Note 174-2 — Chapter III

The classic lands of low wages and pauperism are especially the East Indies and China. A minister of Kienlong was punished after he had extorted about 20,000,000 thalers. (Barrow, II, 149.) In the confiscation of the well known Keschen, the authorities, according to their own accounts, found 682 pounds of gold and more than 6,000,000 pounds in silver. Considering the colossal[TN 12] banquets of the rich, embracing several hundred courses, of which Meyen, Reise um die Erde, II, 390, describes an example, the wretched food of the poor is doubly striking. Count Görtz relates that in Canton, rats and serpents are regularly exposed for sale. (Reise, 445.) The lowness of wages appears from the fact—one of many—that servants frequently get nothing but their board. (Haussmann, Voyage en Chine, etc.) In the cities, tradesmen with their tools run hither and thither about the streets begging for employment in the most imploring manner. Thousands live all their lives on rafts. Numberless instances of infanticide from want of food, (§ 251.) The influence of these circumstances on the morality of the people is best illustrated by the fact that Keschen, when he was ambassador to Thibet, preferred to confide his newly collected treasures to the escort of the French missionaries he persecuted rather than to the mandarins named by himself, so much more highly did he estimate European than Chinese honesty. (Edinburg Rev., 1851, 425 ff.) In the Chinese picture-writing, the word happiness was designated by a mouth well corked with rice. Chinese statisticians speak of mouths (Maul) where ours treat of the number of heads or souls. Ritter, Erdkunde, II, 1060. More favorable accounts in Plath, Münch. Akad., 1873, 784, 788 seq.

In the East Indies, a great many of the rejected castes live on carrion, dead fish, noxious insects, and even the middle class find wheat flour too dear, and therefore mix it with peas, etc. (Ritter, VI, 1143.) It is said that Bengal, in the famine of 1770, lost more than one-third of its inhabitants. (Mill, History of British India, III, 432.) Eloquent description of misery in Rickard, India, or Facts submitted to illustrate the Character and Condition of the native Inhabitants, II, London, 1832. An immense number of badly paid servants of whom it may however be said that each one accomplishes very little. The Pindaries may pass for an extreme of Indian pauperism, corresponding to the pirate-calamity during the later Roman Republic. (Quarterly Review, XVIII, 466 ff.; Ritter, VI, 394 ff.)