over our boasted morality and civilisation.  In the first place, squeezing of masters by servants is a recognised system among the Chinese, and is never looked upon in the light of robbery.  It is commission on the purchase of goods, and is taken into consideration by the servant when seeking a new situation.  Wages are in consequence low; sometimes, as in the case of official runners and constables, servants have to make their living as best they can out of the various litigants, very often taking bribes from both parties.  As far as slight raids upon wine, handkerchiefs, English bacon, or other such luxuries dear to the heart of the Celestial, we might ask any one who has ever kept house in England if pilfering is quite unknown among servants there.  If it were strictly true that Chinamen are such thieves as we make them out to be, with our eastern habits of carelessness and dependence, life in China would be next to impossible.  As it is, people hire servants of whom they know absolutely nothing, put them in charge of a whole house many rooms in which are full of tempting kickshaws, go away for a trip to a port five or six hundred miles distant, and come back to find everything in its place down to the most utter trifles.  Merchants as a rule have their servants secured by some substantial man, but many do not take this precaution, for an honest Chinaman usually carries his integrity written in his face.  Confucius gave a wise piece of advice when he said, “If you employ a man, be not suspicious of him; if you are suspicious of a man, do not employ him”—­and truly foreigners in China seem to carry out the first half to an almost absurd degree, placing the most unbounded confidence in natives with whose antecedents they are almost always unacquainted, and whose very names in nine cases out of ten they actually do not know!  And what is the result of all this?  A few cash extra charged as commission on anything purchased at shop or market, and a steady consumption of about four dozen pocket-handkerchiefs per annum.  Thefts there are, and always will be, in China as elsewhere; but there are no better grounds for believing that the Chinese are a nation of thieves than that their own tradition is literally true which says, “In the glorious days of old, if anything was seen lying in the road, nobody would pick it up!” On the contrary, we believe that theft is not one whit more common in China than it is in England; and we are fully convinced that the imputation of being a nation of thieves has been cast, with many others, upon the Chinese by unscrupulous persons whose business it is to show that China will never advance without the renovating influence of Christianity-an opinion from which we here express our most unqualified dissent.

LYING