and rich--that was the sentiment he breathed out to everyone--and the
foreigner was humble. There is no wrong in enjoying a large superfluity,
but it was not indispensable to have displayed it, to have wounded the
eyes of him who lacked it, to have flaunted his magnificence at the door
of my commonplace.

Had I been able to speak, I should have pointed out to this fellow that
to know how to be rich is an art difficult to master, and that he had
not mastered it; that as an official his first duty in exercising power
was to learn that of humility; and that it is the irritating authority
of such very lofty and imperious beings as himself, who say, "I am the
law," that provokes insurrection. However, I was dumb, and could only
return his contemptuous glance now and again.

To him I could have said, as I would here say also to every foreigner in
the employ of the Chinese Government, "The only true distinction is
superior worth." If foreigners in China are to have social and official
rank respected, they must begin to be worthy of their rank, otherwise
they help to bring it into hatred and contempt. It is a pity some native
officials have to learn the same lesson.

In several years of residence in the Far East I have noticed respect
for the foreigner unhappily diminishing. The root of the evil is in the
mistaken idea that high station exempts him who holds it from observing
the common obligations of life. It comes about--so often have I seen it
in the Straits Settlements and in various parts of India--that those who
demand the most homage make the least effort to merit that homage they
demand. That is chiefly why respect for the foreigner in the Orient is
diminishing, and I have no hesitancy in asserting that the average
European in the East and Far East does not treat the Oriental with
respect. He considers that the Chinese, the Malay, the Burman, the
Indian is there to do the donkey work only. The newcomer generally
discovers in himself an astounding personal omnipotence, and even before
he can talk the language is so obsessed with it that as he grows older,
his sense of it broadens and deepens. And in China--of the Chinese this
is true to-day as in other spheres of the Far East--the native is there
to do the donkey work, and does it contentedly and for the most part
cheerfully. But he will not always be so content and so cheerful. He
will not always suffer a leathering from a man whom he knows he dare not
now hit back.