EXTRACT from the Script on the subject of Sun Yat Sen.
188
"I compared Heung Shan with Hong Kong, and although they are only fifty miles apart the difference of the government oppressed me very much. Afterwards I saw the outside world, and I began to wonder how it was that foreigners, that English- men, could do such things as they had done, for example, with the barren rock of Hong Kong within seventy or eighty years, while in four thousand years China had no place like Hong Kong. After I had studied all this I went home to persuade the village elders to do the same thing on a small scale, at least to clear the streets and make a road to the next village, but they said we have not got any money. I replied labour can be had. young men can start the work, and so while I was at home I swept the street and cleaned the road. Many young men followed my example, but immediately we began to work outside the village there was trouble, and I had to give up getting Hong Kong on a small scale.
"Later I approached the magistrate of the district. He was very sympathetic and promised to help during the next vacation, but when that next vacation came round I found there was a new magistrate, a man who had paid $50,000 for the post, and so the previous holder had been removed.
"Such cases, one after another, impressed me, and when I returned to Hong Kong I began to study the Government. I found that among Government officials corruption was the exception and purity the rule. It was quite the contrary in China, where corruption among officials was the rule. I thought provincial government would be better and so I went to Canton, but I found that the higher the Government the more corrupt it was, and finally I went to Peking, where I found things one hundred times more corrupt and rotten than even in Canton, and I was forced to the opinion that after all village government was the purest government in China."