A BOY CARRYING BASKETS.
To face p. 56.
They are the driest of dry books, and were really written for scholarly men, and for men of thought, whose thinking powers were considerably developed. There is not a single story in their pages. No child or woman’s voice is heard from beginning to end, and no laughter, and no sob of pain, or any touch of the finer qualities of the human heart.
The boy begins at eight not with “Jack and Jill,” or the “House that Jack built,” or with any nursery rhyme that would appeal to a child’s imagination, but with the solemn statements on high ethical questions that some of the greatest thinkers and teachers of China have produced. Some idea of the style of the books that these little urchins have to grind at, may be gathered from the fact that the first book that is put into the hands of that eight-year-old scholar is called The Three Words Classic, from the fact that each sentence is made up of three words rhythmically set. It is about as crabbed and as profound a piece of writing as exists in the whole language. Its first sentence makes a dogmatic statement which has not been generally accepted in China, viz. “Man by nature is originally good.” Just imagine a boy of ten, accustomed till to-day to run as wild as a climbing plant, that creeps up trees, or over ruined walls, or down the side of a precipice, brought face to face with a statement like this, instead of the conventional one, “My dog,” or “His cat,” that confronts the English lad as he first enters the domain of learning.
Try and conceive the wear and tear upon a child’s spirit in having for years to shout and scream out at the top of his voice, as Chinese scholars do, such profound teaching as the above, and you will then have caught a glimpse of the steep and precipitous way along which these eight-year scholars have to travel in their pursuit after knowledge. A more dreary system of education, where imagination and humour, and poetry and romance, and all the finer emotions of the soul are rigorously excluded, it would be impossible to conceive than that which every Chinese scholar has to go through in every school throughout the Empire to-day.
And so the years go by, childhood is being slowly left behind, and young manhood comes with its own responsibilities and its own ambitions. It is a dreary road along which the young scholar travels. He gets no knowledge of life that will make him tender and sympathetic with his fellow-men in their sins or their sorrows. He acquires a profound contempt for every other country but his own. His natural hardness and selfishness of heart are intensified by a pride that nothing can soften, whilst his antipathy to any change or progress either in his own village or in his country is deeply rooted and the adoption of new ideas or liberal thoughts is considered a heresy so abominable as to brand any one that adopts it with the terrible name of “Barbarian,” a term from which every self-respecting Chinaman shrinks as from a plague.
With the leaving of school, childhood has passed away, and now the lads will have to select the occupations they are going to pursue in the future. Some elect to be scholars, especially if they have shown proficiency in their studies, and they finally join the great army of school-masters that are required for the countless schools throughout the country. Others become clerks in business houses, but as arithmetic is not a branch of school education, they are obliged to pay a small premium and learn the use of the abacus or counting boards, in one of the cash shops in the town. Others, again, engage themselves as book-keepers or shop assistants, or in some of the many employments that are open to young men who can read and write.
Not a few of them drift into evil habits and finally become opium-smokers and gamblers. If they are clever scamps, which this class usually are, they turn their attention to medicine, and gathering together a few herbs they travel through the country as strolling doctors, professing to cure every disease to which the human frame is heir, and living a most precarious and, on the whole, a very wretched life.
About the same time that the great change takes place in the experience of the boy, the girl too comes to a point where the easy conditions under which she has hitherto lived suddenly stop and the great trial of her life begins. I refer to foot-binding.