A BOY CARRYING BASKETS.

To face p. 56.

They are the driest of dry books, and were really written for scholarly men, and for men of thought, whose thinking powers were considerably developed. There is not a single story in their pages. No child or woman’s voice is heard from beginning to end, and no laughter, and no sob of pain, or any touch of the finer qualities of the human heart.

The boy begins at eight not with “Jack and Jill,” or the “House that Jack built,” or with any nursery rhyme that would appeal to a child’s imagination, but with the solemn statements on high ethical questions that some of the greatest thinkers and teachers of China have produced. Some idea of the style of the books that these little urchins have to grind at, may be gathered from the fact that the first book that is put into the hands of that eight-year-old scholar is called The Three Words Classic, from the fact that each sentence is made up of three words rhythmically set. It is about as crabbed and as profound a piece of writing as exists in the whole language. Its first sentence makes a dogmatic statement which has not been generally accepted in China, viz. “Man by nature is originally good.” Just imagine a boy of ten, accustomed till to-day to run as wild as a climbing plant, that creeps up trees, or over ruined walls, or down the side of a precipice, brought face to face with a statement like this, instead of the conventional one, “My dog,” or “His cat,” that confronts the English lad as he first enters the domain of learning.

Try and conceive the wear and tear upon a child’s spirit in having for years to shout and scream out at the top of his voice, as Chinese scholars do, such profound teaching as the above, and you will then have caught a glimpse of the steep and precipitous way along which these eight-year scholars have to travel in their pursuit after knowledge. A more dreary system of education, where imagination and humour, and poetry and romance, and all the finer emotions of the soul are rigorously excluded, it would be impossible to conceive than that which every Chinese scholar has to go through in every school throughout the Empire to-day.

And so the years go by, childhood is being slowly left behind, and young manhood comes with its own responsibilities and its own ambitions. It is a dreary road along which the young scholar travels. He gets no knowledge of life that will make him tender and sympathetic with his fellow-men in their sins or their sorrows. He acquires a profound contempt for every other country but his own. His natural hardness and selfishness of heart are intensified by a pride that nothing can soften, whilst his antipathy to any change or progress either in his own village or in his country is deeply rooted and the adoption of new ideas or liberal thoughts is considered a heresy so abominable as to brand any one that adopts it with the terrible name of “Barbarian,” a term from which every self-respecting Chinaman shrinks as from a plague.

With the leaving of school, childhood has passed away, and now the lads will have to select the occupations they are going to pursue in the future. Some elect to be scholars, especially if they have shown proficiency in their studies, and they finally join the great army of school-masters that are required for the countless schools throughout the country. Others become clerks in business houses, but as arithmetic is not a branch of school education, they are obliged to pay a small premium and learn the use of the abacus or counting boards, in one of the cash shops in the town. Others, again, engage themselves as book-keepers or shop assistants, or in some of the many employments that are open to young men who can read and write.

Not a few of them drift into evil habits and finally become opium-smokers and gamblers. If they are clever scamps, which this class usually are, they turn their attention to medicine, and gathering together a few herbs they travel through the country as strolling doctors, professing to cure every disease to which the human frame is heir, and living a most precarious and, on the whole, a very wretched life.

About the same time that the great change takes place in the experience of the boy, the girl too comes to a point where the easy conditions under which she has hitherto lived suddenly stop and the great trial of her life begins. I refer to foot-binding.

In every home that professes to any respectability, foot-binding is an absolutely essential thing for the girls in it. To neglect this would be to confound them with slave girls, whose feet are never bound, and with the children of the very lowest classes whose poverty would not admit of their adopting this polite custom. It has been found by a very large experience that a girl must be eight years old before her feet will bear the tremendous strain that is put upon them, in the effort to destroy the handiwork of nature.

It is true that in some of the more wealthy homes, where a very small foot is a sign of blue blood, they begin as soon as the girl is six to put her to the torture, but this is not the general rule. By the time the girl is eight, the bones of the feet have become sufficiently hardened to bear the incessant pressure that is put upon them to contract the feet into such a small compass that they will go into a shoe of two or three inches in length.

The process begins by turning all the toes, except the large one, on to the sole of the foot. This of course is a slow but an exceedingly painful one. It is continued week after week and month after month for several years until the toes have been thrown back, at the expense of the instep, which is made to bulge out by the pressure of the bandages; until finally the “Golden lilies,” as these unsightly objects are called, are complete, and the poor girl is a veritable cripple for life.

The cruelty that is practised upon these poor children during the initial operation of binding is very severe. The first few weeks are so very trying that attempts are made by the girls to tear the bandages from their aching, tortured feet. This is resisted by their mothers, who have to resort to brutal methods to keep the little hands from endeavouring to relieve themselves of the pain that has become intolerable.

Tears and shrieks and groans that last all day long, and are heard through the sobs of the poor things, as sleep, restless and disturbed, comes to try and make them forget the agony they are enduring, are the constant experiences in that unhappy home.

The girl begs and entreats the mother to loosen the bandages a little so that the agonizing pain may be diminished, and life may become somewhat more tolerable. The only reply is a tighter wrench upon them, and a strain, that were not nature so elastic, would send the poor thing mad. The morrow comes and the rebandaging takes place. For an instant, as the feet are relieved of the old bandages, and they are shown inflamed and discoloured, a momentary relief is felt by the poor girl who has slept in fitful dozes during the past night, but the moment they are rebound by the new ones, a cry of horror proceeds from her as though a raw sore had been touched, and the house resounds with her screams, whilst the mother, apparently untouched by the agony of her daughter, proceeds with her revolting task, as though she had no heart and no feeling left in her heathen soul.

This terrible martyrdom goes on with scarcely any alleviation for three or four years, the poor victim to fashion suffering acutely all the time. There are moments often repeated when the poor child actually quivers all over from excruciating pain, and it would seem as though flesh and blood could no longer endure the frightful strain put upon her, but must dissolve in tears and groans and unutterable agony.Foot-binding is one of the most senseless and cruel customs it is possible to imagine. Its origin is dimly hidden in the maze and mist of the past, and no one can say positively how it originated. Tradition holds that it arose in the palace of an Emperor, who had a most beautiful concubine, but whose feet were deformed. To hide their defect they were so manipulated that their glaring deformity was concealed, and the ladies of the court in order to gain her favour bandaged their own in such a manner as to be an exact imitation of those of the royal favourite. From that time, it is said, the insane and hideous custom began to spread from the court into the capital, and from there it began to be copied by the women of the Empire.

The popular legend makes this woman to be T’a Ki, the famous concubine of Show Sin, the last ruler of the famous Chow Dynasty (B.C. 1146). She is said to have been the most beautiful woman that ever lived, but to have been inhuman and vicious beyond anything that human language can express. She was the cause of the fall of the dynasty, a dynasty in which was enshrined the great names of Confucius, Mencius, Tau-tze the founder of Tauism, and Wu Wang.

To account for the fatal influence of this famous beauty, it is declared that she was a fox fairy, who had assumed the form of a woman in order to be able to hurry on the ruin of China. In the transformation everything was changed but her feet, and in order to disguise these she had to resort to the most ingenious methods. To curry favour with her the ladies-in-waiting in the palace bound theirs to imitate the appearance of hers, and so the custom of foot-binding was commenced that has lasted all these ages.

This legend has become part of the national faith and is firmly believed in by every one. Of course it is absurd, and one that originated in an after age, but with the innate love of the Chinese for the mysterious and the supernatural, it is transmitted age after age as though it were part of authentic history.[1]

Foot-binding is a lifelong misery even after the first few years during which the feet are being tortured into such a hideous mass of deformity that no women will willingly show them to any one. Nature never becomes reconciled to the cruel caricature they present. She continues to make a vigorous protest by pains and suffering that more or less last as long as life itself. The bandages may never be loosed even for a single day, for nature, as if on the eternal watch, would at once begin to revert to the original size and shape with which she was born, and the feet would gradually return to their original shape, though with marks of the cruel treatment to which they have been exposed, and which can never be entirely effaced, no matter how long the owner may live.

The girls are employed in household duties, in learning to embroider, to weave cotton cloth, to make their own shoes, and to learn all kinds of sewing. The years pass on, and when they reach the age of sixteen their childhood begins to vanish, and womanhood, with its responsibilities and its stern demand that the girls shall leave their own clan and become members of others, looms up before them. The transition stage may be delayed for a year or two, but when a girl gets to be eighteen it is considered ample time for her to open her wings and to fly for ever from the parent home.

We have thus taken a very rough and bird’s-eye view of Child Life in China. There are countless details that might have been gone into, but they would have required an entire book for themselves. The main outline that has been given will suffice to convey a very general idea of the kind of life that the black-eyed children of the Empire have to go through.

There is one thing about which there can be no manner of doubt, and that is that the children never forget the home in which they were reared. The home is to the Chinese what the country is to the most devoted patriot of other nationalities. The home is larger and dearer than the nation. It is the one thought that is always enshrined in his inmost heart, and which never dies out. A Chinaman went abroad and lived for a quarter of a century in Australia. He married an Irish woman, had several almond-eyed daughters, who had caught the brogue of their mother and might have been emigrants from Cork or Kerry. He had a thriving money-making business, he possessed a vote, and he was a man of substance in the community.

One day the home hunger came upon him. He handed over his business to his wife and daughters, took his balance out of the bank and returned to his home in China. This was situated by the edge of the sea on a sand dune, the most forlorn and mouldy-looking place one could possibly imagine. He regained his spirits as soon as his feet touched the desolate spot that lay within a few yards of the home where his childhood was spent, and nothing could induce him ever to think of returning to the far-off land where the family he had left behind him were living.

A strong and vigorous coolie showed symptoms of being far from well. Physically there seemed nothing the matter with him. Gradually he lost his appetite and his spirits. He occasionally acted as though his mind was affected. One day he said to his master, “I must go home. I feel very ill, but I am convinced that no medicine that I can take will cure me. Let me go home.” The mal du pays of the Switzer was upon him, and when permission was given him, his eye brightened and his step became elastic, and by the time he reached the old homestead every trace of disease had entirely vanished.

A man becomes a mandarin and is sent to another part of the Empire. He is gradually advanced in rank until he becomes a Viceroy of two Provinces, and rules over thirty millions of people. He marries, and has sons and daughters, and he amasses property in the place where his greatest honours have come to him.

He never has time to get away to his ancestral home, which is more than a thousand miles distant, but it is never out of his thoughts, and when he dies full of honours and wealth, his coffin is carried to his far-off village where he was born, and he is laid to his final rest almost in sight of the house in which his boyhood was passed.

The Americans are greatly distressed because when the Chinese come to their country they do not bring their wives and families with them. The fact is to do so would be opposed to the spirit and genius of their race. It would tend to alienate them from their home, which they intend to revisit as soon as ever they can, and to finally lay their bones amongst their kindred there. Every merchant and scholar, every coolie that lands with but the clothes he has on his back, every spendthrift and opium-smoker and gambler, and every millionaire of the Yellow race in the United States has one dream that never dies out of his brain, and that is the picture of his home, which either in life or in death it is his unalterable purpose to visit. To move their families and become denizens of their adopted country would be to run counter to one of the strongest instincts of their race.