ad. They must have souls or they
couldn't understand pretty things."

"I can't make it out," said the Professor. "They are better artists than
the Hindu,--that carving you are looking at is Japanese, by the
way,--better artists and stronger workmen, man for man. They pack close
and eat everything, and they can live on nothing."

"And I've been praising the beauties of Indian Art all my days." It was
a little disappointing when you come to think of it, but I tried to
console myself by the thought that the two lay so far apart there was no
comparison possible. And yet accuracy is surely the touchstone of all
Art.

"They will overwhelm the world," said the Professor, calmly, and he went
out to buy tea.

Neither at Penang, Singapur, nor this place have I seen a single
Chinaman asleep while daylight lasted. Nor have I seen twenty men who
were obviously loafing. All were going to some definite end--if it were
only like the coolie on the wharf, to steal wood from the scaffolding of
a half-built house. In his own land, I believe, the Chinaman is treated
with a certain amount of carelessness, not to say ferocity. Where he
hides his love of art, the Heaven that made him out of the yellow earth
that holds so much iron only knows. His love is for little things, or
else why should he get quaint pendants for his pipe, and at the backmost
back of his shop build up for himself a bowerbird's collection of odds
and ends, every one of which has beauty if you hold it sufficiently
close to the eye. It grieves me that I cannot account for the ideas of a
few hundred million men in a few hours. This much, however, seems
certain. If we had control over as many Chinamen as we have natives of
India, and had given them one tithe of the cossetting, the painful
pushing forward, and studious, even nervous, regard of their interests
and aspirations that we have given to India, we should long ago have
been expelled from, or have reaped the reward of, the richest land on
the face of the earth. A pair of my shoes have been, oddly enough,
wrapped in a newspaper which carries for its motto the words, "There is
no Indian nation, though there exists the germs of an Indian
nationality," or something very like that. This thing has been moving me
to unholy laughter. The great big lazy land that we nurse and wrap in
cotton-wool, and ask every morning whether it is strong enough to get
out of bed, seems like a heavy soft cloud on the far-away horizon; and
th