er
could, or would, admit that he had actually tasted it.

Take the random statement that any rich man condemned to death can
procure a substitute by payment of so much. So long as we believe stuff
of that kind, so long will the Chinese remain a mystery for us, it being
difficult to deduce true conclusions from false premises.

As a matter of fact, that is, so far as my own observations go, the
Chinese people value life every whit as highly as we do, and a
substitute of the kind would be quite unprocurable under ordinary
circumstances. It is thinkable that some poor wretch, himself under
sentence of death, might be substituted with the connivance of the
officials, to hoodwink foreigners; but even then the difficulties would
be so great as to render the scheme almost impracticable.

For in China everything leaks out. There is none of that secrecy
necessary to conceal and carry out such a plot.

At any rate, the uncertainty which gathers around many of these points
emphasises the necessity of more and more accurate scholarship in
Chinese, and more and more accurate information on the people of China
and their ways.

How the latter article is supplied to us in England, you may judge from
some extracts which I have recently taken from respectable daily and
weekly newspapers.

For instance, "China has only one hundred physicians to a population of
four hundred millions."

To me it is inconceivable how such rubbish can be printed, especially
when it is quite easy to find out that there is no medical diploma in
China, and that any man who chooses is free to set up as a doctor.

By a pleasant fiction, he charges no fees; a fixed sum, however, is paid
to him for each visit, as "horse-money,"--I need hardly add, in advance.

There are, as with us, many successful, and consequently fashionable,
doctors whose "horse-money" runs well into double figures. Their success
must be due more to good luck and strictly innocent prescriptions than
to any guidance they can find in the extensive medical literature of
China.

All together, medicine is a somewhat risky profession, as failure to
cure is occasionally resented by surviving relatives.

There is a story of a doctor who had mismanaged a case, and was seized
by the patient's family and tied up. In the night he managed to free
himself, and escaped by swimming across a river. When he got home, he
found his son, who had just begun to study medicine, and he said to him,
"Don't