“Gentlemen,” he said, “as I have come unprepared for this pleasure, I shall have to fall back on story-telling. In the small hours, one morning, two men who had been having rather too good a time were navigating from street corner to street corner. Said Smith, ‘Jonesh, shtime to go home. Shgetting broad daylight. Theresh sun shining up there.’
“‘No, Shmith,’ replied Jones, ‘you’re mistaken. Tha’sh moon up there, and it’s night.’ They staggered down the street, Smith insisting that it was day, Jones insisting that it was night, until they met a fellow inebriate clinging to a fire plug. To him they appealed their dispute. He heard them out, and then looked thoughtfully up at the moon. For a long time he puzzled over the problem, and finally, giving it up, turned to them and said politely, ‘Gentlemen, you’ll have to ’scuse me. I’m a stranger in town.’
“And, gentlemen,” said Bassett, again looking about from face to face, “you’ll have to excuse me. I’m a stranger in town.”
Judge Wilfley began by calling upon every American lawyer who was practicing in Shanghai to bring a certificate of good moral character and to pass an examination before he could be admitted to practice in the new court. The examination was given, and only two of the lawyers passed. At once there was a hubbub. The judge was attacked hotly. One of the lawyers who failed to pass hurried over to this country, making a speech at Honolulu, on the way, in which he insinuated charges of corruption against Judge Wilfley. Shortly after his arrival at San Francisco, he prevailed upon the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, on the Pacific Coast, to reverse one of Judge Wilfley’s decisions without having the facts of the whole case in hand and without a hearing from the China court. He went on to Washington, and within a month or two last winter actually got a bill through the United States Senate reinstating all the disqualified lawyers. The bill is before the House at this present session. He has conducted a newspaper campaign against Judge Wilfley in this country since his return last year. It seems only fair to call attention to these facts on a fearless and able man, because Judge Wilfley is too hard at work in a distant country to be able to defend himself. In the course of my travels from port to port last year, it became clear to me that this new court was the one uplifting factor in a distressing general condition.
Judge Wilfley, like his district attorney, seems to hold no visionary theories, in spite of the high standard he has set. Before leaving China, I made it a point to call on him and talk with him about the work he is doing in the interest of the American name. He seemed to recognize clearly enough that vice and depravity can no more be put down out of hand in Shanghai than they can be put down out of hand in New York or Chicago or Boston. But he maintained that the disreputably open flaunting of vice can be stopped. In fining the “American girls” $500 (gold) each, and driving a number of them off the Coast, his attack has been directed mainly against the dishonourable use of an honourable phrase. In imprisoning or driving away the American gamblers, he has been trying to put gambling down more nearly to the place it occupies, in this country, as a minor rather than as a major branch of industry. Judge Wilfley has undertaken an Herculean task. It seems to be the hope of all that patient minority, the better class of Americans on the China Coast, that he will be permitted to continue his fight unhampered by political machinery “back home.”
There are two other points, besides Shanghai, at which the two kinds of civilization, Western and Eastern, come into contact—Hongkong and Tientsin. Each is different from the other as well as from Shanghai; and each plays a curious part in the opium drama. We shall take them up in the next chapter.