Chapter IV My Chinese Impressions IT is related in the analects of Confucius that one of his disciples put to him the question: " Is there one word upon which the whole life may proceed?" to which the Master replied: Is not Reciprocity such a word?" If it were pos- sible to find a word expressive of that curiously subtle thing, the Chinese character, perhaps Con- tradiction would furnish the keynote. There is probably no nation so extolled and lauded by some writers, and so inveighed against and execrated by others, as the Chinese, and this, too, by observers who have lived in China for many years. This great divergence of opinion is due, I believe, to the spirit of contradiction in the Chinaman himself. This spirit of contradiction is found not only in the frequently occurring examples of the Chinese way of doing things quite differently from the way that other people have found best, but more particularly in the cases where the Chinaman is so singularly inconsistent with his own apparent way of thinking and of the rules which he has laid down for his own guidance. He seems to be at the same time the extreme of economical and wasteful, practical and impractical, kind and cruel, honest and deceitful. No sooner has the observer 127