il, considered simply as a feat of
Herculean labor, leaves us no room to boast over the Panama Canal.

[Illustration: CHINESE WOMAN'S RUINED FEET.]
The lower picture shows the terrible deformity produced by
foot-binding.

{148}

[Illustration: CHINESE SCHOOL CHILDREN.]
The upper picture suggests a word about the amazing fertility of the
Oriental races--the Japanese, for example, increasing from their
birth-rate alone as fast as the United States from its birth-rate
plus its enormous immigration.

[Illustration: THE AMERICAN CONSULATE AT ANTUNG.]
A great need of America in the East is better consular buildings.
Witness this one at Antung.

{149 continued}

Now, when this happened, the friends of the mistreated man began to
murmur. Failing to do anything with the magistrate, they appealed to
the magistrate's father--for though you may be fifty or seventy years
old in China, if your father is living you are as much subject to his
orders as if you were only ten; this is the case just as long as you
both live. But when the father spoke about the complaints of the
people the magistrate lied about the jar somehow, but not in a way
entirely to deceive the old fellow. He decided to do some
investigating, and went blundering around into a dark room in search
of the jar, and before he saw what he was doing came upon it and fell
into it. Whereupon he cried to his son to pull him out.

The son did come, but when he pulled out one father, behold there was
another still in the jar--and then another and another and another. He
pulled out one father after another till the whole room was full of
fathers, and then he filled up the yard with fathers, and had six or
eight standing like chickens on the stone wall before the accursed old
jar would quit! And to have left one father in there would naturally
have been equivalent to murder.

So this was the punishment of the unjust magistrate. He had, of
course, to support all the dozens of aged fathers he pulled out of the
jar (a Chinaman must support his father though he starve himself), and
it is to be supposed that he used up all the wealth he had unjustly
piled up, and had to work night and day as well all the rest of his
life. Of course the jar, too, had to be returned to its owner, and in
this way the whole community learned of the magistrate's unfairly
withholding it.

This story is interesting not only for its own sake, but for {150} the
light it s