sand incidents of daily life. The day I entered China at Chefoo, I saw a dying man lying beside the road. Hundreds of Chinese were passing and repassing on the crowded thoroughfare. But none stopped to help or to pity and the sufferer passed through his last agony absolutely uncared for and lay with glazing eyes and stiffening form all unheeded by the careless throng. Twenty-four hours afterwards, he was still lying there with his dead face upturned to the silent sky, while the world jostled by, buying, laughing, quarrelling, heedless of the tragedy of human life so near. And when in Ching-chou-fu, I stopped to see if I could not give some relief to a woman who was writhing in the street, I was hastily warned that if I touched her unasked, the populace might hold me responsible in the event of her death and perhaps demand heavy damages, if, indeed, it did not mob me on the spot. Undoubtedly the Chinese are often deterred from aiding a sufferer because they fear that if death occurs “bad luck" will follow them, a horde of real or fictitious relatives will clamour for damages, and perhaps a rapacious magistrate will take advantage of the opportunity to make a criminal charge which can be removed only by a heavy bribe. And so the sick and poor are often left to die uncared for in crowded streets, and drowning children are allowed to sink within a few yards of boats which might have rescued them. But everywhere in China, little attention is paid to suffering and many customs seem utterly heartless.

In spite, too, of the agnostic teachings of Confucius and their own practical temperament, the Chinese are a very superstitious people and live in constant terror of evil spirits. The grossest superstitions prevail among them, while beyond any other people known to us they are stagnant, spiritually dead, densely ignorant of those higher levels of thought and life to which Christianity has raised whole classes in Europe and America.

Some people who are ignorant of the real situation in China are being misled by an anonymous little book entitled "Letters

From a Chinese Official." The author insists that Anglo-Saxon institutions are far inferior to the institutions of China. He declares that "our religion (Chinese) is more rational than yours, our morality higher and our institutions more perfect," and that there is less real happiness in Europe and America than in China. As for Christianity, he regards it as quite impracticable. He holds that Confucianism is feasible and that Christianity is not, and much more to the same effect. There is strong internal evidence that the author is not a Chinese at all, but a cynical European. At any rate, the book is an ex parte statement of the most glaring kind, omitting the good in Europe and America and the bad in China. One who has visited the Celestial Empire gasps when he reads that the Chinese houses are "cheerful and clean," that the Chinese live the life of the mind and the spirit to a far higher degree than the Christian peoples of the West, and that Chinese life has a dignity and peace and beauty which Europe cannot equal. "Such silence! Such sounds! Such perfume! Such colour!" the author rhapsodizes. Bishop Graves, of Shanghai, who has spent a quarter of a century in China and who is therefore presumably competent to speak, declares :

"Far be it from me to belittle the beauty of the Chinese landscape; but why did he not leave out that about the perfume? Why, you can smell China out at sea! However, it is just as easy to imagine the perfume as the rest of it, while you are writing. Exaggeration is

the most conspicuous note of these 'Letters.' Any one who has not seen China can test whether this book is true to fact by comparing it with any narrative of sober travel, and if he happens to live in China, his own nose and eyes are a sufficient witness. The writer takes the worst of our morals, the weakest of our religion, the most debasing of our industrial conditions, the most pernicious of our vices, and against them he sets not the best that China can show, but an exaggerated picture which is false to fact. This is not argument but trickery, because it presumes on the fact that one's readers will know no better."

Indeed, the Rev. Dr. C. H. Fenn, who has resided in

Peking for ten years, writes that he cannot believe that the author of "Letters from a Chinese Official" is a sincere man. He continues:

"I would be almost willing to assert that it is impossible for a man, brought up in China, then spending many years abroad, to return to China and write such a book in honesty and sincerity of heart. He could not possibly help knowing that nine-tenths of what he was writing about China was absolutely untrue, that her political, legal, social, domestic and personal life are rotten to the core, and that only in a few exceptional cases is any pretence even made of living according to the ethics of Confucius. It might be possible for an educated man, whose surroundings had always been of an exceptionally good character, and who had never gone outside of his own province or studied foreign books, to write with some enthusiasm of the beauties of Chinese life, but not for any one else."

Still, at a time when the Chinese are being vociferously abused, it is only fair that we should give them credit for the good qualities which they do possess. I ask with Dr. William Elliott Griffis : "In talking of our brother men, what shall be our general principle, detraction or fair play? Because lackadaisical writers picture the Christless nations as in the innocence of Eden, shall we, at the antipodes of fact and truth, proceed to blacken their characters? Shall we compare the worst in Canton, Benares or Zululand, with the best in London, Berlin or Philadelphia? Surely God cannot look with complacency or hear with delight much of the practical slander spoken among white folks and Anglo-Saxons of His children and our brothers."

There has been too much of a disposition to think of the Chinese as a mass, almost as we would regard immense herds of cattle or shoals of fish. Why not rather think of the Chinese as an individual, as a man of like passions with ourselves? Physically, mentally, and morally he differs from us only in degree, not in kind. He has essentially the same hopes and fears, the same joys and sorrows, the same susceptibility to pain and the same capacity for happiness. Are we not told