But it may be that the husk
is taken from the kernel. The husk comprises the treaty ports and some
of the capital cities of the provinces; the kernel is that vast sleepy
interior of China. Few people, even in Shanghai, know what it means; so
that to the stay-at-home European pardon for ignorance of existing
conditions so much out of his focus should readily be granted.
From Shanghai, up past Hankow, on to Ichang, through the Gorges to
Chung-king, is a trip likely to strike optimism in the breast of the
most skeptical foreigner. But after he has lived for a couple of years
in an interior city as I have done, with its antiquated legislation, its
superstition and idolatry, its infanticide, its girl suicides, its
public corruption and moral degradation, rubbing shoulders continually
at close quarters with the inhabitants, and himself living in the main a
Chinese life, our optimist may alter his opinions, and stand in wonder
at the extraordinary differences in the most ordinary details of life at
the ports on the China coast and the Interior, and of the gross
inconsistencies in the Chinese mind and character. If in addition he has
stayed a few days away from a city in which the foreigners were shut up
inside the city walls because the roaring mob of rebels outside were
asking for their heads, and he has had to abandon part of his overland
trip because of the fear that his own head might have been chopped off
_en route_, he may increase his wonder to doubt.
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