LETTER TO A CHINESE GENTLEMAN.
I.
Dear Sir,—
I received your books and have read them with great interest, especially the "Papers from a Viceroy's Yamen."
The life of the Chinese people has always interested me in the highest degree, and I have endeavoured to become acquainted with what was accessible in the life of the Chinese, especially with the Chinese wisdom, the books of Confucius, Mentze, Laotze, and commentaries upon them. I have also read about Chinese Buddhism and books by Europeans upon China, Latterly, moreover since those atrocities which have been perpetrated upon the Chinese by Europeans—amongst the others and to a great a extent by Russians—the general disposition of the Chinese people; has interested and does yet interest me.
The Chinese people, whilst suffering so much from the immoral and coarsely egotistic avarice and cruelty of the European nations, has, until lately, answered all the violence committed against it: with a magnanimous and wise tranquillity preferring to suffer rather than to fight against this violence. I am speaking of the Chinese people, but not about the Government. This tranquillity and patience of the great and powerful Chinese people elicited only an increasingly insolent aggression from Europeans, as is always the case with coarsely selfish people living merely an animal life as were the Europeans who had dealings with China. The trial which the Chinese have undergone and are now undergoing is a great and heavy one, but precisely now is it important that the Chinese people should not lose patience, or alter their attitude towards violence, so as not to deprive themselves of all the vast
