Missionaries may do much to break the force of this argument by combining, as so many Protestant missionaries are doing, to memorialise the authorities against the wi-authorised use of the name of the mission, and against yielding to any demand whatever which is nob in accord with the law of China on one hand or Treaty regulations on the other. So that a well-known Chinese statesman said (October, 1902), "Thave now no suspicion whatever as to' the motives and work of Protestant missions." When this kind of understanding becomes universal, the argument will fall to the ground; while the opposite of this is, of course, a chief argument for the worship of Confucius continuing to be an essential regulation from the Chinese standpoint.
China might do much, as it has so often been pointed out, to remove such obnoxious reasons for the obligatory worship of Confucius, by the purification of her law-courts as Japan has done, For, as a Chinese neighbour said quite recently, referring to case of his own, unconnected with mission considerations, "There are only three ways of getting an average county court to act. The poor have no resource but to bert the yamen runners; the middle-class students to combine and make a fuss at examination time; the upper classes to threaten the use of higher power. When I went the other day to sve if anything had been done in a matter clearly within the mandarin's duties, the man at the gate exclaimed, Do on take us for foreign Englishmen? "This isa Chinese Court.'" So that at present, convert or non-convert, pressure or pr sents must be employed to move many a mandarin to his clearest duty.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.