China's Strength and Weakness From a Correspondent.
Suichow, Hupeh, China is not to be described in the terms of great cities. Cities are centres, but they are not cir cumferences. Peking and Canton, Tientsin and Shanghai, are mere names upon a wap. The real China eludes the map. It numbers ite people in hundreds of millions, and measures its borders in thousands of miles; and it is not the Treaty Port that counts, in the last analysis, nor the provineial capital, but the village and hamlet, the market and farm. The strength of China is in its fields—the fields that reach in a continuity almost unbroken, save by mountains and lakes and streams, from the Pacific Ocean to the Tibetan marches, the wastes of Mongolia to.the harbour of Hongkong.
Tux Mituions or Cua.
And it is in these fields that we find, in the main, the millions of China. Small fields, small holdings, small farms, emall- hamlets these things carried almost into infinity, and we have—China!
'The real son of Han, the son most typical of his race, is the countryman. He plants' his rice and gathers his wheat. He picks his cotton and riddles his peanuts. He dries his tobacco leaf and cares for his silk-worms. He knows little or nothing of cities. The biggest crowd that he has ever seen he associates with a: wedding, or a funeral, or an open-air play-+~—Tae Parits or Aytiqurry. An ocean steamer he may have heard of from some local adventurer; but a liner or a launch, a tramcar or a train is something that his imagination but vaguely conceives. A motor-car or a bicycle would be a nine days' wondex, He is a child of the soil. His hands are horny, his muscles powerful. His blue jacket and his blue pants are plentifully torn and plentifully patched. Indeed his clothes seem to have solved the problem of the survival of identity for little or none of the original garments is left in many cases and Yet the garments continue the same.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.