To the Editor of the "NortH-Cama Datty News.""
Sir,—I_ should be lacking in courtesy if I failed to notice Mr. F. H. Kales's friendly letter in your issue to-day. I fear that, in common with some of your other correspondents, he has read into my short note on the Chinese Mind" a meaning different from the one that I desired to convey. I hinted at this mis-reading in another note in your issue of the 4th inst.
Someone referred to the '"Chinese Mind" in a sense which appeared to imply that it was marked by some specific difference from the European mind. It seemed to me that this was at once bad psychology and "a racial comparison in the rawest way possible," to quote Mr. Kales. I also was named.
I replied, perhaps too briefly,, in terms which implied that the Chinese mind had originated and worked out a system of civilization (which survives to-day) before one of the leading races of post-Roman Europe had emerged from a primitive stage of social development.
It appears that what I ventured to state as a well-known fact of human culture has been understood as a racial taunt. I invite Mr. Kales to re-read the letter in question, and note the words expressly disclaiming any offensive insinuation in the reference to woad. And I now ask him to believe that no such idea was in my mind when I suggest that my forefathers were civilized men what time the ancestors of some of our impatient critics were not.
Mr. Kales warns us, in this matter, against the sins of vanity and and selfishness. And you, Sir, quote the Jew in Shakespeare. May I adda plea for what the great Christian Jew tells us is the greatest of all virtues.
I am, ete., Evaene CHEN.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.