The manufacturing of the blind—“Before born”—The Rev. Hill Murray—“The Message”—Geography—Marriage—A brave little explorer—Massacre of the blind—Deposits of one tael—A missionary career—The charitable Chinese—A Buddhist orphanage—Invitation to a funeral—An intellectual abbot—The youngest orphan—Pity and mercy.

The blind musician I had seen playing to the village folk with the setting sun, that he could not see, on his face, remained in my mind. Why especially, I do not know, for it is a common enough sight in China. Terrible as is the affliction, the Chinese, by their insanitary habits, more or less manufacture their blind. The cult of the bath is not theirs yet, they live, apparently happily, amongst filthy surroundings, they neglect the eyes of the new-born child, they suffer from smallpox, and ophthalmia, and the barber with his infected razor shaves, not only close round the outside, but with the laudable intention of making all clean and neat, as far down as he can get round the delicate inside of the eyelid. The result one may see any day in the streets of Peking, or any Chinese town. A beggar in China is always a horrible-looking object. He belongs to a guild. His intention is to attract pity, and it would seem to him going the wrong way about it, to begin by being neat and clean. Besides, though many people in China are neat, I suspect very few of them are what we arrogant Westerners would describe as clean, and among a dirty people, the blind beggar stands out, pre-eminent, as the filthiest creature I have ever seen. On the roadside, again and again in a country place where many people are passing, I have seen a half-naked man, who looked as if he had never since his birth even looked at water, clad, or rather half-clad, in filthy rags with raw red sores where his eyes should have been. He was so horrible, so ghastly a specimen of humanity that he seemed almost beyond pity. And yet a blind person always receives a certain amount of respect and consideration from the Chinese, even from the poorest Chinese. Never in his hearing would the roughest rickshaw coolie call him “Hsia Tze” that is “Blind man.” That would be discourteous. Though he be only a beggar, forlorn, hungry, unkempt, he is still addressed by all passers as “Hsien Sheng,” “Before Born,” a title of respect that is given to teachers, doctors, and men of superior rank and age.

Hard though, in spite of the respect that is paid them, must be the lot of those who are handicapped by the loss of sight. It is hard in any land, but in China, where even among those in full possession of their senses, there are hundreds of thousands just on the verge of starvation, the touch needed to send a man over the brink is very, very slight indeed. Not even the close family ties of the Chinese can help them much, for where the strongest suffer, the weak must go to the wall. And there are very few crafts open to the blind man. He may be a storyteller, or a fortune-teller, or a musician, I cannot imagine what he would do if his talents did not run in those lines, and even then he is dependent upon the doles of a people who have very, very little to give away, and naturally guard that little carefully. Once blind there is nothing more to be done. The beautiful blue sky of China, the golden sunshine have gone, and in its place there is the darkness, warm sometimes, bitter cold sometimes, the enveloping darkness that means for so many helplessness and starvation, often at the very best semi-starvation, borne with the uncomplaining stoicism of the Chinese.

Now once upon a time a man stood upon the Beggars' Bridge in Peking, outside the walls of the Tartar City, selling Bibles, and noticed as everyone must do, the number of blind who passed by. Was there none to pity, asked the Rev. Hill Murray, none among all those who had devoted their lives to bringing the Gospel to the heathen to help?

“What?” said some. “When you know that already the Chinese declare we missionaries take the children for the sake of making medicine of their eyes, will you give colour to the accusation by setting up a mission to the blind?” And then, when he still persisted, “They need us, they need us,” they said: “Since you are so keen, why don't you do it yourself?”

To him it was “The Message.” Why should he not do it himself? And there and then he set to work. It was years ago. What the cost, what the struggle, I do not know. I only know that one sunny April day wandering round Peking in a hu t'ung in the east of the Tartar City I came upon the house, or rather, for it is all done Chinese fashion, the nest of little houses with their courtyards and little gardens, that is the Mission to the Blind.

It seemed to me sad, when I went there one bright sunny morning, that these young things should be for ever in the dark, but I am bound to say it was only my thoughts that were sad. The girls came laughing into the front courtyard with their knitting in their hands to see—see, save the mark!—the stranger, and have their photographs taken. The sun, the golden sun of April, streamed down on the stone-paved courtyard, all the plants in pots were in bloom, and the girls, dressed in Chinese fashion, made deep obeisance in the direction they were told I was. All around were the quaint roofs, dainty lattice-work windows, and Eastern surroundings of a Chinese house, and the girls were grave at first, because they were being introduced to an older woman, and one whom they thought was their superior, therefore they thought it was not fitting they should laugh and talk, but when I remarked on their gravity, Miss Murray, shepherding them, laughed.

“Oh they are very happy. They don't feel their lot, not yet at any rate. They are proud because they have learned so much. They can read and write, they can knit, and they have learned geography.”

Geography seemed a great asset, and presently, they, when they knew they might, were laughing and talking, and saying how proud they were to have their photographs taken. They sat there knitting, and even while they talked, did exactly what they were told, for like all Chinese, they have a great sense of the fitting. On one occasion a friend brought in a gramophone and set it going for their amusement.

“I could have shaken them all,” said Miss Murray, “they received the funniest sallies in solemn silence,” and when the entertainer was gone, she reproached them, “You never even smiled.”

A dozen eager voices responded. “Oh but it was so hard not to laugh. We wanted to so much, but we thought it would not be right. It was so hard.”

The lot of all women in China is hard; doubly hard, it seemed to me, must the lot of these poor little girls be, cut off from the only hope of happiness a Chinese woman has, the chance of bearing a son. "And they can never marry,” I said sorrowfully to Miss Murray.

There came a smile into her bright young eyes. “Oh, I don't know. Some of them may. They are so very well-educated, and the Chinese admire education, and in a Chinese household, where there are so many people to do the work, a blind wife would not be so useless. Only the other day we heard of the marriage of one of our girls.”

And I looked at them again with other eyes, and hoped there were many households that would like a wife for their son who knew geography.

We went from the outer to the inner courtyard, a rock garden where, in true Chinese fashion, are set out plants and rockeries, a little winding river with a stone bridge across it, a miniature lake—there is no water in it now—and many creeping plants hiding the stones. It is a charming spot, but naturally the blind are not allowed to go there by themselves. It is too dangerous. However, on one occasion, one curious little boy objected to these restrictions, and went on an exploring expedition on his own account. Groping about in the darkness, he fell into the river, which has steep cement sides, and out of that he could not get. You would think that he would have yelled lustily to call attention to his predicament, but that is not the Chinese way. He had disobeyed, Fate was against him, and he must suffer, and there he lay the livelong day without a murmur, and not till they called the roll in the evening, was his absence discovered, and a search for him instituted. Even that lesson was not sufficient, for once again he was missing, and once again he was discovered fallen into one of the many traps of the rock garden. It was unexplored country to him, and he was willing to risk much to see what it was like.

In the parts of the house with which they are familiar they can all run about, up and down steps, and in and out of courtyards and down passages as easily as people with sight. The boys came out of their class-rooms where they learn to read, and write, and sing, and play the harmonium, and raced about much as other boys in other lands would do.

They have two meals a day—one in the morning and one at four o'clock in the afternoon, and as much tea and bread at other times as they care to have. Mrs Murray apologised for the dampness of the stones of the dining-room floor. It is a Chinese house, and stone floors are not a sign of poverty. These stones are damp because at twelve o'clock the boys come and pour themselves out cups of tea, and naturally they make a mess. The cook is busy, he cannot be with them always. For this charity is run on very simple lines, and the people who see are very few. There is the cook and the house-coolie, a woman for the girls, a doorkeeper, frail and old, he may be seen standing just outside the door in the picture of the hu t'ung, and a couple of men who attend to the making of the Braille books, for their making and binding requires the attention of someone with sight. But with these exceptions, the blind have it all to themselves; they learn, and they play, and they eat by themselves.

In one of the pictures I have taken, the boys have come out of school and are playing cat and mouse. All join hands in a circle, and one boy creeping in and out softly is chased by another. How they manage it in their darkness I don't know, but they chattered, and laughed, and shouted happily though what they said of course I did not know. They are all, boys and girls alike, dressed in the ordinary blue cotton of the country; the boys had their hair cut short, for nowadays the queue, that most curious of fashions in the dressing of hair, is going out. The girls were also dressed like the peasants, with their trousers neatly drawn in at the ankles and their smooth, straight hair drawn back and plaited in a tail down the back, much like an English schoolgirl; the little ones though, have their heads shaven in front, very ugly, but in conformation with Chinese custom, which always shaves part at least of the little one's head.

In the courtyard where the boys were playing, was a rocking-horse, a dilapidated and battered toy without either tail, or mane, or eyes. And this toy is pathetic, when you know its history. It was bought with the pennies saved by Mr Hill Murray's children. They, too, out of their small store, wanted to do something for the blind; and the blind children, immediately it came into their possession, took out its eyes. They were not going to have the rocking-horse spying on them when they could not see themselves.

They all wisely live in native fashion. Their food is the food of the well-to-do lower classes, plenty of bread, steamed instead of being baked, and plenty of vegetables and soup, with just a little meat in it; the food to which they have been accustomed, and which they like best. Their beds, I have tried to depict one, are just the ordinary k'ang, a stone platform to hold three in summer, and five in winter. Under it is a small fireplace where a fire can be built to warm it, above, it is covered with matting, and each boy spreads his own bed of quilted cotton, which is rolled up in the daytime.

I would have thought that the Mission to the Blind was so good and great a thing that it could rouse no bitter feelings in any breast. It has for its object the succouring of those whom the Chinese themselves treat with great respect, yet so fanatical was the Boxer outbreak, that in the hu t'ung outside the Mission, forty of the pupils and their teachers, helpless in their affliction, were done to death by those who would have none of the Westerner and his works, even though those works were works of mercy.

More often, perhaps, in China than anywhere in the world where I have been, am I reminded of the passage in Holy Writ that tells how as the Man of Pity came nigh unto Jericho a certain blind man sat by the wayside begging. And, hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant, and they told him, “Jesus of Nazareth passeth by.” We may not give sight to the blind nowadays, but if we walk in the streets of Peking, and then turn in to the Mission to the Blind with its kindly care for the helpless, and its brightening of darkened lives, we know that that man who stood on the Beggars' Bridge pitied, as his Master had pitied before him. All that he could do he has done, and those who have come after him have followed faithfully in his footsteps, can any man do more? I think not. Truly I think not.

“What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee?” asked the Lord of the World of the blind beggar.

And he said, “Lord that I may receive my sight.”

Those who charge themselves with the care of the blind may not give so royally now. Theirs is the harder part, they tend and care with unfailing patience, untiring diligence, and then they stand, and wait.

China needs medical missionaries, needs them as badly as the city slums of London or New York; and China is going to get them, for there are thousands of people who think a deal more of the state of the soul of the materialistic Chinaman than they do of the starving bodies, and more than starved intellects of the slum children of a Christian land. Formerly the missionary had a worse time than he has now. He came among a people who despised him, and more than once he suffered martyrdom, and even when there was no question of martyrdom, some of the regulations he submitted to must have been unpleasant. Unwisely I think, for you can never make a European look like a Chinaman, the powers that ran the missionary societies, decided that the missionary must wear Chinese dress, even to the shaven head and the queue behind. A hatchet-faced Scot with a fiery red pigtail, they say was an awesome sight, certainly calculated to impress the Celestial, though whether in the way the newcomer intended I should not like to say. The growing of a proper queue was, of course, a question of months, and the majority of missionaries began their career with a false one. A story is told of one luckless young man in Shanghai who lost his, and went about his business for some little time unaware of the fact. When he did discover his loss he went back on his tracks, searching for it at all the places he had visited. At last he arrived at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and there, pinned high on the wall, was his missing property, and attached to it by some facetious clerk was the legend in great letters that all might read: “Deposits of one tael not accepted here!” For the benefit of the uninitiated, one tael is a sum of money, varying with the price of silver, from half-a-crown to three shillings.

But those days are gone by. Nowadays missionary societies are wiser, and the medical missionaries are pleasant, cheerful, hard-working men and women doing an immense amount of good among the suffering poor, so kindly, so thoughtful are they that I grudge their services to the heathen when I think how many of the children, aye and those who are not children, in the mean streets of the great cities of the West need their services. They trouble themselves about the souls of the people too, and the example of kindly lives must be good. Again I grudge it all to the Oriental, though I have come to realise that there are many ways of doing good in the world. I do occasionally feel that the missionaries are a little too strenuous in inculcating prayer and praise, and exhorting to a virtue that is a little beyond the average mortal. The caring for both bodies and souls can certainly be overdone. However I dare say it all works right in the end, and I, who do nothing, should be the last to judge. Still sometimes I could not but remember the picture of the two babies discussing the situation, the fat, plump baby, and the thin, miserable, scrawny one.

Said the thin baby: “How do you manage to keep so fat? My milk's sterilised, and the milkman's sterilised, and even the cart's sterilised, and yet look at me,” and he stretched out his thin, starved hands.

“Ah, so's mine,” said the fat baby serenely, “but, when no one's looking, I climb down and get a chew at the corner of the floor-rug, and get enough bacteria to keep a decent life in me!”

Listening to the talk of the missionaries, hearing of the foolishness of smoking, the wickedness of alcoholic drinks, and various forms of sinfulness, I have rather hoped, and more than suspected, that the converts sometimes got down and had a chew at the corner of the floor-rug when no one was looking.

Not that many of the missionaries don't endeavour to live up to their own moral code, many of them do, and many of them lead lives of abnegation and self-denial. We all know that the missionary of the Church of Rome gives up everything, and expects never again to see his country once he enters the mission-field, and many of the China Inland Missionaries, except in the matter of celibacy, run them close. Their pay is very, very small, no holidays can be counted upon, and their lives are isolated and lonely. Even the American missionary, who is far better paid, gives up his own individuality. The ministers earn more, I believe, than they would in their own country, because people give gladly to missions, while at home the minister's salary is often a burning question. “Far fields are ever fair,” but a clever surgeon who is kept hard at it from dawn to dark, once the Chinese appreciate him, certainly receives far less than he could earn working for himself. He is given a comfortable home, he may marry and have children without a qualm, for, for every child twenty pounds a year is allowed till he is of age; the societies see to it that a six weeks' holiday is given every year, and a year's furlough every seven years with passage paid home for wife and children. No business firm could afford to make more comfortable provision for its employees.

In China, service is cheap and good, the food and the cooks both excellent, and the climate, at least in the north, exhilarating and delightful. But the missionaries do their duty, and do it well, and they are pioneers of Western civilisation. In their wake comes trade, though that is the last thing the majority of them think about. The only trouble for the American missionary seems to me the danger that hangs over every dweller in China—a danger they share with every other foreign resident. It is hard to think of danger when one looks at the courteous, subservient Chinese, but Sir Robert Hart put it succinctly: “Anything may happen at any time in China.” And for all the New Republic, and for all the fair promise, his words are still worthy of attention.

“Do you really think,” said R. F. Johnston, the well-known writer on things Chinese, “that the Chinese knew nothing about charity till it was preached to them by Christian missionaries?”

I intimated that such had been my faith.

“The Chinese,” said he, a little indignantly, “are one of the most charitable peoples on earth.”

And then he told me what I, a stranger and ignorant of the language, might have gone years without learning. To begin with, family ties are far stronger in China than in European countries, and a man feels himself bound to help his helpless relatives in a way that would seem absurd to the average Christian, and in addition there are numerous societies for helping those, who, by some mischance, have no one upon whom they can depend. There are societies for succouring the sick, societies for looking after orphans, and other kindly institutions. There are even societies for paying poor folks' fares across ferries! There certainly are a good many rivers in China, but this society I must admit strikes me as a work of supererogation. I don't think much merit can really attach to the subscribers, for the majority of poor folks I have seen would be so much better for walking through the river, clothes and all.

However, we have a good few foolish charities of our own, and even if the Chinese charities do not cover all the ground, we must remember that China is, in so many things, archaic; and these charities run on archaic lines are naturally shocking to men steeped in the sanitary lore of the West, We have only to read the novels of Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë to see a few flaws in the way the charities of the Early Victorian era were administered; what would we think if we could take a peep into thetlazar-house of the Middle Ages—yet there were kind hearts, I doubt not, in the Middle Ages—and China, with her overflowing population, is yet in the matter of charity where we were some time about the reign of the seventh Henry. Could we expect much?

“Would you like to see a Buddhist Orphanage?” asked Mr Johnston.

I said I would, and he promised to take me to one they were trying to run on Western lines.

It was a pleasantly warm Sunday, with a wind blowing that lifted the filthy dust of Peking from the roadways, and flung it in our faces. We interviewed first two rickshaw coolies with a view to ascertaining whether they; knew where we wanted to go, or rather he interviewed them, for I have no Chinese. They swore they did, by all their gods. Still he looked doubtful.

“Why don't you take them?” said I, feeling mistakenly that nowhere else in the town could the dust and the wind be quite so bad as just outside the Wagons Lits Hotel.

“Because I want to find out if they really know where we want to go. They always swear they do, for fear of losing the job.”

However, at last we set out with rickshaw coolies who seemed to have a working knowledge of the route we wished to follow, and we went through the Chien Men into the Chinese City, and away to the west through a maze of narrow alley-ways, hung with long Chinese signs, past the closely packed, one-storied shops where they sold china and earthenware, cotton goods and food-stuffs, lanterns, and rows of uninteresting Chinese shoes. The streets of course were thronged. There were rickshaws, laden donkeys, broughams with Venetian shutters to shut out the glare, the clanging bell and outrider to tell that some important man was passing, mules, camels, men on foot with or without burdens, with bamboos across their shoulders and loads slung from them, and some few women tottering along on maimed feet. And every man was giving his opinion on things in general to the universe at the top of his voice.

“How I wish I could understand what they were saying,” I said to my companion once, when the exigencies of the way brought our rickshaws side by side.

He laughed. “Sometimes it's as well you shouldn't.” And then he corrected himself lest I should have got a wrong impression. “No, on the whole they are very polite to each other.”

Once we came upon a man with a packet of papers in his hand. He was standing upon something to raise him a little above the passing crowd, and distributing the papers not to everyone, but apparently with great discrimination. Both of us were deemed worthy of a sheet, and I wondered what on earth the hieroglyphics could mean. It was an invitation to a funeral, my cicerone informed me, the next time we were in speaking distance. Some woman, who had been working for a broader education for women, had died, and her friends were going to mark their appreciation of her labours by a suitable funeral. So is the change coming to China.

As we went on the houses grew fewer, there were open spaces where kaoliang and millet were being reaped, for this, my second charity, I visited in September, the grey walls of the city rose up before us, and still there was no sign of the monastery. Our men were panting, the sweat was running down their faces and staining their thin coats, still they dragged us on, never dreaming; of using the tongues Nature had given them to lighten their labours. To ask the way would have been to show the foreigner in the rickshaw that they had not known it in the first instance, and that would be to lose face.

But one of the foreigners had grasped that already, and he insisted on the necessary inquiries being made, and presently we had gone back on our tracks and were at the monastery, being received by the abbot who had charge of it, and a tall Chinese, who spoke German, and was deeply interested in the Orphanage.

It was the great day of the year, for they were having their annual sports. Over the entrance gateway was a magnificent decoration to mark the event. The place was built Chinese fashion, with many courtyards and low-roofed houses round them, and we were led from one courtyard to another until at last we arrived at a large courtyard, or rather playground. Here were the monks and their charges, and a certain number of spectators who had been invited to see the show, all men, for men and women do not mingle in China, and the next day the entertainment would be repeated with women only as spectators. I received a warm invitation to come again, but I felt that once would be enough. We sat down on a bench with a table in front of us, a boy was told off to keep us supplied with tea, and I had leisure to look around me and see what manner of people were these among whom I had come.

Then there were the orphans. They were fat, well-fed looking little chaps dressed in unbleached calico trousers, and coats of the very brightest blue I have ever seen. Each wore on his breast, as a mark of the festive occasion, a bright pink carnation, and every head was shaven as bare as a billiard ball. They looked happy and well, but to my Western eyes that last sanitary precaution, as I suppose it was, spoiled any claim they had to good looks. They ran races, they jumped about in sacks, they picked up hoops, they stood in clusters of six and sang in shrill young voices, weird and haunting songs that I was told were patriotic and full of hope for China. The three first in the races had their names proclaimed in black characters on white flags that were carried round the grounds, and there and then received their prizes, a handkerchief or some such trifle.

It was interesting not so much for the sports themselves, those may be better seen in any well-regulated boys' school, but because this is the first time such efforts have been made in China, and made by the Chinese themselves. That a man should take any violent exercise, unless he were absolutely obliged, that he should have any ideal beyond looking fat, and sleek, and well-fed, is entirely contrary to all received Chinese ideas, and must mark a great step in their advancement.

And then they brought me the youngest orphan, a wee, fat boy of eight, and though he looked well, he seemed much younger. Probably he was. As I understand it, the Chinese counts himself a year old in the year he is born, and the first New Year's day adds another year to his life, so that the child born on the last day of the old year, would on New Year's Day, be two years old! There is something very lovable about a small child, and there was about this little smiling chap, though he was unbecomingly dressed in coat and trousers of unbleached calico, and his head was shaven bare. He held out his hand to me when he was told, bowed low when I gave him a little piece, a very little piece, of money, and then trotted across the grounds to where a young monk was looking on at the show. He caught hold of the monk's robe, and nestled against him, and the man put down a tender hand and caressed him. No child of his own, by his vows, would he ever have, but he was a tender father to this little lonely waif. A waif? He was well-fed, he was suitably clad, and here I saw with my own eyes he had tenderness, could any child have had more? Could men do more? And again I say, as I said when I looked at the Mission to the Blind, I think not. Very surely I think not. At least one of these monks was giving what no Westerner could possibly give to a child of an alien race, that tenderness that softens and smooths life. “They brought young children to Him, that He should touch them... and He took them up in His arms, put His hands upon them, and blessed them.”

These monks profess a faith that was old when Christianity was born, but they are carrying out as faithfully as ever did any follower of Christ His behests. What matter the creed? What matter by what name we call it? Away in this old Eastern city here, they are preaching, in deeds, the gospel of love and kindness, and no man can do more.

We are apt to think that charity and pity are attributes of the Christian faith only but that is to insult the many good and holy men of other faiths. I am not scorning the kindness and self-sacrifice of the Christian missionary, but it is better, where it is possible, that charity and pity for the Chinese should come from those of their own race. For, however tender and kind an alien may be, he still stands outside, and the recipient to a certain extent is necessarily alone. Therefore am I doubly grateful to Mr Johnston for taking me to this Orphanage, where I could see how good the Chinese could be to the waifs and strays of their own people.

Pity and mercy belong not to the Western nations alone. They come from the Most High, and are common to all His people, Christian missionary selling Bibles, and pitying the blind upon the Beggars' Bridge, or Buddhist monk taking to his heart the little forsaken child in the monastery of an older faith in the Chinese City. For such love as that we find in the world we, who look on, can only bow our heads and give thanks.