As a matter of fact, that is, so far as my own observations go, the Chinese people value life every whit as highly as we do, and a substitute of the kind would be quite unprocurable under ordinary circumstances. It is thinkable that some poor wretch, himself under sentence of death, might be substituted with the connivance of the officials, to hoodwink foreigners; but even then the difficulties would be so great as to render the scheme almost impracticable.
For in China everything leaks out. There is none of that secrecy necessary to conceal and carry out such a plot.
At any rate, the uncertainty which gathers around many of these points emphasises the necessity of more and more accurate scholarship in Chinese, and more and more accurate information on the people of China and their ways.
How the latter article is supplied to us in England, you may judge from some extracts which I have recently taken from respectable daily and weekly newspapers.
For instance, "China has only one hundred physicians to a population of four hundred millions."
To me it is inconceivable how such rubbish can be printed, especially when it is quite easy to find out that there is no medical diploma in China, and that any man who chooses is free to set up as a doctor.
By a pleasant fiction, he charges no fees; a fixed sum, however, is paid to him for each visit, as "horse-money,"--I need hardly add, in advance.
There are, as with us, many successful, and consequently fashionable, doctors whose "horse-money" runs well into double figures. Their success must be due more to good luck and strictly innocent prescriptions than to any guidance they can find in the extensive medical literature of China.
All together, medicine is a somewhat risky profession, as failure to cure is occasionally resented by surviving relatives.
There is a story of a doctor who had mismanaged a case, and was seized by the patient's family and tied up. In the night he managed to free himself, and escaped by swimming across a river. When he got home, he found his son, who had just begun to study medicine, and he said to him, "Don't be in a hurry with your books; the first and most important thing is to learn to swim!"
Here is another newspaper gem: "In China, the land of opposites, the dials of the clocks are made to turn round, while the hands stand still."