The Old Conception that Everything Belongs to the Emperor Still Prevails:
Rights of the People, An Amazing Fallacy, I see that Mr, Wang Chung-hui has been urging'the old fallacy that Inws that are good enough for the Chinese should be good enough for If that be true then laws} the Foreigner's Gift should be. good enough for' those to their countries. In 1844
On reading your article on Dr.
'T. Wang's second note to the Powers, on the 14th instant, I find myself agreeing with what you said that the so-called "unequal treaties' were never any bar to the friend-lines of the Chinese people to foreigners except when they were incited to acts of violence by interterested parties; but it seemed to me, that you might have gone much further and claimed, with justice, that the said treaties were the greatest boon foreigners ever gave to China, Tt would not be an over statement to say that at the time the treaty of Wanghia was negotiated (1844) the Chinese people had no rights at all. The common proverb had it "te'un tun moh fei wang ti," Every inch of soil belongs to the Emperor, "In many deeds of sale the character for "sell" was of used, for it {8 evident you can not 5 mnother's property and the Iand being the Emperor's ig might be rented in perpetuity but not sold. If the Emperor wanted to take back his own land, why, there was nothing to be said about it. If} the Emperor wanted concubines the provincial authorities selected the' fairest maidens they could find sent them to the one's children and one's Iand are not his own, surely nothing else can really belong to. him. The Mandarin was the "fu-mu kwan," the father and mother of his people' and if, he beat a man wrongly, well "tien-hela wie pub shikedy fuamu," "There are no parents on earth who do not make mistakes! The people had no rights, Revolution's First Martyr It is now more than twenty years since Hsu Hailing, the proto martyr of the revolution, shot and killed the Manchu governor of the province of Anhui. Hsu was immediately arrested and tried for his crime, fe knew he was certain to be killed and bore himself bravely. The Judge asked him, "Have. you no gratitude for chien t'u shih Kuh chih en?"—The favour of being allowed to tread hho ate belonged to the Emperor and revolt was appalling ingratitude for the Emperor's kindness in allowing him to live. Hsu replied—wrath:
"Shui chien shui t', shui shik ili." "Who treads whose earth, who eats whose grain?"—suggesting that it was the alien Emperor who was living on the people; not he who was living on the Emperor's Brace. He was taken out and bat-chored, but he has been honoured with @ mausoleum in Hangchow by the Nationalist Government. But, to the judge who sentenced him, it was inconceivable that anyone could be-Hieve otherwise than that the life and property of all his subjects were the Emperor's by divine right.
Into this imperialistic state came the foreigner and with him the treaties that guaranteed to him both life and property. That was a new and unheard of thing in old China but gradually it dawned on the people's mind that a man had rights as a man, that even an Emperor might not invade, The "unequal Treaties" were the first step in the revolution and the first impulse the Chinese people ever had towards real freedom,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.