is little drunkenness over here. At a
dinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth while to
mention as a matter of general interest to her guests (so rare is the
occurrence) that she had seen a drunken Chinaman that day. I have not
yet seen one.

China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into industrial
competition with all the world, and I am glad that she is. I believe
that every strong and worthy nation is enriched by the proper
development of every other nation. But in this coming struggle the
people whom vice or dissipation has rendered weak sooner or later must
go down before the men who, gaining the mastery over every vicious
habit, keep their bodies strong and their minds clear. In thunder
tones indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America. If we
are to maintain our high place among the nations of the earth, if we
are to keep our leadership in wealth and industry, we can do it only
by freeing ourselves, as heroically as the yellow man of the Orient is
doing in this respect, from every enervating influence that now
weakens the physical stamina, blunts the moral sense, or befogs the
brain.

The new China is devoting itself to a number of other reforms to which
the people of America may well give attention. The curse of graft
among her public officials ("squeeze" it is called over here) is one
of the most deep-rooted cancers with which she has to contend.
Officers have been paid small salaries and have been allowed to make
up for the meagreness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees
and tips. Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will
{97} doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and "squeeze" system,
stop grafting, and put all the more important offices on a strict
salary basis. Under the old fee system of paying county and city
officials in the United States, as my readers know, we have often let
enormous sums go into office-holders' pockets when they should have
gone into improving our roads and schools. The Chinese system not only
has this weakness, but by reason of the fact that the fees are not
regularly fixed by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened for
numberless other abuses.

Currency reform is in China a matter hardly second in importance to
the abolition of "squeeze." There is no national currency here; each
province (or state, as we would say) issues its own money when it
pleases, just as the different American states did two g