Page:James Hudson Maurer - The Far East (1912).pdf/5



China is one of the most corrupt of nations and yet the standard of personal and commercial honesty is probably higher in China than in any other country in the world.

Women in China are treated as beasts of burden. It is a land where the women wear socks and trousers and the men wear stockings and robes; where a man shakes his own hand, not yours. White, not black is a sign of mourning. Where the compass points south, not north. Books are read backward, not forward. The woman cries when being married and men laugh when they talk of their mother's death.

The Chinese are unquestionably the oldest nation in the world.

They speak the language and observe the same social and political customs that they did several thousand years before the Christian era.

Up to the Nineteenth century China was in a commercial sense, isolated from the rest of the world. She was indifferent to and ignorant of the ceaseless competition and contests of mankind outside her orbit.

She scarcely knew or cared to know that Christian England had conquered and was ruling India. The British, no different from all other nations had but one object in view in wars of conquest, and that was to rob and exploit the conquered. British capitalists at once inaugurated what appeared to be the most profitable system of industry, and that was the cultivation of opium. The means of transportation in India and China was limited in a great measure to pack mules, and a single mule could transport several thousand dollars' worth of opium, and that is one of the reasons why opium is a more profitable crop than potatoes or wheat. But the production and manufacture of opium in itself would be useless unless there was a sale for the product, and there can be no sale for any product unless there are consumers of the product.

Therefore, the Christian British proceeded to find a people who could be taught to consume their poisonous opium.

China appeared to them as the most fertile territory