If one desires to understand the Chinese, he must study the family life, for there we find the secret for much that is amusing and perplexing in their character. In all the long years of Chinese history, the ideal of the family has been an exalted one. Ancient sages have dealt with much eloquence upon it, and it has been made the model upon which the State has been built up. It is declared in books written on China that the Chinese Government is a patriarchal one, the meaning of which, put into simpler language, is that the system by which this vast and ancient Empire is ruled has been borrowed from any one of the countless homes that exist throughout the land. It has been plainly stated by Confucius, more than two thousand years ago, that a man that did not know how to rule his home was quite unfit to govern a kingdom. That the family ideal is held in the highest honour by every class of society is evident from the fact that every one that can by any possibility scrape together the amount required to be paid to the parents of the young girl, gets married; whilst for every woman, without any regard for her personal appearance or even for her infirmities, when the marriageable age comes round, a marriage is arranged, and she is carried to her husband's home with as much ceremony as though she were the most beautiful woman in the land. If a woman does not get married it is her own fault or that of her family, who for selfish or other reasons fail to make the necessary arrangements for her, and never because her features are uncomely or her complexion bad, or because she has some bodily infirmity that in England would condemn her to a spinster's life, though she lived to the age of Methuselah. Let us now take the case of a family, such as one may see anywhere, and look at the peculiar way in which it is built up and developed in accordance with the antique methods that seem dear to the Yellow brain in this land. A young man is going to be married. The parents have decided that question for him, and they have called in a middle-woman, who does all the selecting and all the courting that is possible in China, and by her intrigues and falsehoods, the girl that is to be his bride is settled for him absolutely, without any power of appeal from the sons or the parents should they discover by and by that the young lady would be an undesirable acquisition when she came into their home.