s: tasks such as an American
laborer would regard as inhuman.

Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha. He is
doing the work that horses and mules do at home, and for wages such as
our Southern negroes would refuse for ordinary labor. More than this,
in most cases he is selling you not only his time but his life-blood.
Run he must with his human burden, and faster than Americans would
care to run without a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes his
heart and shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kinds
of weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver in the
winter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure and the
overtaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw man's life, I
was told in Japan, is several years shorter than that of the average
man.

And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into the
rickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which it is not
overcrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost thought my life
endangered by the mob who jostled, tugged, and fought for the
privilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare my patronage involved. In
Hong Kong two runners, wild-eyed with the keenness of the savage
struggle for existence, menaced the smaller, younger man I had hired
as if they would take me by force from his vehicle to their own--and
this for a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather than
feel myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a fellow
being pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in Hankow, where not
even the brutal clubbing of the policeman was enough to keep the men
in order. In wintry Newchwang I think I suffered almost as much as my
rickshaw man did merely to see him wading through mud and foulness
such as I should not wish my horse to go through at home--though if he
had {176} not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used to
it!

I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls the
jinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not be crowded if
it were not that the men find life in other lines no better. Consider
the men who carried me in my sedan chair in Canton. As each man fitted
the wooden shafts over his shoulders I could see that they were welted
with corns like a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many a
summer's plowing.

Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who do the work
not of carriage horses, but of draft horses.