MEUM AND TRIUM, Professor: "Now, Mr. Brown, will you please tell me the difference between" the North and South Poles?"
Brown: "Yes, sir. All the difference in the world." We cannot go so far a3 to say that these two terms are like the poles of a magnet, mutually repellent. All {that can be said of them is that they \are naturally and widely distinct. A discrimination between me and you is born with the babe, punctuated in adolescence, and underscored in old age, Most of the quarrels of children, the disagreements of youth, and the fends and wars of manhood are grounded in the disability of the parties concerned to i define clearly and exactly what is meum jand what is flurn, the former of which in ordinary cases is infinitely superior.
When a certain celebrated traveller" and explorer visited America several years ago, one of the newspapers in commenting on an address he delivered said: "The subject of the lecturer was and emin'" This illustrates what is meant by "infinitely superior." A due regard for the safety and welfare of the first person in many enses explains the reasons and incentives of human actions. Self-preservation is a first law of nature, In the exercise of this natural Iw, how: ever, meum has no right to injure trium, "There is that fellow Yang," said Men-dus, " who goes on the principle of each man for himself,. If he could enrich the whole Empire by the plucking out of a single hair from his own skin, he would not do it. Moh is built of different. tim= ber. He loves men equally, and would be willing to undergo pulverisation from head to heels if he could by this means benefit his country."
When meum becomes satiated there emerges a disposi i favourably, or even to persecute, the less fortunate firn on the principle that it is next to impossible to carry a full cup without spilling the contents. For prosperity, unless rightly tempered charity, breeds discontent, and meuse possesses an innate desire to " wade through slaughter to a throne," or to rise above the stratum of " sublime mediority " and soar in the cheerless, solitary regions of sublime genius, T'wum is the mediocre. Meum never is,. unless re constructed on an entirely different basis: Much of the criticism of the Chinese that has been offered by foreigners is the offspring of surfeit, a poor school, indeed, in which to learn the rectangular optics, or the art of upright, downright, square dealing, Human nature loves the pessimism of trium, and derogatory stories of that personage are gladly rex; ceived and easily believed. - Books: and:; articles which tend to lower the character of the Chinese are more popular than: those which show that this people are but an integral part of humanity, and that, Chinese characteristics are but humor characteristics after all.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.