anding. To the Chinese, their own
language seems to be the language of the gods; they know they have
possessed it for several thousand years, and they know nothing at all
of the barbarian. Where does he come from? Where can he come from except
from the small islands which fringe the Middle Kingdom, the world, in
fact, bounded by the Four Seas? The books tell us that "Heaven is round,
Earth is square;" and it is impossible to believe that those books,
upon the wisdom of which the Middle Kingdom was founded, can possibly be
wrong. Such was a very natural view for the Chinaman to take when first
brought really face to face with the West; and such is the view that
in spite of modern educational progress is still very widely held. The
people of a country do not unlearn in a day the long lessons of the
past. He was quite a friendly mandarin, taking a practical view of
national dress, who said in conversation: "I can't think why you
foreigners wear your clothes so tight; it must be very difficult to
catch the fleas."

As an offset against the virtue of gratitude must be placed the
deep-seated spirit of revenge which animates all classes. Though not
enumerated among their own list of the Seven passions--joy, anger,
sorrow, fear, love, hatred and desire--it is perhaps the most
over-mastering passion to which the Chinese mind is subject. It is
revenge which prompts the unhappy daughter-in-law to throw herself down
a well, consoled by the thought of the trouble, if not ruin, she is
bringing on her persecutors. Revenge, too, leads a man to commit suicide
on the doorstep of some one who has done him an injury, for he well
knows what it means to be entangled in the net which the law throws over
any one on whose premises a dead body may thus be found. There was once
an absurd case of a Chinese woman, who deliberately walked into a pond
until the water reached up to her knees, and remained there, alternately
putting her lips below the surface, and threatening in a loud voice
to drown herself on the spot, as life had been made unbearable by the
presence of foreign barbarians. In this instance, had the suicide
been carried out, vengeance would have been wreaked in some way on the
foreigner by the injured ghost of the dead woman.

The germ of this spirit of revenge, this desire to get on level terms
with an enemy, as when a life is extracted for a life, can be traced,
strangely enough, to the practice of filial piety and fraternal love,