thirty li, as against ten cents offered by the men.  He is now extending philosophic advice to them all, based on a knowledge of the coolie’s life; the little meeting breaks up, good feeling prevails, and the loads carried on merrily.  I still linger, sipping my tea.  Lao Chang has grumbled because he has had to shell out seven cash, and I have already drunk ten cups (he generally uses the tea leaves afterwards for his personal use).

But wrangling about payment prevails always where Chinese congregate.  In China, by high and low, lies are told without the slightest apparent compunction.  One of the men in the above-mentioned dispute had an irrepressible volubility of assertion.  He at once flew into a temper, adopting the style of the stage actor, proclaiming his virtue so that it might have been heard at Yuen-nan-fu.  He was preserving his “face.”  For in this country temper is often, what it is not in the West, a test of truth.  Among Westerners nothing is more insulting sometimes than a philosophic temper; but in China you must, as a first law unto yourself, protect yourself at all costs and against all comers, and it generally requires a good deal of noise.  Here the bully is not the coward.  In respect of prevarication, it seems to be absolutely universal; the poor copy the vice from the rich.  It seems to be in the very nature of the people, and although it is hard to write, my experience convinces me that my statement is not exaggeration.  I have found the Chinese—­I speak of the common people, for in my travels I have not mixed much with the rich—­the greatest romancer on earth.  I question whether the great preponderance of the Chinese people speak six consecutive sentences without misrepresentation or exaggeration, tantamount to prevarication.  Regretting that I have to write it, I give it as my opinion that the Chinese is a liar by nature.  And when he is confronted with the charge of lying, the culprit seems seldom to feel any sense of guilt.

And yet in business—­above the petty bargaining business—­we have as the antithesis that the spoken word is his bond.  I would rather trust the Chinese merely on his word than the Jap with a signed contract.

The Chinese knows that the Englishman is not a liar, and he respects him for it; and it is to be hoped that in Yuen-nan there will soon be seen the two streams of civilization which now flow in comparative harmony in other more enlightened provinces flowing here also in a single channel.  These two streams—­of the East and the West—­represent ideas in social structure, in Government, in standards of morality, in religion and in almost every human conception as diverse as the peoples are racially apart.  They cannot, it is evident, live together.  The one is bound to drive out the other, or there must be such a modification of both as will allow them to live together, and be linked in sympathies which go farther than exploiting the country for initial greed.  The Chinese will never lose all the traces of their inherited customs of daily life, of habits of thought and language, products which have been borne down the ages since a time contemporary with that of Solomon.  No fair-minded man would wish it.  And it is at once impossible.