ps are entailed upon many
classes of the community, especially upon actors and barbers, who might
be in danger of actual starvation but for the common-sense of their
rulers coupled with the common rice-pot at home.

The law forbidding marriage between persons of the same surname is
widely, but not universally, in operation. No Smith may marry a Smith;
no Jones may marry a Jones; the reason of course being that all of the
same surname are regarded as members of the same family. However, there
are large districts in certain parts of China where the people are one
and all of the surname, and where it would be a great hardship--not to
mention the impossibility of enforcing the law--if intermarriages of the
kind were prohibited. Consequently, they are allowed, but only if the
contracting parties are so distantly related that, according to the
legal table of affinity, they would not wear mourning for one another in
case of death--in other words, not related at all. The line of descent
is now traced through the males, but there is reason to believe that in
early days, as is found to be often the case among uncivilized tribes,
the important, because more easily recognizable, parent was the mother.
Thus it is illegal for first cousins of the same surname to marry,
and legal if the surnames are different; in the latter case, however,
centuries of experience have taught the Chinese to frown upon such
unions as undesirable in the extreme.

The Penal Code forbids water burial, and also cremation; but it is
permitted to the children of a man dying at a great distance to consume
their father's corpse with fire if positively unable to bring it back
for ordinary burial in his native district. The idea is that with the
aid of fire immediate communication is set up with the spirit-world,
and that the spirit of the deceased is thus enabled to reach his native
place, which would be impossible were the corpse to remain intact. Hence
the horror of dying abroad, common to all Chinese, and only faced if
there is a reasonable probability that their remains will be carried
back to the ancestral home.

In spite of the above law, the cremation of Buddhist priests is
universal, and the practice is tolerated without protest. Priests who
are getting on in years, or who are stricken with a mortal disease, are
compelled by rule to move into a certain part of their monastery, known
as the Abode of a Long Old Age, in which they are required--not to die,