Changing China Part 2

Confucianism must fall before Western materialism. I do not speak of Buddhism, for that is falling so quickly that its influence may be said to be almost gone. China will be left stripped of religion, robbed of her old ideas, and not clothed with new ones, wandering into all the misery and humiliation that vice and sin can bring upon mankind, till the curse of her millions in misery will go out against the harsh unfeeling West, who could leave her thus blind and helpless without a guide.

The call is great. Those who have knowledge have no right to keep it to themselves. The Christian and the Confucian agree in this, as they do in much else, that all knowledge must be shared. One of the purposes of this book is to arouse my readers to the importance of taking some action. Had they had an opportunity of going to China and seeing things for themselves, I would only have asked them to think; but as there are many who have not had that opportunity, I would try and show them the transitional condition through which China is pa.s.sing, the danger of that condition ending in disaster, a disaster wide as the world itself. I hope to show them what is being done at the present time to lead the Chinese empire into safe paths, and to illuminate her with the highest knowledge of the West. Many efforts have been made, and there has been much success. I {43} am glad to testify publicly to the heroic and self-denying character of the missions, but those who are most successful are those who frankly say China can never be led by aliens.

No race loves the alien, and the further away the alien is in blood and language the less he is loved; therefore the Chinese above all races are least fitted to be led by the European, as they differ from him in most racial characteristics. If they are to be led by their own race, their own race must be fit to lead them. They must have leaders who understand the whole of Western knowledge, and will be able to take what is true and leave what is false. A j.a.panese thinker said the other day, "Our people have made a great mistake--they have taken the false and left the true part of Western thought." Let us hope that China may be preserved from such an error, that she may learn Western knowledge so thoroughly and so well that she may be able to distinguish the good from the bad, the beautiful from the vile in our system of thought.

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CHAPTER IV

FOREIGN RELATIONS OF CHINA

It is impossible to study any Chinese question and ignore the relations of China with foreign powers. They are always curious and generally unique. Certainly any one who goes to China for the purpose of studying the mission question cannot but be struck at the extraordinary treaty rights possessed by missionaries. In most countries the teacher of religion has no peculiar rights. He is, alas! more often bullied than favoured by the modern State, even if that State should profess itself well inclined towards religion. Therefore one would naturally expect in China, where Christianity is reputed to be disliked, that those who teach it would have to contend with every form of disability that a hostile State could inflict.

A feeling of marvel comes over the mind when one realises that in this land of contradictions the persecuted missionary enjoys quite peculiar privileges. The ordinary foreigner cannot, for instance, travel in China except by the courtesy of the Government--a courtesy, indeed, which is never refused; but a missionary may travel freely. The ordinary foreigner has no right to stay in any {45} town in China with the exception of the treaty ports; a missionary may stay where he likes. The ordinary man cannot buy land; the missionary has a right to purchase land for the purpose of teaching Christianity.

So it came about, when we were in China, that His Majesty's Consul, with all the might of England at his back, was unable to buy a suitable site to erect a house where he could bring his wife. He was living in a temple, and temples in China are not very comfortable. I should explain to the uninitiated that every Buddhist temple has guest-rooms attached to it--Chinese rooms largely composed of wooden screens; and these temples are let out as residences by a people whose faith has less hold upon their affections than their purse. Now, ladies are not as a rule prepared to live in a house with paper part.i.tions in a climate where the winters are extremely cold; so the Consul asked a missionary to buy a piece of land on which he could erect a suitable house, and he had almost succeeded when the Chinese Government found out that the land was not to be used for missionary purposes and refused to allow the sale. This does seem a strange situation when one remembers that had that Consul resigned his appointment and joined a missionary body, he could have bought the land and settled his wife comfortably in four solid stone walls, but because he was England's representative and not a missionary he had to s.h.i.+ver between wood and {46} paper screens, and this in a country which is supposed to hate missionaries.

The explanation of this curious situation is really twofold. First, the hatred that the official bears for the missionary is not of such an intense character as to induce him to offer a very strenuous resistance to the missionaries who desire to buy land; and secondly, missionaries have peculiar and special rights secured to them by a series of treaties among the most curious in the history of diplomacy.

In 1844 the Americans got by treaty a right to the free exercise of the Christian religion in the open ports. This right, sufficiently remarkable in itself, has often been stipulated by a State for its own nationals resident in a foreign country, but I doubt if it has ever before been known for a country to insist on the right of preaching a religion to somebody else's citizens. This was obviously an interference of the sovereign rights of China.

It was pushed even further in 1860. The French and English had just completed the sack of the "Summer Palace," and whatever the justice or the injustice of the war may have been, China had tasted her first great lesson of humiliation from the hand of Western powers, and was in no condition to resist any of their demands. The English and the French made treaties, most of them concerned with commercial and military matters with which it is not necessary to trouble the reader, and the French had a condition which was quite reasonable, that the {47} Chinese should restore all the buildings that had been destroyed in the late troubles; the wording of the clause was so vague that it could be made to apply, and did apply, to any building which had been destroyed at any previous time in the history of China, but the most remarkable part of the clause needs further explanation. The French had as their interpreter a very able Jesuit, Pere Delamarre, and as the French Minister could not read Chinese, he had to trust his interpreter with regard to the Chinese version, and this man inserted into the treaty two other provisions, one securing that Christians should have a right to the free exercise of their religion all over China, and the other that French missionaries should have the right to rent land in all the provinces in the empire and to buy and construct houses. When this pious fraud was discovered, the French Minister thought it would do no good to denounce his interpreter, and therefore the treaty was treated by the French as binding and never questioned by the Chinese; the other powers profited by it under the "most favoured nation" clause.

The Roman Catholics a few years later pushed the wording of this treaty to its uttermost. Their missions had been at work for 150 years or more, and they could prove a great number of confiscations which had to be made good by the Chinese. Just at that time in France Napoleon III.

was trying to establish a doubtful t.i.tle by the help of the Pope, {48} and it was his policy to push in every way the interests of the Roman Catholics. China had felt the weight of European armies and she was unable to resist these claims, and so it came about that the very country which now is the centre of free thought was the means of forcing Christianity upon the Chinese through fear of her armed power.

Can you be surprised at the answer I got when I asked a Chinese statesman, who I knew was sympathetic with the teaching of Christianity, why China, who had always professed, and to a very great extent had practised tolerance, should persecute Christianity? His reply was, the Chinese did not hate Christianity, and were indeed tolerant of missions, but they still disliked them, because Christianity is the religion of the military races, and they had a historical tradition that the advance of Christianity was connected with war.

This bad reputation has been intensified by the action of the Germans.

No reasonable man can condemn the Germans for wis.h.i.+ng to enlarge and develop their trade. We can understand the patriotic German saying that it was the duty of Germany to establish good government in Shantung, but it is very hard to understand how any one can defend the taking of Kiauchau on the ground that certain German missionaries had been murdered. The taking of Kiauchau by the Germans has completed the work begun by the French. Christianity and the foreign relations of China are {49} inextricably mixed up, and every Chinaman, believed till lately that Christianity was the religion which has led foreign nations to enter his land. "First the missionary, then the trader, lastly the gunboat," has been too often the order of advance. I am happy to be able to say that the Americans and the English have made great efforts to dissociate themselves from this evil, and have tried to avoid any appearance of such a connection. I was told that in Shansi, owing to the indemnity for the murders of missionaries being retained to China and spent on founding a University instead of being accepted by the missions, Protestant missions are very popular. "You have only to say you are an English clergyman," said my Chinese informant, "and every door will be open to you."

The present aspect of foreign affairs has tended to destroy the unfortunate connection between Christianity and foreign aggression.

The two great powers whose armies have met in Manchuria have neither of them any interest in missions. Russia has never had any missions in China. She forbade them, I understand, because they were likely to embroil her in unnecessary wars. j.a.pan, of course, has none. The Germans, who made the murder of missionaries the reason of aggression, have not many missionaries in China belonging to their nationality.

China, therefore, is coming to look upon Christianity as not quite so dangerous a thing as it seemed when it was essentially the religion of the French and of the English {50} whose armies and navies then held China in fear. Still the political situation cannot but have great interest to the missionary. Even while he rejoices that the foreign relations of China and his work are not so intimately connected as they used to be, he must ask himself, what will the result to my work be, if in the great world struggle j.a.pan or Russia should dominate? At present he fears j.a.pan more than Russia; and his fears are shared, but for other reasons, by the Chinese.

The wildest and most ambitious schemes are accredited to j.a.pan, I cannot say with how much truth. Her purse is empty, but she has far more courage and skill in war than most nations. If she possessed even one part of China she might add to her wealth to such an extent that no race could dare to oppose her, while if she governed China, her armies, supported by the wealth of that mighty empire, might threaten the stability of Europe. She is reported to have two regiments working as private individuals in f.u.kien, and to be prepared to seize the province in case of any disorder. The fact that there are many j.a.panese in the province, and that all the j.a.panese are trained soldiers, gives some cloak to this suggestion. The f.u.kienese speak a different dialect to the rest of China, and they have a natural geographical frontier, which would enable the j.a.panese to maintain themselves there if they were once established.

Again, the recent events have shown that they are preparing to exercise sovereign rights over Chinese {51} territory in Manchuria. On the other hand, Russia is arming; she is double-tracking the railway from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk, and she is getting ready again for a struggle in Manchuria; the gossip among the officers there is that there is to be a war; the Russians do not for a moment regard themselves as defeated; they think of the late campaign merely as an "unfortunate incident."

But the most important development in Russian policy is the proposed railway across Mongolia which will give Russia an entrance to the west of China and into Peking. It is hard to see how, if an advance were made along that line, j.a.pan could in any way resist Russia; the whole breadth of China would lie between them. Meanwhile the Germans of the east have perfected a railway system which converts Kiauchau from being an out-of-the-way place which no one cared about, to a door into the very heart of China. In commercial circles in China it is reported that the Commandant of the Tientsin garrison suggested that the object of the building of the German Fleet was not so much to conquer England as to ensure that Germany should be able to maintain her position in the Far East and make full use of Kiauchau as a way by which her armies might enter China. When one looks at the map and sees how China is surrounded by these powers, and how they are pressing upon her, one realises why the Chinese are feeling that Western education is an absolute necessity, and that if they are to maintain their {52} independence they must understand the arts of war. A great Viceroy was reported to have said that he frankly expected China to be conquered, and to learn from her conquerors the Western arts which would in turn enable her to dominate the West; for this has been her history in the past, that may be her history in the future, and I think that the nations, who propose to conquer her, will do wisely if they consider what might be the result of her influence on them.

China is trying to defend herself by building a navy and creating an army. The navy is rather an _opera bouffe_ concern; every now and then she talks of having s.h.i.+ps; the representatives of all the s.h.i.+pbuilders of the world fly to Peking and try in every way to induce China to buy a fleet which they offer to provide at the very shortest notice, but at present she has none. She has, as a practical step, created a training school of officers. It consists only of some 140 men, and is taught by two British officers lent her by our navy. They said that there was the greatest difficulty in getting the Chinese to be practical; they induced the Government at last to put an old s.h.i.+p at their disposal.

For a long time this was refused, and when it was granted it was regarded as a most wonderful and original departure. The Chinese way of training naval officers would have been to have instructed them on literary subjects, and to encourage them to write essays and poems on the sea. To take them out on {53} the Yangtsze in a s.h.i.+p and actually to show them how a s.h.i.+p was managed, was a wholly new idea, but one of which they approve under the impulse of the modern fas.h.i.+on of doing things in accordance with Western traditions.

As to the army, its exterior is certainly not prepossessing; far and away the most efficient part of it has been created by Yuan-s.h.i.+-Kei in Manchuria, and the Chinese are very anxious to show it to the pa.s.sing traveller. Both times when we pa.s.sed through Manchuria, on every station were armed guards, and in one case they were inspected by a General who was travelling in our train. He was saluted by the officers in charge in Chinese fas.h.i.+on, which is a modified form of a kow-tow, and consists to all intents and purposes of a curtsey. It had a distinctly funny appearance to see the officers in charge of the guards curtseying as we steamed into the stations. Down at Nanking the army was far less smart--in fact, it had the appearance of being a very disorderly rabble; I understand when the Empress died it was regarded as such a danger that those in authority put the broad Yangtsze between them and a possible mutiny.

The real danger to China as regards foreign relations is that her bad finance or her own want of discipline may bring about a state of internal disorder which may compel the interference of foreign powers.

Last year this nearly did happen. Two regiments mutinied and seized a town on the {54} Yangtsze; they stopped all communications with the outside world, and to all intents and purposes were in a fair way to commence a rebellion. Close by them were several other regiments who might be expected to throw in their lot with them, and the position was very critical. The missionaries inside the town were in fear of their lives, and with difficulty managed to communicate with the British Consul and to tell him of their plight. He ordered a gunboat to go down, and the presence of the gunboat intimidated the mutineers. At the same time the Governor of the city showed remarkable courage in going round the town pacifying the mob. The authorities were able to move in two other regiments, who had no sympathy with the mutiny. The mutineers were disarmed and the incident closed. But such an incident may occur at any moment. The condition of the country is such that anywhere a rising may occur, and the fire once alight may be hard to extinguish; the result of the conflagration must be that the powers must enter to secure the safety of their nationals.

Altogether poor China is in a dangerous position in regard to her foreign relations; all round her echoes the cry, "You must reform or disappear." Every railway that is made, every loan that is floated, every trade that is opened up, bring to China increased responsibilities in her foreign relations. If she by her good government and readiness to reform can show that she is able to maintain {55} order in her own land, and to give to foreigners an equal security to that they have in any other country, her empire may endure for many hundred years; but if she be found wanting at the present time and the corruption of her officials renders her unable to maintain order in her country or to fulfil her financial obligations, a new phase in Chinese history will be reached, which will, I believe, be of extraordinary danger to Europe; China will yield to the military might of the West only to rise again to dominate those who dominated her.

The missionary who looks at these dark clouds which surround China, the land of his adoption, feels that there is only one course to take, namely, the course that he is taking, to try and build up in China a high tone of morality, founded on religion, which may enable her to accept necessary reforms and to put herself abreast of other nations.

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CHAPTER V

CHINESE CIVILISATION--ITS WEAK SIDE

I do not suppose that we can have any conception of the amount of suffering which goes on at the present time in China. The first time we were in China I had the honour of meeting a Mr. Ede, who had just returned from distributing food in a famine-stricken district, and his description was truly terrible; the young men had walked away and found work in other districts, but the old people and the children had to remain. What had caused the famine in this case was characteristic of unreformed China; "China's sorrow," the river Hoang-ho, had done what it is ever doing, that is, it had flooded a district. When you pa.s.s over it, it looks most innocuous. It is wholly unable, as a rule, to fill its own vast bed, which is covered with delightful sands, reminding one more than anything else of the sea-sh.o.r.e at low tide; but this sand is what makes it dangerous, for it is not good heavy English sand, but a light sand which is called "loess," and when the river comes down in a flood--that is to say, when they have rainy weather in Thibet or the sun s.h.i.+nes unduly on Himalayan snows--this sand is carried along with the water, {57} and it is a.s.serted indeed that the river consists more of sand than of water; as the river slackens the sand is deposited and the bed is filled up, with the result that the next flood, taking the Chinese unawares, overflows its banks and reduces a huge district to poverty; they cannot sow their fields because they cannot see them. Of course the authorities should not be taken by surprise and the banks should be made up, and ca.n.a.ls should be cut to take away the water in case of a flood; an enlightened Chinese engineer a.s.sured me he had a scheme for raising the level of huge districts of China by using this peculiar character of the Hoang-ho and turning its sand and water flood on to bare places, and he a.s.serted that the results were most wonderfully successful, and that districts which were unfertile before, when well washed and covered up with this loess, became fertile. Still, however beneficial a flood may be to the land in the end, its immediate result is to starve the population who are flooded out, for they have no reserves of food.

In the case already referred to, the country was a long time under water, because a ca.n.a.l which should have drained it away was not kept clear. The money had been paid, but, as often happens in China, the work had not been done. The action that the authorities took was characteristic of Chinese government. China possesses the system of internal custom-houses--a system which the wildest advocate of Tariff Reform would hardly like {58} to see introduced into Europe; these custom-houses are called "Likin," and are a source at once of a great deal of profit to the provinces and of irritation to all traders. The Chinese used these custom-houses to engineer a corner in rice by which the area of scarcity of food was enormously increased and several officials ama.s.sed considerable sums of money; by the law of China it is illegal to export rice even from one province to another; this law was put in force, and the rice supply was cut off; at the same time early in the famine certain rich men bought up rice freely, with the result that it rose to a very high figure, so that round the area of famine and desolation there was an area of scarcity and shortage.

A large amount of food from all parts of the world was sent by the famine funds, but it was very difficult to induce the officials to allow the food to enter the famine district. They were filled with all sorts of scruples. They were afraid, for instance, that the steamers towing the barges full of food on a ca.n.a.l which had not before been opened for steamers, might excite the hostility of the population; they were courteous, they were diplomatic, but they were obstructive; and so it came about that while there was a famine in one district of China, in the other districts there was a very heavy surplus, of which they had difficulty in disposing. All this did not create the slightest surprise in those who knew China. When the story was told {59} us all the old Chinese hands merely said, "How like China," or "Just like them." This was our first insight into what the civilisation of China means, and therefore for the first time we realised the problem that is before the world--the problem which missionaries, with great devotion, are trying to solve.

Chinese civilisation is not, as many people imagine it to be, a mere courtesy t.i.tle for a state in reality only a degree off barbarism.

Many of my humbler paris.h.i.+oners, for instance, when we left for China, ranked the Chinese as something very near cannibals, and I do not think they would have been in the least surprised to hear that we had been roasted and eaten by the natives. The Chinese have perhaps a greater right to be called civilised than we have on this side of the world; their civilisation dates from eras we are accustomed to call Biblical.

Confucius and Ezra represent contemporaneous ideas--ideas that are not wholly different in thought. While on the other side of the globe civilisation has been handed from nation to nation, and a civilised race has become barbarous and a barbarous race civilised, the Chinese, without making any very great advance, have steadily proceeded along a path of progress, and at the present time they possess a very carefully organised system of society. On paper the whole thing is perfect: the Emperor at the top, the Viceroys over each province, under them the Prefectures, and so down to the village community {60} in the country or the trade guild in the town. The system of government is so perfect that they claim that they are able to discover any individual wanted among those 400,000,000 of Chinese, unless his disguise is very perfect. When we were chatting over the revolutionaries and talking about a certain doctor dodging in and out of China at the risk of his life, I said that I wondered that there was any difficulty at all for a man who was bred in the country wandering where he liked, and I was a.s.sured that such was the organisation of the Chinese Government that they could lay hands even in the remotest village on anybody if they required him, and that the only way a revolutionary could hope to escape arrest was by a most perfect and complete disguise.

With this splendid organisation is joined great solidarity. The Chinese race are essentially one. If it were your duty to look through reports coming from China, as it has been mine, the first thing that would strike you would be its essential oneness; you will not find more difference between different parts of China than there is between England and Ireland. I do not for a moment mean to say that there are no differences between the Chinese--that would be untrue; but you will not find such a difference as one might expect from the diversity of geographical conditions. The civilisation is essentially similar. It is a civilisation with great merits. The population is sober, industrious, and perhaps I might add honest, {61} all lovers of China will certainly agree; but if you are writing, as I am, to people who have never been out of England, I think you will have to qualify the phrase with some such a one as "honest as compared with other Orientals," or "honest when contrasted with the j.a.panese."

They are also extremely obedient; their idea of the respect which should be paid to authority far exceeds that which prevails on this side of the globe. I think we may add with truth that great numbers of them are very loyal to their employers. But when this much has been said, the dark side of their civilisation must be added--it is essentially corrupt and cruel; the ideas of honour, purity, mercy are but too little understood. Missionaries a.s.sured us that there was no word for purity that could be applied to a man, while the same word stands for honesty and stupidity.

Yet this nation is in many ways well fitted for the mechanical age in which we live. What the owner of the factory wants is an industrious, sober, and obedient man, and he does not want, or at least does not realise that he wants, an honourable, pure, and merciful man. The Chinaman will be in his element in the factory; the long hours of monotonous toil will not be unpleasant to him; he is always sober--in fact, he is by nature and culture the ideal factory hand; and yet this is what const.i.tutes his danger. He will tend to introduce into Europe the vices which are now desolating his own country, unless, indeed, {62} the European teacher can help him to eradicate those vices.

I have given you some idea of his corruption by the story told at the beginning of this chapter, but we heard many others all to the same effect. We went up the Yangtsze in one of the China Merchants' boats with an old Swedish captain who liked the Chinese and rather disliked the missionaries, so his evidence was not bia.s.sed by any wish to prove that our civilisation was more perfect than that of the Chinese. We asked him why it was that he being a European should be captain of a s.h.i.+p that was owned by Chinese, and largely used by them. He told us that the Chinese merchants had once tried to have a Chinese captain, but the moment the s.h.i.+p reached the first port of the Yangtsze, the custom officers were on board rummaging here and rummaging there. Very soon a large amount of contraband was found on the s.h.i.+p, put there with the knowledge of the captain. The consequence was the s.h.i.+p was fined and delayed. They tried Chinese captains again and again with the same result, and so they have been reduced to employ Europeans to secure honourable officers. He, however, had to confess that the Chinese distrusted the sobriety of the European officers, and a.s.sured us that the old comprador on board, one of whose duties apparently was to look after the pa.s.sengers and take their tickets, was in reality a spy on them.

Perhaps the best instance of the corruption of the {63} Chinese is their action with regard to the currency. In the good old days the currency of China was the silver shoe or ingot, which had no exact weight, and had therefore to be weighed at every transaction. Below that was the copper currency, which had no fixed relation to the silver currency, but only the relation of copper to silver. A copper cash, therefore, represented only its actual value in copper. It was naturally a most unwieldy coin. The old books of travel in China give lamentable pictures of the traveller riding about with huge strings of copper cash almost crus.h.i.+ng him with their weight. When the whites began to trade in China they introduced the Mexican dollar with its subsidiary coinage, and this was the common currency in all the ports until a few years ago; but when the Chinese began to Westernise they considered it inconsistent with their dignity not to have a coinage of their own. Led by the j.a.panese, and a.s.sisted by several firms whose speciality was the erection of mints and mintage machinery, they started mints all over the country, and they have kept these mints busy with the most _funeste_ results. To begin with, they coined a dollar in imitation of the Mexican dollar, but even in this the mints did not agree. Some dollars are very light, some slightly below value, and some are nearly true. The first experience of the traveller is that he possesses in his pocket a set of coins which no one will accept, except at a great reduction. But the muddle goes further than that. It was very profitable coining light coins, {64} but it was still more profitable to do so in the lower denominations. The Chinese thought, or chose to think, that it did not matter what the intrinsic value of a 10-cent piece was as long as you wrote on it 10 cents. They have no bank or post-office where you have a legal right to get a dollar for ten 10-cent pieces, and the result therefore of recklessly coining the base 10-cent pieces has been not only to depreciate it with regard to the dollar, but to make it an uncertain value, so that you must go to the money exchangers almost every morning and ask for the rate of exchange between the dollar and the small silver pieces.

Of course at every step on this downward path the officials concerned made a great deal of money; their next step was to deal with the copper coin in the same way, so now there is no fixed relation between the copper coinage and the silver coinage, nor between the large copper and the small, and this is still further confusing, as the provinces having different mints have dollars of different values. And now I hear that they have begun to make money by debasing the old silver shoe coinage, which, though it is sold by weight, used to have a certain standard of purity, and they have issued cash which have no intrinsic value at all, and that do not represent the fraction of a coin having any intrinsic value. The result of this currency "Rake's Progress" has been to produce what corruption always does produce--widespread poverty.

Everybody cheats. The stationmasters {65} along the line a.s.sure the European superintendents that the fares are always paid in the most debased coinage, and it is very hard to deny the probability of this.

But of course the stationmasters take care if any coin comes to their hand which is not debased to do a bit of exchange on their own account.

If Chinese civilisation is corrupt, it is also cruel, not with the wild tempestuous cruelty of the savage, but with the cruelty of the civilised man who at once uses human suffering as the best engine for human government, and never cares to cure it unless he has some pecuniary object in view. The Chinese are inured to pain, and some people argue that they do not feel it to the same degree as Western nations. No doubt the sensation of pain is intensified in people of highly developed nervous organisation, and the Chinese have a nervous organisation of a very quiescent kind. I remember, when we first landed at Hong-Kong, being struck by a Chinaman who had chosen as his bed for his midday siesta an ordinary piece of granite curbing; and as you go along in the train every freight car that you pa.s.s has some one sleeping on it to protect it from robbery, and a truck of coals or a load of stone is obviously regarded as a most comfortable resting-place. Some of the doctors maintained that this was the case throughout their nervous system--they were insensitive to pain; others said that pain, like everything else, is a thing to which you can get accustomed, and that pain has played so large a part in their lives that they are {66} accustomed to it, and are not therefore afraid of it. Take, for instance, the foot-binding of the women; every family in China must be accustomed to hear the sobs and cries of the little girls as they are going through the first stages of foot-binding. Or take again the public flogging; all the working cla.s.ses of China must be quite accustomed to the idea that men are flogged for certain offences till their flesh is of the consistency of a jelly. A doctor, describing the state in which men are brought into the hospital after such floggings, said that it was a difficult matter to avoid mortification setting in, and it was only with very careful treatment that they could be cured, the whole flesh having to slough away, being absolutely crushed and battered.

Yet this strange people are so indifferent to these horrors, that even those who suffer will laugh amidst their sufferings. We were told the following tale, whether true or not I cannot say. A man was being bambooed for an offence, and astonished the officials by laughing all the time; the more he was flogged the harder he laughed, till at last those who were punis.h.i.+ng him stopped to ask him the reason of his mirth. "You have got the wrong man," he said. It is always a comfort to have a keen sense of humour.

I do not think there is anything more awful than the descriptions one has as to the indifference to suffering that is displayed by the average Chinaman. I remember a story told me by a sailor. As a s.h.i.+p {67} was being loaded, a man, obviously on the verge of death, came and asked for work, but failed to get it. Shortly after he was seen hanging about the s.h.i.+p, and at night they found him lying between some bales. He was turned out, but he constantly crept back, first to one place, then to another, till at last the sailor came to know his face quite well. One day, as the sailor went ash.o.r.e, he was attracted by a little crowd looking at something, and this proved to be the poor fellow in his death struggle, lying in a gutter of water. He called the attention of a Chinese policeman to him. The Chinese policeman explained that he would move him when he was dead, as he had orders to remove all corpses, but that he could not move him while he was alive.

Dr. Macklin of Nanking told us story after story of the way in which the Chinese would leave people in a dying condition on the road. A little time ago he had ridden into an old temple, and there he saw a man apparently asleep, but on looking at him more closely, he saw that his eyes were wide open and that the flies were walking right across his eyeb.a.l.l.s, showing that he was quite insensitive. He called to one or two men and asked them to help him to carry this poor sufferer to some house near, but they could not or would not find a house to keep him in; and so in the end Dr. Macklin determined to take him straight back to Nanking, which he did. There he administered a very heavy dose of quinine hypodermically, with the result that the man soon showed {68} signs of returning consciousness. It was a case of malignant malaria, and had he not been found by Dr. Macklin, the man must have been eaten by wild dogs or have died from the disease; as it was he recovered, and proved to be a hard-working young farmer who was in search of work, as his home had been ruined by a local failure of crops. He had apparently contracted malaria, and owing to his poor and ill-nourished condition it had gone hardly with him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHINESE CIVILISATION: ITS BAD SIDE--AN OLD BEGGAR. ITS GOOD SIDE--A GARDEN]