Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 429

1830.

Men and Things in Shanghai.

391

all convenient care to afford relief, and on the other to provide against civil disorder. Very stringent measures were adopted to prevent lawless vagabonds from banding together, and giving themselves up to plunder and rapine. Subscriptions were set on foot, and large sums of money collected for the purchase and distribution of food. In taking up these subscriptious, an incident occurred, the like of which I have never before known among the Chinese.

A forced donation was returned. The scale of contributions was a very extensive one, the subscriptions varying in amount from a few cash to a few hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of dollars. The officers of government took the lead, themselves individually first sub- scribing generously. To encourage rich gentry, the government has a scale of honors, so that any person subscribing to a specified amount becomes thereby entitled to a specific honor. Among those who, under these circumstances, placed their names on the list, and became entitled to tokens of honor, which are conferred by the emperor, were two native gentlemen who signified, I know not in what way, that they made their contributions by constraint. This coming to the ears of the magistrate, he forthwith issued a proclamation, stating the fact as it had been signified by themselves, viz., that they had been forced to subscribe; and thereupon he ordered their money to be returned to them, and their names to be stricken from the list, that the signatures of such base and sordid men might not remain a stigma on the catalogue of the illustrious benefactors which was about to be sent up to the emperor. The efforts inade by the Chinese, in various ways during the late famine to relieve the distressed people, present a pleasing feature in their national character. The motive operating, in this case, has been a complex one; and of the two principal ingredients-necessity and benevolence-I am unable to say which, if laid in the balance, would preponderate. With the Chinese, charity begins at home, and as it happens sometimes with more enlightened people, usually ends there.

The Asylum for outcast children, mentioned in a former letter, has recently been dismantled, and is being converted into storehouses. It has, so far as I can judge, answered well all the purposes for which it was designed; when I last visited it, on the 10th inst, the rooms, formerly containing about two thousand little children, were all vacat- ed, excepting one or two in these there were twenty-five or thirty poor and feeble orphans, or, at least, if not orphaus, such as no parents or guardians came forward to claim.

Unburied coffins have recently attracted the notice of the local