[Sidenote: The People.] The people, numbering about four hundred million, live chiefly in large towns and in dense settlements along the rivers. Millions live on the rivers in houseboats. The Chinese are industrious and thrifty and at the same time ignorant and exceedingly unprogressive. Only a small class is educated, and education, like all else that is Chinese, has hitherto looked to the past for its subject matter. It consists of the fixing in mind of the ancient classical writings and the acquiring of the ancient, classical style. To the foreigner the language offers obstacles which are almost insurmountable. There are only four hundred different words, but these are so modified by inflections and by the tone of the voice that their variations are legion. One of the early missionaries said that in order to acquire the Chinese language one must have a “body of brass, lungs of steel, a head of oak, the eyes of eagles, the heart of an apostle, the memory of an angel and the life of Methuselah”. The written language is even more difficult to learn than the spoken language and both present the greatest difficulty to the missionary in that they contain no such words as sin, holiness, regeneration, spirit, God, which are so essential a part of the Christian vocabulary. [Sidenote: Religion.] Three religions are firmly established, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. These are not clearly differentiated, by any means, but the individual frequently selects from each the elements which please him. Doctor Warneck describes this strange eclectic religion as follows: “All of them reverence Confucius, regulate their life--to a certain extent--according to his precepts, and are devoted to ancestor worship; all have recourse, especially in sickness and need, to the magic arts and superstitious hocus pocus of the Taoists and almost all commend their souls at death to the Buddhist priests, have masses read for the soul and make use of the Buddhist burial ceremonial. The polite man says to the man of different belief, and the enlightened man who no longer believes anything repeats it: ‘The three doctrines come to the same thing in the end’.” There are in China also about thirty million Mohammedans. [Sidenote: Character.] The Chinese character is as difficult to impress as the Chinese language is hard to learn. Since the Chinese worships that which is old, the stranger and foreigner seems to him indeed a “devil”; since he is self-righteous, he does not consider himself an object for missionary effort. It was at first laughable to him that missionaries should come to his land with so foolish a purpose. In scores of cases he punished the effrontery of their undertaking with death.