The worst feature of the whole system is the treatment of prisoners to make them confess. The Chinese theory is that no one should be punished unless he confesses with his own mouth. Consequently the most brutal, sickening tortures are practised to extort confession, and, in the end, thousands and thousands of innocent men, no doubt, rather than live longer in miseries far worse than death, have professed crimes of which they were innocent.
But let us turn now to happier topics--say to an illustration of Chinese humor. Very well; here is the sort of story that tickles a Chinaman: it is one they tell themselves:
A Chinaman had a magic jar. And when you think of a jar here don't think of one of the tiny affairs such as Americans use for preserves and jams. The jar here means a big affair about half the size of a hogshead: I bathed in one this morning. It was in such jars that Ali Baba's Forty Thieves concealed themselves. Well, this magic jar had the power of multiplying whatever was put into it. If you put in a suit of clothes, behold, you could pull out perhaps two or three dozen suits! If you put in a silver dollar, you might get out a hundred silver dollars. There doesn't seem to have been any regularity about the jar's multiplying properties. Sometimes it might multiply by two, while again it might multiply by a hundred.
At any rate, the owner of the magic receptacle was getting rich fairly fast, when a greedy judge got word of the strange affair somehow. Accordingly he made some kind of false charge against the man and made him bring the jar into court. {149} Then the judge pretended that he couldn't decide about the case, or else pretended that the man needed punishment for something, and so wrongly refused to give the citizen's property back. Instead the magistrate took the jar into his own home and himself began to get rich on its labors.
{147}
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA.
The building of the Great Wail, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, leaves us no room to boast over the Panama Canal.