pieces of gold in order to rescue an infant." If not, then what do they say to abandoning the infants in order to rescue a piece of jade?
Nor would Lusin accept as valid evidence of the superiority of the Chinese national essence the testimony of foreign visitors who find the "Chinese way of life" so delightful because to them it means an infinite amount of leisure, interminable banquets, and an endless flow of languid and meaningless observations on what they call life and the art of living. To Lusin such banquets in the midst of famine and starvation are feasts of the man-eating men, as damnable as the actual cases of cannibalism reported with shocking frequency from the worst famine areas. "Only those foreigners who are qualified to attend such man-eating banquets and who nevertheless curse present conditions in China are men of feeling, men that we should admire," he declared, and not those who relish them.
Nor did he share the views of the Bertrand Russell school of visitors, which have become very popular of late, who, impressed by the apparent good humor of their sweating ricksha coolies and sedan bearers, call China an "artist nation" and attribute to the Chinese people that quality of "instinctive happiness" which makes it possible for them to lead a "life full of enjoyment" in spite of their squalor and misery. Lusin's retort to this was that "if the sedan carriers are not so smiling and contented in their attitude toward those who ride in sedan chairs, China would not be what it is today." Like Hu Shih, Lusin does not see anything spiritual in famine and disease and misery. As Hu Shih has eloquently argued in the symposium Whither Mankind, the civilization that substitutes the machine and the automobile for human
