Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1893 — AVERSE TO ANY CHANGE. [ARTICLE]

AVERSE TO ANY CHANGE.

Chinese from Their Infancy Learn to Ignore Any Suoh Thing ae Monotony. It seems to make no particular difference to a Chinese how long he remains in one position. He will write all day like an automaton. If he is a handicraftsman he will stand in one place from dewy morn till dusky eve, working away at his weaving, his gold beating or whatever it may be, and do it every day, without any variation in the monotony and apparently no special consciousness that there is any monotony to be varied. In the same way, says a writer in the Melbourne Leader, Chinese school children are subjected to an amount of confinement, unrelieved by any recesses or change of work, which would soon drive Western pupils to the verge of insanity. The very infants in arms, instead of squirming and wriggling as our children begin to do as soon as they are born, lie as impassive as so many mud gods. And at a more advanced age, when Western children would vie with the monkey in its wildest antics, Chinese children will often stand, sit or squat in the same posture for a great length of time.

In the item of sleep the Chinese establishes the same differences between himself and the Occidental as in the directions already sp cifled. Generally speaking, he is able to sleep anywhere. None of the trifling disturbances which drive us to despair annoy bim. With a brick for a pillow he can lie down on his bed of stalks, of mud bricks or rattan, and sleep the sleep of the just, with no reference to the rest of creation. He does not want his room darkened nor does he require others to be still. The “infant crying in the night” may continue to cry for all he cares, for it does not disturb him. In some regions the entire population seem to fall asleep, as by a common instinct (like that of the hibernating bear) during the first two hours of summer afternoons, and they do this with regularity', no matter where they may be. At two hours after noon the universe at such seasons is as still as two hours after midnight. In the case of most working people at least and also in that of many others, position in sleep is of no consequence. It would be easy to raise in China an army of 1,000,000 — nay, of 10,000,000 —tested by competitive examination as to their capacity to go to sleep across three wheelbarrows with head downward like a spider, their mouths wide open and a fly inside. The same freedom from tyranny of nerves is exhibited in the Chinese endurance of physical pain. Those who have any acquaintance with the operations in hospitals in China, know how common, or rather universal, it is for the patients to bear without flinching a degree of pain from which the stoutest of us would shrink in terror.