coat," are all equally incomprehensible to the Chinese, particularly as some of these garments do not pretend to cover the chest, which is the most exposed part of the body, made still more exposed by the unaccountable deficiencies of a vest cut away so as to display a strip of linen. Every foreigner in China is seen to have two buttons securely fastened to the tail of his coat, where there is never anything to button, and where they are as little ornamental as useful.
If the dress of the male foreigner appears to the average Chinese to be essentially irrational and ridiculous, that of the foreign ladies is far more so. It violates Chinese ideas of propriety, not to say of decency, in a great variety of ways. Taken in connection with that freedom of intercourse between the sexes which is the accompaniment of Occidental civilisation, it is not strange that the Chinese, who judge only from traditional standards of fitness, should thoroughly misunderstand and grossly misconstrue what they see.
Foreign ignorance of the Chinese language is a fertile occasion for a feeling of superiority on the part of the Chinese. It makes no difference that a foreigner may be able to converse fluently in every language of modern Europe, if he cannot understand what is said to him by an ignorant Chinese coolie, the coolie will despise him in consequence. It is true that in so doing the coolie will only still further illustrate his own ignorance, but his feeling of superiority is not the less real on account of its inadequate basis. If the foreigner is struggling with his environment, and endeavouring to master the language of the people, he will be constantly stung by the air of disdain with which even his own servants will remark in an audible "aside," "Oh, he does not understand!" when the sole obstacle to understanding lies in the turbid statement of the Chinese himself. But the Chinese does not recognise this fact, nor if he should do so would it diminish his sense of innate superiority. This general state of things continues in-
