Chapter V: The Chinese People and Their Characteristics

Great antiquity of China’s national existence—Stagnation of her
organization as well as of her social, religious and
administrative institutions—Unity of Chinese civilization
notwithstanding varied surroundings, differences of language and
of racial origin, it being much more inflexible than that of the
Western world—Some of the principal characteristics of the
Chinese—Love of false appearances—Gulf that divides the
theoretical from the practical in all matters of Chinese
administration—Corruption of the Chinese Government and its
determination to impede progress—Lightness of the taxes—The mass
of the people apparently happy under distressing circumstances—The
good-humour and liveliness of the Celestials—Pity said to be
absolutely excluded from the Chinese character—Why the Chinese
make bad soldiers—Organization of the family and position of
women—Vices of the Chinese: love of gambling, opium, filthy habits
and superstitions—Their better qualities—The people themselves not
in a state of decadence—Primary effects of contact with Western
civilization.

The Chinese are at one and the same time the most numerous and the longest existing nation in the world. The annals of the Celestial Empire date as far back as those of Egypt, and twenty centuries ago, when States which now rule the earth were in process of formation, China, having undergone several evolutions, was already constituted as she is to-day. The Chinese have never been subjected to any of those marked and repeated changes which, during the last two thousand years, have so profoundly modified the social organization and the manners and customs of other countries; and even the introduction of a new religion did not produce in the East anything comparable to the revolution which, at about the same time, occurred in the West through the spread of Christianity. Buddhism did not modify the Chinese people, but the Chinese people modified Buddhism after their own image and likeness, without, however, permitting the doctrines of Sakyamuni to exercise the least influence over their character, or change an iota of their ideas concerning life and morality, which were determined by Confucius and other sage Celestials, being in reality derived less from the meditations of philosophers or the inspiration of prophets than from the intuitive instinct of the race. The institutions of China have not altered the mental habits or method of life upon which they profess to be modelled, any more than has the theoretical principle of family existence altered the Imperial Government; for the Chinese even now often qualify their high officials by the endearing epithets ‘father’ and ‘mother.’ Political revolutions have not made a deeper impression upon the fossilized organization of the Chinese Government, than has religion on the character and manners of the people. The various dynasties that have succeeded each other have changed nothing, although some of them have been of foreign origin: the Mongolian in the thirteenth century and the Manchurian in our own time; but they effected no variations in the system of Government, and only placed certain functionaries to watch over the mandarins, precisely as the Tatar marshals are instructed to spy upon the officials of nowadays.

China has always been governed after Chinese methods, and although she has occasionally been conquered by foreigners, she has invariably absorbed them into her own civilization, and obliged them to observe her traditions. The Chinese care very little about the future, the greatness or the independence of their country; but they cling with extraordinary tenacity to their old manners and customs, and thereby offer a striking contrast to their neighbours the Japanese, who, notwithstanding their intense patriotism, will make any sacrifice, even that of religious principle and most cherished tradition, if they think that they may thereby benefit their Empire. The Japanese have almost the same conception of patriotism as Europeans, but not so the Chinese, with whom this virtue is merely a racial affair, which in the hour of danger invariably proves of little or no avail, especially against adversaries of a kind never previously encountered.

Does there exist, beyond this intense love of old customs and of an immutable civilization, any bond of union among the three or four hundred millions of human beings who constitute the population of China?[23] At first sight no people could possibly appear more thoroughly homogeneous than the Chinese; but it is not necessary to stay long among them to perceive that even from the physical point of view there are certain racial differences which make it more difficult at first to note the dissimilarity which separates their race from our own. Even more striking are the diverse dialects spoken in the Empire, several of which are not mere patois, but distinct languages, rendering it impossible for a native of Canton or Foochow to make himself understood at Peking; and in many provinces these idiomatic peculiarities are very interesting. In Fo-kien no less than three patois are spoken—the Amoy, Swatow, and the Foochow, which are utterly different from each other. Between the cities of Peking and Tien-tsin, scarcely thirty leagues apart, there is already a marked difference in the matter of dialect. It is also a noteworthy fact that very little sympathy exists among the Chinese from different provinces, who keep aloof from each other even when circumstances oblige them to live in the same town. Very marked, too, are the divergent characteristics and temperaments observable between the inhabitants of the North and those of the South, the former being much the most energetic and enterprising, but at the same time more hostile to foreigners. The Central Government is almost unknown by the multitudes outside of Peking, and it would be a comparatively easy task to raise an army in one part of China to fight against the inhabitants of another.

The question may now be asked whether China, which covers an area equal to that of Europe, and is even more thickly peopled, is less homogeneous than our own Continent. Does there exist between the various Chinese provinces the same differences that mark each of the nations that in the aggregate form Europe? From the geographical and climatic point of view it is evident that the difference is not very great, although China possesses very high mountains only on her Western frontier, and her plains are much more extensive and continuous. But from the ethnical point of view it would be an exaggeration to state that there is much analogy between China and Europe, since the former is certainly much the more homogeneous. The different countries of our Continent are inhabited by peoples who are only remotely related to each other, and who are merely united by the ties of a common civilization, whereas amongst the subjects of the Son of Heaven the ties are much stronger and the physical resemblance is more marked. I am, of course, speaking of the inhabitants of China proper only—of the eighteen provinces, to which might be added a nineteenth, Ching-king, or Southern Manchuria, now in process of colonization by the Chinese. The various tributary peoples belonging to the Celestial Empire, such as the Mongolians, the Thibetans and the Turki in Eastern Turkestan, are absolutely distinct from each other and from the predominant race; but although the dependencies which they cover constitute two-thirds of the surface of the entire Empire, they only form a twentieth of the entire population, and do not share in its Government.

It should be observed that the absence of any sympathy between the inhabitants of the different Chinese provinces might have been found quite recently exemplified in Europe, not merely between nation and nation, but between province and province in the same country, and that linguistic variations are still noticeable even in the most homogeneous countries. History is full of instances of intestine troubles which have existed in nearly every European nation, and it is but thirty years since the Germans were at war with each other.

I have often heard related the misadventures of two Celestials, natives of different provinces, who, whilst travelling in Europe, met one day only to discover that their sole means of making themselves understood was by speaking English. But does not this story recall the recent Slav Congress in Austria, whose debates had to be held in German in order that they might be followed by all the delegates? The existence of patois and dialects results from the inhabitants of certain districts having neither the time nor the money to go beyond their village further than the nearest market-town. Then, again, education in China does not tend, as in Europe, to produce unity of language, since its writing is quite independent of pronunciation, and the innumerable letters of its alphabet represent, not sounds, but ideas. The lack of any spirit of patriotism may be largely attributed to this state of absolute isolation, to which may be added a general and very profound ignorance. But patriotism as we understand it is, after all, a matter of modern sentiment, therefore not to be looked for in so antiquated a nation as the Chinese.

It matters little whether there be a common origin or not, since our notions of race are very difficult to define, and modern anthropological and ethnographical discoveries tend more and more towards the acceptance of the theory of the existence of distinct races. Whereas the patois of the ten northernmost provinces are merely dialects of the Manchurian languages, those of the south, especially of Fo-kien and Canton, are totally different, and apparently confirm the theory that the Chinese invaders who came from the north-east found the land already inhabited by a people whom they assimilated, precisely as they are doing in our time in Manchuria, and as did the Romans in ancient Gaul.

The entire population of China, excepting a few obscure mountain tribes, the remainder, possibly, of the autochthones of the South, whatever their origin, have for centuries moulded themselves on a civilization that penetrates far deeper into the details of every-day life than any known in Europe. The result is a greater uniformity among the people who have adopted it than will be found among men who follow a less rigid code that permits of greater latitude and affords a freer scope for the exercise of individuality. Many peculiarities in the Chinese character appear at first contradictory, even to those who have lived long in the country, and who assert that no European can ever thoroughly understand a Chinaman because his mind is so differently constituted.

The most striking characteristic of the Chinese, says Mr. Arthur H. Smith, an American missionary who has lived twenty-two years in China, in his admirable book ‘Chinese Characteristics,’ is their remarkable manner of ‘facing’ a thing. To save appearances, or to ‘face’ a difficulty cunningly rather than boldly, is the endeavour of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of the Son of Heaven, and is the key, moreover, to a great many other matters that might otherwise appear incomprehensible. Every Chinaman considers himself an actor, whose public words, acts, and deeds have nothing in common with reality. The most praiseworthy and even the most innocent of actions, unless it be performed in a certain way, will only cover its author with shame and ridicule. If a fault is committed, the guilty party is expected to deny it with the utmost effrontery in spite of convincing evidence, and on no account must he confess himself guilty, even if he is obliged to repair the injury done. From the highest to the lowest, the Chinese entertain a profound respect for shamming. A boy caught stealing will slip the coveted object up his sleeves, stoop down and pretend to pick it up, and with the smile of an angel present it to his master, saying, ‘Here is what you have lost.’ A little over a hundred years ago the mandarins who were escorting Macartney, the English Ambassador, into the presence of the Son of Heaven, profited by his ignorance of their language to place over his carriage an inscription to the effect that it contained ‘the Ambassador bringing tribute from the Kingdom of England,’ and thus kept up the fiction of the universal sovereignty of their lord and master.

Undoubtedly the observance of a certain amount of etiquette is both useful and praiseworthy, and so considered by all civilized nations; but Chinese etiquette is the most punctilious and complicated that was ever imagined, and never on any account to be neglected for a single instant. This excessive attention to outward forms, which, if they be but observed, may conceal any kind of iniquity, explains the fact that in China there is a deeper gulf between theory and practice than in any other country in the world. That it has always been so may be questioned, but at present the morals of Confucius have long since been lost in a code of etiquette which defines virtue as consisting in the observance to the letter of the three hundred rules of ceremony and the three thousand regulations of conduct, without paying the least attention to the spirit in which they were originally formulated.

It is in the system of Government in China that the contrast between precept and practice becomes most evident. As Mr. Henry Norman remarks with hardly exaggerated severity, ‘Every Chinese official, with the possible exception of one in a thousand, is a liar, a thief and a tyrant!’ Examples confirming this assertion are very numerous, and even the celebrated Li Hung-chang cannot be included in the list of those officials who are noted for their honesty, since he had to disgorge a great part of the immense fortune he had accumulated—twenty millions, it is reputed—to save his head during the Chino-Japanese War, when he had to purchase the goodwill of many Court dignitaries, eunuchs and others, notwithstanding which, money matters still occupy a great deal of his attention. I had the honour while I was at Peking to dine at the French Legation in the company of this exalted personage, on the occasion of the visit of the Admiral commanding the French Fleet in the Far East and several officers of his staff. Li conversed through the intermediary of an interpreter named Ma, to whom he spoke in the Fo-kien, his native dialect; it appears he speaks Manchu very badly. He put to each of the guests several polite questions usual among Orientals, inquired after their rank, their age, and invariably wound up his courteous inquiries by asking: ‘Well, and what is your salary?’ With us the income of an official is a matter of very little importance, but with the famous mandarin it was the essential.

For centuries the administration of China has been as corrupt as it is to-day, but for all this it has never driven the people to rebellion. It is true that occasionally there are local agitations, whose chiefs go so far as to pounce upon offending representatives of authority and convey them to the capital of the district, or province, to demand their degradation, which is more often than not accorded—a fact which inspired an English paper at Shanghai to descant on the ‘democratic manner in which the Chinese participate in their government.’ Oppression tempered by revolt is the rule which prevails in the Celestial Empire, but there is no fear of a general revolution against so degenerate a system. This administrative machine, however, which appears to us to be so detestable, only impedes progress, but does not affect the population, which is accustomed to routine habits hundreds of years old, and has not the remotest idea that a reform is either necessary or practicable. When an enterprising man wishes to introduce even the most insignificant of modern trades, he invariably attracts the attention of the mandarins, to whom he is obliged to apply for permission to carry on his novelty, and will only obtain it after much bribery and a promise to pay such a huge percentage on his profits as to render the returns of his venture too insignificant to be worth his continuing it. But for the uncomplaining and unprogressive, who have nothing to do with administrative affairs, life in China flows easily and quietly enough. The taxes are very light, especially for the peasantry, who live by what they harvest in their fields, or for the workpeople, whose wants are very small They fall, however, heavily upon commercial transactions and the transport of merchandise, are a great impediment to commerce, and though they never affect them directly, for their poverty is far too great to permit of their buying anything, they contribute indirectly to keep the inferior classes in a state of abject poverty. According to the investigations of Herr von Brandt, former German Minister to Peking, and a man who has studied China profoundly, the land tax in China reaches £5,250,000, being about 3s. per acre in the North, with a maximum of 13s. in the South. This is not much when we consider the intense activity of Chinese agriculture, which extracts from the soil almost everywhere two harvests annually. The total of the Budget, according to the same authority, reaches 100,000,000 taels, or £15,000,000. Other authorities estimated it as high as £24,000,000, but even this is not excessive. The following is Von Brandt’s account of the different sources of revenue of the Chinese Empire:

Inland Revenue £5,250,000 Treaty port Customs (obtained by the International Customs Service) 3,450,000 Right for transit in the interior (_likin_) 1,800,000 Native Customs and tax on native opium 1,500,000 Salt tax 1,500,000 Sale of titles and honorary distinctions 750,000 Tribute of rice 450,000 Licenses, etc. 300,000 ——————————— Total £15,000,000 ===========

The public revenues, gathered by the provincial treasuries, are sent on to Peking after deduction of the amount necessary for the requirements of the district. It is stated that only a third of these receipts is disposable for the needs of the Central Government.

The mass of the Chinese people endure, therefore, without much discontent, a Government which in ordinary time weighs very lightly upon them, that meddles very little in the affairs of their villages or communes, always very strongly constituted in the Far East, and, above all, never disturbs their ancient customs. Exceedingly poor, and only able to live by dint of hard work, and having a very severe struggle for life, the people have no time to waste on philosophical reflections, and, moreover, possess no standard of comparison to assist it to judge of the hardness of its fate. In addition to this, we must not forget that the Chinese are endowed by nature with an excessive spirit of conservatism and a patience and perseverance quite beyond praise, to which must be added a jovial good-humour that enables them to endure an existence which to the people of any other country would appear intolerable. Peasants and workpeople alike have no hope of ever seeing their humble condition improved, and their prospective existence is one of absolute monotony, entirely passed in sowing and reaping, in carrying heavy burdens, in the turning of looms, or in labouring the earth, without having, excepting on a few feast-days, a moment’s rest, save what is absolutely necessary for meals and sleep. None the less, they always seem very happy, complain very little, and thoroughly enjoy their few pleasures, and apparently absolutely ignore their troubles.

This happy spirit of resignation explains why the Chinese, notwithstanding their poverty, are one of the most contented people in the world, and, consequently, one of the happiest; but, unfortunately, they are exposed from time to time to dreadful calamities: an inundation, an epidemic, or a bad harvest, which brings about inevitable misery and famine to the entire population, who are left without any resources because their work has not been sufficiently remunerative to enable them to put anything by for a rainy day. Not a year passes without a dreadful calamity occurring somewhere or other in the immense Celestial Empire, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, so that, notwithstanding the astonishing number of children born, the population apparently does not increase. Here, then, we have a striking application of the doctrines of Malthus; for in this society, into which no ray of progress is admitted, men multiply quicker than their means of subsistence, but natural calamities re-establish the balance by annually overwhelming a prodigious number of men, women and children.

The exaggerated sense of conservatism and the improvidence of the administration are in part responsible for the occurrence of these grave calamities, which are generally accompanied by a recrudescence of that chronic piracy and brigandage which is peculiar to China, being the sole means of gaining a livelihood left to many ruined wretches. Sometimes, however, the agents of the Government, after having done nothing either to prevent a catastrophe or to mitigate its consequences, increase it in times of famine by their avidity in seizing the rice, and thus provoke a rebellion, as happened in 1898 at various parts of the Yang-tsze-Kiang. But beyond these cases, in which the authorities are manifestly guilty, the Chinese people submit with the utmost resignation to calamities which they foresee and consider as merely natural, and which, when they happen, barely ruffle their habitual placidity. Death to such a people cannot have the same terrors it has for us.

Europeans are of all the civilized peoples of the earth those who complain most of life, but yet who hold most dearly to it. The people of the Far East, the Chinese as well as the Japanese, on the other hand, consider it least. Indifference to death seems to be with them almost a physical characteristic, the result of the singular insensibility of their nervous system. With respect to this last, we have plenty of evidence. The doctors in the European hospitals where natives are treated relate with amazement how their patients undergo the most painful operations without a murmur and without the necessity of having to resort to anæsthetics. In every-day life, too, the same curious apathy is to be observed in the extraordinary facility with which they can fall asleep whenever they choose, even in the midst of the most awful din and noise, and they can, moreover, remain for hours in one position without making the slightest motion. The reverse of the medal is that, although they are so indifferent to their own sufferings, they are without the slightest feeling for those of others, and can watch the writhing agony of a human being without expressing the least horror or sympathy. The dreadful custom of binding the feet of women in such a manner as to push the heel forward and double up the toes under the sole of the foot, inducing a sore that is never healed, is but one out of many examples of Chinese cruelty. The various and horrible tortures inflicted by the judicial tribunals are another illustration of the same dreadful instinct. The idea of bargaining with a person in danger of death, or with a man who has fallen into the water before attempting to rescue him from drowning, are things which would never suggest themselves to a European, but they come naturally to the Chinese.

The little value in which human life is held in the Far East is exemplified by the frequency of suicide, merely to vindicate a point of honour which in many parts of Europe would be settled at the point of the sword. The _hara-kiri_ is not restricted to Japan, or to the upper classes of Chinese society. A Chinaman, even of the lowest order, will commit suicide out of vengeance, spite, or even through what he considers a matter of honour. Sacrifice of life is common even among women, if we may believe the following narrative extracted from a Chinese newspaper:

‘One day a sow belonging to a certain Madame Feng, having done some slight injury to the door of a certain Madame Wang, that lady forthwith demanded compensation with interest, which was refused, whereupon Madame Wang announced her intention of committing suicide. This dreadful threat proved altogether too much for Madame Feng, who there and then determined to beat her enemy with her own weapon by flinging herself into the nearest canal.’[24] Suicides are by no means rare among the upper classes of the literati, and quite recently a censor, a high functionary who possesses the privilege of addressing petitions to the Sovereign, awaited the passing of the Imperial cortege and then killed himself as a political demonstration, in order to add weight to a memorial he had presented concerning some promise of the Government which had not been fulfilled. The innumerable public executions form a pendant to the equally numerous cases of suicide.

The reader may be somewhat surprised that a people fearing death so little should make such bad soldiers; but, after all, however lightly a man may hold his life, no one sacrifices it unless it be for some ideal or other. If the Celestials care so little about existence, they care still less for the grandeur of their country, patriotic feeling being absolutely absent from their nature. During the French campaign in Formosa it was no uncommon thing to see Chinese prisoners refuse to do tasks which they considered beneath them, and which they could only be induced to perform after having seen the heads of a few of their comrades fall under the sword. These very people who prefer death rather than derogate from their dignity are the same who have often been seen throwing down their arms on the battlefield. It is but fair to add that it is the military mandarins or officers who generally give the signal for a stampede. Possibly, if commanded by other officers, the Chinese, with their wonderful power of enduring privation and callousness for death, would eventually form an admirable army which, even if it were unable to defend China against foreign Powers, would certainly prove a valuable ally to one or other of them.[25]

The practice of infanticide, especially of female infants, is another example of the different ways in which the Chinese and Europeans regard life and family ties. With us the love of parents for children is often greater than that of children for their parents; but in China it is quite the reverse. According to Confucius, filial piety was the noblest of virtues, indeed, the fountain-head of them all, and it is the one which his compatriots still practise most assiduously. Among the lower orders, however, this virtue is confined to the support of parents; but this is a duty never neglected. Among the twenty-four famous examples of filial piety is mentioned the case of a man who, at the very moment that he was about to bury his little three-year-old girl alive because he could not afford to keep her as well as his old mother, had his infant saved by the unexpected discovery of a treasure purposely placed in the intended grave by a good genie, who was eager to reward so beautiful an instance of filial piety. A still greater sin against this virtue is that of not possessing male posterity; for then the family becomes extinct, and the ancestors are deprived of those sacrifices to which they have a right, and which it is the first duty of every well-thinking man to offer them at regular intervals. Marriages are contracted very early, and there is no stronger evidence needed against a wife to obtain her divorce than that she has not had a son. The doctrine of filial piety as it is understood by the Chinese, and the worship of ancestors, which is its highest expression, have their good as well as their bad side. It forms the principal mainstay of that useless system of admiration of an irrevocable past in which everything is supposed to have been better than it can possibly be to-day, and which of necessity turns the people of the Celestial Empire from all desire for progress, because to do so would be an outrage to an ancestry whose wisdom can never be surpassed.

If this belief produces unfortunate social consequences, it at the same time serves to consolidate family ties; but ever so it is pernicious, especially with respect to the condition of women. The lot of Chinese women is certainly not a happy one. Lodging rather than living with her husband, under his parents’ roof, the young wife is never allowed to see her own family, excepting at certain fixed periods prearranged by custom. In their earlier years married women in China are exposed to the caprices and rebuffs of a shrewish mother-in-law, who is the tyrant of the family, and whose humble servants the daughters-in-law are expected to be. For all this, they enjoy a certain amount of liberty, for they are neither cloistered nor veiled; but they very rarely leave their house, a state of semi-seclusion which does not prevent their morals being often very indifferent. ‘In a district near mine,’ an American missionary at Fo-kien assured me, ‘there are very few husbands who are not deceived by their wives; and in the one which is under my direction the state of morality, or rather of immorality, is pretty nearly the same.’ Theoretically speaking, adultery in a Chinese woman is considered a very grave crime. As for the husband, he is not expected to practise fidelity. The average Chinaman delights in obscenity, and revels in improper stories and jests; and when he has a little money to spare, spends it very freely in the loosest company. Those places of entertainment where Venus reigns supreme are not, as in Japan, situated in the best and most brilliantly lighted quarter of the town, for such of my readers who have visited Canton may possibly remember to have had pointed out to them the ‘flower-boats’—floating constructions two stories high, whose internal decorations are of the most magnificent.

The national vice of the Chinese, however, is gambling, and it is one very few of them can resist. In his interesting monograph on Peking, Mgr. Favier tells us how the beggars in rags will stake their last scrap of clothing. Certain fanatics will stake their wives and children, and men have been known to wager away their finger-joints. A young Christian, who was an inveterate gambler, on one occasion staked and lost his wife, who was only twenty years of age, for the large sum of 15s. The missionary paid the debt and returned the young woman to her mother. A few months afterwards she rejoined her husband, and, adds the author, with the authority of his thirty-eight years of missionary life in China, ‘in all probability he has staked and lost her again.’

Intemperance, on the other hand, is extremely rare; but those who would be drunkards in Europe, Mgr. Favier assured me when I was in Peking, are opium-smokers in China, where he estimates that about one-fifth of the population of the towns give themselves over to this horrible practice. In the country districts the number is very much less, and another missionary, who lives at Fo-kien in Southern China, estimates it at not more than five per cent. The habit of opium-smoking is very widely spread among the upper classes and the literati; but its effects are not so pronounced among the rich as among the poor, who, by reason of bad diet, are less prepared to resist its effects, especially as they generally indulge in this vice in their leisure hours in the most dreadful dens, and, moreover, smoke a very inferior quality of opium. A young man who begins to indulge in this pernicious habit in his twentieth year usually shuffles off this mortal coil before he is twenty-two. The vices of the Chinese do not particularly shock foreigners who live among them, for they are not obliged to see them; but it is otherwise with their universal and repellently filthy habits and intense love of all kinds of horrible noises, which they indulge in on every possible occasion, be it a sad or merry one, a marriage or a funeral, at festivals as well as at fires. What exasperates a European, however, more than anything else are the vulgar superstitions which replace among the Celestials the spirit of religion, which is quite absent, and which constitute another hindrance to progress. Their strange ideas with respect to _feng-shui_, or geomancy, often upset the least attempt at introducing any improvement even in European concessions or in such cities as Hong-Kong and Singapore. Then, again, the disposition of the Chinese mind does not admit of general or abstract ideas, and repudiates all sense of the ideal, and, in a word, is sterilized by such absolute materialism as to shock even the most cynical of Europeans. Take them for all in all, therefore, the Celestials may be described as a not particularly seductive or sympathetic people, all the less so as their ugly appearance is not compensated for by the charm of manner which renders the Japanese so agreeable and which enables them to gild even their vices.

The Chinese, however, have certain great qualities which are not precisely amiable, in spite of their extreme politeness, a matter rather of ceremony than of sincerity. These qualities are of a serious nature: patience, perseverance, hard work, the greatest aptitude for commercial pursuits, industry, economy, singular resistive power, and respect for parents and old age, to which may be added a remarkably contented frame of mind. Therefore, even if the Chinese Government presents every indication of decadence, it would be unjust to say the same of its energetic and hard-working subjects. Unquestionably the Government is not the only thing that needs reforming in China. There is the secular habit of always looking to the past for a type of perfection, which produces a certain atrophy of the Chinese intelligence, depriving it of all elasticity, originality and power of invention, and making it only capable of servile imitation, lacking even discernment—a fact which is admirably illustrated in the well-known story of the tailor to whom a European sent an old pair of breeches in order that he might copy them. This he did so conscientiously that he cut a hole in the exact place where there had been one in the well-worn pair which had been entrusted to him. In the same order of ideas is an instance supplied me by the Jesuit Fathers at Sicawei, near Shanghai, who showed me some drawings executed by young Chinese students, intended for the plates to be introduced in a publication on the fauna of the Far East. They included some drawings of the skeletons of animals, which, however, were disfigured, notwithstanding the entreaties of the Fathers, with certain accidental blots and marks that appeared upon the models. It is not impossible to induce the Chinese to learn new habits, but it is almost impossible to induce them to correct those which have been bequeathed to them by their ancestors. It is possible to teach them how to work modern machinery, but no power, human or divine, could teach a Chinese carpenter to work otherwise than he has been trained to do. At the orphanage at Sicawei, under the direction of the Jesuits, I was shown over the carpentry department, and was surprised to find each bench occupied by only one workman. The Father who showed me over the school informed me that it was absolutely impossible to induce two workmen to occupy the same bench. The younger orphans saw the older children and the adults who had remained in the service of the mission working thus, and insisted upon doing likewise.

The awakening of any sense of originality or invention in the mind of this people, by whom these qualities have been lost for the simple reason that they have been systematically trained to look backwards rather than forwards, will be a work of centuries, and only brought about by prolonged contact with the peoples and ideas of the West, and this contact is only now beginning. Before it produces its full effects upon the race it will doubtless do so upon the land of China itself, if permission can only be obtained to exploit the great natural wealth which lies undisturbed beneath the soil of this enormous Empire, and is thus lost to humanity. If the work of developing the economic resources of China be undertaken in a spirit of selfish interest, it will nevertheless very considerably ameliorate the lot of the Chinese people, if only by extending their field of activity, which is now limited to agriculture and small industries. It will allow them, for example, to exploit the subsoil, which is as much neglected in the Celestial Empire as the soil itself has been perfected by exceedingly skilful farming. If, as we believe, the great industries resulting from modern scientific discoveries have really contributed to better the condition of the people of Europe, surely their introduction into China should be most beneficial to the inhabitants of that vast Empire.