Of course at every step on this downward path the officials concerned made a great deal of money; their next step was to deal with the copper coin in the same way, so now there is no fixed relation between the copper coinage and the silver coinage, nor between the large copper and the small, and this is still further confusing, as the provinces having different mints have dollars of different values. And now I hear that they have begun to make money by debasing the old silver shoe coinage, which, though it is sold by weight, used to have a certain standard of purity, and they have issued cash which have no intrinsic value at all, and that do not represent the fraction of a coin having any intrinsic value. The result of this currency "Rake's Progress" has been to produce what corruption always does produce--widespread poverty. Everybody cheats. The stationmasters {65} along the line assure the European superintendents that the fares are always paid in the most debased coinage, and it is very hard to deny the probability of this. But of course the stationmasters take care if any coin comes to their hand which is not debased to do a bit of exchange on their own account. If Chinese civilisation is corrupt, it is also cruel, not with the wild tempestuous cruelty of the savage, but with the cruelty of the civilised man who at once uses human suffering as the best engine for human government, and never cares to cure it unless he has some pecuniary object in view. The Chinese are inured to pain, and some people argue that they do not feel it to the same degree as Western nations. No doubt the sensation of pain is intensified in people of highly developed nervous organisation, and the Chinese have a nervous organisation of a very quiescent kind. I remember, when we first landed at Hong-Kong, being struck by a Chinaman who had chosen as his bed for his midday siesta an ordinary piece of granite curbing; and as you go along in the train every freight car that you pass has some one sleeping on it to protect it from robbery, and a truck of coals or a load of stone is obviously regarded as a most comfortable resting-place. Some of the doctors maintained that this was the case throughout their nervous system--they were insensitive to pain; others said that pain, like everything else, is a thing to which you can get accustomed, and that pain has played so large a part in their lives that they are {66} accustomed to it, and are not therefore afraid of it. Take, for instance, the foot-binding of the women; every family in China must be accustomed to hear the sobs and cries of the little girls as they are going through the first stages of foot-binding. Or take again the public flogging; all the working classes of China must be quite accustomed to the idea that men are flogged for certain offences till their flesh is of the consistency of a jelly. A doctor, describing the state in which men are brought into the hospital after