"Business" is not yet gone from the streets of Hong-Kong, though it is now wholly dark. Every one is working as though the day were but just beginning and it were not Sunday night. It is impossible to select "important" things from out this heap of human debris. Filth, odors, activity, jewelry, dirty little heaps and packets of food,—all are handled over and over again, and each one is content with a lick of the fingers for the handling. Then when quite worn out one may rest his bones on the pavement covered with straw or mat, or if more fortunate, may have a hovel or a house in which to breed. The number of homeless wretches sleeping on the inclined stone pavements of Hong-Kong was simply appalling. And Hong-Kong is British made. Hong-Kong was a barren island twenty-nine miles in area when seventy-five years or so ago Britain demanded it from China; to-day its population is nearly a tenth of that of the whole continent of Australia. But what a difference in the status of that population! Certainly no man who sees the result of over-population in proportion to a people's industrial ingenuity can blame Australia for keeping herself under reproductive self-control.

A few of the things one sees as a matter of course in Hong-Kong will illustrate. As I was coming down Pottinger Street I was horror-struck at the sight of a small boy on his knees groaning and wailing as though he were in unendurable agony. I thought at first he was having a fit, but it became obvious that there was method in his madness. He was repeating some incantation, bowing his head to the ground, tapping frantically with a tin can on the stones, and chanting or shrieking out his blessings or his curses, which ever the case may have been. He was a blind beggar, and though he must have received more money than many a coolie does (for even Chinese have coins to give) and in a way certainly earned it, I could not but smile at his wisdom,—for at its worst it was no worse than the labor of the coolie. Yet from many passers-by he evoked only slight amusement.

Upon some steps in an unlighted thoroughfare stood a Chinese haranguing a crowd. His voice was not unpleasant, his manner was persuasive. But what to? Had he been urging China to stop breeding, to cease this worm-like living and reproducing, I should have regarded him as a public benefactor. For it made me creepy, this proximity to such squirming numbers.

Beside a dirty wall around the corner was a medicine man selling a miraculous bundle of herbs. He screeched its powers, gave each a smell, which each one took since it cost nothing, and then he went into frightful contortions to demonstrate that which these herbs could allay. But from the expression on his face it was obvious they could not allay his disappointment that the purchasers were few.

At an open store was a crowd. I edged my way up to see the excitement. It was a "doctor's operating-room." Upon a bench sat an old man, gray-haired and almost toothless. The "doctor" stood astride the patients' knees and with a steel instrument, somewhat rusty, calmly and carelessly stirred about in the old man's eyeless socket. All the sufferer did was to mutter "Ta, ta, ta," pausing slightly between the ta's, but never stirring. No guarding against infection out on the open, dusty, dirty thoroughfare.

The crowd looked on without any sign of emotion. A few women sat on a bench inside, but seemed quite indifferent. There was one exception. A little mother with a boy of about six contemplated the performance with a pained expression. Her boy's eyes were crossed and turned upward. He had to be treated, too.

Finally even these things end. It is nine o'clock. Shops are closing, the crowds on the streets die down. And for one brief spell the world will rest.

Here we have four examples of life in China. When we examine them closely, haphazardly chosen as they have been, there is a strange uniformity and contradiction in their basic situations. The blind beggar-boy, the charlatan advocate and medicine man, the careless surgeon,—at bottom all charlatans, yet all essentially sincere. That ranting little beggar howled his lying appeals, but at home, no doubt, were other mouths to be fed for which he—blind head of the family—was responsible. The herb-specialist seemed, from the tone of his voice, sincere in the belief in his remedies; the surgeon, certain of his operation. Yet that is what China is suffering from most, and because of the faith in their crude panaceas and the conviction that five thousand years of tradition gives folk, the Rockefeller Foundation will have to work for many generations before it will make China prophylactic.

3

There was another incident that illustrated, to me at least, China's ailment. Hong-Kong seemed possessed one night. I thought a riot or a revolution had broken out, but it was only a house on fire. Thousands of Chinese scurried about like rats looking for ways of escape. From the littered roof and balcony of a five-story tenement a flame leaped skyward as though itself trying to escape from the unpleasant task of consuming so dirty a structure. The curious collected in hordes from everywhere.