Americans are the very last people who can consistently
criticise this tendency in Asia. It is the foreigner who has
created it, and the American is the most prodigal of all foreigners.
I never realized until I visited other lands how extravagant
is the scale of American life, not only among the
rich, but the so-called poor. My morning walk to my New
York office takes me along Christopher Street, and I have often
seen in the garbage cans of tenement houses pieces of bread
and meat and half-eaten vegetables and fruit that would give
the average Asiatic the feast of a lifetime. In Europe, Americans
are notorious as spendthrifts. In the Philippine Islands,
they have thrown about their money in a way which has inaugurated
an era of reckless lavishness comparable only to the
California days of ``forty-nine.'' In the port cities of China,
the porters asked me extortionate prices because I was an
American. Two or three coolies would seize a suit case or
change it from man to man every few minutes, on the pretense
that it was heavy. In Tien-tsin, you hire a jinrikisha and
presently you find a second man pushing behind, though the
road is smooth as a floor. In a few minutes a third appears to
push on the other side, and once a fourth took hold between
the second and third. All of course demand pay, and it is
difficult to shake them off. They do not understand your protests,
or they pretend not to, and you have to be emphatic to
get rid of them. At Tong-ku, my sampan men calmly insisted
on two dollars for a service that was worth but forty cents.
Everywhere, I found that it was wiser to make all purchases
and bargains through trusty native Christians, or to ascertain
in advance what a given service was really worth, pay it and
walk off, deaf to all protestations and complaints, even though