Then there are weddings and family feasts, birthdays and ■graduation festivals, all occasions of much feasting and mirth and giving of presents. Next come the great popular festivals, the Feast of Lanterns, the Feast of Kites, the Feast of the Dragon-boats, and the feast of this or that flower. These are all anniversaries and have wonderful allegorical attributes. Nor should we forget New Year's, a feast of many days' duration. There are also excursions to high mountains and picturesque spots, where some famed author or poet enlivens the occasion with declamations and oratory, while a "pyrotechnic" artist turns night into day by the brilliancy of his display. Excursions on the water are likewise in high favor. Beautiful scenery, a good dinner, fine music and more verses!

The wealthy Chinese, like the same class with us, spend the summers North, sometimes at great distances from their headquarters, in cottages and villas by the water or in high mountain districts. They do not play golf, ride to hounds or talk politics, but cultivate their flowers, walk, read, visit a little, discuss their friends, the latest work of art or the scenery, and, in the end, fall to composing more verses still!

We have read much about their "flower-boats," floating "dens of iniquity," some kind soul has styled them. There is no more immorality about these than about our high-class concert halls. They form part of the amusement of the "gilded youth" of the cities. In the larger centers there is a class of young, unmarried women, professional singers, who are hired—the Chinese say invited—to sing on these boats. A young fellow rents one of these floating gardens and invites his friends to a "night of song." Each in turn invites his particular singing-girl to accompany him. The prettier the girl, the more urgent invitations she gets, naturally. The youths loll about, smoke, eat, make epigrams, verses, plays upon words—they are all of the "lettered" class—and listen to their invited damsels singing in chorus or solos. Nothing vulgar or coarse is uttered. There may be more private seances following such a night; but as far as the flower-boat episodes themselves are concerned they form one of many peculiar customs that make the suspicious Occidental wonder, surmise and criticise, where nothing wrong really exists. They are as sinless as a well-organized Sundayschool festival. The Chinese of both sexes, rich or poor, are not, as a race, coarse in speech or song, lewd or profligate in thought or deed.

The reason they advance for the rather general separation of the sexes is that women are naturally jealous and men far from perfect. The principal object of all their laws and time-honored customs being to insure national and social peace, the best means of avoiding danger was found to be to really avoid it; hence the very practical way of keeping clear of entanglements by keeping away from any occasion for them. Naive, simple, effective, is it not?

By the way, we have neglected to say, under the head of marriage, that a woman found in adultery is summarily executed by her husband without other trial than that his family is willing to give her. A certificate from the chief of the family that that was the cause of death satisfies the authorities. Strictly a family affair!

One can best learn the habits of mind of another by listening to his criticism of a third party. To a traveled Chinaman European society seems astoundingly frivolous. "It is composed of useless forms and meaningless acts that result in nothing. At first sight it pleases, but soon grows stale and musty to the taste. It becomes a surfeit, music composed of noises without harmony. There is nothing real about it; the whole life is a pose."

This may be the idea of one who did not dip very deep before formulating an opinion; still, even to us, it smacks somewhat of a "true bill."

The idea recurs, "what must a Chinaman think, for instance, of our crush official Washington receptions at the hour for refreshments? Would he not be justified in writing home that we do not sit at table to eat, but hurl ourselves into the fray with true warrior zeal and fight for a salad or a cake, carrying back to our women what we cannot eat ourselves—the remains of the feast, which have not been trampled into the carpets? Would he be less justified in calling this local habit a national characteristic than was the famous writer who recently traveled through China, and, being shown some pictures that an enthusiastic artist-priest had painted depicting the Buddhistic hell in all its horrors, wrote home that he had been shown the official charts prescribing the forms of judicial executions of those who did not pay toll at certain river ports?" What a magnificent imagination!

Our great objection to Chinese ways and Chinese civilization is that it remains unprogressive. But does real progress consist in changes? If existing conditions are satisfactory, as the result of centuries of slow and well-measured progress, a true evolution, why change them for speculative uncertainties?

Our civilization must seem to the Chinaman—and is it not so in very fact?—a new edition of anterior civilizations that were not classic works of art by any means, corrected, indexed, beautifully bound and favorably reviewed, if you will, but still containing the same old principles set forth afresh, with a new one tentatively injected, now and then. Their own civilization, on the other hand, has been through a thousand editions, corrected, edited and generally set in order centuries ago, and is to them, to-day, a classic it would be criminal desecration to touch and impossible to improve. It must be a satisfying feeling, this sense of living up to a standard, never seeking to change it, calm in the certainty that it covers all contingencies. When one is comfortable, thoroughly so, why change one's position and run the risk of never getting into one quite so easy again? To chance it is Occidental; to be content is Chinese.

As things were needed evolution has produced them. One should not accuse a nation of backwardness that had dictionaries in the first century of our era, at which period it also had and used the mariner's compass; a nation that understood magnetism, indulged in printing from type nine hundred years ago and amused itself with gunpowder ages before we knew of it. Strange, too, that the peaceful Jesuit missionaries should have been first in teaching the Chinese to make guns, wherein their powder, used before only for fireworks, could be made to project murderous missiles against their enemies, the Jesuits' own people!

Nor must you forget that the Chinese,, like many another people, want some practical demonstration that a thing is good for them before they adopt it; they are not satisfied with the mere say-so of someone else. What good can a railroad do them? It passes over the graves of their ancestors, cuts through; their farms, brings the foreigner—we are all foreigners to them, there is no distinction between friend and foe, we are all opiumsellers or speculators in antiques to them—into their midst before they want him. Wherein is the advantage to the Chinese?" They do not like strangers. Have they ever been shown that these foreigners were of any advantage to them? On the contrary, has it not been clearly demonstrated that the foreigner has reaped all the advantage of his peaceful as well as his warlike incursions into China?

Put the shoe on the other foot for a moment's trial and see how it fits. The lower classes of the Chinese, the "coolies,"^ have heard that there is more money to be made here than in their own country, and, if allowed, would swarm to our ports. We do not see the advantage of their coming, so we build up Chinese Exclusion Acts and other barriers to keep them out. Suppose China were strong enough to say, "We really need your America as a market for our labor, for our surplus population. We insist that all our people who want to shall enter your ports, do business in your towns, be amenable to our laws only, freely introduce our customs, our religions and our goods, how and where and whenever they wish. Your people are nothing to us; we merely need them as a vehicle for our commerce. If you dislike the way we do things, we will leave a garrison of troops strong enough to insure the accomplishment of our wishes, strong enough to enable our people to ride over you with perfect impunity." Would not our affection for the Chinaman be something truly beautiful, just then?

The fact that China will not adopt this or that way of doing things simply because she is told so to do, seems to be her chief fault in European and American eyes. Show her that this or that particular thing is of actual advantage to herself—or even that, while of profit to us only, it will not result in her own ultimate injury—and she will take to it kindly. To combat pauperism and promote peace are her two objects in life. Can we show her that with all our vaunted civilization we have attained either goal. She loves peace above all else. She has found that Occidental civilization is not synonymous with peace and she is suspicious of it and its good intentions; she has also found it to be somewhat haughty and all-absorbing, rather Juggernautic in fact. More than all, how can you expect a country to accept with open arms and shouts of anticipatory delight something presented to it on the point of a bayonet or shot into it with our compliments?

The Jesuits have had better success in China than anyone else, simply because they early recognized this fact; they attempted no forcing. They insidiously got permission to travel and study in that country as early as the sixteenth century. They sent their best men, great scholars and linguists who clamored not for protection and gunboat moral suasion, but went into the country, lived with the people and taught only by the example of their lives. Little by little they began to teach astronomy and physics—not a word was said about religion or law or customs at that time—but they worked around to religion after a while, merely describing their views and beliefs to the native scholars they met. The whole process was slow but very sure. The great Emperor Kang-Hi voluntarily decreed that they could build churches and worship as they wished. All was going well, and the later history of China and even that of our civilization might have been written differently had well enough been left alone. But in 1773, the Franciscans and Dominicans, jealous of the Jesuits' power in the East, got Clement XIV to issue his famous bull against that order. Their churches were destroyed and they were ordered out of China by their own ecclesiastical superiors. The principles they had been teaching were found to be inoperative, for was there not discord among their own people, jealousy and strife? The peace they had been preaching, the perfected civilization they had been trying to introduce were but illusions. Here was proof of it! Im fine, the whole scheme was compromised. The Chinese grew suspicious of everything foreign and withdrew deeper into the shell of exclusiveness, from which the patient and smooth Jesuits had almost gotten them out.

Then came in rapid succession, the forcing of the opium habit upon China by the English; "retaliatory reprisals" upon it for real or fancied injuries done to visitors, missionaries and ships; concessions that were never conceded; indemnities collected twice over; protectorates that were not asked for, and whatnot.