But the Chinese, even those who are the victims of preventable misfortunes, show a vast passive indifference to the excitement of the foreigners; they wait for it to go off, like the effervescence of soda-water.  And gradually strange hesitations creep into the mind of the bewildered traveller; after a period of indignation, he begins to doubt all the maxims he has hitherto accepted without question.  Is it really wise to be always guarding against future misfortune?  Is it prudent to lose all enjoyment of the present through thinking of the disasters that may come at some future date?  Should our lives be passed in building a mansion that we shall never have leisure to inhabit?

The Chinese answer these questions in the negative, and therefore have to put up with poverty, disease, and anarchy.  But, to compensate for these evils, they have retained, as industrial nations have not, the capacity for civilized enjoyment, for leisure and laughter, for pleasure in sunshine and philosophical discourse.  The Chinese, of all classes, are more laughter-loving than any other race with which I am acquainted; they find amusement in everything, and a dispute can always be softened by a joke.

I remember one hot day when a party of us were crossing the hills in chairs—­the way was rough and very steep, the work for the coolies very severe.  At the highest point of our journey, we stopped for ten minutes to let the men rest.  Instantly they all sat in a row, brought out their pipes, and began to laugh among themselves as if they had not a care in the world.  In any country that had learned the virtue of forethought, they would have devoted the moments to complaining of the heat, in order to increase their tip.  We, being Europeans, spent the time worrying whether the automobile would be waiting for us at the right place.  Well-to-do Chinese would have started a discussion as to whether the universe moves in cycles or progresses by a rectilinear motion; or they might have set to work to consider whether the truly virtuous man shows complete self-abnegation, or may, on occasion, consider his own interest.

One comes across white men occasionally who suffer under the delusion that China is not a civilized country.  Such men have quite forgotten what constitutes civilization.  It is true that there are no trams in Peking, and that the electric light is poor.  It is true that there are places full of beauty, which Europeans itch to make hideous by digging up coal.  It is true that the educated Chinaman is better at writing poetry than at remembering the sort of facts which can be looked up in Whitaker’s Almanac.  A European, in recommending a place of residence, will tell you that it has a good train service; the best quality he can conceive in any place is that it should be easy to get away from.  But a Chinaman will tell you nothing about the trains; if you ask, he will tell you wrong.  What he tells you is that there is a palace built by an ancient emperor, and a retreat in a lake for scholars weary of the world, founded by a famous poet of the Tang dynasty.  It is this outlook that strikes the Westerner as barbaric.