Milo Venus than to develope the brains of the
present generation of Celestials into the
dimensions of truth and reality.

The Chinese do nothing like other people,
and very little reasonably, in any way. When
they mount a horse, they get up on the right
side, and where we would say a man has a
glorious brain, they say he has a capacious
stomach; for this they make the seat of
intellect. There are certain tribes in the west—
the Miautsz—said, by the by, to have tails
like monkeys, who are even more than
commonly contradictory to the received traditions
and customs of the rest of mankind. They
conduct most of the ceremonies of life in an
odd way; but those relating to birth and
maternity in quite an original manner.
When the husband is made a father, he goes
to bed with the new-born baby, and the wife
gets up and scrubs the house. If a Chinaman
wants a wife, he sends a go-between, and
buys one; and if a family wants a servant,
the young son has a young wife purchased
for him, and thus the house secures a wife
and a servant in one. Their old men fly
kites, and their young boys look on with
grave approval. A man may divorce his
wife for want of slavish respect to his mother;
but a woman may murder her child and no
questions be asked. If they want rain or
cool weather, sunshine or heat, they go into
a temple (chin-chin joss), burn some silver-
paper, fee the bonzes, if it be a Buddhist
temple, and depart, shaking their fat sides
and wagging their long queues, convinced
that Joss will be good and Buddha complaisant,
and both will do as they are bid. One
Chinese worthy, though a governor, a man
of rank and education, who had passed
through his four examinations, and received
pay for his supreme talent—as all the fourth
examination men do—thinking Joss not
quick enough with his rain-clouds, when
he honoured him by begging him to send
them, for it was very hot, and the great man
wanted a refreshing shower, cried out: "He
thinks I am lying when I chin-chin him and
ask for rain; for how can he know, seated in
his cool niche in the temple, that the ground
is parched and the skies hot? Let us change
places, and then he will know that I do not
lie." Whereupon he flung a rope round his
godship, and hauled him into the burning
sun, his excellency himself taking Joss's
place in the shaded niche, till he was cool,
and the poor god's paint and gold-leaf all
blistered and shrivelled with the heat. Of
course the rain followed; and we are left in
admiration of his excellency's proficiency as
a weather-prophet. To be sure the Italians
do much the same with their saints, when, in
times of plague and pestilence, they carry
them in procession through their towns, and
scold and scourge them to make them more
efficient sanatory reformers. For not the
least wonderful part of fetishism is the
contemptuous familiarity with which the
worshippers oftentimes treat the worshipped.
The Chinese have the further oddity of being
superstitious, unpoetical, and irreligious at
once. They cast horoscopes to determine the
good or evil moment for an enterprise, and
undertake nothing that has not its auspicious
conjunction; yet they have no grand conception
of a God, they have never imagined to
themselves an angel, and all the graceful
fancies of Faërie are hidden from them. They
have made some progress in experimental
science, yet nothing which they have
discovered, of all that has revolutionised the
West, has borne fruit with them. Their
compasses have guided no merchant ships
upon the waters; their gunpowder has
neither simplified the art of war nor led to
the study of strategy; their knowledge of
optics has opened up no microscopical world,
nor brought the bright glories of the heavens
down to earth; credulous as children, they
are as ignorant; but, with all their credulity,
they are sceptical and unbelieving as well.
They believe in evil genii and dragons, in the
phoenix and the primordial dragon; but ask
them to credit an electric telegram, to
understand a steam-engine, to acknowledge the
microscopic revelations spread out before
their eyes, to put faith in the Atlantic cable,
or the East India House, and they will tell
you that you are a barbarian with blue eyes,
a fan-kwei, and a sayer of that which is not.
The dragon and the phœnix are true; but
the rotifer and the message, the sixty miles
an hour, the cable, and the captive kings are
false.

What can be done with such people?
People who place their emperor above laws,
and class humanity by glass buttons and
fox tails? People who, to make sure of a
beautiful daughter, and one that shall perhaps
redeem the fortunes of her family by a
good marriage, bandage up her feet so that
she may go hobbling and deformed for life?
Who build Baby Towers, where dead infants
may be cast without inquiry and without
fear, then gravely reason against female
infanticide, asking philosophically, in governmental
placards, how the next generation are
to get wives if so many female infants are
slaughtered in this? Who regulate all life
by bows and ceremonies, and whose emperor
would rather lose his throne than suffer a
barbarian ambassador to approach him
without the necessary rites of the Ko-tau? What
can one make of such an extraordinary race?
Yet they are human beings like ourselves;
they eat and drink, and marry and die, just
as if they understood physics and had correct
views of history and the exact sciences. And
the world goes on, carrying this mass of
pigtailed wrong-headedness on. her bosom as
contentedly as she carries the Manchester
man, whose god is in the cotton-mill, or the
Liverpool merchant, who thinks that Paradise
must have been incomplete without an
invoice and a bill of lading.