352 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



conduct at once surrendered, with the full knowledge of what 

 his fate would be, and was decapitated. 1 A Chinaman will 

 think little of cutting a piece of flesh from his arm or thigh in 

 order that this with other ingredients may restore his father's 

 health. 2 Sometimes, to relieve their parents' pecuniary embarrass- 

 ment, children voluntarily sell themselves as slaves. 3 The 

 virtues of the Chinese are not conspicuous only in family life. 

 Their merchants are wonderfully honest. As servants they win 

 golden opinions. " We rarely believe in one another's China- 

 man," Mrs Little writes, " but we are each of us absolutely 

 convinced of the fidelity, trustworthiness, and shrewdness of 

 our own Chinaman." 4 Servants don't shirk, the same authority 

 says, because they are ill. And, summing up, Mrs Little de- 

 scribes the Chinese people as hard-working, good-humoured, 

 kindly, thrifty, law-abiding, contented, conscientious. If they 

 have all these virtues why do we reciprocate the contempt which 

 Their they feel for us, and consider them, as they consider us, " outer 

 points barbarians " ? The answer is not far to seek. Cleanliness is an 

 integral part of European and especially of English civilisation, 

 whereas the Chinese are slatternly, untidy, filth-loving. 5 The 

 entourage of the walls of a Chinese city cannot be described in 

 a book that is to lie on an English drawing-room table. 6 In 

 Peking no arrangements whatever are made for sanitation or 

 decency. 7 Add to this that Chinese officials thrive on corruption, 

 that the honesty that is characteristic of the nation, vanishes in 

 the presence of the temptations to which a mandarin is exposed 

 and the most shameful double-dealing is the invariable weapon 

 of Chinese diplomacy. Thus among the mass of the four 

 hundred millions or so of the Chinese people we find great 

 virtues obscured to European eyes by the nauseating filth of 

 their towns and to some extent of their houses and persons, by 

 the dishonesty of the government officials, and, it must be added, 

 by the contemptible figure cut by their soldiers. Besides this 



i See China, by J. H. Gray, vol i. p. 83. 2 Ib. 



3 Loc. cit. p. 234. 4 M rs Little, Intimate China, p. 207. 



5 Loc. cit. p. 348. 6 Loc. cit. p. 472. 



7 See Mrs Little's account of Peking. 



