GEO GRA PHIC LI TERA TURE 367 



drops whole syllables from Japanese geographic names, and refers to 

 Kobe — accent on the last syllable, if you please— which puts him worse 

 than level with the poor couple, who may have since revisited Jeypore, 

 and put the accent where it does not offend the Anglo-Indian ear. But 

 this, and even the moving of Stampede tunnel a few hundred miles across 

 country, from the Cascade range to the Rocky mountains, we could for- 

 give him ten times over if he would not employ the low and offensive 

 sailors'-boarding-house term "Jap" for Japanese. There are people, 

 "masses," in fact, who habitually use the abbreviations Brit and Yank 

 and Jap, gent and pants and bike, but surely Mr Kipling, certainly in his 

 serious, his editing and revising moods, is not of these. That pigeon- 

 English abomination of " Chinaman " for Chinese is lapse enough. His 

 guardian, Ganesh, whom he freely invokes, should prevent him from ever 

 writing "Jap'' again. 



All trifles aside, nothing could be more brilliant, more clearly, cleverly 

 photographic than these letters of travel, and no one has ever in such 

 brief chapters gone to the spirit and the genius of the new countries and 

 new people he found in his travels. His description of dank, chilly, fog- 

 pressed Hongkong in April is the perfect thing, and also that inevitable 

 amazement, that hesitating confession of chagrin of the Anglo Indian 

 when lie discovers and admits the superiority of the Chinese to the Hindu, 

 when the Anglo-Indian has always considered that India, mere middle 

 Asia, was all Asia, the real East, the Far East an unconsidered incident. 



"They will overwhelm the world. . . . Neither at Penang, Singa- 

 pur, nor this place have I seen a single Chinaman asleep while daylight 

 lasted ; nor have I seen twenty men who were obviously loafing. All were 

 going to some definite end— if it were only like the Coolie on the wharf, 

 to steal wood from the scaffolding of a half-built house. . . . Where 

 he hides his love of art the heaven that made him out of the yellow earth 

 that holds so much iron only knows. ... It grieves me that I can- 

 not account for the ideas of a few hundred million men in a few hours. 

 This much, however, seems certain : If we had control over as many 

 Chinamen as we have natives of India, and had given them one tithe of 

 the cosseting, the painful pushing forward, and studious, even nervous 

 regard of their interests and aspirations that we have given to India, we 

 should long ago have been expelled from or have reaped the reward of 

 the richest land on the face of the earth. . . . The great big lazy 

 land that we nurse and wrap in cotton-wool and ask eveiy morning 

 whether it is strong enough to get out of bed seems like a heavy, soft 

 cloud on the far-away horizon, and the babble that we were wont to raise 

 about its precious future and its possibilities no more than the talk of 

 children in the streets, who have made a horse out of a pea pod and 

 match-sticks and wonder if it will ever walk. . . . 



"And yon think, as you go to office and orderly room, that you are 

 helping forward England's mission in the East. 'Tis a pretty delusion, 

 and I am sorry to destroy it, but you have conquered the wrong country. 

 Let us annex China." 



Never was there truer description of Canton than this : "Do you know 

 those horrible sponges, full of worms, that grow in warm seas? You 



