Any other member of it is as incapable of individual expression as is the hand, or the foot, or the eye of man. Indeed, Confucian doctors of divinity might appropriately administer psychically to the egoistic the rebuke of the Western physician to the too self-analytic youth who, finding that, after eating, his digestion failed to give him what he considered its proper sensations, had come to consult the doctor as to how it ought to feel. "Feel! young man," he was answered, "you ought not to be aware that you have a digestion." So with them, a normally constituted son knows not what it is to possess a spontaneity of his own. Indeed, this very word "own," which so long ago in our own tongue took to itself the symbol of possession, well exemplifies his dependent state. China furnishes the most conspicuous instance of the want of individual rights.
A Chinese son cannot properly be said to own anything. The title to the land he tills is vested absolutely in the family, of which he is an undivided thirtieth, or what-not. Even the administration of the property is not his, but resides in the family, represented by its head. The outward symbols of ownership testify to the fact.
The bourns that mark the boundaries of the fields bear the names of families, not of individuals. The family, as such, is the proprietor, and its lands are cultivated and enjoyed in common by all the constituents of the clan. In the tenure of its real estate, the Chinese family much resembles the Russian Mir. But so far as his personal state is concerned, the Chinese son outslaves the Slav.
For he lives at home, under the immediate control of the paternal will--in the most complete of serfdoms, a filial one. Even existence becomes a communal affair. From the family mansion, or set of mansions, in which all its members dwell, to the family mausoleum, to which they will all eventually be borne, a man makes his life journey in strict company with his kin.
A man's life is thus but an undivisible fraction of the family life.
How essentially so will appear from the following slight sketch of it.
To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event--for the household, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer.
He cries. The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his sex.
If the baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if a girl, there is considerably less effusion shown. In the latter case the more impulsive relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more philosophic evidently hope for better luck next time. Both kinds make very pretty speeches, which not even the speakers believe, for in the babe lottery the family is considered to have drawn a blank.
A delight so engendered proves how little of the personal, even in prospective, attaches to its object. The reason for the invidious distinction in the matter of sex lies of course in an inordinate desire for the perpetuation of the family line. The unfortunate infant is regarded merely in the light of a possible progenitor.
A boy is already potentially a father; whereas a girl, if she marry at all, is bound to marry out of her own family into another, and is relatively lost. The full force of the deprivation is, however, to some degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities of adoption. Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.
From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into public life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the shoulders of a slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the tender mercies of a being who is scarcely more than a baby herself.
The diminutiveness of the nurse-perambulators is the most surprising part of the performance. The tiniest of tots may be seen thus toddling round with burdens half their own size. Like the dot upon the little i, the baby's head seems a natural part of their childish ego.
An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive.
That it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another proves the precociousness of children. But this surprising maturity of the young implies by a law too well known to need explanation, the consequent immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow up to, naturally grows up to its limit sooner. It may even be questioned whether it does not do so with the more haste; on the same principle that a runner who has less distance to travel not only accomplishes his course quicker, but moves with relatively greater speed, or as a small planet grows old not simply sooner, but comparatively faster than a larger one. Jupiter is still in his fiery youth, while the moon is senile in decrepid old age, and yet his separate existence began long before hers. Either hypothesis will explain the abnormally early development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent career of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now on the other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator of the proceedings.
As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered to and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home life consists of attentive subordination. The relation his obedience bears to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps sufficiently by the comparative importance attached to precepts on the subject in the respective moral codes. The commandment "honor thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law, while the same injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian precepts.
