ud crossbar suit and a
fore-and-aft cap, who was always shown on the stage with half a dozen
bottles of Bass on a table beside him.) When we bear in mind how much
Britishers despise their next-door neighbours across the Channel for
their defective beefsteakiali-ties, it is not surprising that such a
feeling should be greatly intensified when they come in contact with a
civilisation so much more alien and remote from their own as that of
China and Japan. It needs only a quiet observation and the smallest
degree of intellectual elasticity to be forced to the conclusion that
the advantages are not altogether on our side, and that there is great
scope for the East to send social missionaries to the West. Socially,
I think we have far more to learn from them than they have to learn
from us. And, curiously enough, if such a mission were started, it
would not be entirely to teach us new things, but in many ways it
would be recalling us to points which we have hurried away from in the
rapid progress of our material civilisation for the last couple of
hundred years.

The central idea, the social pivot, the focus of the life, of the
civilisation of the East is to be found in their idea of the home. The
home is the centre of gravity of their existence, round which
everything else revolves. In China it is the all-pervading,
all-vivifying idea of social life, of religion, and of government. The
life of the family is not only of to-day, but extends back into a
venerable past, and is the hope and care of the future.

For us, the dead past buries its dead, and the flowers that we lay on
the newly-made grave quickly wither on the freshly-turned clay on
which we have left them--except where the place of natural ones is
taken by those deliciously ironical representations in the shape of
tin--waterproof imitations which save the mourner the trouble of
renewal.

As to the love of the Chinese and Japanese for their children, it has
to be seen to be appreciated. Those wise-eyed little mites, who before
they can walk sit perpetually enthroned upon their mothers' backs
throughout the livelong day, are a source of so much joy and adoration
to their parents that one feels no surprise at not hearing them cry as
other children do. I only recollect hearing a child cry once during a
two months' stay in Japan, and then there was an excuse for its
dolorous plaint, because its mother was shaving its little head with a
blunt razor and no soap. It mus