Page:Illustrations of China and Its People vol. III.pdf/41



THE buildings in the background of No. 26 comprise the house and offices of Messrs. Russell and Co., a firm whose splendid steamers have contributed greatly to develope the traffic on the Yangtsze. In the foreground we see a portion of a floating gangway used by the steamers to disembark passengers and cargo. On the landing stage, two Chinese assistants are superintending the discharge of foreign manufactures in bales. These bales are slung between two coolies, and carried on a bamboo pole; the number passed into the warehouse is checked after a system which it may not be uninteresting to describe : there is a small strip of bamboo to correspond with every bale, and this the bearers, as they traverse the gangway, hand to a trustworthy native assistant. He, in his turn, delivers the total number of his strips to be entered in the books.

THE Chinese contrivance for supporting a block of wood while they cut it up is a very simple and ingenious one. Like most of the appliances which that people have invented, it effectually performs the work for which it was originally designed; but it wears such a primitive look that we might reasonably expect, had we lived in that land 2,000 years ago, we should have found the same type of men doing the same description of work with the same appliances and in the same methodical fashion. This is among the most startling characteristics of China, and one viewed by a foreigner with continual surprise, accustomed as the latter is to Western progress, and inspired with an insane desire for novelty, as the Chinese themselves might describe him. These men of China, at some distant period of the past, must have had people of inventive genius among them who devised their present simple mechanical appliances, each one, in its own sphere, adapted to do a certain kind of work in a way which left nothing to be desired by succeeding generations. There is something in all this which might have attractions for Mr. Ruskin. The natives at the present time would rebel against the introduction of steam for the achievement of any result which can be brought about in the old way, and by the nimble hands of their working millions. I know a case where an entire village community of silk-spinners threatened to strike because their chief employer proposed to add a few extra reels and spindles to the ancient machine. I asked the master, who was a Cantonese, why he did not introduce the foreign method of reeling. " Ah," said he, " I have had enough of that. I once tried to effect a very slight alteration in the old machine, intending to introduce foreign apparatus in the end; but I was nearly ruined by the attempt." I suppose, in this way, inventive genius and its efforts at improvement must have been suppressed; and so the Chinese, having at an early time brought everything to comparative perfection, have rested since from generation to generation, content to go on, in filial piety, doing as their forefathers did. Perhaps they have found more true happiness in their simple ways than our civilized millions of people can realize in the glorious nineteenth century.

Our own sawyers and saw-pits are being numbered with the things of the past, and engines whose saws fly through a goodly tree in a few seconds have taken their place. Thus the furniture of our houses is now-a-days half constructed by steam. How different is this from the practice which still prevails in China ! There, the carpenter