However, I have to teach him the form of the earth and the natural causes of eclipses.  He is frightened by ghosts, burns mock money to maintain his ancestors in the future state, worships a bit of rusty old iron as an infallible remedy for droughts; I have seen him shoot at clouds from the city walls to frighten away the rain—­and I despise him for it all.  As I revise this copy, a rumor is current in the town in which I am resting to the effect that foreigners are buying children and using their heads to oil the wheels of the new Yuen-nan railway, and I despise him for believing it.  The Chinese will not fight, and I sneer at him; he abhors me because I do.  I ridicule his manner of dress; he thinks mine grossly indecent.  I consider his flat nose and the plaited hair and shaven skull as heathenish; but the Chinese, eating away with his to me ridiculous chopsticks, looks out from his quick, almond-shaped eyes and considers me still a foreign devil, although he is too cunning to tell me.  His opinions of me are founded upon the narrow grounds of vanity and egotism; mine, although I do not admit it even to myself, from something very much akin thereto.[AA]

I have been looked upon in far-away outposts of the Chinese Empire where foreigners are still unknown, as an example of those human monstrosities which come from the West, a creature of a very low order of the human species, with a form and face uncouth, with language a hopeless jargon, and with manners unbearably rude and obnoxious.  Not that I personally answer accurately to this description, reader, any more than you would, but because I happen to be among a people who, as far back as Chinese opinion of foreigners can be traced, have considered themselves of a morality and intellectuality superior to yours and mine.

I write the foregoing because it sums up what may be termed the current ideas regarding Europeans, ideas the reverse of complimentary, which are the more unfortunate on account of the fact that they are held by the vast majority of a people forming a quarter of the whole human race.  This is true, despite all the reform.

These ideas may be, and I trust they are, erroneous, but I know that I must keep in mind the extremely important desideratum in dealing with the Chinese that they look at me—­my person, my manners, my customs, my theories, my things—­through Chinese eyes, and although mistaken, misled, reach their own conclusions from their own point of view.  This is what they have been doing for centuries, but we know that it all now is being subjected to slow change.  The original stock, however, takes on no change whatever, and several generations must pass before this transfer of mental vision can be effected, when the Chinese will view all things and all peoples in their true light.