ing in relays, else not enough would be manufactured to insure existence. To watch an old man or woman, feebly manipulating this crude machine, tying threads in the faint light, hour after hour, till they are cramped and aching, grinding out soul and body in the struggle, is pitiful enough. But when the gaudy cotton prints, from nobody knows where,

These things will adjust themselves in a generation or two, we smugly answer, but our answer does not seem to convince the poor old weaver begging from door to door. door. And this is the problem of laborsaving machinery; for this generation it is not labor-saving, it is labor-destroying, and men do not often cut their throats merely to be in the fashion or to increase the dividends of a foreign steel corporation. Thus it happens that the Chinese have perfected the art of finding jobs for the jobless to a point even beyond that reached by our political bosses; and the Chinaman fights a reform as we fight direct primaries.

In this struggle for existence selfishness

A SANG LAI BEGGING

come in, better finished, attractively colored, at a price that is competitive, then the wolf is not merely at the door, he is inside, for the loom is idle, and the mouth is filled with cursing for the foreign devils who have sent the cotton.

A COFFIN ON THE WAY TO THE GRAVE

The pallbearers are not friends but men hired for the purpose

has so abnormally developed that the sense of responsibility to the common good has become atrophied. The result in many things is chaos. The roads of China afford an excellent illustration. As these are built on private ground, for which the owner must pay taxes, the farmer figures it so much land wasted and lays out the road to interfere as little as possible with the crops. So he puts the road on the margin of his field, or half on his land and half on his neighbor's, and as narrow as possible. And the road runs around willynilly, its object not being to get anywhere but to avoid bisecting a field. ConseConsequently the country highway may have a directness that makes a scenic railway look like a straight line. If the farmer wants earth, he takes it from the road, for it belongs to him; in rainy weather the water from the fields drains into it, creating an unnavigable canal; torrents

wash out enough gullies to add picturesqueness to its other virtues, gradually deepening it until it runs along several feet below the surface, a sort of unroofed subway answering every purpose of a moat, if there was anything to defend. It being the business of no one to keep these roads in repair, save the owner of the land - who simply says that if you don't like his road you may use another one can readily understand that travel in that land is even less delightful than the Pullman described by Mr. Dooley as sleeping on a shelf in a closet with a cinder in your eye. In the misty past great highways, paved and tree-bordered, ran through the country, a fact attested only by the scattered stones of China's Golden Age. Public property to-day in the celestial empire implies something that can be carried away! Why should I give up anything for the public? asks the Chinese.

Practically all the timber in China is sawed up in
this primitive way

In one thing these pictures are in utter discord with the books written about China, though the books are true enough. The books spell misery; the pictures, contentment. Which is right? Are they both right? Yes. In such an array of complex phenomena as one finds in China. there is pretty much of the good, bad and indifferent. Continuous and omnipresent poverty, galling and harassing; exacting and enslaving superstition; a family structure that is the antithesis of comfort, even to the Chinese; the lack of physical comforts; the continual menace of ruin by flood, famine or lawsuit; all of these assail the wall of Chinese patience and

EFFECTIVE, IF NOT GRACEFUL The Chinese way of carrying hogs

contentment in vain. For in this matter of contentment the Chinese is superlative. Whether he must wait three hours for his dinner, or until to-morrow, or just starve to death, is of little matter. Cheer up, the worst is yet to come, is his philosophy. With the occidental mind the obtrusive part of the fact is that the worst is coming; with this Oriental, that it has not arrived!

What a boon this is can be grasped only by one who has seen China. The unit of Chinese life is not the individual, but the family. When the sons marry they bring their wives home to hustle in the paternal household. With several married sons,

their wives, their children and their dogs, living in a few rooms, the fomenting of trouble is sooner or later to occur; usually sooner, and in the class with death and taxes. And such trouble! All the dogs barking, all the children crying, all the wives screaming, and the men either fighting or running for help; all to continue in the house, out of the house, through the courtyard, and down the street, till "peace

talkers' arrive and pour oil on the waters. But it is great entertainment for the neighbors, who in turn will contribute their share, and it provides a topic of conversation in a place where topics are necessarily limited.

The usual Chinese home is of mud that frequently melts when there is much rain; with paper windows that keep out neither rain, sun nor dust; a dirt floor and little furniture; as hot as a tin roof in summer and cold as a mausoleum in winter. They have a sort of a stove; before it some one is always sprawling, stuffing in grass. Its flue is led around by many turns under a platform of unbaked brick, called the kang, upon which the family sleep or huddle during the biting days of winter.

A COMMON TYPE OF PUBLIC WELL

The water is sold, not given away

A LOAD ON A ONE-WHEELED BARROW Two donkeys to pull, two men in front to balance the load and one behind to steer

Some smoke goes up the chimney; plenty of it does not. In a country where there is nothing but room all the dwellings try to get on the same spot, a spot with a wall around it, for mutual defense against predatory bands, or neighboring villages with a grievance! In a circle five miles in diameter there may be forty or fifty villages. Privacy and quiet are unknown. Dr. Arthur H. Smith, an authority, says that "it would be easy to raise in China an army of a million men, nay, ten millions,

tested by a competitive examination as to their capacity to go to sleep across three wheelbarrows with head downward, like a spider, their mouths open and a fly inside."

Yet despite all this lack of comfort, how they can work if necessary. Men will push a clumsy wheelbarrow with three or four adults piled on it, thirty miles in a day, or with a single passenger, perhaps fifty. Another man walks off with six hundred pounds of flour or a large hog on