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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 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.

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 pass 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-shore 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 shines unduly on Himalayan snows--this sand is carried along with the water, and it is asserted 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 canals should be cut to take away the water in case of a flood; an enlightened Chinese engineer assured 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 asserted 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 canal 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 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 amassed 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 canal 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 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 title for a state in reality only a degree off barbarism. Many of my humbler parishioners, 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 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 assured 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, 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 Japanese."

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 assured 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 constitutes his danger. He will tend to introduce into Europe the vices which are now desolating his own country, unless, indeed, 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 biassed 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 ship 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 ship 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 ship, put there with the knowledge of the captain. The consequence was the ship 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 assured us that the old comprador on board, one of whose duties apparently was to look after the passengers and take their tickets, was in reality a spy on them.

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 along the line assure 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 pass 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 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 classes 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 punishing 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 ship 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 ship, 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 ashore, 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 eyeballs, 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 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.

But story after story was told us always to the same effect--that the quality of mercy is not highly esteemed by the Chinese. The appeal the beggar makes to you as he runs after you is the old Buddhist appeal, which after all is essentially selfish, as he beseeches you "to acquire merit" by helping him; we must remember that even this reason for mercy is despised by the gentry and literati of China as essentially belonging to Buddhism. Perhaps the most lurid stories that we heard were up river. One came from the country of the Lolos. The Chinese were going out to fight the Lolos, and the missionary saw them carrying a handsome young man bound on a plank so that he could not move--so bound that his head was thrown back. After certain ceremonies they cut the man's throat, and scattered the blood on the flags; it was a sort of human sacrifice. Another story we heard from some devoted Franciscan Sisters up at Ichang. They assured us that if a mother found her children weakly, and she lost one or two, she would make up her mind that the reason they were ill was because an evil spirit had a grudge against her. She would then take one of her remaining children, and, in the hope of propitiating the evil spirit, she would burn that child alive. We could not believe this story was true; but that evening we saw some hard-working Presbyterian ladies, common-sense efficient Scotchwomen, and they assured us that it was quite true.

CHINESE CIVILISATION--ITS GOOD SIDE

It would give a very false idea of the Chinese if great stress were not laid on the good side of their civilisation. They have many fine qualities, and in more than one point they are superior to the nominal Christianity of some Western countries. The first thing perhaps that strikes a foreigner when he is brought into contact with the Chinese is their great courtesy; their literati are such gentlefolk. Even the less cultured people have most refined manners; no one is ever rude; and one of the things they cannot understand is how we can esteem a rough, frank, honest man. There is a case when they would not appoint a certain Englishman to a commercial post, preferring a man of far less attainments and of much shorter service, because the former was rude. That was enough. It was no use telling them that his honesty was above suspicion, that he was a reliable business man, that he was very hard working, that he had many years of hard service behind him; they allowed all this freely, but they shrugged their shoulders and said, "The truth is, he is such a rude fellow, and he will give such very great offence by his bad manners," so they would not have him.

When a visitor enters a Yamen, he realises that his manners must be those of a most polished diplomat. Before him walks a servant, holding aloft his visiting card. One really ought to have special Chinese cards printed on beautiful sheets of red paper with queer-looking characters on them setting forth one's rank and name. However, in these days of admiration of the West, our poor little white cards are considered adequate. The Viceroy or official meets the visitor, enthusiastically shaking his own hands--the Chinese salutation--and bowing low; the particular door at which he meets his guest marks the amount of respect he wishes to pay him, and is therefore of some importance. In my case, when my host was favourable to higher education, I was received in the outer court. At every door there was a polite contest as to who should go through it first, and at last we found ourselves in a room where tea, dessert, champagne, and cigarettes were offered, although of the two latter I was unworthy. Then began the conversation. I found less stiffness once I had explained that I came to gather opinions about a scheme for education. After the stately interview was over there was an equally ceremonious leave-taking.

Though the methods of the Chinese in doing business may be exasperating to a Western whose time is money and who wants them to come to some immediate decision, they are invariably delightful and courteous in all their negotiations. This courtesy is all the direct result of Confucian teaching. Stress is laid there on courteous behaviour, perhaps even to a degree which may strike the Western traveller as absurd. This courtesy, I understand, extends even to those of lower degree. Your servant in speaking to another calls him brother, and nothing makes the servant despise his master so much as seeing him lose his temper: it is to his mind a mark of our savagery.

The Chinese have higher virtues than courtesy. They are essentially industrious. You have only to look at a Chinaman's garden to realise the extent to which he possesses this quality. I am certain that those people who are proud of the culture of their kitchen gardens would be surprised and ashamed if they could compare them with those of a Chinaman. One passes garden after garden with rows of plants placed at even distances and every plant exactly the right distance in those rows, with never a weed to be seen all over the whole plot. Again in handicraft there is the same industry; you buy Chinese embroidery for a song in such a place as Changsha. No one will tell you that Chinamen ever object to length of hours; they are ideal men for work that needs care and accuracy.

Again, he is cheerful and contented under very adverse circumstances. When we were being rowed in a native boat up the Yangtsze, and the men were straining every nerve against the current, while they were chilled by a drizzling rain, there was never a word of discontent; they were always cheerful and bright, good-tempered and merry.

Their highest quality is obedience, which is the result of their Confucian culture. The central virtue of that teaching is obedience to parents, and they hold that doctrine to a degree which to the Western mind seems exaggerated. One of the grown-up sons of a Chinese clergyman did something which he considered unbecoming in a Christian; to the surprise of the missionary, he did not hesitate to administer a sound thrashing to his son, which the young man took without the slightest resistance, and in this action the clergyman was supported by the public opinion of the congregation. This quality gives to China its great power, and it is one of the points in which there is the greatest divergence between the teaching of the West and of the East. Every Chinaman points out to you how little Westerns care for their parents. I remember a Chinese gentleman explaining in a patronising way to the other Chinese that, strange though it seemed, he knew it as a fact that one of the commandments of our religion really was that we should honour our parents.

Were it not for this principle of obedience which is implanted in the mind of every Chinaman, the government of China would scarcely endure for a day; but he is taught from his earliest youth to obey his father, not as we teach in the West because the child is unable to think and understand, so that obedience to parents is a virtue which must fall into disuse as knowledge increases, but as an absolute duty, a duty equally incumbent on a man of forty as on a child of four. This principle is extended to that of civil government; the local official is in their quaint phrase "the father and mother of his people," and the obedience to parents taught in childhood is therefore extended to those who govern. No Chinaman has any doubt but that the first duty of man is obedience to authority. Let us hope these qualities will ever endure.

What may happen, and, alas, I am afraid, is at the present moment happening, is that the two civilisations may be so blended together that the qualities of each may be lost and its peculiar virtues destroyed while its characteristic vices are preserved. The great qualities of obedience to parents, of courtesy to strangers, are being forgotten. The Chinaman educated in the States is rude and abrupt; he fancies that it is Western and business-like. Every Chinese gentleman to whom I talked, allowed that one of the worst results of Western teaching had been that a Westernised Chinaman was less obedient and respectful to his parents. On the other hand, the Westernised Chinaman does not acquire the peculiar virtues of the Englishman.

The superficial Chinese thinker wants China to learn only the material side of our civilisation, to profit by our mechanical excellence without learning anything of our ethics. His view is that the West is immoral but wealthy; he regards Europe as the place where there is no principle excepting money-worship, and therefore he argues that if you would Westernise China you must despise morality and seek for money. Chang-Chih-Tung voiced this thought when he said, "Western education is practical, Chinese education is moral." If you try to argue with a thoughtless Chinaman who has perhaps never left China, and whose only experience of Western life is what he has seen in a treaty port, you will find that it is hard to convince him that Western education produces a high moral tone. After all we may, to a certain extent, be to blame for their want of appreciation of the morality of the West, for too often we show to the Chinese a very degraded side of our civilisation; and though I do not think that Shanghai at the present merits the term that was applied to it fifty years ago of being a "moral sink," yet undoubtedly the treaty ports, both by their constitution and by their geographical position, collect very unpleasant specimens of white civilisation. There are a certain number of men who spend a great part of their existence being deported from Shanghai to Hong-Kong, and from Hong-Kong to Shanghai.

One of the comedies in the tragedy of the extinction of the independence of Korea is illustrative of this point. The Emperor of Korea heard that the Western races were far more trustworthy than those of the East, and so fearing assassination after the murder of the Queen, he determined to enrol a corps of Europeans as a body-guard; he sent over officers to Shanghai with orders to enlist Europeans. Unfortunately for himself he did not take the precaution of sending with them any Western to help in the selection of the men. To Korean eyes all Westerns look alike, and as they were offering good pay, they soon had their corps complete; they returned to Seoul, and the corps was installed with suitable uniforms, and, alas, rifles and ammunition. The moment the corps was paid, the greater bulk of them got drunk, and for the next few hours Seoul was distinctly an undesirable place of residence, filled with drunken men of all nationalities shouting and shrieking and firing loaded rifles recklessly in every direction. The poor Emperor trembled as he looked from his palace windows at his body-guard out on the drink, and he made up his mind that it would be better to take a reasonable chance of assassination by the Japanese than to risk the danger of being guarded by this inebriate troop of Westerns. With the help of the Consul the body-guard when sober were returned to Shanghai, and let us trust the Chinese heard the story and were convinced that in accepting Western civilisation they must be careful to avoid accepting the vices of the West.

At Changsha I heard a similar story, but with a tragic side, which one felt exonerated the Chinese for being rather incredulous as to the morality of our civilisation. Changsha, I should explain, is reputed one of the most bigoted cities in China; even at the present moment white women are advised not to walk through the streets. The Hunanese have a bold independent character, which makes them rather hostile to any foreigner or to foreign ways, and I am afraid that the story I am going to repeat will have confirmed them in their conviction that foreigners are undesirable. Two white men belonging to one of the South European races--Greeks, I think--settled themselves down in defiance of treaty rights in Changsha, and at once opened a gambling hell. Very soon they taught the Chinese, who are as a race very addicted to gambling, new and most pernicious forms of that hateful vice. The Governor complained to the Consul; the Consul sent his officer down, accompanied by the police, to arrest the Greeks; the Private Secretary to the Governor informed the Consul of the tragedy that followed. The Consular officer warned the Greeks that they must give up their gambling establishment and go back to Hankow. They said they would not. He told them that if they refused he would arrest them, take them to the boat, and send them down by force to Hankow. They still refused, and he advanced, upon which one of the Greeks shot the officer dead. The Chinese police after their manner vanished, while the Governor's Private Secretary, according to his own account, spent most of the time of the interview under the table. The Greeks, seeing the coast clear, and realising that vengeance must come, took to the open country. The Chinese were told to arrest them if they could. Of course they had no difficulty in finding them, but to arrest them was a different matter. They mobilised two or three regiments, and surrounding the house in which the Greeks had taken refuge, they kept on firing at long range till they judged, from there being no signs of life, that they must have killed them. They then carried off the bodies, but thought it better to describe the incident in an official document as a case of suicide from fear of arrest, lest they should be held responsible for the death of these murderers. The next Greeks that came up the river were sent down with a guard of forty men, and so terrified were the Chinese that they had to put them first-class, as no Chinese would have dared to have travelled with them.

There were several other stories told at Changsha to the same effect. The European that the Chinaman sees in that sort of place is too often one of those worthless men who has found his own country impossible to live in, and who hopes that his vices and crimes may escape unnoticed in distant China. Can one wonder that the Chinese are liable to misunderstand the West, and were it not for the saintly life of many missionaries, the high character and strict justice of our Consuls--yes, and the admirable discipline and management of such great undertakings as that of Butterfield and Swire--the evil would be incurable; but though there are many specimens of the bad, there are also not a few men who by their lives have testified before the Chinese to the greatness of our social and moral traditions and to the religion by which they are inspired.

RAILWAYS AND RIVERS

The rivers and railways of China form a very marked contrast. The rivers represent the old means of communication, the railways the new, and the comparison between the river and the railway enables the traveller to compare new with old China and to realise the great changes that are taking place there and the transitional character of the phase through which the country is now passing.

Ancient China, as compared to ancient Europe, was a most progressive country, a very essential point to remember when we have to consider what will be the attitude of the Chinese with regard to modern progress. Theoretically they have always been progressive; practically they have passed through an age of progress and reached the other side. That age of progress improved very much their means of communication. China is naturally well endowed with rivers, and those rivers were infinitely extended by a system of canals. Of these the Grand Canal is the most perfect example. The traveller cannot sail along the Grand Canal and look at the masonry walls of that great work, or the high bridges that span it, without realising that in its time it was one of the greatest works the world had ever seen. That canal, typical of modern China, is now in disrepair, but the spirit of the men who built it is not gone; it is the same spirit that now welcomes railways all over China.

The greatest of China's natural waterways is the Yangtsze-Kiang; it cuts right through the centre of China from the sea to Chungking and further; it has many important tributaries, which lead through great lakes and afford a very useful means of communication to vast districts in Central China.

Along that great river for six hundred miles, ships of the largest size can sail in the summer; battleships, though not of the largest class, can ascend to Hankow. Beyond Hankow the river is much shallower, and communication with Ichang is often interrupted in the winter by want of water. A thousand miles from the sea begin those wonderful gorges of the Yangtsze which are among the greatest wonders of the world.

Up to Ichang, the Yangtsze is still a big, rather dull yellow river, a vastly overgrown Thames, a mass of sandbanks, running through almost consistently uninteresting country; but after that thousand miles, it develops into a sort of huge Rhine. The river is still yellow, but it runs through green mountains and grey rocks. At times it swirls along with an oily surface dented here and there by whirlpools which tell of some sunken rock; at other times the grey rocks creep closer together and the yellow Yangtsze foams itself white in its effort to squeeze through the narrow opening left. In quieter reaches of the river a house-boat or luban can be rowed or sailed. The rowing is rather jerky, the sailing delightful, and so the advance of the traveller is pleasant and uneventful; but when the boat reaches the rapids, the only way to get her through is by towing.

There is a temptation always to delay putting men ashore to tow--a temptation which ended in our house-boat being bumped upon a rock.

Our captain had cleverly devised, by creeping along the side of the river under shelter of projecting rocks and then by dodging round the points, everybody shrieking and yelling as they strained at the oar, to avoid the necessity of towing; but a more malign whirlpool than the rest twisted us round till the oars on one side of the boat could not row because they were fouled on the rocks, and then another twisted us sideways on to a submerged rock, and there the current held us till the police-boat the Chinese Government supplies to foreign travellers kindly took our rope ashore and we were hauled off without apparently having suffered any damage.

These police-boats, or "red boats," are a great feature in travelling on the Yangtsze. They add enormously, to begin with, to the artistic effect, as they are furnished with an art-blue sail, which would rejoice the heart of an artist, but the nervous traveller regards them with feelings of a warmer nature than those their aesthetic effect would arouse. They guarantee, if not the safety of boats and goods, at least the safety of his person amidst the terrible rapids of the river. If his boat should be wrecked and his goods become the property of the fishes, he knows that the "red boat" will dart into the rapids, and owing to its peculiar construction and the skill of the boatmen, will be able to rescue and return him, a washed and grateful traveller, to Ichang.

The excitement of passing the rapids is intense. It is a pleasurable sensation when you watch from the shore some one else passing through them; it is more exciting but less pleasurable to be on the boat itself at that moment. The excitement is largely a question of the size of the boat, whence the wisdom of taking a small boat even if it is less comfortable. To watch an eighty-ton junk being hauled through a narrow passage of foaming water is intensely thrilling. It is a matter of great difficulty owing to the rocky nature both of the channel and the shore.

The Yangtsze rises and falls some hundreds of feet in the year, and at low water the banks are a mass of rough rocks which remind one more of the sea than of a river. The men who tow are called trackers, and they have to climb over these rocks tugging and straining at the rope while a certain number of them, stripped to nudity, try to keep the rope clear of the rocks which constantly entangle it both on shore and in the water. It is splendid to watch these men as they bound from rock to rock to disengage the rope from some projecting point, or as, leaping into the stream, they swim across to isolated rocks and extricate it from all sorts of impossible situations. Meanwhile the junk creeps up inch by inch, at times standing almost still while the water surges past her and makes a wave at her bow which would not misbecome a torpedo-destroyer in full steam. Woe betide the junk if the rope should foul and break in spite of the efforts of these men, for then she would be at the mercy of the current, and if it should so happen that there was no wind, the mariners on board have no command over her, and she must drift as chance will guide her till quieter water is reached. Of course if there is a wind they can haul up their sail, and then, though they will descend backwards down the stream, they will do it with dignity and safety. We passed a junk doing this. Her rope had apparently broken, her huge sails were set to a stiff breeze; as you watched her by the water she seemed to be sailing at a good rate forwards; as you watched her by the land she was travelling a good steady pace down stream. If she cannot hoist her sail because the wind is unfavourable, then she will rush back, inadequately guided by three huge strange-looking oars. The one at the bow, worked by six men, can twist her round like a teetotum, so that as she dashes down stream, the captain can select which part of her shall bump against the submerged rocks, which after all is but a poor privilege, when you remember that eighty tons of woodwork banged against massive granite rock must be resolved into its constituent boards, whatever part of it strikes the rock first. The two other oars are even less helpful. With eight men at each, they can propel the boat at the rate of about three miles an hour; but what use is that when the stream is bearing the junk to destruction at twenty miles an hour. If the rope breaks, it is rather a question of good luck than good guidance. If there is no rock in the way, the junk happily sails down and is brought up in the quieter waters below the rapids. If there is a rock in the way, the junk arrives at the end of the rapid in a condition which would please firewood collectors but no one else. Those of the crew who can swim get ashore, and those who cannot are either picked up by the "red boat," or if there is not one there, they disappear; their bodies are recovered several days later lower down the river. From a Chinese point of view this is all a small matter; what is important is that a junk containing a valuable cargo has been lost. So frequent have been these losses that five per cent. insurance is demanded for cargoes going above Ichang.

Perhaps I ought to say one word about the rope on which the safety of the junk depends. It is made of plaited bamboo, which is extraordinarily light, and does not fray, though it is so stiff that it behaves like a wire rope. Its great lightness allows of the use of ropes of enormous length. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that some of them are a quarter of a mile long. They are very strong, and therefore can be of wonderfully narrow diameter, but apparently they last but a short time, and every boat is furnished with coil after coil of bamboo rope ready for all emergencies. A horrible accident happens when owing to bad steering the trackers are pulled back off the narrow ledges cut into the face of the precipices, which at times border the river, so that they fall into the rapid.

They are an attractive body of men, these trackers. They leap over the most incredible chasms in the rocks, they climb like cats up the precipices, they pull like devils, while one master encourages them by beating a drum on board the junk, and another belabours them on shore with a bit of bamboo rope, which makes an excellent substitute for a birch rod, and yet withal they are cheerful. When it rains or snows they are wet through; when the sun is hot--and remember the Yangtsze is in the same latitude as North Africa--they expose their bent backs to the scorching sun; yet apparently they never grumble, but they wile away the hours of their labour with cheerful song. When they row or pull easily, the song is a weird antiphonal chant--it seems to be sometimes a solo and a chorus, sometimes two equally balanced choruses; but when the work becomes hard, the song changes into a wild snarl and they laugh a savage laugh as they strain and sweat to the uttermost. I will complete their description by saying that their views of decency are those of Adam before the Fall, and that they preserve their strength by a diet of rice and beans with a handful of cabbages as a relish. At night they sleep on the deck of the junk on their rough Chinese bedding with only a mat roofing to keep the rain off them. And as I watched their cheerful demeanour, I felt more convinced than ever that the natural virtues of the Chinese are of the very highest order.

Perhaps I ought to say one word about the beauty of the gorges. I think in two points they excel. First, in the height of the massive cliffs, through which the Yangtsze has cut its way like a knife; the size of the river and the size of the cliffs are so much in proportion that the eagle circling above the gorge looks like a swallow, and the crowd of trackers appears as a disturbed ant colony. The other way in which the gorges excel in beauty is in colouring; at one point especially it was most remarkable--the rocks were red, the mountains when we saw them were purple, and the purple and red harmonising with the fresh green foliage of early summer and the deep yellow of the river, made a rich combination of tints in the landscape which could hardly be surpassed. It is typical of the state in which China is at the present day that a scheme should be on foot for building a railway which no doubt will render the gorges of the Yangtsze a silent highway, and, instead of hearing the wild song of the tracker or the savage beating of the tom-tom, the lonely eagle will circle above a silent river on which the fisherman's bark alone will sail in the future.

For all schemes to tame the wild and fierce Yangtsze are clearly impossible. The river rises and falls more than a hundred feet with great rapidity, and no human hand could ever throw a dam across this mass of surging water. Possibly it might be used as a source of power for electrical work, but it is far more probable that the smaller rivers which fall into the Yangtsze will be chosen for that purpose. This district may be a tourist resort, and dwellers in the plains of China may seek coolness and beauty on one of the crags that overhang the river; the modern hotel may perch itself beside the ancient Buddhist temple; but the days of the river as a great commercial route of China are numbered as soon as the railway linking far-western Szechuan to the rest of China is completed. One wild scheme proposes that the railway should come from Russia straight down from Szechuan, in which case more than probably Szechuan will fall completely under the influence of the Russian Government.

One of the results of Westernising China must be to produce an industrial revolution. All those men, for instance, who make a living by leaping from crag to crag, from rock to rock, and swimming, struggling, rowing in that river Yangtsze will find their living gone. But not only will the railway make many poor who had a competence, but it must make many rich who before were poor. In this case, for instance, all those commodities which are now extremely dear in Szechuan, because of the cost of transit, will fall in price, and there will be a period when there will be a wide margin of profit between the cost of importation and the conventional price the people are used to pay, and those who live by trade will grow rich.

What has happened in the West must also happen in the East. The introduction of steam did not make the official classes or even the working classes immediately rich. The people who immediately profited by improved means of production and communication were the great middle class; afterwards as the working class realised that the margin of profit would allow of larger wages, they compelled the masters to share these advantages with them. So it will probably happen in China. With the railway will come a rich middle class who will be a factor of growing importance in future China.

A great contrast between the Yangtsze and its wild gorges is the great trunk line from Peking to Canton which runs at right angles through the Yangtsze north and south, and must make Hankow, the place where it crosses the Yangtsze, one of the greatest cities in the whole world. The railway is only completed as far as Hankow. It runs from Peking right across the plains of China, which are so desolate in the spring and so fertile in the summer, and which depend for their fertility on the July rains. At every station a great Chinese inn is erected--that is to say, a big courtyard with rooms round. At first, of course, trade was small; the Chinese village community has but little that it wants either to buy or sell; each community is to a great extent self-supporting. A farmer reckoned, I was told by a Chinese official, that if he had made 30s. a year, he had done well. That does not mean that he lived on 30s. a year, though in a country where men are paid threepence a day, one would almost have been ready to believe it; but it means that he had fifteen dollars a year to spend on things outside his daily food. His farm supplies him with food and drink and his vicious luxury, opium; his women make his clothes; it only remains for him to buy material for the clothes and the little extras that they cannot make, besides salt. He pays for the few things that he has bought, probably with the opium he produces, or in Manchuria with beans; but the trade has been of microscopical dimensions owing to the difficulties of transit.

When the railway is made he finds at the railway inn the Chinese merchant ready to buy and sell anything that he on his part is ready to trade. At first, such things as sewing cotton and cigarettes are the things that are traded against silk or opium, and then comes Chinese medicine and mineral oil, and so trade begins, and soon the Chinese inn becomes a market-place, and the railways begin carrying goods.

Of course the full development of the railway system must depend on the feeding lines and in what we had in Europe before the railway system, and what the Chinese have not got, the feeding roads. In Manchuria--for China, like England, is more go-ahead in the north than in the south--they are already moving in this direction. The Russian railways, possessed now by the Japanese, are very busy carrying beans to Dalny, and soon the Japanese lines from Mukden to Antung will be equally busy, and the line from Mukden to Tientsin also will carry this crop. What they are now considering at Mukden is how they can arrange a feeding system of light railways, by which a bigger area of ground can be brought within reach of the railway system. To give some idea of the energy and progressive character of the officials in those parts, I may mention that they are already making inquiries as to the mono-rail system for such railways.

The Chinese have made up their minds to welcome railways, and though they would far prefer railways to be built with Chinese capital, they are of necessity compelled to accept European capital, since their fellow-countrymen want very high interest for their money. The Germans have taken very full advantage of the Chinese desire for railways, and have linked Kiauchau with the railway system of China.

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