of the Chinese which have led to it, is that it is very difficult for a foreigner to have to do with the Chinese in a practical way, and on any extended scale, and yet contrive to preserve his reputation — should he be so fortunate as to have one — as a "superior man." It is a proverb constantly quoted, and self-verifying, that carters, boatmen, inn-keepers, coohes, and middlemen, irrespective of any specific offence, all deserve to be killed on general principles. The relation of this class of persons and others like them to foreigners is peculiar, for it is known that foreigners will consent to a great deal of imposition rather than have a social typhoon, for which they generally lack both the taste and the talent; yet it is by the social typhoon that, in case of any supposed breach of equity on the part of Chinese towards Chinese, the social atmosphere is brought at last to a state of equilibrium.
He must be a rare man who has no blind side upon which those Chinese who choose to do so cannot get. Not to be too suspicious and not to be too confiding is a rare illustration of the golden mean. If one exhibits that just disapprobation towards insincerity which it seems to demand, the Chinese, who are shrewd judges of human nature, set it down to our discredit as a mark of "temper"; while if we maintain the placid demeanour of a Buddha absorbed in his Nirvana, a demeanour which is not easy for all temperaments at all times, we are at once marked as fit subjects for further and indefinite exactions. That was a typical Chinese who, being in foreign employ, saw one day a peddler on the street, vending little clay images of foreigners, cleverly executed and in appropriate costume. Stopping for a moment to examine them, he said to the dealer in images, "Ah, you play with these toys; I play with the real things."
It is unnecessary to do more than to allude in passing to the fact that the Chinese government, so far as it is knowable, appears to be a gigantic example of the trait which we are
