A splendid task for some scholar of unlimited patience and a mathematical turn of mind would be to count the graves in China and compute how many sadly needed acres they withdraw from cultivation. He might offer a thesis on the subject, in exchange for the right to wear the letters “Ph.D.” Unfortunately he could not complete the task in a mere lifetime, or just a century or two, but the undertaking might be handed down, Chinese fashion, from father to son, until data were forthcoming that might in time make an impression even on the Celestial mind. This worshiping of ancestors is all very well, if only the living could also be given a fair deal. The constant sight of undernourished multitudes grubbing out a scant escape from starvation in the interstices between the sacred mounds of earth littering almost every Chinese landscape recalls the story of Bridget tearfully refusing Pat a taste before he died of the roasting pork that smelled so good to him, because it was all needed for the wake.

Reflections of this simple nature were inclined to crowd out all other impressions during another of my cross-country jaunts in Shantung, this time northward to an ancient city still popularly called Loa-An. For the way led through Lin-tze, also walled, aged, and dreaming of the past, which in the days of Confucius was in the heart of the kingdom of Chi, as the home of the sage was in that of the neighboring one of Lu. For miles about it, therefore, the princes of Chi lie buried, not under the mere cones of earth of ordinary ancestors, but beneath hillocks and hills, and what sometimes seem across the floor-flat country to be almost mountains. Some are still so respected that the groves of mainly evergreen trees about them, beautifying the usual bare nudity of Chinese graves, have survived to this day, and one or two are guarded at a respectful distance by a standing stone giant who recalls those of Egypt or of the southern shores of Lake Titicaca. Then there are many lesser lights, such as always cluster about a court, and innumerable areas are sacred to other ancient families, the mounds graduated in size and state of repair from the principal one of the collection at the back to the small ones so far out in front that the peasants dare to cultivate close about them. Remnants of tissue-paper “money” donated to the dead all over China at the New Year still fluttered from the peak of many a mound, some of which dated so far back, perhaps, that live servants and domestic animals were buried in them, instead of the flimsy paper substitutes for these that are burned at modern funerals, along with papier-mÂchÉ automobiles containing a pair of painted chauffeurs and a concubine or two; but more than anything else, even of the sense of antiquity, one was impressed by the endlessness, the uncountability of the grave-mounds of all sizes.

Draft-animals, if only a cow or a donkey, or the two hitched together, were drawing crude but effective plows and what American farmers call a “drag,” on which the driver stands, raising clouds of dust behind him. But the dodging of graves seemed to be the most serious task of all, far as we rode northward, and one could fancy the undernourished peasants, suddenly struck with Western seeing in place of blind custom, deciding that it is high time these aged mounds are leveled off, or at least planted over. Possibly that miracle will some day come to pass, and China will by a turn of her hand increase her productive land by several provinces, without extending her boundaries or robbing her neighbors of an acre.

This time I used still another of Shantung’s many modes of locomotion,—a bicycle. It has its advantages in a flat country where the roads are often narrow paths, and where a vehicle that cannot be lifted about by hand now and then is limited in its range. But when it chances that a raging head wind blows both going and coming, and the contrivance between one’s aching legs emanates from a Chicago mail-order house, there are certain things to envy the traveler by wheelbarrow. In a way the season was poorly chosen, too, for though the day was cloudless and warm, plowing was on, and while the Chinese peasant leaves unmolested the graves that dot his little field, he often plows up the road. Thus a route which at best was an alternating between the bottom of a ditch deep in dust and a precariously narrow and by no means continuous path often on the sheer edge of it, frequently became a trackless field, plowed by draft-animals or chopped up with the clumsy, sledge-heavy adz-hoe still used in China. Rye and barley, and above all peanuts, were to be the principal crops wherever winter wheat was not already showing its tender green. One does not at first thought closely associate the two, but peanuts and missionaries are likely to lie side by side on the floor of the Chinese coolie’s mental granary. The Chinese had a peanut before the missionaries came, and still cultivate it to a certain extent. But it is so tiny and dry that it looks more like the end of a pea-pod, with a pea or two left in it, that has survived several winters in a very dry place—and the taste does not dispel this illusion. American missionaries brought the much more profitable variety from Georgia in an effort to improve the conditions of Shantung, and to-day the American peanuts grown in China probably run into millions of bushels, dotting every market-place and producing oil enough to supply the world with peanut-butter.

Loa-An is no longer officially known by that name, and thereby hangs a typically Chinese tale. Soon after the establishment of what passes in the outside world for a republic, it was decreed that deeds of land-holdings must be registered again, though this had been done quite recently under the Manchus. The registry fee was to be a dollar and twenty cents, of which 70 per cent was to go to the Government and the rest to the local magistrate. Now, a dollar and twenty cents, even in “Mex,” is a lot of money to a Shantung peasant, with the tiny parcel of land which the custom of dividing among the sons of each generation has left him, and a decade ago it was still more so. Moreover, the magistrate should have known that in China government decrees are not necessarily meant to be carried out, at least beyond the point of individual discretion. But he was of the aggressive type of official, sadly needed perhaps but not always successful in China, and his insistence on having the order obeyed to the letter reached the point where he helped to carry it out in person. The wrath of the country-side increased. One day when the magistrate was some forty li out of town in the interest of thorough collections and an honest return of them from his constables, a band of peasants fell upon him and chopped him to death with their hoe-hooks.

Soldiers were hurried to Loa-An, where they oppressed the population for months in the time-honored Chinese way, and finally lopped off eight heads. None of these had been the leading spirits in the assassination, nor perhaps had any real part in it at all, but they had been the easiest to catch; and, their duty ended, according to Chinese lights, the soldiers withdrew. But the Government saw fit to inflict a heinous punishment on the city of Loa-An itself, for the crime of permitting such a crime within its district. Loa-An means “Rejoicing and Peace,” as nearly as it can be translated; it was ordered henceforth to call itself Gwang-Rao. Does this mean “Bunch of Rascals,” or something of the sort, as we of the West might suppose? It does not; it means FarReaching Forgiveness, for, as I have already had occasion to remark, the Chinese mind may have been originally built on the same specifications as our own, but its manner of functioning has grown quite different during the many centuries that separate us. For one thing, it refuses to jar itself by sudden readjustments, and Gwang-Rao is still spoken of as Lao-An in ninety cases out of a hundred.

As is so often the case throughout China, much of the population and the business of Lao-An have gathered outside the city walls, where there are certain advantages which the American suburbanite will understand. Inside, there is that atmosphere of an old ladies’ home which one feels in an aged New England village off the trail of modern progress—though certainly in outward appearance there are no two things more dissimilar than a New England village and a Chinese walled town. An immense pond or lake takes up a whole corner of the enclosure, licking away at the inner base of the crumbling wall. In its prime this was almost majestic, higher than anything within it, broad enough for a “Peking cart” to drive comfortably upon it, the crenelated parapets armed with small cannon of curious casting which now lie rusting away wherever chance has rolled them. There are other open spaces within the walls, some cultivated, some merely idle, but the town itself is compact enough, with one long trough of dust or mud as a main street, lined by baked-earth houses of one form or another, enlivened only by an occasional hawker marking his leisurely progress by some Chinese species of noise, or a long unlaundered family group enjoying the brilliant sunshine of early spring.

Outside it is different,—movement, crowding, an uproar of wide-open shops and transient venders, all noisily contending for patronage, dwellings that are almost imposing in their milieu, and, in the outskirts, a large Presbyterian school and mission under an unusually trusted Chinese pastor. His board beds may not have been the last word in comfort, but they were many times nearer that than a passing guest could have found in all the rest of the district. The auditing, counseling, and moral sustenance for which the white-haired missionary I had accompanied made his annual visit to Lao-An, with a brief service by the honored visitor and a few moments in the unheated school-rooms, where full outdoor garb was in order, left us time to go to prison before we faced the head wind again. It was typical probably of most local limbos in Shantung, unless the weekly services which the pastor had been allowed to give there for a year now had remodeled the moral outlook of the prisoners as completely as he believed: cells that were larger than the average inmate had at home, and not overcrowded, by Chinese standards, tolerable food and plenty of sunshine, a certain semi-freedom at times in the yards, and in contrast iron fetters about the neck, waist, and ankles in most cases, with clanking chains connecting them. The prisoners got five coppers a day to feed themselves—more than a whole American cent! Yet they lived well, according to the pastor, and could save money. Three coppers paid for a catty (a pound and a third) of millet, and the grain hong saw to it that they got good measure. What average Shantung countryman is sure of a catty of millet a day? Besides, they were paid for their work. The young and spry could earn as much as ten coppers daily making hair-nets, and the older ones, with their more clumsy fingers, half as much weaving dee-tze—girdles, I suppose we would call them, though the Chinese use twice as many of them about their ankles as around their waists. Then Loa-An gets great quantities of a rush the size of a lead-pencil from nearer the mouth of the Yellow River, and from these are fashioned baskets and scoops, and shallow basins for the feeding of animals, buckets for use at wells, winnowing pans, and, strangest of all, a thick winter shoe that looks like an infant Roman galley.

All the romance of hair-nets is not limited to the tresses they confine. Shantung, and to a lesser degree some neighboring provinces, has known some of it. Until Europe went mad, hair-nets were made mainly in France. America, callous upstart, continued to demand them even though the guns were thundering. Some of the materials had always come from China, though the French were much given to the use of horsehair; now it occurred to some genius that the Chinese might be taught to make them on the spot. A small town in Shantung became the center of the new industry; later it gravitated naturally to Chefoo. Every one took to turning discarded cues and combings into nets; children learned to tie them; coolies forced their clumsy fingers to it when nothing else offered; in mission churches women pinned the things to one another’s backs and went on tying the little knots while they listened to the sermon. The making of hair-nets kept many from starvation in famine days, even though the wholesalers took advantage of the situation and paid the hungry toilers as little as possible. Even in the best of times the workers make no fortune. They are paid by the gross of nets; women and children working at odd times can earn from five to ten coppers a day; those who are skilled and put in all their time at it make from thirty-five to fifty coppers—ten to thirteen cents gold—when the nets are selling at their highest, five to seven dollars “Mex” a gross. Just now they were down to half that, and with a great oversupply of nets on the market and fashion turning toward the double-strand net, the makers were getting hardly three American cents a dozen.

Many wholesalers, on the other hand, have quickly gotten rich out of hair-nets. There is a barber, for instance, who is known to have laid up ten thousand dollars in three or four years, a great fortune in China even to men far above the lowly barber caste. But the newly rich are not so kindly treated where class lines are still rather sharply drawn and precedent especially tenacious. His envious neighbors overwhelmed their former hair-cutter with lawsuits, the most common and effective form of Chinese community persecution; though he turned his money into land he can neither live on nor rent it, so virulent is the prejudice against him. With the coming of hair-nets the bicycle trade boomed. This was the only quick way of getting about the country, and the buyers could carry thousands of nets back with them. The Germans of Tsingtao had good FahrrÄder to offer at reasonable prices, and made the most of their opportunity. Then came a slump in the trade, hints of the reasons for which in time reached the wholesalers, if not the makers. American girls had taken to bobbing their hair! But this fad had begun to die out again, and already the people of overcrowded Shantung were feeling the effect of this in fuller bowls of rice.

In wandering about Shantung I was constantly coming across coolies who had been to France. One could generally tell them at a glance, from some remnant of uniform, or their way of wearing what they had chosen when that wore out, perhaps by a certain air of something that was not exactly what we popularly dub “freshness,” yet which was more or less distantly related to it. Besides, they seldom waited long on the chance of recognition, but greeted the foreigner with the self-confidence of familiarity and proceeded to impress their fellow-countrymen who had been denied their advantages, and who never failed to gather about in as great a circle as the community afforded.

The British and, to some extent, the French, took large numbers of coolies overseas for work behind the lines, mainly from Shantung and southern China. Some three hundred thousand went from this northern province, at first slowly and with misgivings, then more eagerly, as propaganda and the reports of those who had gone ahead filtered out through the villages. The French made some arrangement whereby their recruits seem to have been much lower paid, yet to have come home more contented, than those with the British. The latter offered them ten Chinese dollars a month in France and an equal amount to their families at home, with of course transportation, food, and clothing. This was so high that at first the coolies would not believe it; these wily foreigners must have something else up their sleeves, they told one another, putting them out in front of the soldiers perhaps, for it was a rare coolie who had ever earned half the amount so glibly offered. But the incredible turned out to be true. Several towns were designated as district headquarters; foreign residents, usually missionaries, were asked to take charge in them, and once a month the nearest of kin of the absent workmen came in and got their ten dollars, in coin. At Weihsien ninety thousand were paid monthly for several years, for the coolies of the labor battalions were not returned until 1920, after the carrying of troops had been completed. Up to that time the Chinese with the British had been quite satisfied. But when they came to draw what they had saved during their years abroad there was an uproar. In the contract made with them “Mex” dollars were specified; there was no mention of francs. But in France they were of course paid in the money of the country, and the amounts they chose to lay aside were credited to them in francs. By the time they came to draw their savings the franc had crashed. Being from China they should have been wiser on the vagaries of exchange than the American “doughboy”; but they insisted that the British had promised to pay them in the dollars of their home-land, and raised such a hullabaloo that the matter reached the honor of being discussed in Parliament, though that was its loftiest attainment. The resentment at what was considered a raw deal by tricky foreigners has somewhat died out in Shantung now, and many a man would willingly go abroad for the British again; but the few wise or lucky coolies who turned their francs back into dollars as they saved them, and then meddled with the exchange in those glorious days when the gold dollar went down to about eighty cents “Mex,” are still the envy of their comrades. In an almost entirely illiterate throng, thousands of miles from home and all its exchange-shops and customs, and filled from childhood with suspicion of their fellow-men, it is easy to guess about how many took advantage of this opportunity.

One suspects that it was from the highest point of honor attained by this painful subject that there originated an attempt to soften the resentment that only resulted in increasing it. Legislative bodies the world over have a reputation for bone-headedness. One day word was sent out over Shantung and beyond that if coolies who had been to France for the British would report back to the centers where they had been discharged and paid they would learn something to their advantage. Aha, ting hao! they are going to give us all the money they promised after all, said the coolies, and began to flock in from all directions, often from considerable distances. Some came overland all the way from Tientsin, not being able to afford the railroad. When they arrived they were each given a nice brass medal to hang about their necks, with a likeness of their grateful ex-employer, King Georgie, on one side and words of similar sentiment on the other. Any one with thirty cents’ worth of understanding of the psychology of the Chinese coolie could have told the thoughtful originators of this idea that an extra cumshaw of a dollar or two would have won his everlasting gratitude far more than a medal graced with the vapid faces of all the kings of Christendom—and probably have cost less money. But textbooks on psychology, particularly of far-off “heathen” lands, are not required in a politician’s education. At first some of the coolies thought the things were gold, and raced to the exchange-shops accordingly. When these reported that the gaudy gifts were not even coin at all, men drifted out to mission compounds to inquire what they were good for.... “Is it worth anything?” “Well, I’ll give it to you for fifteen coppers.”

Coppers, by the way, are the general medium of exchange in Shantung. Silver dollars pass, though silver fractions of them do not, and bank-notes even of the province have only a limited acceptance. Except in large towns or transactions, every one pays in coppers, the division being the diao. In olden days this meant a thousand “cash” on a string. Now it means forty-nine coppers in most regions. How this decided change came about is only another of the queer stories with which monetary matters bristle in China. One day the Manchu dynasty decided it could get plenty of money to pay its grumbling troops merely by decreeing that thenceforth a diao would be five hundred, not a thousand, “cash.” Every one would be compelled to accept the new rating, on penalty of severe punishment, and the surplus five hundred “cash” would accrue to the Government. As late as the beginning of the present century the brass “cash” was the only money used in the interior of Shantung; in those days my missionary friends had taken an extra wheelbarrow with them to carry their change. Then in 1902 the copper began to be minted. Ten “cash” make a copper; fifty coppers therefore should make a modern diao; but in most places one of them goes to some one, identity unknown but strongly suspected, as the inevitable “squeeze” of all Chinese transactions.

Probably a majority of the third-class tickets sold on the Tientsin-Pukow line in Shantung are paid for from clothfuls of coppers handed in at the window, the cloth and any excess coins being returned with the ticket. The foreigner who produces a silver dollar when only a few cents are needed will be deluged with a shower of huge coppers sufficient to fill an overcoat pocket. The general run of prices and wages in Shantung is suggested by some of those paid by my missionary companion. Master masons were receiving fifty-four coppers a day, their helpers thirty-six—a copper being approximately half a farthing or the fourth of an American cent. In the good old days of a decade or more back they were satisfied with fifteen and ten respectively, though the copper was then worth 50 per cent more than at present. Country pastors are paid twenty Chinese dollars a month, those in towns all the way from that to forty, “Bible women” eight dollars, “evangelists” (unordained preachers who also work on their farms) receive eleven, teachers from eighteen to forty, and native doctors fifty.

At Weihsien “Peking carts” are the almost exclusive means of transportation, though forty miles west a similar town has only wheelbarrows. This important half-way station between Tzinan and Tsingtao lies in the heart of what was thirty centuries ago the kingdom of Wei, and the landscape on either side of it is littered with monuments and graves. Shantung is much given to elaborately carved stone p’ai-lous, or p’ai-fangs, as they are more often called in that province, and these imposing memorial arches to virtuous widows or officials more or less willingly honored naturally outlast the mainly wooden ones in Peking and vicinity. Stone horses completely saddled and bridled, stirrups hanging ready for instant use, stood with other less familiar animals before some of the graves, awaiting their riders these many centuries; and groves of evergreens, some of them overtopped by the four reddish upright poles bearing a kind of ship’s crow’s-nest which means that the principal deceased of the group some time in the bygone ages passed the examinations for the highest rank of Chinese scholar, were a little more frequent about them than is general in northern China, though there were still far too many of the one and too few of the other.

Weihsien is really two distinct cities, each surrounded by a massive stone wall, with a sandy-bedded river between them. But the farther one was not walled until the days of the Taiping Rebellion, and it is still regarded as a suburb of the other. Thanks to spring rain and water-carriers, the streets of both were rivers of mud in which a mule-cart was almost indispensable even for the shortest distance, and an ordeal into the bargain. Weihsien had indeed recently imported her first rickshaws, but all three of them were without rubber tires or experienced runners, which made the first jaunts in them by a few of the town dandies an experience to be remembered rather than to be repeated or recommended, and the fear was expressed that these evidences of modern progress would be withdrawn for lack of appreciation. However, the new autobus line to Chefoo starts from Weihsien, and motor-cars have become almost familiar sights to those who have come out to see them at the edge of the suburb, beyond which they cannot penetrate. There should long since have been a branch railway to Chefoo. Ocean communication with that important silk and hair-net center is irregular and uncertain—except from Dairen over in Japanese-controlled Manchuria. But so long as they held the Shantung Railway the Japanese would not permit this extension, lest Chefoo become a serious rival to their beloved Dairen. So the usual raised dirt highway has been built, with frequent guarded barriers to keep others off it, and along this the few still movable contrivances of all sizes and makes which were bought second-hand from the Japanese before they evacuated Shantung stagger in a daily service scheduled to make the journey in a day and a half, with the brick bed of a Chinese inn to break it. The line is under railway management, but one glimpse of the once gasolene-driven wrecks that litter the yard at Weihsien should convince the most foolhardy that to ride behind a Chinese chauffeur is more risky than behind the worst locomotive driver in the Orient. Chefoo, by the way, is unknown to the Chinese; they call it Yentai. Just what misunderstanding on the part of early sailors led to the name by which it is known to all foreigners, including the Japanese, seems never to have been fully cleared up.

When Tzinan was voluntarily opened to trade in 1906, Weihsien, as well as Choutsun farther west, was also designated as a “port”; but though the Chinese laid out “foreign settlements” in them no one came to settle. A stray German or two is all that the city has to offer in this line, except the missionaries. The Catholics have an imposing church building just outside the walls, and there is an important mission school established by one of the pioneers among American Presbyterians in China, far outside the town, where the bitter hostility of those earlier days drove him. When the school was first founded, pupils had to be paid to attend; to-day there are waiting lists at fifty-eight dollars a year—a great deal of money, let it be kept in mind, in Shantung—of which twenty-five dollars pays a year’s board. Millet or kaoliang in a kind of gruel seemed to be the chief diet. Then there was the pickled tuber resembling a turnip that is constantly munched all over Shantung, and which does away with any desire to salt the other food. There were flocks of timid high-school girls in their neat trousers, though missionary influence tends to introduce the skirt, which is surely mistaken zeal for mere change. The trousers are more convenient, more becoming, and certainly many times more modest than the unstable garb of our modern maidens of the West. Formerly many Shantung women of the better class, influenced perhaps by the Manchus, who once had walled towns of bannermen in all this region, wore a skirt over their trousers when they appeared in public, and older missionary ladies can still remember the polite greeting when they reached the home of a Chinese hostess: “Well, take off your skirt and stay a while.”

The large church of the Weihsien mission was well filled at Thursday evening prayer-meeting and packed at the principal Sunday service. Chinese pastors officiated on both occasions. Though the weather was still distinctly cold, no provision for heating the building was made, and one could only guess what it must be in midwinter. Gradually the stone floor congealed the feet and removed them completely from the realms of sensation, but the Chinese, in their full outdoor garb, caps and all, seemed to be as comfortable as they ever have any need to be. Uncovering the head had become so nearly a dead letter that even the two or three American missionaries in their overcoats usually kept their hats on, even when they rose to pray in fluent Chinese. The feminine portion of the congregation occupied the back part of the church, the boys the front and center, graduating back to youths and men behind and on either side; when prayers were offered all rose to their feet instead of kneeling, and the less said of the bold and stentorian “singing” of hymns the better.

A few weeks before my visit the Shantung Railway had been turned over to the Chinese, in accordance with the agreement reached at the Washington Conference. But to go back to the beginning: you will recall that two German missionaries were killed in Shantung in 1897 and that Germany quickly made this a pretext for demanding the lease of Kiaochow Bay, and the concession for a railroad from there to the capital of the province. Though it was a generation since the Chinese Government had been able to still popular uproar against such diabolic contrivances only by buying out the first railway in China, running a few miles out of Shanghai, and shipping it over to Formosa, there was bitter opposition to this one, ostensibly from the superstitious masses, though it is known now that officials and some of the gentry urged the people on. In fact, the building of the Shantung Railway was very largely responsible for the “Boxer” uprising, which had its beginning, as I have said before, in mountainous southern Shantung. The exasperation was partly due to pure superstition, partly to real grievances which the Germans unwittingly perpetrated. They cut through the hill south of Weihsien which had brought the town all its good luck for centuries, and thereby destroyed its beneficence. This matter of feng-shui, of placating the spirits of wind and water, is of the highest importance, and there seems to be no fixed rule in dealing with them. For instance, there is another peak, west of Weihsien, through the top of which a slot quite like a railway cutting was gashed centuries ago at great labor, in order to neutralize the bad luck it brought the town. When they first came the Germans had to depend upon interpreters, and these of course were true Chinese. They would stroll out when they were off duty, or when no one was watching, and drive a survey stake in the top of a grave, perhaps miles from the projected route of the railroad; and a day or two later they would offer to get the stake removed and leave the grave unmolested if the descendants could raise money enough to “bribe the Germans.” When a railroad is surveyed its proposed turns are marked as sharp angles first and the curve is traced inside this later. The interpreters collected handsomely also from farmers for getting the Germans to remove stakes on the points of these angles—where the railroad had never thought of trespassing. In spite of both passive and active opposition the Germans pushed the line rapidly inland; many Chinese Christians free from the popular superstitions or sustained by the missionaries took contracts to prepare the way by sections, and early in the present century locomotives snorted into Tzinanfu.

The line still bears many marks of its original nationality. It is a direct descendant of the railways of Germany—excellently built, with stone ballast in exact military alignment along flanking paths of exactly such a width, iron ties of the reversed trough shape, light rails and fourteen-ton bridges—European rolling stock is not heavy by our standards—well-built stations, service buildings, and grade-markers, still here and there bearing a German name, in spite of eight years of Japanese occupancy, the whole railway still lined for much of its length by the quick-growing acacia-trees which the Germans expected to furnish supports for their mines. Now that the Chinese have returned, one frequently runs across a station-master who speaks German but no English.

It is said that there was more graft under the Germans than under their successors. German inspectors were conspicuous; Japanese ones blended more or less into the general racial landscape. In German days unrecorded telegrams sped along from station to station, “Inspector coming to-day,” and certain customs were temporarily suspended. On other days passengers often got on without tickets, crossed the hand of the Chinese guard with silver, and the latter gave the high sign to the gateman at the disembarking station, dividing the spoils with him at the first convenient opportunity. Whatever their other faults, the Japanese know how to run a railroad, and under them this sort of thing is reputed to have disappeared. Their influence was still distinctly in evidence. The people are said to have liked the Germans better than their successors because, among other things, they were not so strict—which speaks loudly indeed for Japanese sternness. Part of this strictness was the insistence on order instead of the free-for-all methods so loved by the Chinese. The Germans allowed huckstering at the trains; the Japanese licensed and curbed it. They introduced the innovation of standing in line for tickets, instead of the riot in vogue on all purely Chinese railways. It is said that it took the butt of many a rifle and the flat of many a sword to convince the coolies that they should drop back to the end of a cue when there was plenty of room at the front, but as they became more familiar with the language the Japanese, like the Germans before them, got their results with less violence. Foreigners, especially their somewhat kindred island neighbors, can discipline the Chinese as they never could themselves. The weakest thing in China is discipline, and there is not moral fiber enough in the country—or there is too much gentleness in the Chinese temperament, whichever way you choose to put it—to cure such things from within.

A private carriage, Shantung style