The superficial Chinese thinker wants China to learn only the material side of our civilisation, to profit by our mechanical excellence without learning anything of our ethics. His view is that the West is immoral but wealthy; he regards Europe as the place where there is no principle excepting money-worship, and therefore he argues that if you would Westernise China you must despise morality and seek for money. Chang-Chih-Tung voiced this thought when he said, {76} "Western education is practical, Chinese education is moral." If you try to argue with a thoughtless Chinaman who has perhaps never left China, and whose only experience of Western life is what he has seen in a treaty port, you will find that it is hard to convince him that Western education produces a high moral tone. After all we may, to a certain extent, be to blame for their want of appreciation of the morality of the West, for too often we show to the Chinese a very degraded side of our civilisation; and though I do not think that Shanghai at the present merits the term that was applied to it fifty years ago of being a "moral sink," yet undoubtedly the treaty ports, both by their constitution and by their geographical position, collect very unpleasant specimens of white civilisation. There are a certain number of men who spend a great part of their existence being deported from Shanghai to Hong-Kong, and from Hong-Kong to Shanghai. One of the comedies in the tragedy of the extinction of the independence of Korea is illustrative of this point. The Emperor of Korea heard that the Western races were far more trustworthy than those of the East, and so fearing assassination after the murder of the Queen, he determined to enrol a corps of Europeans as a body-guard; he sent over officers to Shanghai with orders to enlist Europeans. Unfortunately for himself he did not take the precaution of sending with them any Western to help in the selection of the men. To Korean eyes all Westerns {77} look alike, and as they were offering good pay, they soon had their corps complete; they returned to Seoul, and the corps was installed with suitable uniforms, and, alas, rifles and ammunition. The moment the corps was paid, the greater bulk of them got drunk, and for the next few hours Seoul was distinctly an undesirable place of residence, filled with drunken men of all nationalities shouting and shrieking and firing loaded rifles recklessly in every direction. The poor Emperor trembled as he looked from his palace windows at his body-guard out on the drink, and he made up his mind that it would be better to take a reasonable chance of assassination by the Japanese than to risk the danger of being guarded by this inebriate troop of Westerns. With the help of the Consul the body-guard when sober were returned to Shanghai, and let us trust the Chinese heard the story and were convinced that in accepting Western civilisation they must be careful to avoid accepting the vices of the West.