Neither of the three men I had with me could read or write. The thoughts
of these people are circumscribed by the narrow world in which they
live, and only a chance traveler such as myself allows them a glimpse of
other places. Each man, with rare exception, lives and labors and dies
where he is born--that is his ambition; and in the midst of a people
whose whole outlook of life is so contracted, I find difficulty in
believing that progress such as Japan made in her memorable fifty-year
forward movement will be made by the Chinese of Yuen-nan in two hundred
years. Everything one can see around him here, at this town of
Anning-cheo, seems to make against it. In my dealings with Chinese in
their own country--I speak broadly--I have found that they "know
everything." I erected a printing-press in Tong-ch'uan-fu some months
ago--a type of the old flat handpress not unlike that first used by
Caxton. It was a part of the equipment of the Ai Kueh Hsieh Tang (Love
of Country School), and I was invited by the gentry to erect it. Now the
thing had not been up an hour before all the old fossils in the place
knew all about it. Printing to them was easy--a child could do it. It is
always, "O ren teh, o ren teh" ("I know, I know").
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