In point of fact, we have failed to find but a tithe of that real vice which cuts short so many brilliant careers among men who, with all the advantages of education and refinement, are euphemistically spoken of as addicted to the habit of "lifting their little fingers." Few Chinamen seem really to love wine, and opium, by its very price, is beyond the reach of the blue-coated masses. In some parts, especially in Formosa, a great quantity is smoked by the well-paid chair-coolies, to enable them to perform the prodigies of endurance so often required of them. Two of these fellows will carry an ordinary Chinaman, with his box of clothes, thirty miles in from eight to ten hours on the hottest days in summer. They travel between five and six miles an hour, and on coming to a stage, pass without a moment's delay to the place where food and opium are awaiting their arrival. After smoking their allowance and snatching as much rest as the traveller will permit, they start once more upon the road; and the occupant of the chair cannot fail to perceive the lightness and elasticity of their tread, as compared with the dull, tired gait of half an hour before. They die early, of course; but we have trades in civilised England in which a man thirty-six years of age is pointed at as a patriarch.
It is also commonly stated that a man who has once begun opium can never leave it off. This is an entire fallacy. There is a certain point up to which a smoker may go with impunity, and beyond which he becomes a lost man in so far as he is unable ever to give up the practice. Chinamen ask if an opium-smoker has the yin or not; meaning thereby, has he gradually increased his doses of opium until he has established a craving for the drug, or is he still a free man to give it up without endangering his health. Hundreds and thousands stop short of the yin; a few, leaving it far behind them in their suicidal career, hurry on to premature old age and death. Further, from one point of view, opium-smoking is a more self-regarding vice than drunkenness, which entails gout and other evils upon the third and fourth generation. Posterity can suffer little or nothing at the hands of the opium-smoker, for to the inveterate smoker all chance of posterity is denied. This very important result will always act as an efficient check upon an inordinately extensive use of the drug in China, where children are regarded as the greatest treasures life has to give, and blessed is he that has his quiver full.
Indulgence in opium is, moreover, supposed to blunt the moral feelings of those who indulge; and to a certain extent this is true. If your servant smokes opium, dismiss him with as little compunction as you would a drunken coachman; for he can no longer be trusted. His wages being probably insufficient to supply him with his pipe and leave a balance for family expenses, he will be driven to squeeze more than usual, and probably to steal. But to get rid of a writer or a clerk merely because he is a smoker, however moderate, would be much the same as dismissing an employe for the heinous offence of drinking two glasses of beer and a glass of sherry at his dinner-time. An opium-smoker may be a man of exemplary habits, never even fuddled, still less stupefied. He may take his pipe because he likes it, or because it agrees with him; but it does not follow that he must necessarily make himself, even for the time being, incapable of doing business. Wine and moonlight were formerly considered indispensables by Chinese bards; without them, no inspiration, no poetic fire. The modern poetaster who pens a chaste ode to his mistress's eyebrow, seeks in the opium-pipe that flow of burning thoughts which his forefathers drained from the wine-cup. We cannot see that he does wrong. We believe firmly that a moderate use of the drug is attended with no dangerous results; and that moderation in all kinds of eating, drinking, and smoking, is just as common a virtue in China as in England or anywhere else.[*]
[*] Sir Edmund Hornley, after nine years' service as chief judge of
the Supreme Court at Shanghai, delivered an opinion on the anti-
opium movement in the following remarkable terms:—"Of all the
nonsense that is talked, there is none greater than that talked
here and in England about the immorality and impiety of the opium
trade. It is simply sickening. I have no sympathy with it, neither
have I any sympathy with the owner of a gin-palace; but as long as
China permits the growth of opium throughout the length and
breadth of the land, taxes it, and pockets a large revenue from
it,—sympathy with her on the subject is simply ludicrous and
misplaced."—(J. W. Walker v. Malcolm, 28th April 1875.)
But the following extract from a letter to the London and China
Express, of 5th July 1875, part of which we have ventured to
reproduce in italics, surpasses, both in fiction and naivete,
anything it has ever been our lot to read on either side of this
much-vexed question:—"The fact is, that this tremendous evil is
utterly beyond the control of politicians, or even
philanthropists. Nothing but the divine power of Christian life
can cope with it, and though this process may be slow, it is sure.
Christian missions alone can deal with the opium traffic, now that
it has attained such gigantic dimensions, and the despised
missionaries are solving a problem which to statesmen is
insoluble. Those, therefore, who recognise the evils of opium-
smoking will most effectually stay the plague by supporting
Christian Protestant Missions in China.—Yours faithfully,
"An Old Residenter in China.
"London, June 28, 1875."
THIEVING
Nowhere can the monotony of exile be more advantageously relieved by studying dense masses of humanity under novel aspects than in China, where so much is still unknown, and where the bulk of which is generally looked upon as fact requires in most cases a leavening element of truth, in others nothing more nor less than flat contradiction. The days are gone by for entertaining romances published as if they were bona fide books of travel, and the opening of China has enabled residents to smile at the audacity of the too mendacious Huc. It has enabled them at the same time to view millions of human beings working out the problem of existence under conditions which by many persons in England are deemed to be totally incompatible with the happiness of the human race. They behold all classes in China labouring seven days in every week, taking holidays as each may consider expedient with regard both to health and means, but without the mental and physical demoralisation supposed to be inseparable from a non-observance of the fourth commandment. They see the unrestricted sale of spirituous liquors, unaccompanied by the scenes of brutality and violence which form such a striking contrast to the intellectual advancement of our age. They notice that charity has no place among the virtues of the people, and that nobody gives away a cent he could possibly manage to keep; the apparent result being that every one recognises the necessity of working for himself, and that the mendicants of a large Chinese city would barely fill the casual ward of one of our smallest workhouses. They have a chance of studying a competitive system many hundred years old, with the certainty of concluding that, whatever may be its fate in England or elsewhere, it secures for the government of China the best qualified and most intelligent men. Amongst other points, the alleged thievishness of the Chinese is well worth a few moments' consideration, were it only out of justice to the victims of what we personally consider to be a very mischievous assertion. For it is a not uncommon saying, even among Europeans who have lived in China, that the Chinese are a nation of thieves. In Australia, in California, and in India, Chinamen have beaten their more luxurious rivals by the noiseless but irresistible competition of temperance, industry, and thrift: yet they are a nation of thieves. It becomes then an interesting question how far a low tone of morality on such an important point is compatible with the undisputed practice of virtues which have made the fortunes of so many emigrating Celestials. Now, as regards the amount of theft daily perpetrated in China, we have been able to form a rough estimate, by very careful inquiries, as to the number of cases brought periodically before the notice of a district magistrate or his deputies, and we have come to a conclusion unfavourable in the extreme to western civilisation, which has not hesitated to dub China a nation of thieves. We have taken into consideration the fact that many petty cases never come into court in China, which, had the offence been committed in England, would assuredly have been brought to the notice of a magistrate. We have not forgotten that more robberies are probably effected in China without detection than in a country where the police is a well-organised force, and detectives trained men and keen. We know that in China many cases of theft are compromised, by the stolen property being restored to its owner on payment of a certain sum, which is fixed and shared in by the native constable who acts as middleman between the two parties, and we are fully aware that under circumstances of hunger or famine, and within due limits, the abstraction of anything in the shape of food is not considered theft. With all these considerations in mind, our statistics (save the mark!) would still compare most favourably with the records of theft committed over an area in England equal in size and population to that whence our information was derived. The above refers specially to professional practice, but when we descend to private life, and view with an impartial eye the pilfering propensities of servants in China, we shall have even less cause to rejoice over our boasted morality and civilisation. In the first place, squeezing of masters by servants is a recognised system among the Chinese, and is never looked upon in the light of robbery. It is commission on the purchase of goods, and is taken into consideration by the servant when seeking a new situation. Wages are in consequence low; sometimes, as in the case of official runners and constables, servants have to make their living as best they can out of the various litigants, very often taking bribes from both parties. As far as slight raids upon wine, handkerchiefs, English bacon, or other such luxuries dear to the heart of the Celestial, we might ask any one who has ever kept house in England if pilfering is quite unknown among servants there. If it were strictly true that Chinamen are such thieves as we make them out to be, with our eastern habits of carelessness and dependence, life in China would be next to impossible. As it is, people hire servants of whom they know absolutely nothing, put them in charge of a whole house many rooms in which are full of tempting kickshaws, go away for a trip to a port five or six hundred miles distant, and come back to find everything in its place down to the most utter trifles. Merchants as a rule have their servants secured by some substantial man, but many do not take this precaution, for an honest Chinaman usually carries his integrity written in his face. Confucius gave a wise piece of advice when he said, "If you employ a man, be not suspicious of him; if you are suspicious of a man, do not employ him"—and truly foreigners in China seem to carry out the first half to an almost absurd degree, placing the most unbounded confidence in natives with whose antecedents they are almost always unacquainted, and whose very names in nine cases out of ten they actually do not know! And what is the result of all this? A few cash extra charged as commission on anything purchased at shop or market, and a steady consumption of about four dozen pocket-handkerchiefs per annum. Thefts there are, and always will be, in China as elsewhere; but there are no better grounds for believing that the Chinese are a nation of thieves than that their own tradition is literally true which says, "In the glorious days of old, if anything was seen lying in the road, nobody would pick it up!" On the contrary, we believe that theft is not one whit more common in China than it is in England; and we are fully convinced that the imputation of being a nation of thieves has been cast, with many others, upon the Chinese by unscrupulous persons whose business it is to show that China will never advance without the renovating influence of Christianity-an opinion from which we here express our most unqualified dissent.
LYING
We have stated our conviction that the Chinese as a nation are not more addicted to thieving than the inhabitants of many countries for whom the same excuses are by no means so available. That no undiscerning persons may be led to regard us as panegyrists of a stationary civilisation, we hasten to counterbalance our somewhat laudatory statements by the enunciation of another proposition less startling, but if anything more literally true. The Chinese are a nation of liars. If innate ideas were possible, the idea of lying would form the foundation of the Chinese mind. They lie by instinct; at any rate, they lie from imitation, and improve their powers in this respect by the most assiduous practice. They seem to prefer lying to speaking the truth, even when there is no stake at issue; and as for shame at being found out, the very feeling is unfamiliar to them. The gravest and most serious works in Chinese literature abound in lies; their histories lie; and their scientific works lie. Nothing in China seems to have escaped this taint.