The Chinese are firm believers in the doctrine of rewards and punishments. A man who has been conspicuous for his evil deeds will meet no shadow of sympathy when trouble of any sort overtakes him. He is a tiger in a pit. Such an one who was attacked with worm-breeding corrosive ulcers, dragged himself to the terrace of one of the temples of his native village, where he lay sometimes in a coma, and at others screaming with pain. His neighbours would revile him as they passed with the comment: “It is heaven’s vengeance!”
The Chinese character often abounds in amiable alleviations of conditions which would seem at first sight to make existence intolerable. In the breasts of the Chinese, as in ours, Hope springs eternal. His generalizations from the experience of others as well as his own, render him measurably certain that in the long-run almost nothing will go right. He expects to meet insincerity, suspicion, and neglect, and he is rarely disappointed. He will often be dependent upon those who would be glad to get rid of him, and who keep him constantly aware of this fact. He knows as certainly before as after the event that the loans which he is obliged to make will not be repaid at the proper time, nor in full; that the promised assistance if given at all will be rendered grudgingly, and perhaps turned into open hostility. It is proverbial that he has in his mind “two hundred next years” but he is not infrequently perfectly aware that no number of “next years” will ever suffice to get him straight with the world. Yet amid all this he generally maintains a serene cheerfulness which to us would be as impossible as comfortable respiration in the foul atmosphere of a Chinese sleeping-room. He is used to it—we are not. A man of this type weighted with a termagant wife, who had become exasperated by the unexpected remarriage of a brother of her husband for twenty years a widower, and who filled the house with a tempest in consequence, said to the writer that for the past three months he had not drawn “one peaceful breath!” This was not mentioned by way of complaint, but as one might refer in reply to an inquiry about a troublesome corn on the toe. Under stress of this sort many Chinese exhibit a degree of forbearance to which it is to be feared we have no counterpart in the West, where individual rights have not for ages been merged in those of the family. Such persons are said to “eat a dumb man’s injury,” and the number of them is proverbially unlimited, for the class is immortal.
No one who is intimately acquainted with their real life is likely to exaggerate the evils from which the Chinese suffer, since the strongest representation often seems to come short of the truth. But every one finds himself asking by what means it would be possible to forefend some of these evils. Since many of them appear to be inseparably associated with that poverty which is apparently the keynote of Chinese discords, one is tempted to imagine that if poverty were abolished, family disunity also would largely disappear. Something may be said in favour of this theory, but it fails in presence of the undoubted fact that the evils to be remedied are perhaps quite as prevalent among those Chinese who are fairly well off, as among the poor, besides being much more conspicuous and irrepressible.
Moral discord can be cured only by radical and not by superficial remedies. Yet there is one prescription of an economic as distinguished from a moral type which were it tried on a large scale for a generation or two might work such a revolution that China would hardly know itself. If marriages could be invariably postponed until the partners had arrived at mature age, and if on occasion of the marriage of each son the family property were divided so that a conflict of interests were no longer unavoidable, a whole continent of evils would be nipped in the bud.
At the inquiry held in marine courts as to the reasons for the wreck of great steamers with all their passengers and cargo, in the Formosan Channel, it is often shown that the vessel was acted upon by a powerful but hidden current which made ruin inevitable. The hereditary habits of the Chinese in the agglomeration of large numbers of individuals under one head constitute a drift toward disunity and disintegration. We firmly believe that the strain upon the temper and the disposition incident to the mechanical collocation of so many human beings in one compound-family on the Chinese plan is one which no society in the world could endure, because it is more than human nature can bear. It is certain that the resultant evils are inevitable, insufferable, and by any means at the command of the Chinese incurable.