this point, money will probably make the foreigner in China more trouble than any other single cause. Whether the Chinese concerned happen to be educated scholars or ignorant coolies, makes little difference. All Chinese are gifted with an instinct for taking advantage of misunderstandings. They find them as a January north wind finds a crack in a door, as the water finds a leak in a ship, instantly and without apparent effort. The Anglo-Saxon race is in some respects singularly adapted to develop this Chinese gift. As the ancient Persians were taught principally the two arts of drawing the long bow and speaking the truth, so the Anglo-Saxon is soon perceived by the Chinese to have a talent for veracity and doing justice as well towards enemies as towards friends. To the Chinese these qualities seem as singular as the Jewish habit of suspending all military operations every seventh day, no matter how hard-pressed they might be, must have appeared to the Romans under Titus, and the one eccentricity proves as useful to the Chinese as the other did to the Romans.
Foreign intercourse with China for the century preceding 1860 was one long illustration of the Chinese talent for misunderstanding, and the succeeding years have by no means exhausted that talent. The history of foreign diplomacy with China is largely a history of attempted explanations of matters which have been deliberately misunderstood. But in these or in other cases, the initial conviction that a foreigner will do as he has promised is deeply rooted in the Chinese mind, and flourishes in spite of whatever isolated exceptions to the rule are forced upon observation. The confidence, too, that a foreigner will act justly (also in spite of some private and many national examples to the contrary) is equally firm. But given these two fixed points, the Chinese have a fulcrum from which they may hope to move the most obstinate foreigner. "You said thus and thus." "No, I did not say so." "But I understood you to say so. We all understood you to say so.
