One would imagine that these beautiful and choice epitomes of all the virtues would have made the Chinese a highly moral and virtuous people, but they have not done so. The exquisite sentences that give you a thrill as you read them for the first time, stare down upon the inmates and upon the passers-by without the remotest apparent effect upon any one. The opium-hued runner, and the mandarin whose sole aim is to enrich himself, pass in and out of the Yamen with sentences that extol righteousness and benevolences as the highest virtues, but the Yamen remains unchanged, and continues to be the abode of the greatest villainies. It is an undoubted fact that it has the worst reputation for roguery and cheating and chicanery, and the violation of all justice, of any other place throughout the kingdom. This is no new development of modern times, but has been in existence from ages immemorial.[4] It is not, moreover, the result of any class legislation, for all the mandarins spring from the masses, and therefore all their vices and defects are inherited from them. There needs a renovation of the whole social fabric to make men honest in life, and to cause them to refrain from the practice of things that would never be tolerated in the common life of the Englishman of to-day. The methods of judicial procedure in China are entirely different from those in the West. There is no jury, no summoning and questioning of witnesses, and no lawyers to defend their clients or to expound the law, so as to deliver them from any penalties they might have incurred. Everything is left in the hands of the judge, who takes whatever view may seem to him to be the best in the case, and to decide without any reference to law books or statutes or to legal precedents. A case, for example, is going to be tried. A man is accused of robbing a grave, one of the most heinous crimes of which a Chinaman can be guilty. As it is one of the axioms of Chinese law that an accused person is assumed to be guilty, he is brought in forcibly and with brutal roughness by some of the runners, wildly declaring that he is absolutely guiltless of the offence with which he is charged.