First of all, China is a very large country, and from want of proper means of communication for many centuries, there has been nothing like extensive intercourse between North, South, East, West, and Central. Of course the officials visit all parts of the Empire, as they are transferred from post to post; but the bulk of the people never get far beyond the range of their own district city. The consequence is that as regards manners and customs, while retaining an indelible national imprint, the Chinese people have drifted apart into separate local communities; so that what is true of one part of the country is by no means necessarily true of another. The Chinese themselves say that manners, which they think are due to climatic influences, change every thirty miles; customs, which they attribute to local idiosyncrasies, change every three hundred miles. Now, a globe-trotter goes to Canton, and as one of the sights of that huge collection of human beings, he is taken to shops,—there used to be three,—where the flesh of dogs, fed for the purpose, is sold as food. He comes home, and writes a book, and says that the Chinese people live on dogs' flesh. When I was a boy, I thought that every Frenchman had a frog for breakfast. Each statement would be about equally true. In the north of China, dogs' flesh is unknown; and even in the south, during all my years in China I never succeeded in finding any Chinaman who either could, or would, admit that he had actually tasted it. Take the random statement that any rich man condemned to death can procure a substitute by payment of so much. So long as we believe stuff of that kind, so long will the Chinese remain a mystery for us, it being difficult to deduce true conclusions from false premises. As a matter of fact, that is, so far as my own observations go, the Chinese people value life every whit as highly as we do, and a substitute of the kind would be quite unprocurable under ordinary circumstances. It is thinkable that some poor wretch, himself under sentence of death, might be substituted with the connivance of the officials, to hoodwink foreigners; but even then the difficulties would be so great as to render the scheme almost impracticable. For in China everything leaks out. There is none of that secrecy necessary to conceal and carry out such a plot. At any rate, the uncertainty which gathers around many of these points emphasises the necessity of more and more accurate scholarship in Chinese, and more and more accurate information on the people of China and their ways. How the latter article is supplied to us in England, you may judge from some extracts which I have recently taken from respectable daily and weekly newspapers. For instance, "China has only one hundred physicians to a population of four hundred millions."