protracted through several days and nights, with all grades of severity, and while most of the candidates experience much inconvenience from such an irrational course, it would be difficult to convince any of them of its inherent absurdity as a test of intellectual attainments.
The products of the minds of those thus educated are redolent of the processes through which they have passed. The Chinese language itself is essentially antediluvian, and to overtake it requires the lifetime of a Methusaleh. It is as just to say of the ancient Chinese as of the ancient Romans, that if they had been obliged to learn their own language they would never have said or written anything worth setting down! Chinese histories are antediluvian, not merely in their attempts to go back to the ragged edge of zero for a point of departure, but in the interminable length of the sluggish and turbid current which bears on its bosom not only the mighty vegetation of past ages, but wood, hay, and stubble past all reckoning. None but a relatively timeless race could either compose or read such histories; none but the Chinese memory could store them away in its capacious "abdomen."
Chinese disregard of time is manifested in their industry, the quality of intension in which we have already remarked to be very different from that in the work of Anglo-Saxons. How many of those who have had the pleasure of building a house in China, with Chinese contractors and workmen, thirst to do it again? The men come late and go early. They are perpetually stopping to drink tea. They make long journeys to a distant lime-pit carrying a few quarts of liquid mud in a cloth bag, when by using a wheelbarrow one man could do the work of three; but this result is by no means the one aimed at. If there is a slight rain all work is suspended. There is generally abundant motion with but little progress, so that it is often difficult to perceive what it is which represents the day's "labour" of a gang of men. We have known
