the Government who make use of the telegraph, and their
communications are sent by private code. When the Tsungli Yamen in
Peking sends a telegram to the Viceroy in Yunnan it is in code that the
message comes; and it is by private code also that a Chinese bank in
Shanghai telegraphs to its far inland agents. Messages are sent in China
by the Morse system. The method of telegraphing Chinese characters,
whose discovery enabled the Chinese to make use of the telegraph, was
the ingenious invention of a forgotten genius in the Imperial Maritime
Customs of China. The method is simplicity itself. The telegraph code
consists of ten thousand numbers of four numerals each, and each group
so constituted represents a Chinese character. Any operator, however
ignorant of Chinese, can thus telegraph or receive a message in Chinese.
He receives, for instance, a message containing a series of numbers such
as 0018, 0297, 5396, 8424. He has before him a series of ten thousand
wood blocks on which the number is cut at one end and the corresponding
Chinese character at the other, he takes out the number, touches the
inkpad with the other end, and stamps opposite each group its Chinese
character. The system permits, moreover, of the easy arrangement of
indecipherable private codes, because by adding or subtracting a certain
number from each group of figures, other characters than those
telegraphed can be indicated.

I need hardly add that the system of wood blocks is not in practical
use, for the numbers and their characters are now printed in code-books.
And here we have an instance of the marvellous faculty of memorising
characteristic of the Chinese. A Chinaman's memory is something
prodigious. From time immemorial the memory of the Chinese has been
developed above all the other faculties. Memory is the secret of success
in China, not originality. Among a people taught to associate innovation
with impiety, and with whom precedent determines all action, it is
inevitable that the faculty of recollection should be the most highly
developed of all the mental faculties. Necessity compels the Chinaman to
have a good memory. No race has ever been known where the power of
memory has been developed even in rare individual cases to the degree
that is common to all classes of the Chinese, especially to the
literati.

The Chinese telegraph clerk quickly learns all the essential portion of
the code-book by heart. The book then lies in the drawer a su