“Of late, however, our schools have turned out an arrogant and ignorant lot—­boys who venture to use old books for wrapping parcels or papering windows, for boiling water, or wiping the table; boys, I say, who scribble over their books, who write characters on wall or door, who chew up the drafts of their poems, or throw them away on the ground.  Let all such be severely punished by their masters that they may be saved, while there is yet time, from the wrath of an avenging Heaven.  Some men use old pawn-tickets for wrapping up things—­it may be a cabbage or a pound of bean-curd.  Others use lottery-tickets of various descriptions for wrapping up a picked vegetable or a slice of pork, with no thought of the crime they are committing as long as there is a cash to be made or saved.  So also there are those who exchange their old books for pumeloes or ground-nuts, to be defiled with the filth of the waste-paper basket, and passed from hand to hand like the cheques of the barbarian.  Alas, too, for women when they go to fairs, for children who are sent to market!  They cannot read one single character:  they know not the priceless value of written paper.  They drop the wrapping of a parcel in the mire for every passer-by to tread under foot.  Their crime, however, will be laid at the door of those who erred in the first instance (i.e., those who sold their old books to the shopkeepers).  For they hoped to squeeze some profit, infinitesimal indeed, out of tattered or incomplete volumes; forgetting in their greed that they were dishonouring the sages, and laying up for themselves certain calamity.  Why then sacrifice so much for such trifling gain?  How much better a due observance of time-honoured custom, ensuring as it would a flow of prosperity continuous and everlasting as the waves of the sea!  O ye merchants and shopkeepers, know that in heaven as on earth written words are esteemed precious as the jade, and whatever is marked therewith must not be cast aside like stones and tiles.  For happiness, wealth, honours, distinctions, and old age, may be one and all secured by a proper respect for written paper.”

SUPERSTITION

Educated Chinamen loudly disclaim any participation in the superstitious beliefs which, to a European eye, hang like a dark cloud over an otherwise intellectually free people.  There never has been a State religion in China, and it has always been open to every man to believe and practise as much or as little as he likes of Buddhism, Taoism, or Mahomedanism, without legal interference or social stigma of any kind.  Of course it is understood that such observances must be purely self-regarding, and that directly they assume—­as lately in the case of Mahomedanism—­anything of a political character, the Chinese Government is not slow to protect the unity of the Empire by the best means in its power.  And so, but for the suicidal zeal of Christian missions and their supporters, who have effected an unnatural amalgamation of religion and politics, and carried the Bible into China at the point of the bayonet, the same toleration might now be accorded to Christianity which the propagators of other religions have hitherto been permitted to enjoy.