“There is no nation,” says the Jesuit Du Halde, “more laborious and temperate than this.  They are inured to hardships from their infancy, which greatly contributes to preserve the innocence of their manners....  They are of a mild, tractable, and humane disposition.”  He thinks them exceedingly modest, and regards the love of gain as their chief vice.  “Interest,” says he, “is the spring of all their actions; for, when the least profit offers, they despise all difficulties and undertake the most painful journeys to procure it” This may be true; but if a Chinese traveller in America should give the same account of us, would it not be quite as true?  One of the latest writers—­the author of “The Middle Kingdom”—­accuses the Chinese of gross sensuality, mendacity, and dishonesty.  No doubt these are besetting sins with them, as with all nations who are educated under a system which makes submission to authority the chief virtue.  But then this writer lived only at Canton and Macao, and saw personally only the refuse of the people.  He admits that “they have attained, by the observance of peace and good order, to a high security of life and property; that the various classes are linked together in a remarkably homogeneous manner by the diffusion of education; and that property and industry receive their just reward of food, raiment, and shelter.”  He also reminds us that the religion of China differs from all Pagan religions in this, that it encourages neither cruelty nor sensuality.  No human victims have ever been offered on its altars, and those licentious rites which have appeared in so many religions have never disgraced its pure worship.

The Chinese citizen enjoys a degree of order, peace, and comfort unknown elsewhere in Asia.  “He can hold and sell landed property with a facility, certainty, and security which is absolute perfection compared with the nature of English dealings of the same kind."[22] He can traverse the country for two thousand miles unquestioned by any official.  He can follow what occupation he pleases.  He can quit his country and re-enter it without a passport.  The law of primogeniture does not exist.  The emperor appoints his heir, but a younger son quite as often as an elder one.  The principle that no man is entitled by birth to rule over them is better known to the three hundred and sixty millions of China than to the twenty-seven millions of Great Britain that they have a right to a trial by their peers.[23] The principle of Chinese government is to persuade rather than to compel, to use moral means rather than physical.  This rests on the fundamental belief in human goodness.  For, as Mr. Meadows justly observes:  “The theory that man’s nature is radically vicious is the true psychical basis of despotic or physical-force government; while the theory that man’s nature is radically good is the basis of free or moral-force government.”  The Chinese government endeavors to be paternal.  It has refused to lay a tax on