Chinese civilisation is not, as many people imagine it to be, a mere courtesy title for a state in reality only a degree off barbarism. Many of my humbler parishioners, for instance, when we left for China, ranked the Chinese as something very near cannibals, and I do not think they would have been in the least surprised to hear that we had been roasted and eaten by the natives. The Chinese have perhaps a greater right to be called civilised than we have on this side of the world; their civilisation dates from eras we are accustomed to call Biblical. Confucius and Ezra represent contemporaneous ideas--ideas that are not wholly different in thought. While on the other side of the globe civilisation has been handed from nation to nation, and a civilised race has become barbarous and a barbarous race civilised, the Chinese, without making any very great advance, have steadily proceeded along a path of progress, and at the present time they possess a very carefully organised system of society. On paper the whole thing is perfect: the Emperor at the top, the Viceroys over each province, under them the Prefectures, and so down to the village community {60} in the country or the trade guild in the town. The system of government is so perfect that they claim that they are able to discover any individual wanted among those 400,000,000 of Chinese, unless his disguise is very perfect. When we were chatting over the revolutionaries and talking about a certain doctor dodging in and out of China at the risk of his life, I said that I wondered that there was any difficulty at all for a man who was bred in the country wandering where he liked, and I was assured that such was the organisation of the Chinese Government that they could lay hands even in the remotest village on anybody if they required him, and that the only way a revolutionary could hope to escape arrest was by a most perfect and complete disguise. With this splendid organisation is joined great solidarity. The Chinese race are essentially one. If it were your duty to look through reports coming from China, as it has been mine, the first thing that would strike you would be its essential oneness; you will not find more difference between different parts of China than there is between England and Ireland. I do not for a moment mean to say that there are no differences between the Chinese--that would be untrue; but you will not find such a difference as one might expect from the diversity of geographical conditions. The civilisation is essentially similar. It is a civilisation with great merits. The population is sober, industrious, and perhaps I might add honest, {61} all lovers of China will certainly agree; but if you are writing, as I am, to people who have never been out of England, I think you will have to qualify the phrase with some such a one as "honest as compared with other Orientals," or "honest when contrasted with the Japanese."