Peking to Lhasa : vol.1 / Page 361 (Color Image)

0361	Peking to Lhasa : vol.1

THE CHINESE STUDENT 277

When I looked over the bleak, forbidding hills

of Nosuland and thought of the thousands of

patient suffering Chinese hearts who had trodden

those paths on their way to slavery, which has

utterly crushed them down, I could not help but

feeling, although a foreigner, a bitter indignation

against the Chinese in general, and the students,

as the leaders of public opinion, in particular, for

their apathy and allowing such things to be.

Again as I passed by Lu Chou on the Yangtze

and heard how brigands had been allowed to

pillage the city recently with impunity and how it

had previously suffered from soldiers, I thought

of the countless harmless citizens of towns and

villages who had suffered in the same way, and

yet never a word of protest has been raised by a

student, for they know it is the work of the

soldiers, and their patriotism does not go so far

as to risk falling out with one who would ad-

minister a beating in return for their protest.

Yet this same student, so silent when matters

vital to the happiness of his country are at stake,

is ready to raise an outcry against the foreigner

at the slightest provocation.

One of the chief of these grievances is the

British occupation of the very important village

of Pien-ma on the Burma frontier. It is im-

material that the Chinese claim arises from their

ignorance of the difference between a watershed

and a valley, or that the lucky natives of this

village are far happier under British than under

Chinese rule, or that the Chinese trader, if he

visits this out-of-the-way spot, gains by transact-

ing his business under British rule instead of under

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