A Chinaman once appeared at a British Consulate, with a present of some kind, which he had brought from his home a hundred miles away, in obedience to the command of his dying father, who had formerly been cured of ophthalmia by a foreign doctor, and who had told him, on his deathbed, "never to forget the English." Yet this present was addressed in Chinese: "To His Excellency the Great English Devil, Consul X." The Chinaman may love you, but you are a devil all the same.

It is most natural that he should think so.

For generation upon generation China was almost completely isolated from the rest of the world.

The people of her vast empire grew up under influences unchanged by contact with other peoples.

Their ideals became stereotyped from want of other ideals to compare with, and possibly modify, their own.