Religious and Physical Qualifications as Pioneers of Asia. 375 



excel in capacity for work, mechanical dexterity, and dogged 

 perseverance. Even the religious movement gives the Chinese 

 certain advantages over all other nations of the Asiatic 

 type of civilization. The Hindoo, like the Catholic, has num- 

 bers of festivals, which greatly diminish the number of his 

 actual working days; the daily ceremonies prescribed by 

 Brahminism further curtail the most precious hom^s of 

 labour ; his exclusively vegetarian food not alone prevents 

 the proper development of his muscular power, but also by 

 its ostentatiously morbid delicacy, brings him constantly into 

 collision with the social order of a Christian household. The 

 Chinese, on the other hand, keeps but one holiday -time, the 

 beginning of the new year, which he celebrates for fourteen 

 days without intermission. But the remaining 11 J months 

 of the year are for him but one long day of work. Moreover, 

 the Chinese has no fastidious notions about his food. He eats 

 pork, and drinks wine, and prefers fat meat to meagre fruit 

 diet, thoroughly unrestrained by any considerations as to 

 whether such a mode of life accords with the institutes of 

 Brahma and Menu, or the teaching of Confucius. Their so- 

 briety, their capacity, their industry, their frugal mode of life, 

 and theii' numbers, all seem to indicate the Chinese as 

 destined to play an important part, not alone in the develop- 

 ment of the Oriental nations, but also in the history of man- 

 kind. They are, as a German philosopher has profoundly 

 remarked, the Greeks and Romans of Eastern Asia, and they 

 will, if once hurried onwards by the great tide of Christian 



