udents home in
sedan-chairs. The magistrate then seized the assistants in the shop
where the row began and sentenced them to be beaten on the mouth.

Next morning ten thousand shops were closed in the city and suburbs. The
shopkeepers said they could not do business under such an administration
of law. In the course of the morning a large meeting of the students
was held in a college adjoining the examination hall. The district
magistrate went out to confer with them. The students cracked his gong,
and shattered his sedan-chair with showers of stones, and then prodded
him with their fans and umbrellas, and bespattered him with dirt as his
followers tried to carry him away on their shoulders. He was quite
seriously hurt.

The prefect then met a large deputation of the shopkeepers in their
guild-house in the course of the day, and expressed his dissatisfaction
at the way in which the district magistrate had acted. A settlement was
thus reached, which included fireworks for the students, and business
was resumed.

* * * * *

Any individual who is aggrieved by the action, or inaction, of a Chinese
official may have immediate recourse to the following method for
obtaining justice, witnessed by me twice during my residence in China,
and known as "crying one's wrongs."

Dressed in the grey sackcloth garb of a mourner, the injured party,
accompanied by as many friends as he or she can collect together, will
proceed to the public residence of the offending mandarin, and there
howl and be otherwise objectionable, day and night, until some relief is
given. The populace is invariably on the side of the wronged person; and
if the wrong is deep, or the delay in righting it too long, there is
always great risk of an outbreak, with the usual scene of house-wrecking
and general violence.

It may now well be asked, how justice can ever be administered under
such circumstances, which seem enough to paralyse authority in the
presence of any evil-doer who can bring up his friends to the rescue.

To begin with, there is in China, certainly at all great centres, a
large criminal population without friends,--men who have fallen from
their high estate through inveterate gambling, indulgence in
opium-smoking, or more rarely alcohol. No one raises a finger to protect
these from the utmost vengeance of the law.

Then again, the Chinese, just as they tax themselves, so do they
administer justice to themselve