," says the Chung Wang, "sprang up in the city. The nights were disturbed with incessant cannonading within the walls, and murders and pillages of whole families took place. These were fatal omens, and indications of coming destruction." As dangers gathered round him, Hung Sew-tsuen, the Heavenly Monarch, became more cruel in his edicts, and ordered any of his people who might be found communicating with the enemy to be flayed alive or pounded to death; but even he could no longer conceal from himself the fact that the days of his reign and of his life had drawn to a close. It would be interesting to know what were. the last thoughts of this extraordinary man when he found himself in these circumstances. Did he still believe that he was a favourite of heaven, and authorised representative of Deity on earth, or had he in his last hours some glimpse of the true nature of the terrible and cruel destiny which he had had to fulfil? Surely as his thoughts reverted to the simple Hakka village of his youth, he must have known that his path over the once peaceful and happy Flowery Land could be traced by flames and rapine and bloodshed, involving a sum of human wretchedness such as had never before lain to the account of the most ferocious scourge of mankind. Where there had been busy cities, he had left ruinous heaps; where fruitful fields, a desolate wilderness; "wild beasts, descending from their fastnesses in the mountains, roamed at large over the land, and made their dens in the ruins of deserted towns; the cry of the pheasant usurped the place of the hum of busy populations; no

hands were left to till the soil, and noxious weeds covered the ground once tilled with patient industry." Even, as has been remarked, the very physical features of the country, owing to neglect of the embankment of great rivers, had been largely changed by his destructive carcer. And, after all this ruin and misery, what had the Tai-ping movement come to at last but the restoration of Imperial rule in China, while a cloud of fear and wrath hung over the doomed city in which the king and priest and prophet of the Great Peace anticipated death in the midst of his trembling women and the remnant of his ferocious soldiery?

It is a dreadful story, but chiefly interesting and solely valuable to us from the warning it gives as to the disorganisation and ruin which may swiftly overtake the human race, when it tries to avoid the constantly recurring necessity of facing the exigencies of its position; and as to the danger of allowing a man of powerful imaginative mind to become mad in the fire of his own repressed energy, and under a sense of his own sufferings and wrongs. Men like Rousseau and Hung Sew-tsuen are not to be held personally accountable for their destructive effect on the society in which they grow up. "They made themselves a fearful monument;" but in order to its being made, society must have become ripe for ruin the tree must be ready to fall; and there is no surer indication of such rottenness in any civilisation, than its inability or its unwillingness to find a fitting place for men of so remarkable powers. the case of the Tai-ping chief, over-population, nominal submission to Tartar dominion, and unlooked-for contact with a different civilisation, at least as powerful as its own, had brought China to a condition in which it required a great purifying punishment. A

In

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striking indication of this fact was the sale of civil offices for money, because there was nothing on which the Chinese had so justly prided themselves, and in which they were so superior to other nations, as their committal of both power and wealth to men of regal qualities. "Virtue," says the commentator in the Great Learning,' "is the root, wealth is the result; " and so long as the Chinese acted on this principle their empire flourished; when they departed from it, trouble came, as it has always come, and always will come, upon nations who value this result more than its root, and having first allowed the exercise of low qualities to determine the possession of wealth, proceed to the almost necessary consequence of allowing wealth to wield the chief power. It really required some such terrible affliction as the Taiping Rebellion to save China from the state of corruption and imbecility into which it was sinking; and when that rebellion had served its purpose, it too came to an end, and fell like a tree prepared to fall. In all this there was nothing but that benevolence of Heaven to which Confucius refers, terrible as its working may seem to human eyes; and so it becomes intelligible how the nation which required this punishment had not the privilege of meting out justice and inflicting retribution on the instrument of it.

Those who were in intercourse with him at this period gave no indication as to Hung Sew-tsuen's state of mind. His son, the "Young Lord," only states that on the "24th May 1864 the Tien Wang succumbed to sickness;" but the Faithful King more probably relates that, terrified by the bursting of mines which the Imperialists had sprung round the East Gate, the Rebel Monarch fell into such anxiety and trouble of mind that on the 30th June he poisoned himself. His corpse was buried by

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one of his wives in the garden behind his palace, where it was afterwards dug up by the Imperialists, and was found draped in yellow silk, the head being bald and the mustache grey.

After the death of this monarch, his eldest son, Hung Fu-tien, a youth of sixteen years old, ascended the nominal throne; but he had been brought up in ignorance of state matters and of military operations. The city was still more closely beleaguered, and on the 8th July the Faithful King made a sortie, but was driven back after a severe fight. As it was plain to him that the city could not be held much longer, he was now anxious to surrender, but was so closely watched by his colleagues that he could not get away, and an attempt he made to escape nearly cost him his life, through the drunken loquacity of one of his adherents. On the 19th of this month the Imperialists fired an enormous mine, said to contain over 40,000 lb. of gunpowder, which blew a long breach clean through the wall, and through this the Imperialists poured into the city, while at the same time false attacks were made on all sides. On seeing this, the garrisons of Chung-kuan, and of the few other forts which remained to the Tai-pings outside, either surrendered or were killed when running away; but inside the city the Faithful King rallied his troops, and repulsed the assailants near the Tien Wang's palace, which he held till midnight, protecting the Monarch's weeping family. As the Imperialists thronged into the city, however, he found he could no longer make a stand, and, having set fire to the palace, along with his own residence, retreated towards the South-west Gate. Here Hung Fu-tien and two other sons of the Rebel Monarch claimed his assistance, and, as a last instance of his wonderful and unselfish faithfulness, he mounted the Young