China is the European Middle Ages made visible. All the cities are walled and the walls are kept in a condition for use. The streets are narrow, crooked, poorly paved, filthy, and malodorous. There is no public lighting, and until recent years there was no force to maintain public order. The people use raw river water brought to them in buckets by regular water carriers. System of public sewage there is none; but the cultivators are so eager for fertilizer that in the early morning they penetrate to every street and lane and by nine o'clock they have removed from every house that which the wasteful West casts into its sewers. Most of the houses are low and mean and the windows are few, small, and unglazed. Until American kerosene began to penetrate the Empire the common source of light was a bit of cotton wick hanging over the edge of an iron cup containing rape seed oil. Pasture there is none and little fruit is grown; for the production of the staples of human food has the first claim on the soil. Lumber is too dear to be used freely in building. Coal is largely neglected and charcoal is the chief fuel.

The handicraft stage prevails, machinery is unknown, and I have never seen in China a windmill. Waterpowers are used, but only for grinding. The exchange of bulky commodities is slight and the people of one province may be starving while in the neighboring province there is food a-plenty. On the road to

Shansi I met on the way to distant markets cartloads of salt, paper, wool, hides, cotton, tobacco, licorice, oil, and flour. Coal, charcoal, locust wood, wheat, and millet were bound for nearer markets. A few miles from the pit's mouth I found good lump coal selling at $0.80 a ton; while a hundred miles away the same coal was selling for $5.60. The cost of carting was $0.041⁄2 a

ton.

There is little provision for the unfortunate, and the cripple or the leper begs his bread by the roadside. After the sheaves have been gathered in, poor widows and children spread over the stubble fields and glean the heads of wheat the rakes have missed. There are professional beggars, united in strong guilds, who blackmail the reluctant shopkeeper into giving by keeping up such a din in front of his shop that no customer will enter. Until the new system started six years ago, there were no free common schools. Not over one man in ten can read, and less than one woman in a hundred. The masses believe in witchcraft and evil eye, and, while normally very peaceable, may, when goaded by superstitious fear, form fanatical and cruel mobs as did our forefathers in the Middle Ages. Until recently newspapers were wanting, there was no real public opinion and no participation whatsoever of the people in government. In order to impose a check upon the rulers in the interests of the people, the ancient sages taught that, while the ruler governs by the will of heaven, the rising of his people is a sure sign that Heaven's mandate has been withdrawn. Insurrection, therefore, was taught as a sacred right of the people-a doctrine more productive of disorder and woe than all the errors democracies have ever committed.

The analogy with the Middle Ages should not, however, be pressed too far. To our Middle Ages were unknown such features of China as a purely secular learning, competitive civil service examinations, ancestor worship, the patriarchal family, parental control of matrimony, the system of mutual responsibility, and direct imperial administration. On the other hand, contemporary China knows nothing of such mediaevalisms as feudalism, the manor, heriditary caste, ecclesiasticism, the religious orders, chivalry, and the passion for the chase.

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

To the sociologic eye, the most outstanding thing in the Far East is the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence. Evidences of it are seen in an intensive farming carried on by hand implements rather than the plow, in the measures taken to recover the fertile elements washed from the soil, in the eager and instant appropriation of everything of fertilizing value, in the impressive fashion in which the landscape has been carved, molded, and terraced as if by giant hands, in the completeness of utilization that has carried the fields right up to the crest of the mountains, in some cases, five thousand feet above the floor of the valley, in the elimination of most domestic animals save the scavengers, such as pigs and fowl, in the simplicity of the diet of the common people, and the retention therein of coarse or even repulsive food elements. Secondary consequences of population pressure are the very small proportion of well-to-do or rich families, the cheapness of human labor, the low standard of comfort, the squalor of the habitations of the cultivators, the waste of health and life in such undermining occupations as that of the ricksha runner, the chair bearer, the porter, and the treadmill coolie, the early age at which boys are turned to account, the smallness of the funds available for philanthropy, the exposure of female infants, the callousness to human suffering shown by a people so hard pressed that they cannot indulge in sympathy or generosity, the solidarity that prevails in those mutual aid associations-family, clan, or guild-that tide the individual over crises in his life, and a religious materialism that prompts worship in the frank hope of deriving worldly benefit from the favor of the gods.

The population pressure is not due to the niggardliness of the soil, the sloth or stupidity of the people, the prevalence of wasteful vices, the oppression of government, or the exploitation of landlord or capitalist. Beyond all question, it is due to a family system that eliminates every prudential check on multiplication. The Chinese imagine that unless twice a year his male descendants offer paper money at his grave a man's spirit wanders forlorn about the spirit world begging its rice. It is therefore the