ndards are being adopted--and in some places with considerable
energy--even in the "backward province." In travel anywhere in the
world, one becomes absorbed more or less with one's own immediate
surroundings, and there is a tendency to form opinions on the
limitations of those surroundings. In many countries this would not lead
one far astray, but in China it is different. Most of my opinion of the
real Chinese is formed in Yuen-nan, and it is not to be denied that in
all the other seventeen provinces, although a good many of them may be
more forward in the trend of national evolution and progress, the same
squalidness among the people, and every condition antagonistic to the
Westerner's education so often referred to, are to be found. But China
has four hundred and thirty millions of people, so that what one writes
of one particular province--in the main right, perhaps--may not
necessarily hold good in another province, separated by thousands of
miles, where climatic conditions have been responsible for differences
in general life. With its great area and its great population, it does
not need the mind of a Spencer to see that it will take generations
before every acre and every man will be gathered into the stream of
national progress.

The European traveler in China cannot perhaps deny himself the pleasure
of dwelling upon the absurdities and oddities of the life as they strike
him, but there is also another side to the question. Our own
civilization, presenting so many features so extremely removed from his
own ancient ideas and preconceived notion of things in general, probably
looks quite as ridiculous from the standpoint of the Chinese. The East
and the West each have lessons to offer the other. The West is offering
them to the East, and they are being absorbed. And perhaps were we to
learn the lessons to which we now close our eyes and ears, but which are
being put before us in the characteristics of Oriental civilization, we
may in years to come, sooner than we expect, rejoice to think that we
have something in return for what we have given; it may save us a rude
awakening. It does not strike the average European, who has never been
to China, and who knows no more about the country than the telegrams
which filter through when massacres of our own compatriots occur, that
Europe and America are not the only territories on this little round
ball where the inhabitants have been left with a glorious heritage.

But