We have already mentioned that the villager who has been far from home is a conspicuous exception to the general vacuity of mind so often to be met. He has a rich and a varied experience which he is willing although not forward to relate. But it is a striking fact that the man of this sort when he returns to go abroad no more, tends speedily to relapse into the prevailing type. He may have been in every one of the Eighteen Provinces, or possibly in foreign lands, yet on his settling down to his old ways he has no more curiosity to know what is going on elsewhere, than a man who had at some time in his life been shipwrecked would have to know what had become of the schools of fish with which for a time he was in fortuitous proximity. When it is considered how vast a proportion of the whole population live in villages, and when we contemplate in detail the meagreness and poverty of the mental output, an impressive conception is gained of the intellectual barrenness of the Flowery Empire. The phenomena which we everywhere see are the outward expression of inner forces which have been at work for more than two thousand years. The longer they are considered and the more thoroughly they are understood the more profoundly will it be seen and felt that the "answer to Confucianism is China." XXV UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM OF THE CHINESE FAMILY The family is the unit of Chinese social life and, as we have often had occasion to observe, the Chinese Family is a highly complex organization, with many aspects which sometimes appear mutually contradictory. To the consideration of one of these polyhedral faces we now turn, asking the reader to bear well in mind that while what we have to say contains important truth, this is but one out of many points of view. The instability of the equilibrium of the Chinese family arises from its constitution, from its environment, and from the relation between the two. Let us first glance at some of the exterior causes. In a large portion of the empire the rain-fall is more or less uncertain, rendering famine a perpetual possibility. Within the past quarter of a century foreigners in China have had superabundant opportunities to study the phenomena of famine upon a great scale. The misery thus occasioned is inconceivable, but we wish to refer only to the resultant disruption of families. Nothing is more common than to find that the father has gone to some distant region hoping to secure a bare sustenance leaving the wife and children to shift for themselves. This is not because he does not care for them, nor because he desires the separation, but because there is literally "no help for it."