Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally stable kind.

For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status quo.

Jostled, he at once settles back to his previous condition again; much as more materially, after a lifetime spent in California, at his death his body is punctiliously embalmed and sent home across five thousand miles of sea for burial.

With the Japanese the condition of affairs is somewhat different.

Their tendency to stand still is of a purely passive kind.