A., they have no wish to alter the habits of the
foreigners, any more than we wish to put the monkeys at the Zoo into
trousers and stiff shirts. And their attitude towards each other is, as
a rule, equally tolerant. When they became a Republic, instead of
cutting off the Emperor's head, as other nations do, they left him his
title, his palace, and four million dollars a year (about L600,000), and
he remains to this moment with his officials, his eunuchs and his
etiquette, but without one shred of power or influence. In talking with
a Chinese, you feel that he is trying to understand you, not to alter
you or interfere with you. The result of his attempt may be a caricature
or a panegyric, but in either case it will be full of delicate
perception and subtle humour. A friend in Peking showed me a number of
pictures, among which I specially remember various birds: a hawk
swooping on a sparrow, an eagle clasping a big bough of a tree in his
claws, water-fowl standing on one leg disconsolate in the snow. All
these pictures showed that kind of sympathetic understanding which one
feels also in their dealings with human beings--something which I can
perhaps best describe as the antithesis of Nietzsche. This quality,
unfortunately, is useless in warfare, and foreign nations are doing
their best to stamp it out. But it is an infinitely valuable quality, of
which our Western world has far too little.
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