and servant; in
what way they fought the battle of life, how they feasted and how they
mourned. If circumstances took her over and over again to different
parts of China for long stretches of time, she would add to her
traditions and her early atmosphere some experience of her race on
their own soil and under their own sun. What she could tell us would
be of such small importance that she would often hesitate to set it
down; and again, she would hesitate lest what she had to say should be
well known already to those amongst her readers who had sojourned in
her father's country. She would do well, I think, to make some picture
for herself of the audience she could hope to entertain, and to fix
her mind on these people while she wrote her book. She would know that
in the country of her adoption there were some who never crossed their
own seas, and others who travelled here and there in the world but did
not visit China or know much about its people. She would write for the
ignorant ones, and not for any others; and she would of necessity
leave aside all great issues and all vexed questions. Her picture
would be chiefly, too, a picture of the nation's women; for though
they have on the whole no share in political history, they reckon
with the men in any history of domestic life and habit.

Germans often maintain that their country is more diverse than any
other, and on that account more difficult to describe: a country of
many races and various rules held loosely together by language and
more tightly of late years by the bond of empire. But the truth
probably is, that in our country we see and understand varieties,
while in a foreign one we chiefly perceive what is unlike ourselves
and common to the people we are observing. For from the flux and
welter of qualities that form a modern nation certain traits survive
peculiar to that nation: specialities of feature, character, and
habit, some seen at first sight, others only discovered after long and
intimate acquaintance. It is undoubtedly true that no one person can
be at home in every corner of the German Empire, or of any other
empire.

There are many Germanys. The one we hear most of in England nowadays
is armed to the teeth, set wholly on material advancement, in a
dangerously warlike mood, hustling us without scruple from our place
in the world's markets, a model of municipal government and
enterprise, a land where vice, poverty, idleness, and dirt are all
unknown. W