ON THE OTHER SIDE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 2, 1901

ON THE OTHER SIDE.

“THE well-fed American,” says Mr. Henry Briggs, who was a trader in China for twenty years, “can have no idea of the utterly bare life of the Chinese rice-picker. It is, at the best, perpetual semi-starvation. In years when the crop is short, these men grow into the likeness of skeletons. Infant female children are smothered as a religious duty, to save them from the pangs of death by famine. Yet, in the midst of this hardship and want, they are brave and cheerful, and kind and considerate neighbors, helping and nursing each other with tenderness.”

Mr. Briggs says that one autumn, in a year of famine, he went with two English travelers to shoot ducks in the vast rice-swamps. They lost their way, and after wandering for hours, met a Chinese of the lowest class, who conducted them, after two hours of hard plowing thru the mud of the swamps, back to their starting-place. The man was thin and weak, and was pale with exhaustion when he turned to go home. Hence it was a liberal handful of money which they offered him in payment—more than he could earn by two years of labor; for wages in China are almost incredibly low.

To their astonishment, he refused to accept any reward whatever. The reason he gave was that Confucius had ordered his followers to show kindness to their brother-men. “We are so poor,” he said, “that the chance rarely comes to us to obey him. No such chance as this has ever before come to me. I will not lose it.”

“Nor was this a solitary case,” says Mr. Briggs. “It is the habitual temper of the people.” Such incidents as this lend weight to the statement so often made by those most familiar with China, that continued seizure of territory by foreigners and the interference with domestic laws and customs, have roused the Chinese to a fury quite at variance with their usual temper.—Selected.