Chinese Police.
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all cry aloud for death, more or less slow and painful; and parricide evokes the sternest chastisement of the Chinese, as it once did of the Roman law. Forgery is less harshly viewed than with us. Orientals generally take a merciful view of those crimes which are wrought by pure cunning,— those aesthetic offences, as it were, which spill no blood, rifle no strong-box, and fire no roof. Accordingly, the talented imita tor of commercial signatures is pretty certain to meet with judges who can appreciate lit erary merit, even when it stoops to counter feit invoices and sham promissory notes. And Chinese law has a very extraordinary principle, radically opposed to our American ethics, which apportions light penalties to the high and erudite criminal, heavy and hard atonement for the misdeeds of the poor untaught sinner. Cathay has a peculiar ten derness for Dives, especially for a Dives who loves his library, and pens a sonnet in the true classical style of the Han dynasty. The purblind Astrsca of Mongolian philosophy can afford to wink at the trespasses of power ful wrongdoers : they are beaten with few stripes; and that which in meaner men shall be esteemed heinous and horrible, shall in them be classed as a mere peccadillo that dollars can wash away. But there are other offenders out of the pale of official sympathy, and these are the outlaws and the conspirators. The outlaws, or declared brigands, are in China a formid able fraternity. They are called, in the in are considered as still more venial offenders. land provinces, where the pure court lan A vigorous bastinado, or a week of the pil guage is the orthodox standard, by the name lory, is the law's award in such trivial cases. of kouan-kouen, or desperado. But on the Petty assaults are as leniently disposed of, I borders of the empire, in Mantchuria, and but fire-raising is a sin of deeper dye; and on the edge of Mongolian- Tartary, the the malicious piercing of a neighbor's dyke, Turkish words " orolis " and " haiduck" to let in a devastating flood, is punished with come into use — borrowed from the nomadic extreme vigor. Murder and treasonable prac tribes of the Transoxian steppe. All these tices, wholesale piracy and armed brigandage, words, Chinese or Turkish, denote a daring
its. These poor rogues do not aspire to a ship of their own; they come paddling out of muddy creeks in the smallest of sampans, ill-armed, ill-clad, but plentifully smeared with fish-oil. If manfully confronted, they fly; if grappled by the crews of the fourthclass junks, which they select as prizes, they slip like so many eels through the hands that grasp them, and their swimming makes amends for their lax courage. Seldom do any sinister results follow one of these at tacks; if the fresh-water pirates prove victo rious, they are mild conquerors, and only too eager to be on shore again with their booty of rice and corn, stray garments, odd frag ments of chain, bits of copper and brass hastily ripped from the poop and cabins, and, perhaps, the glorious trophy of a few rattling strings of cash. The dollars and silver bars are generally too well hidden to be detected by such hurried searches; food, rather than fortune, is the object of the foray; and, except in rare cases of remarkable temptation, no life is attempted and no torture resorted to. With these amphibious petty-larceny rogues the magistrates deal mildly, according to the traditions of Chinese justice. Three hundred strokes of the bamboo may be endured by the human frame. Four sleepless weeks in the "cangue," or bamboo pillory, may fail to madden a stolid, unimaginative coolie. A few minor tortures need only be added to these two first-named inflictions, and the culprit is thought Pilferers to have in a been fair, or most thetenderly streets dealt of a town, with.
