d be next to
impossible. As it is, people hire servants of whom they know
absolutely nothing, put them in charge of a whole house many rooms in
which are full of tempting kickshaws, go away for a trip to a port
five or six hundred miles distant, and come back to find everything in
its place down to the most utter trifles. Merchants as a rule have
their servants _secured_ by some substantial man, but many do not take
this precaution, for an honest Chinaman usually carries his integrity
written in his face. Confucius gave a wise piece of advice when he
said, "If you employ a man, be not suspicious of him; if you are
suspicious of a man, do not employ him"--and truly foreigners in China
seem to carry out the first half to an almost absurd degree, placing
the most unbounded confidence in natives with whose antecedents they
are almost always unacquainted, and whose very names in nine cases out
of ten they actually do not know! And what is the result of all this?
A few cash extra charged as commission on anything purchased at
shop or market, and a steady consumption of about four dozen
pocket-handkerchiefs per annum. Thefts there are, and always will be,
in China as elsewhere; but there are no better grounds for believing
that the Chinese are a nation of thieves than that their own tradition
is literally true which says, "In the glorious days of old, if
anything was seen lying in the road, nobody would pick it up!" On the
contrary, we believe that theft is not one whit more common in China
than it is in England; and we are fully convinced that the imputation
of being a nation of thieves has been cast, with many others, upon the
Chinese by unscrupulous persons whose business it is to show that
China will never advance without the renovating influence of
Christianity-an opinion from which we here express our most
unqualified dissent.

LYING

We have stated our conviction that the Chinese as a nation are not
more addicted to thieving than the inhabitants of many countries for
whom the same excuses are by no means so available. That no
undiscerning persons may be led to regard us as panegyrists of a
stationary civilisation, we hasten to counterbalance our somewhat
laudatory statements by the enunciation of another proposition less
startling, but if anything more literally true. _The Chinese are a
nation of liars._ If innate ideas were possible, the idea of lying
would form the foundation of the Chinese mind. They lie by