The public revenues, gathered by the provincial treasuries, are sent on to Peking after deduction of the amount necessary for the requirements of the district. It is stated that only a third of these receipts is disposable for the needs of the Central Government.
The mass of the Chinese people endure, therefore, without much discontent, a Government which in ordinary time weighs very lightly upon them, that meddles very little in the affairs of their villages or communes, always very strongly constituted in the Far East, and, above all, never disturbs their ancient customs. Exceedingly poor, and only able to live by dint of hard work, and having a very severe struggle for life, the people have no time to waste on philosophical reflections, and, moreover, possess no standard of comparison to assist it to judge of the hardness of its fate. In addition to this, we must not forget that the Chinese are endowed by nature with an excessive spirit of conservatism and a patience and perseverance quite beyond praise, to which must be added a jovial good-humour that enables them to endure an existence which to the people of any other country would appear intolerable. Peasants and workpeople alike have no hope of ever seeing their humble condition improved, and their prospective existence is one of absolute monotony, entirely passed in sowing and reaping, in carrying heavy burdens, in the turning of looms, or in labouring the earth, without having, excepting on a few feast-days, a moment’s rest, save what is absolutely necessary for meals and sleep. None the less, they always seem very happy, complain very little, and thoroughly enjoy their few pleasures, and apparently absolutely ignore their troubles.
This happy spirit of resignation explains why the Chinese, notwithstanding their poverty, are one of the most contented people in the world, and, consequently, one of the happiest; but, unfortunately, they are exposed from time to time to dreadful calamities: an inundation, an epidemic, or a bad harvest, which brings about inevitable misery and famine to the entire population, who are left without any resources because their work has not been sufficiently remunerative to enable them to put anything by for a rainy day. Not a year passes without a dreadful calamity occurring somewhere or other in the immense Celestial Empire, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, so that, notwithstanding the astonishing number of children born, the population apparently does not increase. Here, then, we have a striking application of the doctrines of Malthus; for in this society, into which no ray of progress is admitted, men multiply quicker than their means of subsistence, but natural calamities re-establish the balance by annually overwhelming a prodigious number of men, women and children.
The exaggerated sense of conservatism and the improvidence of the administration are in part responsible for the occurrence of these grave calamities, which are generally accompanied by a recrudescence of that chronic piracy and brigandage which is peculiar to China, being the sole means of gaining a livelihood left to many ruined wretches. Sometimes, however, the agents of the Government, after having done nothing either to prevent a catastrophe or to mitigate its consequences, increase it in times of famine by their avidity in seizing the rice, and thus provoke a rebellion, as happened in 1898 at various parts of the Yang-tsze-Kiang. But beyond these cases, in which the authorities are manifestly guilty, the Chinese people submit with the utmost resignation to calamities which they foresee and consider as merely natural, and which, when they happen, barely ruffle their habitual placidity. Death to such a people cannot have the same terrors it has for us.
Europeans are of all the civilized peoples of the earth those who complain most of life, but yet who hold most dearly to it. The people of the Far East, the Chinese as well as the Japanese, on the other hand, consider it least. Indifference to death seems to be with them almost a physical characteristic, the result of the singular insensibility of their nervous system. With respect to this last, we have plenty of evidence. The doctors in the European hospitals where natives are treated relate with amazement how their patients undergo the most painful operations without a murmur and without the necessity of having to resort to anæsthetics. In every-day life, too, the same curious apathy is to be observed in the extraordinary facility with which they can fall asleep whenever they choose, even in the midst of the most awful din and noise, and they can, moreover, remain for hours in one position without making the slightest motion. The reverse of the medal is that, although they are so indifferent to their own sufferings, they are without the slightest feeling for those of others, and can watch the writhing agony of a human being without expressing the least horror or sympathy. The dreadful custom of binding the feet of women in such a manner as to push the heel forward and double up the toes under the sole of the foot, inducing a sore that is never healed, is but one out of many examples of Chinese cruelty. The various and horrible tortures inflicted by the judicial tribunals are another illustration of the same dreadful instinct. The idea of bargaining with a person in danger of death, or with a man who has fallen into the water before attempting to rescue him from drowning, are things which would never suggest themselves to a European, but they come naturally to the Chinese.
The little value in which human life is held in the Far East is exemplified by the frequency of suicide, merely to vindicate a point of honour which in many parts of Europe would be settled at the point of the sword. The hara-kiri is not restricted to Japan, or to the upper classes of Chinese society. A Chinaman, even of the lowest order, will commit suicide out of vengeance, spite, or even through what he considers a matter of honour. Sacrifice of life is common even among women, if we may believe the following narrative extracted from a Chinese newspaper:
‘One day a sow belonging to a certain Madame Feng, having done some slight injury to the door of a certain Madame Wang, that lady forthwith demanded compensation with interest, which was refused, whereupon Madame Wang announced her intention of committing suicide. This dreadful threat proved altogether too much for Madame Feng, who there and then determined to beat her enemy with her own weapon by flinging herself into the nearest canal.’[[24]] Suicides are by no means rare among the upper classes of the literati, and quite recently a censor, a high functionary who possesses the privilege of addressing petitions to the Sovereign, awaited the passing of the Imperial cortege and then killed himself as a political demonstration, in order to add weight to a memorial he had presented concerning some promise of the Government which had not been fulfilled. The innumerable public executions form a pendant to the equally numerous cases of suicide.
The reader may be somewhat surprised that a people fearing death so little should make such bad soldiers; but, after all, however lightly a man may hold his life, no one sacrifices it unless it be for some ideal or other. If the Celestials care so little about existence, they care still less for the grandeur of their country, patriotic feeling being absolutely absent from their nature. During the French campaign in Formosa it was no uncommon thing to see Chinese prisoners refuse to do tasks which they considered beneath them, and which they could only be induced to perform after having seen the heads of a few of their comrades fall under the sword. These very people who prefer death rather than derogate from their dignity are the same who have often been seen throwing down their arms on the battlefield. It is but fair to add that it is the military mandarins or officers who generally give the signal for a stampede. Possibly, if commanded by other officers, the Chinese, with their wonderful power of enduring privation and callousness for death, would eventually form an admirable army which, even if it were unable to defend China against foreign Powers, would certainly prove a valuable ally to one or other of them.[[25]]
The practice of infanticide, especially of female infants, is another example of the different ways in which the Chinese and Europeans regard life and family ties. With us the love of parents for children is often greater than that of children for their parents; but in China it is quite the reverse. According to Confucius, filial piety was the noblest of virtues, indeed, the fountain-head of them all, and it is the one which his compatriots still practise most assiduously. Among the lower orders, however, this virtue is confined to the support of parents; but this is a duty never neglected. Among the twenty-four famous examples of filial piety is mentioned the case of a man who, at the very moment that he was about to bury his little three-year-old girl alive because he could not afford to keep her as well as his old mother, had his infant saved by the unexpected discovery of a treasure purposely placed in the intended grave by a good genie, who was eager to reward so beautiful an instance of filial piety. A still greater sin against this virtue is that of not possessing male posterity; for then the family becomes extinct, and the ancestors are deprived of those sacrifices to which they have a right, and which it is the first duty of every well-thinking man to offer them at regular intervals. Marriages are contracted very early, and there is no stronger evidence needed against a wife to obtain her divorce than that she has not had a son. The doctrine of filial piety as it is understood by the Chinese, and the worship of ancestors, which is its highest expression, have their good as well as their bad side. It forms the principal mainstay of that useless system of admiration of an irrevocable past in which everything is supposed to have been better than it can possibly be to-day, and which of necessity turns the people of the Celestial Empire from all desire for progress, because to do so would be an outrage to an ancestry whose wisdom can never be surpassed.
If this belief produces unfortunate social consequences, it at the same time serves to consolidate family ties; but ever so it is pernicious, especially with respect to the condition of women. The lot of Chinese women is certainly not a happy one. Lodging rather than living with her husband, under his parents’ roof, the young wife is never allowed to see her own family, excepting at certain fixed periods prearranged by custom. In their earlier years married women in China are exposed to the caprices and rebuffs of a shrewish mother-in-law, who is the tyrant of the family, and whose humble servants the daughters-in-law are expected to be. For all this, they enjoy a certain amount of liberty, for they are neither cloistered nor veiled; but they very rarely leave their house, a state of semi-seclusion which does not prevent their morals being often very indifferent. ‘In a district near mine,’ an American missionary at Fo-kien assured me, ‘there are very few husbands who are not deceived by their wives; and in the one which is under my direction the state of morality, or rather of immorality, is pretty nearly the same.’ Theoretically speaking, adultery in a Chinese woman is considered a very grave crime. As for the husband, he is not expected to practise fidelity. The average Chinaman delights in obscenity, and revels in improper stories and jests; and when he has a little money to spare, spends it very freely in the loosest company. Those places of entertainment where Venus reigns supreme are not, as in Japan, situated in the best and most brilliantly lighted quarter of the town, for such of my readers who have visited Canton may possibly remember to have had pointed out to them the ‘flower-boats’—floating constructions two stories high, whose internal decorations are of the most magnificent.