Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/105

Rh the American flag over them, for a fee from the real owners. Merchants of all classes are taxed five per cent on gross sales, and have to submit their books for inspection freely to the tax-collectors; and detected efforts to get around the tax, other than by bribing the collectors, which is not at all difficult to do, results in the confiscation of their entire possessions. Once I witnessed the novel transaction of a foreigner who wanted to purchase a milch-cow, and the farmer drove the cow to the outside limits of the tax station on the outskirts of the town, and tied her there and came for the buyer to accompany him outside to complete the purchase. He could pass the cow without taxation, but the native owner could not. This is why the Chinese in California show such skill and fertility of resource in smuggling in opium. Their past training in subterfuges to beat their own tax-collectors has trained them in the business. And they do not regard it as any crime to beat the Government if they can. In this freak they are not wholly unlike many of our own race, as our custom-house officers are aware.

We can not, of course, determine what would have been the condition of China, in the matter of the relationship between ruled and rulers, had Confucianism never impressed its doctrines on the subject, but certainly he has not achieved any striking success in this first of the five relations.

—The husband is regarded as holding much the same relation to the wife as the Emperor to the people—that is, he has absolute authority over her. But that authority must be exercised with justice and sympathy. The wife shall obey the husband, but he must be worthy of obedience. Polygamy is now practiced in China, but it seems not to have been at the time of Confucius. At least I have observed no reference to the matter in his treatise on the second relation, which seems probable would be the case if it was recognized at the time he wrote. His plan elaborated the most minute provisions for the conduct of married people, and, were his ideal carried out, a most happy state of married life would result; but, judging from appearances, he has more signally failed on this point than on the first relation. Chinese marriages are not conducted on the plan most conducive to harmony. Their matches are not made in heaven, as poets sometimes declare of this matter, but in a broker's office. They are not the result of a personal courtship between the parties to the compact, but are a matter of barter and sale. Fathers negotiate for wives for their infant sons, and infant betrothals are in reality infant purchases. Both husband and wife being entirely passive in the matter, there can not be anything approaching to personal attachment between them. Marriage being a matter of purchase, there is no provision