the weary, pressing, throbbing throng for five hundred years.''[2]


[2] The Rev. J. T. Gracey, D. D., ``China in Outline,'' p. 10.



There is something amazing in the immensity of the population.
Great cities are surprisingly numerous. In America, a
city of nearly a million inhabitants is a wonderful place and all
the world is supposed to know about it. But while Canton and
Tien-tsin are tolerably familiar names, how many in the United
States ever heard of Hsiang-tan-hsien ? Yet Hsiang-tan-
hsien is said to have 1,000,000 inhabitants, while within comparatively
short distances are other great cities and innumerable
villages. In the Swatow region, within a territory a
hundred and fifty miles long and fifty miles wide, there are no
less than ten walled cities of from 40,000 to 250,000 inhabitants,
besides hundreds of towns and villages ranging from a few
hundred to 25,000 or 30,000 people. Men never tire of writing
about the population adjacent to New York, Boston and
Chicago. But in five weeks' constant journeying through the
interior of the Shantung Province, there was hardly an hour in
which multitudes were not in sight. There are no scattered
farmhouses as in America, but the people live in villages and
towns, the latter strongly walled and even the former often have
a mud wall. As the country is comparatively level, it was easy
to count them, and as a rule there were a dozen or more in
plain view. I recall a memorable morning. It was Friday,
June 28, 1901. We had risen early, and by daylight we had