I was going about a good deal and it worried me to be pulled around by a human being so emaciated. One morning our regular boy was missing. Another replaced him, cheery and smiling. Three days later the first returned. He had been sick, he said; he had had smallpox. The scabs had not yet peeled off. I spoke to the doorman at the hotel, who managed the rickshas. “This boy is not well enough to work.” “Oh, yes, he’s used to it. He feels a little bad, but he’s all right.” Nevertheless, I sent him home to rest up. Nothing save famine and pestilence and plague seemed to give the Chinese any breathing spell. It was said the average ricksha coolie lasted but four or five years—the remainder of his life he merely subsisted. I was submerged in a strange despondency and questioned “the oldest civilization in the world” which still, after so many thousand years, permitted this barbarism. Grant rode a donkey when we went to the Ming tombs, and the guide did also. I was carried in a chair for miles and miles through an arid, dusty plain. Two coolies held the lengthy bamboo poles on their shoulders and a third jogged alongside waiting to take his turn. I felt so sorry for them I wanted to get out and walk. I wished I could carry myself. All the way these poor, starved creatures made animal noises, “Aah-huh, aah-huh,” nasal, interminable, varying the tone but slightly; even their words sounded like grunts to me. China was not yet past the story-telling age, as you saw in the theater, where someone recited the news from the stage; for a copper anybody could hear what was going on in the world. The ancient classical forms of the Chinese language were intelligible to scholars alone, and Dr. Hu-Shih had been instrumental in devising a literary vernacular which the people could use. This philosopher who at three years old had been familiar with eight hundred characters, now in 1922, while only in his late twenties, was already reputed to be the initiator of the Chinese Renaissance. He asked whether I would speak to the students of the Peking National University and, though he was to act as chairman, volunteered also to interpret, which I esteemed an almost unheard-of honor. His outlook, coinciding with mine, recognized what birth control might mean for civilization. Dr. Tsai Yuen-Pei, the Chancellor of the University and a leader of the anti-Christian movement, had gathered into his fold the most brilliant students of Young China, all of them bubbling over with interest at Western ideas, which were sweeping the globe. A great turmoil was going on in their lives and a revolt against rigid Chinese tradition.