THE RACE FIBER OF THE CHINESE 407 



ity which they have acquired in the course of a longer and severer 

 elimination of the less fit than our North-European ancestors ever ex- 

 perienced in their civilized state. Such selection has tended to foster 

 not so much bodily strength or energy as recuperative power, resist- 

 ance to infection and tolerance of unwholesome conditions of living. 

 For many centuries the people of south and central China, crowded 

 together in their villages or walled cities, have used water from con- 

 taminated canals or from the drainings of the rice fields, eaten of the 

 scavenging pig or of vegetables stimulated by the contents of the cess- 

 pool, huddled under low roofs, on dirt floors, in filthy lanes, and slept 

 in fetid dens and stifling cubicles. Myriads succumb to the poisons 

 generated by overcrowding and hardly a quarter of those born live to 

 transmit their immunity to their children. The surviving fittest has 

 been the type able to withstand foul air, stench, fatigue toxin, damp- 

 ness, bad food and noxious germs. I have no doubt that if an Ameri- 

 can population of equal size lived in Amoy or Soochow as the Chinese 

 there live, a quarter would be dead by the end of the first summer. 

 But the toughening takes place to the detriment of bodily growth and 

 strength. Chinese children are small for their age. At birth the in- 

 fants are no stronger than ours. The weaker are more thoroughly 

 weeded out, but even the surviving remnant are for a time weakened 

 by the hardships that have killed the rest. 



I would not identify the great vitality of the Chinese with the 

 primitive vitality you find in Bedouins, or Sea Dyaks, or American 

 Indians. This early endowment consists in unusual muscular strength 

 and endurance, in normality of bodily functions, and in power to bear 

 hardship and exposure. It does not extend to immunity from disease. 

 Subjected to the conditions the civilized man lives under savages die 

 off like flies. The diseases that the colonizing European communi- 

 cates to nature men clears them away more swiftly than his gunpowder. 

 Entrance upon the civilized state entails a universal exchange of dis- 

 ease germs and the necessary growth of immunity. Now, it is pre- 

 cisely in his power to withstand the poisons with which close-dwellers 

 infect one another that the Chinaman is unique. This power does not 

 seem to be a heritage from his nomad life of five or six thousand years 

 ago. It is rather the painful acquisition of a later social phase. It 

 could have grown up only in congested cities, or under an agriculture 

 that contaminates every growing plant, converts every stream into an 

 open sewer, and fills the land with mosquito-breeding rice fields. Such 

 toleration of pathogenic microbes has, perhaps, never before been de- 

 veloped and it certainly will never be developed again. Now that man 

 knows how to clear away from his path these invisible enemies, he will 

 never consent to buy immunity at the old cruel price. 



To the west the toughness of the Chinese physique may have a sin- 



