All the strength of the
world and all its beauties, all true joy, everything that consoles, that
feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark paths, everything
that enables us to discern across our poor lives a splendid goal and a
boundless future, comes to us from true simplicity. I do not say that we
get all this from the Chinese, but in many ways they can teach us how to
live in the _spirit of simplicity_. They were living from hand to mouth,
with seemingly no anxieties at all--and yet, too, they were living
without God, and with very little hope.
And here the foreigner re-appeared to disturb them. Even in Anning-cheo,
only a day from the capital, I was regarded as a being of another
species, and was treated with little respect. I was not wanted.
No international question has become more hackneyed than "Does China
want the foreigner?" Columns of utter nonsense have from time to time
been printed in the English press, purporting to have come from men
supposed to know, to the effect that this Empire is crying out, waiting
with open arms to welcome the European and the American with all his
advanced methods of Christendom and civilization. It has by general
assent come to be understood that China _does_ want the foreigner.
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