The Chinese magistrate being in theory the father of his district, he must not merely hold the balance between his people when they come to him with their quarrels; he must not merely punish the offender and vindicate the cause of the oppressed: he must also instil into the minds of his "children," by word and example, a submissive reverence for the doctrines of the ancient sages, which include proper respect for tradition, a dutiful obedience to all properly-constituted authority, whether in family or in State, and the practice of courtesy and forbearance in all dealings with neighbours and strangers. Some of the most valuable of the Confucian maxims are summed up in the "Sacred Edict," which, though it only dates from the time of K'ang Hsi (seventeenth century), is entirely based on the Confucian teachings and is very well known--by name if not by its contents--to the vast majority of the Chinese people. Whether Chinese magistrates always fulfil their functions either as models or as teachers of virtue is a matter which does not concern us.
In Weihaiwei, where the King's Order-in-Council justifies a magistrate in giving effect to Chinese customs and practices, I have frequently, in delivering judgments in both civil and criminal cases, used appropriate texts taken either from the Confucian classics themselves or from the Sacred Edict, for the purpose of giving my hearers little moral discourses on points suggested by the cases before me. If, for example, two neighbours have quarrelled over some trifling matter I tell them of the wise words used by K'ang Hsi and his commentators with reference to the observance of harmonious relations among people who inhabit the same village. I remind them, perhaps, that "if fellow-villagers quarrel with one another and neither is willing to forgive, then the result will be a state of enmity which may not only last all their own lives, but may embitter the lives of their sons and grandsons, and even then peace may not ensue."
On one occasion on which I had quoted a passage from the Sacred Edict a local missionary pointed out to me that I could have found a far more appropriate text for my purpose by turning to a certain passage in the Bible to which he referred me. He was very probably quite right, though I did not verify his Biblical reference: but it would no more occur to me, in addressing a crowd of Chinese from the magisterial bench in Weihaiwei, to read them passages from the Bible than it would occur to a judge in England to entertain the jury or the prisoner at the bar with quotations from the Zend Avesta or the Institutes of Vishnu. Is it not probable that an ordinary Chinese peasant will think more of his magistrate's ethical views and be more likely to profit by them if the magistrate bases his discourses on teachings which the Chinese and his ancestors have always been taught to hold sacred, rather than on strange-sounding quotations from a book he has never heard of?