ica and in Europe the chief concern is industry,--industry
in the large sense, agriculture, manufacture, commerce. These are the
interests that concern the people, that control their policy. In India
religion holds this place, while in Japan the ideals of the old social
order were military, and in a measure that is still true of the new. But
in China material interests have full possession of the field, and the
strong man of the Chinese nation is not the soldier or the priest, but
the merchant.

And there is something very Western, very American, as America used to
be, in the small part played by the Government in the life of the
ordinary Chinese. If he does not misbehave and keeps out of a lawsuit,
he rarely comes in contact with his rulers. He is acquainted with the
saying of Mencius that "the people are of the highest importance, the
gods come second, the sovereign is of lesser weight," and he knows the
place of the Government, but he expects little from it, and neither does
he fear it.

It is the district officer who represents to the ordinary Chinese the
Government, and there are about fifteen hundred of these in the eighteen
provinces, about one to every two hundred and fifty thousand of the
population. The headman of the village is the only official of whom the
Chinese really knows much, and he is one of the village folk, governing
by homemade rules of very ancient date, and never interfering if he can
help it. Policemen are few, and the various inquisitorial boards and
officers that make us clean and sanitary and safe in spite of ourselves
are simply non-existent. No one inspects the Chinese garbage pail except
the pig, or sniffs about for defective drains, or insists upon a man's
keeping the roadway in front of his house in order, or compels him to
have his children vaccinated. The tyranny of the majority may exist in
China, but it is not exercised through the Government. The Chinese as he
is to-day has been fashioned and shaped by long-inherited custom, and
the dead hand rests heavily upon him, but he is not a government
product, nor is he likely to be just yet.

And the Chinese is democratic in very much the same way that the
American is. If there has been an aristocracy at all, it has been
essentially one of race, the conqueror and the conquered, and hereditary
distinctions have played a very small part in the past outside Peking
and the Manchu circle. An official career is, in theory, and in good
measure