Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/189

Rh houses and goods, in these billions of paper cash, thousands of which may be purchased by the poorest for a few brass cash, is a certain index to many things in the national character. It is this exaggerated reverence for ancestors which hangs like a millstone round the neck of the Chinese. The people live in a state of voluntary bondage to the dead. They look to the past instead of to the future, and when the present generation considers the future at all, it is the vital necessity of raising posterity, not for the good of his country, but for the sole and all-important purpose of being assured that when he in his turn is numbered among the dead there shall be some one to pay him those attentions which he himself has lived to pay to some one else, that fills his mind. "If you have no children to foul the bed, you will have no one to burn paper at the grave," and this latter prospect being intolerable, the Chinese marries at the earliest possible moment, with the fixed determination of obviating it. "The hundreds of millions of living Chinese are under the most galling subjection to the countless thousands of