t is
less admirable. I will only ask the reader to remember that, on the
balance, I think the Chinese one of the best nations I have come across,
and am prepared to draw up a graver indictment against every one of the
Great Powers. Shortly before I left China, an eminent Chinese writer
pressed me to say what I considered the chief defects of the Chinese.
With some reluctance, I mentioned three: avarice, cowardice and
callousness. Strange to say, my interlocutor, instead of getting angry,
admitted the justice of my criticism, and proceeded to discuss possible
remedies. This is a sample of the intellectual integrity which is one of
China's greatest virtues.

The callousness of the Chinese is bound to strike every Anglo-Saxon.
They have none of that humanitarian impulse which leads us to devote one
per cent. of our energy to mitigating the evils wrought by the other
ninety-nine per cent. For instance, we have been forbidding the
Austrians to join with Germany, to emigrate, or to obtain the raw
materials of industry. Therefore the Viennese have starved, except those
whom it has pleased us to keep alive from philanthropy. The Chinese
would not have had the energy to starve the Viennese, or the
philanthropy to keep some of them alive. While I was in China, millions
were dying of famine; men sold their children into slavery for a few
dollars, and killed them if this sum was unobtainable. Much was done by
white men to relieve the famine, but very little by the Chinese, and
that little vitiated by corruption. It must be said, however, that the
efforts of the white men were more effective in soothing their own
consciences than in helping the Chinese. So long as the present
birth-rate and the present methods of agriculture persist, famines are
bound to occur periodically; and those whom philanthropy keeps alive
through one famine are only too likely to perish in the next.

Famines in China can be permanently cured only by better methods of
agriculture combined with emigration or birth-control on a large scale.
Educated Chinese realize this, and it makes them indifferent to efforts
to keep the present victims alive. A great deal of Chinese callousness
has a similar explanation, and is due to perception of the vastness of
the problems involved. But there remains a residue which cannot be so
explained. If a dog is run over by an automobile and seriously hurt,
nine out of ten passers-by will stop to laugh at the poor brute's howls.