Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/154

comprador generally grew rich at the expense of his employer. All the while the sincerest friendship existed between them, often descending to the second and third generation." It stands, indeed, to the high credit of Chinese commercial morality that such a relationship could possibly have continued without disaster to the foreign merchant, for he placed himself completely in the power of his native agents under circumstances which, were the ordinary motives of mercantile dealings paramount, must have led to his ruin. During recent years there have been, it is true, several cases of defaulting compradors, but they constitute an infinitesimally small fraction of the great body of men who have established a record for upright dealing. "Of all the accomplishments the Chinese nation has acquired during the long millenniums of its history," says Mr. A. Michie, speaking with the experience of thirty years in China, "there is none in which it has attained to such perfect mastery as in the science of buying and selling. The Chinese possess the Jews' passion for exchange. All classes, from the peasant to the prince, think in money, and the instinct of appraisement supplies to them the place of a ready reckoner, continually converting objects and opportunities into cash. Thus surveying mankind and all its achievements with the eye of an auctioneer, invisible note-book in hand, external impressions translate themselves automatically into the language of the market-place,