and six different sets of soldiers popped out and saluted us on our way through the maze of buildings to the central offices. Ex-President Eliot of Harvard said a year or so ago that the Peking Prison was the most interesting thing he saw in his whole trip through China. I think the "Gate of Hope" is more interesting, but I should place this magnificent prison a close second.

Take the work rooms, for instance. In great, high-studded rooms forty yards. square by a measurement I was curious enough to verify, there were groups of forty or fifty men working at their trade. under conditions, if one considers the standard of living of the far East, almost ideal. There were big rooms for ten or more trades, including tailoring, shoemaking, woodworking, ironsmithing, bookbinding, spinning and weaving, basketmaking, printing, and several others, not the least of which was market-gardening outdoors. It was strange to hear, out in far-away Peking, in a city through the streets of which I had traveled continuously for six weeks without once meeting a foreign face except in the tiny, walled

foreign quarter-it was strange to hear that the majority of men who came to prison knew no trade, and that the best way to make them behave themselves like decent citizens when they got out was to teach them a trade. It was all what we are still vainly trying to practise at home.

At the Peking Prison they not only teach prisoners a trade, but they have an employment bureau which connects a man with a job. They segregate first offenders. from old-timers and men convicted of light offenses from those guilty of heavier ones up through second, third, and fourth offenders. In fact, forgery, petty larceny, robbery, and assault and battery are the names of cell rows where convicts of kindred offenses are exclusively confined. The governor confessed that the atmosphere of specialism in crime might be rather narrowing, but it was all in the name of modernism and system.

The parole system has been introduced, and the governor has decided to stick to it. Physical drill, an innovation in any class. of Chinese society, is held daily, and the setting-up exercise I saw proved that the men enter into it with appreciation and

enthusiasm. But the outstanding note of the prison is cleanliness and order. The cells are large, and though doubling up is common, they are dry and clean. Electric lighted, of stone construction throughout, on high and level ground, with sanitary conveniences far better than home standards in China, the great prison at Peking is as much a lasting credit to the far-reaching social reform spirit of the Chinese as Sing Sing, for instance, where Warden Osborne's back is still against the wall, is a disgraceful witness to the complacent conservatism of America.

We went up into the cupola as the six o'clock bugle blew the signal to stop work, and from the first landing we could see long lines of prisoners waiting for their evening wash. They were clad in clean white suits, and they stepped briskly along to the wash-room, knowing that beyond it lay supper. Supper is set out in rice-bowls, and on special occasions there are three sizes of them, a potent discrimination against unruly spirits. Up and down the long tables, with completely shaven heads (the laundry workers have to submit to this, too), moved the cooks and waiters, and as we went on up the stairs the hum of talk which mingled with the busy click of chop-sticks showed that these Chinese had granted another mercy that we still withhold more often than not in the civilized West-the mercy of talk at meals.

Up in the cupola was the assemblyroom, with rows and rows of high-sided seats that enabled the prisoners to see the platform, but not one another. On the wall over the platform I saw five crude paintings of men with beards. In regular order, beginning at the left, the governor pointed them out as Mohammed, Jesus, Confucius (in the center), Buddha, and Lao-tsze, the founder of the Taoist faith. Thus was China liberal to all religions, and every Sunday, when the prisoners gathered here, they heard a moral discourse from some representative of one of these five creeds, with the other four to frown down upon him with united disapproval if he became too partizan.

The last thing we saw at the Peking

Prison was a set of the instruments of torture with which prisoners were brought to reason in days gone by. Balls and drags for the feet, vises for breaking the bones of the hand, the terrible old slicing-knife, and, amid a host of other tools, two handsomely chased beheading swords with nicked and rusty blades-how wholesomely they fitted into the dusty chamber to which they were once again to be consigned away from the uses of man! Only the light bamboo is allowed to-day, and that very sparingly, at this prison; and as a testimony to the humane treatment, which I have since verified, let it be said that for more than four years there has not been a single attempt to escape. one doubted that this is a model prison, could one have any better proof?

If

There was a day in Peking when the gutters of the streets ran in floods on rainy days, so that it was no unusual thing for an unwary victim who lost his footing, particularly a small child, to fall in and be drowned. The revelations and the odors on the coming of dry weather made it a veritable city of the damned. Since those days, before the siege, the spirit of the city has entirely changed; but even to-day the curious traveler may poke his nose into backwaters of the old capital's life, as I did the next day, and get the full stench of the unregenerate past.

The next day's trip that I made with Captain Ho included a visit to the Boys' Industrial Home (the Shih Yi Sou) and the poorhouse (the Ping Ming Yuan). The Shih Yi Sou is under the capable administration of the ministry of the interior, a thoroughly modern department of the Government, and is, in its way, wholly as creditable an institution as the Peking Prison. The 375 boys there, ranging anywhere from fifteen to twenty-one years of age, are given a thoroughly efficient tradeschool education along lines that could hardly be improved in the Western world. They are taught tailoring, tinsmithing, printing, soap-making, cloth-weaving, hatmaking, gardening, and half a score of other trades. But most important of all, they are taught under a clean, efficient,

and humane system that turns out human quality, and not merely good artisans. The boys we saw about the neat, spacious, well-ventilated buildings, in their clean blue uniforms, had good, shining boy faces it was worth while going to see. And yet when they came to the institution they were beggar wastrels, orphans, paupers, young pickpockets, and incorrigibles of all descriptions. The Shih Yi Sou, tucked away in the trackless heart of this vast Chinese city, is a thoroughly up-to-date, twentieth-century institution.

The Ping Ming Yuan is hidden away quite as obscurely, but it is hidden in a shameful past as well. It is the city poorhouse, and as such it is a disgrace to the city that has been touched deeply with the humane movements of the republic. Rows and rows of able-bodied young paupers, men sunk in the degenerate sloth of an idle existence, hung around the buildings. Scattered among them, with no attempt whatever at alleviation or segregation, were the aged, the blind, the crippled, the deaf, the destitute, and the dumb.

From out the squalid buildings that bordered the dirty and unkempt courtyards dull, hopeless eyes and rueful, pasty faces, men, women, and children alike, eyed us without interest and without intelligence. The broken bodies of the aged and the helpless little bodies of orphans and pauper children appeared to have been cast into this place as on some dust-heap with equal callousness. There was no expert care whatsoever; only coolies kept them in bounds and saw that they received their meals.

We had made the tour of the buildings and were turning back when our guide. said to us, "Would you like to see the lunatics?" He spoke as though he were promising us an interesting show. He pointed with a grimace to a round hole cut in the wall for a door, giving upon another set of courtyards that we had not noticed. And then I heard them. I had been hearing them for some time, I believe, but now I knew what that weird chanting Babel was. We were already almost in a state of nausea, and as I started

I felt a breath of real terror. But the impulse to go was overwhelming, and we went through the little round door into the lunatics' courtyard.

I took one step inside the courtyard and then stopped. I shall never forget that sight as long as I live. There must have been eighty people in the courtyard, which was something like forty paces square, and every one of these people was a drama to himself. In the middle of the space there was a well, with a tin dipper on its rim, and in front of it a man stood, naked to the waist, with wildly tousled hair, making what seemed to be a speech, and looking me straight in the eye. I had never wholly become used to the Chinese face, especially to that hostile, absolutely unfeeling stare it turns on the foreigner as he is going through the street.

This man turned his uncanny, vacant face on me and came walking nearer and nearer. I stood transfixed with terror. And then suddenly the whole emotional tension snapped as two or three younger men rushed out and seized his pigtail, and began to play horse with him, apparently jealous at his occupying the center of the stage. The crowd howled with glee as an attendant in khaki drove them off. The man sat down on the edge of the well and whimpered; and only then could I take my eyes off him and look at the others. I could hear the sound of high, falsetto singing, but could not place it anywhere, till suddenly I noticed a dark little man, with a black mustache, in a corner, a pitiful, fat, extremely sensible-looking man, who sat with his back to the crowd and sang unceasingly.

The day was a deadly hot summer day, and the courtyard was dry and blistering; yet one half-naked wretch deliberately got down and rolled in the noonday sun, moaning piteously. A guard ran over to him nervously, picked him up bodily, and carried him to a bench. He rolled off, but in the shade, and still moaned and moaned. Near him, and regarding us intently, was a man with a red flower behind one ear and a large leaf behind the other. Everywhere I looked, my eyes

would meet a face that would at once become a vacant grin; one man put his hand to his head and crooked his knees,-he was a tall wizen old man with a face like a satyr,―asking for money in the familiar beggar gestures of the street, and grimacing horribly every time I looked in his direction.

Some were new cases, with what hope of improvement in that ghastly atmosphere no one seemed to care. And over in one corner were the women. Many of them were old, but one or two were young and pretty, and one kept putting on clothes every time I looked in her direction, one coat after another until she must have had on at least five. Here was a boy of eight, incurable, just come in. And round about them walked the coolie guards, grinning at their queer antics as at a game.

We stood there-it must have been fifteen minutes-without speaking a word. I had intended to take a picture, but as I folded up my camera Ho said, "Yes, for God's sake, let 's leave them to their misery." I can still hear the yell that pursued us as we ducked through the little round door again-a yell in which the whole eighty voices seemed to join in a fiendish chorus, and which rang through my mind throughout the journey home, and has rung in it intermittently to this day.

I left Peking for the south shortly afterward, but before I left Ho promised. to move heaven and earth to have this pitiful lot of people put under decent care, and wipe out the terrible blot on modern China represented by the condition of the whole institution. I am sure that he has done it, as I heard a few months ago from a friend in the Peking Y. M. C. A. that the lunatics' compound had been entirely reformed since we had visited it the year before.

In bringing to practical extinction within ten years the age-long national curse of the opium traffic, the Chinese have shown the unconquerable resolution which makes for social betterment. That is their true mettle, and we of the Western world, for all our boasted progress