projected line of railway, the probable yearly profits of which were worked out to decimals of a cent! The matter-of-fact Japanese calculator simply transferred to his pamphlet the figures that came out on his abacus. The practical (because also theoretical) European knows that such apparent exactness is illusory. We have ourselves often seen, when travelling through various provinces of Japan, the distances along roads (in one instance across a wide strait of the sea) given, not only down to feet, but down to inches!
Here are two or three shorter dicta on the land and its people:—
"The land of disappointments." (An Old Resident in the Japanese service.)
"They impress me as the ugliest and the most pleasing people I have ever seen, as well as the neatest and most ingenious." (Mrs. Bishop, in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan.)
"The land of gentle manners and fantastic arts." (Sir Edwin Arnold.) The same author says of the Japanese: "They have the nature rather of birds or butterflies than of ordinary human beings … They will not and cannot take life au grand sérieux." (!!)
People are fond of drawing comparisons between the Chinese and the Japanese. Almost all seem agreed that the Japanese are much the pleasanter race to live with,—clean, kindly, artistic. On the other hand, the Chinese are universally allowed to be far more trustworthy. "I know," says Sir Ewen Cameron, late Manager of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in Shanghai, "of no people in the world I would sooner trust than the Chinese merchant or banker For the last twenty-five years the bank has been doing a very large business with Chinese in Shanghai, amounting, I should say, to hundreds of millions of taels, and we have never met with a defaulting Chinaman." Or listen (we cull at random one more testimony from among a hundred) to Mr. J. Howard Gwyther, chairman of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China. Speaking in 1900 at the half-yearly general meeting
