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brought to the point of giving practical effect to his designs. Then came the great journey -the first organised exploration of the Hinterland of IndoChina from the shores of the China Sea ever undertaken by white men.

Doudart de Lagarée, a postcaptain in the French navy, who then was holding the post of Political Agent at the Court of Kambodia at Phnom Penh, was given the supreme command, but Garnier was his chief lieutenant, his right-hand man, and throughout the inspiring genius of the expedition. The valley of the Me-kong was explored from the delta to Chieng Hong, the point at which the river had been struck from the Burmese side by M'Leod, the Scotsman, in 1837; the Chinese province of Yun-nan, then rent by the great upheaval of the Muhammadan Rebellion, was traversed; Ta-li-fu, the capital of the rebels, was visited by Garnier in circumstances of the greatest difficulty; and the valley of the Yang-tse was descended till at last the French flag was sighted floating over the Consulate at Han-kau. The explorers returned to Saigon after an absence in the wilderness of over two years; but, alas! they bore with them only the bones of Doudart de Lagarée, the wise, tactful, kindly chief, whose prudence had often curbed the fiery impulsiveness of his lieutenant, and whose lovable character had won the enthusiastic affection of every one of his comrades.

"It seemed to us," said

Garnier, on his return, to the Empress Eugénie, who throughout had taken an intense interest in this journey of exploration-"It seemed to us, while we were toiling and travailing in the wilderness, that the eyes of all France were fixed upon us. I find now that the eyes of your Majesty alone marked our progress. That for us is

a more than sufficient recompense for hardships endured."

Which was well and prettily said, for what fairer, kinder eyes would any man desire to watch his struggles and his victories? But there abode in the words, I suspect, more than 8 trace of bitterness. The great achievement left Paris and France cold. Far greater interest was excited by it in England, for instance, and Garnier himself was made the victim of the most heartless calumnies and misrepresentations. Nobody cared for the fame of Doudart de Lagarée for its own sake; but it was gall and wormwood to the mean and the envious that a living man should earn fame or credit. Garnier was represented as a ghoul who had waxed rich by the plundering of the honoured dead, and though he never stooped to defend himself, though he insisted upon sharing every honour showered upon him by the learned societies of other lands with the widow of his dead chief, he presently turned his back upon a France which had for him neither gratitude nor honour, and passed back to the Indo-China which was still for him the land of dreams.

He was killed a few years

later in an ill-managed little business in Tongking, and today his statue stands in the most incongruous spot in all Asia, looking down upon the

meretricious frivolity of les civilisés of Saigon! Was it my fancy only that seemed to mark an expression of awful melancholy in that still face of bronze?

• THE DISCONTENTED ENGLISHMAN.

"How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to seem Falling asleep in a half-dream."

There is a saying on the Outskirts anent the first public works which are wont to engage the attention of the various European nations when, in the struggle for empire, they start, each after its own characteristic fashion, the task of administration in a newly acquired country. The English, it is said, build first a road, which leads to a cricketfield. The earliest care of the Belgian is to construct a guillotine, and to put it into firstrate working order. The Dutchman erects a custom-house; the German, a block of barracks, or failing that, a sentrybox; the Italian makes nothing; while the Frenchman builds a café chantant and flanks it by a Roman Catholic church.

I had seen the cafés chantants overnight the church in close proximity-it filled the whole of the upper end of the Rue Catinat was not to be overlooked when next day I stepped out of the still slumbering hotel into the cool, fresh fragrance of the early morning. I had found it impossible to get my café au lait before a liberal six heures et demi. An outraged Chinese servant, blear-eyed from the

-The Lotos-Eaters.

night before, had exclaimed with horror at my desire to have it even at that late hour

-for in the Tropics half-past six is late; but at seven o'clock the European part of the town seemed still to be lapped in slumber. This struck me as curious at the time, in view of the fact that in the East the cool hours of the early morning are the most precious in the twenty-four-precious alike for work and exercise. It appealed to me as something still more remarkable later, when I learned that the business hours of the place are from 7 A.M. to 11 A.M., and from 2 P.M. to 4 P.M.

This fact, and some others, were explained to me by the Discontented Englishman. He added that by making seven, seven-thirty, by reckoning tenthirty as eleven, and by treating the afternoon hours in a like generous spirit, the time devoted to the silly trivialities of toil were by the majority of Frenchmen sensibly and satisfactorily reduced. Later, when I had a little business of my own to transact, I discovered the truth of this assertion. The puzzle is to hit upon the moment which may legitimately be regarded as a real

business hour. It can be done, however, with thought, experience, and practice; but even so, the achievement owes not a little, I think, to some occult, natural instinct.

I had been that morning into a chemist's shop in search of tabloids of bisulphate of quinine-a drug of some repute in tropical Asia,—and had watched the small French chemist shrug contemptuous shoulders at the sheer extravagance of such a demand. I had tried other chemists with a like result, and had been blandly assured that such a thing did not sell itself in Saigon. This information was imparted with an air of the most complete satisfaction with the scheme of appointed things. There was no senseless fiction anent a stock which had unexpectedly run out, about a consignment due by the next mail. On the contrary, the impression which these shopkeepers succeeded in conveying to me was that articles which Saigon did not sell were things which common sanity would refrain from demanding.

It

was I, not they, who was rightfully garbed in shame. From curiosity I asked to be furnished with other articles at other shops, -a rough waterproof overcoat, a decently strong umbrella, boots that would fit one, and the like. But none of these things, it appeared, sold themselves in Saigon. Instead, the shops seemed to be littered with all sorts of extraordinary trash which no hypothetical eccentric could be supposed to require. If this rubbish sold itself in Saigon, Saigon, I reflected, must be a mighty queer place. So it is. It is (among other things) the dumping - ground for the unsaleable surplus stocks of France.

And, lo! ere I knew it, there were the Discontented Englishman and I about to be close locked in a grapple over the eternal Fiscal Question. One does not go all the way to Indo-China to renew a discussion in which no man of "settled opinions ever convinces his neighbour, or by his neighbour is convinced. I fled for my life.

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LES FONCTIONNAIRES.

"Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?"-The Lotos-Eaters.

There were roads, beautiful French roads, as good as any in the world, in and about Saigon. If their length equalled their quality they would form at any rate the beginning of a magnificent road system. As it is, most of them fade away into nothing

at a discreet distance from the town. They enable one to take the air; they do not materially assist one to take a journey. They are quite pretty to look at.

There is, at any rate, the beginning of a railway system, but in a country which has

been occupied for sixty years by a European nation, and where the engineering difficulties are reduced to a minimum by the flatness of the wide areas to be traversed, the progress made is not impressive. L'Administration, it would appear, blossoms out chiefly in the direction of its personnel. In Kambodia, for instance, where there is a scattered population of one and a half million souls, no less than two hundred European fonctionnaires are considered necessary for its government. British India, with its three hundred millions, claims the services of less than five hundred officials of similar position.

But the Indian Civil Service, like all our services, is notoriously short-handed. Our cadets nowadays are set to work upon active administrative duties long before their official education has been satisfactorily completed. This at any rate, it would seem, need not be the case in French Indo-China, where there can hardly be enough work to go round. The French Civil Servant should surely have that which our people to-day most notoriously lack-time, time to learn. Unfortunately, however, unless my informantsall themselves Frenchmen of experience-are at fault, the notion that there is aught to learn is one which does not readily present itself to the young official newly imported from France. Being posted to an appointment in the Colonial Civil Service of his country appears to be regarded by him

as the end, rather than as the beginning, of his life's work. To secure employment as a Civil Servant in Indo-China no examination, competitive or otherwise, beyond the taking of an ordinary degree, is demanded of him. The rest is a question of influence-the winning of a nomination from the Minister of the day. Appointments in the Colonies are not things for which Frenchmen scramble with any eagerness: the family "waster" is the person on whose account, for the most part, the necessary influence is exerted. He will be returned to France and mercifully retransported once every three years at the expense of Government. For the rest, he is provided for for life. His own immediate preoccupation is to create in the land of his exile as close an approximation as adverse circumstance will admit to the France from which he has been banished. The country in which he finds himself is hopelessly, incurably Oriental. To work in it any notable transformation would be a herculean task. He has no liking for tasks, even when their proportions are not magnificent. He contents himself with the creation of a Rue Catinat.

It is not over difficult, it adds to his material comfort, the which is his chief care, and it helps ever so little to disguise the banishment to which he is condemned.

For, be it remembered, he is always in banishment, always a kind of official remittanceman, your French fonctionnaire in Indo-China,-always there

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because he cannot help it, the exception. Facility of never because he likes it. The communication with with Europe East sounds no call for him, has loosened many a foundabut the alluring voice of France tion stone of our Oriental is for ever making mocking music in his ears. He is "putting in time," like any other deported criminal, and only in very rare instances does he learn to love his chains.

These are facts which seem to be recognised by the Administration. The attitude of Government toward its Civil Servants is largely one of compassion, of pity. It is hard enough for these poor devils to be here at all, it seems to say. It would be wicked to make things harder for them by expecting them to be useful. Accordingly, though the inability of the French Civil Servant to speak the vernaculars is universally admitted and almost as universally deplored, successive Governors-General have drawn back dismayed from the proposal to make such studies compulsory and promotion dependent on proficiency. Such action, it is thought, would be a cruelty, a brutality, the adoption of methods of barbarism. One does not wantonly strike the man who is down; and if a man were not "down," how, in the name of common-sense, would he ever be a Civil Servant of France in Indo-China?

We English, we too to-day, are suffering in Asia from the fact that less and less do our people who work for England in the East regard the scene of their labours as the one place that matters, as "Home" in all save the name alone. Aforetime this was the rule: now it is

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Empire. But that Empire had been upreared, vast, solid, and four-square, ere ever Progress, with its offspring Mechanical Contrivance, had begun to work the ruin which so many of us now watch with such despairing eyes. To Henry Lawrence, who "tried to do his duty"; to grim John, who wrought through sheer strength mightily, as his brother wrought through tenderness, sympathy, and love; to Nicholson, the Quixote of our race, who fought with no imaginary foe,-India, their India, was to them the whole world. What to them did Europe matter, or the criticisms or the plaudits of the folk who did not know? India claimed from them their sole

allegiance. At her feet they laid their love, their labour, and their lives. We, who today maintain with little ease that which they wrested from ruin, know in our hearts that we are daily becoming more and more depolarised. Our lodestar now is Europe, not the East.

But our race produced that breed of giants whose work we have inherited,-produced the men whose names will live in story long after the Raj for which they toiled has tottered to its fall. France has been less fortunate. Our foundation-stones may be working loose: those of her Empire in Indo-China seem never to have been laid.

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