Why and How
Why the Chinese emigrate, and the Means they adopt for reaching America. With Sketches of Travel, Amusing Incidents, Social Customs, etc, By . With Illustrations by Hammatt Billings. Boston : Lee and Shepard.
MR. CONWELL’S knowledge of China is drawn from his own experience, as well as the best recent authorities, and if it does not strike the reader as quite novel, this is because we have all been learning a good deal about China of late years, and have had access to the books which he quotes in confirmation and amplification of his statements. In some respects his views of the Chinese question are novel, or at least so little familiar as to strike us anew. He attributes the emigration from China to the hopelessly bad government at home, and not to the superabundance of population. It may seem, he says, " almost a paradox to affirm that labor is scarce in China yet all experience goes to prove it ” ; and he declares that at present vast tracts of land lie waste, because there are no laborers to reclaim them ; for if the certainty of every sort of governmental extortion and oppression did not paralyze industry, the want of loads and markets would discourage it. So the peasant sells all, and even mortgages his family to get money to emigrate in violation of the laws ; and when he lands in San Francisco, he finds himself, even with the welcome which our impulsive Irish masters give him, a comparatively happy and prosperous man.
Mr. Conwell is a friend of the late Taiping rebellion, and no admirer of the Imperial government, not even of its civil service and competitive examinations, which he tells us are a pecuniary and not a literary competition. In fact, as to the administration of the laws in China, he has nothing good and therefore nothing new to say. There are some interesting notices of the coolie trade, which may be described in like terms, and some similarly interesting notices of Chinese society and superstitions, — religion, Mr. Conwell thinks, the great mass of the Chinese have none.
His book is chiefly estimable because it contains in brief what we must elsewhere seek in many places and in much extended phrase, and because it is the work of a sincere, if enthusiastic observer, and of a man who can wish well to the Chinese and abhor their oppressors, without being enamored of their faults. We think these such eminent merits in a writer about any foreign people, that we count a frequent lack of literary grace as nothing against them.