Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/91

 Oh! Basil, old chap, how could you, how could you"

"Well," sulkily, "I'm not the first."

"No," brokenly, "and you'll not be the last. And where will it end, where will it end!"

"I thought you"

"Oh! I don't mean where will this special case end—for you and for that poor child I know how it will end—but how will it all end?—the putrid inter-racial welter and tangle that we Christians have made! And we—misunderstanding China, spoiling China, insulting her people, fattening on her industry—we, we English call ourselves men! We push our way into China. We laugh at everything she holds sacred, mock what we should admire, condemn what we lack the brain to understand, spit on a culture four thousand years older and in a good deal as much deeper and more sincere than ours, we steal what we want—oh, yes! it's just that, most of it—we teach her boys to smoke opium, we show her a dozen new corruptions, teach her twenty new sins, we seize and spill her thimbleful of saki and give her a tumbler of brandy, and her women—her women" he broke off.

The other man winced now. He knew there were tears in Bradley's eyes, perhaps on his face. Just once before he had known John in tears, and he thought of it now, a never-to-be-forgotten radiant summer day when a young boy, an only child, had been publicly expelled from school for the saddest of young crimes—the one crime that even the laxest of our public schools neither forgive nor condone—and sent broken home to his mother, a widow.

"You'd like to throttle me when I dare say, 'How would you like it, what would you think of it then, if a Chinese man treated your sister as you have treated this