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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due
honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his
neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living.
Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly
different line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to
redeem the general immorality of the plot.
Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run.
A very similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the
two consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the
two cases are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly
little when we consider that in the one case it is his own classics
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