Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 August 1896 — Chinese Make Slow Progress. [ARTICLE]

Chinese Make Slow Progress.

In these times, when we can put a circle around the world in seventy days, this globe of ours scorns a small enough place. But who conceives its real extent? Who can compass in his mind such a realm as China? Penis Kearney used to tell us the Chinese were "mOon-eyed lepers.” My old friend Bret Ilartc clubbed them heathens. Our enlightened government proscribes them ns things accursed. Y'et in tlmt marvelous nation lias gone on for Immemorial years a civilization and an industry which were brilliant when Europe was a t en peopled by savages and America an undreamed of wilderness. They had a literature before the Egyptians, aud a wise one, too. They had printing when the, European world was a chaos. They had art when It was an unknown thing, except, perhaps, to the Egyptians, aud to them only ill a primitive way. They were the inveiffors of glass, and centuries upon centuries before a European ship penetrated to the Indian ocean their junks traded glassware to the ports of the Persian gulf. The Arabs, with cutting tools procured from the Chinese, engraved this Chinese glass with Arab emblems, and so stole the claim to Invention. AVheu the Chinese commenced to make pottery is unknown. From pottery to porcelain, from porcelain to glazed porcelain the progress went on. They cut jewels with miserable tools, which uow almost baffle the niechnnical Ingenuity of Amsterdam. They made coral a jewel when Italy was unknown. They carved jade, an apparently worthless mineral, intractable and brittle, into the most ingenious of artistic forms. Their silks were the silks of the world, for there were no others. And through all these aeons, with all their capricious changes of dynasty. they have remained the same people* perpetuating the feudal system of Europe, a nation of lords and serfs. But of late years, the vassals having been ground down so fine, the conditions having changed so much since a new world has grown up about them, the-lords reluctantly part with their treasured heirlooms under the pressure of necessity.—Collector.