of no sort of consequence. It would be easy to raise in China an army of a million men—nay, of ten millions—tested by competitive examination as to their capacity to go to sleep across three wheelbarrows, with head downwards, like a spider, their mouths wide open and a fly inside!
Beside this, we must take account of the fact that in China breathing seems to be optional. There is nowhere any ventilation worth the name, except when a typhoon blows the roof from a dwelling, or when a famine compels the owner to pull the house down to sell the timbers. We hear much of Chinese overcrowding, but overcrowding is the normal condition of the Chinese, and they do not appear to be inconvenienced by it at all, or in so trifling a degree that it scarcely deserves mention. If they had an outfit of Anglo-Saxon nerves, they would be as wretched as we frequently suppose them to be.
The same freedom from the tyranny of nerves is exhibited in the Chinese endurance of physical pain. Those who have any acquaintance with the operations in hospitals in China, know how common, or rather how almost universal, it is for the patients to bear without flinching a degree of pain from which the stoutest of us would shrink in terror. It would be easy to expand this topic alone into an essay, but we must pass it by, merely calling attention to a remark of George Eliot's, in one of her letters. "The highest calling and election," she says—irritated, no doubt, by theological formulas for which she had no taste—"is to do without opium, and to bear pain with clear-eyed endurance." If she is right, there can be little doubt that most Chinese, at least, have made their calling and election sure.
It is a remark of Mrs. Browning's, that "Observation without sympathy is torture." So it doubtless is to persons of a sensitive organisation like the distinguished poetess, as well as to a multitude of others of her race. An Occidental does not like to be watched, especially if he is doing any delicate
