Crimes & Mysteries

CHAPTER XXIII. MUTUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND RESPECT FOR LAW.ONE of the most distinctive features of Chinese society is that which is epitomised in the word "responsibility," a word which carries with it a significance and embraces a wealth of meaning to which Western lands are total strangers. In those lands, as we well know, the individual is the unit and the nation is a large collection of individuals. In China the unit of social life is found in the family, the village, or the clan, and these are often convertible terms. Thousands of Chinese villages comprise exclusively persons having ...

CHAPTER XXII. SOCIAL TYPHOONS. AMONG a population of such unexampled density as in China, where families often of great size are crowded together in narrow quarters, it is impossible that occasions for quarrels should not be all-pervasive. "How many are there in your family?" you inquire of your neighbour. "Between ten and twenty mouths," he replies. "And do you have everything in common?" you ask. "Yes," is the most common reply. Here, then, are fifteen or twenty human beings, probably representing three, if not four, generations, who live from the income of the same business or farm,...

CHAPTER XXI. THE ABSENCE OF SYMPATHYATTENTION has been directed to that aspect of Chinese life which is represented by the term "benevolence," the very first of the so-called Constant Virtues. Benevolence is well-wishing.  Sympathy is fellow-feeling. Our present object, having premised that the Chinese do practise a certain amount of benevolence, is to illustrate the proposition that they are conspicuous for a deficiency of sympathy.It must ever be borne in mind that the population of China is dense. The disasters of flood and famine are of periodical occurrence in almost all parts...

CHAPTER XX.  BENEVOLENCE.THE Chinese have placed the term "benevolence" at the head of their list of the Five Constant Virtues. The character which denotes it, is composed of the symbols for "man" and "two," by which is supposed to be shadowed forth the view that benevolence is something which ought to be developed by the contact of any two human beings with each other. It is unnecessary to remark that the theory which the form of the character seems to favour, is not at all substantiated by the facts of life among the Chinese, as those facts are to be read by the intelligent and ...

CHAPTER XIX. FILIAL PIETY.TO discuss the characteristics of the Chinese without mentioning filial piety, is out of the question. But the filial piety of the Chinese is not an easy subject to treat. These words, like many others which we are obliged to employ, have among the Chinese a sense very different from that which we are accustomed to attach to them, and a sense of which no English expression is an exact translation. This is also true of a great variety of terms used in Chinese, and of no one more than of the word ordinarily rendered "ceremony" (li), with which filial piety is in...

CHAPTER XVIII. CONTENT AND CHEERFULNESS.WE have already seen that the capacity of the Chinese to bear the ills they have, is a wonderful, and to us in most cases an incomprehensible talent, which has well been called a psychological paradox. Notwithstanding their apparently hopeless condition, they do not appear to lose hope, or rather, they seem to struggle on without it and often against it. We do not perceive among them that restlessness which characterises the people of most other nations, especially towards the close of the nineteenth century. They do not cherish plans which seem t...