Few things are more noticeable in China than the incessant chattering
kept up by servants, coolies, and members of the working classes. It
is rare to meet a string of porters carrying their heavy burdens along
some country road, who are not jabbering away, one and all, as if in
the very heat of some exciting discussion, and afraid that their
journey will come to an end before their most telling arguments are
exhausted. One wonders what ignorant, illiterate fellows like these
can possibly have to talk about to each other in a country where
beer-shop politics are unknown, where religious disputations leave no
sting behind, and want of communication limits the area of news to
half-a-dozen neighbouring streets in a single agricultural village.
Comparing the uncommunicative deportment of a bevy of English
bricklayers, who will build a house without exchanging much beyond an
occasional pipe-light, with the vivacious gaiety of these
light-hearted sons of Han, the problem becomes interesting enough to
demand a solution of the question--What is it these Chinamen talk
about? And the answer is, _Money_. It may be said they talk, think,
dream of nothing else. They certainly live for little besides the hope
of some day compassing, if not wealth, at any rate a competency. The
temple of Plutus--to be found in every Chinese city--is rarely without
a suppliant; but there is no such hypocrisy in the matter as that of
the Roman petitioner who would pray aloud for virtue and mutter
"gold." And yet a rich man in China is rather an object of pity than
otherwise. He is marked out by the officials as their lawful prey, and
is daily in danger of being called upon to answer some false, some
trumped-up accusation. A subscription list, nominally for a charitable
purpose, for building a bridge, or repairing a road, is sent to him by
a local magistrate, and woe be to him if he does not head it with a
handsome sum. A ruffian may threaten to charge him with murder unless
he will compromise instantly for Tls. 300; and the rich man generally
prefers this course to proving his innocence at a cost of about Tls.
3000. He may be accused of some trivial disregard of prescribed
ceremonies, giving a dinner-party, or arranging the preliminaries of
his son's marriage, before the days of mourning for his own father
have expired. No handle is too slight for the grasp of the greedy
mandarin, especially if he has to do with anything like a recalcitrant
millionaire. But this very mandarin himself, if compelled by age and
infirmities to resign his place, is forced in his turn to yield up
some of the ill-gotten wealth with which he had hoped to secure the
fortunes of his family for many a generation to come. The young hawks
peck out the old hawks' e'en without remorse. The possession of money
is therefore rather a source of anxiety than happiness, though this
doesn't seem to diminish in the slightest degree the Chinaman's
natural craving for as much of it as he can secure. At the same time,
the abominable system of official extortion must go far to crush a
spirit of enterprise which would otherwise most undoubtedly be rife.
Everybody is so afraid of bringing himself within the clutch of the
law, that innovation is quite out of the question.
Neither in the private life of a rich Chinese merchant do we detect
the same keen enjoyment of his wealth as is felt by many an affluent
western, to whom kindly nature has given the intellect to use it
rightly. The former indulges in sumptuous feasts, but he does not
collect around his table men who can only give him wit in return for
his dinner; he rather seeks out men whose purses are as long as his
own, from amongst whose daughters he may select a well-dowried mate
for his dunderheaded son. He accumulates vast wardrobes of silk,
satin, and furs; but he probably could not show a copy of the first
edition of K'ang Hsi, or a single bowl bearing the priceless stamp of
six hundred years ago. These articles are collected chiefly by
scholars, who often go without a meal or two in order to obtain the
coveted specimen; the rich merchant spends his money chiefly on
dinners, dress, and theatrical entertainments, knowing and caring
little or nothing about art. His conversation is also, like that of
his humbler countrymen, confined to one topic; if he is a banker,
rates of exchange haunt him day and night; whatever he is, he lives in
daily dread of the next phase of extortion to which he will be obliged
to open an unwilling purse. How different from the literati of China
who live day by day almost from hand to mouth, eking out a scanty
subsistence by writing scrolls for door-posts, and perhaps presenting
themselves periodically at the public examinations, only to find that
their laboured essays are thrown out amongst the ruck once more! Yet
these last are undeniably the happier of the two. Having no wealth to
excite the rapacious envy of their rulers, they pass through life in
rapt contemplation of the sublime attributes of their Master,
forgetting even the pangs of hunger in the elucidation of some obscure
passage in the Book of Changes, and caring least of all for the idol
of their unlettered brethren, except in so far as it would enable them
to make more extensive purchases of their beloved books, and provide a
more ample supply of the "four jewels" of the scholar. Occasionally to
be seen in the streets, these literary devotees may be known by their
respectable but poverty-stricken appearance, generally by their
spectacles, and always by their stoop, acquired in many years of
incessant toil. These are the men who hate us with so deep a hate, for
we have dared to set up a rival to the lofty position so long occupied
by Confucius alone. If we came in search of trade only, they would
tolerate, because they could understand our motives, and afford to
despise; but to bring our religion with us, to oppose the precepts of
Christ to the immortal apophthegms of the Master, this is altogether
too much for the traditions in which they have been brought up.