The most striking characteristic of the Chinese, says Mr. Arthur H. Smith, an American missionary who has lived twenty-two years in China, in his admirable book ‘Chinese Characteristics,’ is their remarkable manner of ‘facing’ a thing. To save appearances, or to ‘face’ a difficulty cunningly rather than boldly, is the endeavour of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of the Son of Heaven, and is the key, moreover, to a great many other matters that might otherwise appear incomprehensible. Every Chinaman considers himself an actor, whose public words, acts, and deeds have nothing in common with reality. The most praiseworthy and even the most innocent of actions, unless it be performed in a certain way, will only cover its author with shame and ridicule. If a fault is committed, the guilty party is expected to deny it with the utmost effrontery in spite of convincing evidence, and on no account must he confess himself guilty, even if he is obliged to repair the injury done. From the highest to the lowest, the Chinese entertain a profound respect for shamming. A boy caught stealing will slip the coveted object up his sleeves, stoop down and pretend to pick it up, and with the smile of an angel present it to his master, saying, ‘Here is what you have lost.’ A little over a hundred years ago the mandarins who were escorting Macartney, the English Ambassador, into the presence of the Son of Heaven, profited by his ignorance of their language to place over his carriage an inscription to the effect that it contained ‘the Ambassador bringing tribute from the Kingdom of England,’ and thus kept up the fiction of the universal sovereignty of their lord and master. Undoubtedly the observance of a certain amount of etiquette is both useful and praiseworthy, and so considered by all civilized nations; but Chinese etiquette is the most punctilious and complicated that was ever imagined, and never on any account to be neglected for a single instant. This excessive attention to outward forms, which, if they be but observed, may conceal any kind of iniquity, explains the fact that in China there is a deeper gulf between theory and practice than in any other country in the world. That it has always been so may be questioned, but at present the morals of Confucius have long since been lost in a code of etiquette which defines virtue as consisting in the observance to the letter of the three hundred rules of ceremony and the three thousand regulations of conduct, without paying the least attention to the spirit in which they were originally formulated.