eets were lined with pedlars. One could buy
anything; get anything made. I dined at a Chinese restaurant, cleansed
myself at a public bath in a private tub with a small boy to assist in
the scrubbing. I bought condensed milk, bitter, canned vegetables,
bread, and cake. I repeat it, cake--good cake. I bought knives, forks,
and spoons, granite-ware dishes and mugs. There were horseshoes and
horseshoers. A worker in iron realized for me new designs of mine for my
tent poles. My shoes were sent out to be repaired. A barber shampooed
my hair. A servant returned with corn-beef in tins, a bottle of port,
another of cognac, and beer, blessed beer, to wash out from my throat the
dust of an army. It was the land of Canaan. I was in China.

The Korean is the perfect type of inefficiency--of utter worthlessness.
The Chinese is the perfect type of industry. For sheer work no worker in
the world can compare with him. Work is the breath of his nostrils. It
is his solution of existence. It is to him what wandering and fighting
in far lands and spiritual adventure have been to other peoples. Liberty
to him epitomizes itself in access to the means of toil. To till the
soil and labour interminably with rude implements and utensils is all he
asks of life and of the powers that be. Work is what he desires above
all things, and he will work at anything for anybody.

During the taking of the Taku forts he carried scaling ladders at the
heads of the storming columns and planted them against the walls. He did
this, not from a sense of patriotism, but for the invading foreign devils
because they paid him a daily wage of fifty cents. He is not frightened
by war. He accepts it as he does rain and sunshine, the changing of the
seasons, and other natural phenomena. He prepares for it, endures it,
and survives it, and when the tide of battle sweeps by, the thunder of
the guns still reverberating in the distant canyons, he is seen calmly
bending to his usual tasks. Nay, war itself bears fruits whereof he may
pick. Before the dead are cold or the burial squads have arrived he is
out on the field, stripping the mangled bodies, collecting the shrapnel,
and ferreting in the shell holes for slivers and fragments of iron.

The Chinese is no coward. He does not carry away his doors amid windows
to the mountains, but remains to guard them when alien soldiers occupy
his town. He does not hide away his chickens and his eggs, nor any o