Social Life of the Chinese: With Some Account of Their Religious, Governmental, Educational, and Business Customs and Opinions, Etc
By , Fourteen Years Member of the Fuhchan Mission of the American Board. With over One Hundred and Fifty Illustrations. In Two Volumes. New York : Harper and Brothers.
MR. DOOLITTLE speaks of a class of degraded individuals in China, “who are willing to make amusement for others.” The severest critic can hardly assign him to any such class, for there is no reason to suppose that he would have made his book amusing, if he could possibly have helped it. But the Chinese are a race of such amazing and inexhaustible oddities, that the driest description of them, if it be only truthful, must be entertaining.
What power of prose can withdraw all interest from a people whose theology declares that whoever throws printed paper on the ground in anger “ has five demerits, and will lose his intelligence,” and that he who tosses it into water “ has twenty demerits, and will have sore eyes ” ? A people among whom unmarried women who have forsworn meat are called “ vegetable virgins,” and married women similarly pledged are known as “ vegetable dames,”— among whom a present of sugar-cane signifies the approach of an elder sister, and oysters in an earthen vessel are the charming signal that a younger brother draws near, — a people among whom the most exciting confectionery is made of rice and molasses, — how can the Reverend Justus Doolittle, deprive such a people of the most piquant interest ?
And when we come to weightier matters, one finds this to be after all one of, those “ dry books ” for which Margaret Fuller declared her preference, — a book where the author supplies only a multiplicity of the most unvarnished facts, and leaves all the imagination to the reader. To say that he for one instant makes the individuality of a Chinese conceivable, or his human existence credible, or that he can represent the whole nation to the fancy as anything but a race of idiotic dolls, would be saying far too much. No traveller has ever accomplished so much as that, save that wonderful Roman Catholic, Huc. But setting all this apart, there has scarcely appeared in English, until now, so exhaustive and so honest a picture of the external phenomena of Chinese life.
It is painful to have to single out honesty as a special merit in a missionary work ; but the temptation to filch away the good name of a Pagan community is very formidable, and few even among lay travellers have done as faithful justice to the Chinese character as Mr. Doolittle. He fully recognizes the extended charities of the Chinese and their filial piety ; stoutly declares that tight shoeing is not so injurious as tight lacing, and that Chinese slavery is not so bad as the late lamented “ institution ” in America ; shows that the religions of that land, taken at their worst, have none of the deified sensuality of other ancient mythologies, and that the greatest practical evils, such as infanticide, are steadily combated by the Chinese themselves. Even on the most delicate point, the actual condition of missionary enterprises, the good man tells the precise truth with the most admirable frankness. To make a single convert cost seven years’ labor at Canton, and nine at Fuhchan, and it was twenty-eight years ere a church was organized. Out of four hundred million souls, there are as yet less than three thousand converts, as the result of the labor of two hundred missionaries, after sixty years of work. Yet Mr. Doolittle, who has spent more than a third of his life in China, still finds his courage fresh and his zeal unabated; and every one must look with respect upon a self-devotion so generous and so sincere.