individual inclination.
Very good. But the foreigners considered it a vice, and he, Lawson,
was appointed to run to earth Chinese fan-tan houses, in the
Concession, and suppress them. Yet his own people, the foreigners,
gambled freely and uproariously in their own establishments--at the
races, and at certain houses which they maintained for their pleasure.
True, these houses were not in the Concession--for some reason the
foreigners had set their face against gambling in the Concession--yet
they maintained their establishments, their showy and luxurious
establishments, outside the Concession and upon Chinese soil. They
must pay a handsome squeeze for the privilege. Yet it was difficult to
reconcile. What was right and wrong, anyway? What was moral or
immoral, anyway? Lawson, of very limited intelligence, walked along,
sorely puzzled. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander--well, two
very different kinds of sauces, composed of very different
ingredients, as far as he could see. Lawson, being a young man of
limited intelligence, was greatly puzzled. He had been greatly
bothered over this for a long time. It began to look to him--very
vaguely--as if morality was not an abstract but a concrete affair.

Just then he passed an opium shop, and considered again. That surely
was a nasty game, yet his Government encouraged it--and made money
from it. But the Chinese, on their side of the boundary line, were
doing their best to suppress it. It was very difficult for them to
make headway, however, since opium shops flourished and were
encouraged by the foreign concessions, over which the Chinese had no
control. Topsy turvy, anyway. No wonder a person like Lawson was
unable to understand it. It all resolved itself into a question of
money, after all. For after all, money was the main object of life,
whether on the part of an individual or of a government. And since all
governments were composed of individuals, and reflected the ideas of
individuals, there you were!

By this time, young Lawson had become quite bored with life in the Far
East. The romance was gone and it offered so little variety. One day
was so like another, and every day, winter and summer, it was the same
thing or the same sorts of things, and there was an intense sameness
about it all. By day he did his work--that goes without saying--one
has to work in the Far East, that is what one comes out to do.
Otherwise, why come? Unless one is a tourist or a missiona