One has only to return to Shansi, after a trip in other provinces, to realize afresh that the claim to the title of the "Model Province" is being maintained. On the other side of the Yellow River, you leave the motley throngs of unkempt, pigtailed humanity clad in tattered blues and blacks, with their opium pipes in evidence, and once on the weather worn and leaking ferryboat you know you are passing into a region where the fear of ¢ufei for the present no longer reigns, nor is military oppression a daily terror, save to the unrighteous smuggler. Here in Shansi clean shaven faces and close cropped heads are the order of the day, and white—usually well washed white, too—is the common dress. A_ street crowd in Honan is totally different from a_ street crowd in Shansi.
Then in Shansi every available wall is covered with exhortations to patriotism and right living, and look where you will, in town or village, there are the freshly ainted maxims both of the governor and the local official in one form or another all around. Here, a dozen rules of living in prominent characters, covering a square of. ten feet lime wall; there, half-a-dozen suggestive characters, a foot or more in size. All down one street are black boards at every door with precepts in character and script, while another locality will have the same on white boards and yet another reproduce them on red paper. Prominent everywhere is the motto, "Every "man a with reminders that "the dogs."
unpatriotic are like lost "Call the doctor before the patient dies," Save the country before it is lost," "In times of peace prepare for war," Money and munitions are the essentials for national defence." These and countless other such maxims em-hellish the walls at every turn, while the evils of the "golden pill and opium are proclaimed on a colossal scale that might make the greatest advertising firms envious of such enterprise.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.