ay,
different from what they are in the West. The men wore their hair
braided down their backs, and the women dressed in trousers, and both
mourned in white. The seat of honour was on the left, not on the right,
and when people greeted you they shook hands with themselves. All that
one is prepared for, but being prepared does not take away from the
impression of queerness. But even from the beginning, and the feeling
grew stronger as the days lengthened into weeks and the weeks into
months, underneath this surface difference the Chinese seemed to me more
like ourselves, or maybe our ancestors, more like us at one stage or
another, than any other people of the East that I had known.

In India, as every one knows, religion dominates the life of the people.
A man is first of all a follower of a certain creed, a Hindu or a
Moslem, and the observances of that creed control his daily acts in a
way to which there is no parallel in the West--or in China. The
principles of Christianity underlie the best of Western civilization,
but the majority of men in Europe or America pay little conscious heed
to Christ's teachings as they make the daily round of work and
pleasure, and generally they confine their formal religious observances
to one day of the week, if as often. The Chinese, to be sure, is one of
the most superstitious of men, but there is little more religion in his
fears than is implied in the practices of many a Westerner. He never
builds a straight entrance into his house, for he believes that evil
spirits cannot move in a curved line; and across the world, people who
call him names because of this refuse to sit down thirteen at table. The
malign influences appeased, the average Chinese goes his way untroubled
or unconsoled by any thought concerning that which is to come, or at
most he strives to acquire merit, not for a week only, but for the whole
year, by some pilgrimage much more strenuous than church-going. Like the
Western man of to-day he also is impatient of priestly control, and is
apt to say slighting things of his spiritual leaders. His mind is set,
not on things above, but on the bread-and-butter, or, more precisely,
rice, aspect of life. The scale of rewards is different, but the
mainspring of daily living is much the same in the Far East and the Far
West.

Or put it in another way: with Chinese and man of the West alike,
national standards, national aims, all bear the mark of the industrial
world. In Amer