7-
22
pride the balm of appearing to ignore the slight. Instead, he may
politely lie, saying he admires and respects the English people, and
has no personal dislike for them; or he may attempt to prevaricate,
professing to have had too few contacts with British people to express
an opinion; or he may admit his dislike for the British people, giving
as his reasons the time-honoured grievances of the exclusion of Chinese
from residence on the Peak, the fact that Hong Kong is in British hands
at all, and so on, though inwardly he knows oftentimes better than his
questioner that these grievances are almost groundless and are often
merely & weapon used by overzealous 'patriots', propagandists, politi-
cians and political adventurers, and having nothing to do with the
genuine dislike.
Having in mind the incident at the bank to which I have just
referred, in course of conversation with a group of Asiatic bank clerks
some months later, I asked them how they were treated by their European
superiors. One of their number expressed this opinion, with which the
others concurred: "The 'big bosses' are, on the whole, true and court-
eous gentlemen, who treat us with kindness and consideration. The
'aneller bosses', with whom we come into contact daily, are not all
quite the same, The men who come out fresh from England are without
exception very gentlemanly in dealing with us local hands, but within
a year they begin to change and within two years the majority of them
get to be so overbearing that we simply fear and hate them. The
English 'small bosses' transferred from India are, as a rule, the
worst of all
J
they treat us like dogs. Our pals in the Dutch and
the American banks are treated by their bosses, no matter how long