The fact of the matter is, I suppose, that outsiders can only judge generally, and China is true to type, the individual has never counted there and he does not count yet. What are a few thousand unpaid soldiers revolting in Kalgan? What a robber desolating Kansu? A score or two of villagers killed because they could not pay a tax? Absolutely nothing in the general crowd. I, being a woman, and a woman from the new nations of the south, cannot help feeling, and feeling strongly, the individual ought to count, that no nation can be really prosperous until the individual with but few exceptions is well-to-do and happy. I should like to rule out the “few exceptions,” but that would be asking too much of this present world. At least I like to think that most people have a chance of happiness, but I feel in China that not a tenth of the population has that.
China left a curious impression upon my mind. The people are courteous and kindly, far more courteous than would be the same class of people in England, and yet I came back from the interior with a strong feeling that it is unsafe, not because of the general hostility of the people—they are not hostile—but because suffering and life count for so little. They themselves suffer and die by the thousand.
“What! Bring a daughter-in-law to see the doctor in the middle of the harvest! Impossible!” And yet they knew she was suffering agony, that seeing the doctor was her only chance of sight! But she did not get it. They were harvesting and no one could be spared!
What is the life then of a foreign barbarian more or less? These courteous, kindly, dirty folk who look upon one as a menagerie would look on with equal interest at one's death. They might stretch out a hand to help, just as a man in England might stop another from ill-treating a horse, though for one who would put himself out two would pass by with a shrug of the shoulders and a feeling that it wras no business of theirs. Every day of their lives the majority look upon the suffering of their women and think nothing of it. The desire of the average man is to have a wife who has so suffered. I do not know whether the keeping of the women in a state of subserviency has reacted upon the nation at large, but I should think it has hampered it beyond words. Nothing—nothing made me so ardent a believer in the rights of women as my visit to China.