May 17, 1889.] 



SCIENCE. 



377 



made impossible, the food of the common people will be cheapened, 

 their luxuries increased, their standard of comfort raised, and the 

 famine demon will depart, never to return. Wider and more gen- 

 eral information will be diffused throughout the empire, and, with 

 enlarged knowledge and sympathy, the old-time ignorance and ex- 

 clusiveness will disappear. But with the peculiar conditions of 

 Chinese civilization, reforms more interesting and unique than these 

 will certainly follow. 



From the difficulty and expense of travel, the inhabitants of the 

 various provinces have been born and brought up in a state of 

 seclusion beyond modern experience. A Chinaman is, as a rule, 

 born and buried within a radius of a few miles. Practically he is 

 a stranger to his neighbor, and an astonishing variety of language 

 is the result. In all, there are nearly 300 dialects spoken in China, 

 many of which are as different as French and English. It is not 

 uncommon to see a southern Chinaman meet a countryman from 

 the north, each utterly unable to comprehend the speech of the 

 other. The facilitation of travel must, in course of time, do much to 

 mitigate this babel of tongues, and the necessities of the case must 

 produce some modification of one of the principal dialects, from 

 which a new universal language for China will be evolved. This 

 hope seems the more reasonable, as the written language is the 

 same all over China. There is also a fainter hope of a reform in 

 the written language itself ; and perhaps a later generation may 

 know the blessings of an alphabet, and exchange the present 

 cumbrous and involved ideographs for a system of phonetic roman- 

 ization. 



Railways will also produce an entire reform in the Chinese cur- 

 rency. The same reasons which have produced a variety of lan- 

 guages have also conserved the most bewildering varieties of 

 weights and measures. There are no coins of any kind, with the 

 exception of small brass and iron cash, of v/hich from ten to 

 twenty, or even more, are equal to a penny. For all large pay- 

 ments, lumps of silver are employed, which are generally, for con- 

 venience' sake, moulded into the form of a shoe. In making a 

 purchase, you produce your silver, and, after one lengthened dis- 

 pute as to its quality, you enter upon discussion number two as to 

 the particular measure of weight to be employed, of which there 

 may be several. In Peking, for instance, there are no less than 

 five in common use. All this, of course, occupies much time, and 

 it would be manifestly impossible for the train to vi^ait while a bevy 

 of passengers were conducting the purchase of their tickets in this 

 way. A coinage will have to be adopted. The standard chosen 

 will probably be a coin of silver, of one tael in weight, and equal to 

 about $1.08 of our money, and the smaller coins will be in decimal 

 proportion. The convenience to the country and benefit to com- 

 merce of the new currency will be felt from one end of China to 

 the other. 



It vi'ill be necessary also to adopt a foreign standard of time. 

 At the treaty ports there is a ready sale for cheap clocks and 

 watches, and the Chinese who have dealings with foreigners have 

 not been slow to appreciate their convenience. In Peking there is 

 a considerable number of watchmakers, descendants of old Catholic 

 families, who still practise the somewhat antiquated horology 

 which their fathers learned from the early Jesuit missionaries. But 

 the system in vogue throughout China remains unchanged from 

 the days of antiquity. The entire day is divided into twelve periods 

 of two hours each, beginning at 1 1 P.M. Each period is known by 

 the name of some animal, and is further divided into eight chihs, 

 corresponding to our quarters of an hour. The nights are, in ad- 

 dition, divided into five watches, which the patrols ring out from 

 wooden drums; but there is no smaller subdivision than the chih. 

 For time-keepers they have sun-dials, or clepsydras, or spiral in- 

 cense-sticks, arranged, like King Alfred's hour-candles, to burn 

 for a certain length of time. If you ask the time of day, you will 

 be told that it is near the dog, or two-eighths from the rat ; but 

 more approximately than that, you cannot get. It is curious that 

 a people so industrious as the Chinese, and so studiously econom- 

 ical in their habits, should never have a juster estimate of the 

 value of time. To them, so far from time being money, money is 

 every thing, and time nothing. He who aims at \i€\x\'g\.\\e. superior 

 mail, whom Confucius held up as a model for all time, must never 

 be in a hurry. Every thing must be done in a dignified and de- 



liberate manner, and the idea of a quarter of an hour, more or less, 

 making the slightest difference to himself or any one else, has not 

 yet entered the Celestial cranium. It will be one of the greatest 

 surprises in the life of a mandarin when he first stalks down to the 

 railway-station, and finds that the train is timed to start to the 

 minute, and will wait for no man. Happily, there can be no objec- 

 tion, superstitious or otherwise, to the introduction of timepieces, 

 and the railway clock will be the precursor of a new punctuality 

 and despatch in China. 



Changes so far-reaching and profound as these cannot fail to 

 produce a sensible modification of the Chinese character. The 

 odium and contempt in which foreigners are held, simply because 

 they are foreigners, will melt away as opportunities for intercourse 

 increase. 



As yet the question has been considered only from the Chi- 

 nese point of view. The interesting point is that the new railway 

 sounds the deathknell of Chinese exclusiveness. The empire can 

 no longer remain sealed, and now is the time for England to con- 

 sider if she is in the best position for taking advantage of the vast 

 field of commerce which may shortly be thrown open. English 

 consuls have recently borne a singularly unanimous testimony to 

 the apathy of the British trader, and he must be on the qui vive 

 now if he does not wish to see the benefits of the coming change 

 pass into the hands of others. To begin with, the Chinese are 

 totally unacquainted with modern engineering, and the railway 

 construction of the immediate future must be done for them by 

 foreigners. Both with engineers and traders, a serious difficulty 

 will be the want of men familiar with the Chinese language and 

 mode of thought. For several years past, the professor of Chinese 

 at King's College has labored, with a zeal and enthusiasm which 

 deserved a better return, to supply this want. To meet the con- 

 venience of clerks and others unable to attend during the day, a 

 series of evening classes was started, of which the first-fruits may 

 be seen in the successful career of some of Mr. Douglas's old stu- 

 dents in China. But these may be counted upon the fingers of one 

 hand, and the general result must be pronounced disappointing. 

 Probably no attempt by an English professor to teach an Oriental 

 language without the aid of a native assistant is likely to be com- 

 pletely successful. But this is a desideratum which could and 

 should be easily supplied. A greater, and alas ! almost insuper- 

 able difficulty remains in the apathy and indifference of those in 

 whom indifference is least excusable. Foreign clerks employed in 

 England arrive with a general knowledge of two or more languages, 

 while your Englishman is accustomed to hold in contempt all lan- 

 guages except his own, and even to feel a certain pride in his igno- 

 rance. His neighbors are more quick-witted. Men are drafted off 

 to China from the Oriental College at Paris, who, on their arrival, 

 exhibit a very passable acquaintance with the rudiments of the 

 Chinese language. A similar college has just been opened at Ber- 

 lin ; and the chair of Chinese is filled by Professor Arendt, a sino- 

 logue of the highest standing. True, England has professors of 

 Chinese at her universities, but the teaching given is too scientific 

 to be of much use to commercial, men. Business men have neither 

 the time nor the inclination to form even a tolerable acquaintance 

 with Chinese literature or the flowers of official discourse. It must 

 not be forgotten that the written language, the language spoken 

 among officials, and the ordinary colloquial, are practically three 

 different tongues. It is the last which is necessary, and happily 

 the colloquial is well within the reach of any one who cares to ap- 

 proach it in a spirit of patience and perseverance. With a Chinese 

 teacher, under the supervision of a European sinologue, a two- 

 years' course would be sufficient to equip any one of ordinary 

 ability and application with a fair talking knowledge of the collo- 

 quial, which would prove of immense service to him in China. The 

 importance of such a course on the future commercial relations of 

 England with China is sufficiently apparent. The danger lies in 

 delay. The former has now a strong hold on the foreign trade of 

 China; but, when the interior is thrown open, there will be an 

 enormous development in every branch of commerce. Foreign 

 banks and trading-houses will become as much a feature of the in- 

 land as of the seaboard towns, and the English will have to strain 

 every nerve to maintain their old lead, or the French and the Ger- 

 mans will be before them in the race. 



