d and ten millions. Perhaps
three hundred millions would be a juster estimate; even that would
absorb no less than one-fifth of the human race. From this total it is
easy to calculate that if the Chinese people were to walk past a given
point in single file, the procession would never end; long before the
last of the three hundred millions had passed by, a new generation would
have sprung up to continue the neverending line. The census, however, is
a very old institution with the Chinese; and we learn that in A.D. 156
the total population of the China of those days was returned as a little
over fifty millions. In more modern times, the process of taking the
census consists in serving out house-tickets to the head of every
household, who is responsible for a proper return of all the inmates;
but as there is no fixed day for which these tickets are returnable, the
results are approximate rather than exact.

Again, it is not uncommon to hear people talking of the Chinese language
as if it were a single tongue spoken all over China after a more or less
uniform standard. But the fact is that the colloquial is broken up into
at least eight dialects, each so strongly marked as to constitute eight
languages as different to the ear, one from another, as English, Dutch
and German, or French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. A Shanghai man,
for instance, is unintelligible to a Cantonese, and so on. All officials
are obliged, and all of the better educated merchants and others
endeavour, if only for business purposes, to learn something of the
dialect spoken at the court of Peking; and this is what is popularly
known as "Mandarin." The written language remains the same for the whole
empire; which merely means that ideas set down on paper after a uniform
system are spoken with different sounds, just as the Arabic numerals are
written uniformly in England, France and Germany, but are pronounced in
a totally different manner.

The only difficulty of the spoken language, of no matter what dialect,
lies in the "tones," which simply means the different intonations which
may be given to one and the same sound, thus producing so many entirely
different meanings. But for these tones, the colloquial of China would
be absurdly easy, inasmuch as there is no such thing as grammar, in the
sense of gender, number, case, mood, tense, or any of the variations we
understand by that term. Many amusing examples are current of blunders
committed by fa