which filters through regarding China becoming the El
Dorado of the Westerner. He is wanted for no other reason than that of
teaching the Chinese to foreignize as much as he can, teaching the
leaders of the people to strive to modify national life, and to raise
public conduct and administration to the best standards of the West.

When China is capable of looking after herself, and able to maintain the
position she is securing by the aid of the foreigner in her provinces,
following her present mode of thought and action, the foreigner may go
back again. But it is to be hoped that the evolution of the country will
be different.

Another feature impressed upon me was the emptiness of the lives of the
people. Education was rare, and any education they had was confined to
the Chinese classics.

Neither of the three men I had with me could read or write. The thoughts
of these people are circumscribed by the narrow world in which they
live, and only a chance traveler such as myself allows them a glimpse of
other places. Each man, with rare exception, lives and labors and dies
where he is born--that is his ambition; and in the midst of a people
whose whole outlook of life is so contracted, I find difficulty in
believing that progress such as Japan made in her memorable fifty-year
forward movement will be made by the Chinese of Yuen-nan in two hundred
years. Everything one can see around him here, at this town of
Anning-cheo, seems to make against it. In my dealings with Chinese in
their own country--I speak broadly--I have found that they "know
everything." I erected a printing-press in Tong-ch'uan-fu some months
ago--a type of the old flat handpress not unlike that first used by
Caxton. It was a part of the equipment of the Ai Kueh Hsieh Tang (Love
of Country School), and I was invited by the gentry to erect it. Now the
thing had not been up an hour before all the old fossils in the place
knew all about it. Printing to them was easy--a child could do it. It is
always, "O ren teh, o ren teh" ("I know, I know"). These men, dressed in
their best, stood with arms behind them, and smiled stupidly as I
labored with my coat off fixing their primitive machinery. Yet they did
_not_ know, and now, within a few months, not a sheet has been printed,
and the whole plant is going to rack and ruin.

This is the difference between the Chinese and the tribespeople of
Yuen-nan. Here we see the god of the missionary again, quite apart from
a