"Surely," I cried, "you do not believe that your doctors are better than
ours! You don't mean to say that an intelligent and educated man like
you thinks that there is merit in powdered toads, and snake liver-pills!
You don't believe for an instant that incantations to drive away devils
can be of the slightest benefit to a girl with a bullet through her
lungs!"
Big Sam looked away from me with something of shame and discomposure in
his face. The yellow mask dropped away for a moment, and I could read
in his countenance the struggle that was going on in his mind between
the veneer of western education and the inborn basic faith in the system
evolved by his fathers.
"If you had asked me a week ago, and purely as a matter of theory," he
said slowly, "I should have replied that your doctors were far superior
to ours--that the medical practice of our people was merely superstition
reduced to an absurdity."
"Your good sense would have spoken," I said.
"But now," he continued, "it is not a matter of theory that I have to
consider. It is a life and death problem. Immense interests--my
future--perhaps the future of the Chinese in this country--are all at
stake. And who am I, to throw aside the wisdom of my ancestors and call
it folly? There are powers in the earth and in the air that you and I
do not understand. There are forces that you and I do not know how to
use. I have seen things that science--even your science--can not
explain. May not the race know what the common man does not know? Does
not the experience of three thousand years count for more than our ideas
of what is reasonable? Our ideas! What are they but bubbles blown in
air, now seen, now gone into nothingness? Here is a scrap of paper. I
crumple it thus, and throw it out of the window. It is blown here and
there--up the street, down the street, around the corner--and it comes
at last to the rubbish pile and is burned. And because it has found
nothing but pavements and buildings in its course it scoffs at the
stories of green fields, mountains, forests, the powers of nature and
the works of man that it has not seen. Is that not the attitude of
civilized man, Mr. Hampden?"
"We must believe our experience, our observation and our intelligence;
they are the only guides we have," I replied.
"The savage is much more reasonable," said Big Sam, with the air of one
who argues with himself. "He makes allowance for the universe outside
his little round of experience." He rose from his seat with a troubled
face, as though to relieve his stress of thought by walking. Then, as
if ashamed at the loss of his customary calm, he sat down once more.