ea. Only two fires
are needed as the heat from the two end fires does for the water in the
middle.

There is no doubt that the Chinese are a sociable people if given a
chance. Of course, men like the husband of our hostess are the extreme
of ability and advanced ideas here. But it is remarkable that he shows
us things as they are. When we visited schools he did not arrange in
advance because he did not want us to see a fixed up program. When we
went out to lunch he took us to a Chinese place where no foreigners ever
go.

Yesterday we went to a department store to buy some gloves and garters.
Gloves were Keyser's, imported, so were the stockings, so were the
garters and suspenders, etc. The gloves were from $1 to $1.60 and the
suspenders were a dollar. I bought some silk, sixteen inches wide, for
fifty cents a yard. The store was messy and the floors dirty, but it is
a popular place for the Chinese. We paid three dollars for a book marked
1sh. 6p. in England, and everything here is like that. Gloves and
stockings are made in Japan, and good and cheap there; fine silken
stockings $1.60 a pair. But still the Chinese do not buy of them, but
from America. We have visited a cotton mill. The Chinese cotton and silk
are now inferior, owing to lack of scientific production and of proper
care of seed. In weaving, they sometimes mix their cotton with ours.

SHANGHAI, Monday, May 12.

The Peking tempest seems to have subsided for the present, the
Chancellor still holding the fort, and the students being released. The
subsidized press said this was due in part to the request of the
Japanese that the school-boy pranks be looked upon indulgently.
According to the papers, the Japanese boycott is spreading, but the ones
we see doubt if the people will hold out long enough--meanwhile Japanese
money is refused here.

The East is an example of what masculine civilization can be and do. The
trouble I should say is that the discussions have been confined to the
subjection of the women as if that were a thing affecting the women
only. It is my conviction that not merely the domestic and educational
backwardness of China, but the increasing physical degeneration and the
universal political corruption and lack of public spirit, which make
China such an easy mark, is the result of the condition of women. There
is the same corruption in Japan only it is organized; there seems to be
an alliance between two groups of big capitalists a