the head of a large business establishment but the commander-in-chief
of a small army? The efficiency of his force depends far more upon the
moral agencies brought to bear than upon any system of rewards and
punishments human ingenuity can devise; for Chinamen, like other
mortals, love to have their prejudices respected, and fear of shame
and dread of ridicule are as deeply ingrained in their natures as in
those of any nation under the sun. They have a horror of blows, not so
much from the pain inflicted, as from the sense of injury done to
something more elevated than their mere corporeal frames; and a friend
of ours once lost a good servant by merely, in a hasty fit, _throwing
a sock at him_. We therefore think that, considering the vast extent
of the Chinese empire and its innumerable population, all of whom are
constructed mentally more or less on the same model, their language
and customs are deserving of more attention than is generally paid to
them by foreigners in China.




LITERATURE

It is an almost universally-received creed that behind the suicidal
prejudices and laughable superstitions of the Chinese there is a
mysterious fund of solid learning hidden away in the uttermost
recesses--far beyond the ken of occidentals--of that _terra
incognita_, Chinese literature. Sinologues darkly hint at elaborate
treatises on the various sciences, impartial histories and candid
biographies, laying at the same time extraordinary stress on the
extreme difficulty of the language in which they are written, and
carefully mentioning the number (sometimes fabulous) of the volumes of