would begin to bleed.
Hong-Kong showed me how the Chinaman could work. Canton explained why he
set no value on life. The article was cheaper than in India. I hated the
Chinaman before; I hated him doubly as I choked for breath in his
seething streets where nothing short of the pestilence could clear a
way. There was of course no incivility from the people, but the mere mob
was terrifying. There are three or four places in the world where it is
best for an Englishman to agree with his adversary swiftly, whatever the
latter's nationality may be. Canton heads the list. Never argue with
anybody in Canton. Let the guide do it for you. Then the stinks rose up
and overwhelmed us. In this respect Canton was Benares twenty times
magnified. The Hindu is a sanitating saint compared to the Chinaman. He
is a rigid Malthusian in the same regard.

"Very bad stink, this place. You come right along," said Ah Cum, who had
learned his English from Americans. He was very kind. He showed me
feather-jewellery shops where men sat pinching from the gorgeous wings
of jays, tiny squares of blue and lilac feathers, and pasting them into
gold settings, so that the whole looked like Jeypore enamel of the
rarest. But we went into a shop. Ah Cum drew us inside the big door and
bolted it, while the crowd blocked up the windows and shutter-bars. I
thought more of the crowd than the jewellery. The city was so dark and
the people were so very many and so unhuman.

The March of the Mongol is a pretty thing to write about in magazines.
Hear it once in the gloom of an ancient curio shop, where nameless
devils of the Chinese creed make mouths at you from back-shelves, where
brazen dragons, revelations of uncleanliness, all catch your feet as you
stumble across the floor--hear the tramp of the feet on the granite
blocks of the road and the breaking wave of human speech, that is not
human! "Watch the yellow faces that glare at you between the bars, and
you will be afraid, as I was afraid.

"It's beautiful work," said the Professor, bending over a Cantonese
petticoat--a wonder of pale green, blue, and Silver. "Now I understand
why the civilised European of Irish extraction kills the Chinaman in
America. It is justifiable to kill him. It would be quite right to wipe
the city of Canton off the face of the earth, and to exterminate all the
people who ran away from the shelling. The Chinaman ought not to count."

I had gone off on my own train of thought, and i