ther
commodity he possesses. He proceeds at once to offer them for sale. Nor
is he to be bullied into lowering his price. What if the purchaser be a
soldier and an alien made cocky by victory and confident by overwhelming
force? He has two large pears saved over from last year which he will
sell for five sen, or for the same price three small pears. What if one
soldier persist in taking away with him three large pears? What if there
be twenty other soldiers jostling about him? He turns over his sack of
fruit to another Chinese and races down the street after his pears and
the soldier responsible for their flight, and he does not return till he
has wrenched away one large pear from that soldier's grasp.

Nor is the Chinese the type of permanence which he has been so often
designated. He is not so ill-disposed toward new ideas and new methods
as his history would seem to indicate. True, his forms, customs, and
methods have been permanent these many centuries, but this has been due
to the fact that his government was in the hands of the learned classes,
and that these governing scholars found their salvation lay in
suppressing all progressive ideas. The ideas behind the Boxer troubles
and the outbreaks over the introduction of railroad and other foreign
devil machinations have emanated from the minds of the literati, and been
spread by their pamphlets and propagandists.

Originality and enterprise have been suppressed in the Chinese for scores
of generations. Only has remained to him industry, and in this has he
found the supreme expression of his being. On the other hand, his
susceptibility to new ideas has been well demonstrated wherever he has
escaped beyond the restrictions imposed upon him by his government. So
far as the business man is concerned he has grasped far more clearly the
Western code of business, the Western ethics of business, than has the
Japanese. He has learned, as a matter of course, to keep his word or his
bond. As yet, the Japanese business man has failed to understand this.
When he has signed a time contract and when changing conditions cause him
to lose by it, the Japanese merchant cannot understand why he should live
up to his contract. It is beyond his comprehension and repulsive to his
common sense that he should live up to his contract and thereby lose
money. He firmly believes that the changing conditions themselves
absolve him. And in so far adaptable as he has shown himsel