Under the head of "Manners and Customs" it was said of some savage tribe, "manners they have none and their customs are beastly." Whether the Chinese rank as civilised, semi-civilised, or semi-barbarous is largely a matter of definition, but in any case it cannot be said of them, " Manners they have none." Those who know best might rather complain that they have too many. The average English boy hates to take off his cap in greeting you and does it awkwardly; the average American boy is apt to keep his on even when he enters a room; but no Chinese schoolboy fails to greet his teacher with proper ceremony, formal bat not awkward. Foreign schoolboys, on their return to school, do not show much interest in the state of health of their companions' parents; but among Chinese students and schoolboys there are always formal enquiries after the "peace at home" and as to "peace upon the road."
When differing civilisations meet there cannot fail to be a good many misunderstandings on both sides. Our manners are not only less formal and tiresome than those of the Chinese but they are very different in character, being the out conte of a different civilisation in a different environment: the two systems are incommensurables.' It is therefore not to be wondered at if the Chinese think we are mannerless and impolite. It has happened for example that a foreigner riding in China has been deliberately misdirected by the peasant of whom he asked the road. Chinese manners required that before enquiring the rider should alight, and the peasant answers impoliteness with impoliteness, The foreigner rides some miles out of his way, and ever after treasures his experience as a proof of the boorish hatred of the Chinese to the foreign devil. Misunderstandings of this kind take place every day. Not every foreigner, any more than every Chinese, can recognise the actual politeness which may very well exist under a breach of formal manners.
The foreigner's insolent disregard of Chinese conventionalities has sometimes an unfortunate result on those natives who are intimate with him,—they also learn to leave off, being polite according to the native code, and, needless to say, they do not acquire instead the ease of foreign manners. We have seen the missionary's wife shaking hands with her neighbour's table-boy—which will cause a few discerning readers to shudder; we have seen the foreigner dining with the mandarin, who did not know enough to cap "your honourable" with "my unwortby,"—who proffered tea with one hand while the other was in his pocket who emphasised his thou, thou, thou,' with flourishes of a table-knife before the great man's astonished spectacles. Worse still, we have known schools where manners became disin ted because the foreign teacher knew no Chinese civilities and the pupils naturally learnt no Western manners; with the result that after years of schooling they enter the world unpleasant, ungracious, uncouth to native and foreigner alike. Hostility we may often make allowance for, but overfamiliarity or lack of polish is hardly less offensive, and is often a mark of those who have been educated under foreign teachers. The Chinese do not require that we should teach formal politeness—they could rather be our instructors; but they do require that we should impress them the value of good manners whether native or foreign; in schools especially it should be looked to that good Chinese manners should be encouraged, and that laxity or awkward imitations of the freedom of foreign manners should be checked.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.