New Forces in Old China | Page 9

of China. It is crowded with boats of all sizes. The owner of each lives on it with his family, the babies having ropes tied to them so that if they tumble into the water, they can be pulled out.
Altogether, it is a remarkable city. Viewed from the famous Five-Story Pagoda, on a high part of the old city wall, it is a swarming hive of humanity. As one looks out on those myriads of toiling, struggling, sorrowing men and women, he is conscious of a new sense of the pathos and the tragedy of human life. If I may adapt the words of the Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs on the heights above Naples, at the Church of San Mar- tino, on the way to St. Elmo--I suppose that every one who has ever stood on the balcony of that lofty pagoda ``has noticed, as I remember to have noticed, that all the sounds coming up from that populous city, as they reached the upper air, met and mingled on the minor key. There were the voices of traffic, and the voices of command, the voices of affection and the voices of rebuke, the shouts of sailors, and the cries of itinerant venders in the street, with the chatter and the laugh of childhood; but they all came up into this incessant moan in the air. That is the voice of the world in the upper air, where there are spirits to hear it. That is the cry of the world for help.''[3]
[3] ``Address on Foreign Missions,'' pp. 178, 179.

II
DO WE RIGHTLY VIEW THE CHINESE
TOO much has been made of the peculiarities of the Chinese, ignoring the fact that many customs and traits that appear peculiar to us are simply the differences developed by environment. Eliza Scidmore affirms that ``no one knows or ever really will know the Chinese, the most comprehensible, inscrutable, contradictory, logical, illogical people on earth.'' But a Chinese gentleman, who was educated in the United States, justly retorts: ``Behold the American as he is, as I honestly found him--great, small, good, bad, self-glorious, egotistical, intellectual, supercilious, ignorant, superstitious, vain and bombastic. In truth,'' he adds, ``so very remarkable, so contradictory, so incongruous have I found the American that I hesitate.''[4]
[4] ``As a Chinaman Saw Us,'' pp. 1, 2.
The Chinese are, indeed, very different from western peoples in some of their customs.
``They mount a horse on the right side instead of the left. The old men play marbles and fly kites, while children look gravely on. They shake hands with themselves instead of with each other. What we call the surname is written first and the other name afterwards. A coffin is a very acceptable present to a rich parent in good health. In the north they sail and pull their wheelbarrows in place of merely pushing them.
China is a country where the roads have no carriages and the ships have no keels; where the needle points to the south, the place of honour is on the left hand, and the seat of intellect is supposed to lie in the stomach; where it is rude to take off your hat, and to wear white clothes is to go into mourning. Can one be astonished to find a literature without an alphabet and a language without a grammar?''[5]
[5] Temple Bar, quoted in Smith's ``Rex Christus,'' p. 115.
It would never occur to us to commit suicide in order to spite another. But in China such suicides occur every day, because it is believed that a death on the premises is a lasting curse to the owner. And so the Chinese drowns himself in his enemy's well or takes poison on his foe's door-step. Only a few months ago, a rich Chinese murdered an employee in a British colony, and knowing that inexorable British law would not be satisfied until some one was punished, he hired a poor Chinese named Sack Chum to confess to having committed the murder and to permit himself to be hung, the real murderer promising to give him a good funeral and to care for his family. An Englishman who thought this an incredible story wrote a letter of inquiry to an intelligent Chinese merchant of his acquaintance and received the following reply:
``Nothing strange to Chinamen. Sack Chum, old man, no money, soon die. Every day in China such thing. Chinaman not like white man-- not afraid to die. Suppose some one pay his funeral, take care his family. `I die,' he say. Chinaman know Sack Chum, we suppose, sell himself to men who kill Ah Chee. Somebody must die for them. Sack Chum say he do it. All right. Police got him. What for they want more?''
These things appear odd from our view-point and there are many other peculiarities that are equally strange