Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/11



author was made painfully aware, at an early stage of his residence among the Chinese, of his own all but total ignorance of this "peculiar people," who are a world to and in themselves; and he knows that this ignorance is characteristic of his countrymen. Books written by travellers to China abound; but a visit to the Celestial Empire no more entitles a man to write on this people than the knowledge of simple arithmetic warrants a man to enter the arena of the most abstruse problems of mathematical astronomy. Travellers relate the odd, the grotesque; for this only is sufficiently notable to make it impossible to escape their passing notice. But the knowledge that the Chinese wear "tails," are olive-eyed, eat birds' nests, and consider bears' paws the greatest delicacy, no more explains this people than beef-eating accounts for the history of the English; for it is not from the eccentricities of a people we can understand them, but by our knowledge of those principles which they esteem most highly, and which they are always ready to praise, though perhaps slow to practice;—for it is only a small minority in any country which is found honestly endeavouring to embody in their life, up to the measure of their ability, those principles of right conduct which are all but universally professed by that country. This knowledge we can acquire only from the national and every day life of a people.