This being the home of a literary race, papers and notebooks are on most Members’ desks.  As the electric bells ring sharply an unending procession of men file in to take their seats, for there has been a recess and the House has been only half-filled.  Nearly every one is in Chinese dress (pien-yi) with the Member’s badge pinned conspicuously on the breast.  The idea speedily becomes a conviction that this after all is not extraneous to the nation, but actually of the living flesh, a vital and imperative thing.  The vastness and audacity of it all cannot fail to strike the imaginative mind, for the four or five hundred men who are gathered here typify, if they do not yet represent, the four or five hundred millions who make up the country.  You see as it were the nation in profile, a ponderous, slow-moving mass, quickly responsive to curious sub-conscious influences—­suddenly angry and suddenly calm again because Reason has after all always been the great goddess which is perpetually worshipped.  All are scholarly and deliberate in their movements.  When the Speaker calls the House in order and the debate commences, deep silence comes save for the movement of hundreds of nervous hands that touch papers or fidget to and fro.  Every man uses his hands, particularly when he speaks, not clenched as a European would do, but open, with the slim fingers speaking a language of their own, twisting, turning, insinuating, deriding, a little history of compromises.  It would be interesting to write the story of China from a study of the hands.

Each man goes to the rostrum to speak, and each has much to say.  Soon another impression deepens—­that the Northerners with their clear-cut speech and their fuller voices have an advantage over the Southerners of the kind that all public performers know.  The mandarin language of Peking is after all the mother-language of officialdom, the madre lingua, less nervous and more precise than any other dialect and invested with a certain air of authority which cannot be denied.  The sharp-sounding, high-pitched Southern voice, though it may argue very acutely and rapidly, appears at an increasing disadvantage.  There seems to be a tendency inherent in it to become querulous, to make its pleading sound specious because of over-much speech.  These are curious little things which have been not without influence in other regions of the world.

The applause when it comes proves the same thing as applause does everywhere; that if you want to drive home your points in a large assembly you must be condensed and simple, using broad, slashing arguments.  This is precisely what distinguishes melodrama from drama, and which explains why excessive analysis is no argument in the popular mind.  Generally, however, there is not much applause and the voice of the speaker wanders through the hall uninterrupted by signs of content or discontent.  Sometimes, although rather rarely, there is a gust of laughter as a point is scored against a hated rival.  But it dies away as suddenly as it arose—­almost before you have noted it, as if it were superfluous and must make room for more serious things.