All this does not mean that my presence is desired, or that fear of me, the foreigner, has ceased.  On the contrary, it signifies that I am more greatly to be feared.  The European is not wanted in China, no matter how absurd it may seem to the student of international politics, who sits and devours all the newspaper copy—­good, bad and indifferent—­which filters through regarding China becoming the El Dorado of the Westerner.  He is wanted for no other reason than that of teaching the Chinese to foreignize as much as he can, teaching the leaders of the people to strive to modify national life, and to raise public conduct and administration to the best standards of the West.

When China is capable of looking after herself, and able to maintain the position she is securing by the aid of the foreigner in her provinces, following her present mode of thought and action, the foreigner may go back again.  But it is to be hoped that the evolution of the country will be different.

Another feature impressed upon me was the emptiness of the lives of the people.  Education was rare, and any education they had was confined to the Chinese classics.

Neither of the three men I had with me could read or write.  The thoughts of these people are circumscribed by the narrow world in which they live, and only a chance traveler such as myself allows them a glimpse of other places.  Each man, with rare exception, lives and labors and dies where he is born—­that is his ambition; and in the midst of a people whose whole outlook of life is so contracted, I find difficulty in believing that progress such as Japan made in her memorable fifty-year forward movement will be made by the Chinese of Yuen-nan in two hundred years.  Everything one can see around him here, at this town of Anning-cheo, seems to make against it.  In my dealings with Chinese in their own country—­I speak broadly—­I have found that they “know everything.”  I erected a printing-press in Tong-ch’uan-fu some months ago—­a type of the old flat handpress not unlike that first used by Caxton.  It was a part of the equipment of the Ai Kueh Hsieh Tang (Love of Country School), and I was invited by the gentry to erect it.  Now the thing had not been up an hour before all the old fossils in the place knew all about it.  Printing to them was easy—­a child could do it.  It is always, “O ren teh, o ren teh” ("I know, I know").  These men, dressed in their best, stood with arms behind them, and smiled stupidly as I labored with my coat off fixing their primitive machinery.  Yet they did not know, and now, within a few months, not a sheet has been printed, and the whole plant is going to rack and ruin.