At any rate, the uncertainty which gathers around many of these points emphasises the necessity of more and more accurate scholarship in Chinese, and more and more accurate information on the people of China and their ways.

How the latter article is supplied to us in England, you may judge from some extracts which I have recently taken from respectable daily and weekly newspapers.

For instance, “China has only one hundred physicians to a population of four hundred millions.”

To me it is inconceivable how such rubbish can be printed, especially when it is quite easy to find out that there is no medical diploma in China, and that any man who chooses is free to set up as a doctor.

By a pleasant fiction, he charges no fees; a fixed sum, however, is paid to him for each visit, as “horse-money,”—­I need hardly add, in advance.

There are, as with us, many successful, and consequently fashionable, doctors whose “horse-money” runs well into double figures.  Their success must be due more to good luck and strictly innocent prescriptions than to any guidance they can find in the extensive medical literature of China.

All together, medicine is a somewhat risky profession, as failure to cure is occasionally resented by surviving relatives.

There is a story of a doctor who had mismanaged a case, and was seized by the patient’s family and tied up.  In the night he managed to free himself, and escaped by swimming across a river.  When he got home, he found his son, who had just begun to study medicine, and he said to him, “Don’t be in a hurry with your books; the first and most important thing is to learn to swim!”

Here is another newspaper gem:  “In China, the land of opposites, the dials of the clocks are made to turn round, while the hands stand still.”

Personally, I never noticed this arrangement.

Again:  “Some of the tops with which the Chinese amuse themselves are as large as barrels.  It takes three men to spin one, and it gives off a sound that may be heard several hundred yards away.”

“The Chinese National Anthem is so long that it takes half a day to sing it.”

“Chinese women devote very little superfluous time to hair-dressing.  Their tresses are arranged once a month, and they sleep with their heads in boxes.”

What we want in place of all this is a serious and systematic examination of the manners and customs, and modes of thought, of the Chinese people.

Their long line of Dynastic Histories must be explored and their literature ransacked by students who have got through the early years of drudgery inseparable from the peculiar nature of the written language, and who are prepared to devote themselves, not, as we do now, to a general knowledge of the whole, but to a thorough acquaintance with some particular branch.

The immediate advantages of such a course, as I must point out once more, for the last time, to commerce and to diplomatic relations will be incalculable.  And they will be shared in by the student of history, philosophy, and religion, who will then for the first time be able to assign to China her proper place in the family of nations.