What's Wrong with China

CHAPTER I (PART 1 OF 3)

ILLUSIONS

A GREAT many books have been written in English about Oriental countries which are introduced to the world with the pious hope that they will promote to some degree that mutual understanding which leads to mutual sympathy. Lecturers, journalists and apostles of various religions are encouraged, patronized and subsidized by the Anglo-Saxon peoples in the firm belief that if they run to and fro enough, telling us about others and telling others about us, until we are all thoroughly familiar with one another's inti-mate thoughts, we must inevitably come to have such an un-selfish regard for one another that the brotherhood of man wiU be achieved in deed as well as in theory, all relations through-out the world will be based on love and esteem, wars will be impossible, and the distinctions between breeds, nations, races and colours will be obvious to the eye alone.

That all such endeavours are not only futile but are a real menace to the future well-being of humanity is the first premise upon which the arguments in these essays are based. The English-speaking peoples can be practical, even highly scientific, in some things and in some moods. They can be ruthlessly frank with themselves and with others when the humour is on them. But all the world knows that when they get a firm grip on an ideal, they are as oblivious to facts as a runaway horse with the bit in his teeth is to both guidance and obstacles. When a serious-minded Anglo-Saxon converts himself to a doctrine, though it be in contravention of all the testimony of his senses and all the normal operations of a well-trained mind, he will cling to it with a pertinacity and a loyalty which

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are simply appalling in a supposedly reasonable being, and commit not only great follies but great crimes to prove his devo-tion to a pet idea. WTien he is in such a state of mind reason is impertinence, science is blasphemy and opposition is a chal-lenge from the powers of evil.

The great mass of the people in the Occident who are firmly convinced that international amity will come of itself when mutual understanding has demonstrated that all men are brothers under the skin, that racial differences are no barrier whatever to racial equality, that all the breeds of men can be taught to bow before and respect the same abstract standards, ideals and ethical codes ; and that all have the same capacity for grasping these ideals and ruling their conduct by them — these numerous persons are impervious to argument and blind to the most obvious facts. Most of them believe that all the races of man-kind are the offspring of a man and woman who were made from the dust in Jehovah's image just 5,929 years ago, that the diversity of language among them indicates no essential differ-ence in mental or spiritual capacity but can be traced to the direct interference of the Lord in the work of building a certain tower in Mesopotamia, and that the difference in physical char-acteristics is due entirely to environment, climate, habits and what not, working their changes within a period of something less than five thousand years. Most of these people believe that under the right spiritual influence the lion will lie down with the lamb and the shark frolic in love and peace with the whitebait.

They all believe that a silk purse can be made out of a sow's ear. And because these good people have countless organiza-tions within which they confirm one another in such creeds and wax so enthusiastic about them that they undertake great crusades for the conversion of all the rest of humanity to the same way of thinking, they exert a tremendous influence upon Governments and through them upon international relations. They force great nations to commit themselves to policies which run diametrically opposite not only to science but to ordinary common sense ; and they pave a smooth road for their arch-enemies, the wreckers of church and state, for the sort of people

who have wrecked Russia and are busy poisoning the East, the Communists who are bent upon reducing all of humanity to a dead level so that the unfit may rule the fit by sheer weight of numbers.

The pious and the utterly impious are, in this generation, equally well organized, the one to demonstrate that humanity can be brought to perfect bliss by making all sows' ears into silk purses, the other to hasten the millennium by making all silk purses into sows' ears. Both have already done incalcul-able harm to society in many quarters of the earth by trying to promote social relations and international relations wholly divorced from both science and common sense, by striving for that fatuous sympathy between men and breeds of men which is based upon sentiment and theory instead of upon clear under-standing. Thanks to these influences the policy of the Occident in its dealings with the Orient has, for some decades, been so obstinately founded upon fostered misimderstanding that noth-ing short of the most radical change in tactics can save Asia from a seismic upheaval in the near future.

A superficial study of the relations between individuals in even the smallest community will serve to illustrate what is wrong with the relations between the East and the West. A real mutual understanding between individuals, as we all know, leads just as often to mutual dislike, suspicion, contempt, anta-gonism or real hatred, as it does to sweet sympathy and love. Even among men of the same breed, language, hereditary tradi-tions and upbringing, there exists such a wide divergence of ability, tastes, habits and morals that the less some people know of each other the less friction there is between them. The closer they are brought together the more antagonism is gener-ated, until they come into conflict and the loser either defers to the tastes and judgment of the winner or gets out of the way. So it is in every community, some govern and others are governed, some are put in jail and others put them and keep them there, some saturate their souls with piety while others saturate their systems with rum, some sweep the streets because they can do nothing more useful, while others ride down them in limousines because they have contributed more to the com-

munity and have been paid proportionately ; some ride in limousines because they are clever rogues, while others sweep the streets because they are honest but stupid, and so it goes and always will.

The most perfectly organized community can only endeavour to strike a balance among all the different human factors so that each will have a chance to find his level, none will be denied his proper reward and none will get rights which he doesn't deserve. The clamour of the East, in this generation, is for rights neither earned nor deserved. The more rights forfeited, the louder the clamour.

An unbiased observer, going to and fro in the world, must observe that breeds of men differ, almost as widely as individuals, in temperament and capacity as well as in physical appearance, language, customs and culture. There are inferior races in the world, just as there are inferior men in every community. There are nations that cannot govern themselves, but must have a master, just as there are men in every community that need a guardian and are a menace to the community if granted the unqualified " right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happi-ness ". Races, like men, have their limitations. Education and environment, law and the exercise of it, may make the inferior man a more useful and less dangerous member of the community, but he is born with certain distinct limitations beyond which no amount of education or training can carry him. When such a man is told by kind sentimentalists that he is as good as any other and is entitled to as much, he blames society for his failures, and bitterly resents the success of others. There is no hatred like that of the conscious inferior for the superior.

The same precisely is true of breeds of men. Their lot can be improved through training, education and good govern-ment, but they have a cultural limit beyond which they can only go through an infusion of better blood. If the culture of a people of greater natural capacity is foisted upon them, they are thrown into the same state of confusion and misery as the savage who is taken from his native wilderness and is introduced into the society of a modern European capital. The man who

enjoys liberty, wealth and education which he has not the capacity to use rightly, invariably misuses all and is anything but an ornament or an asset to the community. So the breed of men that is artificially introduced to the culture of a superior people and is artificially raised to a status in the human family to which it cannot attain by its own efiorts, invariably makes an unholy spectacle of itself and is a liability upon the rest of humanity.

These would seem like self-evident truths, which have only to be stated to be recognized by all. As it happens, however, there are a great many million people on earth who will by no means recognize them. One huge class of folk who would reject all of these facts as premises for an argument is made up of the idealists, theorists, sentimentalists and cranks, including pious folk of many religions, who believe literally that all men are born free and equal, that all have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that ability and morals are matters of education, training and environment. They believe in the self-determination of nations and refuse to recog-nize that there are any inherently unfit to determine their own afiairs. The spectacle of a savage horde being given peace, prosperity and good government by a group of civilized white men grieves them beyond words.

Another huge class that supports all of these beliefs and fights for them is made up of the obviously unfit who organize in various ways to war against nature, to ensure that they do not sink to their proper level and to prevent the fit from rising above their level. Union labour everywhere is devoted to this cause. Union labour fights piecework and insists upon adopting as a wage standard the average capacity of the less competent. If the weaker vessels at a low average can paint five square yards of wall in a given time, the more capable and energetic man is not allowed to paint fifteen square yards in the same time and earn more money for it. He must kill time and paint five square yards, so that the inferior workman can draw an expert's wage.

When union labour takes to socialism it goes to the same pains to keep the fit down to the level of the unfit in all walks

of life, in politics and in international afiairs. The government of those unfit to govern themselves by those who have proven their administrative capacity, is denounced as imperialistic exploitation, because the inferior man knows that if he had a chance to boss another he would exploit him and because he is incapable of conceiving of a man who has power and doesn't use it to his own advantage and to the disadvantage of those within his power.

Some beautiful examples of this attitude towards govern-ment on the part of the unfit might be drawn from the career of the Bolshevists in Russia or of the Socialists in Italy a few years ago. The political creed which does not recognize the fundamental inequality of individuals, and the international code which does not recognize the fundamental inequality of breeds, must invariably give birth to anarchy, war and misery.

European policy in Asia has for several generations been bridled, check-reined and hobbled by the idealists, sentimental-ists and doctrinaires, the jealous guardians of the equal rights of man, which do not exist in the real nature of men or any other forms of creation. The results have been bad. The policy of the West in the East, and consequently the thought of the East, is now being shaped by those who believe in the right of the unfit to inherit the earth ; and the results promise to be very much worse.

The shades of unbelievers like Rousseau, Paine and Jefferson, manifesting themselves through pious folk, who believe that all human beings are descended from our common parents created less than six thousand years ago in the image of Yahweh and that the least of us only needs a chance to prove this equality of birth, have modified policy, where they have not actually shaped it, enough to bring a lot of trouble into Asia. The spirits of Marx and Lenin, most eloquent rebels against Nature and her laws, most persuasive believers in the transmogrification of the sow's ear into the silk purse, most earnest pleaders for the worth of the labourer to the hire which he doesn't earn, high apostles of the right of the multitudinous unfit to assert them-selves for the humiliation of the fit, are now completing the

work of the sentimentalist and paving the way for infinite trouble in the Orient. The Powers of the Occident are making their course smooth with soft soap. And this is the occasion for these essays.

By reference to any almanac one will discover that nearly a third of the dry land on this planet is Asia, and that the people whom Asia is believed to support number considerably more than half of the world's total population. By consulting a great number of books published by competent observers during the past thirty years one will learn that Asia is " awakening ".

It will also be learned from reference books that China com-prises about a quarter of the area of Asia and supports a quarter of the population of the world. The world has had many re-minders, moreover, that China has been " awakening " with no little turbulence and that she shook off a Manchu dynasty in 1911, set up what is alleged to be a Republic, and has since furnished the world's great metropolitan papers with much news having to do with loans and defalcations on debts, inter-necine wars, opium cultivation, banditry and the assertion and re-assertion of theoretical rights.

It is to be assumed that enough of such reports have gone forth to convince the world that all is not well with China and that, having been stirred into a wakeful irritability, she has not, so far, improved the lot of her people nor made her land a more comfortable and secure residence for outsiders. The stirring of other quarters of Asia seems to have netted the same general results. From Tokyo to Angora and on into northern Africa the spread of the creed of liberty, equality and fraternity, supplemented by ideas of independence, self-determination and self-government — all interpreted in Oriental minds in terms wholly alien to the Occident — has generated enough heat under a great pot of " double toil and trouble " to bring it almost to a boil.

The World War entailed the perpetration of many follies in the East in the name of policy which added fuel imder the pot ; and then came along Bolshevism and tossed into it the " poison'd entrails " and the " swelter'd venom " which have already

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brought Asia very close to a grand ebullition of almost volcanic violence. In this bubbling of the pot the idealists see hope and promise of a democratic Asia looking up to the Cross for guid-ance. The Asiatics see in it hope and promise of the beUttle-ment and subjugation of the domineering white races. The Communists see in it the hope and promise of infinite anarchy and chaos, wrecking the economic interest of Europe in Asia and thereby weakening the West in the face of the Communist advance. Bolshevism cherishes the avowed ambition of turn-ing Asia into a shambles bo that the Occident's attention may be sujficiently diverted to weaken its defences against the crusades of the unfit.

The politics of Asia and of northern Africa are therefore of no little interest to the white races. Problems are being formu-lated by two-thirds of humanity which the Anglo-Saxon, or more largely the Anglo-Germanic peoples, will be called upon to solve. Failure to solve these problems may mean the swamping of Occidental culture and the loss of the white race's identity. It will at least spell world war on an enormous scale in which a mere handful of Anglo-Germanic superiors, with no preparation and no binding organization among themselves, will be called upon to revert completely to Nietzschean militarism and subdue, exterminate or enslave all the inferior peoples of the earth, organized into a vast rebellion of the unfit, or go under. This may sound like scaremongering to the alderman of Usquebaugh, Missouri, or the rector of Easygo-by-the-Swamp ; but the writer believes that it will strike a resounding echo from the hearts of many thousand rightly nervous Occidentals living in the East.

To most of us who live with our fingers on the Asiatic pulse it seems that a few ounces of prevention would forfend us against such a drastic struggle — or might have a little while back. It seems that if we could override the sentimentalists and convey a little truth about the state of Asia to the com-placent folk at home, we might influence policy and stave off a catastrophe. Of Asia generally the writer is equipped to talk by hearsay only. With all classes in China he has had a great deal of cheek-by-jowl contact, and the more he knows

of China the more is he distressed by the misplaced sympathy born of misunderstanding which China elicits from the West, particularly from the idealistic Anglo-Saxons.

No one, Chinese or foreign, but the Chinese charge d'affaires in London has the e&ontery at this time to tell the world that there is nothing wrong with China ; but a great many persons, about equally divided between the very simple and the very adroit, are so busy telling the Occident what is super-ficially wrong with China that the essential shortcomings of the state and the people are almost completely smoke-screened. That China's surface weaknesses can only be corrected by control from without or by evolution through such a long period that none but a commission of biologists and ethnologists would be competent to guess at it, are facts which are not being presented to the world by journalists, merchants, missionaries or diplomats for various good reasons of their own, mostly selfish or cowardly ; while the superficial shortcomings are magnified by thousands of interested persons, not only to smoke-screen the fundamentals, but because they would be temporarily benefited by the allevia-tion of this or that purely local symptom of a deep-rooted disease.

For instance, those who live by the sale of useless playthings to the Chinese Central Government see in the Government's chronic poverty a serious ban upon business, and therefore favour loans. Those who travel widely in the interior and appre-ciate order, believe that China would be a good enough place for them if bandits were eliminated. Those who navigate the interior waterways and are fired upon by unruly soldiery hold the opinion that China is going to the dogs because there are not enough foreign gunboats to guarantee shipping against Buch outrages and because the Legations do not hold the Govern-ment responsible for the irresponsibility of the militarists. The Treaty Port folk are sublimely indifferent to the state of the country until an interprovincial war is brought to the outskirts of foreign settlements and local lines of communication are cut, when they suddenly discover that the treaty rights of foreigners have for years gone by default because of the indifierence of the wealthy and influential residents of the ports and concessions.

The Chinese seize upon superficialities also and announce that China is in a bad way because of the tyranny of the military ; because of the poverty of the Government from which the miserly foreign bankers withhold loans ; because of the loans which the greedy foreign bankers pour into the Government's hands in exchange for rights and privileges that impinge upon China's sovereignty ; because the foreigners are here and because the foreigners do not do this or that ; because we are indifferent to China's fate and because we take a calculating and imperial-istic interest ; because we squabble over China and because we unite and agree not to squabble, thereby shaping nefarious plots for the exploitation of " poor old China " ; for every possible reason, in short, except any inherent defect in the make up of the Chinese breed.

The sentimentalists who come to China, stay a few weeks in an atmosphere of balm and flattery and go back, are all ardent expounders of many apologies for China but appear to carry with them no real explanations. They have the impression that China is suffering from growing pains and that patience is called for. The radical Chinese tell one another and their Ked friends that China is a victim of Imperialism and cannot hope to better herself until she has put the outsider in his proper place — namely in a position completely subservient to the whim and fancy of any lordly Chinese who finds pleasure in walking upon the foreigner's countenance.

It is probably well enough understood abroad that China is financially something more than bankrupt ; that the recognized Government has not been in a position for many years to guarantee respect for international obligations in more than a minute fraction of Chinese territory ; that the Chinese army long since ceased to exist as a national army, and is split up into greater or smaller units of feudal retainers whose allegiance to this or that nominal cause is determined much more often by bribery and conspiracy than by any motive resembling patriotism or concern for the public weal. It is widely enough known that the Chinese Republic is a gross humbug ; that government by representation has not even been envisaged ; that elections when they are held are shameless burlesques ; and

that the administration of justice is not only in the hands of the strong, but is openly tempered to the purse of the litigant in so many cases that the exception, when there is one, elicits gasps oi astonishment from both foreigners and natives. It is generally known that China's elementary school system is wholly inadequate, that the preparatory schools and univer-sities are always starved for funds, that the teachers are poorly paid, when paid at all, and that the standard of modern educa-tion is consequently low. It may be realized, or should be if it isn't, that the Chinese educated in Europe and America have contributed almost nothing to the welfare of their country ; that the native students are much more devoted to the pursuit of radicalism in its extremest forms than to either useful or abstract learning, while all who can pretend to even a smatter-ing of modern schooling are intensely anti-foreign.

Business-folk abroad who are interested in China know that with a very long line of coast and millions of seafaring people, China has almost no merchant marine and no scientific fishing industries ; while inland, in a country considerably bigger than the United States of America, there are only six thousand miles of railway, which are consistently misused by the military, are for ever in debt although they earn as high a percentage on investments as any railways in the world, and now have so little credit that they cannot replace damaged stock and are rapidly deteriorating. Deforestation and clumsy conservancy work in the past bear fruit in devastating floods and famines, as all the world hears from time to time. Half of China's avail-able iron deposits are already leased or mortgaged, her industries except in the foreign-governed concessions are invariably bled white by a greedy officialdom. Interior trade struggles with bad roads, car monopolies on the railways, the heavy burden of domestic transit taxes, Ukin and countless impositions in each locality, not officially listed as taxes. Everywhere there is favouritism, nepotism, corruption and outlawry to fight at every turn in even the most humble undertaking. Agriculture, which is the mainstay of China's existence, is always bungling and primitive, yielding a minimum return upon a maximum of toil.

These conditions are clearly enough recognized and sufficiently advertised. Almost every one grants them and each little interested group has a panacea for them all. But suggested remedies are as superficial in most cases as the ailments they are designed to cure. One man thinks that if unlimited money were poured into the cof!ers of the recognized Government, a hand-picked group of Chinese officials would be able to buy supremacy and eradicate all evils. The Japanese tried this and three reputable Japanese banks have been tottering on the verge of bankruptcy ever since, while China has gone cheer-fully from bad to worse. Another wants railways built in all directions on any terms. Another sees in plenty of trees a solution of all evils. Another wants China to have a real national army and another votes for the navy. Others agree with the Chinese that all foreign treaty checks should be removed, that extra-territoriality should be abolished, that foreign troops and gunboats should be withdrawn and that China should be given all possible elbow-room to work out her own salvation. The wholesale Christianization of China appeals to some as a solution ; others plug for universal education along Western lines ; others for a Chinese alphabet ; others for the total rejec-tion of the Chinese language ; and still others for a reversion to the Empire under traditional conditions. All are examining symptoms and doctoring them and nearly all eschew funda-mentals as they would black magic.

From the Chinese themselves one gets very little real help in diagnosing China's essential ailments. In China a very strict code of etiquette is in force which forces the man who wants to be polite to belittle everything pertaining to him, including his family and his country. When they are not trjring to be polite, but to tell the truth as they see it, the Chinese in this generation who are sufficiently articulate to make an impression are so violently anti-foreign that they lose all per-spective on their own situation.

Both the distinguished traveller and the casual tourist, unless they encounter bandits, meet the Chinese on their best behaviour ; and there is no possible situation which can ruffle the Chinese who is determined to be polite. Etiquette is with him a ritual,

covering every holy and unholy occasion. Propriety in China was reduced to set written forms three thousand years ago and every generation has elaborated upon the code then in force to meet new needs, so that the Chinese who is soundly spanked with a lath while looking down a well knows as exactly what to do under the circumstances as a prime minister does in the face of an Imperial tantrum.

In dealing with a guest one must be humble, according to the Chinese code. The foreigner who calls on a Chinese of high degree is a guest no matter how poisonously objectionable he may be. It is therefore ruled that the Chinese who is playing the part of entertainer has to indicate, whether he believes it or not, that he is the younger brother of his vis-d-vis, if not actually his slave ; that his native land is an unwholesome and unhappy place in every way ; that the visitor's native land is the one among all others to which China looks for real friendship, guid-ance and instruction ; and that China sincerely desires to learn from the foreigner the practice of virtues in which she is deplor-ably lacking. The less he believes all of this the thicker the host lays it on. Polite Ipng is everywhere an accomplishment ; in China it is art, and the Chinese, when busy adhering to their rules of propriety, are past masters in insincerity.

In the face of a display of such finesse in mendacity the innocent Anglo-Saxon is almost invariably enough of a barbarian to mistake art for truth, and sometimes even crude enough to agree with the native who is painting a lurid picture of the ineptitude of his race and the miserable condition of his country. The foreigner is of course supposed to shout down the native when he is abusing his own land and kind, and insist that China has had a glorious past, has built up a noble civilization, wiU certainly surmount immediate difficulties, which are very ephemeral at worst ; and that he and his poor fellow-country-men come to the East with the sole object of absorbing at short range as much as their limited capacity will permit of the wisdom and virtue that are at the bottom of China's lasting greatness.

Few know the rules of the game, however, and the majority who have knocked about the country for a few weeks, encounter-

ing many bad smells, a good deal of insolence and a surfeit of knavery, hear in the polite platitudes of the educated native a sincere promise of improvement, delightedly agree with his survey of his country's woes, thereby earning his lasting con-tempt and hatred, and then go home to tell the West in lectures, sermons, articles or books, that China is pretty bad but that contact with the elite has proved that the nation's shortcomings are understood ; that many are working sincerely to better conditions and that the Orient is really stretching out a hand for friendship, help and guidance which the West cannot, in kindness and humanity, withhold. And in this fashion is Occidental policy in the East determined. Any attitude towards China which does not take into consideration the fact that the Chinese are enormously pleased with themselves must inevitably go very far astray.

CHAPTER I (PART 2 OF 3)

When the outsider first comes to China and enters into rela-tions with the people, he is fascinated by much that is colourful and picturesque ; but, unless his business is simply gadding and gawking, he is very shortly conscious of a thousand Chinese ways, traits and habits which irritate him beyond measure. Dirt, smells, procrastination and standards of abstract ethics and of daily commercial conduct which are absolutely alien to all his home traditions, grate on his spirit until he is convinced that the world owes it to itself to exterminate such an obtuse and obstinate people. Given sufficient time, however, he learns to adapt himself to Chinese ways and not only forgives them much that once annoyed him, but cultivates such a liking for the people that he will hear nothing said against them. Like a man who has to occupy an old house without running water, lights or heating arrangements, he curses the incon-veniences of the place with rancour when he first moves in, but, when he has learned how to make- himself comfortable, becomes attached to the old barracks and simply detests any-one who has an ill word to say of it.

The Occidental who has lived let us say five years in China and has travelled away from the treaty ports and foreign com-munities, is almost invariably an ardent apologist for China and a mighty champion against any force that would seek to

interfere with her own way of doing things. He curses his i^ervants with whole-souled vehemence ; but anyone else who wants to criticize them had better shed his coat. He damns the Chinese merchant as elusive and crooked ; but shows bared teeth to the new-comer who has the temerity to generalize upon Chinese commercial integrity. He can tell endless stories of Chinese ofl&cial corruption, ine£&ciency and the hopelessly irresponsible attitude of Chinese officialdom towards national welfare ; but let anyone suggest intervention or interference in any form, and he fairly raves about China's successes in history, her capacity in administration and her right to work out her own salvation under the new conditions that face her — unhampered and unmolested.

The writer of these lines has not been the least eloquent champion in such appeals to the world, and he will not be the last. The Chinese under all conditions, imderstood or mis-understood, undervalued or overvalued, are an extremely like-able people, and it is therefore as difficult to get a correct estimate of China's shortcomings from those who know the country as from those who tour the land under special guidance and learn worse than nothing. The embittered and disillusioned also contribute their little bit to Western misconceptions of the East, but command a small audience.

The only people who should really be allowed to testify in a world court upon China are those who enjoy living in the country, have been there long enough to know it, and yet have sufficient sense of humour to armour themselves against both enthusiasms and prejudices. Unless one is endowed with both humour and good humour, it is hard to acquire such a sane perspective upon China as to tell anything near the truth about the country and its people. It is hard to be sympathetic enough to get a true insight into the Chinese mind without being either sentimentally indulgent or unjustly hostile. It has been the writer's experi-ence that the old resident in the East who sees the amusing side of the Chinese character is invariably the most capable critic of persons and events and at the same time the most impopular with all the high authorities upon Chinese affairs, including the Chinese themselves.

To understand China at all, it must first be very clearly under-stood, no matter what the Chinese say of themselves in public, that all but an infinitesimal fraction of the Chinese people are convinced that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with China. The Chinese people are not only sure of this, but are fully per-suaded that they are the cream of creation, the elect of the gods, the heirs of the only real civilization that has ever been evolved, the heirs of the only literature and art that are not beneath contempt ; the handsomest people on earth, beside whom all others are monstrosities, and the only race whose philosophers have worked out an answer to every possible question which man has a right to ask through all eternity. These and a hundred other similar conceits are not passing vanities in the Chinese mind. They are deep-rooted and solemn convictions, as old as Chinese history and more passionately adhered to by the rising generation than ever. Anyone who shows signs of dis-agreeing with this point of view by failing to conform to Chinese ways and adhering to his own is, in the sight of every Chinese living, an enemy of China ; and this is the whole root and sub-stance of anti-foreignism, under whatever form it may manifest itself. To be not only the object of latent antagonism but to be positively and bitterly hated, one has only to find the Chinese and their ways amusing.

The Chinese are so solemnly fond of themselves, that neither the individual nor the people as a whole can abide ridicule for even a moment. If you do not realize that they are the one perfect race under heaven, it is your loss, but you are entitled to your opinion. But no one is entitled under any conditions to think anything Chinese funny. The individual Chinese takes himself so seriously that he is incapable of laughing at himself no matter how ludicrous a position he may find himself in. The writer has at times been surprised and pleased to find what he thought exceptions to this rule — Chinese who could see a joke on themselves and laugh with the rest of the world about it. But it has always transpired in the writer's experience that the person with the sense of humour was not really a Chinese, but a Mohammedan of Turkish descent, or a Manchu, Mongol, or Tibetan masquerading as a Chinese.

THE CODE OF "FACE" 27

The ingrained self-esteem of the Chinese people has given birth to a sense of dignity commensurate with their imagined importance ; and to define and protect this dignity, the Chinese have evolved a code of honour which was imtil lately very strictly adhered to, but which is based upon such strange pre-cepts, having so little to do with the Anglo-Saxon code of good behaviour and decent citizenship, that it takes a lifetime for the outlander to learn its rules and even pretend to abide by them. In Chinese terminology it would be described as the code of " face ". To " make face " is to enhance one's dignity (dignity always being measured by Chinese standards), while to " lose face " is to sacrifice dignity, which is equivalent to spiritual death. To " no-want-face " is to be indifferent to one's dignity and nothing more contemptuous can be said of a human being in the Chinese language. The meekest Chinese, the merest mouse for courage, will fight any odds to save his " face ", and hundreds die of apoplexy every year who find themselves minus a certain degree of " face " but have not the physical means of regaining it and therefore throw veritable fits of fury in an effort to demonstrate how highly they regard themselves. To give all the laws of " face " which are recognized after a few years' contact with the Chinese by even the most casual observer, would need a very large book indeed. The outsider who does not understand Chinese standards of manhood and propriety and who is ignorant of the Chinese inborn sense of superiority, could anticipate very few of them.

It is, of course, a serious loss of face to be laughed at, but mere acts of cowardice or treachery which are dexterously concealed entail no shame. To cheat and be caught in the act and to be proclaimed a cheat beyond hope of explanation, entails a loss of face ; but there is no loss of dignity if one cheats and is not detected, or if when caught one can make a dignified retreat under a smoke-screen of bluster and lies. When one is on the verge of losing face, one can recover and save face through the silliest and most transparent lies and pretences, if all the other parties concerned will solemnly pretend to accept them as sufficient explanation or apology. And the loss of face is such a really serious matter that no Chinese, unless much

embittered, will cause another a loss of face if he can get redress or satisfaction from an injurer without it.

The writer, for instance, once had an elderly Chinese widow as a landlady who sent a trusted servant each month to collect her rent. This servant had been taken ofE the street when a small boy and had been with her for more than thirty years. The rent was the landlady's only source of income and barely served to cover her expenses. She was responsible for the repairs to the house and whenever money had to be deducted from the rent to make such repairs it meant a genuine hard-ship for herself and her family, as all the members of her house-hold well knew. One month when I had paid her servant in full he pocketed seven dollars and told his mistress that he had had to pay that sum for the repair of a wall that had collapsed. She did not doubt him, but the deduction was so inopportune that she was greatly distressed and came to me to ask if I would lend her seven dollars and take it out of the next month's rent instead. She was astonished and grieved when I explained that there had been no repairs and that the servant had received the money in full. When she returned to her home, however, she did not accuse the man of having robbed her. To have done so would have cost him a loss of face, because she knew and he would have known that the charge of theft could have been proven to the hilt. To save his face, therefore, she let him know indirectly, through her daughter, that she had called on me ; and was then very cold and distant with him. That night he came to her and announced that a sister-in-law in a remote village was desperately ill and that he had received a Bimimons to visit his family, asking her permission to go, which she granted. The man went to the country, worked three months as a farm labourer and returned with the seven dollars which he had saved. This he presented to the old lady after telling her a little fiction about the long illness and slow recovery of his sister-in-law, which he did not expect her for a moment to believe, and with the explanation that he had found on a visit to my house that I had decided to pay for the mythical repairs to the wall and had therefore given him the seven dollars to hand her. She accepted the money without demur and the

servant went about his usual duties as though nothing had happened. The old lady had recovered her money and the servant had saved his face.

In the same way both the Imperial and the Republican Govern-ments of China have, in their relations with foreign Powers, published thousands of the most transparent lies in oflScial and very solemn proclamations, to save the nation's face without deceiving anyone, and have felt satisfied in each case, because their pretensions were not challenged, that the nation's face was fully and adequately saved. When an ofl&cial is caught redhanded in the most heinous offences against the State or the people, he is almost invariably given an opportunity to escape punishment in flight and is allowed to resign because of " illness " and then, that his face may be the more secure, his resignation is not accepted until he has sent it in three times.

These few lines of explanation will help the reader to imagine for himself how often the Occidental in China has been guilty in the past, and is still guilty daily in every quarter of China, of simply walking on the face of Chinese with whom he comes in contact, and how ruthless and barbarous, therefore, he appears in Chinese eyes. Some idea also of the peculiar mental processes which go on in the Chinese head under the inspiration of this code, based upon a sense of importance unrelieved by a sense of humour, can be gained from the few examples given, and it may, therefore, be understood how many gross misconcep-tions of China's attitude towards the rest of the world are sent abroad by writers and diplomats who cannot or will not under-stand Chinese thought.

As an example of mistaken policy based upon both ignorant and wilful misrepresentation of Chinese thought, let us take that which is dictated by the belief among the Occidental peoples that special consideration can be won for foreign endeavour in China, whether commercial, missionary or diplomatic, through a display of national leniency and generosity in our dealings with China. Exiles in China who return to their homelands are rendered simply speechless with amazement when they are asked by their guileless friends at home whether they are not

specially favoured by the Chinese because of this or that act of gracious condescension on the part of the home Government. We who live in China and have learned to think along Chinese lines are so hardened to the cold fact that every act of generosity, every show of leniency and every gracious condescension on the part of a Western Power in its dealings with China renders our position in China so much less comfortable and our commerce and lives so much more precarious, that we are appalled when we find that public opinion in the West actually sanctions measures that we thought no one but a professional diplomat could be stupid enough to inaugurate.

When one presents a gift to China one must understand very clearly the Oriental attitude towards gifts in general, or one is likely to be led very far astray in estimating the recipient's reaction. First of all, every Oriental people has grown so accustomed to looting others and being looted in turn, and so accustomed to seeing the successful looter not only enjoy the loot to his fullest capacity but take vast credit to himself for his ability as an international highwayman, that none of them can conceive of a successful looter relinquishing even a fraction of his spoil, to any but his colleagues and immediate subordinates, until his grip has relaxed and he feels obliged through a con-sciousness of his own weakness to placate the looted by the restitution of some portion of the spoils. Neither remorse nor generosity can possibly play a part, according to Oriental standards, in such restitution except in idealistic fiction, or in the equally unreal phraseology of polite official correspon-dence.

Generosity from a confirmed and hereditary enemy is either a sign of weakness or a bribe. The Oriental mind can conceive of no other explanation of either leniency or generosity and would not deign to entertain any other conception. If, having got a certain hold upon China in one way or another, we volun-tarily relax that hold, it means to the Chinese, no matter how many Western degrees he has or how much Shakespeare, Words-worth, Schiller and Moliere he can quote, that we are either afraid of China and are paying tribute to her unquenchable superiority, or that we are trying to exchange old lamps for

new ones, trying to return old, worn-out concessions for new and larger concessions more commensurate with our larger piratical ambitions. If we insist, as America usually does through her official spokesmen, that we want absolutely nothing in China, not a foot of land, not a single preferential commercial concession, and if the Chinese bring themselves to believe us, they are forced to conclude that since we want nothing but their goodwill, their goodwill is something vastly superior to anything else in the world, we recognize their worth at China's own appraisement of it, that China is so important that we need and fear, her and that we are fear-inspired to crawl up to her threshold abjectly tendering presents. The reaction to this conviction is inevitable and would be foreseen by the merest simpleton who has lived in the East.

The Chinese conclude that the one people on earth towards whom they can assume the arrogant attitude of the superior receiving tribute from the tribute-bearer is the American. A long-restrained impulse to kick all foreigners is given vent in kicking the American tribute-bearer since he has so obviously invited it.

Then some one persuades Great Britain, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that America is making something out of grovel-ling at China's doorstep, and Great Britain decides to crawl along and kow-tow with presents, whereupon China, further still from being grateful, remarks to herself that the whole world, including her most powerful and most arrogant enemies, stands in real dread of her rejuvenated powers and is pleading for her favour, so that there is no really good reason why she should not kick the whole world in the face, make sausage meat of her treaties and financial obligations, and particularly of the few thousand " foreign devils " who happen to have entrusted themselves to her hospitality, and thenceforth go her own gait, as supreme and superior in the world as was the self-esteemed Middle Kingdom with nothing around her but skin-clad savages in the north and straw-sandaled head hunters on the south, a broad sea to the east and a savage desert to the west.

Quite apart from the normal Oriental tendency to regard

all gifts as either tributes or bribes — other than which few presents are ever given in the East — it would be wholly incom-patible with China's regard for herself, her dignity and her face, even though she were obviously the beggar nation of the planet, to accept anything in the spirit of the humble recipient of charity. We help her recover Shantung and, to discharge her debt to us in true Oriental fashion, she must persuade her-self that we stand behind her in this so as to loot her in some other quarter. Thus persuaded she owes us nothing but a watchful hostility against our next move of aggression. We cancel a Boxer indemnity to spend it on education of the Chinese, and China concludes that we want to rear her children to be untrue to her, and laughs hoarsely to think how worthily these children of hers will accept our gift of education, and how adroitly they will turn all that they have learned against us to our own undoing. They feel perfectly sure that we have a most nefarious ulterior motive in such educational work and welcome our gifts with bland make-believe in the sure knowledge that we are teaching China's children to use strange but effective weapons which these true spawn of hers will eventually turn upon us in the interest of the one and only chosen race. The gift-bearer to China is, in short, either a dolt or a coward. The simpleton China is ready to use, the coward she will treat with fitting arrogance and with true Oriental cruelty.

If the Chinese could persuade themselves that we were being lenient with their nation out of genuine charity, they could only look upon it as the condescension of the self-conscious superior to the inferior in the ditch, and there is nothing which their code of face and their lofty opinion of themselves would prompt them to resent more. Persuade them that we neither fear them nor pay tribute to their superiority when we make diplomatic concessions to them, and they are forced to the conclusion that we are deahng with them — we the barbarians, with them the heirs of all divine wisdom — as inferiors and we lay the foundations of a bitterer hatred of us than has yet been conceived in the East except by the limited number of foreign-educated students who have taken this attitude and are com-mensurately poisonous in their hostility to us.

Under the inspiration of the noisiest element in China, the rattle-brained pro-Bolshevist element, China prefers to believe that the recent acts of generosity or condescension or whatever one likes to call them are inspired by the Occident's sense of its own decadence, as a result of the World War, and by a consequent fear of the " awakening " Orient. The natural inference, there-fore, from every act of grace on the part of the Western Powers in China, is that it is only another sign of the growing weakness of the West, of which the East has only to take prompt and bold advantage to rule, in no time at all, a larger world than Chinghis and Kublai dreamed of, with China again the Middle Kingdom, the cultural pivot of the universe.

This is really and truly China's attitude towards all the rest of mankind, which every good Chinese will lie to himself to maintain, for the sake of his own and his country's face, and lie to all the rest of humanity to conceal for the sake of propriety, in some cases, and of expediency in others. It is an attitude, however, which no class of Occidentals in the East feels free to explain to the world for various and devious reasons, largely selfish, and which puts the lone prophet, who dares to voice what we all know and confess to one another every day, in much the same role as John in his skin garments, a voice crying in the wilderness.

China is deliberately misrepresented abroad by Occidentals for so many reasons that a full catalogue of them is not within the compass of these essays ; but ignorance and innocence, self-deception and sentiment, are all fruitful sources of mis-understanding of the Orient at large and of China in particular. In fiction the mystery of the East and the inscrutability of the Oriental mind are traditions which few story-tellers have the courage to violate.

The fiction writer who does not know the East, or who has a very superficial knowledge of it, as most writers of Oriental fiction have, conforms to tradition as a matter of course and weaves veils of gossamer nonsense about characters who would be very plain everyday folk in real life. Mystery is confounded with charm, and since the Orient is known beyond cavil to cast a charm over those who reside in the East, it is assumed

w.w.c. c

that Oriental life can yield neither charm nor romance without mystery. As a matter of fact, much of the charm of the East reposes in the simplicity of Eastern life and in the naive sim-plicity and childlike ingenuousness of Oriental thought. The traditional Chinese of fiction glides noiselessly through all scenes and settings, preserving an emotionless countenance and a stoic calm in the presence of anything, from a street fight to a volcanic eruption. All residents of China know that the Chinese are the noisiest people on earth, make the maximum amount of racket in doing the simplest thing, and love dearly what they call a " hot and bustling " situation. The roar of fortissimo conversation carried on by the nine hundred thousand residents of Peking after sunset, when work is done and every one settles down to gossip, can be heard three miles outside the walls of the capital. A comparison of notes upon the price of cabbage in the servants' quarters would invariably be mistaken by a new-comer to China as a mob fight in which a number of sorely wounded were already lamenting their fate, while the survivors were shrieking for more blood.

The Chinese have the strongest dramatic sense of any people, are always acting, supplementing every descriptive remark with bold gestures and facial distortions which exhaust as much vital energy in ten minutes' talk as a physical culturist would put into his daily setting-up exercises. The Chinese scholar is such a nervous and high-strung person that he is never really still, but either sways in his chair or taps his foot on the floor until the more phlegmatic Occidental is on the verge of strangling him. Anyone who has seen and heard an indignant Chinese woman in the act of " cursing the street ", as the phrase goes, would be forever cured of the delusion that the Celestial is un-emotional. The code of face often dictates that a Chinese should be restrained, calm and expressionless in the thick of trouble and he is then a true stoic, but in the ordinary run of events his vivacity makes a Latin seem a restful companion.

For these and many other reasons the so-called Oriental fiction which appears in current publications abroad appeals to residents in China as the most grotesque nonsense, even less true to Oriental life than the extravagances of a Chinese his-

CfflNA IN FICTION 35

torical play. The attempts at Chinese fiction which are some-times made by aspiring authors resident in the country are little better, because they too have at the back of their minds the conceptions of China and the Chinese which are entertained abroad and shape their characters according to Western tradi-tions and preconceived notions of China, evolving creatures and scenes wholly foreign to all that goes on in their daily sur-roundings. Of course, fiction has little bearing upon China's future or upon relations between the East and the West ; but, as it happens, the presumably serious writers on the East, who compile and purvey to the Occident what are alleged com-pendiums of facts about China, pander just as much to the West's preconceived ideas of China as do the fiction writers. The writer, dming the residence of more than a decade in China, has never read a book, a magazine article, an opinionated con-tribution to the Press abroad, a missionary report, a diplomatic dispatch or a commercial report meant for publication, which was frankly true, either as an uncoloured reflection of foreign opinion in the Orient or of the Chinese attitude towards the world. All defer, consciously or unconsciously, to the West's fixed idea of what ought to be going on in China and what the Chinese ought to be thinking, and feebly confirm the Occident in what it wants to believe before stiU more feebly trying to introduce a new view upon the situation.

The Chinese are well aware of this, encourage misconceptions of the situation here very adroitly and energetically, play upon the sentiments of the Occidental peoples and contrive to obfuscate vital issues in China in every capital in Europe. This would not be possible, of course, if the usual sources of information upon which the Occident has come to rely were not, and had not been for some generations, the sources of such great volumes of misinformation. Every assault which the Chinese have made in recent years (while they have been building up courage to demonstrate what they really think of the foreigner in their country and of the outside world as well) upon the rights, com-fort, prosperity and pergonal safety of the Occidental in the East, has resulted in a victory for China, inspiring all classes of Chinese to bolder efforts, simply because of consistent misre-

presentation abroad of Chinese conditions and opinions, until now, when the big foreign commercial commmiities in China are almost in a panic and are denouncing their diplomatic repre-sentatives in no uncertain terms, the diplomats are helpless because, however they may exhort their Governments to drastic action, these Governments would not dare to endorse such action in the face of the Occidental peoples' sentimental mis-conceptions of China and the mind of China. The conclusion to which every foreign community in China has come is that the West will never really awake to a knowledge of what is "vsTong with China now, and the home Governments will never have a mandate to deal with China as she should be dealt with, until outrages against foreigners reach the proportions attained during the Boxer movement in 1900.

There are always a host of folk in China — adventurers, advisers, concession hunters and the like — whose fortunes depend upon their ability to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese Govern-ment or with this or that influential official or civilian. These are generally clever and highly articulate persons, some of whom are given to writing books and to making speeches and, as a class, they forward Chinese ends through very energetic pro-paganda, dealing suavely with the diplomats in the interest of their Chinese connections, soft-soaping China at every oppor-tunity, and telling the Western world in persuasive accents, when they go to their homelands, what it suits them to have the Western world think.

The missionary misrepresents conditions in China to justify his own continued existence and residence in the country and to earn the goodwill of the Chinese for his movement. A mission-ary who is indiscreet enough to say publicly what he really knows and thinks of the Chinese and their mental processes, is raising barriers against the christianization of China by engendering among the Chinese hostility to his society or his Church and is therefore little better than a traitor to the cause. He must persuade himself that the Chinese can be converted to the brand of Christianity which he preaches and that, when they have all been shaped to the same form and to the same mental and spiritual state as the folk back in HuU or Chicago,

who are putting pennies in the plate for his upkeep, China will undergo an automatic political and social regeneration and all our problems of relations with China will be solved. Not very long ago a veteran American missionary testified before a Congressional committee in Washington, voicing the opinion that if the balance of the American Boxer indemnity were returned to China unconditionally and without supervision over its expenditure, the Chinese would not only be grateful but would spend it for education without the misappropriation of a cent. This was at a time when China wfis defaulting on all legitimate debts and obligations, when the vociferous radical element was turning Bolshevik and publicly asserting China's right to default whenever she liked, and when every available revenue, pledged to education and other laudable purposes, was being openly misappropriated and diverted to destructive ends. The publication of this testimony in the Far East reduced the foreign communities here to a state in which they could only gasp, gulp and sputter ; and even the Chinese grinned. Publishable comment was impossible and, t-o us, superfluous. The commercial agent in China misrepresents conditions to keep his job. He reports that conditions are bad at the moment, that the Grovernment is bankrupt, and that many foreign firms are on the verge of bankruptcy because they cannot collect from insolvent national or provincial administrations. He admits that trade with the interior is bad because of the break-down of railway traffic, a war here and an epidemic of banditry there. But he is not human if he does not try to point out that there is hope of an improvement and that there are reasons to believe that there will be opportunities next month, or next year, to collect a few old debts and do a little new business. If he were to report that business conditions were getting steadily worse, that the Chinese were more openly anti-foreign daily and more determined to make life and business for the foreigner difficult, that there was no hope for the restoration of order except through intervention by the Powers, following upon a virulent and destructive anti-foreign outbreak, his firm at home would be bound to reply that under such conditions there was no sense in maintaining an expensive agency yielding no returns

CHAPTER I (PART 3 OF 3)

and that he had better shut up shop and come home. This would mean that the commercial nabob, with his mansion and his dozen servants, his motor-car, his ponies and dogs, his monu-mental club and his seven-course dinners with seven different kinds of wines and liqueurs, his short and elastic office hours and his long outings, would have to return to a desk job in an industrial beehive at home and sit on a high stool to eat his luncheons off a marble slab. Either this or go jobless until he could persuade some other expanding and ambitious firm, against his better knowledge and his conscience, that he could make a success of their wares in the undeveloped but growing markets of the East.

The reader can imagine that China is in most cases charitably and optimistically dealt with in the great majority of such reports, to the further land greater misconception of China abroad. Locally established firms, whose heads haven't even a desk job in the industrial beehive to go back to, are of course as eager to cultivate and hold Chinese favour and patronage as the adviser and the missionary, and as loath therefore to commit themselves publicly when asked for an opinion upon China and the Chinese, and can only be induced to tell the truth under pledges of the strictest confidence and secrecy. The " intelligence officer " in Peking of one of the biggest business concerns in the world recently invited the writer to peruse a bale of his reports to his London office. They were true and frank surveys of the situation in China and showed a clear enough understanding of what was and will continue to be wrong with the coimtry.

" If only these could be published," said I, " they might do a lot of good. Shown privately to the officials of your Govern-ment at home, they can be conveniently ignored, but if they were before the public they would make an impression which the Government could not afford to ignore."

" Oo-oo-oo ! " said the author of the reports, gathering them up and replacing them hastily in a tin dispatch-box with a good-sized lock on it. " Think of the howl it would raise ! First I'd lose my job, and then we should have a Chinese boycott on OUT hands."

The diplomat tones down his reports and misrepresents con-

ditions in China chiefly because he enjoys a quiet, pleasant life. Polite and frictionless relations with educated Chinese are the most polite in the world. Contentious relations with a Chinese official are exasperating beyond all comparison. If the diplomat reports to his home Government that things have reached such a pass that he must take energetic steps in the interest of his nationals, and gets by return cable authority to take such steps, it means that he has condemned himself to a little hard work in a troubled atmosphere, that he has on his own initiative ruffled the exquisite calm of the diplomatic puddle in Peking. If he can possibly see his way clear, therefore, to taking any other measures or to letting the issue slide, he does it.

Again, diplomatic misrepresentations are often based upon ignorance of what is going on in China, born of the most ineffable conceit. The dignity and omniscience of the Diplomatic Body in Peking is a holy tradition within that body. Advice to a diplomat from a mere outsider is an insult. He is offended if you tell him anything he doesn't know and with a ponderous " hem " impresses upon you that this news came to him long ago through his own sources of information but that for certain reasons, inscrutable except in the inner circle, he has not yet seen fit to act upon it. The idea that he should to some degree be influenced in his reports and suggestions to his Government by the consensus of opinion in the communities of his nationals in China is a presumptuous and insubordinate thought which makes the Legation employee long for the powers and instru-ments of the Inquisition. The diplomat wants it clearly under-stood by every one whose welfare hinges upon his doings, that he is responsible to no one, at home or abroad, but the bureau with which he corresponds in tortuous cipher, and that if he knows nothing and does nothing, it is his business and the business of the bureaucrat at the other end of the cable, and absolutely the business of no one else.

To prove this to the hilt, he conspires with his colleagues to demonstrate to all foreigners in China how little a corys diplo-matique can know and do and yet seem to function.

The sinologue, the student of Chinese letters, history and philosophy, is responsible for the impression abroad, wherever

there are folk who take enough interest in China to read about Chinese affairs in standard books, and among the great pro-portion of foreigners in China who never take the trouble to study more of the country than is essential to their immediate well-being, that the Chinese are a people of perfectly stupendous intellectual attainments, worthy of respect, almost of reverence. It cannot be denied that the Chinese have, with almost incon-ceivable patience and care, put a perfectly amazing mass of writing on paper and have had something to say in print about every conceivable thing that came under their observation during a long history. Whether or not much of it is worth reading in the original, the sinologue is best equipped to tell, and since he has, in nearly all cases, spent the better part of a lifetime learning to read Chinese with sufl&cient facility to warrant him in passing judgment, he is not likely to confess that he has wasted his life burrowing into a rubbish heap, but is most strongly inclined to persuade himself and others that his labours have been rewarded, that he has unearthed wonderful treasures, and that the literature of the Chinese is worth all it costs to under-stand it.

It must also be remembered that to learn enough of the Chinese written language to make reading anything less than drudgery, a man must devote so much of his waking time to it over such a great period of years that, in the end, he is literally absorbed in and by his studies, and sees his books no longer with his own eyes but through Chinese spectacles, and from the view-point of the native scholars who have helped him at every turn to gain an understanding and appreciation of the literature which they so profoundly reverence. There are now reliable translations available, however, so that the ordinary reader can gain a very fair idea of the sense of Chinese prose, verse, history and philosophy with so little expenditure of time and energy that he does not feel that he has to laud what he has read to apologize for the hours devoted to reading and appraising it.

Most of the dabblers of the writer's rather wide acquaintance, who have courage enough to say what they think in the face of the monumental authority of the sinologues, confess that they

have been interested in their Chinese studies, because they have acquired through their reading an insight into the Chinese mind which would not have been otherwise attainable, but that, for the merits of the works themselves, Chinese poetry is senti-mental moonshine, rising nowhere to anything like sublimity ; that Chinese canonical philosophy is stuffy and ponderous, revealing at every turn a childish ignorance of first principles ; that Chinese history is rambling, ill assembled, ill presented and often prejudiced, while Confucian ethics as expressed in the classics are either childish platitudes or arbitrary rules based upon traditional prejudices. The conclusion of the Philistine, who has no reason to say other than what he thinks, is that Chinese literature, minus the mystery with which bulk, antiquity and a frightfully difficult language have shrouded it, may have its value to the historian, the philologist, and to scientists gener-ally ; but that as literature pure and simple, the greater part of it is sententious and laboured twaddle.

Yet one of the principal reasons why we are told to revere China's past, deal leniently with her present and put faith in her future, is that a people who have written a stack of books that would throw the Pyramids in the shade, cannot be less than intellectually great.

As the writer has already said, the West seems to believe that lenient and generous treatment of China inspires gratitude and improves, therefore, the condition of Occidentals residing and trading in China. The West also believes that China is a land of " vast undeveloped resources " in somewhat the same sense that America was seventy-five years ago. The Chinese are also credited with great engineering and constructive skill and enterprise, as witnessed by the Great Wall, the Grand Canal, the irrigation system of central Szechuan, and other huge monuments to amazing toil and fine breadth of vision.

It is thought abroad that the Chinese have developed a profound and sincere admiration for the civilization of the West and are in all humility trying to pattern themselves after us because of the ostensible superiority of our ways. It is com-monly asserted here and abroad that China has survived longer than any ancient state because, before she came in contact

with the West and the new problems which Westerners brought, she had evolved a system of Government that perfectly suited her needs in all emergencies and that, whenever she has adapted herself to the new conditions which accompany contact with the world, she can again contrive to govern herself successfully and become an efficient member of the family of nations. As a corollary to this idea, it appears to be believed abroad that all progressive Chinese have grasped, appreciate and are trying to apply our theories of representative government, rule by and for the people, and all the rest of it, so that it would be tyran-nically unjust to meddle and stay the grand work of political evolution that is going on in the East. Finally there is probably no business man in Great Britain, Europe or America who has ever thought of doing business with China who has not been solemnly assured that "a Chinaman's word is as good as his bond ".

None of these pleasant dogmas is wholly true or unconditionally true. If they are to apply to the real China, rather than the China of fiction and propaganda, so many qualifications must be added to them that little semblance of truth remains. For instance, China has great resources in her man power, land and fisheries. But the resources which furnish the backbone of great modern commercial and industrial states, and the sinews of war as well, are oil, coal, iron, copper and timber ; and in all of these China, in proportion to her area and population, is simply pathetically poor. There is no room here to demonstrate this, but it may be of interest to know that a greater tonnage of iron and steel have been manufactured in America alone during the past ten years than China's entire reserve of unworked ore underground, and that China's reserve of ore is about one-twenty-fifth of that still remaining to the United States.

Deforestation through thousands of years has made wood a luxury in China and is the direct cause of frequent floods and droughts which limit the productivity of her arable land, impover^ ish her workers and have rendered huge tracts wholly arid. Oil has not yet been discovered in paying quantities and her avail-able reserve of coking and bimker coal is trifling indeed com-

pared with that of many smaller countries that have been feeding industry for some generations already.

China's greatest engineering feats have been conceived, inspired and pushed through by non-Chinese, and the dynasties which stand out in her history as the most brilliant were nearly all founded by aliens. Her boundaries, established by military exploits, were more often than not extended by barbarian allies or by Chinese armies under generals of alien stock. The first man to extend China's boundaries to anything like their present extent, break down the petty feudalism of Confucian China and make a real nation of it with a centralfzed Government, was a barbarian princelet from the West who afterwards became Ch'in Shih Huang, the builder of the Great Wall.

In the T'ang Dynasty a Chinese army carried out a military campaign which still excites the wonder and admiration of students of military afiairs. They marched in conquest through the deserts of Turkestan, crossed the terrific barrier of the Hindu-Kush and raided what are now the north-west outposts of the Indian Empire. Upon examination it appears, how-ever, that the leader of the expedition was a Korean and that he had more difficulty driving and cajoling his army along than he had surmounting natural obstacles. The engineer who planned and carried out the great irrigation system in Szechuan was an aboriginal hill tribesman. The better part of Asia was once ruled from Peking, but Kublai Khan, the builder of most of the Imperial highways, was the Mongol Emperor of China at the time and drew upon almost every Asiatic people for his advisers, executives and generals. But more of all this later.

Almost no effort has ever been made to portray the situation in China from any but the Chinese, or " sympathetic " point of view, with the result that in this generation the Chinese have already taken advantage of the inspired ignorance of the Occident to elicit a great deal of sympathy which they have not earned, and are now busy proving to themselves and preparing to prove to the world that there is nothing really wrong with their country but the indigestible foreigner in China. They are telling them-selves, and will soon be announcing to all, that their history, literature and potential wealth prove them a people of the

largest calibre, capable of anything and everything, thrown completely out of their orbit by foreign aggression, and now struggling towards a place in the world under the galling burden of slaves' shackles, chains, cords and cangues, imposed upon them during the period of their weakness and bewilderment. There are millions of narrow-chested folk on the other side of this planet who gulp and swallow when a brass band plays, and whose lean ribs strain the stitching of their waistcoat buttons when a florid person in a frock-coat stands above them and talks about " liberty, equality and fraternity " or " life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ", announces that " all men are born free and equal ", calls the welkin to witness that " Britons never wiU be slaves ", or echoes the solemn aspiration that " government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from this earth ".

The Chinese official who has accepted the chairmanship of a famine relief board in the hope of buying a new concubine out of the funds which he intends to misappropriate, and who bitterly resents the presence of a " foreign devil ", with a hawk's eye for doctored accounts, on the board, has learned to know that these people exist on the other side of the planet and has begun to realize how they will react to talk of gyves, fetters and leg-irons. All Chinese officialdom has, in fact, learned to play on the same strings and now that the " intelligentzia " of China, led by the students whom we have educated, are preparing to demonstrate that the only way to pull China out of the mire is to scupper the foreigner and his interests in China, China's propaganda abroad has already been adapted, under the direction of the foreign educated Chinese, to appeal particu-larly to the good souls who mop their eyes when the flag goes

There would be no truth and no profit in denying that inter-course with the world has brought China new and vexing problems. It is folly, however, for the foreigners in China who know the country, to let the Chinese persuade the world that nothing is wrong with China but what the foreigner has imported, and that she would adjust herself to the new conditions imposed by international relations if she were only given a free hand —

perfect freedom to repudiate her treaties and obligations, per-fect freedom to deal with foreigners in China according to her own caprices, and perfect freedom to fence herself in again against the world's meddling, after she has shown how little she thinks of anyone but herself, by the erection of an abatis of her own designing around herself, within which she can proceed, with unalloyed " self-determination " to exhaust her energies and a goodly portion of the earth's surface in her own peculiar deviltries.

What these essays are designed to prove is that the advertised difficulties that face China because of her inclusion in the family of nations are not fundamental, but superficial ; that what is wrong with China is to be found in the core of the heart and mind of the average Chinese, and that China has failed and may always fail, as a racial entity, to meet modern conditions, not because of a lack of opportunity to prove her capacity, nor because of repression from without, but because her develop-ment was arrested more than two thousand years ago, because whatever the forces are in a people that make for growth are atrophied ; that what is really wrong with China and will con-tinue to be wrong with her, is that the Chinese are children, that their world is a world of child's make-believe ; and that they have no more right, in their own interest or in humanity's larger interest, to govern themselves or shape their own course of education, than the pupils in a school have to boss the faculty and dictate what they will learn and what they will not.

No successful ruler of China, native or alien (and most of the best had alien blood in them), has ever extended to the Chinese people any other rights than those due to thoroughly lovable, thoroughly docile, apt, keen and often precocious school children. If the Occident wants to know China's real place in this micro-cosm of ours, the Occident would do well to study the history of China's scintillating epochs and learn how her alien rulers made the most of the really fine qualities of the Chinese people by a proper balance between brisk whippings and kind encourage-ment.

Only one person in ten thousand can write a fairy story that

will not be rejected as spurious by the child. Only one person in ten thousand can learn to speak colloquial Chinese to the satisfaction of the Chinese — except a child. Foreign babies in China acquire fluency in Chinese through chance contacts with the natives long before they respond to the most assiduous instruction in their ancestral tongues, and find much more in common with the household servants than with their own parents. The person who can understand the whims and fancies of a child and invent fairy stories, invariably acquires in no time an understanding of the seemingly mysterious workings of the Chinese mind and enters into profound sympathy with them.

Old residents in China who have for many years been per-plexed by the strange and erratic reactions of the Chinese and have been almost ready to admit that there was some baffling element in their mental make-up, which vexed them as much as an organic impurity does the analytical chemist when he thinks he is dealing with simple inorganic compoimds, have suddenly found, when they had children of their own to study and understand, that the difference between the Eastern and Western mentality is precisely the same as the difference between the puerile and adult mind ; that the famous barrier between East and West is like nothing so much as the barrier of adolescence that stands between the sympathies of ten and twenty.

To the adult who has forgotten his childhood, as so many have, the Chinese and the child are each a bundle of likeable, amusing but perplexing and often irritating contradictions.

The Chinese have all the native charm of children and all their weaknesses. They are kind, as children are kind ; and cruel, as children are cruel. Children either love a pet to death or subject it to tortures that would shame the lowest savage just to see it squirm and squeal — so do the Chinese indulge themselves. Highly cultured Chinese officials, who are so high-strung that they shudder at the suggestion of pain, can watch a man being skinned alive with an eager interest that becomes no one but a child. The Chinese are as trustful and loyal as children, and yet suspicious, secretive and circuitous in their

methods as only children can be. They are suspicious and sensitive, but affectionate and trusting — as only children are. Like children they are wilful, proud, independent, recalcitrant and resentful of correction, but under sustained and reasonable discipline are the most docile, tractable and responsive people on earth — like nothing so much in fact as good schoolboys. We all know how graspingly mean and selfish a child can be at one moment and how foolishly and lavishly generous he can be the next, acting under impulses which we cannot grasp ; the Chinese are the same. They are timid, but bold ; peace loving, but warlike ; painstaking and indefatigable workers, and at the same time careless, slipshod and shirking, just as they happen to be used and inspired, as children are.

The Chinese love cliques, as children do. They display a high power of organization in guilds, secret societies, conferences and meetings of all sorts, under authority. Under adequate check they take up burdens of responsibility and carry them through as schoolboys do under an " honour system ", or as Boy Scouts do imder adult direction. Lacking that adequate check, their organizations are about as well ruled as we could imagine a school would be without masters, or as Boy Scout organizations without the supervision of a grown-up. The Chinese have the wonderful acquisitive powers and memories of children ; but a power of consistent and patient application of acquired theories just about equal to a child's. Like children they are highly original in mischief and stodgily imitative and uncreative in matters that do not amuse them and hold their fancy. Finally, like children and animals, they squirm under ridicule, find everything most amusing but themselves, and simply abhor the person who refuses to take them seriously.

Superficially China has a great many serious problems to face and the world has much to do to arrange for lasting placid relations between the East and West. But it is the purpose of these essays to demonstrate what will here be stated as a fundamental hypothesis : that most of China's ills have grown out of her own and our failure to appreciate that the Chinese mind is a child's mind — ^the mind of a precocious child at its best and worst. If China's ills are to be laid at our door, as her

propagandists say, it is because we have failed to realize that we are dealing with children, because we have treated the individual Chinese as an adult and the nation as a grown-up. If China is, at this time, making a display of impertinence and recal-citrance, is demanding rights which she not only has not earned but has many times forfeited, we must come to our senses and recognize that it is because we have encouraged her to introduce into the schoolroom the laws and by-laws of the Witenage-mote.

We all know how thoroughly detestable and obnoxious spoiled children are, and we all know whom we usually hold responsible for their faults. We should enjoy spanking the children of course, but we should get much more satisfaction out of kicking the parents. China is not to be blamed so much for the unhappy mess in which she now finds herself as a result of her contact with the West and for the resentment which she cherishes against us, as the sentimentalists who have taught her that the pupil was as good as the teacher, that discipline was tyranny, that control was exploitation and that rules were a challenge which none but a tyrant could defend. Liberty has been translated into Chinese by the phrase " self -permitted ", and it is sacred particularly to those who permit themselves to loot the public exchequers in the name of Democracy.

To any intelligent person living in the East, it is evident enough that China's present state is primarily due to the com-plete breakdown of discipline and of respect for authority, upon which the maintenance of order has depended since the beginning of things Chinese, and without which the Chinese masses are no more a nation than a masterless horde of young hoodlums at large is a school.

It is also apparent to students of Oriental history that, for peculiar reasons of their own, the Chinese are utterly incapable of restoring order dependent upon respect for native authority, chiefly because no native authority worthy of respect exists or is likely to exist, and because weaklings and hypocrites can no more restore order in a nation of schoolboy minds than they can govern and re-shape a demoralized school.

It is further obvious to all of us in the East that foreign influ-

ence and imported ideas had, of necessity, much to do with the collapse of that Imperial authority which sufl&ced for China's good order before we meddled with her, but having done the damage, it would be a feeble sense of responsibility indeed that would prompt us to say " hands off " now, just because the demoralized Chinese shouted for it, when a firm hold upon the situation would right matters.

That China under the discipline that she needs would con-tribute enormously to the world's peace and prosperity, it would be easy to show ; and no Occidental nation is now in such a position that she can afford to ignore a rich market that re-quires no more than a summary house-cleaning. China policed, and each Chinese working for himself under a respectable authority in security and peace, would yield the world a thousand per cent on the cost of restoring and maintaining order within a few years. What China's complete disruption and the collapse of all her trade and industry would mean to the world, is to be gauged by the pains and expense to which Moscow is going to promote chaos in the Orient.

Occidental policy in the Orient, as exemplified in diplomatic practice, has not for many years been the check that it should have been upon the demoralization of China, which foreign contacts originally brought about, but has more or less deliber-ately fostered it. Diplomacy has yielded and cajoled, bullied and blufEed, turned a blind eye to malicious pranks and bought order from time to time with sweetmeats and relaxed rules precisely like the footling, timid, irritable and weak masters of a demoralized school who vie with one another in winning tem-porary favour and in promoting lasting anarchy.

How and why the supposedly sober, peace-loving and indus-trious Chinese have been so readily converted through mis-management into a nation of unruly and impertinent school children, the ensuing chapters are designed to explain.

w.w.c.

CHAPTER II (PART 1 OF 3)

SOCIAL TRADITIONS

THE Chinese are pleased to assume that they are all of common origin, the descendants of a single mother, and hence the " Four Hundred Million Brothers ", as their phrase has often been translated. The impression seems also to have gone abroad that all the people of China are of the same stock, that they are racially a homogeneous unit. The most casual observer, travelling from port to port along the China coast, will soon observe so many differences in type and speech, habits and temperament, that he is bound to be per-suaded otherwise. In the more remote frontier provinces the traveller sees Chinese in the making and, without the help of history or a study of the dialects, can form some idea of the many widely variant elements which have gone into the evolu-tion of the Chinese people as we know them.

Chinese history, even superficially read, furnishes abundant evidence to prove that, whoever the original Chinese were, they have absorbed, from the most ancient times down to the imme-diate present, vast hordes of many breeds and have shaped them somewhat to their own traditions and ways of doing things, but have by no means evolved a common ethnological type. It would be as inexact to speak of " the Chinese race " as it would be to speak of " the European race ". The Irishman would find as much in common with the Bulgarian in speech and manners as the native of Shansi with the Cantonese. The speech of the highlands in Shantung differs as much from that of the adjacent lowlands in the same province as does Italian from Spanish, and the people are as different in type as their dialects. In the time of Confucius the Shantung lowlands were

populated by the Cliinese, while the highlands and the coast were peopled by the Lai savages, possibly of Korean origin, at all events a Tunguzic people having no more in common with the Chinese than the Slavic tribes had with the Romans. All of North China has been overrun and peopled by successive waves of Tunguzic and Tartar hordes, while the various peoples of the southern provinces are the descendants of aboriginal tribes who became Chinese under a united rule in much the same way that the Celtic peoples of Gaul and Britain became Romans. In the time of Confucius there were blond Aryan tribesmen occupying tracts in what is now North-west China, and light eyes and hair in very frequent throwbacks testify that, while the majority of these blondes migrated, a certain number were absorbed. Colonies of Indians, Arabs, Jews and Russians have been absorbed. There are Chinese in Peking who can prove that they are the descendants of Mohammed. A very prominent Mohammedan general, whose name has recently appeared frequently in the Press, comes from a village on the Tibetan frontier, but can prove that on his father's side he is descended from a Jew who became a Mohammedan, while his mother's family originally came from Nanking in the Yangtze Valley. He also has Turkish and Arab strains in him. Within the bounds of China proper there are scores of fragments of non-Chinese peoples who still maintain their racial identity and their own non-Chinese languages but who are slowly but surely being absorbed and who would, with improved communications, be as Chinese as any others in two or three generations, retain-ing few traditions of an alien origin.

To grasp what sort of a pot-pourri the Four Himdred Million Brothers are, imagine that Rome had at the opening of the Christian era conquered and civilized (as she civilized Gaul), Germany, Scandinavia and European Russia, moulding the whole of the modern Europe into a single state with a highly central-ized Government and with the Roman classical language estab-lished for all time throughout these territories as the medium for literature, religion, administration and commerce, but leaving each people to develop its own brand of colloquial Latin, as the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians and Roumanians have

done. Imagine that this Roman Empire was kept more or less intact throughout the succeeding centuries, but that it was periodically overrun and ruled by successive invasions of Ger-mans, Slavs, Moors, Turks and Celts from the British Isles, shifting the capital about, garrisoning the European nation with their own armies, influencing somewhat the customs and language, but eventually conforming to the traditions of the state established by Rome and becoming Romans. Imagine such a modem Roman people, comprising all of Europe and its many peoples, plus a sprinkling of Turkish and Arab blood, and you are prepared to form some conception of what the Chinese people are.

If the reader can carry this conception of China in his mind,

he will understand how difficult and dangerous it is to generalize

about anything Chinese. One cannot say that they all have

almond eyes, because many millions of them have not. One

cannot even say that they are all yellow, because there are

brown Chinese, yellow Chinese and Chinese who are almost

white with ruddy cheeks. The vast majority are black haired

and black eyed, but curly hair, light eyes and brown hair are

not unknown. Marshal Wu Pei-fu, for instance, has a tinge

of brown in his hair, a reddish light in his moustache and very

light-brown eyes. The flat-faced, almond-eyed Chinese, with

very broad cheek-bones, short jaw and a slight figure, is an

aboriginal type found everywhere in the upper Yangtze Valley

and in the south-western provinces. Large raw-boned Chinese,

with the flat faces and round heads of the conventional Tartar

type, are to be found in every community in North China.

But throughout North China also may be found millions of

individuals with the faces and heads of the type which art

tradition in North China and Japan has set apart as the classical

type. These are persons with long, narrow heads, long faces

and thin aquiline noses. Every one has seen photographs ^f the

head of the mummy of Rameses II. There are milHons of

individuals in North China who, in old age, show a striking

resemblance to Rameses and thereby conform to the classical

Chinese standard. In striking contrast to these, there are

other millions in China with decidedly negroid heads and fea-

tures who, if blacked and dressed for the part, would photo-graph as natives of New Guinea.

The point to which all of this leads us is that character and temperament vary over as wide a range in China as they do in Europe, and that while standards of living and thinking have been conventionalized to conform to a traditional classical model, set up in Chinese literature and history, just as one can imagine a modern Roman state including all of Europe, adher-ing as best it could to classical Roman standards, the temper-ament and character of various groups of Chinese difEer as much as they do among individuals ; while the superficial resemblance of the Chinese of Yunnan to the Chinese of Chihli is due largely to a uniformity of literature and tradition, which no more makes them a homogeneous people than an army uniform makes all the members of a squad blood relatives or intellectual equals. But this, like the uniform, brings the individual up or pushes him down to a common conventional level.

Whoever the original Chinese were, they were a people of energy, originality and great inventive and creative power. But they conquered a very limited strip of land along the Yellow River and set up their little Middle Kingdom which became an island in a vast sea of barbarity. Their boundaries were slowly extended by force of arms, but much more rapidly by force of ciilture. As they developed arts and industries, their savage neighbours borrowed them and, by virtue of their savage energy in warlike undertakings, became such serious menaces to the little Chinese state which was putting aside arms and relying more and more upon the plough and the pencil, that they had to be taken in and made integral factors in the Chinese state to ensure peace in the Middle Kingdom. This process has gone on ever since and China has, throughout history, been absorbing and moulding to her own original pattern one horde after another of intellectual and cultural inferiors, leaving her little time for cultural advances and forcing her, to keep her head above the sea of savagery with which she was threat-ened, to convert her art and literature of the period when she was first thrown into a defensive attitude into a fetish which

54 . SOCIAL TRADITIONS

she had to teach her barbarian conquerors to worship long before they were capable of appreciating it.

She had no sooner taken in and converted to her ancient standards one set of Tartars who insisted upon ruUng her, or a set of aborigines who had adopted Chinese ways and insisted upon being admitted to the fold or upon setting up a rival fold, than another group of rank outsiders, full of fight and ambition, came over the horizon and brought with them a new but similar problem. China got used to it, however, and by conventionalizing her culture and putting it upon an altar before which she taught the savages to kneel, she maintained her identity and her national consciousness. Development has been sacrificed to keeping alight the ancient flame on the altar, and now a hybrid people bow down to standards which run contrary to the innate impulses in the great majority of them, which puts an effective check upon whatever is left of the creative impulse of the ancient Chinese in this consomme of peoples, and which keeps the best of them in an arrested state of development, comparable only to the mental baby-hood of the mediaeval monk in Europe, roped, bound and fet-tered by his classical studies, against which every fibre of his Teutonic being revolted.

When China, with her arrested development, came in contact a few centuries ago with the rough and ruthless pioneers of Occidental exploitation of the East, she calmly assumed that she was face to face with another breed of heavy-handed savages whom she might not be able to resist but whom she could eventually lead to that altar on which was set a civilization matured twenty-odd centuries before and in front of which these new-comers must inevitably bend the knee as a preliminary to their absorption into the grand mass of the elect. The failure of the new-comers to conform, their presumption in adher-ing to what they asserted to be an equally high civilization, their resourcefulness and violence in proving it, and China's belated attempts to acquire the secret of their strength and assurance and use it against them, give us the clues to most of the problems which now face China and the only real explanation of the supposedly complex Chinese attitude towards the West.

To understand Chinese thought at all, we have to be fully aware that ever since the time of Pericles, China has been so busy impressing upon bloodthirsty neighbours that they could contribute nothing to the wisdom and virtue of Confucius and his school, that she, being made up very largely of awe-struck immigrants from her barbarous neighbourhood, has come to accept her own propaganda as a religion and is just as re-sentful of any attempt to enlarge upon Confucius and Mencius, except through the abject medium of commentary, as we should be if we had in centuries convinced ourselves that all thoughts born after Pericles, which did not fit the standard of his age, might be interesting and amusing, even useful in emergencies, but must nevertheless be regarded as superficial and super-fluous. This will give the reader some idea of how cantankerous the Chinese can be when he is a conservative and also of how desperately radical and irresponsible he feels when he makes up his mind to announce that the wisdom of the ancients is all tosh and to break away from it. The rebel against Chinese conventional thought is in much the same position in this Chinese generation as Darwin, Huxley and Haeckel would have been in Martin Luther's, if they had had their nineteenth-century theories to purvey to Luther's audience. The Chinese extremist is a mediaeval product, crazy-drunk with modernism, like a Mongol shepherd out of the wineless wilderness with a magnum of champagne under his belt.

As a result of being defeated so often by outsiders and of extending her boundaries through the use of alien barbaric allies, while she subdued both allies and enemies with her superior culture, China very long ago decided that soldiers were inevitably parasitic rifi-rafE, useless in an emergency and troublesome in time of peace, whose trade was therefore about on a par with the barber's and the scavenger's. The power of a culture that was obsolete was exalted beyond measure until it came in con-tact with a living culture with modern science behind it ; and the power of arms was religiously belittled, since all barbarian arms had proved inefiectual against China's ancient culture, imtil Occidental arms came along, with both science and bar-baric virility behind them, and ushered in a living culture which

refused to bow down before the mummified culture of the ancients.

From the shock of this contact China has not yet recovered ; and to this shock China has got so many and such kaleidoscopic reactions that she presents to the Occident the likeness of a multi-coloured pinwheel in a fitful gale, a thing that you can-not put your finger upon and of which you can get no definite impression while it is in motion. About sixty-five years ago China was as fond of herself and as contemptuous of the out-sider as she had been at any time in her previous two thousand years of history. Then a little uppishness brought down upon her an Anglo-French invasion of Peking which forced her Emperor to take flight to a summer residence in the mountains north-east of Peking, where he died, and which led to treaties providing for international intercourse on a basis of equality between China and several outside Powers. To the Chinese mind this was not particularly disturbing. China was used to paying verbal, make-believe tribute to physically superior peoples whom she despised and proposed to reduce to the level of all the other barbarians that had impinged upon her aura. At that time the Chinese people would not have been seriously upset if the Powers had taken control of their country, unseated their dynasty and set up a government by superior force in China. It had happened so often that they were used to it. They would have raised their eyebrows and said : " Well ! Here's another lot of savages to educate and reduce to discipline ! We hope that they will not be as obdurate and conceited as the Mongols."

Our failure to take charge of China at that juncture, run the country as a conquered dependency and eventually melt into China and become part of the country, was a startling departure from precedent and caused the Chinese to prick up their ears and notice things. All that they have observed between then and now has been disturbing. They discovered that they were face to face with a people who, like the Mongols of old, were very ingenious and determined in the use of force but who, unlike the conventional savage, followed up the swag-ger of force with a cultural swagger which made no bows nor

concessions to the philosophical system which had hitherto been the ever reliable backbone of the Chinese State. China either had to amend the cultural system which had sufficed for several thousand years to overawe and subdue the barbarian after his despised arms had won him control of the country, or, to preserve that system, she had to acquire the secret of the Occident's military strength and courage, and protect her sacred antiquated culture by borrowed military deviltries.

It was upon this latter course that she decided after her humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan in 1894 ; and it was a similar course which she was persuaded to follow after the still more humiliating experiences of the Boxer exploit in 1900. To repel the barbarians who did not stand sufficiently in awe of her past greatness, China had to borrow enough of the savage's ingenuity in the exercise of force to repel him. She decided to sit at the feet of the foreign soldier and learn his trade, since the foreign soldier would not sit at the feet of her Confucian scholars and learn how to be a good Chinese. The story of what has come of this will come later and the foregoing has only been given here because it has a bearing upon the develop-ment of China's social traditions.

The social code which Confucius derived or deduced from the works of the ancients that survived in his time and enjoined upon posterity is one of the most primitive surviving in the world, certainly the most primitive among the peoples who have reason to be called civilized. The philosopher, in his passion for all that was ancient, went as far back as he could for a model and selected the code governing the relations of the well ordered patriarchal family as his standard, thereafter rigidly adhering to it in all his teachings. He ignored whatever experience China might have had in his day in the government of clans, tribes, states or kingdoms, and selected the smallest group within which social relations can possibly exist, as an inflexible criterion for the government of all humanity for all time. The result is that all good Chinese have faithfully adhered, and continue to adhere, to principles of government which were vital in their country something more than three thou-sand years ago, but which have been decidedly out of date for

more than two-thirds of that time, and are now, in the face of the numerous schools of political thought which have been developed in the West and are now being imported into China, childishly primitive.

In the time of Confucius the character of the Chinese people was undergoing rapid changes and the traditional order of things which Confucius so devoutly admired was breaking down because the Chinese State was growing, not only in size and experience, but also in the diversity of its peoples. China was all ready to change and experiment freely with new political and social codes when Confucius and his school arrived upon the scene, were horrified at the prospect of change and put such an effective brake upon experimentation that no very radical revision of social standards has been possible from that day to this.

The protective instinct was, as has already been said, the most likely reason for the reactionary position which Con-fucius and all of his followers have taken. They may also have sensed the fact that nothing but the most primitive political and social tradition would be binding upon the hordes of alien barbarians whom China was absorbing and had yet to absorb. The more homogeneous and the nearer a common level all the elements in a nation are, the more likely are liberal political and social standards to succeed. A nation made up of many different breeds of widely different mental capacity, displaying a great variety of good and evil instincts, is not so likely to make a success of government by consent of the governed as a homogeneous tribe, where an equal voice in public affairs is a recognition of the real equality of the members of the tribe. Confucius may or may not have realized this when he took the patriarchal system as his standard, but he and all who have since come after him have certainly understood that a nation which was bound to absorb millions of aliens would have to have a master with pontifical powers if the culture upon which the nation was originally founded were not to be swamped and if the political unity of the State were to be restored and preserved. The State which, as it expands, cannot pre-serve the homogeneity of its people cannot afford to dabble

in liberal political institutions, but must maintain the same sort of discipline as that which holds a great army of mer-cenaries together. Such a people can expect the best pos-sible government for all from a benevolent autocrat. Con-fucius saw in the primitive patriarch, who enjoyed absolute authority over all his descendants, their dependents and subor-dinates, but who ruled kindly and justly with an eye to the welfare of the whole family group, the perfect pattern of the benevolent autocrat. Therefore, in evolving for China a hard and fast political and social system, he first studied the law of the family, as it had come down to him from the earliest times, codified it to his own satisfaction and then said to his fellow-countrymen : " Let this be for all time the law of the government of China and the nation will never perish ", or words to that effect. And it remained in effect the law of the government of China until a few years ago, when, to all intents and purposes, China ceased to have a government.

The Confucian system of government, the patriarchal form without serious modifications, has often meant good govern-ment for China and has nearly always been dignified. There was no little worldly wisdom and knowledge of human nature behind its conception and it satisfied a need which China feels now even more keenly than she did in the time of Confucius — ■ the need for strict discipline under a respected master. The great weakness of the system, however, has been that to main-tain the patriarchal form of government it has always been necessary to insist upon the most rigid adherence to and respect for the spirit of the primitive family code. It would be hopeless to try to foist a paternal form of government, founded upon prehistoric clan government, upon a people that had already discarded the prehistoric traditions of the clan. To retain respect for authority it was essential that each generation of native born Chinese, and each wave of absorbed aliens, should be schooled in rigid adherence to the family laws and social traditions which Confucius collected, edited and transmitted. To admit that any improvement in these could have been wrought by change would have been to admit the fallibility of the whole administrative system. It therefore became, in each gener-

ation, the concern of every educator and of every administrative ofl&cial to help with all his might in the perpetuation of a social code which was in decay when Confucius was born and which he recovered by burrowing into the most ancient records and traditions of the race. It is amazing how well they have succeeded and how limited the Chinese therefore are in their conception of public duties and obligations outside the family circle.

In Siberia there were still within the last century breeds of people who recognized no ethical code binding upon them outside the family circle. Each household was a state to itself, and to rob or murder a neighbour was not wrong if the crime was wanton, and quite right enough if it had for its object the enrichment of the paternal household. Beyond the forti-fications which were erected around the home, charity was disloyalty to the family, while kindness, tolerance and help-fulness in any form were weaknesses to be discouraged. No social relations between families, except those founded upon suspicion and hostility, existed. Each family was constantly on its guard against all others and between all there was a constant state of war, chiefly with the object of stealing women to set up grown sons in establishments of their own. Loyalty and honesty were virtues indoors, vices out of doors. No con-tracts were broken because none were made. This is the pic-ture which Russian travellers have drawn of what one must regard as human society boiled down to its irreducible minimum, but the savages who were the neighbours of the Chinese at the dawn of history still nursed the traditions if not the actual memory of such an age, and, in parts of China, still enjoy almost as primitive relations with one another.

There are mountainous districts in Chekiang and FuMen still where small clans, which are simply large famihes, huddle together in imposing fortifications, carrying on feuds with one another and recognizing no authority, no obligations, no social code outside the clan except by special treaty or under force majeure. Patriotism, to such folk, means loyalty to the clan ; treason is disloyalty to the clan. Blood relationship is the one and only binding tie between men. Good faith can only

CHAPTER II (PART 2 OF 3)

be expected between blood relatives except under coercion or by special arrangement. Discipline within the clan is essential to its survival and the authority of the patriarch has to be above challenge to prevent friction in so small and so cramped a community. Outside the fold no authority is recognized that is not supported by force, and it is no crime against con-science to resist or evade checks upon one's conduct imposed by other than a superior in the clan. Alliances by marriage extend the field of relations within which good faith is imposed by duty, but not very far.

It was to some such point that the Chinese had advanced in their social traditions when the philosophers advocated the extension of family laws to governmental relations as a means of holding a mixed people together in something like relations of mutual tolerance ; and there they have stayed, with little modification, for more than two thousand years, landing the Chinese of this generation in the thick of world affairs about as well prepared for democracy and representative govern-ment as our forebears must have been three thousand years ago.

Confucius noted that in the patriarchal establishment peace and order were maintained if the son obeyed the father, with or without reason, the younger brother obeyed the older brother, the girl had nothing to say, the wife obeyed her husband implicitly and acted as a slave to her mother-in-law, and if all juniors deferred to their seniors, no matter how hide-bound the latter might be nor how far they might be gone in dotage.

The patriarch of the household was supposed to remember that he was to be kind, generous and broad-minded with his juniors and dependents, but if he happened to forget this re-sponsibility and developed into a pestiferous old imbecile or a cantankerous family tyrant, it provided the other members of the household with no excuse whatever for a lapse of rever-ence or obedience. Confucius was so busy taking care of his own dignified position among his disciples and the various princelets whom he failed to convert, that he had no time to provide the by-laws for such emergency relations between the governor and the governed. When the supernatural Powers

came up for discussion, he was again too busy with demon-strating what music ought to be from his time for evermore and how kings should be papas to their people, and peoples good children to their kings, to trouble his wits about the after-world, and was content to rule categorically that one's own dead progenitors should be worshipped and revered with all the forms and ceremonies of antiquity, but that it was not only superfluous but indecent for a member of this family to pay any respect to the defunct ancestors of that.

In short, Confucius established as the political science of all time the family unit system out of which the Teutonic tribes-men were just emerging before they swamped Rome and established England ; and because of her difficulties China has reta.ined Confucius and advanced no further than his con-ception of political science down to the present day.

This is true of the mental reactions of the mass of the people to public events. They know the Confucian tradition, are fairly true to it in their ordering of their daily lives, and judge political events by it. One of China's great difficulties happens to be, however, that the " emancipated Chinese ", the sophisti-cated gentleman half-educated in foreign methods, untainted at all by foreign ethical standards, but sufficiently westernized to feel that he is above Confucian restraints, makes his way in the world by holding the conservative proletariat to its conventions and professing great horror whenever the riff-raff kicks over the conventional traces, but pleads a grand esoteric contempt for Confucian forms whenever his own con-duct, in his owTi interest, is called into question.

The Chinese paternal scheme of government, founded upon family laws, provides for no check upon bad government ; and the traditions which have grown out of its application provide only for mob violence and rebellion. The Manchu Emperor Kang Hsi, in a famous edict, wrote an essay upon the ordering of society and social relations which all of his successors have taken pains to put into colloquial form and keep before the people. The Emperor's whole argument is designed to prove that a perfect State, with every one prosperous and happy, is entirely dependent upon the cultivation among

the people of filial respect and of unswerving obedience to parents, seniors and established authorities.

According to this scheme of things, under the Empire, the head of a Chinese family group was absolute ruler of all his descendants and juniors ; owner and manager of aU the family properties ; the judge and jury of all delinquents within the fold, from whose judgments there was no possible appeal ; responsible to no one within the family establishment for his own conduct but the shades of his ancestors, from whom he held his mandate and before whose altar he was the family high priest. In the same way the Emperor was the supreme patriarch of the State, holding his mandate from Heaven, re-sponsible to Heaven alone for his disposition of his subjects and their belongings, and sole intermediary with Heaven for all his people. The nation was his family, the highest officials his eldest sons, their subordinates their little brothers, and the people the little children of the district magistrates. No senior in this arrangement was ever responsible to a junior or any group of them for his conduct, nor did any junior have the right even to suggest the correction of a senior's errors except in the form of humble petition. All checks came from above, never from below.

Implicit obedience was expected from every subordinate, and from the people was demanded implicit and unthinking obedi-ence. They were not to think about government, nor speculate upon the motives of their governors ; their duties as good Chinese were summed up in the admonition : " Tremble and obey ! " The people had no right to a return upon their taxes. If the Emperor chose to spend some of their tribute to him upon the people, it was only for the upkeep of his own pro-perty ; and they were supposed to accept public improvements and remission of taxes in famine years as acts of grace and benevolence. An official whose misgovernment brought ruin upon a district made no apology to the people, but confessed his sins to the Emperor whose property he had mismanaged. When the Emperor made a mess of things and was conscious of it, he apologized to Heaven only.

To keep the people persuaded through all ages that they

had no right to meddle with administrative affairs, it had to be granted that they were mider no obligation to help maintain good government outside their own households. The head of the family was responsible for the conduct of every member of his family, and the family at large for the conduct of the individuals and the whole, but no member of the Wang family was responsible for the Chang family's observance of the law unless such responsibility had been especially imposed upon him by the authorities. If Mr. Wang was singled out as the elder of a community and told that he would be held personally accountable for any wrong-doing in that community, he would naturally keep a very sharp eye upon his neighbours, lord it over them, and exploit them as a little emperor and call upon the local magistrate for help if things got beyond his control. Otherwise whatever went wrong beyond the confines of his own establishment was distinctly none of his business in his mind.

If Mr. Wang were sitting in his shop and heard neighbours Li and Chang across the alleyway sharpening knives and tel-ling one another how they were going to carve up Mr. Chao in the next street, his first inclination would be to plug his ears and forget it. If Mr. Chao were a friend or a relative, he might take it upon himself to slip around the corner and whisper a warning ; but nothing would impel him to give infor-mation to the authorities unless he had good reason to fear that he might be charged with complicity, but even then he would be more inclined to look up a few elderly neighbours and persuade them to act as a committee of peacemakers, rather than bring the authorities into it.

Thanks to the system of government and the emphasis laid upon mutual family responsibilities, the Chinese conception of social obligations is very low indeed. Charity most decidedly begins at home and, more often than not, ends there. If a man is leading a heavily laden mule through an icy street, into which families Li, Wang, Chang, Chao and Ch'en have been throwing their slops to their mutual annoyance for days, if the mule falls on the frozen muck and the driver is unable to get him on his feet again, and if all the members of families Li, Wang, Chang, Chao and Ch'en are sunning themselves in their doorways, it

doesn't devolve upon them in the least to lend a hand. If the muleteer in his struggles slips and falls and gets kicked in the face, it will be screamingly funny, and the whole neighbourhood will echo cackles of merriment. If, in his desperation, the muleteer finally ofiers to part with a twenty-cent piece to get his animal on four legs again, several stalwart louts will saunter up, pick up the mule and then go ofE in a body to a shop to wrangle over the exchange of the twenty-cent piece into small copper coins and the equal division of the proceeds. And the muleteer thinks no less of any of them for it. He would deal with the stranger in his home village in precisely the same way, and think himself a fool if he helped another without hope of reward or of services in return. In fact, under the patriarchal system, no one ever does anything in China without hope of reward. The assumption of responsibility within the family is paid for by the loyalty and mutual help of all the members. Outside the family group or the clan group, it must be paid for in coin or kind.

Within the family the Chinese are, on the whole, the least selfish and most self-sacrificing folk. Outside the family circle they show as little consideration for the comfort or welfare of others as any race on earth. The Chinese who is going after something that he wants and who has no particular reason for being polite, will crowd, elbow and jostle his way along with the utmost indifference to the comfort or convenience of others. When they are being polite they defer very gracefully to others, but the Chinese with a little power or authority dispenses with politeness as easily as he removes his coat, and " hogs " what-ever he wants with a contemptuous stare for those who have not the power to interfere nor assert their rights. No one dreams of doing the public a service without hope of reward. Farmers repair roads to keep traffic off their lands. The house-holder sweeps the street in front of his door when he has to. If no one objects he will pile his garbage and ashes there until the street level is many feet above the level of his, still without a thought for those who are inconvenienced by it. There are fewer Good Samaritans in China than in any country on earth. No people can be so tenderly solicitous for the welfare of their

w.w.o. E

own families and yet so heartlessly indifferent to the misery of those next door. The Chinese who may be a saint, according to any standards, in his own courtyard, leaves his virtues behind in his wife's keeping when he goes abroad, carrying nothing with him but his superficial good manners, and is free then to be as complete a scoundrel as it pays him to be.

The paternal system of government which the writer has tried to outline, accounts for an almost total want of what we should call patriotism in the Occident. The Chinese plebeian, trained through centuries to believe that he enjoys no right and sufiers no responsibility in government, sees no reason why he should exert himself to defend anything more than his ancestral mansion, around which he builds a high wall and within which he equips his descendants, relatives and retainers with weapons. He pays in time of peace for defence in wartime, so why should not the Emperor, who, like the householder, is simply protect-ing himself against recalcitrants within the fold and bandits without ? If the Emperor needs more men than he has already within his employ, let him dip into his silver hoard, as the head of the family does under similar conditions, and employ a few ruffians to help in the defence. The idea that Mr. Chang of Changchow is under any obligation to help the Emperor maintain his property intact, after he has paid his taxes and done his share towards providing the Emperor with the sinews of war, cannot be conceived of until the Emperor, as head of the great Chinese family, calls upon him to help repel a non-conformist outsider who threatens an assault upon the greater family pale. He might then conceive it his duty to lend assis-tance with money or arms, which he would not voluntarily put at the State's service for keeping internal order — that is, for keeping the Emperor's personal property intact for him. If the State had ever been as benevolently paternal in its attitude towards the people as it should have been under the Confucian code, the Chinese people, through the centuries, might have cultivated the same regard for the welfare of the heads of the State that they have for the heads of their families, but such devotion the State has never taken the trouble to elicit, exact-ing the obedience of the child from the common man without

often lavishing upon him the tender solicitude of the parent. The family idea has been sufficiently ingrained, however, to ensure a real concern for the integrity of the nation-family as a whole when an alien enemy threatens to break it up and establish some other system, and, while the average Chinese seldom gets enthusiastic enough about it to clamour for a gun that he may join the ranks and fight for the greater family, he does enter with zest at such times into the practice of cursing the foreigner, and even joins in assaulting an occasional isolated outlander where it can be done with impunity.

Against the outsider, the enemy of the family, the head of the Chinese Government, or of any governmental tinit, can always appeal to the family feeling with some certainty of a response, no matter how delinquent the ruler may be in the discharge of his own obligations within the national family group. The Boxer movement in North China began as a mob movement against the decadent Manchu dynasty, but was easily diverted by the Imperial Court against the foreigner on the ground that it should be a campaign against the outsiders who were trying to wreck the integrity of the Confucian Chinese family unit. Rebellion against established authority in China has never been patriotism. The system does not admit of it. It is either a diseased excrescence, when a failure ; or the triumph of the will of Heaven, when a success. Chinese patriotism has nothing to do with internal reforms, of which paternalism takes no cognizance unless the patriarch is the instigator, but is only to be aroused by external assaults upon the walls of the family keep. It therefore pays the retainer within the keep who is looting the larder to yell " Wolf ! Wolf ! " as often and in as high a key as possible when he thinks he is under suspicion, which again has a decided bearing upon China's foreign rela-tions. Republican officials, as well as Emperors, still find it convenient to foster anti-foreignism whenever their own mis-conduct is attracting too much domestic attention and to divert the restlessness of the mob under misrule against the out-sider.

The Teutonic peoples have had two thousand years of educa-tion in self-government and were better prepared for it at the

earliest period of which we have written record, when Rome was on the crest of the wave, than the Chinese people were in 1911. Tacitus, the Roman historian, in his account of Teu-tonic customs, draws a picture which shows that the savage German tribes of his time had more experience in representative government and a higher conception of social duties than the great majority of the Chinese people have at this time. The primitive German forest communities were ruled by popular assemblies ; administrative and military leaders were elected ; the unit, within which the individual assumed part responsibility for the control, welfare and protection of all, had already out-grown family proportions, and the laws which governed the community were subject to challenge by any freeman in council. Their conception of a State and of the responsibilities of every individual factor in it towards both the State and his fellows was something bigger than any but a handful of foreign-trained students had grasped in China at the time of the Revolution in 1911. The number of Chinese now, whose political and social philosophy, whose public ethics, have transcended those of the ancient Teutons, is pathetically small.

Within a few hundred years of Tacitus' time, large groups of the Teutonic tribes were prepared to conceive of and create nations, very much as we conceive of them in the Occident to-day, that is States in which the people are provided with means of expressing their judgment and will, and in which the rulers are responsible in some degree to the people for their conduct, for the forms of government and for the care and dis-position of public property and funds. The whole social history of most of the northern European nations has been the story of the development of these ideas and their struggles with Roman absolutism in one form or another. In China they not only were not developed, but were never born. A rigid adher-ence to the Confucian patriarchal idea guaranteed to the Chinese of the twentieth century a more primitive conception of the State than the Vikings who peopled Iceland had in the tenth century. A reading of the sagas and of contemporary Anglo-Saxon liter-ature will also demonstrate that the Teutonic peoples of the same period had a higher conception of social ethics, of the

individual's social obligations, than the Chinese have ever developed.

The Chinese will of course argue that the conception and growth of these ideas in the West over a period of two thou-sand years has by no means guaranteed us good government throughout this period ; that many Occidental nations have not yet evolved good government, and that under many dynasties the Chinese people enjoyed a peace and prosperity which might well have been the envy of any nation in Europe in corresponding periods. To this the writer can only say that he is not arguing the relative merits of representative government and benevolent paternalism. If appointed in debate to prove the superiority of a patriarchal tyranny over a representative government in a hybrid state, the writer could probably make out a very good case for despotism ; but such argument would be beside the point towards which we are labouring. In an effort to help the reader to arrive at the fundamental source of China's present very obvious difficulties, the writer is simply trying to demonstrate that the Chinese people have never in their history had any preparatory educa-tion whatever for the part they are supposed to play in the present so-called representative government which they pretend to have adopted, and that, as avowed republicans, their traditional ideas upon government and social duties are simply infantile.

It will be difficult for the Occidental, whose whole education has ground into his being the traditions of the struggle towards what we call democracy among our ancestors, to grasp that the Chinese, at the opening of this century, utterly lacked any such traditions and were more innocent of them than our people were at the opening of the Christian era. It is to make this clear that the writer is covering so many pages. The reader, to understand China's present position, must try to realize that no government in China ever pretended to represent the will of the people, that it was never described as a medium to this end, and that no administration in China, whether local or national, was ever founded upon the consent of the nation, but upon the people's submission. No ruler ever saw fit to reason with the people. Under the will of Heaven, he derived

his right to rule and exploit them by conquest, and maintained it by force. He gave orders and they were either obeyed or disobeyed. His only way of obtaining any moral hold upon them was by persuading them that he stood in the position of the patriarch and that they owed him the same implicit obedience that they owed their parents. The only obligations implied in this system were obedience to parents and elders in the family, and to the Emperor and his agents outside the family. Beyond these relations, the rules governing conduct were rules of propriety rather than rules of ethics, making up a code bounded by considerations of " face ", instead of by con-science. In other words, if what you do outside the family looks well and costs you no loss of dignity, it is perfectly all right no matter what it costs others in wealth, health or hap-piness.

Within the narrow limits of their system, the Chinese are rigid adherents to their ethical standards. Family ethics are more faithfully adhered to than among any people in the world. The members of a Chinese family are mutually loyal and self-sacrificing beyond Occidental conception, and the one member of a poor family who rises in the world accepts the burden of a horde of hungry worthless relatives without question, and struggles cheerfully throughout his life, not only feeding and clothing them but, if he is an official, pushing them along in the world and providing places for them, regardless of their inefficiency and their cost to the public. They may damage his reputation, undermine his friendships and jeopardize his position and his life, as President Tsao Kun's relatives did, but he makes " face ", according to Chinese standards, by defending them.

These Confucian family rules are elastic enough to be extended to the relations between friends, and between leaders and subor-dinates, and once recognized and established, are proof against tests which would bring about an immediate breach of relations in the Occident. We recognize that a woman's testimony against her husband is worthless in court and that she is under no obligation to tell the truth if the truth is detrimental to her husband's interests, and our inclination is to be almost

as indulgent with a man's immediate relatives when they are obviously perjuring themselves in his interest.

In China, once household relations have been extended to an outsider, loyalty and self-sacrifice are implied to almost the same degree as within the family. The servant who considers himself one of the household, despite the fact that he ekes out his salary through petty commissions upon purchases, petty thefts of food and firewood and the like, which he regards as his legitimate perquisites, can rise to heights of devotion which would be hard to match in the West.

The poor timid coolie, who would not dream of fighting for his own rags and chattels, becomes a veritable Cerberus, and will die biting and kicking, to protect his master's effects. The great lord who has his ups and downs in the Chinese official world, and who is most unmercifully robbed by his servants when he is at the zenith, is almost invariably supported by his more provident retainers when his fortunes have gone into a decline, and they will pawn everything they have to ensure him some degree of comfort.

A Chinese friend is not only supposed to be a good friend when you are right, but also an ally and champion when you are wrong. He is your elder or younger brother, and in China is supposed to help you in situations from which blood brothers in the Occident would retreat. If you wanted to kill a man he would be a poor friend if he did not try to dissuade you from it, but if you were determined, and he owned a useful weapon, he would be a still poorer friend if he did not lend it to you. The Chinese politician who has enjoyed pleasant personal rela-tions with a foreigner over a number of years and has come to entertain an afEection for him, is not only shocked but be-wildered when he asks his foreign friend for help in some nefarious enterprise and is told : " I'm sorry, but it's against my prin-ciples. I will help you when I think you're right, but I'm conscientiously bound to oppose you when I know you're wrong ". No real Chinese friend would take such a course. If he had conscientious scruples he would spend days and nights trying to dissuade the villain from his purpose, but if in the end he failed, his conscience would be subordinated to his brotherly

CHAPTER II (PART 3 OF 3)

duty and he would resignedly become a party to the crime.

Subordinates in Chinese political and military life are subject to the same family rules as servants and friends. The chief fattens his underlings at the public expense and treats them as little brothers. When he gets into trouble they are called upon to support him in right and wrong. Devotion to the people or the nation, both abstract concepts, carries little weight in a well-ordered Chinese official group as compared with devotion to the immediate superior and patron. Marshal Tuan Chi-jui, who is at this time provisional executive of what we are pleased to call China, has been misled by certain subordinates in the past who are as cordially detested by a large group of other subordinates as good Christians hate the Devil, but the latter nevertheless feel that they are under an unbreakable obligation to support Marshal Tuan, still acting under the influence of evil advice, diametrically opposed to the good of China, no matter what it may cost the Chinese people and the world at large.

Marshal Wu Pei-fu was liberally cursed throughout China for continuing to support Tsao Kun against the interests of the nation, but enjoys the respect of all conventional Chinese for fulfilling his obligations to a patron loyally ; while General Chen Chiung-ming, the Cantonese independent, who was for years encouraged to turn against Sun Yat-sen, his patron, as a public nuisance, has earned universal Chinese suspicion and contempt by obeying what might be called the public will and turning against his chief. Cantonese abroad have no use what-ever for the administration of their native province of Kuangtung by the regime set up by Sun Yat-sen, whose name they have learned to detest, but they have an ingrained contempt for Chen Chiung-ming, the dependent who turned against his master, which would not be relieved by the conviction that he was about to set up an immaculate government in Kuangtung province and right all of the wrongs suffered under Sun Yat-sen.

Another relation to which Confucian tradition extends the family code, is that existing between teacher and pupil. The teacher is the high priest of Confucianism and the foster-father of the child mind. The boy who accepts guidance from the

miserable, underfed expounder of the sacred classics, has recog-nized a foster patriarch to whom he is bound to pay deference throughout the rest of his life. If the teacher goes up in the world, the pupil has the claim upon him which the child has upon its father. If the pupil goes up in the world, the teacher is entitled to the care and consideration of a decrepit parent. A few years ago China had an utterly worthless premier who had started out in the world as a baker and vendor of seed-cakes. To embark upon this profession one must have a professor of seed-cake cookery ; and this high and mighty person whose remarks upon world affairs were cabled to all the capitals of the West by sycophantic diplomats, had had such a patron in his youth and had been guided to the first rung of the official ladder by this artist.

Pupil and teacher lost sight of each other for something like fifty years, and then one day the aged instructor, still making and selling seed-cakes, migrated to the capital, and in shouting his wares happened to cry out their merits before the wide doorway of the Premier of China. Officious soldiers began to hustle him on his way, but the ancient had already read on the jamb the characters which announced that the Premier of China dwelt within, so raising up his voice he protested that this was his old pupil. The soldiers immediately fell back in attitudes of deference and humility, and the baker of seed-cakes, first instructor to the Prime Minister, was conducted into an inner court where the potentate himself, duly advised, came forth to meet him and pay appropriate respects. A little later in Republican history this same Premier was most valiantly and efficiently supported by a Minister of Finance because the Premier's mother had been the Minister's wet nurse.

It will be appreciated that in a country where strict adherence to these family and social traditions meant in the past that the individual often rated the faithful discharge of his personal duties much higher than any duty to the community or the State, the removal of the Imperial check upon officialdom meant that what were doubtful virtues, from the Occidental point of view, became positive vices imder the new regime. All power was theoretically vested in a people who were, through the

training and education of centuries, disinclined, unfit and unable to wield any power at all, while the officials of the country, relieved of the surveillance of the Imperial Court, naturally seized control and proceeded to work for themselves, their relatives, friends and subordinates, controlled only by China's primitive social and patriotic standards, which implies little or no consideration for the public weal. The methods by which they served their own particular ends were limited only by consideration for the laws of " face ", which, as the writer has tried to show, is a very different code from the code of con-science. The result was that Chinese public affairs were thrown into a chaotic state, getting worse from year to year as provincial officialdom came more and more to realize that the reverberations from Peking were a very feeble dish-pan imitation of the old Imperial thunder, and resulting in a contempt for authority and a breakdown of discipline which have not only permeated official-dom and the Army, but have corrupted commercial circles and are now rapidly affecting the lives and thought of the people.

Contempt for authority has brought contempt for the social traditions upon which authority has been founded for some-thing like a hundred and fifty generations, and, while the masses of the common people, who still count for so little in public life, are still true to their primitive social ideals, the intellectual classes who go to make up the only articulate China have been busily absolving themselves from them whenever freedom from traditional restraints meant personal profit or advantage. Among a people who are constitutionally unable to grasp and unwilling to apply the standards governing public life which ought to go with the form of government that China has adopted, it will be understood that the rejection of moral restraints, following upon the removal of physical checks, has wrought such utter confusion that it is impossible to know at midnight what turn the political situation is going to take at simrise. The official or the merchant who never had any conscience, according to our conception of conscience, and who loses all consideration for his own laws of " face ", became purely and simply an unmoral opportunist, driven to and fro by ambition and fear, and amenable to nothing but force. When the old

traditions of family loyalty, as applied to social relations, no longer control a man's action, it is no longer helpful, as it once was, to know who his relatives, friends, patrons and subordinates are and what they want, because, if he arrives at the mental attitude where the selfish interests of his clique are subordinated to his own selfish interests in a crisis, a knowledge of the clique's interest is of no help in prognosticating his commercial or political manoeuvres. Every year in China sees an appalling increase in the number of highly intelligent persons who have thrown oS old moral restraints, and therefore an increasingly rapid breakdown of the whole Chinese social fabric.

If the new social standards which are associated with repre-sentative government in the West were being assimilated or applied as rapidly as the old restraints were being thrown off, it would be possible to adopt a very tolerant and patient attitude, while pointing out that within a certain number of years China must inevitably emerge, like the new-born phoenix from the flames which consumed the old bird, from blazing chaos into a soberly ordered new life. The hopeless feature of the present situation is that the growth of wholesome new ideas is infinitesimal as compared with the collapse of old moral standards. The writer has travelled extensively in China for many years, coming in contact with all breeds and classes of Chinese, and living with them under all conditions. He has come to enjoy intimate friendly relations with some of China's most powerful leaders, and has also lived cheek by jowl with coolies, peasants, soldiers, boatmen and bandits. While still moved in all his relations with the Chinese by a fond and indulgent regard for them, it is his studied conviction that not one in ten thousand is, after thirteen years of alleged republicanism, what we should describe as a good citizen of the Republic of China. It is further his personal conviction that the importation of foreign forms, modes and the political terminology that came with the Republic has as yet had no other substantial effect upon Chinese political and social life than to furnish apologies for licence and to breed a huge crop of insincerity and hypocrisy. Thousands of thinking Chinese have made the same observation on their own account and are greatly disturbed by it.

To understand what the Chinese are thinking to-day about the state of their own affairs, which no one but Chinese diplomatic agents abroad pretends are in a healthy condition, it must be remembered that the revolution in China, which unseated the Manchu Imperial house and ushered in the Republic in 1911-12, was by no means a revolt against Chinese civilization, but a movement towards its protection and perpetuation. It was no confession that anything in the world could be better than Chinese institutions, but an attempt to reorganize China super-ficially so that by absorbing foreign mihtary skill, foreign science, which seemed to be the backbone of foreign military skill, and by adopting the institutions upon which both military successes and the national prosperity essential to them seemed to depend, China might gain strength to protect her civilization and the Chinese effectually assert their innate superiority over all the rest of creation. It was in no spirit of humility and worship that China approached the West for instruction and with no idea of altering her essential native traditions that she came to squeeze her government into a Western mould. She simply sought the secret of power and mistook the form for the spirit. The tragedy of the situation in Chinese eyes is that the move-ment went wide of its mark, that she is rapidly losing what she sought to protect and has as yet acquired nothing in its stead but a ludicrously thin theatrical make-up. It is realized that the mutinous crew that took charge of the old ship of State have thrown her ballast overboard to load her up with flimsy but dangerous combustibles which the crew does not know the use of and which do not even keep her on an even keel.

The Chinese are passionately fond of theatricals, and every one of them is a born actor. The most illiterate of them struts the boards and strikes postures from the cradle to the grave. The " face " system is largely make-believe. Most public functions, such as funerals and weddings, are solemnly acted plays which would be simply funny to any people who had the capacity of laughing at themselves. Much of the dignity of the decadent Manchu Government under the old regime was founded upon hocus-pocus, but the ministers of State in old China differed from the augurs of ancient Rome in that they did not wink at

one another while going through their solemn rites. To have done so would have been to confess that their position was ridiculous and would have involved a loss of " face ". To meet every situation with the solemnity of the actor soliloquizing as Hamlet when bespattered with a bad egg, is the ambition of all Chinese who retain a consideration for "face ". The equestrian Chinese coolie who loses his seat and finds himself head, arms and shoulders in a puddle of muck with his legs kicking frantic-ally above the turbid level, sees nothing funny in the situation, though all the rest of the world is in hysterics, and he com-pletely recovers and preserves his dignity, if ,he can recover sufficient aplomb when extricated to strut theatrically and curse his mount with dramatic vehemence. All the world in China is more truly than anywhere a stage and all its people are mummers. The Republic in China is the world's greatest contemporary burlesque.

When the Republican regime was ushered in, it was imder-stood that foreign ways and institutions were to be the salvation of the ancient Middle Kingdom, so every one set out to ape the foreigner. Just as the regime brought with it excruciatingly funny attempts to adopt foreign costumes, furniture and eti-quette, so it brought with it the terminology of Occidental politics and social science. The gentleman who strolled through the streets in a top hat, a lavender all-wool union-suit of under-wear and patent leather pumps, did nothing essentially funnier than the fat old official who tried to talk glibly of liberty, fraternity and equality. Discussions of liberty, patriotism, constitutionalism, public opinion, the will of the people, repub-licanism, democracy, and a hundred other words and phrases imported with the new clothes and the new manners, were employed on the political stage by the magicians who were saying of the public funds " Now you see it, and now you don't ", as so much clap-trap and hocus-pocus, as the professional patter of the ultra-modern prestidigitator, which neither he nor his native audience made the slightest effort to understand. Only the foreign observer was flattered and deceived by what he imagined was emulation of his ways.

When a Chinese general or bandit chief now wants to make

himself an independent ruler, he denounces Peking as unre-presentative and corrupt, and, in the name of the bewildered people whom he proposes to loot and exploit, declares the inde-pendence of Kuangtung or Yunnan or Chekiang or whatever his field of operations may be. He employs a professor of the modern political abracadabra to draft for him a constitution and to announce for him in lengthy highflown telegrams that he, though small and unworthy, is executing the will of the people, championing constitutionalism, protecting the rights and liberties of the masses, and fighting corruption and the reactionary enemies of the Republic. Friends betray friends and subordinates betray their chiefs in the name of patriotism of which they have not the remotest conception, or "to preserve the peace ", which they are about to shatter for months to come.

This nonsense deceives no one. Every one is conscious of the collapse of discipline and good faith which it covers, and the worst sinners against sincerity and truth will denounce the evil tendency of the times with indignant heat, while busily feathering their nests under the same transparent smoke screen. Impulsive foreigners, who are time after time inveigled into championing the cause of this or that political leader, or into reposing implicit faith in this or that friend or business associate, find themselves deceived over and over again and finally reach a state of disillusionment and despair, in which they can believe no good of China or of anything Chinese. The most unkind and unjust opinions of China are now held by foreigners who once put most faith in the Chinese and were most enthusiastic about China's prospects. Nothing but an unbiased under-standing of China's difficulties and shortcomings will suffice to keep the old foreign resident in China out of this mental slough ; and it is the writer's opinion that no one can arrive at such a fair and charitable appraisement of China's political and social conditions as the experienced schoolmaster, nor so clearly indicate her needs.

Even the persons who are sentimentally indulgent mth China and are most jealously concerned for her " sovereign rights ", would admit that it is impossible to run a school without dis-

cipline. The small boy under strict but kind control is almost invariably a very lovable creature and responds with alacrity to instruction and takes pride in keeping up to whatever standards are set him. But the small boy in a school where no discipline is maintained is a detestable little savage, an unmoral animal, a disgrace to his teacher and his family. He despises the weak and indulgent teacher, delights in breaking his injunc-tions, resents instruction, rewards kindness with impertinence, and fights against family control of his whims and fancies tooth and nail. Anyone who has dealt with schoolchildren is aware of these truths, and anyone who has dealt with the Chinese knows how aptly the same rules apply to China.

All modern school systems are designed to develop character, self-reliance and self-control, as much as to inculcate knowledge. Schoolboys are therefore extended progressive privileges and liberties as their capacity for self-reliance and self-control grows under discipline, until, in the higher institutions of learning, they are virtually self-governing. In China there has been, through the ages, no such development and no encouragement of it. On the contrary, every effort has been made under the Confucian system to prevent the Chinese people from developing in character beyond the average of the Occidental kindergarten. Discipline was as strict in the old age of the nation as in its infancy. Chinese officials were simply boy monitors, keeping check upon the others under the strict check of the master. Self-control was not allowed to transcend the Confucian laws of propriety and the rule of " face " ; and self-government was strictly limited to the family circle. When the headmaster of China was therefore deposed in 1911 and self-government introduced, the Chinese of all classes were just as ready for it as the boys of an elementary school — say boys ranging from the age of six to the age of ten — would be to run an elementary Occidental school from which all the masters had been ejected.

In such a school, if it can be imagined, the big strong boys would bully and fleece the little ones ; the precocious and re-sourceful young savages would scheme to be the overlords of the school, control the big strong boys by cajolery and bribes and exact tribute from all ; the bellicose youngsters would

become leaders of " gangs ", warring perpetually with one another, and the clever boys would form cliques, suspicious and resentful of one another. The stupid and weak boys and all the small boys would be enlisted or impressed into the service of the rival leaders and would be bullied and robbed by all. Try to imagine the state of such a school after twelve or thirteen years of so-called self-government, and you will have as clear a picture in mind of the state of China to-day as could possibly be drawn.

Try to conceive of a school board which, having agreed to the ejection of the masters, had made indulgent efforts to guide the evolution of a self-governing school by bargaining and dickering with the leaders of the various gangs and cliques within the school, had alternately supplied them with money without check upon its expenditure, and again refused them funds of any sort, had furnished the self-appointed clique leaders with canes and switches, then put a ban upon further supplies, and yet had looked the other way and said nothing when one or another of the board smuggled in canes and switches to the bullies whom he thought at the moment capable of restoring order in the school. Get a clear picture of all this in your mind and you have a very fair conception of the part which the world Powers — the members of this hypothetical school board — ^have played in China's descent into chaos.

All of this only leads up to the statement, already made in many different forms, that the average Chinese is in his political and social concepts an elementary schoolboy, in crying need of discipline under a master to save him from his bullies and from himself. The Chinese people, if they are to remain a nation and assume their responsibilities, have to be taught self-control and self-reliance, under efficient check and control, like the pupils of an elementary school who advance through various grades and forms acquiring increasing liberties, under discipline, as their development of character and their growing experience warrant. The master who restores discipline in China, whoever he may be, will naturally have to face at the outset the covert resentment of all the clever boys and the open antagonism of aU the strong ones. He must bend all to

his will by a display of both moral and physical force, before he can even consider the evolution in his school of anything resembling the development of character under a self-govern-ment system. The writer, as a youngster, once took charge of a thoroughly demoralized school and, being small in both years and stature, found himself face to face with open and covert rebellion against every form of discipline. The bullies and conspirators resented every form of check and inspired all manner of deviltry in the most docile of the little innocents, just as rampant Chinese officialdom is capable of aligning its harmless coolie victims against a threatened check upon its Republican licence to loot. To get the upper hand the writer had to take boxing lessons and do long cross-country runs at night for the sake of endurance, but at the end of a month two heavy-weight bullies had gone to the hospital and sullen but placid order prevailed. At the end of six months the school ran itself and the obnoxious bullies who had been the fathers of insurrection were the master's most loyal and reliable lieutenants.

The Chinese people are, thanks to centuries of control, the most docile subjects of a good master on earth and the most responsive to sympathetic treatment. The Chinese soldier is a marvel of obedience, correct behaviour and reckless courage under leaders whom he trusts and respects. The Chinese official is possessed of a high sense of responsibility, great shrewdness, insight into human nature and above aU an unerring knowledge of justice based upon common sense rather than codified law, when properly rewarded for his services and diligently checked and controlled by a superior. A body of soldiers under one commander will cheerfully sacrifice their lives in the protection of a community and establish brotherly relations with all its members, seemingly based upon the highest ethical principles ; but under another chief the same body will conspire with the local bandits and become the cruellest and least scrupulous of armed extortioners. Under one chief no virtue is unattainable ; under another no form of crime is too low. The same material can in China be moulded into any form : a brickbat to hurl at a window or a divine figure to adorn a church, just as clay can

W.W.O. p

be moulded, or just as the pupils in a school can be guided or misguided into one channel or another. The Chinese, thanks to their political and social education, or rather the lack of it, are little children without a master at present, the more objec-tionable the more they are relieved of discipline, the more likeable and productive wherever and whenever their energies and their acute minds are properly directed.

Upon whom devolves the world responsibility of restoring discipline in China is a subject for debate, and will also be the subject of the writer's comment later.

CHAPTER III (PART 1 OF 3)

LANGUAGE AND LETTERS

TO explain why the writer has the temerity to ap-proach this subject it is necessary to introduce his remarks upon Chinese language and literature with a few truisms by way of preface and apology ; otherwise what he has to say will seem a gross impertinence in the sight of many hundred Occidentals, in and out of China, who have attained a knowledge of the subject to which he will never even aspire.

Barring intuition, one individual human being can gather little knowledge of a fellow unless they employ some common means of expression. To this end signs have not proved an all-sufficient medium, or words would never have been invented. The person who sees a heavy meat axe descending upon his scalp knows that he is about to perish because the holder of the axe desires his extinction ; but if his enemy is speechless, the victim may cease to exist without knowing any further motive. Words were invented to reveal ideas which no panto-mime could wholly convey. The deaf and dumb have in all ages been most ingenious in communicating thoughts through signs, but never really came into close contact with the silent world about them until they learned to use the spoken language through letters and the finger code. Words and their written equivalents have come to be the one all-important medium of expression among all civilized peoples. The cries of wild animals express wants, but neither motives nor ideas except by implication. The fact that the use of words has enabled the two-legged animal to express much more than wants, to convey, more or less clearly, hopes, regrets, motives, fears,

plans and what not — is usually accepted as the explanation of the dominion of a comparatively soft, weak, furless species, with dulled sense of smell, sight and hearing, over all the rest of creation. A knowledge of words and the means of convey-ing them has therefore come, quite logically, to be the gauge of a people's capacity and of a people's right to rule its less gifted neighbours. While fully realizing that speech, and the symbols used for making a permanent record of it, may be as readily used to disguise and conceal thought as to express it, we have come to value the capacity of both nations and individuals according to their power of expressing themselves in words. Music, painting and sculpture may sometimes be more subtle media for the few who can use them, but language must always be the more popular standard of mental and spiritual achieve-ment and therefore the standard by which both individuals and nations are judged. The illiterate, struggling towards expres-sion through a clumsy patois, is given no credit in any civilized country for soul or mind. The nation with an infantile litera-ture and an infantile mode of expressing itself in speech stands no possible chance before a world court of being ranked as a nation entitled to lead others.

Few peoples discovered and expressed these truisms earlier than the Chinese. No people is more insistent upon the appli-cation of the literary test as a test of fitness to-day. No people is so confident that it is the creme de la cretne as the Chinese, because of its command of the science of words and their written expression. Therefore one can be doing them no injustice if one judges their relative development in direct ratio to the value of their approved media of expression, the spoken and written Chinese language.

The sole reason that the Chinese language and literature have not long since been used as rigid standards by which to gauge the relative value of Chinese culture and to fix the Chinese mind in a scale of human development, is that both the spoken and written language are extremely difficult for the adult Occidental who is equipped to make comparisons, while the appraisements of the Chinese language that are published by the few assiduous scholars who have spent a lifetime in its

study, are naturally coloured by a desire to make the subject, upon which they have lavished so much time and spiritual energy, seem worth while in the sight of their fellow men.

The difficulty of digging naturally enhances the value of the excavated object in the digger's mind. The placer miner, who washes a fortune in nuggets out of a mountain puddle, has less respect for his gold than the prospector who finds it in quartz and has to raise capital for an erpensive cyanide plant. The tourist in the Alps who risks his neck many times over to pluck a single bloom of edelweiss from the brow of a precipice, con-ceives a higher regard for the plant than the careless traveller on the Chinese-Tibetan frontier who can ride a pony through hundreds of upland acres of far superior edelweiss flowers. The highly intellectual solver of an obdurate cross-word puzzle who completes his task by writing in sowp after having spent hours of energy from an eighty-horse-power thinking machine trying to think of a fitting four-letter equivalent for a nourishing liquid, quite conceivably prizes those four letters above the rose that he could pluck in his garden without let or hindrance. The sinologue's estimate of the value of China's literary culture has, in the same way, to be discounted by the knowledge of the effort that he has made in acquiring something like facility in speaking or reading Chinese.

To acquire sufficient knowledge of the Chinese written and spoken languages to compete successfully with a bright twelve-year-old Chinese schoolboy, the average adult Westerner would have to focus the major portion of his mental energies upon the language and devote most of his time to it for at least twenty years. No living foreigner has ever composed what the Chinese would consider a highly erudite essay, and there is probably none who could write the characters of his own Chinese name in a style that would elicit scholarly admiration. Consular, military and naval language students in Peking, who are released from all other duties and devote all of their time to study for three or four years are proud if, at the end of that time, they can converse for ten minutes with a country bumpkin without misimderstanding, or read laboriously through an official pro-

clamation, couched in stereotyped language, without reference to the dictionary.

Those of us who, after many years of incessant chatter with all degrees of Chinese, can " get along ", and can get the sense of a Chinese newspaper article written in simplified style, natur-ally look with respect, if not actually with awe, upon the accom-pHshments of the few great sinologues who have devoured the bulk of Chinese classical literature in the original and can actually write a letter to a friend without using a dictionary or a native secretary. A sense of humility therefore prevents any but the acknowledged masters of the language from making public comment upon it, and it is left to them to tell the world of the beauties of the language and of the worth of China's literature. Against this attitude the writer, though a very slovenly Chinese student, is now a conscientious rebel. He is convinced that the least qualified of all persons to pass judgment upon the Chinese language as an index to the genius and character of the Chinese people, or to value the relative worth of Chinese literature as compared to other peoples' contributions to human advancement, is the professional student of Chinese who not only has to account to himself and his public for the time and effort that he has given the subject, but is also saturated with Chinese thought and with Chinese assertions of the value of it.

Almost anything upon which the Chinese themselves put value in their literature can now be bought and read in trans-lation. Translation may, or may not, do justice to the form and style of the original, but, if the translator is intelligent and competent in both tongues, it can do no serious injustice to the ideas expressed. One may not gather from translation, the way in which a thing was said in the original, but if he does not know what was said it is the translator's fault, for it would be silly to say that there is any comprehensible idea in ancient literature which cannot be expressed in the modern European languages. As for the medium of expression — it may need a lifetime of study to know enough of Chinese to appreciate the beauties of the language, but one does not have to go very deeply into it to be forcibly struck by its shortcomings and to appreciate that restraints, in the form of rigid conventions

and hide-bound prejudices, are put upon the Chinese literary aspirant who wishes to appeal to a scholarly audience which no genius could possibly surmount except through rebellion against them. To understand why there is so little in Chinese literature that really thrills the Occidental and moves him to speak of China's alleged masterpieces with real respect, one must know what short shrift has been given in the past to rebels against literary conventions.

The vast bulk of Chinese writings which have come down to us are a veritable gold mine, invaded by nothing but surface washings, for the scientist. The student of Asiatic history, archaeology, ethnology, comparative etymology and of ancient geography, simply has to read and sift Chinese literature to the bottom, or he will know little of Asia. But the student of Chinese psychology can get all he wants by studying the collo-quial tongue for six months, let us say, and by doing a little collateral reading in standard English translations over the same period.

The spoken language in China has no written history. Chinese characters are symbols expressing ideas and not sounds. Through all the long period covered by Chinese history and tradition, the written character was sacred, and the sound asso-ciated with it wholly immaterial. Ancient poetry is our only clue to the sounds which the Chinese, before the Christian era, associated with the written character. To make a line of the Odes, to which Confucius paid such profound deference, read smoothly, it is necessary to assume that the sound of each character was a monosyllable. Rhymes also give a clue to pronunciation. But it never seemed important to the Chinese to attach to each character a definite sound until the end of the fifth century a.d. Then, under the Toba Tartars, who ruled North China as ardent Buddhists and sat at the feet of Indian missionaries, Sanskrit texts were liberally translated into Chinese, and many Indian words and names had to be rendered by Chinese characters. Chinese conservatism did not permit of the adoption of an alphabet, but Chinese scholars were for the first time aware that the sounds associated with a symbol were of some importance, and, under Indian guidance, a scheme was devised

for indicating sounds by the combination of other characters. It is from this that we know that the Chinese syllables of that age, as they were used in popular speech, were the direct ancestors of those used to-day, though a modern Chinese of the twentieth century would no more understand his ancestor of the fifth century, than an English countryman would understand Beowulf if he met him on the highway. From other clues in the classics it is possible to determine that when Chinese first began to be written down, the spoken tongue of the Middle Kingdom was at least remotely similar to modern speech in China.

This, however, does not prove that the language of the founders of the Middle Kingdom was a speech even remotely related to the written and spoken language of China at the time when she first evolved a written language. Scholars have discovered ajBinities between Chinese and the languages of Tibet, Burma, Siam and aboriginal peoples still living within the bounds of China ; while all tradition indicates that the founders of the Middle Kingdom came from the west and set up a kingdom in the heart of a tribal country. Ingenious students have compiled Chinese vocabularies which seem to show a relation between the ancient Chinese and various peoples of the Near East, and some have even tried to show that a great number of Chinese words are essentially Aryan roots, and have thereby drawn down upon themselves infinite ridicule.

It would require a fat book and great scholarship to survey all these hypotheses justly, but as a shot in the dark, the writer ventures a suggestion which, to his own mind, would explain much. It is this : The founders of the Middle Kingdom came into the Yellow River Valley from the north-west, speaking a language alien to anything about them, full of vigour, initiative and warlike prowess, and in the process of subduing and absorb-ing their savage tribal neighbours, developed a lingua franca, more aboriginal than imported, and also developed a primitive culture based upon aboriginal beginnings. Recent excavations in Central China have shown that a non-Chinese people in pre-historic times was making earthenware which was later copied in the bronzes of China's earliest civilization. If the infant China borrowed her most primitive culture from the savages

and developed it, it is just as likely that she mixed her speech with that of the aborigines and developed it. The substantia-tion of such a theory would indicate that the invaders had adopted a language of convenience, based largely upon the aboriginal tongue spoken about them, leaving only those super-ficial marks upon the evolved language in which enthusiasts now find traces of an Aryan or Semitic origin.

China has always been a great absorber. When we consider how thoroughly China has been overrun and how completely dominated by alien peoples, numerically inferior but vastly superior in energy, it is amazing to find how little the language has changed since the time of Confucius. Borrowed words in modern colloquial are numerous enough, but their number is trifling compared with the seismic effects which the invaders have had upon the breed. The student can easily isolate from the modern Chinese vocabulary a few hundred Hun, Turkish, Mongol, Korean, Tibetan, Indian, Arabic, Persian and Manchu words used in common parlance, but he is not so much struck by their survival as by their paucity, considering how profoundly China has bowed at various times to the spiritual or forceful influence of these numerous aliens. Huge Hun colonies in Shansi, imported by the builder of the Great Wall, numbering hundreds of thousands, are to-day speaking Chinese with a slight dialectic twist, but have conformed in all essentials to the speech of Confucius's time. In fact, by analogy and in the light of recorded Chinese history, it is indicated that whoever the founders of the Chinese Middle Kingdom were, and whatever language they spoke, the tribal language of the aborigines prevailed, and that the modern huckster in Peking's streets is limited to a medium of expression not far removed from that of the tribesmen who were subdued and absorbed by their conquerors several thousand years before the Christian era. The invention of written symbols petrified a primitive medium of expression, and Chinese thought has ever since been as rigor-ously bound to this prehistoric medium as Chinese politics have been bound to the Confucian conception of a family state.

Whatever scholars may in future reveal of the origin of the Chinese spoken language, it remains to-day, under all tests, a

baby language which alien infants find most convenient, but which adults seldom, if ever, master, for the simple reason that they have outgrown it and that they find it a prestidigitator's task to fit their grown-up thoughts to the infantile garb which the Chinese language provides.

The first limitation upon speech which the outsider notes when he tries to learn the language is the paucity of sounds. In theory at least Chinese is a purely monosyllabic language, and, so far as Roman letters wiU register Chinese sounds, there are in the official dialect, as it is actually spoken in North China, no more than four hundred syllables ; no more than four hundred words, in short. There are, however, some 40,000 written char-acters in the standard dictionary, so that, on the average, each spoken monosyllable is capable of a hundred interpretations. In the living colloquial the chances are, of course, greatly reduced because, unless one's vis-d-vis is quoting from a book or is very affected in his speech, he would be unlikely to use more than 4,000 words if he talked for a decade. A few hundred words, in adroit combination, carry the illiterate coolie from birth to death.

The opportunities for misunderstanding in a tongue so poor in variety of sounds are, nevertheless, manifold. The Chinese reduce these opportunities to a quarter by speaking in what are known as " tones ". . There are four tones in the North in which every one of the 400 available spoken monosyllables may be pronounced. These, Occidental babies acquire with ease, and grown-ups curse throughout the period of their residence in the East. The same word spoken in a flat, colourless tone, a fade-away tone, a rising, inquisitive tone, or a high exclamatory tone, has at least four different meanings. Unfortunately so many words have both the same sound and the same tone that there is still room for trouble, and both sounds and tones differ so much in the innumerable dialects that, for the traveller, there is no surcease from misunderstanding. For this reason the enunciation of a single Chinese word conveys nothing out of an explanatory context. Chinese may be seen in public places from one end of the land to the other, writing to one another, when speech has failed to convey a meaning, or outlining char-

acters in the palms of their left hands with their right forefingers. In English, the Londoner speaking to the native of Chicago, does not have to snatch up a scrap of paper and scribble on it to make it clear that he is saying " to " and not " too " or " two ". If, however, there were in his vocabulary thirty possible words of the same sound but of as diverse meaning, there might be difficulties. Hip in English means a part of the body, the fruit of the wild rose, a depression of spirits, or the beginning of a cheer. With any context at all there is no chance of misunder-standing what a man is " hipping " about. But if there were several dozen hips in English one could imagine situations in which the context would be of little help. In an abridged Chinese dictionary there are nearly 150 characters of different meaning, pronounced yii. Without consulting a vocabulary, anyone famihar with the Peking vernacular could volunteer that yii meant elm, fish, sad, rain, converse, jade, hell, plenty and residence. To the Chinese ear the tones are all-important and greatly reduce the chances of misunderstanding, but the context is the only certain guide to the meaning of any Chinese word, and sometimes a good deal of it is required. It so happens that a Chinese new-comer in a restaurant cannot follow the conversation going on at an adjacent table. Ask him what is being discussed and he will often reply : " I can't understand ; I didn't hear the beginning of it."

The lack of grammar and syntax, made up for by a wealth of idiom, is an even more serious barrier to the adult mind. There are no conjugations or declensions, as we know them in Occidental languages. Gender is ignored, even in the pronouns. Tenses and moods are rather loosely expressed by auxiliary verbs and a few suffixes. Singular and plural are never dis-tinguished in the verbs, seldom in nouns, and only consistently in pronouns.

To appreciate how language can be reduced to its simplest elements and what a difficulty this simplicity presents to the Occidental adult mind, one has only to render colloquial Chinese literally into the nearest English equivalents. Take a sentence at random from Sir Walter Hillier's The Chinese Language, a standard work. Word by word, one reads " Under Prayer

six, heaven-breath if good-ed, I (or me, for there is no distinction) strike-reckon sit above half day's fire-cart, upon Peking go, at that-in pass Prayer, Prayer-one, under half day, back come." All of which is the equivalent of : " Next Saturday, if the weather is fine, I expect to go by the morning train to Peking, spend Sunday there, and return on Monday afternoon." Another would read literally like this : "He father at's time he always give I do work, he father dead-ed, he then open piece small buy-sell, now no act wood artisan-ed," Which means that ; " While his father was alive, he always did work for me, but after his father's death he set up a small business and now no longer works as a carpenter."

Most Chinese conversation is not made up of phrases and sentences as logical and closely knit as these, but of stereotyped verbal formulae so idiomatic that they are meaningless when translated, and so loosely strung together that the listener has to supply all the conjunctions and other connectives for himself. All the polite phraseology of the language is embodied in such cut-and-dried phrases, which, if properly placed, take the place of polite and graceful original speeches in other lands. The Occidental who is being complimented or flattered, and who wishes to seem modest and at the same time appreciative, would probably have a good deal to say to make clear his mental attitude. The Chinese would say : " How dare ! How dare ! " and have done with it. There are polite phrases for every situa-tion, and the person who does not use them when called for seems astonishingly crude ; but the person who deviates from them and tries to invent something more graceful and original may only succeed in exciting even greater bewilderment. There is no premium upon originality in speech in China. It only leads to misunderstandings. The eloquent Chinese, seeking to express a new idea clearly, is the man who can express it adroitly in old phrases, illustrated and adorned by older quota-tions. New words are subject to suspicion, and new modes of expression are resented. Motor-cars, for instance, have been in common use in Peking for less than ten years, and when they first came there were scores of parts and processes which the Chinese language could not describe. At first many things

like batteries, valves, magnetos, tyres and the like created difficulties, and Chinese mispronunciations of the English words were current ; but it was not long before every part and process had a descriptive Chinese name, often childishly inadequate, as a description. The battery is now an " electricity bottle ", the tyre a " leather belt ", the pump a " wind vessel ", and so forth ; and so it is with all machinery, all innovations in fact.

An inexact and illogical language has led to inexact and illogical thinking among the masses of the people. It is against reason to suppose that a people using a primitive medium of expression can think anything but primitive thoughts. The average Chinese is as incapable of sustaining what we should consider a logical argument in his own tongue as he is of whistling a tune. Only one in a thousand can tell a straight story in logical sequence, the normal tendency being to start in the middle and work both ways. The Chinese speaker, who has acquired the vocabulary and the phraseology to express himself eloquently, has already achieved so much that he is much more taken up with the form of what he is saying than with the sense of it ; and his hearers also are too busy being impressed by his style to worry much about the truth of his statements or the sound-ness of his arguments.

This is even truer of the written language. Everything is subordinated to form, and originality is heresy. The silliest platitude, worded in the conventional style of the ancients and \\Titten with approved flourish on a scroll, will impress a group of Chinese literati very much as the best and most significant painting in a national gallery impresses a group of Occidental artists. The ancient conventions have had the same stultifying efiect upon Chinese literature as the primitive character of the spoken language has had upon the popular mind, and it is a rare Chinese scribe indeed who can evolve a logical argument and at the same time express it in a form that will meet with the approval of the literary pundits. For this reason an official styhst can publish letters or proclamations which, when trans-lated, are so childishly futile and silly that they make us gasp, and yet retain the profound respect of his own people from highest to lowest. Point out the logical absurdities in such a

composition to your Chinese friends and you may be able to convince them that the argument is nonsense, but they will wag their heads and smile sadly, thinking you a crude barbarian who cannot be brought to appreciate real beauty in language.

The Chinese written language was invented to enable the ancients to scratch records on slips of bone and bamboo. Unless one had unlimited time, energy and material, not to mention patience, it paid to boil things down. The materials and the form of writing discouraged long-winded, rambling composi-tion. Nothing but what seemed most important at the time was put down at all, and that in the briefest form. The same laws governed the composition of the early records as now limit the sending of expensive cablegrams. Clarity of expression was essential, but brevity nearly as important. Every word that did not contribute to the sense was deleted and the result is what might be expected. There is about as much lilt and music in an ancient Chinese composition as in a Press telegram, and what may have seemed perfectly clear to the scribe is often as perplexing to posterity as an under-worded code message is to its recipient.

Two thousand years ago writing materials had greatly improved, the characters had acquired a semi-cursive form, and their number had greatly increased ; so that composition was subject to as few physical limitations as in Rome of the same period. But by then, under the growing influence of the Confucian pedants, China was already living in the past, making fetishes of her primitive letters and philosophy and showing the same intolerance for the original mind which tried to evolve improvements as the mediaeval Roman Church. Persecution made a religion of what might otherwise have come to be re-garded as the whimsies of old fogies. Whenever a feudal lord wanted to do something unusual, good or bad, he was faced with a solemn deputation of scholars, with their books at hand, to remind him that Yao and Shun had never parted their hair in the middle, that the Duke of Chou had never mounted his horse via the tail, or that Confucius had worn a night-shirt of this or that length. Those were autocratic days, and every little while one king

or another would have a select coterie of scholars speared on his threshold and their books tossed into the midden. Then came Ch'in Shih Huang, builder of the Great Wall, who was not a real Chinese by birth, who had big ideas unfettered by Chinese traditions and prejudices, and who found the hide-bound pedantry of the native literati an intolerable nuisance. Their ejSorts to make him an orthodox worshipper of the past only enraged him, and he finally took very drastic steps indeed. The reactionaries were executed en masse wherever they could be rounded up and all the ancient books which the Emperor's agents could unearth were burned. China was to have a fresh start, hitched to no cartload of mouldy dogma.

Such treatment, of course, had the eSect which any modern student of history could anticipate. The scholars were martyrs, the survivors became more reactionary than ever and were organized into a close fraternity, the books were guarded with a religious zeal and when, a little later, a vicious Empress Dowager of the Han Dynasty showed a disposition to remove the ban upon the ancient learning, the relics were more holy than the bones of saints, and everything pertaining to the past was glorified from end to end of the land. This revival of learning, however, gave no encouragement to innovations and put no price upon originality. It stressed in every possible way the doctrine that the present could only be improved through faithful imita-tion of the past, and that nothing new could possibly compare with the institutions of the Golden Age. And it is within the compass of these ideas that China has been squirming ever since, like a growing child sewn into a canvas suit, splitting a seam from time to time, but nevertheless pitiably restricted in movement, exercise and growth. While all the rest of the world has grown through expression and the improvement of media of expression, China's literary efforts from then till now remind one of a sprinter taking his exercise by running in a barrel.

What China might have been now, had there been no revival of learning, no reactionary movement under the Han Djoiasty, no recovery of the books, is only guesswork ; but it seems fairly certain that her highest modern officials and scholars would not

now be insulting the world's intelligence with puerile pronuncia-mientos in print or trying to discuss complex modern civilization in prehistoric baby talk. Had the old literary patterns been irreparably lost the Chinese writers of the Christian era would inevitably have created new modes of expression, new styles, and, with the influx of the Buddhist missionaries during the succeeding four or five centuries, would probably have adopted an alphabet and have written in the living spoken language, growing with it as it improved as a means of voicing new ideas.

CHAPTER III (PART 2 OF 3)

The ban upon the ancients, imder Ch'in Shih Huang, lasted only a generation or so, however, and this period was, of course, survived by hundreds of pedants, turned into fanatical devotees of the past by persecution and then given power and prestige under the Han rulers. It was during this later period that the bonds of antiquity were so firmly fixed upon China, that count-less wars, great infusions of alien blood and the frequent destruc-tion of libraries, representing losses as great as the burning of the library at Alexandria, had scarcely even stretched them at the time of the Revolution in 1911. No adverse critic of the classics has ever enjoyed a lasting prestige, and the works of the great majority of the free spirits who, from time to time, discarded classical models and took up new themes in a new style, have only attracted scholarly attention when they acquired suJB&cient vogue to warrant their inclusion in the Imperial index librorum 'prohibitorum.

How Oscar Wilde knew anything of Chinese literature one may well ask, but in the opening paragraphs of his Rise of His-torical Criticism he says justly and accurately :

" The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to the barbarous forest life of the nation, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a freedom from invention, which is almost unparalleled in the writings of any people ; but the protective spirit which is the characteristic of that people proved as fatal to their literature as to their commerce. Free criticism is as unknown as free trade."

To make sure that each Chinese who enters a school shall emerge from it with his thoughts, speech and written style moulded for life by the literature of the ancients, each child

is taught to memorize verbatim the Confucian classics, long before he can be expected to understand them. This has deve-loped in the Chinese prodigious memories, but reason and origin-ality have both been completely subordinated to this faculty, resulting, as S. Wells Williams says in his Middle Kingdom, in " stunting the genius, and drilling the faculties of the mind into a slavish adherence to venerated usage and dictation, making the intellects of Chinese students like the trees which their gardeners so toilsomely dwarf in pots and jars."

Originality in both thought and mode of expression has not only been suppressed by the school system for scores of genera-tions, but for nearly twenty centuries conformity to the ancient modes and standards has been absolutely essential to success in official life. Before the introduction of the examination system for Civil Service in the Han Dynasty, it was the pre-vailing idea that none but a highly accomplished scholar was qualified to take office or to act as the adviser of princes. It was only a convention then, but once the examinations began it became a hard and fast rule. To enter official life one had to qualify by passing with merit a series of competitive examina-tions. This was a pre-eminently fair and democratic idea in its inception, because it took no account of birth, wealth or influence. If the standards applied had been expanded with time it would have been as healthy a system of selecting public servants as any nation ever devised. The difficulty with it was that it provided no real test of fitness for office. The aspirant was put through a grilling ordeal which revealed, if he succeeded, almost nothing of character, mental capacity, judgment or general knowledge. The classics and the standard books of history he had to know and xmderstand thoroughly. He had to be a master penman, with a delicacy and sureness of touch which few Occidental artists have ever acquired, and he had to be able to compose prose and verse in strict conformity with classical style and thought. All that he had demonstrated when he got his higher degrees was that he had the patience and determination of a nerveless drudge and that he was endowed with a freak memory. It did not even prove a liking or an aptitude for literature. It only demonstrated that he wanted

w.w.c. a

an official job and was willing to work for it with phenomenal industry.

Yet in the sight of all Chinese through all these centuries, the man with a sufficiently high degree was fully qualified to accept almost any post in the Government. The ignorance of the highest official of the last generation, after several centuries of contact with the West, would have appalled an American or British urchin of ten. To rule millions he was not required to know the geography of his own country. That he had never heard of the simplest arithmetical processes and could not divide 39 by 3, either in his head or on paper, was no disqualification. Though a master of what might be called the canonical history of China, it would be no shame to him to be ignorant of and indifierent to the history of a conspicuous monument in his home town, unless it happened to have been mentioned in some book that he should have read to qualify as a scholar. In 1900 a bright ten-year-old schoolboy abroad could have prepared an examination of a dozen questions from the chapter on China in his geography which the majority of the highest Chinese officials would have failed to pass.

Any general information which a Chinese official in the past needed to perform a particular task, he was supposed to acquire speedily and easily, without special training, as a result of the intellectual drill to which he had submitted himself in memorizing and digesting the classics. A man from a northern province who had never seen a river, knew nothing of irrigation, nothing of the culture of rice and silk, would be sent to a southern district, interlaced with canals, where irrigation, rice and silk culture, boating and fishing, were the intimate daily concern of the entire population, and would be supposed to cultivate the welfare of these people, encourage them in the improvement of their industries and adjudicate in hundreds of law-suits annually growing out of them. If the Government wanted to make a special efiort to stimulate the output of copper, nothing would be thought if a provincial judge were sent out as surveyor and superintendent of mines. It is as though the American Grovern-ment, for instance, were to take a man who had just finished his studies and make him port superintendent of New York

simply because he had won his doctor's degree in Greek with a particularly brilliant thesis on the iota subscript.

The Chinese in past and present have been capable of even greater absurdities, inspired by their worship of their stereotyped literature. Even generals have been chosen to command great expeditions because of their learning. To entrust big campaigns to a physical wreck, who had never handled a sword, who could not draw a bow or lift a spear, who was wholly ignorant of manoeuvres and tactics, had never seen even a street fight, and had no knowledge of the tactics and arms of the enemy, would seem an incomprehensible folly, but it has often been done in all seriousness and is still being done. During a recent campaign in North China, which entailed very heavy fighting, the com-mander of 200,000 men entrusted the chief command for three days to a scholarly political adviser who had never worn a uniform, never handled a weapon, and had the greatest difficulty in reading a map. Had this gentleman had time to prepare for the emergency before he went to the front he would probably have exhumed and read some treatise on military matters written by an author contemporary with Herodotus, and then gone forth full of assurance to direct the artillery fire. As it happened an ex-journalist, who likewise knew nothing of weapons but much of literature, was put in charge of the anti-aircraft guns.

If there were any overwhelming merit in Chinese literature one might forgive its stultifying effect upon Chinese thought and be persuaded that the Chinese literati had remained in a state of arrested mental development for several thousand years to some good purpose. But even the most flattering translations fail to reveal anything like the beauty, the imagina-tion, the sublimity or the dignity of our Western literature, whether ancient or modern. The writer has never heard a foreign student of Chinese letters say that he had read either poetry or prose which thriUed him, moved him or even impressed him. Professor H. A. Giles, of the University of Cambridge, has compiled a book of his own brief prose translations from many Chinese authors of all periods, called Gems of Chinese Literature. Professor Giles is not only a great scholar but a

man of taste, as his own writings testify, so it is safe to assume that he has chosen well ; but if there is anything in the book that displays real artistry in narrative, description or character-ization, the writer has overlooked it in several careful readings. The book is decidedly worth reading if one wants to understand China, because it is such a bald expose of the limitations of the Chinese scholarly mind.

A Cantonese, named Liang Chi-chao, who has had much to do with Chinese politics and has exercised tremendous influ-ence over the thought of his people at various times during the past twenty-seven years, is recognized throughout the country as a great literary genius. A few years ago the writer, who with most other foreigners had accepted this appraisement, picked up a well-written English translation of one of Liang Chi-chao's essays on Government, He read it through from beginning to end, and was shocked and disillusioned. It was simply childish.

The writer once had an esteemed friend who had been governor of two provinces. The man was shrewd, quick-witted, better informed than the average, a master of political intrigue and a real humorist. One day he remarked that he had a great idea for a political essay which he would like to see translated and published in a foreign paper. I had no doubt that it would be good, so encouraged him to write it, promising to translate it with the help of a Chinese secretary and try to have it pub-lished. In due course fifty pages of closely covered manuscript came along and, after a week of hard work, it was translated and put into readable English. The result was a futile mass of stale platitudes, long-winded dissertations upon the obvious, and the most sickening cant. The theme was respect for law ; but this gentleman was at the moment plotting a petty rebellion against the constituted authorities, in the course of which he cheerfully broke all laws, written and unwritten, purely in his own interest.

The Englishman who is at home in Italian is a different man in thought and manner when he is speaking the language. The Chinese is one person when he is speaking English, another when he is speaking his own language, and still another when

he is writing it. Many of our friends seem like grown men when they are speaking English, like adolescents when they are speak-ing Chinese, and like schoolboys when they are trying to express themselves in their conventional written language. These are in fact the degrees of limitation which the conventions of these various media put upon the individual Chinese mind. But they also serve to illustrate much that is wrong with the nation.

Chinese poetry can make little more appeal to the Occidental than Chinese prose. Like everything else in Chinese litera-ture, it has been too circumscribed through the ages by rigid convention to rise to high flights. Confucius fairly worshipped the Odes, an anthology of ancient poems which he himself is believed to have edited. Hence every scholar since has wor-shipped the Odes, and no poet, except such small fry as strolling minstrels, has ever found it profitable to deviate too widely from their style. In recent years there have been a great many persons, some scholarly, some decidedly not, who have tried to do for the Chinese poets what Fitzgerald did for Omar Khayyam, but they have not succeeded because the material wasn't there. Khayydm, whatever the shortcomings of the original Rubdiydt, was at least expressing original thoughts in a living language. Most of the Chinese poets have expressed conventional thoughts in rhythmical and rhymed cable code.

In orthodox Chinese literature there are no epics and no great poetic dramas. Needless to say, there is no flippant or comic verse. There is more humanity in Chaucer's Prologue than in all Chinese canonical literature. The great bulk of the Chinese poetry that has been translated is alleged to be lyrical, which is the one thing that it is not, for -no Chinese ever thinks of setting it to music and singing it as he wanders about, and no one would understand him if he did. One of the odes Sir Walter Hillier has translated literally as follows :

" Quiet girl her beauty Wait I at city wall comer. Love yet not see, Scratch head undecided halt."

Out of this Dr. Legge, the famous translator of the classics, contrives to evolve the following :

" How lovely is the retiring girl, She was to await me at the comer of the walL Loving and not seeing her I scratch my head and am in perplexity."

Even this isn't very inspiring, is it ? But it does suggest a picture and a story. It neither tells the story nor paints the picture, nor does the best of later Chinese poetry. It isn't a song, because it isn't in a language that was ever spoken. All Chinese verse is more or less like this. The object seems to be to suggest a little scene or situation, generally sentimental or pathetic, and let the reader do the rest. It is impossible to attain to the heroic, grand or beautiful within such limits, and the result is that Chinese poetry when it is naive and fresh, as it is in the Odes, and not artificial and affected as so many later efforts are, is simply quaint and pretty in thought.

The poet sees moonlight, filtered by overhanging willows^ on a placid stream. A boat glides silently by ; and the light of the cooking pot in the stern shows a mother nursing her child, and a toothless old man looking on with a grandfather's love in his eyes. How still it is ! Then the reeds on the oppo-site bank part and a young girl stands tottering on her crippled feet. With the moon on her fairy face, lighting her eyes like sad jewels, she laments the loss of the boy over the fence who went to war. The reeds close and she is gone. What a vale of sorrow this is !

Put the above into the sort of language that you would use if you wanted to order a shipment of beans by wire at the least possible cost, and you will have a very fair idea of the improve-ment that would be wrought if you were re- writing it in Chinese literary style. Let us try it :

" Moonlight through willows on placid stream. Boat passes silently. Cookfire lights mother Nursing child. Grandfather's loving eyes observe. Very still ! Girl parts opposite bank reeds. Tottering small feet, observing moon. Face fairy, eyes sad jewels. Mourns neighbour boy soldiering. Reeds close, girl gone. World sad place."

A very fair example of this suggestive rather than descriptive quality in Chinese verse is the following translation of a poem by the T'ang Dynasty poet Li T'ai-po on a battle at the south of the city. It is quoted from a volume of translations by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell.

" How dim the battle-field, as yellow dusk ! The fighting men are like a swarm of ants. The air is thick, the sun a red wheel. Blood dyes the wild chrysanthemums purple. Vultures hold the flesh of men in their mouths, -They are heavy with food — they cannot rise to fly. There were men yesterday on the city wall ; There are ghosts to-day below the city walL Colours of flags like a net of stars,

RoUing of horse-carried drums — not yet is the killing ended. From the house of the Unworthy One — a husband, sons. All within earshot of the rolling horse-drums."

The writer does not have the original of this at hand, so cannot vouch for the translation, but it is typical. It suggests quite a picture. The poet, one of China's greatest by the way, wants us to see an anxious woman standing on a city wall at simset looking out over a dim battle-swept plain. An attack on the city has been repelled, but the fight has left its trophies on the field, duly disturbing to the woman whose husband and sons have gone out with the rest in pursuit of the enemy, when she realizes from the roU of the drums that it is not yet over. The poet wants us to share with the woman her vision and her anxiety ; and Li T'ai-po might easily have moved us to a very full share of these feelings if he had been writing in almost any language but the conventional Chinese literary code. Cramped by his medium and the conventions that govern it, he can only suggest the picture which the reader is to paint for himself.

The best Chinese poems are, in this wise, only scenarios in code of themes which might have been developed into fine songs in a more elastic language. The translations of China's best poetical efforts when published abroad for this reason have not been accepted very widely as artistic contributions, but rather as material upon which rhyming wags could make

clever burlesques ; just as the pompous trivialities of the Con-fucian Analects furnished Bret Harte with material for a very clever parody, but have wrung few tributes from Occidental philosophers and pedagogues.

The non-Chinese student of the literature of the Middle Kingdom almost invariably finds more matter to his taste in the works of the literary stepchildren and outcasts than in the accepted classics. Those who have had both the originality and courage to deviate from rigid convention in both thought and style, have always been the subject of such scathing Chinese comment as the serious student of music lavishes upon jazz. Even if thousands of self-opinionated, stifE-necked scholars have found hours of unholy relief and joy in reading heretical philosophy, or some thrilling novels in the colloquial ; listening to the very clever patter of the vernacular theatre ; hearing and telling folk stories, or singing light theatrical songs and street ballads, no Chinese student would dream of admitting this fact to another, as evidence that he found literary merit in these things, any more than one symphony orchestra conductor who enjoyed dancing the fox-trot would think of asserting to another that jazz was music. As well ask the College of Cardinals to include Byron's Sardanapalus in the canon of the Old Testament, or Wilde's Salome in the New, Appreciation of China's outlaw literature, in which is to be found much originality, much humanity and no little art, has, in most instances, been stimu-lated by aliens ; and the literary revolution in China, which is now making painful headway, running off upon wild tangents and perpetuating grotesque excesses, but nevertheless shaking Chinese scholarly prejudices to their foundations, is one of the few promising movements that have grown out of contact with the Occident.

Li spite of being under the scholarly ban, much of China's outlaw literature has so profoundly afEected Chinese thought and manners that it is safe to say that the Chinese world would have been an utterly different world if the art of words had been allowed free and unrestrained development during the past two thousand years. There is no space here for a review of all the heretical and uncanonical systems of philosophy which

have been propounded in China. Probably none of them would stand the test of modern application under modern conditions, any better than Confucianism ; but some of them do have the merit of bold originality, which Confucius by his own confession eschewed.

One of the most strikingly original books for its time that has ever been written is the Too Te Ching, attributed to Lao-tze, the traditional founder of the Taoist religion, who preceded Confucius by half a century. The philosophy of Taoism and the Taoist religion, as it has been practised for many centuries in the name of Lao-tze, have nothing in common. The religion is older by far than the alleged founder. It is founded on the most primitive Shamanism, with much attention given to the influence of the light and dark principles, and, in practice, is almost wholly concerned with the worship, propitiation or exorcism of countless benign and evil spirits, ghosts, fairies, sprites, spirit-possessed animals, and voracious hobgoblins. Its priests are simply witch-doctors ; and in their circles one will hear little or no discussion of the philosophy of Lao-tze, but a- great deal of sorcery and black magic.

The literati delight in pointing this out, and in comparing Taoist mummery with the pure and dignified ceremonies held in the temples of Confucius, who, during his life, always refused to discuss supernatural affairs and beings. The high authorities have always united moreover to deny the authenticity of Lao-tze's Too Te Ching, and have frequently asserted that no such person over existed. Lao-tze is indeed a very shadowy figure, and it is more than likely that the Taoist scripture is simply a patchwork of written fragments and oral traditions roughly compiled some time before the Christian era ; but that it does set forth, more or less faithfully, the teachings of a very unusual individual. It is too consistent and also too original and unique to have been a forgery. But whether Lao-tze, or some other imknown transcendental intellect, fathered the book is quite beside the point. The point is that its originality is amazing, and that for that reason it has ever been taboo in orthodox China, except when vouched for by aliens, and that nearly all unbiased Occidentals who have read the work consider it an

infinitely greater mental achievement than all the compilations of Confucius put together.

This is no place for a dissertation on the subject, but a para-graph or so is essential to an understanding of the orthodox Confucian prejudice against the system. First of all, it con-forms to no scheme of thought current before Confucius and qualifies in advance some of his most categorical dicta. The Judaism of the Old Testament has in it many traceable alien elements ; the Christianity of the New Testament a hundred. The theology, ethics and philosophy of Islam are all crude alloys, fused more by emotion than reason. The Greek philo-sophers were debtors to Egypt and Mesopotamia ; and Buddhism owed much to elder Indian cults. Zoroastrianism is refined Shamanism, with a philosophy to match ; but Lao-tze's ideas seem to have had no traceable parents and must have been as startling in his generation and environment as Bolshevism would have been at the court of Peter the Great.

Lao-tze was a pantheist and something of an anarchist. The Too, which he preached, literally means the way, and anticipates the use of the word in Christian phraseology, as in the " way of salvation ", " way of the cross ", et cetera. His Tao was, how-ever, the Universal Principle, or Universal Law, or Universal Spirit, if you like, antedating all things and bound to survive all things, whether spiritual or material ; animating everything animate and comprising all of Nature's laws. Conformity with this principle is virtue, rebellion against it is evil. Man rebels against the great law of the universe through reason and desire, sins thereby and sufEers for it. The activities of mind and body lead the human being into conflict with Tao, and the punishment for such conflict is automatic and inevitable. This philosophy finds no more need for a beneficent or avenging God to account for the bliss or sufiering of the individual, than we should need to account for the fate of one who defied the law of gravitation and deliberately walked over a precipice. Since man's activity leads him into contraventions of the one great law, the obvious cure for evil in the world, if the theory is carried to the n^^ degree, is total inaction, and this the opening chapter of the Tao Te Ching is bold enough to state. Ensuing

chapters, however, compromise with practical problems of life, and lay down general maxims of conduct which will bring the human being into closer contact with the universal, if they do not actually yield immortality through oneness with Too.

Lao-tze preaches meekness, simplicity, temperance, charity, sincerity and kindness. He is the inveterate enemy of pride, display, greed, indulgence, hypocrisy, ambition and intellectual snobbery. He believes that a multiplicity of laws breeds crime and that too much government spells disorder and misery. He is a passivist and a pacifist. The striking similarity of his ethical teachings to those of the New Testament, which they antedate, could not escape the most bigoted reader. If there were any reasonable way of explaining it, one would be almost driven to conclude, from some passages, that the Preacher on the Mount had had access to the Too Te Ching. If one were to substitute Holy Spirit for Tao, when the latter word occurs, many passages in the Taoist gospel might well pass in toto for Christian homilies. There are few of the following passages for which Biblical parallels will not occur to the reader ; and all express the ideals if not the words of the New Testament. They are from the translation by Mr. Lionel Giles, of the British Museum, which is more likely to be accepted as authentic than anything that the writer might attempt.

" Only one who is eternally free from earthly passions can apprehend its (Tao) spiritual essence ..."

" It brings down what is high and raises what is low. It is the Way of Heaven to take from those who have too much, and give to those who have too Uttle."

" Possessed of Tao, he endures for ever. Though his body perish, yet he suffers no harm."

" He who acts in accordance with Tao, becomes one with Tao."

" Purge yourself from your profound inteUigence and you can still be free from blemish. . . . He who is conscious of being strong, is con-tent to be weak, — he shall be the paragon of mankind. Being the paragon of mankind, virtue will never desert him. He returns to the state of a little child. . . . He who strives his utmost after tenderness can become even as a Uttle child."

" Keep behind and you shall be put in front."

" He who, conscious of desert, is content to suffer disgrace, — he shall be the cjmosure of all mankind."

" I have three precious things, which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness ; the second is frugality ; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold ; be frugal and you can be liberal ; avoid putting yourself before others, and you can become a leader among men."

"... bid us be true to our proper nature : to show simpUcity, to em-brace plain dealing, to reduce selfishness, to moderate desire."

" He who knows others is clever, but he who knows himself is enlight-ened."

"To see oneself is to be clear of sight. Mighty is he who conquers himself." (Know thyself, etc.)

" He who prides himself upon wealth and honour hastens his own downfaU."

" To the good I would be good ; to the not-good I would also be good, in order to make them good."

" Even if a man be bad, how can it be right to cast him off ? "

" Requite injury with kindness."

There is much more along similar lines that might be quoted, but these few passages will probably suffice to convince most sincere Christians that Lao-tze evolved, before Confucius, the nucleus of a code of ethics which would have done China no harm had they been as ardently preached by the literati for twenty-five hundred years as the mass of Confucian trivialities. The merits or weaknesses of the Taoist code are no concern of the writer's, however. It is the bold originality and con-sistency of the Tao Te Ching, which is striking, and it is these qualities which have been sufficient through the ages to out-law it in the sight of Chinese scholars. To be different is to err in their sight. There can be no merit in heresy. To be original is to threaten change ; and change has always been a threat against the balance of the inverted Confucian pyramid, neatly pivoted upon something little bigger than conceit. Lao-tze committed the unforgiveable sins of being original and different. His doctrines clash with Confucianism at many points, and there are two or three passages which must inevitably grate so harshly upon the orthodox Chinese literateiir that they could never be forgiven him if all the rest were pure gold.

Confucius, in his passion for harking back to antiquity after perfection, lays infinite stress upon propriety, ceremony and punctilious deportment, and thereby establishes the root of

all the hypocrisy, insincerity and make-believe that characterize his most cultured but mendacious disciples even to this day. Lao-tze makes a clean sweep of pretence in a few lines, as follows :

" Ceremonies are but the veneer of loyalty and good faith, while oft-times the source of disorder. Knowledge of externals is but a showy ornament of Too, while oft-times the beginning of imbeciUty.

" Therefore the tnily great man takes his stand upon what is solid, and not upon what is superficial ; upon what is real, and not upon what is ornamental. He rejects the latter in favour of the former. ... Be honest without being mean. Be upright without being punctilious."

Filial piety is the very keystone of the whole family system upon which the Confucian code of personal conduct and social ethics is founded. To displace this keystone is to wreck the whole vast edifice at a blow. He who breathes a sacrilegious breath upon it incurs hostility and suspicion. The times were very much out of joint when Lao-tze and Confucius were on earth, and most of the virtues lived more in memory than in practice. To set things right Confucius unearthed from the past and inculcated an elaborate ritual of filial piety, presumably hoping that the spirit would be born of the form. Lao-tze, having no patience with pretence, despised the form where the spirit was lacking. A prominent scholar once told the writer that the Tao Te Ching could never be accepted as a guide to the morals of the people because it cast a slur upon filial piety. The only sentence in the whole book which remotely lends itself to such an interpretation, appears in the paragraph below, which is simply an assault upon make-believe. By misconstruc-tion of a sentence, a sneer at filial piety might be impHed. That even one intelligent scholar should see fit to damn Lao-tze for it, illustrates with what a jealous eye Chinese orthodoxy has watched every stroke of the pen through the ages, and how a slight deviation from the accepted criterions meant literary exile for the independent thinker. The paragraph in question is the following :

CHAPTER III (PART 3 OF 3)

" When the Great Tao falls into disuse, benevolence and righteousness come into vogue. When shrewdness and sagacity appear, great hjrpocrisy prevails. It is when the bonds of kinship are out of joint that filial piety

and paternal affection begin. It is when the State is in a ferment of revolu-tion that loyal patriots arise."

This is, of course, cutting sarcasm, and there is nothing which so ruffles the self-esteem of the canting Confucianist. Such remarks are about as sweet in the sight of the official literati as the words of Jesus Christ were in the ears of the Pharisees.

Lao-tze has certainly had eminent apostles, but they are not the schoolboy's paragons. We read in Chinese history that Taoism was favoured and fostered by this and that Emperor from time to time, but it was not the philosophy of Lao-tze that found favour. It was the alchemy, fortune-telling and exorcisms of the Shamans of corrupt Taoism which appealed to superstitious potentates of the earlier dynasties. Under the T'ang Dynasty, when Taoism became the State religion, it was already heavily impregnated with Buddhist doctrines and forms, and although Lao-tze was revered as a god and the Tao Te Ching was widely circulated and studied, it was by no means because of any scholarly enthusiasm for the book, but out of deference to the T'ang Emperors who chose to believe that they were the descendants of the philosopher. The Emperors insisted upon exalting their supposed ancestor, and there was nothing for the scholars to do but trip into line.

To understand how the T'ang Emperors came to choose Lao-tze as an ancestor, it must be known that at the outset they were by no means deeply imbued with Chinese traditions. They came of a family of Hun chieftains, seized the throne and estab-lished themselves with a Turki army behind them. Their minds were not warped by the Confucian code and, having to deal with the exasperating Chinese literati to get ahead with the business of governing the conquered country, they probably were strongly moved by Lao-tze's appeals for sincerity and truth and his denunciation of make-believe.

Other semi-barbarian dynasties tried to rescue Lao-tze's philosophy from corrupt Taoism and exalt it above all other Chinese philosophies. The first Chin Emperor accepted the Tao Te Ching in its simplicity as his code of government and had it engraved on monuments, forcing all aspiring scholars to study it. When Chinghiz Khan, the great Mongol conqueror,

was pushing his campaigns into Central Asia, he was visited by the abbot of Po Yiin Kuan, the oldest Taoist establishment in the neighbourhood of Peking, who harangued him to such good effect, using the Too Te Ching as his text, that the Khan in his sweeping way appointed him Pope over all faiths for all Asia.

A few generations later Kublai Khan, impatient with the hocus-pocus of exoteric Taoism, ordered that all the books of the sect should be destroyed, excepting only the Too Te Ching, 80 that that work might be divorced from the degrading absurdi-ties of the necromancers. It would be easy to show, by many other examples, that the passion for sincerity, simplicity and logical consistency displayed by the author of the Tao Te Ching has made an appeal to the barbarian mind only. Popular Taoism in Chinese hands has been swamped in superstition. Philosophical Taoism has suffered the same fate as Confucianism at the hands of purely Chinese metaphysicians. One has only to read the doctors of philosophy of the Sung Dynasty, who, in their delight in artificial subtleties, entirely divorced from both nature and humanity, have tied themselves up in inex-tricable webs of speculation upon Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, and have therefore wrought more havoc with the esoteric exposition of the last religion than the ignorant devil-doctors who cater to popular tastes.

In this same native Sung Dynasty (in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries) some of the worst crimes against the spirit of literature which have ever been perpetrated were fostered by the spineless Chinese Imperial family. Poetry and prose were both reduced to a state of such elaborate artificiality that Art, distracted, flew wild-eyed out of the window. An essay style that has been the bane of all succeeding prose students was evolved and poems (alleged songs !) were surcharged with Buch obscure and far-fetched quotations and cross references that none but the widely-read savant could pretend to under-stand them. Clever, nimble-witted men, driven to do something with their profound learning and their ready brushes by the artistic urge, found themselves circumscribed and limited by their language, its shortcomings, its conventions and sacred

traditions ; and, instead of leaping the barriers and running off into freer and more beautiful fields to exercise their prowess, they set about learning feats of agility, contortion and sleight of hand, which could be performed in the narrowest cubicle. In this wise they set standards which have proved an even heavier ban upon free expression in the generations that followed than the bamboo and stilus manner of the ancients.

The whole tendency of art under this native Sung Dynasty was in the same direction and is in striking contrast to the genuine, if imsuccessful', efforts made imder the earlier T'ang Dynasty to get out of the rut. The Turkish blood in the Em-perors of the latter regime prompted them to look with favour upon " new things " and to encourage the importation of thoughts as weU as commodities. Foreigners flourished at the court. All religions were tolerated, and even Christians and Mohamme-dans, Syrians, Turks and Arabs, were permitted to set up their establishments and make what impress they could upon Chinese orthodoxy. The results were some sincerity in philosophy, an approach to nature in art, and an attempt to embody ideas in belles lettres. The early Emperors of the Dynasty were strong enough politically to risk the encouragement of some little rebellion in art which a weak Chinese ruler, under the thumb of the literati, could only have looked upon as the prelude to a rebellion in arms and the coUapse of the State. Thus the T'ang Dynasty poet, Li T'ai-po, most popular of all with translators, who himself had a Turkish strain in him, ventured to have ideas and sometimes ventured further and sacrificed sacred form to sense. Under the Sung Dynasty, exiled from China proper by the northern barbarians, and in constant peril of the com-plete extinction which the Mongols finally brought, strict con-formity to the Chinese type in all things was considered essential to Chinese survival. New ideas were dangerous and originality in form was treason. The only field for talent lay in elaborating upon and adorning the past, so both philosophy and art were divorced from life. Ingenuity overrode genius in letters ; philosophy reflected not the wisdom of tl^e highways and by-ways but the mental pyrotechnics of the recluse detached from life ; and art was the art of the studio.

To return to the subject of Cliina's literary stepchildren — the novel has always been beneath the dignity of the literary aspirant. Although the Chinese are simply entranced by a good story and have always among them marvellously good raconteurs in every grade of society, they have been, since the very beginning of things, a people simply starved for want of good fiction. The pedant's curse fell upon the art of story-telling in its infancy, with the result that the Chinese are centuries behind all the rest of the civilized world in a field of literature in which they might easily have excelled. A loose-jointed novel, thinly disguised as history, and entitled The History of the Three Kingdoms, was written about the middle of the fourth century in the simplest possible literary style. It gives descrip-tions of countless stirring fights and scenes, and embodies many stories which would make good reading in any age. It would compare favourably with prose translations of Homer and the Niebelungen Lied in subject-matter and manner of treatment, and might have been the subject of a Chinese epic if the poets before Confucius had even set the fashion oi writing something other than imsingable songs. In subsequent ages, this tale has been the motif for innumerable paintings, sculptures, poems and plays, and has had an incalculable influence upon the thought of the common people, but the attitude of the scholarly world was such that it stood alone in its class for nearly a thou-sand years and was never given unstinted praise from above until it was translated into Manchu a few centuries ago and subsequently endorsed as worth while reading by the Manchu Dynasty. Then the historical persons whose characters are so well drawn in the ancient novel were deified and their worship ofiicially regulated !

Outside the more diverting histories and this one historical novel there was almost nothing upon which the Chinese hunger for good narrative could feed from the middle of the fourth century until the Mongol conquest of all China brought with it a flood of alien ideas and tastes. Even the drama, of which the Chinese are passionately fond, had a languishing career, having begun under foreign inspiration during the T'ang Dynasty or immediately before it. With the Mongols the drama advanced

w.w.c. H

with great impetus, and story-telling came into favour both in the literary style and in the despised colloquial. Yet the hide-bound stylists still remained the arbiters of a writer's literary destiny and continued down to the present century to keep colloquial fiction outside literature, thereby forcing story-tellers who were moved to put their tales in writing to " write down " to the semi-literate for an audience, making their appeal through vulgarities sometimes, padding their yarns with im-possible marvels and feats of heroism, and even descending to obscenity in places.

While catering to the million on the one hand, to the cost of their novels or light plays, the popular story-tellers were still under the spell of the literary tradition and made pathetic efforts to interlard their narratives with long disquisitions in impeccable literary style and a high moral tone.

These only serve to break the thread of the narrative and contribute absolutely nothing to either plot or characterization. They are simply propitiatory offerings to the jealous god of the literati. In the themes, other heavy concessions to the scholar's sense of propriety are also made. The hero is usually a scholar, struggling towards official promotion. The heroine is an accom-plished young lady, with literary and artistic tastes, of un-smirched virtue. Merit is always recognized in the end, purity is ever triumphant, and vice comes to a dismal end. Such being the rules, the real stories have to be worked in as incidents and " asides." The grand result is a little meat under a great wash of insipid dressing.

A story-teller whose tales probably appeal most strongly to the European in China and who has yet contrived to disarm to some degree the captious literati, is the author of the Liao Chai Chih Yi (translated by Professor Giles as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio), P'u Sung-ling, a disappointed seventeenth-century official aspirant, who seemingly wrote more for his own amusement than in any hope of public recognition. He feels under no obligation to burden his tales with erudite sops to his fellow-scholars, but chooses as his subject-matter folk-tales full of Taoist animism and magic and all the inconsistent superstitions of the people. But at the same time, these

fairy stories, so trivial in the sight of the inflated pundits, are written in a style which adheres to all the strictest traditions, and is so difficult that none but the masters of the language can read it with ease. The whole work is leavened by a very keen and delicate sense of humour ; and the Occidental who has gone through the fanciful text in English and then tried to read it in Chinese, cannot escape the impression that the author is perpetrating a literary joke upon the snobs of his generation. In the sight of his learned readers, it is as though he had invited a group of purse-proud and haughty neighbours to dine, had made their eyes bulge by setting before them a great and beautifully wrought dish of gold ; and had then, upon raising the lid, displayed a mess of fried pork and cabbage and invited them to partake thereof. Be this as it may, it is not a book that is put before students, nor one which makes a popular appeal. The subject-matter does not appeal to the pedant, though he reads it with as much gusto as similar persons in the West read French novels ; and the style is an insurmount-able obstacle to the man who frankly prefers stories to homilies. It cannot be said therefore to have helped in any way in libera-ting Chinese thought or literature from the shackles of ortho-doxy.

Pedantry and insincerity, pomp and ostentation, the sub-ordination of living thought to antiquated form, the sacrifice of wisdom to tradition and of beauty to formulae — these must inevitably seem to every Western mind the major qualities of Chinese literature as catalogued by its own devotees and arbiters. Professor Giles, in the preface to his Gems of Chinese Literature, writes :

" ' Untold treasures,' says Professor G. von der Gabelentz, ' lie hidden in the rich lodes of Chinese literature.' Now without committing myself to exaggeration or misdirection as to the practical value of these treasures, I dare assert that the old pride, arrogance, and exclusiveness of the Chinese are readily intelligible to anyone who has faithfully examined the litera-ture of China and hung over the burning words of her great writers."

While this is faint praise from a profound scholar who, in spite of his devotion to his subject, had retained a singularly clear perspective upon it, the implication is that the Chinese

in tlie past have been justified in their pride, arrogance and exclusiveness, that their bulky literature is worthy of the abject devotion of all Chinese, literate and illiterate. This, the writer is persuaded, is only conditionally true.

The Chinese people, through all ages, have put implicit faith in the assertion by their scholars that the gems of their litera-ture transcend all other products of the human mind. For this belief the people are to be forgiven. There has never been more than two or three per cent of the entire nation equipped to read what is alleged to be best and pass independent judg-ment. This tiny minority has always constituted the priest-hood of literature in China. They have always led the masses to the altar of a veiled god whose face they could not see, have told them how much they were in debt to him and of all the graces and beauty of his person. And the people have gone away meekly, through fifty generations, believing faithfully in the beneficence of this deity, and never suspecting what a tyrant he has been to them ; praising him for his manifold blessings, but pathetically ignorant of the spiritual wealth which he has withheld from them. The masses are to be for-given a pride in their god, founded upon ignorant credulity. But no such indulgence can be extended to the priesthood. The most innocent among them have kept and still keep their faith by virtue of an impervious conceit. The rest have been moved, consciously or subconsciously, by political considerations.

To admit that Chinese literature was capable of improve-ment, to adopt alien ideas, forms or words, to compromise in any way with the rigid conventions of the past, was to expose weaknesses and flaws in China's one bulwark, before which her savage neighbours had all bowed, sooner or later, in ex-haustion and humility, leaving it to China's discretion how and when they were to be admitted to the fold. Internal cultural rebellions were as rigorously suppressed as external assaults because, again consciously or subconsciously, it was felt that the written language and literature had served so well to make one nation of many dissimilar peoples that any attempts at change or improvement, any tinkering with well-tried bonds, might bring dissolution and ruin.

THE "PROTECTIVE SPIRIT" 117

The true literary spirit in China has therefore been subordin-ated throughout the ages to what Wilde so well calls the 'pro-tective spirit. The Chinese literati always are and always have been a cautious, timid, evasive cult of physical weaklings, with passive rather than active — defensive rather than aggressive minds. They are temperamentally fonder of armour than of armis, prefer high walls to armies, and would rather stay at home than go afield. Instinctively, therefore, they made of their literature a fort for defence, to be kept intact throughout the ages, rather than a force for aggression, subject to constant improvement in manoeuvres, arms and tactics. This attitude they have conveyed to the people, so that, just as the citizens who live within strong walls drop the exercise of arms and grow soft in the confidence that they put in their barriers and their few professional defenders, trained only to believe that the walls are sacred and that to tamper with them is mischievous, so the Chinese people have been taught to lie snug within the barrier of their sacred culture and entrust its keeping to the professional guards — the literati.

How much China has lost in virility through the habit of erecting high walls and living behind them in sleek physical impotence, it would be easy to demonstrate from the history of the Manchus during the last few centuries. A whole nation of intelligent, self-reliant, energetic warriors, with free and eager minds, have sunk like sheep into a mire ; and in the process of being Chinacized have become, while yet unabsorbed, a helpless, purposeless, spineless mob of dependent idlers. This has been the last great conquest of Chinese culture over barbaric stamina — and the Chinese are inordinately proud of it ! The lower the Manchus sink, the better the Chinese like them, because they are, through degeneration, approaching con-formity to type and ultimate absorption. The same fate in the past has overwhelmed vast numbers of Tartars, Tunguz and tribes of aboriginal peoples. And precisely the same fate that has sapped the virility and stamina of invading barbarians who have settled in China has overwhelmed invading ideas.

If the Chinese had been truly isolated throughout the cen-turies, and if the people had displayed no aptitude for literary

creation, the mummifying of Chinese literature by successive generations of literati and the stunting of the development of the despised spoken language might be looked upon more charitably.

There is no room for charity, as it happens. The masses of the Chinese people, restricted as they are to colloquial expression, show a genius for literary creation and for sound thinking, which should, centuries ago, have given birth to a really great litera-ture. Their countless proverbs reveal an understanding of human nature and a whimsical appreciation of its vagaries, in which there is more real wisdom, more of the fruit of an ancient people's manifold experiences, than in any cartload of classics that one might assemble.

Like all Orientals, they have a strong dramatic sense, and a professional story-teller, speaking his primitive and undeveloped language, can rise to heights in characterization, description, narrative and metaphor, to which not one Occidental in ten thousand could aspire in his own tongue. An infallible sense of rhythm and cadence is born in the great majority of Chinese. In ordinary speech, they divide their sentences up into euphoni-ously balanced periods. Their music, while conveying neither melody nor harmony to the European ear, is faultless in rhythm. So it is that in their street songs and lengthy ballads in the colloquial, there is not only the germ of real poetry in theme and treatment, but there is also metre, which, in our sense of the word, does not exist in conventional written poetry. In the written language a line contains so many characters, repre-senting so many monosyllabic sounds, and a certain amount of cadence is achieved in verse by the adroit use of tones and rhymes ; but there is no such thing as foot-metre, and the untutored Occidental, hearing a poem read aloud, would derive far less aesthetic pleasure from it than from the syncopated beat-ing of a tom-tom. Colloquial Chinese verse, however, has a swing to it which the hearer can catch instantly because it is in metre, and in as great a range of different metres as our own verse. Finally the Chinese have a great fund of delicate humour and good temper, which permeates the whole of what might be called their unwritten literature and which would make

most attractive reading of any stories or essays which they might compose if they were ever encouraged to put their lighter fancies upon paper.

The restrictions put upon the importation of alien ideas, words and forms, have been just as deliberate and obstinate as the elimination of the colloquial from literature and have been just as deadening in effect. Two thousand years ago China was in direct touch with Persia, Greek Bactria and India, and in indirect touch with all the European world beyond. She had more or less contact with half a dozen peoples who were creating literature of more or less merit by writing in alpha-betical characters their several spoken languages. Since then she has never been out of touch with people who used an alphabet, who borrowed words and ideas as they found them useful, and who revelled in a living literature, however crude.

The Mongols established communications between all of China and the West which made it comparatively easy for Marco Polo of Venice to cross Asia by land and return by sea, and China, had she wished, could have imported then all the science of the Arabs, all the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and all the art of mediaeval Europe. But China would learn from no one ; for to admit that she could be taught any-thing would have meant disillusionment for her people and a breach in her defences against her enemies.

In short the defensive spirit in China has carried the nation through many vicissitudes and has converted millions of former aggressors into defenders, only to reach this age of easy com-munication, which brings Europe and America into closer touch with Peking than the Huns in Mongolia were with the capital of the Han dynasty ; bringing her face to face with a people flaunting a culture that they have the effrontery to consider superior, against whom the defensive tactics of old are as futile as mud walls before gunfire, and who show not the slightest inclination to bow down before a petrified literature, to conform or to be absorbed. For twenty-odd centuries China has deliber-ately stunted, dwarfed and twisted into grotesque forms the minds and thoughts of her people, by limiting their expression

to a primitive and childish medium, only to encounter a whole world full of people with grown-up minds and adequate means of developing and exercising them.

Much of what is wrong with China may be traced to the collision in this generation of a petrified defensive culture with an elastic aggressive one. Consternation and confusion have been born from close relations between the clever child's mind of the East and the broader adult mind of the West. But it must not be supposed that the Chinese visualize the situa-tion from this angle. The vast majority have no more idea of the source of the trouble than the average citizen who is fright-fully ill at ease, and who can only say that he has an unlocated feeling of distress throughout his anatomy. Most of those who attempt to diagnose their country's present ills either reiterate, with growing venom, that China's only ailment is foreign aggres-sion, or hit upon some superficial shortcomings, such as the growth of militarism, the cupidity of officialdom, the backwardness of industries, or the emptiness of the exchequer. The Grand Army of the learned is so far from going to the root of the matter that it becomes more and more reactionary in spirit, and burrows deeper into the past as confusion approaches chaos. The scholars are all frantically busy thumbing through their moun-tains of books, whenever a fresh calamity threatens to descend, looking for precedents, to see how Shun and Yao, or Han Wu-ti or Tang T'ai-tsung, would have handled the situation.

The only people in a position to realize that China's complaint is a spiritual and not a physical disease, that it is a case of arrested development, are the foreign trained students, who use and think in languages other than their own, and who can therefore diagnose their people's fundamental ailments, remove the adenoids, prescribe the spectacles and outline the curriculum that will give the backward boy a chance in the world.

The hopeless part of it is that not one in a thousand of the students whom we have trained abroad, and who have gained a perspective on their country, has either the temerity or the initiative to say what is wrong, or to initiate a curative cam-paign. Once back in his own country the colossal weight of tradi-

tion and prejudice crushes him and the task before him looks both dangerous and futile. He was sent abroad to learn the secret of Occidental power so that he could come back and tell his people how to defend their sacred culture against foreign aggres-sion. He finds it impossible to tell them that their weakness lies in what they consider their spiritual assets, and that the secret of Western strength does not lie in machines, chemicals, guns and gimcracks, but in what China considers their spiritual and cultural inferiority. How can he break these tidings with-out being tossed into the ditch ? He does not try. He either sinks into a comfortable apathy and makes the most of his know-ledge of foreign gimcracks to feather his nest, or he is embittered against those who have opened his eyes to the dismal bleakness of his nation's whole spiritual background, and takes the lead in anti-foreign propaganda with a frenzy that relieves him of the duty of thinking, so that he can deal in sophistry without qualm.

It is only fair to say that in the literary field there are a few rebels who are exceptions to the above rules. A few men are trying to develop an interest in the growth of a living litera-ture, based upon the spoken language and freed from pedantic shackles. Others collect folk-lore and folk-songs in the spoken language. Others foster a newly introduced system of spelling the spoken language phonetically. Others are fighting illiteracy in most energetic campaigns. The Christian missions have for years tried to reach a larger public than the scholastic fraternity by writing in the colloquial and even in the romanized colloquial. But all of this effort, spread over a number of years, has not even nicked or scratched the steely complacency of China. Ninety per cent of the people are still virtually illiterate. Ninety-nine per cent of the rest still feel sure that they are the repositories of the only literary culture worth mentioning that mankind has evolved. The newspapers reach less than 1 per cent of the total population — less than a half of 1 per cent in actual sales.

Take these facts into consideration, remember that China is speaking and writing the language, and therefore thinking in the grooves, of a people contemporary with ancient Rome,

and then remember that China no longer has a master but is trifling with so-called Republicanism, and the reader will have a few clues to some of the things that are fundamentally wrong with China.

CHAPTER IV (PART 1 OF 4)

HISTORY

THE only thoroughly practical excuse for the study of history is that it helps to explain the present and to give clues to the future. When we meet a man with sufficient character to interest us, we try to understand him, and, in trying to understand him, we instinctively search into his origin and past. We expect to learn thereby what he will think and how he will act under various circumstances. We study history for the same reason : and, if it were not for history, the customs, traits and temperament of many of the modern nations would remain inexplicable to one another.

The character of a people without a history is influenced by the past through the ordinary biological channels of heredity only. The rest is environment. Among a people with a long recorded history, especially a history-conscious people like the Chinese, the past not only works through heredity upon their character, but influences them strongly as a big part of their environment. We all know many elderly men who are amusing, pathetic or annoying because they have seen better days and therefore live in the past, arrogating to themselves dignities and abilities which they have long since lost through senile decay. It is possible for whole nations to be in the same mental state. Don Quixote burrowed into the chivalry of the past until he was so strongly moved to emulation that he was oblivious to the changes which time had wrought in the manners of his people and in his own elderly person. Germany in 1914 was as much possessed by the past and as blind to a changed physical environment as the Knight of La Mancha.

No one can hope to understand the German pre-war mind

who has not read what the Roman historians have to say of the German character in their day, who has not read the ancient Teutonic Sagas, and who has not then studied carefully the later histories of the exodus of all the more virile fighting tribes from the heart of old Teutonia into France, Spain, Italy, Northern Africa and the British Isles, a movement which left the less-enterprising elements at the mercy of the Slavic and Tartar hordes on the East, who fairly saturated old High Germany and bred a mixed race in which the Nordic element is now subor-dinate. Blind to the fact that there is more of the German about which Tacitus and Caesar enthused in the average English-man, Dutchman or Dane, or even in the peasant of Normandy and Lombardy, than in the Prussian, Germany was persuaded that she was the descendant and heir in situ of a magnificent race, appointed by nature to rule the earth, and set out to prove it. This was one of the fundamental causes of the World War, and no one can have a complete understanding of what was wrong with Germany in 1914 who does not know how the Germans read their history and interpreted it to their own satisfaction. By the same token it is essential for anyone who wishes to understand the Chinese mind and character, to go through their voluminous records with their accepted interpreters and ex-pounders, to see how a people so bound up in the past envisages itself in the light of the available material ; and then to put all the commentaries aside and make an impartial study. This is a work that has yet to be done ; and it is a work which we can no more expect the Chinese to do for us than we could have expected a German professor on the War Propaganda Staff to publish an honest analysis of the ancestry of the modern native of Central Germany. From a scientific point of view, no real history of China exists. There is an enormous mass of material, in print and underground, which sinology and arch-aeology are bound to bring to scientific attention within the next two or three generations, pending which we can only dabble and guess at much that is temptingly obscure. But there is enough material, already easily available, to prove that the most honest and painstaking Chinese historians, in studying their documents and writing their records, have almost invari-

ably catered to the preconceived Chinese idea of China's past, and, while suppressing little, have contrived to emphasize whatever fed the self-esteem of the nation.

Many of the most eminent sinologues, falling under the scholarly spell, have fostered this propaganda in the European languages, leading all of the world that is interested in China to judge the modern state by a past seen through Chinese eyes. The writer is by no means qualified to write the work that would give China her true background, without which she will remain an enigma, but hopes that what the Chinese would consider an unsympathetic review of history in very brief out-line will help to an understanding of China's present diffi-culties.

Many Occidental writers upon China have said in one way or another that China is a sea which salts all that flows into it. This is a fine figure, but it does not really apply. It is true, rather, that China is a miasmic swamp in which all clear streams mingle to stagnate. The aboriginal tribes, still to be found in South China and in greater numbers in the Indo-China peninsula, were the original swamp, into which wave after wave of virile peoples have swept, only to be overcome in time by the malarial swamp lethargy, enervated, demoralized and reduced to type. This is the lesson which Chinese historians and Occidental sinologues do not derive from a perusal of the records, but it is the quod est demonstrandum of this essay.

The Chinese written records that have come down to us purport to cover a period of something over 4,000 years. They begin with mythology pure and simple, cover a long period of which there could have been no written record, a period known through oral tradition only, and are finally compilations of more and more voluminous documents. Dr. Leon Wieger, S.J., is satisfied that certain existing bronzes bearing inscriptions in primitive characters date back to 1800 B.C. It is not gener-ally conceded, however, that the written language had developed sufficiently at that time to have enabled the Chinese to keep full records. It was not until nearly a thousand years later that the written language was sufficiently elastic to supply satisfactory materials for the historians of a later period ; so

the story of all that went before was either pure fiction or his-torical tradition richly adorned with fiction.

That this is true is obvious from a cursory reading of the Book of History and the Bamboo Books. In these the names of scores of ancient worthies and places are written with char-acters which had not been invented prior to the truly historical period, so could not have been taken from ancient inscriptions or documents. The style of conversations and speeches in the Book of History, moreover, savours so strongly of the style of the Confucian period that one cannot escape the belief that they were not even traditional but were late interpolations by scribes who wished to stress the wisdom or piety of the ancients. Tradition cannot be wholly ignored, however, and sinologues agree that traditions reaching as far back as the twenty-third century B.C. probably had some foundation in fact. Many are inclined to think, indeed, that history of a sort begins with the tribal chief Huang Ti, and that his reign coincides with the settlement of the original Chinese clans in the nucleus of the Empire in Honan. This is, of course, on the assumption that the Chinese came from the north-west and were not indigenous — a theory strongly supported by all missionary writers and given some slight support by Chinese legend. Archaeology has so far done little to prove or disprove this theory. It has demon-strated only that in prehistoric times a people did live in Honan who used implements and pottery which were the exact proto-types of those used through all historical times in China ; but from this we do not know whether the Chinese were indigenous or whether they were aliens who adopted the culture of older residents.

Mr. E. T. C. Werner, in his Myths and Legends of China, says, without quoting authorities or indicating his source of informa-tion, that the original Chinese were a high-headed blond race, speaking a polysyllabic language. He is also inclined to believe that they came overland by way of Khotan. That they were from the very beginning surrounded by several breeds of savages, with whom they could carry on no intercourse without inter-preters, is obvious from the traditions of all ages. That they were numerically inferior is also often implied. That they

occupied a very rich district and not only held it but expanded from it until they became too pacific and had mixed too freely with the aborigines, is sufl&cient evidence that they were a bold, energetic, and hard-fisted race. In the oldest traditions worth considering, they seem to have had little memory of a nomadic pastoral life. They used horses and cattle as draught animals at a very early period, but they did not ride their horses and had no knowledge of camels until a much later period — facts which militate against the theory that they came across Asia from Akkadia as a semi-civilized people.

Such of their manners as tradition makes clear, indicate that they were a forest-dwelling people, living iti caves, like the primitive inhabitants of Europe, farming small tracts in the clearings and depending for the rest upon hunting and fishing. If they were ever pastoral nomads, which they must have been, temporarily at least, if they crossed Asia as a people, they had very hazy recollections of such a life. If one grants that they came from the north-west within this geological period without acquiring the distinctive vocabulary and customs of all the nomads of Asia, geography limits the length of their migration and suggests that they came from no farther west than the Nanshan, in the north-west of the province of Kansu, or, at farthest, from the Pamirs, where they might easily have lived much the same life that they later pursued in the heart of China, and whence they might have reached what is now Honan through river valleys without crossing grass-lands or deserts and without much contact with pastoral nomads.

The written characters with which they later described their neighbours show a contempt for both the aquatic savages of the south and the Tartar savages of the north, proving clearly that, at a very early time, they considered themselves related to neither. The aborigines are usually described in characters which indicated that the Chinese thought them insects, while the nomads are labelled dogs. No such disrespect is shown for the Timguzic forest dwellers on the east, for whom the generic term was " the men with bows ", or for the Jung, also a forest people, who are the people of the adze or axe, then a respected

weapon, now in another form the most useful agricultural implement in North China.

As for the theory that they were a blond race, the writer is in possession of no real evidence one way or the other, but Chinese scholars, when cross-examined, can unearth what they consider evidence in favour of such a theory from the con-struction of certain characters, and the use of certain terms in the more ancient writings. These deductions are interest-ing, but would only be convincing in conjunction with more weighty evidence. To review these arguments in detail would require much study and countless quotations from China's ancient books. A few lines will explain their general char-acter.

The classical histories which Confucius is supposed to have edited seem to draw a distinction between two terms, Min and Po-hsing, which are now used indiscriminately to describe the common people. The Min are nearly always spoken of as the black, or black-haired Min. The Po-hsing were appar-ently a more limited group of aristocratic clans, ranking just below the titled nobility, and distinguished in many passages from the black-haired Min. It is argued that if all were black haired, there would have been no point in describing the num-berless tribes of Min as such. It seems to be indicated that the black-haired were the aboriginal folk about the Chinese, while the Po-hsing in early historical times were the aristocratic survivors of a race distinguished from the black-haired ones. In support of this theory the writer has been supplied with many quotations and analyses of characters which would only bore and confuse the average reader. The character for Po, which now means " hundred ", but had not this meaning origin-ally, is the character for " white ", with a line above it signify-ing the firmament. The character for " hsing " originally meant clan. Those who favour the theory that the Po-hsing were the survivors of a race of white pioneers who founded the Chinese State, read into this combination, Po-hsing, the meaning " exalted white clans ".

A much sounder starting-point for studies along this line would be an investigation of the history of the Yueh-shih or

Yueh-ti, a race whom the Huns drove out of what is now the Nanshan district, in North-west China, about 300 B.C. Those people later became quite a nation in Central Asia, and in the latter part of the second century before the Christian era the Chinese tried to form an alliance with them against the Huns, but without much success. Fragments remained in the Nan-shan, where traces of them are still to be found, and others appear to have remained as distinct groups in the popula-tion of what is now Chinese Turkestan down to a compara-tively late period. Dr. A. von Le Coq, F. K. W. Muller and Professor Henri Cordier have agreed, from manuscripts dis-covered by the Le Coq Expedition in Turkestan in 1904 and from wall paintings found in the vicinity of Turfan, that the Yueh-shih were a light-haired, blue-eyed people, speaking an Indo-Germanic language more closely akin to the European languages than to what is usually known as the Asiatic-Aryan group. In the time of Confucius these people were living on the borders of his China, and if they had been strikingly differ-ent from the Po-hsing we should have heard at least as much of the red-headed savages as we do of the black-headed Min. It would appear that among the ancients the black hair of the Min was more worthy of remark than the red hair of the Western barbarians.

It has been already remarked that tradition brings the Chinese from the north-west, the land of the Yueh-shih. The way to make more of this subject is to confirm this tradition through history and archasology and also to pry further into the customs of the ancient Yueh-shih and learn how much or how little they had in common with the Chinese of the ancient records. This the writer leaves to those who are equipped for it.

It would be interesting but of no great value to prove that the Chinese were once white and spoke an Indo-European language ; but it is of more value to know that they were differ-ent from and superior to their subject peoples, because one does not have to follow tradition very far towards the present to find that they mixed with the Philistines freely after a time, were lost among them and reduced to type, losing consequently in initiative and virility until the leadership among the mixed

w.w.c. I

people within the Middle Kingdom was seized by invading aliens who, in successive waves, brought new stamina and energy into the decadent nation of a mixed breed, in which the inferior element had swamped the original creators of the State.

At the very opening of the period covered by historical tradi-tion our attention is called to the spectacle of a barbarian seizing the throne, whipping the realm into shape and extending its boundaries and the number of its dependencies. According to the accepted story in the Confucian version of history, the wise and benevolent Emperor Yao chose as his successor a countryman named Shun, to whom he gave his two daughters in marriage and in whose favour he abdicated in the seventy-third year of his reign. Making much of this arrangement, the history which Confucius edited fairly bubbles over with praise of the countless virtues of these two worthies of the Golden Age. The Bamboo Books contain many passages which suggest very different relations between these two Confucian paragons, and the famous historiographer of the T'ang Dynasty, Liu Chih-chi, in his review of history published in the eighth century a.d., entertains no doubt that Shun was a rebel against Yao J who imprisoned both the Emperor and his son and seized the throne and the kingdom. The careful Mencius, writing in the fourth century B.C., makes the unqualified statement moreover that Shun was a man of the Eastern barbarians. This passage has upset Chinese scholars through all successive ages, because they cannot and will not admit that one whom Con-fucius and his school held aloft as the incarnation of all the perfections could have been akin to the Tunguzic savages for whom the Great Sage had such a profound contempt. Under the spell of the literati, even Dr. Legge has been impelled to mistranslate this passage ; but it is so clear and simple that there can be no two translations of it. Either Mencius must be discarded, or Shun was an alien.

At all events, historical tradition thenceforward is a record of the gradual expansion of the Empire in dimension and popu-lation through the absorption of non-Chinese tribes on the frontiers, who did most of the fighting for the realm until they

lost their vitality through admixture and civilization, and more tribes on still wider frontiers became the dependent defenders of the kingdom, warding off savages and paying tribute, in ex-change for the privilege of intercourse with the Middle Kingdom and the eventual right to be considered Chinese. Growing in bulk and pride, and losing vitality at the heart in direct pro-portion to her growth, China emerges into history at the com-mencement of the Chou Dynasty, in the eleventh century B.C., already decadent, helpless, and unfit to rule herself, a swamp with clear running water on her outer fringes only. Her savage neighbours on all her flanks were preying on her, the wild people of the south, east and north were carrying their raids into the heart of the old kingdom of the aristocratic Po-hsing in Honan ; and the Chinese nation was on the brink of a collapse, when the Western barbarians from the mountains of Kansu and western Shensi swept in, seized the State, and established a dynasty which lasted for nearly a thousand years.

Mencius says that Wen Wang (King Wen) was a man of the Western barbarians. Legge again mistranslates the passage to make it appear that he came from " near " the Western bar-barians, an absurd dodging of the obvious facts. Wen Wang was the father of the Emperor Wu, founder of the Chou Dynasty. The grandfather of the first Emperor, Chi-li, had been so great a warrior in the service of the previous dynasty and had saved it so often from the inroads of barbarians other than his own, that his tribes inspired more fear than gratitude in the Imperial Court and he was killed by the Emperor's orders. His son Ch'ang, later knowTi as Wen Wang, escaped this fate, but was imprisoned from time to time when he had performed the Chinese State too great a service. This treatment he did not openly resent, but meekly submitted to the whims of a degenerate court, while using all rebellions and savage incursions as excuses for hammering respect for his Western hordes into the various States and Dependencies, but it was not until nearly twelve years after Ch'ang's death (1049 B.C.) that his son Fa finally gathered his tribes in force, descended upon the Chinese territories, obliterated the old State and set himself up as the Emperor Wu. ,

To satisfy ingrained prejudices, the new conqueror had to have Chinese ancestors, so just as the later founder of the T'ang Dynasty picked upon the hazy figure of Lao-tze as a progeni-tor, Emperor Wu went back a safe distance, something over a thousand years, into the era covered by tradition only, and found a forbear in a Minister of Agriculture who was supposed to have served the great Shun, above mentioned.

This is about as significant as though Charlemagne had claimed descent from the shield-bearer of Odin. One gathers from the records that the family could actually trace its descent back a little over two hundred years, when the forefathers had been tribal chiefs of the barbarians on the present Kansu border, with the modern Pinchow, in Shensi Province, as their seat. From this district they moved southwards, in 1275 B.C., into the present Fenghsiang district and had settled on the plain of Chou at the foot of a mountain still known as Chishan, under the leadership of an ancestor named T'an-fu, or Father of the Barn, possibly because he brought them out of the hills and forests and set them up as agriculturists on the plain. At all events, when they swarmed ijito the Middle Kingdom, although they had much Chinese support, the tribes of Yung, Shu, Chiang, Mao, Wei, Lu, P'ang and Pu, all non-Chinese, were (according to the Bamboo Books) with the Chou tribes, who were Turkish according to Dr. Wieger. At all events they were Jung, the people of the adze, and the conqueror carried such a weapon, ornamented with gold, into the fight with him.

Thanks to this conquest, the nation was revived, barbarians were expelled or subdued, and the feudal lords took orders ; so while the Western savages were being assimilated and the Chou Dynasty became more and more Chinese and thought less and less respectfully of its heathen origin, prosperity increased, art and literature flourished, and government was elaborated until a pinnacle was reached and the inevitable descent began. As the savage blood was bred out of the Chou Dynasty and the hybrid blood was bred in, the pristine stamina of the invaders gave way to the malarial torpor of the half-breed aboriginal. Confucius was born when the Dynasty was gathering speed on the down grade, and his whole life was devoted to a vain

endeavour to put the brakes on the inevitable, to push China back up the slope to the Golden Age.

Three hundred years before his birth the Huns had appeared in the north and west and the Chinese expressed their opinion of them by writing the character for dog into all the tribal names that they gave them. Tungusic barbarians lived within a few days' journey east of the Sage's home and overran all the country to the north and north-east, east, south and south-east. For these people too Confucius had no use. He encountered them once indeed at a political conference in a neighbouring township, to his great disgust. The people of the whole south, beyond the Yangtze River, with the exception of Tunguz tribes in what are now Kiangsu, Chekiang and northern Fulden, were still the insect people to Confucius and his contemporaries. These last are the people, by the way, who have contributed much of the blood and none of the virility, the bulk of the population and probably the form of the language, to China, but are the only class of barbarians that contributed to the grand Chinese medley who have never contributed a dynasty. The people of the Shanghai district are a mixture of the Tunguzic settlers and the aboriginal folk of the insect tribes, and the dialect em-bodies mementoes of both strains.

The China of Confucius's time was again a limited belt of country almost coinciding with the valley of the Yellow River, bounded on the west and east by the mountains of the Kansu border and the mountains of the Shantung peninsula, and once more the burden of defence fell upon the semi-Chinese tribes on the frontier of this region, while such energy as survived in the body of the nation was expended upon inter-State feuds with imported savages as auxiliaries. Yet Confucius, with all his study of the past, did not learn the one big lesson of the past, and would have been horrified to learn that what his country needed was a fresh infusion of savage blood and that the glory of the ancients could never be reproduced by the stagnant nation of which he was one, but would be revived over and over again by successive waves of the despised peoples of the wilder-ness on the east, north and west.

CHAPTER IV (PART 2 OF 4)

When the Chou Dynasty finally sank to the lowest possible

ebb and the nation was again at the point of disintegration, the saving infusion came as another tide from the west, following the same course as the Chou invasion. After a century of border-harrying from all angles, the leader of the hordes of Ch'in came into the plains from what is now Kansu, set up his dynasty in 221 B.C., and gave China the first highly centralized govern-ment that she had ever had. The feudal system was abolished at a stroke, vast territories were brought imder actual instead of nominal control, the Great Wall was built delimiting all the territory on the north that was considered worth defending ; and the border territories, which the effete Chinese were afraid to colonize, were peopled with whole nations of barbarians brought in both by invitation and force. Finally a campaign was initiated against the cult of the dead past, through the burning of the books and the persecution of the scholars, and the Imperial order fo all classes was " Eyes front ". The fame of the military prowess of Ch'in spread throughout Asia and finally reached Rome, where Ch'in became China, whence the modern name.

The Principality of Ch'in was peopled by the Tibetan border folk, whom Marco Polo later railed the people of Tangut, and by the Turkish tribes of the Hsiung-nu or Huns. The Chinese among them were, for the greater part, escaped criminals, deserters from various armies, and political refugees. The barbarians were all warlike people with little respect for Chinese traditions, and, several centuries before they came into China as conquerors, they began to show that capacity for military organization under perfect discipline which has always been characteristic of the various Turkish and semi-Turkish nations. In this they were not emulated by the declining Chou Dynasty, but as their power and reputation grew, their princes were placated by presents of women from the Imperial Court and the bestowal of ranks and titles. The Chinese who fled to them from the intrigue and confusion of a decadent capital became excellent public servants under their unbending ruthless discipline, as Chinese always do under such conditions, and, while paying no tribute whatever to the past and looking only to immediate needs, this barbarous State evolved a governmental system which

was eminently just and fair but which held the wild tribesmen more firmly in check than steel shackles. Once self-consciously superior to the realm of Chou in military strength, Ch'in opened a campaign of terrorism which in a century reduced all of China to a state of abject humility.

Hostilities commenced in 316 B.C. In 312 a Chinese army encountered a force from Ch'in at Tanyang in modern Sliensi, and, by actual count of the heads taken according to the Hun custom, 80,000 Chinese were killed. The State of Han lost 60,000 heads in 308. In 293, the Ch'in General Pai-ch'i attacked the States of Wei and Han and took 240,000 heads. The same States lost another 40,000 in 275 and an equal number in 274. In 274, the Ch'in General Wei-jan in various raids took 150,000 heads. In 260 the State of Chao lost 50,000 to Pai-ch'i in combat, and then, in a grand massacre at Ch'ang P'ing, lost 400,000. As Dr. Wieger says, this is probably the greatest massacre in history. In 256, the State of Han again lost 40,000 heads and the State of Chao 90,000, together with the nine urns of Wu, " the palladium of the Empire ". Han was utterly obliterated in 230, and Chao in 228. The State of Yen, corresponding to the modern metropolitan province of Chihli, was annexed in 226, which extended the territories of Ch'in to the sea, and the following year the State of Wei was brought into the fold. By 222 B.C. the whole Empire, and more besides, was under the iron discipline of Ch'in, and the following year the Prince of Ch'in assumed the Imperial title and called himself Shih Huang Ti, the First Emperor.

He set himself up in great state in the town of Hsienyang on the Wei river in modern Shensi, garrisoned all of his territories with his barbarian armies and established a strong standing force at the capital, then set out to inspect his new domains in person. This was a period of an enormous influx of alien blood. The tribes of Ch'in and their cousins from remoter parts not only peopled the territories which they had devastated, but occupied great tracts of undeveloped wilderness in what is now China. They served China well as defenders and as pioneers in the remote west during the generations of corrupt degenerate government that followed, but they did not save the dynasty

of the First Emperor wlio had brought them into China. The Imperial family, indeed, was already on the downward trend when Ch'in Shih Huang mounted the throne.

No one goes to seed so quickly as the Turk when he leaves his tent in the wilderness, abandons his diet of half-cooked meat and sour milk and gives up riding a horse. Ease and luxury are poison to the nomad ; and the Princes of Ch'in, while ruling hordes with a heavy hand, had indulged themselves for some generations with Chinese comforts, dainties and women. When the First Emperor set himself up in such grandeur in Hsien-yang his family was already moribund. Though a tjrrant with big ideas, he was so swayed by superstitions and suspicions that he was in many respects a craven weakling, cruelly ungrate-ful to the generals who were the props of his throne. To make a long story, short his organization fell to pieces immediately after his death in 210 B.C., and within a few months his family was extinct and all China was in confusion. The court intrigues which came to the surface before his body was cold broke down the prestige of the court and shattered discipline, and, lacking discipline exercised by a supreme authority, China went her inevitable course.

The quietus has been given to most Chinese dynasties by an alliance between an unscrupulous woman and a tricky eunuch. The Ch'in Dynasty fell, however, through an alliance between a worthless boy and a eunuch. The First Emperor had exiled his eldest son, Fu Su, in whom there seems to have been good material, and when he died his second son, Hu Hai, and the eunuch, Chao Kao, were with him. They destroyed his last mandate naming Fu Su his successor and forged another in which Hu Hai's name appeared as heir, while Fu Su was de-nounced. The elder brother either committed suicide or was murdered. The usurper then inaugurated his rule by murdering all the members of his family, including his closest relatives, so that he might have no rivals. His father's old retainers naturally deserted him, the army was alienated, and when the eunuch Chao Kao murdered him in 206 he had no avengers. His nephew Tze-ying, son of the dead Prince Fu Su, was named Emperor by the eunuch and suitably avenged his father by

killing the malevolent Chao Kao with a knife when he called to announce the publication of the decree.

If Tze-ying had come to the throne a few years earlier the dynasty might have lived, but discipline was gone, the army was gone, and the country was overrun by great hordes of bandits to which various units of the old army of Ch'in had attached themselves. In less than six months one of these hordes, numbering 100,000 men imder Liu Pang, who later founded the Han Dynasty, entered the capital, and Tze-ying, without means of defence, went out almost alone to meet the marauders. He was kindly received and no outrages were perpetrated, but immediately on the heels of Liu Pang came another outlaw with a horde of 400,000, including the bulk of the tribal military units of Ch'in, and Tze-ying was killed, his family exterminated, the palace burned and the capital looted. This was the end of Ch'in and the inauguration of four years of anarchy preceding the establishment of the Han Dynasty.

When it is remembered that from the beginning of the Chou Dynasty, which is also the beginning of reliable recorded history, down to the present day, only two dynasties of what might be called pure Chinese origin, the Han and the Ming, have governed a united China (covering a total period of less than 700 years out of 3,000), we can imagine how inordinately proud the Chinese are of the family that founded the Han Empire and to what lengths historians have gone in the pleasant inter-pretation of the events of the period. The result of their efforts is that all the Chinese of the north still proudly call themselves the " Men of Han " and imagine that the Han epoch was an era of undiluted grandeur. With this in mind the history of the dynasty, soberly reviewed, is worth studying.

The founder, Liu Pang, was not a native of the State of Han, in the south-west of what is now Shensi Province, but became Prince of that State after the final collapse of the Ch'in Dynasty and before his assumption of the Imperial title. He was born in the vicinity of what is now Hsiichowfu, in northern Kiangsu. He was a crude and wholly illiterate countryman who started life as a ferryman, became a soldier in a southern State and then, when banditry became popular and profitable, organized a band

in his native district and became one of a number of great chiefs who were operating in various parts of the disintegrated Empire. The territory from which Liu Pang came, including (on the modern map) the north of Kiangsu, the south of Shantung, the east of Honan and the north of Anhui, was the heart of the old home of the Tunguzic Huai barbarians — not yet wholly assimilated in the time of Liu Pang. This district has produced for twenty-odd centuries, and is still producing, as its two principal crops, soldiers and bandits. The same neighbourhood brought forth much later the founder of the Ming Dynasty, still later the army which, under Li Hung-chang and with foreign support, broke the power of the Taiping rebels, and in 1923 the Lincheng bandits who made themselves famous by capturing a number of foreigners and holding them for ransom. No one can challenge the virility of this breed which gave China her two great native dynasties and has been a thorn in the flesh of all others from the beginning of history, but such sturdy ruffians as Liu Pang or the Momo Liu of Lincheng fame, are not often the pride of scholarly China.

Liu Pang certainly did nothing to endear himself to the Con-fucianists. One usually gets the impression from reading the outlines of Chinese history that the Han rulers commenced their glorious career by cancelling the Ch'in ban upon the holy classics and restoring the Confucian literati to their rightful place in the scheme of things. As a matter of fact Liu Pang had as little use for the traditions of the pedants as Ch'in Shih Huang, and did not restore them their books or show them any favour. On the contrary, in his bandit days he took delight in humiliat-ing the scholars, and made it a practice to snatch the cap of any scholar that he met and — well, what he did to the cap is too indelicate to retail here. It is hard to conceive of a Chinese of even the lower order adopting this attitude towards the learned, and when the writer was told some months ago in Hsiichowfu that Liu Pang was, according to a persistent local tradition, a Huai tribesman, this story of the scholars and their caps at once popped into his mind. At all events he came to the throne, partly through courage and partly through guile, and established a line which ruled a vast territory for 200 years

• — until A.D. 25 in fact. \Mietlier he and his descendants ruled it well is another matter.

Liu Pang's first task was to recover a reasonable portion of the Ch'in territories from the bandit kings and the barbarians who had encroached upon it. Those of the States which he recovered he gave into the keeping of his immediate relatives, elevating them to the nobility, and had to be content with the nominal allegiance of the rest. When reasonably secure at home he attempted to drive the Huns out of the northern provinces where they were settled, but was most ignominiously defeated near Taiyuanfu and narrowly escaped capture. Deciding that the Huns were too much for him, he bought peace and an alliance by offering one of his daughters to the Khan of the barbarians and, when the agreement was ratified, palmed ofE a good-looking girl from his harem on the savage instead. By way of securing his position he did away with all his subordinates, the lesser bandit chiefs who had helped him to win the throne, and trusted only his relatives, who were notoriously bad governors.

He was succeeded in 195 B.C. by his son Hui, aged four years, with the Empress-Dowager Lu as Regent. This woman was so atrociously bloodthirsty and cruel that her name is despised to this day. All of Liu Pang's numerous relatives, whom he had put in their posts, and his trusted followers she murdered, and replaced with members of her own family. When her son died at the age of eleven she put an adopted child on the throne and then, weary of pretence, murdered him and assumed the throne herself. In the year 191 B.C., by cancelling a number of Ch'in enactments en masse, she inadvertently raised the ban on the study of the classics, so it is to her that the Confucianists owe the revival of learning and their own prestige.

China has seldom been governed worse than during her reign, and the nation was on the verge of collapse when the old lady had the good grace to die in 179 B.C. and to make way for another son of Liu Pang who assumed the Imperial titles as the Emperor Wen. This ruler held the Empire together rather by good nature than by ability. His illiteracy and ignorance, as well as his notorious degenerate practices, lost him all respect, but

a kindly temperament won him adherents and he held the State together through his reign of twenty-two years. His economies relieved the Imperial treasury of strain and the country pros-pered. His son was, however, one of the villains of Chinese history. He brought a rebellion of seven States down upon his head and sought to shift responsibility l/y making a scapegoat of one of his ministers whom he executed. The general who saved him from the rebels was disgraced for his pains. In 140 B.C., however, the Emperor Wu came to the throne at the age of sixteen and entered upon a reign of fifty-four years, during which China extended her influence into hitherto unknown regions and was a greater power than contemporary Rome, with whose colonies in Asia, China all but came in touch. Between the years 135 B.C. and 111 B.C., the better part of the aboriginal peoples in South China were conquered, Chinese armies penetrated as far into their territories as the modern Canton, and relations were opened with what is now French Indo-China.

Enormous campaigns against the Huns were undertaken, but they were more spectacidar than successful. Nevertheless, China held what is now Kansu and kept open the southern trade route through Turkestan, enabling a Chinese army to reach Sogdiana in Central Asia in 101 B.C. and paving the way for alliances with other enemies of the Huns which stood China in good stead in later years. To relieve the State from the burden of defence on the borders, outlying warlike tribes were invited to occupy some frontier lands while others were colonized by the rifi-raff of the cities who were deported in hordes and given the alternative of learning to farm and fight or of starving to death.

Expeditions against the Huns began in 133 B.C. The first two great campaigns, organized at tremendous expense, came to nothing. The third army was surrounded and the general-in-command was captured. In the fourth the Chinese claimed to have killed 90,000 Huns, but they themselves lost 110,000. During the next ten years, China gained some territory but lost her two best generals, Li Ling and Li Kuang-li, both of whom after serious defeats at the hands of the nomads feared to return to court, 80 joined the Huns and became high functionaries

among them. Their families in China were of course exter-minated according to the pleasant practice of the day.

In spite of the fact that China inherited vast numbers of fighting people, both invaders and colonists, from the Ch'in regime, the Emperor and the court of Han were too corrupt to make the most of this material. The Emperor himself was notoriously a degenerate, and throughout his reign his court was disgraced by his support of the crudest Taoist practices, by incessant conspiracy and counter-conspiracy and by bloody feuds. During an illness the Emperor was persuaded that he had been bewitched, and, under the guidance of his sorcerers, had countless people tortured and many thousands executed. The Taoist who was responsible for these crimes was killed by an hereditary prince, whose family the Emperor had exter-minated by having them cut in half in the public square. He forced the mother of the heir to the throne to commit suicide so that there would be no Dowager-Regent, and remained lasciv-ious, superstitious and brutal to the end of his days. The less said of his successors the better. His son, the Emperor Chao, was swamped in court intrigue, accomplished nothing and died childless at the age of twenty-two. The next, Liu-ho, was so immoral that he was forced to abdicate. The next, Huan, devoted all his time to court intrigue and feeble negotiations with the Huns. The next. Yuan, was an imbecile whose eunuchs constituted the government. The next, Nai, was a pervert whose degenerate practices are still a scandal in scholarly circles. The Emperor P'ing was poisoned in infancy by Wang Mang, the Grand Tutor, who drew upon himself rebellions from all quarters which he contrived to suppress, after which he set himself up as the First Emperor of a new line (a.d. 25), retaining however the dynastic name of Han.

Thus ended the career of the descendants of Liu Pang, of whom China is so inordinately proud. The evil character of the rulers and the corruption of the court rivalled, if they did not outdo, the decadent Rome which Juvenal satirized. The expansion of the Empire in various directions was bought at an enormous expenditure of lives and treasure, and such campaigns as were successful were largely won by the mixed-

bred cavalry of the border States. The foot soldiers of China proper were so many sheep before the mobile and elusive Huns, and were only useful in subduing the " insect " people of the South. It was in an attempt to use a mixed force of southern Chinese against the Huns that Li Ling was overwhelmed and forced to enter the service of the nomad king.

Wang Mang's Dynasty, which ruled China from a.d, 25 until A.D. 220, presents no more elevating spectacle than that which preceded it. Chinese generals were active in Central Asia and in the extreme south of China, but the discomfiture of the Huns, for which the Chinese take credit, was largely due to the alliances which Chinese agents formed with various peoples in Central Asia who were themselves at war with the nomads and upon whom the greater part of the fighting devolved. The southern Huns, moreover, were at feud with those in the north-west, and supplied the Chinese with hordes of cavalry which attacked their kindred on their own ground. The astute Pan Ch'ao, a Chinese diplomat, united all the enemies of the Huns in Central Asia in one league and directed their campaigns with little loss to the Middle Kingdom, acquiring a huge territory peopled by non-Chinese of all sorts, of which he became viceroy. From the court, however, China was getting the same sort of govern-ment by cruel dowagers, eunuchs, weaklings and imbeciles as under the Liu family. In this epoch Buddhism was ofiicially introduced, the Taoists were at once persecuted and many thousands of innocent persons were massacred, the Confucian classics were edited and given their present form and interpre-tation, and a small group of heretical philosophers flourished. Government ceased to function thirty years before the recorded end of the Han Dynasty, and frightful anarchy reigned. In A.D. 220 China was split up into three kingdoms and was not again united, except for twenty-odd years under the Sui Dynasty, until the opening of the T'ang epoch four hundred years later.

During these four hundred years the real China of that time was overrun time and again by Turkish, Tunguzic and Tibetan hordes, who struggled for control. All were stalwart fighters and many were good rulers. One after the other came forward as a ruling caste, flourished for a time, was swallowed up in the

general morass and was superseded by fresher and more vigorous blood. The Tunguzic Toba (or Wei) carved out a respectable Empire, in China, after forty or fifty years of fighting with the Chinese and with various barbarians established on Chinese soil, and bid fair in the middle of the fifth century to reunite the country, but they were eager to become Chinese in all things, and succeeded so well that they followed the course of all their predecessors and rivals and were split up, lost and forgotten in less than a century.

At the end of the fourth century a.d., a horde of Huns which had taken its name from the Great Khan Tsu-ch'u had settled and become more or less tractable in the extreme north-west of what is now Kansu, in the vicinity of the modern Kanchow, north of the Nanshan. They were ruled by a descendant of Tsu-ch'u, named Lo-ch'iu, who had entered the service of a Tibetan, Lu Kuang, the foimder of an " empire " in that region along Chinese lines which he called Liang. The Tibetan " Emperor " was advanced in years and had lost his grip upon his mixed following, so that one of Lo-ch'iu's brothers advised him to overthrow the ruler and seize the throne. The chief of the horde replied that he would rather sufEer ingratitude than be ungrateful. Shortly after this the Tibetan Emperor killed him without cause. An army of Huns assembled at the funeral and the dead chief's nephew, Meng-sun, who succeeded him as chief, harangued the untamed nomads on the subject of the outrage, exhorted them to set up their own Empire, and was chosen Emperor and leader of a punitive expedition against Lu Kuang on the spot. The Tibetan regime was easily over-thrown and Meng-sun ruled in Lu Kuang's place in a.d. 398.

He seems to have been a good ruler and to have given his neighbours no trouble except when they troubled him, when he usually annexed their petty territories with ease and gave them better government than they had enjoyed before. In 432, however, a Tunguz King of Wei, then busy uniting north-west China under his own rule, sent an envoy to Meng-sun de-manding the return of a relative who was in the Hun's harem , to which demand the Hun replied by killing the envoy. A year later Meng-sun became too ill to rule, and the horde, thinking his son

Pu-t'i too young, elevated the ruler's brother Mu-chien, who promptly made apologies to the Wei " Emperor " for the murder of his messenger, and relations appeared to be friendly again, but the Wei Emperor coveted the territory and thought that it must be worth adding to the realm, since the restless Huns were content to stay there and appeared to prosper.

So in 439 the Wei Emperor organized an expedition against the remote north-west. Like all the nomads who have won kingdoms in China by hard fighting, the Huns had relaxed their discipline and had relegated the business of defence to four Tunguzic tribes, with a strength of 30,000 fighting men, whom they had permitted to settle on their borders. The Wei Tunguz, before attacking the Hun capital, of course made over-tures to these nomadic cousins and enlisted their support, so that they took over a defenceless capital and carried the Hun Emperor off to their own capital a prisoner. A brother, Wu-hui, later attempted to recover the throne but was driven into the west and set up a kingdom at Turf an, which lasted another thirty years. Mu-chien was carried to the modern Siningfu, on the Tibetan frontier, where he was taken into the family and was married to the Tunguz ruler's daughter. But he made himself too much at home, robbed the palace treasury, was caught at it and had to commit suicide. From this time forward, for nearly three hundred years, the descendants of the Great Khan of the Huns, Tsu-ch'u, played such minor parts on the Chinese political stage that it is very difficult to follow them, but a direct descendant of Chief-of-the-Horde Meng-sun became quite a big figure in what is now Shansi at the close of the sixth century, and a little later founded one of the most brilliant of all Chinese dynasties, the T'ang.

CHAPTER IV (PART 3 OF 4)

Li-yuan, with the title of Duke of T'ang, was a descendant of Meng-sun and an officer under the extravagant hedonist Yang Ti, the second and last Emperor of the short-lived Sui Dynasty. He seems to have been used to govern districts popu-lated largely by what might be called tame barbarians, in country adjacent to the stamping grounds of the less tractable Turkish allies of China. He first appears in the year 613 as governor of the Huan River valley, with his seat at what is now Ch'ingyang

in eastern Kansu. In 616 he was transferred to Taiyuan in Shansi and given control over the Fen River valley, the favourite highway into China of many Turkish hordes before his time and of others to come. The Sui Dynasty had then gone into a decline and the Emperor Yang had almost given up trying to hold his realm together. In 615 a malicious official, who had a grudge against a certain Li Hung, interpreted a dream which troubled the Emperor to mean that a man named Li wovdd overthrow the Empire. The Hung, of Li Hung, means flood, and since the Emperor's dream had been about the flooding of the capital he immediately suspected Li Hung of treachery and did away with him. All the Li's were under suspicion, however, and were naturally uncomfortable — Li Yuan, the descendant of the Great Khan, and his sons among them.

Li Yuan's second son, Li Shih-min, foresaw the downfall of the Sui Dynasty and was on the alert to make the most of it. When, in 617, the Turkish hordes north of T'aiyuan were making one of their periodical descents upon their tame brethren and it devolved upon Li Yuan as governor to check them, a general he sent out for that purpose was badly beaten and, according to the etiquette of the time, the governor should have committed suicide. Li Shih-min seized his opportunity, the Emperor being on a pleasure jaunt in Yangchow, and persuaded his father that it would be much more sensible to invite the nomads to support them and seize the Empire than to commit suicide, especially as the Emperor was so hostile to every one named Li. Li Yuan at first blustered about his duty and threatened to put Li Shih-min under arrest, but he soon gave his tacit consent to the scheme, since half the Empire had already revolted against the throne.

So the Turks were invited to put the descendant of Tsu-ch'u Khan on the Chinese throne and cheerfully agreed. The capital was easily taken, a show was made of deposing the Emperor Yang and putting his son in his place, but this make-believe was droppedi n 618 and Li Yuan became Emperor of T'ang. This move did not go unchallenged, however, for the new Emperor had about a dozen rivals to eliminate, and his Turkish supporters did some heavy fighting before his position was secure, Li

W.W.O. K

Shih-min was the mainstay of his government and his campaigns, and, after a few years, the father abdicated in his favom". The son assumed the title of T'ai Tsung in 627, after he had consoli-dated the Empire, and entered upon one of the most brilliant careers that any public man has ever enjoyed in China. The T'ang Dynasty was for some generations the most powerful ruling house on earth. Its court was the hospital rendezvous of embassies from nations of which the Chinese had scarcely heard before. All the religions of Asia had their establishments in the capital. Trade flourished by land and sea. The Empire soon extended from Siberia to the Malay Peninsula and from the tip of Korea to the Aral Sea. The Japanese sent an expedition to forestall the T'ang conquest of Korea, and were badly defeated. The land was full of foreign traders, imported goods, and new ideas.

The Turkish tribes who had raised the Li family to Imperial rank became truculent and hard to handle, but they were soon put in their places, and were most valuable frontiersmen in the campaigns of the north, north-east, and north-west. A Persian king took refuge in China, and his son entered the Chinese service. Three thousand Arabs were once imported to fight the Tibetans, and Islam found a firm footing. Nestorian Christianity was intro-duced and spread widely, especially among the Tartars. Taoism was the State religion, but the Buddhists had all freedom, and the Confucianists were liberally patronized. The Li family was nothing if not liberal.

Yet with all this glory under the first few Emperors, with all the prestige that China acquired under them, the ruling family was on its way to ruin. Weak rulers, powerful dowagers, scheming concubines and eunuchs paraded across the stage in less and less dignified array. In the middle of the eighth century a Tartar, An Lu-shan, engineered a formidable rebellion, and royalty took to hiding in the mountains. The Ouigur Turks came in from the west and saved the situation, but this did not check the decline. The blood of the Li family was too thinly diluted to produce another real administrator and the tame Turks were too tame, while the boisterous nomads on the frontiers were recovering their courage and losing respect

for the heirs of Tsu-ch'u Khan. At the close of the ninth century the only respectable prop to the throne was a Turk who dwelt north of Shansi, outside the Great Wall, and ruled a nation of warriors known as the Crows because of their black fighting costumes.

The Tunguzic peoples of Manchuria and eastern Mongolia were again boiling over into China, and he was a check upon them. The bandits of central China organized in such strength that they marched on the capital, and royalty again took to the hills, but Li K'o-yung (or Yarkeiyun, as the Turks call him) came in with his Crows and made short work of the bandits, restoring the last Emperor to a throne which he was not fit to hold. In true Chinese fashion he snubbed his benefactor and exalted an ex-chief of the bandits, who had made life so thrilling for him. This weakling died in 888, his brother succeeded him, and, being unable to control the eunuchs, called in the exalted ex-bandit to conduct a grand massacre of them in the palace. This ruffian, Chu Wen, became the boss, forced the Emperor to move the capital, murdered him in 905 to set up a child in his place, only to murder the child in 907, so that he could call himself Emperor, the first of what he called a Dynasty, the later Liang. A dozen petty kingdoms declared their inde-pendence, and he had as many wars on his hands, but he feared most the Turk, Li K'o-yung and his Crows. He attempted a campaign against them, engaging the state of Yen (environs of Peking) as an ally, but was defeated, although Li K'o-yung had meanwhile died. The latter's son followed up his victory by annihilating Yen and making inroads into the new Empire of Liang.

The ex-bandit Chu Wen was murdered by his son, who was in turn miu"dered by his brother, who was in turn murdered by his attendants when the Crows had overwhelmingly defeated his army. The son of Li K'o-yimg then set up a short-lived dynasty of his own, known as the After T'ang. Three others followed it, and a most unholy disorder prevailed throughout this period, which is known as the Five Dynasties, a period of sixty years in all.

As a matter of fact, although the Chinese historians trace

this continuity of their Government through the Sung Dynasty, founded in 960, and afEect to ignore the several barbarian regimes in the north, what had been imtil then China proper was not again brought under a single Government until the latter part of the thirteenth century, when the Mongols had conquered the greater part of Asia and a little of Europe, and was not united under a Chinese ruler until 1368. The people of the oldest provinces were either ruled by barbarians and were largely dis-placed by them, or were paying heavy tribute to them, while the Chinese Sung Dynasty was spending most of its time in exile south of the Yangtze, restricted in its influence to the territories of what had once been the despised " insect " peoples.

A Tunguz breed, from the Liao River district in eastern Mon-golia and southern Manchuria, had established themselves in China, and had made Peking a capital thirty years before the Sung Dynasty was founded. These folk called themselves the Kitan (whence the Turkish and Russian names for China, and our " Cathay "), and in a very few years were ruling a belt across North China from the sea almost to the borders of Tibet, and had pushed south as far as the Yellow River. The Sung capital was at Kaifengfu, and while a number of States agreed to take orders from the new line, what is now French Indo-China broke away at once, the Kitan became more aggressive, and in 1004 the Sung Emperors agreed to buy peace with tribute, agreeing to pay 200,000 ounces of silver and 200,000 bolts of silk annually to be left alone. Chinese " face " was saved, however, by the usual paltry device. In correspondence the Sung Emperor was to be addressed as Elder Brother and the Kitan monarch as Younger Brother, and as this did not distress the barbarians, every one was happy. Forty years later Sung in North China was still smaller, and was paying the newly arisen Tangut king-doms of Hsi Hsia in the north-west an annual tribute of 250,000 ounces of silver, 250,000 bolts of silk, and 250,000 pounds (catties) of tea, in exchange for which the King of Hsia agreed to keep the peace and call the Sung Emperor " Father ". The Kitan kingdom continued to grow at the expense of the Sung, and the latter could make no real defence, but were casting about for an ally who would fight their battles for them, when another

wave of Tiinguz rolled out of Manchuria early in the twelfth century and was hailed with joy by the Chinese.

These new-comers were the Niichen, and their relations with the Chinese began in the year 1120. The Chinese agreed that if the Niichen would crush the Kitan and restore to the Sung Dynasty their lost territories, the Niichen would be the recipients of the annual tribute or " present " as it was called. Part of the bargain was that the Chinese were to take Peking while the Niichen were diverting the attention of the Kitan in other quarters. The new-comers had little difficulty with the Kitan. Xhey had already lost their barbaric vigour, had made themselves comfortable in the Chinese way, had mixed to a great extent with the Chinese, and were no match for the barbarians from the wilderness. They were still more than a match for the Chinese, however, and when, in 1123, the Chinese tried to carry out their part of the bargain and take Peking, though the Kitan were fighting desperately with the Niichen elsewhere, the Sung arms suffered a most ignominious defeat.

The barbarian Niichen of course refused to fulfil their part of the bargain, ceded a very small portion of territory, which they had already looted, and exacted, in addition to the usual tribute, a payment of a million strings of cash, equivalent to more than a million ounces of silver, annually.

It was of course a very short time before the Niichen found an excuse for moving southward, and Kaifengfu, the Sung capital, was invested with ease. The Emperor fled to Chenkiang, south of the Yangtze River, and for the capital an enormous ransom was demanded. The Chinese bargained, however, until the barbarians began to run short of supplies, and were glad to with-draw temporarily with two million ounces of gold and five million of silver. The following year (1126), the Chinese having broken faith, Kaifeng was looted, the Emperor and an ex-Emperor who had abdicated, with their respective harems, were carried north in captivity, and the heir to the throne, who had the luck to be away at the time, abandoned the north and set himself up in Nanking and then in Yangchow, from which latter place he was soon hounded by a Niichen army and pursued from place to place until he found refuge on a small island ofE the

Chekiang coast. The barbarians were not inclined, however, to hold South China or even the provinces immediately north of the Yangtze River, which they tm-ned over to Chinese adherents to rule for them, so the Sung Dynasty crept back as far as Nanking and resumed relations and tribute.

Early in the thirteenth century, when the Niichen, like the Kitan, had adopted Chinese manners and modes and had entered upon their decline, they came into conflict with Chinghis Khan's invincible Mongols, and began to crumple before them. The spineless Sung rulers of course pricked up their ears and began to exchange compliments with the Mongols. They were pleased with the thought that once more they would have some one to fight their battles for them. They gave up paying their tribute in 1214, because the Niichen were so busy with the Mongols that they could not enforce payment. In 1234 they had effected an alliance with the Mongols. In 1235 the latter were masters of all North China, and when the Sung Emperor, who had led an army as far north as Kaifengfu to meet the conquerors, de-manded a share of the spoils of the campaign, it was only because the Mongols were too busy elsewhere in Asia to concentrate upon South China that the Sung survived, in name at least, for nearly forty years more. Once entered upon a serious campaign, Kublai of course made short work of the south.

The Mongols ruled from Peking the greatest Empire that has ever been even nominally under one man's hand. Numerically, the Mongols themselves were not a strong people, but from the outset they showed a remarkable talent for military organization and for attaching others to themselves and using them. Every Turkish and Tunguzic tribe that showed any fighting capacity was conquered and incorporated in the Mongol armies. Their hordes came to include Persians, Syrians, Arabs, Indians — all the peoples of Asia, in fact — and even Europeans. They never massacred artisans who could be of service in their engineer-ing corps, and they liberally patronized alien scholars, scientists, and political advisers. It wall be remembered that Marco Polo, the Venetian, was for many years an official in China under Kublai Khan. All religions were tolerated, trade was patronized and protected, and any foreigner who could do something that

the Mongols themselves could not do was received with honour and put to work. This attitude was in such striking contrast to the chronic xenophobia of the Chinese that the latter had little influence at the Mongol Court in its heyday, and do not seem to have participated to any extent in the business of government. They are the only people among whom Polo lived whose outstanding manners and customs did not attract his attention. He did not even recognize them as a race, but refers only to the Kitan in the north and the aborigines (Mantze) in the south. He gives no attention to their system of writing, their multitude of books, their tea drinking, their manner of eating, the bound feet of the women, nor their ceremonial customs. They were simply ignored as a subject-people whose doings did not interest him.

Apart from a great number of such employees as Polo, the Great Khan maintained at Peking, as his immediate following, a veritable army of foreigners. "He had", says Dr. Wieger, " thirty thousand Alains, of whom a thousand formed his personal guard, ten thousand Russians, a corps of Georgians, a corps of Crimeans, and twenty thousand prostitutes ". Chinese scholars Kublai Khan had to have as middlemen in the government of the conquered, but he never seems to have been influenced by their traditions nor to have shared their prejudices. His heir, however, who came to the throne in 1295, was already sufficiently out of touch with his Mongol kinsmen in central Asia to find it politic to flatter the Chinese and ingratiate himself with the scholars by paying court to the memory of Confucius. The Chinese literati were given the majority of the adminis-trative posts, and proceeded to make the most of them in con-ventional Chinese fashion, but the Emperor still had enough of the Tartar in him to know how to take direct action and, in the one year 1303, he degraded 18,473 of them. But he set the fashion of conforming to Chinese ceremonial usages, and became to all intents and purposes an Emperor of China rather than a Mongol Khan ruling China as one of a number of appendages.

This was the beginning of the end. The next ruler came into power in 1307, not as the chosen leader of the hordes, approved by the princes and generals, but in good Chinese fashion by way

of two murders and a usurpation. The Mongols were not fond of him nor proud of him, so he cultivated the Chinese literati assiduously, and his opinions upon Confucius, summed up in a few phrases, are still recognized by the scholars as a commentary upon the Sage's doctrines as masterly as any written before or since. After flattering the Buddhists adroitly in their turn, his following in China was strong enough to enable him to assume the Imperial title in 1308. For forty years the Mongol power in China went through a rapid and sure decline. The Mongols of all classes took their ease in the Chinese way, discipline relaxed, and their organization went to pieces.

From 1350 forward, pirates and bandits had a merry time. The notorious bandit area which had brought forth the founder of the Han Dynasty more than 1,500 years before, the ancient country of the Tunguz Huai barbarians, which had been the last Chinese district north of the Yangtze to resist the Mongol conquest, again brought forth a formidable army in 1352 under a certain Lou Tso-hsing. One of his lieutenants was a young renegade Buddhist acolyte named Chu Yuan-chang, who after-wards succeeded him as chief of the band. This youngster was born in Anhui, not far from the home of Liu Pang, who founded the Han Dynasty, of a poor family. All his relatives were wiped out by a famine, and he was left an orphan at the age of seventeen. He entered a Buddhist monastery, but was of too adventurous a turn to stay there, and shortly turned bandit. He and his colleagues began operations on a big scale in 1357 in Kiangsu, between Shanghai and Nanking, taking many important cities, then crossed the Yangtze River, took Yangchow, and proceeded to threaten the north. A sympathetic movement in the Han River valley and the upper Yangtze was meanwhile making progress, while the Shantung militia, organized with the approval of the Court, went on the warpath in 1358 and cut a wide swath through the country to a point within a day's march of Peking. Chu Yuan-chang, however, became the big figure, and in a series of campaigns extending over fifteen years, he eliminated a number of formidable bandit rivals and conquered the greater part of China from Canton to the Mongol border. In 1368 the last Mongol Emperor escaped from Peking

just before it was taken by a force of 250,000 cavabry, and the same year Chu Yuan-chang became the first Ming Emperor. His establishment was set up in Nanking, whence he ruled China for thirty years. Upon his death his brother put his infant son aside and made himself Emperor after a few years' nominal regency, and ruled until 1424, when he was succeeded by his deposed nephew.

The capital meanwhile had been moved to Peking. The new monarch is highly praised by the literati, whom he patronized liberally, and in whom he reposed all faith. But he only lived a few months, so there is little on record by which to judge him. As for those who followed him, the less told of their true history the better for China's fair name, China was never governed by a more impotent line of pottering misfits. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Mongol princes were worrying the northern provinces ; pirates, both Chinese and Japanese, were looting the maritime provinces merrily ; Chinese bandits were having a good time in the middle, and the Manchus were threaten-ing invasion from the north-east. The latter became a nation under the supreme chief Nurhachu in 1608, and in 1629 they came through the Great Wall and raided the metropolitan pro-vince up to the gates of Peking. In 1644, following a famine, a vast horde of bandits from Shensi, under a chief named Li Tze-ch'eng, advanced upon Peking.

For two hundred years and more eunuchs and women had ruled the country, while the Emperors and their courtiers were too busy keeping au courant with palace intrigues and conspiracies to pay much attention to government. The bandits therefore had little difficulty in reaching the capital. One army after another scattered like smoke before them. The only respect-able soldier in the Emperor's army, Wu San-kuei, was at Shan-haikuan, holding the Manchus in check. Peking was taken and looted. The Emperor killed off his women and committed suicide, and Li Tze-ch'eng was, for a brief space, ruler of China. Wu San-kuei lost his family in the general massacre, and realizing that the Ming regime was at an end, he invited the Manchus to join him in suppressing the bandits. This they did, and in a com-paratively short time conquered China as well and established

the Ch'ing Dynasty, which, by way of contrast with the native Ming line, furnished China with some of her ablest and most intelligent rulers. The Revolution of 1911-12 ended with the abdication of the Emperor Hsuan Tung, who was only recently ejected from the Imperial Palace by an upstart militarist, Feng Yii-hsiang, who has made himself internationally famous by the blatant advertising of his Christian faith and by the betrayal, with calculated treachery, of China's most courageous soldier, Wu Pei-fu.

The Manchus came into China endowed with as much intelli-gence as the Chinese, much more courage, and ten times as much initiative and energy along original lines. They were passionately fond of horses, dogs, and hawks, delighted in archery and warlike exercises, had unbounded intellectual curiosity, and, withal, were inclined to be kind, tolerant, and good-tempered. The early Emperors could not confine themselves to their palaces and revel in luxury, intrigues, and lasciviousness, but were for ever travelling, seeing the condition of the Empire with their own eyes, or risking their necks on hunting expeditions in the wilderness. As long as they remained aliens in their manner of living and thinking they were a truly magnificent ruling caste. Once they began to prefer the cushions of the divan to the saddle, adopted the Chinese language as the medium of daily intercourse, and abandoned straightforward thinking for tortuous and evasive Chinese sophistry, they began to go down. Their descent into the bog was marked in the middle of the last century by the usual symptoms — insurrections and banditry on a big scale. The rest of their history is common knowledge to every one who is sufficiently interested in China to read this account. Embittered by the realization of their own weakness, after the Taiping Rebellion and the various encounters with foreigners which culminated in the capture of Peking by British and French troops in 1861 and the flight of the court to Jehol, after the great Mohammedan rebellion in the west, which was finally suppressed by the employment of a large force of Mongol mercenaries — conscious that the ground was sHpping from under them, the Manchus showed their weakness by sharing with the Chinese their intense xenophobia, and were happy in 1900 to support

the anti-dynastic Boxer movement and turn its current against the foreigner. The rest of the story forms the immediate back-ground for the situation of the moment, and does not belong in this dissertation.

Even such a brief outline of history furnishes some very satisfactory explanations of the peculiar things that have been happening in China during the past few years, and gives a few clues to the probable future. A few conclusions. are so obvious that the writer will only review them as a matter of form.

China has never in her history had such a thing as govern-ment by consent of the governed. The Chinese people have never chosen a ruler either directly or through representatives, but with each new dynasty the land, and the people on the face of it, have been the prizes awarded to the champion in a free-for-all fight who has demonstrated his fitness to rule by the masterful and unscrupulous exercise of violence or craft, or both. Reason has played absolutely no part in the creation of Chinese dynasties. Superior force has given each dynastic founder his one and only clear title to the throne. Against a strong Government, whether good or bad, the Chinese people have never rebelled. They never quibble with superior force. Mild-mannered Governments, whether good or bad, have always been tormented by insubordination, because the Chinese delight in quibbling with the weak.

CHAPTER IV (PART 4 OF 4)

Heaven's mandate, by virtue of which Chinese sovereigns have governed for three or four thousand years, has never been a reward of merit, but a blessing upon the strong and ruthless. Chinese dynasties have not collapsed because they were bad, extravagant, unjust, immoral, and cruel ; but because they were weak, because they lost their hold, and discipline relaxed. The strong and ruthless Emperor had only to whisper an order and the most atrocious cruelties were practised in his name in the most remote corners of the Empire without eliciting a rebellious murmur. But the benevolent weakling who tried to collect his taxes in a neighbouring province had to defend the gates of the capital against a howling mob. The Chinese people have always been docile under discipline, even when cruelly severe and unreasonable, and have always been unruly and insub-

ordinate when given their own head, no matter how mild and benevolent the ruler's intent. Chinese officials have always been efficient and careful of their conduct under masterful rule at the capital, but inefficient, self-seeking and venal when freed from checks and given liberty of action.

In this wise has history prepared China for democracy and " self-determination ". China has always flourished, prospered, and waxed great under heavy-handed rulers, and has descended into turmoil and darkness under the gentle-handed. With the exception of a few thousand scattered individuals who carry no great weight in public affairs, there are no Chinese, educated or illiterate, who are prepared to understand what government by consent of the governed means, or what it means to discharge the duties of public office conscientiously except under the shadow of degradation, mutilation, or death. Government in the past has left little or nothing to conscience. China was ruled by fear ; and the Government that could no longer inspire fear collapsed, and, sooner or later, after a longer or shorter period of hideous anarchy, made way for another established by some one who had bespattered the landscape with enough brains and blood to convince all that he was terrible and there-fore respectable.

To think independently and yet sanely is an accomplishment that can only be acquired by training and experience. To act independently and freely, and yet with decent restraint, is also an accomplishment which requires no little preliminary education. The famished man, given access to a full larder, almost invariably over-eats. The freed slave is inclined to abuse his liberty. The parson's son goes out into the world and paints it red. The Sunday-school mind runs amok in Bohemia. The renegade nun wants to be a Zaza or nothing. The cowboy who discovers a gold-mine lights his cigars with notes of large denomination and buys diamond tiaras for waitresses. So a nation released from 3,000 years of tyrannously restricted thought and a longer period of government by fear is a very unusual nation indeed if its thoughts and acts do not run ofE on wild tangents of extravagance and excess. Democracy and freedom of thought are banquets to which it is gross folly to

introduce the starveling who has not been gradually prepared for them.

The Anglo-Saxon peoples have been working up to as much liberty of action and thought as they now enjoy since the begin-ning of the Christian era, and the use they make of their liberties is not always edifying yet. The Chinese went through no period of evolution whatever, but were a few years ago as primitive in thought and in their system of government as they were at the opening of the Christian era — and then suddenly found themselves blessed with democracy and faced with a banquet of heresies and twentieth-century " isms ". The present state of China is only surprising in that it is not worse. If the average Chinese had in him the energy in evil doing, the courage to do violence, and the capacity for active deviltry that the average Anglo-Saxon has, China would be a much less com-fortable place of residence, so that we Occidentals in China should either have been scuppered long since or should now be viewing a splendid display of fixeworks from afar. One of the things that makes China's future seem so hopeless, under the circumstances, is that so little has happened. Psychopathic cases excepted — and theologians to the contrary — the capacity for evil in most normal persons is pretty evenly balanced by the capacity for good. The passive individual, who is never strongly moved to crime, is not likely to bring great blessings upon his fellows either. Great sinners make great saints, and peoples like our own, who have risen to prominence through bold piracy, reckless adventure, mad guzzling, and monumental crimes, invariably show the greatest fervour in the pursuit of elusive ideals and spiritual will-o'-the-wisps. China's comparative tameness, the passivity and indifference of her masses untrained in self-government, under conditions so favourable to frenzied folly, are indices of character which do not inspire hope for her future in the Occidental — but more of this later.

We also observe by hastily reviewing Chinese history that no one has ever ruled a united China but leaders of barbarian hordes, families of barbarian descent who established themselves with the help of semi-savage armies, and two ruffians of peasant stock from China's most notorious bandit district with followings

of their bandit neighbours. This certainly means something. It means, in the first place, that to establish the reign of terror which is the essential preliminary to control of China, after a few inept rulers have given the people an opportunity to kick up their heels, the would-be " Son of Heaven " must be a man of spirit. It means, in the second place, that to forge his way to and fro through a vast territory, eliminating all rivals over a period of years, he must be a man of great physical energy and stamina, and, to keep ambition alive and do the job thoroughly before taking his ease, a man of big ideas, plenty of imagination and moral courage. He must also be a man who knows how to win and hold confidence and handle men. That China, in competition with the barbarian armies, has produced so few men who have won the throne and passed it on to their descendants, is evidence that China has been, since the beginning of history, poor in men who were qualified to subdue and rule her. Among a people of chronic passivists the appearance of an active man of spirit is a startling phenomenon ; among a people who are convinced that the first great prerogative of scholarship, wealth or position is physical ease, a people who abhor physical exercises, who are wholly unashamed of physical debility, and in whom a handsome physique inspires no other interest than would be shown in a three-legged heifer, or an exceptional case of goitre ; among a people who have for centuries crippled their women's feet and professed to see grace in their pathetic efforts to hobble along, one can only expect to find physical stamina and energy in the hard-working peasant. Men who are the abject slaves of tradition, docile copyists of the past for scores of generations on end, do not breed many sons with mental initiative, imagination, and big ideas. Men who have never been allowed to conceive of self-government, who have never been exhorted to think and obey, but have always been called upon to " tremble and obey ", are not qualified to win the loyalty and support of great armies of free ruffians, who have spirit enough to turn bandit, and to impose upon them the discipline that is all-important. The man descended from generations of forbears who have been meek under threat of the lash and turbulent when freed from surveillance, whose only

inspiration to good behaviour has been fear of the consequences of bad conduct, must be an unusual person indeed if he can inspire loyalty and be acknowledged peer among desperadoes. The appearance of men in China with all these qualifications is a freak of nature as rare as the visitation of the phcenix, and to this fact Chinese history bears witness.

Chinese history also testifies that when a man of sufl&cient calibre has climbed to the dizzy height of the Imperial throne, his last step to the summit is the first step upon the greased chute that will inevitably carry his family and all their retainers on a more or less speedy voyage into the abyss. Chinese dynas-ties in history do not go up and down like the line on a hospital chart that registers the obstinacy of a fever. They start at the peak, run along the level for a little while perhaps, and then go steadily down, with inconsequential upward waves, like the charted curve of a fever case amenable to treatment. Chinese civilization is an infallible sedative which reduces like magic those fevers of the heart, blood and brain which we call spirit, courage, and initiative. The more civilized the barbarian and the bandit become, the less they have in them those aggressive and annoying qualities which qualify a man to rule China, and the readier they are to worship tradition and be guided in their conduct by fear alone.

This has applied in the past to the stock which bred emperors and to the armies that made them. North China, as we have seen, has been inundated time after time by great tides of virile, feverishly aggressive people of Turkish and Tunguzic stock. The proportions of the various breeds in the populations of the various districts varies widely, and in the south aboriginal blood is thickened to various consistencies by the infiltration of mixed breeds from the north, giving rise to great diversity, from province to province, in physique, character, and temperament. But wherever the people are recognized as Chinese by virtue of their civilization, traditions, and language, the great sedative has worked to the same purpose, the effect only varying in degree. The mixture of breed has not tended to make the Chinese people less sensitive to this drug, whatever it is, but rather to have heightened its effect.

Some have a theory that the force which reduces new blood to the common temperature is inherent in the soil or climate ; others attribute it to the character of Chinese civilization and culture and the environment which they provide ; others still to a supposed virus in the blood of one of the elements in the mixture, of which a trace is enough to modify the character of all the descendants of a cross-breed as a scrap of fragrant fish will flavour everything in an ice-box. Heredity, physical environment and cultural training, from generation to genera-tion, undoubtedly all play their part in developing what might be called the negative traits in all Chinese, which come nearer than anything to being characteristics in common ; but it would appear that the cultural education and the traditions that go with it have as much to do with reducing all new-comers to type as heredity, and more than soil or climate.

The original Chinese may have lost their virility through assimilation with an inferior breed of aborigines, and xm-doubtedly the Chinese of mixed alien and Chinese descent is more characteristically Chinese than the outsider who has become Chinese through association ; but the fact remains that the alien who absorbs the language and literature, recognizes the standards, respects the traditions, and becomes familiar enough with the manners and customs to be at ease among Chinese, has already swallowed a very generous dose of the infallible sedative, and is duly altered in thought and character by it.

Every old resident in China who reads these lines will think of one or more Occidentals whom he has known upon whom the sedative potion has worked to greater or less degree. Foreign firms in China prefer to hire employees abroad who know nothing of China, and give them preferential treatment in every way, rather than use men born in the country, fluent in the language, and thoroughly conversant with Chinese cus-toms, because as a rule (a rule proved by many striking excep-tions) the purely Occidental manner of thought of the importee is a greater commercial asset than the knowledge and experience of the China-born.

However this may be, both history and routine experience

in the Orient demonstrate that the Chinese atmosphere, or whatever one likes to call it, unfits in time any stock of any race to endure prosperity and independence, to work efficiently, think straightforwardly, and live sanely, without a boss.

In the China of history, the only persons who held themselves responsible to no power under Heaven were the Emperor and the outlaw. The outlaw and the founder of dynasties both had similar if not equal qualifications for freedom from restraint — virility and imagination, courage and some breadth of vision, a barbarous indifference to tradition and convention. But all Imperial families were taught in due course to conform and to respect tradition. They were civilized after the Chinese fashion, and the more civilized they became in the Chinese way the less fit did they become to rule China. The better Chinese did they become, the less virility and independence of thought did they have. The better Chinese they were, according to accepted standards, the more they abused their freedom from control, and the more they needed a boss. Sooner or later they conformed perfectly to type, and were good Chinese in every act and thought, and then invariably China got a new dynasty.

What is true of Imperial families in China is also true of successful families in all walks of life. They rise abruptly above the mean level, under the leadership of some one unusual man, and then slowly but surely decline. The great man in China is essentially a different man, fundamentally uncon-ventional, a striking variation from type. He is no more like his fellows than the pouters, carriers and fan-tails are like the ancestral rock-pigeon, but his descendants go back to type as fast as the fancy breeds of pigeons revert to their original blue-grey forefathers when varieties are crossed. In the Anglo-Saxon countries greatness consists in an accentuation and super-development of the racial characteristics. In China it consists in variation from them.

It is as though there were in China a force of gravity so powerful that the great majority of human beings could only wriggle on their stomachs, while a minority could crawl on their hands and knees, a few could rise upon their knees, and only one in a

w.w.o. L

hundred million were strong enough to stand upright and walk. His sons inherit half of his leg strength, and totter along ; his grandsons walk on their knees. The next generation crawls, and its offspring wriggle on their bellies with the majority. The aboriginal peoples, it would seem, wriggled or crawled from the beginning of time. Neither they nor the crossbreeds, in which their blood is predominant, have ever produced a man who walked easily on his hind legs. The Turkish and Tunguzic peoples have all come into the country, like the original Chinese, walking upright, but have all in due course felt the irresistible downward pull, and have conformed sooner or later to the country's most fashionable means of locomotion. Fresh infusions of alien blood have, from age to age, enabled respectable numbers of men in China to follow the fashion of the alien, fight gravity and stand upright, but these have never been more than temporary variations from type, as we see from history, which have no more perceptible effect upon the mass than the introduction of a few fancy birds among a flock of rock-pigeons.

All of which the Chinese recognize, and, strange as it may seem, recognize with satisfaction. They don't like freaks. They resent resistance to their levelling force. They view with suspicion the man who walks on his hind legs, and with aversion the breed in which the sons and grandsons continue to perambu-late in this fashion in contravention of the natural laws of the land. They recognize that conformity to type means the elimination of the elements of greatness which fit the unusual man to govern them ; they are pleased that it should be so. They know that money does not stay in any Chinese family more than a few generations, so that there is no permanent aristocracy of wealth. They know that the descendants of the great scholar and the high ojficial with an aggressively active mind will revert to the plebeian passivity, so that there can never be an hereditary aristocracy of brains. And in their old system of bestowing titles they provided for the decline of the family, and the elimination of the elements of greatness which distinguished the founder, by bestowing on each generation a lower title. Thus the aggressively great man, like Li Hung-chang, rises abruptly from the mean level by virtue of a striking

variation from type, and becomes a Prince ; but his eldest son is a Duke, the grandson a Marquis, and so forth, until the sixth from the Prince is one of the mob, and usually, having acquired all the vices and lost all aptitude for either thought or work, is somewhat below the mean level.

This powerful levelling force, beside which all Bolshevik efforts to hamstring the fit and assure the predominance in the world of the imfit are puny, is also recognized, as the writer has already said, by foreign firms in China, whose ledgers are as sensitive to it as the most delicate scales are to the pull of gravity. They not only import their employees green and untutored at no little expense rather than employ those born in the country and familiar with Chinese business tactics, but they insist periodic-ally upon having their employees return to their homelands for a good long inhalation of their native atmosphere. Every four, or five, or six years the Occidental employee in China is given leave of six months or more with salary in full and expenses paid to and from his native land.

This is not charity, it is business. It is not consideration for physical health, but for spiritual health. It is designed to renew the vital force which resists the downward pull of China upon the soul. It is cheaper to do this than to spend money upon training a man to do business in China, only to have him turn Chinese and arrive at the point where he needs as much supervision to keep him straight and as much spurring to keep him in action as a Chinese employee, which is what hap-pens to a fair percentage of those who do not go home on leave now and then. The street dogs in China will tell a man when he ought to get out. They slumber peacefully on the doorsteps while a thousand Chinese go by, but bark and snarl at the new-comer though he may be wearing Chinese clothes, eating Chinese food and be saturated with the aroma of China. They will continue to bristle and snarl when he goes by for five years or ten years, and then, some day, he will discover that they pay no heed to him, that they recognize no difference between his emanations, whether material or psychic, and those of the Chinese mass. And it is then fairly certain that his employer's books register almost as little difference in worth.

Some Europeans are ignored by the dogs from the day they land in China. They are usually sent home by subscription, that the white man's prestige may not be lowered. Others who live a life-time in China will promote a canine uproar, wherever they go, to the end of their days. Such men do not need vaca-tions to resist the downward pull, the workings of the great sedative.

Next to the dogs, the instinctive attitude of the natives is the best test of fitness among Occidentals in China. The man whom the Chinese instinctively like more than they respect ia the man who tends to be most like them, upon whom the great sedative works with greatest force and speed. The man whom they dislike, but fear and respect, is the man who is essentially different and does not conform. It is to the latter rather than to the men they like that the Chinese go for help when they are in trouble, and it is to them that high honours, influence, position and wealth naturally gravitate in direct proportion to their resistance to the levelling force.

Chinese history and current observation along such lines all teach us that China can never attain to sustained self-govern-ment until the sedative that's in the air, the blood, or the civiliza-tion, is eliminated for all time. Until then, periods of com-paratively good and efficient government, accompanied by peace and prosperity, will be sporadic and fleeting, as much freaks of nature as the rare ascensions of the born leader of China. If this sedative can be eliminated at all it is going to take time — not years but generations — and meanwhile China must either be a nation subject to a bandit king or to the out-sider, or continue to display to the world the present unedifying spectacle. If the levelling force is inherent in the breed, then China's future will simply be an unchanging continuation of her past, while the Chinese people will continue to be alternately a subject race, hewers of wood and drawers of water, or a turbulent and impleasant mob. These facts the world has to understand if it cares to know what is wrong with China.

The writer of course has his own theories about the source and nature of what he has called the great sedative force in China. He believes that it works through Chinese culture as a medium,

that it finds its source in the standards of manhood of the Chinese people which had much to do with shaping Chinese culture, defining its evolution, and that the standards of manhood of the modern Chinese are for the most part the standards of the aboriginal peoples among whom the founders of the Chinese Empire were swamped, least binding among the border peoples of the north and most strictly adhered to among the peoples of the south where aboriginal blood prevails. This theory the writer does not ask the reader to accept, however, until he has heard something more about Chinese standards of manhood than is to be gathered from this and the preceding chapters.

CHAPTER V (PART 1 OF 3)

STANDARDS OF MANHOOD

ONE of Darwin's theories, which scientific studies since his time have confirmed in every field, is that each race and breed of men — and probably animals too — admires an accentuation of its physical and spiritual character-istics. Standards of beauty vary enormously among the various races just as their outward appearance varies. These standards may be warped a trifle by tradition or education, but usually among a copper-coloured people, copper is the colour of beauty. Among men who are for the most part fair-haired and blue-eyed, the blond man or woman is the handsome one ; the dark-haired, dark-eyed man is subject to suspicion in his daily life and is the villain in their literature, while the exotic beauty of the dark woman may have a recognized fascination but is not considered a wholesome beauty.

In a tribe marked with big noses, the big nose is a feature of beauty, while among small-nosed people it is a deformity. Where big burly men are the rule, they are thought handsome ; but where slight and graceful men are commoner the big man is thought lubberly. The tall, blond, light-eyed foreigner, with his big hairy hands and his big-boned red face, might be a very handsome chap stalking down Broadway or Pall Mall ; but in a Chinese village, where his like had never been seen before, he would be a hideous monster before whom women and children would run screaming, and at whom the men would gape in mingled terror and dislike. The traditional Mephistopheles is in features a cross between the Saracen and the Tartar, both objects of fear and hatred in mediaeval Europe ; while the sculptors of

the Middle Ages, in making their gargoyles as hideous as possible, gave them the caricatured faces of Asiatics.

Spiritual standards vary as much among primitive peoples as standards of beauty. In civilized countries they are shaped to some extent by religion, tradition and education, but never-theless what is wrong in Edinburgh may be perfectly all right in Paris, and what is virtue in Wyoming may be vice in Berlin. Environment certainly shapes moral standards. In the frozen North a theft of fuel or the looting of a cache of food is a much more serious offence than in the tropics. Courage is at a much higher premium on the savage frontier than in the heart of a well-policed town. Mountaineers cultivate and put a high valuation upon what are known as rugged virtues, while metro-politans cultivate and condone soft and effeminate vices, making polite accomplishments of many things that would be heinous sins among the mountains.

In spite of all this each breed of men develops and passes along from generation to generation certain racial traits which are as characteristic of them as their distinctive physical features, and which they admire greatly in themselves. At some time in our remote past it was the master killer, of both men and beasts, who was chosen to rule his fellows and who had his pick of the women. Conditions have changed and promiscuous and wanton slaughter is no longer a virtue. Under certain conditions it is a sin and imder some a serious crime ; but we have not ceased to admire greatly the characteristics which made the master killer a master. The physical prowess, the courage, the energy of body and mind, the masterful manner which made a man great in a barbaric age, the essential attributes of the great killer of the past, are still at a premium among men in the Anglo-Saxon countries and still elicit the adoration of our women.

In spite of much interchange of thought with other peoples, in spite of the inculcation of Christianity for many centuries, our most highly prized virtues among the peoples of northern Europe are still the traits of our savage ancestors, inherent in the breed and only subject to eclipse in decadent communities. The Church takes the credit for some of them and calls them Christian virtues, but they do not contrive to thrive in many

lands (which it would be bad taste to indicate) which are much more ardently Christian than, let us say, the Anglo-Saxon countries. When the average English-speaking person sets out to find a friend, or a business associate, or a companion on a dangerous adventure, or a comrade in arms, or even a mess-mate, he is drawn to the man of his choosing by what we call his manliness much more than by his profession of faith, his polite accomplishments, or his medals for an unbroken attendance at Sunday school. In every crucial situation, when we English-speaking folk cast about for help we clutch at the hand of the kind of fellow who, several thousand years ago, would have been a master among our ancestral barbarians. In short we really like what is inherent in us a great deal better than what has been introduced into our civilization through imported literature and religious systems.

So do all races. There are parts of the world where the coward suffers no disgrace ; other places where the mean man is respected and elevated. There are still lands where a sneaking murder may redound greatly to the murderer's credit in the eyes of his fellows. The Assyrians were inordinately proud of cruelties that they inflicted upon captured and helpless enemies. Torture was blessed by the Cross in Spain and her colonies during the period of the Inquisition. Unlimited promiscuity is a virtue still among the girls of certain Tibetan border tribes. The swindling of the unbeliever is a step towards spiritual uplift among some of the Moslem peoples of the Near East. Right and wrong vary as much with the degrees of latitude and longitude as the length of noses, but in each breed the inherent traits are the true standards of manhood in spite of any amount of education or religious inculcation.

We Occidentals of the blond breed admire courage, to the point of recklessness, generosity in all its forms, straightfor-wardness and a capacity for enthusiasm to the point of exaltation. We hate beyond measure cowards, sneaks, and mean folk of all sorts. We adore energy, even when misdirected, and despise sloth and passivity. We have only 'to read the classical his-torians who studied the habits of the Germanic barbarians and our own fragmentary ancient literature to discover that we have

come by these tastes naturally and not through inculcation. The two forms of endeavour in which our remote ancestors seemed to have excelled were fighting and drinking. Both are vices in modern civilized communities, but the spiritual energies which prompted our forefathers to excess in these two lines of activity are those which we most admire in our fellows now. A man may fight, in a modern community, with many other weapons than the axe, and he may get drunk upon many things besides alcohol — religion for instance, or idealisms and enthu-siasms of a hundred sorts. The aggressive urge and the inclin-ation towards transcendentalism which, in the barbaric com-munities of the forests of Teutonia found in the axe and the ale cup their only outlet, have since discovered a thousand mediums of expression ; but they remain characteristics which we are bound, by something that is bred into our blood and bone, to admire, cultivate in our young, and incorporate into our governments, whether our borrowed religious and social standards are in harmony with them or not.

What all this has to do with the present state of China may not at first be apparent to the reader. The point is that in China the standards of manhood are radically difierent from ours. If both the average Occidental and the average Chinese were called upon to set out on paper what he admired in a man, there would probably be little difference apparent between the manly Chinese and the manly Anglo-Saxon. The scribe who takes his pen in hand no sooner picks it up than he is swamped by all the artificial traditions of the pen through which he has received his education. The Anglo-Saxon has learned through the printed word that Blessed are the meek. He doesn't believe it, except when he has his pen in hand. He cordially despises the meek in his daily encounters with them. By the same token the Chinese, when he takes up his pen, harks back to the classics, conjures up heroic scenes, and wnrites that the Chinese admire courage, initiative and aggressiveness, though the scribe himself fears nothing so much as these qualities in his fellows.

The elements of greatness in the West are the elements of outlawTy in the East ; the fundamental bases of contempt in the West distinguish a man in the Orient and raise him above

his fellows — all literature to the contrary notwithstanding. It is with Oriental bandits that our Occidental folk find more in common than with the staid and respectable townsmen, as the testimony of every one of the little party held by the notorious Lincheng outlaws will confirm. It is with the Mongols, Turki, Manchus and Koreans that our folk more often strike a har-monious chord than with the conservative Chinese. And among the Chinese we like the rough mountaineers and the border folk better than the more highly cultured natives of supposedly pure breed ; we like the primitive and uncouth countrymen better than the effete town-dwellers, and we like the illiterate better than the cultured. The ruJB&an from the " back blocks " in China is the less essentially Chinese and therefore the fellow with whom we savages from the West, we conquerors and exploiters of the world, with our delight in virility and fair play, find most in common.

It is the China that leads China, the highly educated and elegant Chinese of both native and foreign training, with whom we have the least sympathetic contact and the most bones to pick, and this is largely because these are the exponents of a standard of manhood and manliness so alien to ours that we have almost nothing in common with them.

To understand what we really like in a man, the individual has to put behind him all that he or she has learned in the con-vent and the Sunday school. Put the Beatitudes behind you and try to think upon what basis of character you choose your friends, your husbands and your wives. Return in the same way to your inborn prejudices when you have to appraise the Oriental, and note where he really stands, if you know anything about him, in your estimation.

Giving a very wide interpretation to each term, we people of the blond stock love courage, honesty, generosity, industry and restraint in one another, with a relative value upon these qualities in much the order given. We despise the coward, the sneak, the mean man, the lazy fellow and the intemperate chap in somewhat the same order of values. These virtues and vices are virtues and vices all over the world, because we happen to live everywhere under approximately the same conditions ;

but as we amble about the globe we find that in various quarters, in relation to various differences of breed and climate, they are rated in various degrees of importance.

Honesty, truth, sincerity, straightforwardness, frankness, or whatever you like to call it, is appreciated as an abstract virtue wherever the sun rises and sets, but this does not prevent it having a different rating in the scale of virtues in Teheran and Duluth. As it happens in China, where things are notoriously done backwards, the order in which the abstract virtues are ordinarily rated in everyday life is precisely opposite to our inherited and inherent appraisement of them. It would be very unphilosophical indeed to say that we are right and they are wrong. So long as philosophy recognizes that different standards of right and wrong, different ratings of the virtues, can exist among men, we must either accept some allegedly divine revelation upon the subject of right and wrong or, reject-ing all supposedly authoritative revelations, judge ethical systems, standards of manhood, and the like, by our own, if we are not judicially inclined ; or by the tangible results of the alien systems if we have the judicial temperament.

In China most of the positive qualities which we, at heart, admire in a man are positive nuisances. We are essentially and fundamentally aggressive. We are impelled by our natures to do something, whether right or wrong, and we admire a man who is actively ■v\Trong-doing more than a man who is passively correct. We hate stagnation and we have no sympathy with the religious systems which see eternal bliss in eternal nothingness. To the Oriental who j&nds his greatest joy in doing, thinking and feeling nothing, we are therefore as alien and as incomprehensible as the wasp in a bottle. With them, at their best, we have the same fundamental sympathy that we have with the toad which is supposed to hibernate in a rock through several geological periods. In the East, passivity, negation, the peace that passeth understanding, the willing absorption into the void, the voluntary loss of individuality in a lethean universe of soul, are synonymous with happiness. Blessed inaction does not appeal to the blond man's mind. He wants to carry on and he wants to be himself while he is

doing it. He would rather entertain the idea of being blown to perdition and done with it, than that of being wafted on angels' wings to a life of balmy drowsiness. " Rest, rest for the weary " is not a Teutonic aspiration ; it is imported, and has been fostered by the slavelings among us. If one wants to know what the real white man would like in the next world he must read a heathen account of Walhalla. In Walhalla they fight all day long and drink all night long. Struggle and intoxi-cation constituted our ancestors' highest conception of happiness. Struggle and enthusiasm are still ours. We've foimd other things to drink than mead and ale, and other monsters to fight than the Wolf Furnis, but what we still want, if we have to go on, is a chance to be doing — not absorption into nothingness. Con-trast this with Nirvana and you will understand how and where the West difiers from the East.

The difference between the Anglo-Saxon and the Chinese standards of manhood is exemplified in nothing so much as the attitude of the two races towards sport. There is not one Chinese in ten thousand who really shares with the average Occidental his love of hard exercise, rough games and risky adventures. We like to use ourselves roughly and believe that it is good for our children to be trained to rough usage. The Chinese love ease, inactivity, peace, and what we should consider a colourless existence ; and the greater their wealth the more are their children sheltered from hardship and rough usage.

The Chinese are even fonder of a spectacle than we are, and will watch games with the most intense interest, enjoy exhibitions of athletic prowess, feats of strength, and like to read and talk about rash adventures ; but the refined and accomplished Chinese would shrink from the very thought of providing his fellows with any such spectacles and from participating in dangerous en-deavours. The athlete in China is nearly always a professional, in whatever field, and diverts his fellows for pay just as the actor does. The story of the Chinese official who watched several foreign friends struggle through a strenuous set of lawn tennis on a hot day has been often told, but it typifies the Chinese attitude so well that it is worth repeating. He said, when they were finished, that it appeared to be an excellent game, but asked

why they did not pay coolies to do it so that they could sit at their ease in the shade and enjoy it themselves.

Ease and safety are at such a premium in the East that no one dreams of exerting himself physically or mentally or of risking his bones, without hope of tangible reward. One encoun-ters just enough exceptions to this rule to prove it a sure one. Chinese students study that they may some day be fat officials ; Chinese soldiers fight for food, money and loot ; Chinese travel about on one errand or another when they have to ; or when the prize to be won at the end of the journey is a comparatively rich one, but the mere business of going out of one's own gate is considered a hardship for which there should be tangible compensations. The foreigner who travels in rough and remote districts earning nothing thereby and acquiring nothing but hard knocks and information which he cannot exchange for ready money, is simply mad. Nine-tenths of the people will not believe that such beings exist at all. They are certain that we, who seem able to live in such luxury when static, are richly rewarded by our Governments or by someone else for riding off to the ends of China, sleeping in hovels, eating poor food, facing all kinds of weather and running serious risks in the wild border countries. Doing such things for the fun of it, or for the love of it, is beyond their comprehension, because they have no urge in their own souls to do such things. When you find one that has, he is a rare bird and is usually well worth knowing.

The Chinese therefore have nothing of our appreciation of sport for sport's sake. They are beginning to comprehend the Western idea of sport for health's sake, the value of exercise, open air, sunlight, the idea that a mind is all the saner for being housed in a sovmd body, but those who are ready to apply these ideas in person are still few and far between. There has been some tendency to introduce games into Chinese schools, and one sees a good deal of tennis, football, calisthenics and the like now among the youths of every big community, but this is simply because such exercises are a part of the newly imported system of education, taken over bodily in emulation of the foreigner. In the same spirit Chinese now own country houses,

own and ride race-ponies, go to the seaside resorts and swim and walk in the summer, and otherwise indulge in the peculiar diversions of the foreigner. But this emulation which is so flattering to some foreigners, and nearly always appeals to the tourists as evidence of the benign effect of democracy, is, like the adoption of foreign clothes and customs, the adoption of foreign styles in architecture and furniture, the study of foreign languages, the study of foreign military practice, the feeble pretence at a foreignized administration of justice, and the still feebler burlesque upon representative government which we call the Republic, only another groping and fumbling in the dark after the secret of Occidental strength, success and prosperity. Such strivings are pathetic when one understands that they must always be superficial imitations, because these people do not have in them, and consistently breed out of every race that they have absorbed, that passionate urge to struggle and that passion for high enthusiasms which drive our folk from birth to death and which our ancestors hoped would be rewarded in Heaven by the right to fight and drink, day and night, for all eternity.

At some time in the remote past the original Chinese believed in the worth of what we should call the manly sports. No gentleman of the classical age was really accomplished who was not an adept at archery and charioteering, both valuable in war and the chase. In Confucius's time the tradition of these standards still prevailed and, as the sage was such a slave to the past, he was bound to pass these traditions along, although he was much more concerned with the length of his night-gowns than the state of his biceps. The story is told that a certain man once remarked in the philosopher's hearing that though he was a great scholar he was not famed for the manly accomplishments. This was tantamount to a charge of lack of respect for antiquity, so Confucius thought awhile and then remarked that he supposed he would have to take up charioteer-ing. How he got along with it we do not know, but students of the classics, when faced with the charge that the Chinese have not encouraged manly exercises, are delighted to point out that if Confucius could handle a team of horses in the mili-

tary manoeuvres of the time, over the roads that may be pre-sumed to have existed then, he was not a pedantic weakling. He is said to have been a very tall man, and it is possible that he was physically a strong one, but one gathers from the literature of a period antedating him by some centuries that the manly exercises prescribed for the accomplished gentleman had already been reduced to ritualistic performances, in which attention to the minutiae of form and ceremony were a hundred times more important than real physical proficiency. Nothing could be more absurd than the rules set forth for a high-class archery meet in the " / Z/i," a semi-sacred book of etiquette which is supposed to have been WTitten nearly three thousand years ago, that is, at the opening of the historical period. Hitting the target was of minor importance. It was really important, however, to note whether the contestants were correct in posture, style, and in keeping step with the music which accompanied the performance. If the contestant hit the target but made the wrong gesture when accepting his wine, he might just as well have stayed at home. If he postured or shot out of time with the music, he was a tyro.

In short, some centuries before the time of Confucius, the tradition of manly sport still dominated the minds of the Chinese, but as they were already slaves to ceremony and already inclined to find bliss in placid inaction, sport had been reduced to a theatrical show, in which a pompous display of form completely overshadowed all standards of efficiency and skill. Charioteering for the cultured was probably an elegant show of proficiency in the proprieties rather than a show of real horsemanship. Real archery and real horsemanship were left to the coolies paid to be proficient in them, or to hired barbarians who were skilled in such matters because they enjoyed them.

The actual business of fighting has never been considered the province of a real Chinese gentleman during the past 2,500 years, and therefore he has never been expected to be more than theatrically proficient physically in any form of exercise. Archery was a favourite Manchu sport, and the Manchus were, in their time, splendid horsemen, so that in and about Peking there is still a good market for bows and for fast ponies, trained

to pace ; but if one now undertakes to learn archery from a local adept he will find that much more stress is laid upon pose, poise and posture than upon shooting, and that the fast ponies are not bought that their owners may race them and prove their skill, but that grooms may ride them up and down a short track to show off their paces while the owners sit under an awning drinking tea and comparing notes.

In the ancient books there is much said of hunting expeditions, and one gathers from history that each fresh influx of bar-barians brought with it fresh enthusiasm for the chase. The last of them, the Manchus, still keep hounds and hawks in Peking, languishing on leashes or chained to perches, as tokens of their ancestral tastes ; but few Manchus really hunt now for sport and no Chinese ever does. Game-hunters hunt for the market ; and if there are amateur fishermen in China they fish with a keen desire to replenish the larder and get something for nothing. On the Chinese stage there are constant repre-sentations of warlike scenes in which the ornate hero dances about exposing his back to the enemy as often as his front, and is, nevertheless, presumed to be mowing down hundreds. The average Chinese when called upon to defend himself — a situation which always surprises and grieves him — has no better standard to hark back to than the acrobatics of the stage hero, and makes such a clown of himself that few would be cruel enough to hit him.

It would be both useless and unjust to try to demonstrate that the Chinese is, under all conditions, a coward. He simply is not inherently bold and therefore does not admire courage under all conditions as we do, and would be inclined to approve of caution in many cases where we should pronounce caution cowardice. When he feels called upon to display courage the trouble-dodging Chinese can be as reckless of life and limb as any other, and is often so cool in the face of danger which cannot be avoided as to appear utterly nerveless. The Chinese soldier, who is paid to fight and believes in his leader, fights bravely ; but if he hasn't been paid, if he loses confidence in his leader, or if he thinks the cause hopelessly lost, he conceives it no shame to secure his own skin in flight, shedding his uniform

and weapons as he goes. Many a meek old man who would not in daily life say boo to a goose and who trembled whenever he heard the Emperor mentioned, has accepted an appointment as Imperial Censor and risked his neck time and again in boldly reproving the Son of Heaven for his mistakes or follies. To save his face or discharge what he conceives to be binding obligations, the timidest is often as bold as a lion. Being good gamblers the Chinese will take any risk for a sufi&ciently high reward, but take no chances for the joy of it, or the fun of it, and conceive no particular respect for a man who does. Life is never too tame for the Chinese rank and file, as it is for so mapy Occidentals ; so that while there have been and are many brave Chinese in the face of unavoidable danger, there have been few great adventurers of the type with which the history of Europe is crowded. The great trouble-hunting heroes of our fiction, from Beowulf to Captain Blood, would be dangerous madmen in the sight of the well-balanced Chinese, the sort of folk whom he would instinctively avoid.

For these same good reasons, which the Chinese who imitate Western ways in the hope of learning how their country may be great and strong, have not fathomed and cannot, the Chinese cannot understand as we do that the same inherent qualities which force us to admire reckless courage — valour displayed where discretion would not only do just as well, but would be wiser and be more conducive to everyone's comfort — impel the Occidental to boldness in constructive as well as destructive enterprises, send him chasing high ideals as well as pursuing trouble, and are precisely the qualities which make for at least our material greatness in this world.

CHAPTER V (PART 2 OF 3)

By the same token the passive quality in the Chinese, which prompts them to admire courage only when their own peculiar code calls for it and to regard boldness under all other circum-stances as sheer folly, is recognized by every Occidental living in China as the one essential difference between the Chinese people and the foreigners among them and the one essential Chinese shortcoming which disqualifies them for all time from worldly greatness — that is material greatness in a material world in which the aggressive whites are still at large. As

w.w.o. M

long as the white races retain what the Chinese must regard as their barbarous virility, their energy, creative instinct, aggres-Biveness and taste for dangerous adventure, the people who lack this virility in body and mind must, by the nature of things in a material world, play second fiddle.

Time after time in Chinese history we read of Chinese Emperors buying peace from the Huns, Turks, and other savages on their borders through the gift of Imperial princesses to nomad chief-tains. One has to know how thoroughly the Chinese despised the " rank smelling Tartar " to understand what this meant. One must not suppose that it was as though the King of Spain married his daughter to the King of Italy to effect an alliance. Refined and delicately nurtured girls, accustomed to every luxury which an effete court could afford, were sent into the remote wilderness, blasted by the most rigorous climate, to live in a felt tent with skin-clad savages who never washed, who fed like animals from a common pot over an acrid dung fire, and whose chief relaxation was drinking to satiety from the skulls of those whom they had slaughtered. Exile among these people the Chinese have regarded, from the beginning of time down to the present day, as a most hideous fate. For an Emperor to send his daughter among them to stave off their attacks for a few years or to buy one horde's services against another Was as though the King of England were to send his daughter as a present to the chief of the Zulus to buy peace for his dominion in South Africa, or as though the Emperor of Russia had sent a princess to a tribe of rotten-fish-eaters in the Yakutsk to extend his domains.

In the writer's mind this explains better than anything else the quality of the much advertised Chinese love of peace, and shows how the scales in China tip down on the side of discretion and expediency where with us they would tip to the side of courage. It is not necessary to point out how impossible this peddling of daughters would be in an Anglo-Saxon State. Not only would no ruler dream of buying peace or new realms from despised savages in this fashion, but no people would permit it. In the American wars with the Sioux Indians, can one imagine that the frontiersmen would rather have had the President buy

immunity from Indian raids for them by giving his daughter in marriage to an Indian chief than have organized to fight the savages ? Scarcely. But for such expediencies the " peace loving " Chinese have always been ready, and are still. In seasons of distress, panders and bawds always swarm over stricken areas, buying girls from their parents for the houses of prostitution in the big cities. There never fail to be thousands of families ready to sell their girls and men ready to sell their wives into a life of shame to alleviate their own distress. If the Chinese were a people who laid little stress upon morals this traffic would appear in a different light, but it goes on for the most part in northern rustic communities where the standard of morals is puritanically rigid and where chastity among women is at almost as high a premium as among the Arabs. One can easily imagine that isolated cases of such deals could be discovered in every Occidental community, but only among the dregs of society, not among honest, self-respecting country folk. No community would tolerate it, if it became known, and such parents or husbands would be given short shrift among us.

It may be argued that the Chinese put a lower rating upon women than we do, but a lower rating of women implies a lower standard of manhood, which is just what the writer is trying to illustrate. Among fighting races every sacrifice is made for the protection of the women and children, because the women are the breeders and the children the warriors or breeders of the coming generation, and their loss would mean the extinction of the tribe while the loss of the majority of the men would mean only a temporary set-back. "WTien a fighting people become a civilized people this tradition of consideration for women and children becomes what we know as chivalry. Its existence is a testimony to the existence of courage and fighting capacity in the breed. The lack of it is a proof of a low standard of manhood both in the past and the present. About the year A.D. 900 the city of Tsangchow suffered a protracted siege. It was thought that relief would come if the garrison could hold out for a few months longer, so, to ensure their own preservation, the bold defenders fattened the women and children on bran

and slaughtered them for food as occasion demanded. Such tactics, it need scarcely be said, are against all the instincts of a superior breed. They prove a biological inferiority which no amount of education or religion can materially affect.

Everywhere one sees among the Chinese a strong tendency to bully and exploit the weak and cringe before the strong. The Chinese coolie under a master is abjectly docile, and will meekly submit to much verbal and physical abuse, which an upstanding Anglo-Saxon yokel would resent with his fists or any weapon that came to hand against any superior force, regardless of the consequences. A man in a fat job will suffer much humiliation to retain it ; and the average Chinese will lightly abandon independence and principles before a show of superior force if he can contrive at the same time to save his face. The meek coolie in a soldier's uniform and armed with a gun is, except in the presence of some one who has the power of life and death over him, the most objectionable creature on earth. He exploits the timidity of his unarmed fellow-countrymen in a thousand ways which no other people would tolerate, but once disarmed or overpowered, is again the cringing docile coolie. This state of things the Chinese take as a matter of course and think it no great shame to submit to it, which again illustrates the difference between the quality of courage in the East and the West.

Next to courage, the Occident probably admires honesty of thought, speech and action in a man, and regards honesty as a high test of manliness. In fact honesty and courage are so often interdependent that the two qualities are almost one, just as cowardice and dishonesty are often so closely related as to seem different terms for a single weakness. The Chinese also profess to admire honesty, but experience in the country will very soon prove that their standard of honesty, sincerity and truth is something astonishingly different from ours. Although the phrase, " A Chinaman's word is as good as his bond," has been given the widest possible advertising, there is probably no standard book on China within which the author has not recorded that the Chinese are, from start to finish, a thoroughly men-dacious people. They lie with malice aforethought ; and they also lie innocently as children do because they are unmoral and

their imaginations get the better of them. And they also lie for no apparent reason at all. They hate frankness and straight-forwardness, delight in roundabout methods, circumlocution in speech and make-believe so thinly veiled as to be laughable elsewhere. They lie to save their faces and to save other people's faces. They lie to be polite, as all civilized people do every-where, but polite lying in China is an art so highly developed that the Occidental can never even grasp the rudiments of it.

In others they love honesty of thought because it connotes to them a guilelessness and simplicity of mind which makes the honest man a ready victim. They like honesty in the Mongols because it indicates that simplicity which enables a Chinese to buy the nomad's skins and wool and camel hair at a quarter of their value and to pay for them with silver bullion which is three-fourths pewter. They believe that the foreigner is honest in the same way and therefore love to do business with him, because they feel sure that they will get from him honest goods at no more than their real worth and can then sell to him rubbish at triple its worth. When they are occasionally deceived by an Occidental rogue, as dishonest as they are, they are most pro-foundly hurt and grieved ; but at the same time they develop a great respect for him as a clever fellow, an equal worthy of their steel. Occidental rogues in China invariably establish really close friendships with the Chinese, while the honest man, sin-cerely desirous of being a friend, is held at arm's length and praised as the ordinary worldling praises the austerity of the saints.

When honesty takes the form in the Occidental of outspoken-ness, however, the Chinese flee in horror. Frankness is a terrible menace to " face ", to that holiest of all holy things, the Oriental amour-propre. In nothing is it so disconcerting as in ofl&cial relations. The foreign consular or diplomatic official who will not oil the wheels of diplomacy with an effusion of lies and make-believe is feared and detested. The business man who fights circumlocution and roundabout methods gets no business. Truth is often crude in the Occident ; it is almost always indecent in the East. The man who always insists upon telling the truth, hearing the truth, acting the truth, and upon exacting the

same conduct from others is persona non grata in China, except with a few rare spirits who create endless discomfort for their fellows in China but who, more often than might be expected, rise to such an eminence that they are as universally famed as they are universally feared.

All Chinese business is done on the caveat emptor basis. The Occidental horse coper's commercial ethics rule every market in China. There is absolutely no good faith in money matters except within the family or among friends boimd by the closest ties. That honesty is often the best policy is quite clearly recognized, but it is only a policy and not a guiding principle. If A buys regularly from B on credit and realizes a handsome profit on every turnover, it does not pay A to swindle 5 on a single transaction and thereby lose a profitable connection. Under such conditions A's word is certainly as good as his bond. What is the use of writing down a pledge the breach of which would entail a permanent loss ? But when the connection is no longer profitable nor promising and a breach of contract would benefit A, he has no more regard for a written bond than a verbal one if he believes B powerless to enforce collection. In China when honesty ceases to yield returns it is a policy to be discarded at the first available opportunity, as scores of foreign merchants can testify from the experience of the past few years.

In witness of this truth one has only to call the Chinese Govern-ment to the stand. While the credit of the Government meant profit to the Government in the form of new loans, the credit of the Government was scrupulously maintained. Foreigners thought that it was a matter of " face " for the Government to recognize its obligations and discharge them scrupulously. When the foreigners got it into their heads, however, that more money was not good for China ; that she ought to be taught to depend upon her own resources ; and when loans were there-fore generally discouraged, China saw that honesty in the form of recognition of obligations was no longer good policy, and has therefore, for some years past, made it her business to default upon every loan which could be ignored with impunity, dallying only with those which promised further credit.

Because foreign gunboats can visit the majority of the ports

where import customs taxes are collected in appreciable amomits, and because the foreign powers have shown a tendency to use gunboats in the defence of the Customs Service, policy has enjoined honesty upon various Chinese Governments in the service of those loans secured upon the Customs receipts, but China laughs raucously at other foreign creditors who have not this security, as she ignores her obligations to them, and con-tinues to float loans upon the Customs surplus — the so-called domestic loans — under the protection of foreign gunboats. The fact that China raises annually large sums upon a foreign pro-tected security for purposes largely wasteful and destructive, while she thumbs her nose at other foreign creditors who have chosen securities which gunboats cannot command, is eloquent comment in itself upon the Chinese respect for both the verbal and the written bond. The Chinaman's bond, like his word, is good when it does not pay him to break it, or when the holder of liis pledge has power to force him to keep it. To this the writer could cite a sufficient number of striking exceptions out of his experience to prove the rule.

Next to the qualities of courage and honesty in a man, we Anglo-Saxons like generosity — the open mind and the open hand. Liberality and tolerance are essential qualities of the big soid in all English-speaking countries and in a good many others. Meanness of spirit and miserliness are with us vices which we go to no great pains to condone. Nearly all of our greatest sins against these innate standards of ours have been perpetrated in the name of religion, while from similar crimes the Chinese, throughout their history, have been singularly free. An excess of enthusiasm for things of the spirit, bordering often upon intoxication or insanity, has prompted our Occidental folk over and over again to commit outrages against their better natures, from which the Chinese have been saved by a lack of enthusiasm often approaching complete indifPerence.

Christianity was not a spontaneous product of the northern European mind. Coming from Asia into southern Europe, it brought with it countless rites and traditions which were so alien and exotic that they required interpretation. The first interpretations were made in southern Europe, and when Chris-

tianity came into the north it had acquired many trimmings which were as exotic there as the Asiatic traditions had been in the south, and the whole faith required still further interpre-tation and adaptation before it was felt to be a fitting garment for the northern soid. The Northerners, like the Southerners, developed an enormous enthusiasm for the faith in its essentials. They found in it an outlet for the strenuous spiritual steam which was for ever threatening an explosion in them, but they insisted upon putting interpretations upon it which suited their natures and confirmed their own best traditions. For something like fifteen centuries we have been fighting among ourselves to try to determine how an Oriental religion can best be made to fit a Latin, Celtic, Teutonic or Slavic soul under various conditions, each group so enthusiastic about the various styles of Christianity that it evolved as to be impatient of all others. The struggle is not over yet, as the vast number of well supported cults proves, but nearly every one who professes Christianity (not to mention the great number who have ceased to do so) is now ready to admit that it has been a disgraceful and futile struggle. The sanity and sobriety which result from exhaustion have brought with them an appreciation of broad-mindedness and tolerance, with which our ancestors seem to have been liberally enough endowed before the introduction of Christianity. We have to get what satisfaction we can out of the fact that after all these centuries of intensive education in intolerance we are now returning rapidly and easily to our ancestral respect for generosity of spirit as well as of hand. It is better to have lost it and regained it than to have discovered that meanness of spirit, inspired through so many generations by our misguided enthusiasms, had killed the quality of generosity in us.

The Chinese have a reputation for broadmindedness which is largely founded upon their indifference to religion. Had they possessed the same capacity for mad religious enthusiasms, they might have had a very different reputation. But the Chinese are not religious, they are only superstitious — a fact which every foreign missionary in China will admit about all Chinese except his own converts. The highly cultivated Chinese,

who denounces superstition, thinks with Confucius that the affairs of the supernatural world are not worthy of serious discussion, and, if he is not an out-and-out atheist, he professes simply to believe in a very nebulous Power above, known as Heaven or the Supreme Ruler, with whom he has and can have no direct traffic. Also, he either worships or pays conventional deference to the memory of his ancestors, depending upon the point to which he has carried his Rationalism.

The masses, however, believe in the existence of any and all gods, and in any number of good and evil spirits, spirit-possessed animals, fairies, household gods and tutelary saints presiding over localities, mountains, streams, professions and trades. They have cheerfully believed so much in the past that one can exhume from their current legends the elements of almost every dead and living faith. Faith, doctrine and ethics have so little to do with this conglomeration of superstitions that a Chinese with a mild religious turn can, without conscious inconsistency, patronize the gods and devils of three or four conflicting religions, including the Christian. Fear of the unknown prompts him to propitiate or exorcise spirits at every turn in his existence, but this implies no real enthusiasm for or against the individual god or demon vdih which he thinks it wise to have dealings, unless he imagines that he has been injured by or has received some benefit from some particular spirit. He develops the keenest interest in the spirit world when he is in trouble and goes from shrine to shrine, from cult to cult, and eventually perhaps attaches himself permanently to the one from whom he imagines that he received help, announcing that he is a Buddhist or a Taoist or a Christian, or that he is under the protection of one of the unattached spirits of hazy genealogy.

The theatrical side of ritual makes a strong appeal to the Chinese, who have a real passion for ceremony and mummery, and every faith that has come into China with a spectacular ritual and plenty of seemingly mysterious forms, has enlisted masses of followers who love to participate in such doings as chil-dren do, but who remain for the most part indifferent to the creed or the ethical code that goes with them. Cultured folk in China not infrequently take to this or that religion and study

its tenets assiduously, but the writer, wlio lias known many such, has almost always discovered that these studies were regarded in the light of intellectual exercises having very little to do with the spirit. Officials out of office not infrequently take up the study of Buddhist lore and enter eagerly into Buddhist polemics, much as the Occidental Rationalist on a vacation might study with zest the writings of the Church Fathers. But the Chinese with his passion for acting must make a play of it, burn incense, surround himself with monks, assume an ascetic mien and otherwise give his studies the right setting. Then, when he gets a chance to resume office, all the " properties " go into the rubbish bin, he returns to his old mode of life, and he devotes much more energy to the exploitation of his position than he did to an understanding of doctrine.

It will be understood that where' there is so little capacity for religious enthusiasm, there can be very little religious persecution, and since most of such persecution as there has been has had a political rather than a religious significance, the Chinese have acquired abroad a reputation for great generosity of spirit. In matters in which they are really interested, however, they are the most intolerant people on earth, though caution puts a check upon an open demonstration of it. The Boxer movement in 1900 was not an anti-religious movement, but an anti-foreign movement, inspired by Chinese intolerance of the aliens in the country who would not conform to Chinese ways, and, though China has superficially adopted so many things in the last twenty years from abroad, and seems on the surface to be con-forming to Occidental tactics in many ways, the intolerance for the foreigner who will not become a Chinese in spirit and standards is more intense now than it was in 1900, and only the means and the courage are lacking to make a much more thorough display of it than the sporadic efiort of the peasant Boxers which the Empress-Dowager god-mothered.

And in this attitude the Chinese are perfectly justified and would feel even more intensely, and show it even more openly if they had the same capacity for enthusiasm as the Occidental. They regard themselves as a superior people who, by rights, should be shaping us to their standard and ways, dominating us

and civilizing us ; but instead of this we invade and dominate the East and have the power not only to bring our own standards with us and adhere to them, but also to make them the stan-dards of relations with the Oriental. They see in the present situation the beginnings of a race struggle and a cultural struggle in which they are likely to lose, and they would be small fry indeed if they did not resent it. The feebleness of their resistance is no proof of their greater tolerance ; it is only evidence of a lack of both enthusiasm and virility in what every Oriental feels, consciously or subconsciously, is a life and death struggle.

Apart from all questions of religious intolerance, wherein our ancestors have been such heinous sinners against their own innate love of the generous spirit, there has survived through all ages in the Anglo-Saxon the passion for fair play which makes a victory won over an opponent in distress a positive disgrace. This feeling has never existed in China. Even when our lives are at stake we think it mean to kick a man who is down. There are few Orientals who would not regard that as the precise moment for delivering the most vicious blow.

The writer does not believe that any northern European in perusing the Old Testament has ever really admired the ancient Hebrews who, when establishing their hold upon the Promised Land, captured a city after the inhabitants had been cajoled into submitting to the rite of circumcision. Such a victory would leave a bad taste in the mouth of the most savage Viking. It would be cursed to-day by the roughest Limehouse bully. But it would appeal to the average Chinese as a very clever and admirable stroke.

When the Danish pirates in the eighth century began to harry the coasts of England, the settled Anglo-Saxon invaders were already home-loving farmers, having little in* common with their marauding heathen kindred. The depredations of the Danes engendered a detestation of them which it is hard to appreciate in this generation. Yet one of the best descriptive battle stories in old English literature, furnished evidence that even in their fights with the detested Vikings, the harried and desperate Anglo-Saxons could not be untrue to their traditional love of generosity of the spirit.

On a certain occasion when the Anglo-Saxons were on the defensive, the Viking long boats pulled up to a muddy river-bank and were grounded, while the heathern marauders leaped overboard fully armed to wade ashore and attack a Saxon force that held the high ground. Instead of shallow water and hard sand the invaders found themselves up to their thighs in sticky mud, hopelessly mired and an easy target for the defenders. Seeing the plight of the abominable heathens, the Saxons with-held their fire and instead of cutting them down, retired up the slope, abandoning their advantage and shouting to the Vikings that when they had reached dry land and had washed their legs, they would be ready for them. It would amaze the Chinese to find in their literature a counterpart to this incident. The spirit which made it possible was dead in China before history began.

The hard economic conditions in China, prevailing through many centuries, have shaped the Chinese attitude towards open-handedness in a rather peculiar mould. It is difficult for the new-comer to discover when and where open-handedness is admired and where it simply earns him contempt. One dis-covers after a time that it is unkind, through competition or meanness, to crowd a Chinese absolutely out of existence ; but that it is not unkind to grant him just sufficient toe-hold upon life so that he may continue in infinite pain and misery to hang on.

Every man in China has an inalienable right to a bare existence, but if he wants more than that he will have to fight a very cruel and ruthless world to get it. It is a most heinous offence in China to deprive a man wholly of his means of subsistence, but few scruples are felt about taking everything from him but the power to struggle on. Man's right to happiness is not conceded, but his right to crawl along in misery is. The incessant struggle for a little more than this, in an over-populated coimtry with few great sources of wealth, and those poorly developed, is there-fore a hard game without rules, in which all are on the defensive, their families and relatives guarding their backs, and in which an inch gained by meanness, guile or treachery is an inch gained and nothing said about the means. Under such conditions it can

be well imagined that real generosity is as greatly admired as it is respected ; but that, being so rare, displays of it are always under suspicion and the recipient of gifts or liberal treatment in any form credits the giver with every possible ulterior motive before he can be convinced that he is really generous.

CHAPTER V (PART 3 OF 3)

To strike a balance between the very rich and the very poor, so that all may survive no matter how miserably, convention demands in China that the very rich man should be carelessly liberal with a certain proportion of his money, that the middle-class person with a moderate income should be moderately indifferent to lucre, and that the poor man should be inordinately mean without scruple. A constant struggle therefore goes on to loot from the rich what they ought by rights to be yielding up and, on the rich man's part, to satisfy society by making as much display of generosity and carelessness about expendi-ture in public as possible while really yielding up as little as possible.

In this struggle no real generosity is expected nor credited to a donor's account, " Face " demands that, earning or stealing so much, he should be just so liberal. If he can make a show of generosity and at the same time continue to be mean, " face " is saved, he is a winner in the struggle and is a very clever fellow, whom all would envy and admire.

A foreigner's servants in China go to tremendous pains to discover just about how much his income is, so that they may judge to what precise extent he ought to be looted. If he con-trives to deceive his staff and keep expenses down without seem-ing mean, he is a clever fellow whom they admire greatly ; but if he is fussily and openly mean and cuts the servants' graft down to too low a figure out of obvious penuriousness, he loses " face " and they despise him. Again, if he allows his following to rob him well beyond the limits to which they are entitled and is carelessly generous beyond his means, he is simply a fool to be looted without scruple or respect. A great proportion of the foreigners in China fall into this last category and are con-sequently held in contempt. Most of the Great Powers in their dealings with China make similar mistakes and are similarly despised. The obviously wealthy person in China who never

gives a beggar a copper is an outlaw against the code of " face " and against the law that all have a right to a miserable existence. But if he were to give a beggar a dollar or a new suit of clothes, all the beggars would roar with merriment and tell one another what a contemptible fool So-and-so was.

Like all Orientals, the Chinese are great givers of gifts. But gifts made in the true spirit of generosity or goodwill are as rare as the appearances of the phoenix. They are either bribes or tribute. The man who has a favour to ask never fails to accom-pany his request with a gift and, if it is accepted, he expects some consideration for his petition. The acceptance of a gift is a promise of help or of continued patronage in one form or another. In ancient China only the Emperor could receive presents with-out making or promising a return. The recipient of a gift in China can assign three reasons only for its arrival. The first and most likely is that the giver wants something ; the second and most flattering is that he is a sincere admirer and is paying tribute ; and the third is that the giver is a simpleton moved by some silly impulse which the recipient cannot fathom. Real generosity is recognized only in gifts from superiors of whose sanity and common sense there can be no question — that is, gifts from persons who cannot possibly want anything from the recipient, who certainly are not paying tribute, and who are not simpletons. The Chinese are really grateful for such presents, and a grateful Oriental can be devotedly grateful ; but it is seldom that the foreigner elicits such gratitude because there are very few foreigners whom any Chinese would regard as a real superior. A polite show of gratitude much more often covers a contempt for the simple barbarian from whom liberality can be so easily wheedled.

Scores of writers, enlarging upon China's value to the world as a potential market and telling what a great producer China will be when she develops modern industries and modern agri-cultural methods, have dwelt upon the enormous industry of these yellow millions, and the Chinese themselves lay great stress upon it and consider it a virtue much more vital to the race than we do. The Chinese would much rather have for an asso-ciate an industrious man than an honest or courageous man.

At the same time the Chinese put upon absolute ease a valuation which is foreign to us ; and the hours in the lives of millions of Orientals which cannot, for one reason or another, be devoted to profit-making industry of one sort or another, are happily-spent in an absolute idleness which would shortly become torture for any Occidental who was not afflicted with hookworm. To be forced to do nothing and think nothing, just to vegetate, is bliss in the East where it is a punishment in the West. Imprison-ment without hard labour in the Orient, under model conditions, will never be a real punishment. Work from which he derives nothing is real torture for him. Coniinemeilt without means of physical or mental diversion drives the Anglo-Saxon of normal propensities to madness and the most intense misanthropy. The Oriental, unless the conditions are so bad physically that he cannot attain real ease, enters upon such a career with the idea that he has reached Elysium before his time. In the West the desire to be doing something, useful or otherwise, is so common that its absence is conspicuous in those who lack it. In the East the desire to be doing something is almost never divorced from the desire to acquire something, and, when there is no opportunity to acquire anything, the great overwhelming desire is to be doing nothing.

Industry in the Orient is not spontaneous ; it is born of grave necessity. The traveller who sees no more of China than the big ports will see thousands of men everywhere doing mule's work from dawn till dark, taxing frail bodies and lean muscles to the limit on poor food and for a minimum return. The Chinese shopkeeper takes down his shutters at daybreak and puts them up again when there is no more chance of business, though it be an hour before the following dawn. Those who travel through the country in summer will see the farmers hard at it in the fields before there is light to work by and long after sunset at night. He meets cartmen and muleteers trudging along their miserable roads hours before sunrise and even struggling along in the middle of the night. The casual observer gets the impres-sion that these folk are so hungry for toil that they simply cannot be kept away from it. He does not grasp the fact that these are some of the millions who are granted a bare toe-hold

upon life and that they are struggling to keep it, or some of the still more numerous millions who are struggling to get just a little ahead of the game so that they can enjoy perfect ease and watch others do the slave work. When working for himself the Chinese shows astonishing industry. He is struggling to reach the point where he can enjoy perfect rest in the shortest possible time.

The Chinese day labourer, working for another at a daily wage without adequate supervision, would furnish a striking cinema picture of slow motion. He will move no faster than he is driven, and it is no exaggeration to say that a dozen Chinese pick-and-shovel men, left to their own devices, will do less work in a week than two white labourers will do in a day. The number of idlers in any Chinese village or city street would amaze many folk abroad who think that the Chinese are passionately fond of work. The size of the crowd that has time to collect almost anywhere in China and stare vapidly at nothing for hours at a stretch is a constant revelation. If you hire a number of work-men on building construction you will be struck by the fact that they come early and go late, but that in the meanwhile they stop three times for food and twice for tea, while there is always some consignment of material unavoidably delayed which enables a good proportion to sit and stare at the others. It takes three times as many domestic servants to staff a house inadequately and get through the work in a slovenly fashion as it does to get through the work efficiently in Europe, and yet they seem to have much time to idle and sleep. The Chinese householder, if he can sit in his chair and get action by raising his voice, does not mind giving them orders and driving them all day long, coaxing and reprimanding them in turn, but the foreign housewife who keeps in pursuit of them, seeing that the work is done, looking for concealed dirt, guarding against too much squeeze on purchases and keeping the cook up to the mark, exhausts more nervous energy getting mediocre service from people who expect to be driven than if she did all the work well herself.

The longer one stays in China the larger he discovers is the class of gentlemen of leisure in a small way. This is partly because,

with few industries, there are not enough jobs to go round, and also because of the family system, under which the one man with a man's-sized job has dumped upon him a host of hungry kinsmen who simply potter about a little and spend most of the time staring at something. In every successful-looking shop one finds two or three assistants for every customer. The majority of these are relatives. Attached to some of the Government Ministries in Peking there are thousands with nominal jobs, with small pay it is true, but with almost nothing to do. Some only show up to draw their pay, others find this too onerous and send a servant. Quite apart from all these, however, there seem to be other millions of small investors who own a little land which some one else farms on shares, or a small share in a business, who idle on a trifling income and only occasionally turn over a small deal when it comes their way, by which they add something to their capital. They live very simple lives, requiring little and, like all the rest who are blessed with idleness, devote their leisure to gossip, tea drinking, simply vegetating placidly — and sleep. The Chinese are amazing sleepers. If the ability to sleep soundly anywhere, at any time, in any position, and for any length of time, is really the sign of a clear conscience, China deserves to inherit the earth.

The uses which the Chinese make of their leisure are in striking and significant contrast to the pastimes of the Occident. The Chinese aversion to sports as partaking of the character of unproductive labour, where they do not simply provide the idle one with a spectacle or provide a field for gambling, has already been remarked upon. Hobbies which require exertion of any sort are pursued by the smallest minority. Tea drinking and gossip, entailing neither energy nor exhilaration, are favourite pastimes. Reading for pastime is astonishingly rare, consider-ing the professed interest in and admiration for Chinese litera-ture. Conversation, in all walks of life, is almost invariably of " shop ", and one gathers the impression in the streets that the Chinese seldom talk of anything but food and money. Within the rank and file these are indeed the major topics and are only diluted by story-telling. The greatest of all national diversions is staring at something — at the theatre, at shop

w.w.c. ir

windows, at the passing crowd, at a procession of ants, at an old naan combing his whiskers, at the sore on a dog — nothing is too insignificant to draw the protracted and empty gaze of the idler and hold it for an indefinite time. Chinese never go for a walk unless they have an objective, but they do go strolling to find something to stare at. They also stroll to give their birds an airing.

Finally, they never work for the fun of it or because they simply cannot rest idle, as so many millions in the West must do or burst. They work for returns only. In short, recreation in China means inactivity, while to the majority of Occidentals it means a change of activity. Industry in China is inspired by economic necessity, and since necessities are so hard to acquire and luxuries so far beyond the reach of the great majority, the industry of the man who can get ahead of the game and acquire the means to both luxury and ease, is a greater spiritual asset in China than in countries where life is easier and where the great masses of the people are not just one stride ahead of starvation. The quality of Chinese industry is that of the patient, plodding draught animal, among the classes of folk that really do the hard work, not that of the highly strung horse that delights in his own speed. Laziness is only a vice in those who cannot afEord it.

Restraint is to some extent like industry, a virtue born of necessity, in China. On the average the Chinese are probably the most temperate in all things of the world's races. Grinding poverty has, of course, dictated great frugality in the majority of them for countless generations, so that the national traditions are all against extravagance, waste and self-indulgence ; but the average Chinese naturally does not have the intense feelings and appetites of the Occidental. Their enthusiasms can seldom be keyed up to as high a pitch as ours. They love mildly, hate mildly, and almost never pine away and die of a broken heart from any cause. One meets plenty of garrulous, volatile spirits who seem almost Gallic in their vivacity ; and many solemn, sober and serious-minded men, but very few really intense persons. In fact, the more one has to do with them, the more he feels that they are a race in whom the psychic flame is burning

low for want of fuel — much lower than in the Western races which are not removed by so many centuries of civilization from barbarism.

With fewer active impulses and less intense feelings, they have less than we to restrain and therefore find it easier. Their love of peace, placidity, ease and quiet dignity prompts them to value restraint and temperance in one another. When the Chinese is a hedonist he indulges himself in the quiet, drowsy vices. When he wants to escape from himself or his troubles, he takes naturally to opium and not to alcohol. The opium habit and other quiet vices are not looked upon with disapproval in China so much because they poison body and soul, as because they are taken up by persons who cannot afford them and who ruin themselves and their families through indulgence. The wealthy man, who can afford to be a hedonist, is not severely criticized for his vices if they do not annoy his neighbours in any way. Restraint in China is a social virtue and not an abstract virtue. It is very highly valued because it makes for peace and quiet, not because it implies soul-discipline. We dislike the " drunk and disorderly " person because he disturbs the peace and makes a nuisance of himself ; but we do not despise him for the breach of the peace, we despise him for his lack of self-discipline. The Chinese would not criticize him so bitterly for being a vicious mortal as for creating a disturbance. If he were to get drunk quietly and go to sleep, and if this per-formance entailed no economic loss to himself or his family, it would be regarded quite dispassionately by the average Chinese and would call for no more comment than any other harmless idiosyncrasy. One often hears opium-smoking bitterly de-nounced in Chinese circles — but always on the same ground : Those who cannot afford to smoke the drug acquire the habit and ruin their families to satisfy the growing craving. The writer has never heard the practice condemned in a person of wealth and leisure. Vice in China is only sin when it becomes in some way a public nuisance, when it impinges upon the peace of the community, and restraint is so precious in Chinese sight because it is conducive to peace. It is a convenience rather than a virtue. The man who gorges himself at every meal is

no sinner if lie can afford to pay for the food he consumes without depriving others of it.

There are times in China indeed when propriety demands that all restraint should be thrown to the winds and that one should lash himself into such a frenzy that he is in danger of apoplexy. It is quite the correct thing to do when one's " face " is in immi-nent peril and there is no other way of saving it. Under such circumstances the mild man who is really incapable of getting angry about anything, simulates wrath like an actor until he has raised his blood pressure to the danger-point, shrieking with supposed fury, until he is surrounded by a sufficient number of relatives, friends and neighbours to hold him under any circumstances, and then threatens murder, mayhem or suicide, and struggles with make-believe fury to carry out his threats. Such farcical orgies nearly always end in exhaustion, which sometimes lasts for days, and not infrequently end in an apoplectic fit and death. Such shows of temper are in no sense disgraceful. The code calls for them and they are therefore thoroughly proper ; but if a man were in cold blood to resent an injury with violence, without first shouting himself red in the face and giving the bystanders a chance to hold him, he would be guilty of a lack of restraint that would be scandalous and would brand him as a dangerous outlaw, no matter what the original provocation might have been. The fury of a Chinese mob is just as theatrical. When a situation, according to tradi-tion, calls for mob action, the mob proceeds to lash itself into a semblance of frenzy of which it is inherently incapable and commits the most hideous excesses out of the actor's passion for verisimilitude ; but each individual is always ready to recover his senses in a flash, to duck and run, when the game proves dangerous.

In all things, as in religion, the Chinese are (with exceptions of course) incapable of high exaltation, of overwhelming enthusiasms, of mad intoxication or of the divine frenzy under which the Occidental commits great deeds and great crimes. Because the psychic flame burns low and evenly in them, they find one another very comfortable people to live with, and because the same flame in the Westerner burns high, and sometimes

flares up in one way or another beyond his control, they find us, on the average, most uncomfortable folk to have about. Re-straint is with them a matter of temperament and they have to go mad to shed it. With us it is a matter of discipline and is likely to go up in shreds at the drop of the smallest spark. Hence, from their point of view, they are a race of natural gentlemen and we are a race of lightly leashed carnivorae who really ought to be in a Zoo. In China we are regarded with much the same feelings as a group of polite and sociable wolves would be in a flock of sheep. The sheep have no natural inclination to bite one another so they can herd together in perfect confidence, but the wolf on his good behaviour is always restraining his natural inclination to snap at his fellow or eat a lamb ; so, how-ever well the wolves behave, the sheep are never at their ease when exchanging compliments with them.

This figure of speech may not seem to be a happy one. If the Chinese were to call us wolves we should be entitled to resent it, if we were not displaying wolfish inclinations, but it does serve to illustrate quite well the great difference between the inherited temperament and the fundamental standards of the Chinese and the Occidental. Because of our ancestry and our instincts we should be more inclined to admire the well-behaved wolf than the browsing sheep, while the Chinese by virtue of his temperament would see in the well-behaved wolf nothing but a potential source of trouble, and would trade a dozen of the best wolves for one placid sheep any day. We like bold, straightforward, generous-minded fellows, with lots of virile energy but with enough check on their high spirits to make them tolerable neighbours. The Chinese like quiet, decor-ous folk who appreciate ease, win their battles by a roundabout exercise of craft and strategy, have a shrewd knowledge of the value of a penny, and have enough appreciation of the value of peace to be cautious and circumspect in all things, never rashly getting themselves or others into trouble, whether in a good or an evil cause.

The Chinese standard of manhood is essentially the standard of all Asia and of some peoples in Europe in whom there is an Asiatic strain. The opposing standard of manhood is most

vigorously upheld and cherished by the direct descendants of Tacitus's Teutons, numerically an insignij&cant fraction of humanity, a race more devoted to a display of courage than of caution ; fonder of risking life than of procreation ; given to destructive enthusiasms which have decimated whole nations whom common sense would have saved ; valuing kindness above self-interest ; mad about truth and the defence of truth ; blessed or cursed with an energy which has been destructive as often as constructive, if not oftener ; finding an outlet for this uncon-trollable steam in crusades, religious wars, wars about nothing, games which hold vast audiences in thrall, countless novels, poems, essays, musical scores and vast smears of paint, each trying not to conform but to be new and different, and finally climbing after ideals to the zenith. A very fair proportion of these mad folk now speak English and the rest speak allied tongues, and between us all we seem to have explored and conquered the greater portion of the insignificant planet on which we live and move and have our being. Diametrically opposed to us are the vast conglomerations of vari-coloured peoples with whom we cannot amalgamate without losing our characteristic traits and to whom we cannot submit without suppressing in ourselves the instincts which have made us a dominating race. We have to determine in our own minds, without sentiment, whether we are the fit appointed to survive, or whether we are simply a poisonous excrescence on the face of the universe, whose eradication would make for a better world.

There is no dodging this issue. Those who, like Bertrand Russell, see in the Chinese outlook the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, are entitled to their opinions ; but if they agree with him they condemn all the instincts of the white race to damnation, as the Church once did when it buried unbaptized babies outside consecrated ground, and vote for the extinction of a breed which will be neither subdued nor absorbed.

The question of selection between the Oriental and the Occi-dental (particularly the Anglo-Saxon) outlook upon life is no question of right and wrong ; it is a question of survival, a question of fitness to survive and rule. If we are eavages who would be well eliminated, whose standards are barbaric and

destructive, and if the Chinese and other Orientals have dis-covered the secret of happiness for all humanity, we were better out of the way, for we can no more change our spots than the leopard. Thanks to our aggressive qualities, temper them with piety as you may, we have either to be exterminated or to rule. The writer has set out to demonstrate what is fundamentally wrong with China, This task develops into a show of differences between the Easterner and the Westerner, of vital and funda-mental differences. If, in the course of these dissertations, he has inadvertently proved that the Chinese is a better cus-todian of humanity's interests than the Occidental, in the reader's opinion, he is content. The vast majority of China's fundamental ailments are then signs of health, and most of what we think distinguishes us is disease.

The rest of these essays are in the nature of an appendix. The story is here ended but the moral of it has to be applied. If the story is all wrong the application of the moral has no real significance. That China is in a frightful mess means nothing unless we are right and they are wrong, unless we are superior and they are inferior, unless we are entitled to rule or are elected for eventual extermination. The Anglo-Saxon sentimentalists would rather die a hundred times over than commit themselves to a decision on such a point, pro or con, but the Chinese wouldn't, and that is the whole point of all this verbiage. The funda-mental differences between the East and the West are such as can only be eradicated by evolution over a tremendous period and not by conferences, the promulgation of pleasing sentiments, education, or the inculcation of this or that religion. Improved communications have made the world so small that we cannot keep away from each other, and the differences are such that contact must mean incessant friction, unless it is soon and clearly recognized that the West dictates to and uses the East, or the East dictates to and uses the West ; whether Oriental standards are to be the standard of the world, or Occidental standards. These essays are written to put forward in the Occident what is fundamentally WTong with China, from the Occidental point of view, so that the reader may determine

whether he would rather be an Occidental and control the East, or submit to Oriental standards, sooner or later, and be dominated by the East.

The policy of Europe and America in China must finally be determined by this choice, and the earlier it is made the less devastating will the shock be to all concerned.

CHAPTER VI (PART 1 OF 5)

FOREIGN RELATIONS

IT is less than a century since China first gained some insight into the meaning of foreign relations on a basis of equality. Her rulers granted that such relations were possible only after several European Powers had demonstrated that if they liked they could put China in a subordinate position but that they were willing to treat her as an equal. China thought this concession very weak and sOly on their part, but was pleased to take advantage of it, and make believe that there could be friendly relations between nations treating as equals. She has never really believed it, however, and has only accepted the theory as a modus vivendi, a convenient camou-flage, pending the time when she could reassert her undoubted superiority.

Prior to the treaties negotiated at the point of a gun during the past century, China never entered into any agreements with alien States in which at least the fiction of her superiority was not maintained. All envoys who came to her court had to kow-tow to the Emperor, and it was always arranged that in correspondence the Son of Heaven was to be addressed as Father or Elder Brother, while the barbarian potentate who was enter-ing into relations with him had to call himself Son or Younger Brother. To keep up this show of superiority, China often had to pay heavily in one sort of tribute or another, remitted under the guise of " presents ". The abandonment of these pre-tences meant war. Either China was superior or she was con-quered, and the Emperor dead or fled. None of her barbarian neighbours ever offered to treat her as an equal and maintain friendly relations with her after they were in the position of

conquerors. Until they were ready to swallow her whole they pretended to look up to her as a superior, and then, when they were ready, they simply swallowed her and that was all there was to it. The thought that there were nations which might swallow others, and yet refrained from doing so, had never been conceived in a Chinese head until the Europeans began forcing treaties upon China ; and that she was not swallowed whole by anyone she insisted upon regarding as evidence of her super-iority which those who wished to enter into treaty relations with her should duly acknowledge. That one who has the power to brow-beat a neighbour and loot him with impunity, should refrain from doing so voluntarily, is hard for any Oriental to conceive ; and that one nation, having defeated another, should cheerfully offer to treat the defeated one as an equal is only evidence of the conqueror's simplicity, which any people as clever as the Chinese is in duty bound to exploit.

All of the treaties which grant foreigners the right to live and trade in China and which hold the Chinese Government responsible for the protection of their lives and property, followed upon military campaigns in which the Chinese were so hope-lessly defeated that they were delighted to talk of peace. The mildness of the terms imposed by the conquerors in these docu-ments never failed to astonish them. Why those who could march into the capital of the country and send the Emperor scurrying did not rule the country and exploit it, as China would have done in a similar case, was beyond Oriental comprehension, and could only be explained by the simplicity or stupidity of the conquerors. The right which they gave China to discuss the terms of the treaties exacted, to bargain about them, and to enter into formal agreement upon them, was further evidence either of profound respect for China's stupendous worth or of sheer folly. In any event, it was a novelty in Oriental relations of which China was bound, in duty to herself, to make the very most. She discovered later that these savages beyond the seas were jealous of one another, and that, although any one of them could conquer and swallow her, these mutual jealousies were in some part at least a guarantee of her security. Obvi-ously it was her duty to herself to foment them, to flirt coyly

with A when B was demanding favours, and to hand B a small token of her regard when A began to expect too much. This was an old game. China had been busy for 2,000 years setting the barbarians on her frontiers against one another that the Middle Kingdom might enjoy peace without going to the trouble of defending herself, so she had to learn a little only about the ways of the savages from across the seas to become very adroit in the practice of flirting with them all, and of fomenting jealousies among them all.

China's two and only lines of diplomacy are exploiting the supposed simplicity of the foreigner, to whom she gives no credit whatever for good-will, and plapng one against the other. Along these two lines she has been so eminently successful that the contempt which she entertains for all of us is fully deserved. In recent years the policy of every Power in China has fully justified an Oriental state in entertaining no respect for us whatever, and the very low standing in the eyes of China of nations, any one of whom could conquer the country and net a hundred per cent increase in trade within three years as the result of a little house-cleaning, is simply evidence of well-earned contempt. Silliest and saddest of all mistaken policies is the American. No Power has done so much to demonstrate to the Chinese how soft and simple the Occidental can be, how easily he can be wheedled and hoodwinked, how much effrontery he will tolerate through sentiment when physically able to resent it. In recent years Great Britain, and even Japan, have followed America's lead and have substituted soft-soap for gunpowder and compliments for ultimatums, so that the Chinese are simply hysterical with self-complacency and contempt for the foreigner, and indulge in vociferous hate-feasts in every part of the country which inevitably bear fruit in an increasing number of outrages against foreigners, defalcations on loans, impertinent diplomatic notes and assertions of " rights " every year. Of this situation the Russian Soviet is now delighted to take the fullest advantage, egging China on to hitherto unconceived deviltries and impertin-ences and ladling out to China an endless amount of bogus sym-pathy for her struggle against Occidental " Imperialism " and the " unequal treaties ". China accepts the sympathy at

par, because it is convenient to put faith in it, but is really delighted to have a new champion to play against the Western Powers which have shown some signs of taking an intelligent interest in their affairs. The Soviet has acquired sufficient influence in China to alarm even the Occidental diplomats, and America has recently adopted what she fondly conceives is a counter-policy, in which England and the others seem to concur. And can anyone who has read the foregoing chapters conceive what it is ? Does it consist in holding China more strictly to her obligations ? It does not. It consists in deluging China with soft-soap, in proving to China the West's good-will (a synonym for feeble-mindedness in Chinese eyes).

Every time an American or British diplomat in China is sche-duled to make a speech which will be publicly reported, the old foreign residents in the land prepare to squirm in anguish, because it is absolutely sure that the Occident's respect for China will be emphasized, that the audience will be reminded over and over again of China's noble civilization, her glorious history, her stupendous literature and learning, the amazing spectacle of her four hundred million tireless workers and of her boundless natural resources. Every such outbreak inspires the Chinese to get together and think of new ways in which the foreigner's interests can be damaged, his rights curtailed and his prestige lowered ; while the agents of the Soviet, who are in China to wreck Europe through her established trade and her investments in the Orient, hug themselves in glee.

When the Mongols ruled China and the greater part of Asia as well, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many arteries of trade between Europe and the Far East were opened ; and many adventurous spirits, both merchants and missionaries, found their way to Mongolia and China. The Mongols had no prejudice against aliens, and travellers were not only hospi-tably received but those with outstanding accomplishments were given employment, as Marco Polo's record bears witness. Had the Khans retained their hold upon China and the trade routes for another century or so there can be little doubt that Europe would have been in close political and commercial touch with China nearly five hundred years ago. The break-up of

RUSSIAN ADVANCES IN XVIIth CENTURY 205

the Mongol Empire, its division into a number of Mongol king-doms not too friendly with one another, and finally the collapse of the Mongol Dynasty in China, put insuperable obstacles in the way of overland trade by the best-known routes and post-poned the development of commerce with the Far East for several centuries. Overland trade was not resumed until the Russians, not yet strong enough to expand in Europe, pushed into Asia and finally, about 1640, came into rather rough contact with the newly born Manchu Empire on the Amur.

At that time the Dutch were already in Formosa, the Portu-guese in Macao and the Spanish in the Philippines ; and South China was already fully aware of the adventurous, aggressive, rough-and-ready character of these barbarians from across the seas. These traders came and went on their own respon-sibility, making their own opportunities and fighting their own battles without much control or encouragement from their home Governments, and without attempting to get in touch with the Chinese Government, and have their rights and privileges ofl&cially defined. Even the local Chinese oj0&cials in the southern ports that they visited took little notice of them, until their trade with the natives was rich enough to afford opportunities for " squeeze ", and then they confined themselves to imposing restrictions to ensure that they got liberal commissions on all business.

The Russians, however, were no sooner in contact with the Manchu Empire than they tried to open official relations, and have their trade rights defined. The Russian trading-post at Albazin on the Amur was fighting an unequal war with Manchu armies when the first Russian trade mission arrived in Peking in 1654, bringing rich presents for the Emperor Shun Chih. The presents were received as tribute, and the Emperor wrote to the Tsar, commending him on his loyalty and ordering him to receive the gifts, that he was sending to Moscow, wit^ rever-ence. There was no idea here of equality. Relations were established but they were on the same footing as those which China had always enjoyed with other tributary States. In 1670 the first Chinese mission arrived in Moscow, not to present compliments and presents but to demand the return of a tribe

whom the Manchus had persecuted in Manchuria, and who had fled to Siberia and put themselves imder Russian protection. No one at the Tsar's court could speak or read Chinese, so the mission made no headway, and the Chinese envoys were sent back and Russian officers were sent with them to find out, if possible, what their errand was. They arrived in Peking in 1675 and got into touch with the Chinese court through the intermediation of the Jesuit missionaries, then resident in Peking and in high favour with the authorities.

The scientific attainments of the Jesuits had won them the respect of the Chinese scholars of the previous dynasty, and they continued for some generations to wield no little influence at the capital. It was with their help that the first real treaty, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, was signed — the authoritative text being Latin ! In 1692 Peter the Great sent an envoy to exchange the ratifications of this treaty who kow-towed to the Emperor and was received kindly as the envoy of a loyal and respectful vassal. In 1719 Peter the Great sent another emissary with an extremely flattering letter to the Emperor. The ambassador kow-towed to the Emperor and the latter was so pleased that he had a high Chinese functionary kow-tow to the letter. This came very near being an acknowledgment of equality.

The Portuguese had been established in Macao for two hun-dred years when they made their first effort in 1727 to open official relations with China. It is recorded that they brought tribute, returned with presents and with instructions to their ruler to be a good subject and take orders. By this time the British were trading at Canton and other points on the West River delta, and foreign trade had been officially recognized and duly regulated by the Governor of Kuangtung to his own advantage. What is known as the Co-hong system in the records had been established in 1720 and was destined to persist until 1842. A limited group of Chinese merchants — the 13 Hongs — were given the monopoly upon foreign trade and were under direct official control. Foreigners could deal with no others, could only reside and do business in the very limited area allotted to them, and were not allowed to wander inland nor enter the walled cities. There was no such thing as extra-

territoriality, and the outsiders who committed offences were surrendered to the Chinese magistrates for trial and punishment. As late as 1780 foreigners were executed by the Chinese authorities, and the latter enjoyed the right of jurisdiction for another sixty years, though it was exercised with caution because of the growing power of the traders.

The first British ambassador to the Chinese Court arrived in Peking in 1792. Lord Macartney, with his following, landed at Taku and was brought to Peking by boat with his " tribute ". He had an audience ^\ith Ch'ien Lung, during which he knelt on both knees but did not actually perform the kow-tow. His cortege was preceded by flags bearing a Chinese inscription announcing to the world that an ambassador was en route bearing tribute from England, an impression which the diplomat appar-ently made no effort to correct. Chinese '• face " was given quite a boost by this visit, because it was already known that England was a very long way from China and very powerful. It meant that the most remote and powerful of the barbarians under the sun had been apprised of China's greatness, and had sent respectful envoys to make formal acknowledgment of China's universal supremacy. Lord Macartney, while creating this impression in Peking, got absolutely nothing in the way of definition of trade rights. His mission would much better have stayed away. During the next twenty-five years the Manchus had no little difficulty with Chinese secret societies, and foreign missionaries in China came under suspicion. The Jesuits lost their influence in Peking, and the Christian Church in China was regarded as something akin to a secret revolutionary society. Priests were frequently arrested and imprisoned for long periods as well as their converts ; diplomatic missions from abroad were discouraged, and finally, in 1815, Christianity was put under an Imperial ban, and Chinese everyvp^here were for-bidden to teach outsiders the Chinese language on pain of death.

Meanwhile two foreign envoys had set out for Peking and had failed to secure audiences. Russia had wearied of flatter-ing Chinese vanity, and while willing to make large concessions to keep alive the overland trade between Peking and Moscow, the Tsar was not inclined to be put in the position of a tributary.

A Russian ambassador who arrived at Kalgan in 1805, bringing with him enormously valuable presents, was told that if received at court he would have to kow-tow. This he refused to do, and so, after some debate, he packed up his presents and returned with them to Moscow. In 1816 the second British mission arrived, headed by Lord Amherst. He was allowed to reach Peking and was told upon his arrival, after a hard journey, that the Emperor Chia Chi'ng was even then awaiting him at the Summer Palace six miles north of the city. As the baggage had not come and the ambassador had no means of changing his travel-stained clothes, he refused to go on ; so the Emperor was kept waiting and was so indignant that he refused to see Lord Amherst at all. The mission therefore returned with nothing accomplished, but with a good deal of ill-will on both sides.

Great Britain had, by this time, begun to take official cogni-zance of the value of trade with China. The East India Company had a monopoly of this traffic which expired in 1834, and the agreement between the Government and the Company was not renewed. Independent American trade with China had commenced irf 1784, and many other nations were participating in 1834, so that England decided, when her Far Eastern trade was thrown open to free competition and private enterprise, to appoint a trade superintendent, a consul-general with full diplomatic powers — in other words, to promote British interests at Canton. The first incumbent was Lord Napier, who had had no experience of Chinese conceit and arrogance, and would have had no patience with Chinese methods if he had under-stood them. Without asking for permission to visit Canton through the intermediation of the 13 Hongs, as was customary, he proceeded to his post and attempted to open direct com-munications on a basis of equality with the Viceroy Lu K'un. His letter greatly incensed this potentate, who refused to see him at all, and promptly put a ban upon Chinese trade with the British. At this crucial juncture Lord Napier became very ill and had to go back to Macao, where he died shortly after. The Viceroy believed that he had registered a diplomatic victory, and was so pleased that he graciously permitted the resump-

THE WAR OF 1840 209

tion of trade. Napier's successor got nowhere in his negotiations, but in 1836 a certain Captain Elliot was appointed trade super-intendent, who, by a liberal use of soft-soap, won many con-cessions and laid the foundations of much future trouble. He addressed the Viceroy as a superior, accepted privileges as acts of grace, and in other ways encouraged the Chinese to believe that the British had knuckled under.

About this time the Chinese began to discover that the national supply of silver bullion was being depleted. The British traders, representing a Company long established in India, had catered to the Chinese liking for opium, and had built up an enormous trade in the drug, in which all nationalities participated, though the British naturally had the advantage because they con-trolled what was then the principal source of supply. Chinese oflScials everjrwhere encouraged the traffic, though it was under Imperial ban, because their commissions were enormous. Exports amounted to little as compared with the opium import, and China soon learned that the foreigners were taking her silver out of the country by the shipload, thus depleting the nation's stock and greatly enhancing the value of the metal. The Canton Viceroy was instructed to put an end to this business in a summary way, and did so. In 1839 the foreign companies at Canton were ordered to deliver up their opium stocks, and, being unable to resist, 20,000,000 chests were turned over to the authorities. The Viceroy was keen on sending this north as loot, but Peking ordered him to destroy the whole seizure, and, as there was then some discipline in official circles, the opium was mixed with lime and thrown into the sea.

This act brought on China's first real foreign war. The opium traffic was imdoubtedly a heinous trade, but the officials at Canton had smiled upon it and profited by it ; and their arbitrary seizure without warning of stocks valued at something like $6,000,000 was naturally resented bitterly. This sum repre-sented much more in those days than it does now. If foreigners were to continue to trade with China, such an action had to be challenged, and the burden of the responsibility fell upon the British. In 1840 China was faced for the first time with a real foreign war, though Peking was far from realizing the

w.w.o. o

significance of it. It meant no more at Court than the impertin-ence of a clique of pirates operating on the coast, and was taken no more seriously. The eventual shock was therefore all the more humiliating.

During the two years of the war the Bogue forts, guarding the approach to Canton, were twice shelled and taken, and the Chusan Islands occupied. The Canton Viceroy appreciated the catastrophe and was, in true Chinese fashion, ready to make any and all concessions ; but after he had signed a ten-tative agreement with the British agreeing to make proper amends, his treaty was repudiated by the Emperor Tao Kuang and he was given orders to deal with the barbarians on their merits. These orders he kept under his hat pending the arrival of armies sent from the north, and then attempted to end the feud by treachery. The result was the occupation of the forts north of and commanding the city of Canton. The city of course capitulated without resistance. Ningpo and Chenhai on the Chekiang Coast were then occupied, and Peking began to feel that the situation was serious, so fresh armies were raised and shunted into Chekiang in 1842. They were ignominiously defeated, and Shanghai was taken by the British fleet. It was then determined that the way to make Peking feel the serious-ness of the struggle was to cut ofi the grain supply which went north from Chenkiang by the Grand Canal, so the British fleet sailed up the Yangtze and attacked Chenkiang. The boldness of this enterprise, carried out at a time when China was supposed to be a thing of stupendous weight and strength, is hard to appreciate now.

The Chinese garrison of course bolted and disappeared before the first British landing-party at Chenkiang. The Manchus were still fighters at that time, however, and resisted to the last, when the survivors committed suicide to avoid capture. Nanking was the next objective, but the story of what had happened at Shanghai and Chenkiang had already reached Peking, and the Emperor, the sixth of his line, was sufficiently Chinese to wish to temporize, although he had not touched his military resources. He sent delegates, fully empowered, to Nanking, and the first " unequal treaty ", that is, the first

treaty in which the Chinese Emperor is not recognized as the delegate of God and the ruler of the material universe, was signed on August 29, 1842. Indemnities totalling $21,000,000 were stipulated and paid. Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai were opened to foreign trade, and Hong-Kong, a barren rock sticking up out of the sea, which was valueless in Chinese eyes, was ceded to Great Britain. It is worth emphasiz-ing at this juncture that every spot which the Chinese have ever assigned to foreigners for purposes of residence and trade has been one of those which they considered particularly use-less : mud-flats, swamps, barren rocky hill-sides, unapproachable anchorages — all the most valuable land in China at this time, which the young nationalists are struggling frantically to recover, and which they would reduce to their pristine Chinese worth-lessness for the sake of China's precious " face ".

In Canton the foreigners are supposed to live on a sand spit known as the Shameen — " sand surface " — a miserable bank of silt upon which no Chinese would set foot imtil the foreign devil built it up, planted trees upon it, erected handsome buildings on it, and raised its value to the point where any Cantonese who could buy a road frontage of forty feet of it would consider himself and clan made and endowed for many generations. Shanghai is the worst possible site for a great city of modern buildings. Off the artificially elevated river front, wells are only three feet deep. The whole substratum is ooze, yet there, in less than a century, the foreigner has contrived to establish interests which make the land worth something like $1,000,000 an acre, while better land under Chinese jurisdiction is worth $50. This of course means nothing to the nationalist. It is only an insult to China, which every Chinese official who has sufficient money is glad to condone by buying Shanghai real estate. Tientsin is another mud flat, turned over to the foreigner as a joke, upon which Chinese potentates are now happy to build the most magnificent palaces in the Orient, at unbelievable expense, to serve as what are known as "funk holes " in seasons of distress.

CHAPTER VI (PART 2 OF 5)

Hong-Kong is now one of the most beautiful places in the world, and one of the richest in trade. In Chinese hands it was

a fisherman's refuge, and a very barren one at that. In the interests of face the Chinese of this generation would like to see it returned to its original status. The Emperor laughed when he gave it away. Chinese political refugees from tyranny and injustice laugh now when they are able to set foot upon it and begin conspiring against the peace and welfare of their country under the foolish tolerance of the simple-minded Anglo-Saxon ; but the nationalists want it back so that they can strip it of whatever it is worth and make it really Chinese, like all the other fisherman's rocks off the coast, which yield their country nothing but wrecks and pirates.

To come back to the Nanking treaty in 1842 — it was imme-diately followed by American and French treaties, in which these Powers secured all the advantages and privileges gained by Great Britain through much heavy fighting, and no little expenditure of money, men and courage. Our missionaries take much credit to themselves (the writer is an American) that we did not participate in this opium war ; yet the British in this struggle first won us all the right to be regarded as human beings, and not as hairy savages, in China ; and France, in her supple-mentary treaty, was the first to force Peking to remove the ban upon the propagation of Christianity — a niatter which neither Great Britain nor America had thought of. Both America and France were too self-righteously democratic to join England in the war upon China, but both tumbled over one another in the effort to share with England the fruits of her expenditure and victories.

The Chinese, thanks to the mild terms of the treaties, refused to believe that these were serious documents, concluded that they had won a great moral victory in not being wholly con-sumed, and commenced, immediately after the signing of the treaties, to demonstrate it.

Canton turned violently anti-foreign, as though under licence. Placards were posted everywhere denouncing the upstart " foreign devils ", and Chinese astuteness was highly exalted in the person of the Viceroy Hou Kuang-chin. He assigned to the foreigners a trade-plot of twenty-one acres, and though foreigners were supposed to enter the city of Canton freely, won

high rewards from Peking for keeping them out. Treaty viola-tion was the order of the day, and any Chinese official who could break a treaty and " get away with it " was overloaded with decorations. Hsien Feng, the husband of the notorious Empress-Dowager, a Manchu concubine of mediocre rank, was particularly eager to see the foreign devils humiliated, and most of the devil-tries which made life difficult for traders and missionaries were instituted under his direct orders. The treaties signed as a result of England's expenditures were all subject to revision in 1854. When the subject of revision came up the Chinese gave their customary cynical laugh — cultivated especially for the uppish barbarian and still much in vogue.

The Canton Viceroy of course ignored all requests for revision. Force had been removed, therefore the obligation was gone. For some reason all the Powers were busy elsewhere, and nothing much happened until a Chinese lorcha (schooner), the Arrow, happened to come into Canton insufficiently armed to resist imposition. The Arrow was registered in Hong-Kong as a British ship, and carried a crew of twelve men under British protection. The members of the crew were carried away, October 8, 1856, and locked up in a Chinese yamen. The British Consul, H. S. Parkes, destined for higher laurels, demanded the return of the crew after an apology. The Viceroy was attacked with the usual Chinese " cold-feet ", and tried to return the men without registering an apology. The British reply was an immediate seizure of the forts. The Cantonese, then madly anti-foreign in spite of the fact that they were growing from a shabby town into a real city because of foreign trade, engineered a riot, and burned all the foreign offices and warehouses. At this juncture France joined Great Britain because of the murder of a mission-ary in Kuangsi for whose death the French had been unable to exact a satisfactory account.

Lord Elgin and Baron Gros, representing Great Britain and France as both ambassadors and commanders-in-chief of the allied forces, tried to come to terms with the Imperial High Commissioner at Canton, Yeh Ming-ch'en, but he refused to have anything to do with them. He had consulted a fortune-teller, and had learned that the whole trouble would be over

before the end of the year (1857), so he refused to treat with the foreigners, and neglected, in spite of the appeals of his col-leagues, to make any sort of military preparations. A concerted attack was made on Canton in December, 1857. On the 28th of the month 6,000 men were landed, and the following day the city was at peace in foreign hands, and Yeh Ming-ch'en was in hiding ; so the trouble, locally at least, was all over before the end of the year, but not in the fashion that Yeh had anticipated. Some days later he was found, and was deported to Calcutta, where he died. For three years Canton was governed by three foreign commissioners.

After this victory Lord Elgin and Baron Gros proceeded to Shanghai, whence they sent their demands for treaty revision to Peking. The United States and Russia were eager also for the revision of their treaties. They would not join in the war, but were glad to take advantage of the French and British vic-tory in the south, and to join the allied commissioners in their appeal to Peking and later to follow them to Tientsin and reap the advantage of their aggressive action in that port. To the joint note from Shanghai, Peking replied that the foreigners could settle matters with the Kuangtung viceroy. They had had enough of this indirect dealing, however, and determined to get into direct touch with Peking by force of arms if need be. So the fleet sailed to the north and captured Taku. Chinese envoys arrived to talk peace, but were not equipped with proper credentials, so an allied force proceeded up the river and occupied Tientsin, Peking hastened to send duly accredited agents, and the Treaty of Tientsin was signed June 26, 1858. The opening of more ports was provided for. The Allies demanded and were promised an indemnity of Tls. 4,000,000. China pledged herself anew to the toleration of Christianity, and arrangements were made for the revision of the Chinese customs tariff at Shanghai. It was also arranged that foreign envoys could reside in Peking, and the new treaty was to be ratified there. Russia and America were able to negotiate similar treaties at the same time, but in the American treaty ratification at Peking was not stipulated.

In 1859 a Russian envoy, travelling overland by way of

ALLIES TAKE PEKING, 1860 215

Kalgan, was able to reach Peking without difficulty, and get his treaty ratified. The American envoy did not attempt to go to Peking, and had no difficulty about his treaty, but the French and British commissioners were flatly refused permission to proceed to the capital. After much useless bargaining, they tried to force their way up the river to Tientsin again, but the Chinese had secretly installed new batteries along the shore. The allied fleet was ambushed, and considerable damage was done. In 1860, however. Lord Elgin and Baron Gros returned with 18,000 men, and made short work of Chinese resistance. China's best troops, a large army of Mongol cavalry, were wait-ing for the foreigners, and fought desperately but were almost annihilated. The forts on the river were all taken from the rear, Tientsin was again occupied, and, without waiting for negotiations, the allied force advanced upon Peking. Some miles from the capital the Chinese showed signs of a desire to negotiate, and Harry Parkes approached them under a flag of truce. He was seized, tortured, and sent to Peking a prisoner. There was nothing to do then but take the capital, which was readily done. The Emperor, Hsien Feng, fled to a summer capital, Jehol, in the mountains north-east of Peking, and died there, probably under the impression that his dynasty had collapsed and that China was to have a foreign ruler.

The foreign forces, under the orders of their commanders, committed many outrages. The magnificent summer palace, Yuan Ming Yuan, six miles from the capital, was totally des-troyed, and other acts of gross vandalism were sanctioned. These measures have frequently been deplored by foreign his-torians because they were not outrages perpetrated in the heat of battle, but were coolly ordered by the commanders. They are inclined to forget that there was much provocation, and that it is impossible to deal with the Chinese as rational human beings in such a situation. Lord Elgin had rightly concluded, as he stated in correspondence, that they were a people who never yielded to reason but always to force. They are only content when they are on top, bullying some one else, or grovel-ling in the dust before some stronger bully — never satisfied to deal fairly and equitably with anyone on a basis of equality.

They are only amenable to reason when sufficiently frightened to be glad to take orders. Those of us who have lived in China and have had to struggle empty-handed against Chinese pro-crastination, evasiveness, and impertinence, can appreciate in what a temper the British and French commissioners finally were when they reached Peking after three years of futile effort to bring the Manchu Government to its senses ; and those of us who love the magnificent old Peking that the Mongols laid out, are more grateful to Lord Elgin and Baron Gros for sparing what was really worth preserving in the capital, than annoyed with them for destropng the semi-foreign pleasure gardens which Jesuit architects had helped the Manchus to build in the coimtry.

When the refugee court at Jehol discovered that the foreign-ers had no intention of doing the reasonable thing, no thought of seizing the Government for themselves, they hastened to send Prince Kung to Peking as their envoy to make what terms he could. The previous treaty was, of course, ratified, an in-demnity of Tls. 8,000,000 was agreed upon, and Tientsin was opened to foreign trade. Russia and America were sitting meanwhile on the side-lines, playing the sympathetic neutral to both China and the Allies, offering their services as intermediaries, using no force and spending no money, but ready to clinch for themselves whatever bargains the British and French might exact from China. Russia secured the cession of an enormous territory east of the Ussuri River — what later became the Primorsk Province, including the port of Vladivostok. America got nothing tangible, but of course benefited to the same degree as " the most favoured nation " by virtue of her ratified treaty of the previous year. America has only once participated in armed aggression in China, a fact which the hands-around-the-world sentimentalists make the most of, but she has never yet dissociated herself from armed aggression by refusing to enjoy any of the rights and privileges in China fought for, or paid for, by others while she was preserving a self-righteous and sanctimonious neutrality. The most numerous and the most active missionaries in China are Americans, none of whom would have come here at all had not France and Great Britain exacted

from China a grudging toleration for Christianity. But no American missionary ever misses a chance to tell the Chinese with what pious horror he regards the memory of Great Britain's " opium war ", nor to remind them that America did not par-ticipate in the Elgin-Gros campaign which resulted in the flight and death of the Emperor Hsien Feng and the scandalous des-truction of the Yuan Ming Yuan. British missionaries of course warble in the same key. American business men make much capital with the Chinese out of the fact that the United States has not a single land concession in China, omitting to mention the fact that they have had three or four concessions which they turned over to the nefarious and grasping British, because the American Government would not sanction the expenditure of enough money to improve and police them, that they were not returned to China but were delivered into the hands of the alien, and that American business folk are happy to live, move and have their being in these alienated territories, and also to organize volunteer forces for their defence against the sovereign owners of the soil. The American " holier-than-thou " attitude in the Orient is a policy foimded upon nothing but hypocrisy, leading to nothing but dissension of which the Chinese are ready to take every advantage, and rooted in nothing but the desire to curry favour with the Oriental at the expense of others who have courage and initiative enough to do the " dirty work ". It is a Russian policy, very becoming to both the old and the new Russia, but it is a policy very unbecoming to a great English-speaking nation, and one which it behoves every self-respecting American to repudiate. The writer would like to reassert here that he is an American of many generations' standing.

The Chinese Court of course never admitted to the nation that the Emperor had run away and had died as the result of the excitement attendant upon his flight. He had gone to the mountains for his hea.lth, or to avoid the obnoxious duty of dealing wath the offensive savages. A new situation was created, however, which China had to face in some way with new weapons. Changes had to be made to meet the demands of the intruders who had foisted themselves upon the country. In 1861, there-fore, a new Government office was created to handle foreign

affairs, officially known as the bureau in charge of relations with dependent and tributary tribes — the Tsung Li Yamen. Two years later the Customs Service was taken away from the three-power agent in Shanghai, Lay, who had been handling it, and Sir Robert Hart entered upon his remarkable career, building up for China the first efficient revenue collectorate that she had ever had in her long history, and thereby instilling into every Chinese official, and all those who hoped to be officials, the idea that it would never do to have China run by foreigners, because they were efficient and unreasonably honest. Those who know something of old-time Irish ward politics in America might be moved to snort at this point, but they are adjured to restrain themselves until they have seen a Chinese magistrate in the act of feathering his nest.

In 1867 China began to weep on the world's shoulder and elicit sympathy. She chose an American, of course, as weeper-in-chief. Those who have seen a Chinese widow bedew a grave after she has had a good meal, a lot of tea, and a wholesome exchange of persiflage with her neighbours and kinsmen, plus a few salacious jokes, have some idea of the Chinese capacity for tears when propriety demands them ; others do not. Anson Burlingame, once American Minister to China, was chosen as China's envoy to go abroad, tour every known country, and tell the world how anxious China was to enter into the family of nations, and how sorry she was for past lapses from virtue. While Burlingame was doing his best, the Tientsin Chinese con-trived, in 1868, to embarrass him seriously by murdering a number of foreigners, accused of stealing children's eyes and making medicine of them. The weeper-in-chief died in St. Petersburg in 1870 under an unmanageable burden of care.

The zealous Roman Catholics, working along conventional lines, had decided that the way to make a Christian out of a Chinese was to catch him under seven, before he had outraged God by thinking, and to rear him in happy unreasoning faith. They had therefore established numerous orphanages, and in their eagerness to fill them had offered to pay a price for each child brought in. The inevitable result was that children were everywhere sold or stolen, and that kidnapping became an excep-

tionally profitable profession. The Chinese, little realizing that any person could be enthusiastic enough about any religion to pay money to bring others within the fold, sought for an explana-tion of this strange behaviour on the part of the Roman Church, and, since the missionaries were doctoring people and charging for it, decided that the children were carved up and boiled down into potent elixirs. Riots of necessity followed, and among those scuppered was the French consul in Tientsin. The Chinese, with whom most of us have converse, now join us in laughing at their excitable ancestors, and assure us that their people could never again be guilty of such follies. These are polite lies. The writer could produce, upon demand, a veritable host of his good-natured Peking neighbours who sincerely believe that the huge hospital endowed by John D. Rockefeller, the best institution of its kind in the world, was put here by the American Government so that it might have the benefit of scientific knowledge derived from the corpses of poor Chinese, inveigled into the institution and murdered in cold blood in the interest of science. There is not a native woman of Peking who does not still gather her children against her skirts when a foreigner goes by, in fear of his insensate longing for babies' eyes. Those who think that the Chinese, of any social status, credit us with good-will in our Oriental charities, know pathetically little about the workings of the Chinese mind. No Oriental exerts himself in any way or spends anything with-out reckoning upon a commensurate return ; so why should they give us credit for other motives ?

The Occidental Legations were established in Peking after the Elgin-Gros outrages, but for the sake of face the Emperors still continued to refuse them a vis-d-vis audience in the Western fashion. Ch'ien Lung would have said : "If you object to our way of meeting and have your own, observe your own rules. I have sufficient fighting men behind me to take care of my dignity whenever you try to infringe upon it." But Tung Chih's throne was already wobbling, and he could not make concessions, so to prove to the nation that he was Heaven's appointee he had to deal with the foreigners as upstart bar-barians. The Legations made so many pointed demands for

audiences that in 1873 it was finally agreed that the Emperor was to meet the savage envoys in person. The savage envoys were naturally delighted, and wrote their Governments long letters congratulating themselves upon their victory. When the great occasion came the foreign envoys were of course received in the Tsu Kuang Ko, the building especially reserved ioi many generations for the reception of tribute and pledges of fidelity from neighbouring barbarian tribes. Japanese, Russians, Amer-icans, British. French and Dutch all walked complacently into the same diplomatic trap, congratulated one another upon their achievement for some days, and were then equally horrified to learn that they had been formally received as tributary savages. It was about this time that the Manchus realized that they could not fight the West until they had learned more of the Western processes. They started building arsenals, opened an official school in Peking for the study of foreign languages (putting Manchu and Mongol at the head of the list to show what inferior means of communication the others were), and sent the first Chinese students abroad under Dr. Yung Wing to learn how to circumvent the outlander by his own methods. Opinion upon the best way to achieve this end was by no means imited. Some were for learning all the foreign tricks and adopt-ing all their devices ; others feared the corruption of Chinese manners through the introduction of new things and new methods, were bitterly prejudiced against anyone who seemed to ape the foreigner in anything, and were particularly opposed to the improvement of communications which, they feared, would not only give the foreigner himself easy access to the interior but would provide channels for the infiltration of his ideas. A light railway was built in 1876 from Shanghai to Woosung along the Huangpu River, and became the subject of tremendous con-troversy in Chinese circles. The conservatives finally won, and the new line was torn up and transported to Formosa. The only point upon which all Chinese could agree was that China must become as proficient as the foreigner in weapons, ships, and military tactics, or perish ; and it was not until many years later that it was realized that possession of and skill in the use of big gims and iron-clad ships were not the real secrets of Occi-

dental power, and that the lack of them was not China's only weakness.

From about 1875 imtil 1900 China appeared to be dissolving like a silt bank before a flood, and it seemed almost inevitable that the Empire must break up into a number of foreign depen-dencies and protectorates. The outlying fringes of the Empire gave way first. China had many nominal vassal states over whom she exercised no real authority, but which acknowledged her supremacy and sent periodical missions to Peking with tribute, frequently of far less intrinsic value than the presents sent back by the Emperor. Such relations were of no material value to China, but they greatly enhanced the Emperor's " face " and gave the Government no little prestige with the Chinese people. If the Emperor could elicit respect and tribute from savages living no one knew how many thousand miles away on the borders of nowhere, the Chinese under direct administration, within easy reach of his couriers and his soldiers, obviously, had little chance to escape his vigilance.

Besides Mongolia, Turkestan, Korea, Tibet and Indo-China, tribute came from the Indian frontier States, Burma, and even more remote regions. Every one of these outlying dependencies, however, was coming in contact in the latter part of the last century with much more vigorous Powers than China, and they were all beginning to wonder if China were really the greatest nation on earth, its civilization the zenith of human attainment, and if affiliation with China were a real material or spiritual asset. The British were pushing into Burma and the Indian frontier States. Japan and Russia were meddling with Korea and Manchuria, both England and Russia were showing an interest in Turkestan (later in Tibet), the Japanese had an eye on For-mosa and the Piscadores, and the French were actually estab-lished in Indo-China. Contact between China and Great Britain in Burma resulted in the death in 1875 of R. A. Marjory, which nearly brought on a war, and which ended in the Chefoo Conven-tion, at which Great Britain exacted terms which further improved the position of foreigners in China. In 1883, Indo-China was persuaded to renounce formally her fealty to China and became to all intents and purposes a French colony. This brought on a

war in which China, as usual, was worsted in the long run. The tropical climate wrought much more havoc among the French troops in the south than the Chinese armies and delayed opera-tions, but finally a French fleet sailed up the coast and took Foochow. The Chinese commander-in-chief at this port was 80 dismayed that instead of defending the port, which is pro-bably the easiest to defend in China, he ran to the top of a mountain and composed a poem. There had been no formal declaration of war, so the feud was settled quietly in 1885. China lost all hold upon Indo-China, and France gained access to the provinces of Kuangsi and Yunnan.

China's last great military commander. General Tso Tsung-tang, died at Foochow in 1885, and, as a last word to the nation, left a memorial in which he advised the Emperor to promote education along foreign lines, build railways and improve com-mimications generally, develop mines and industries, learn some-thing of modern finance and, above all else, create an army and a navy. This made a tremendous impression, and thousands of thinking Chinese were converted to the belief that the way to defeat the foreigner and check aggression was to imitate him in all things. China's decline went on, nevertheless, without pause. In 1886 Burma put an end to her nominal fealty to China. In the following year Macao, which had been occupied by the Portuguese since 1537 — just 350 years — was formally recognized by China as a Portuguese colony on the one condition that it could not be ceded to another Power. One of the first nations of the West to come into close contact with China was thus one of the last to enjoy treaty relations on a basis of equality.

CHAPTER VI (PART 3 OF 5)

The story of what was going on in Korea meanwhile is too involved to detail here. The Korean Imperial house was even more decadent than the Manchu Imperial family, but no class of Koreans was essentially anti-foreign, and foreign envoys in Seoul enjoyed an influence, while the country was nominally subject to Chinese control, which they have never acquired at any period in Peking. China lost steadily in prestige at the Korean Court while Japan steadily gained in influence. Out of this situation came the war between Japan and China, which ended, in 1895, with the Peace of Shimonoseki, in China's com-

plete humiliation. Her new fleet was almost totally destroyed, thanks to the fact that Chinese conceit had already got the better of her common sense and she had snubbed the foreign officers whom she had employed in the belief that she knew all about rimning a navy. Her armies in Manchuria were decimated because none of the hide-bound senior commanders would even listen to the advice of the foreign-trained junior officers. China was loaded with an indemnity of Tls. 200,000,000, a sum wholly beyond the comprehension of Prince Kung and the other nego-tiators, who were forced to call in foreign financiers to think for them, negotiate loans for them, and handle the service of them. A number of Yangtze ports were opened to trade, For-mosa was lost and, according to the terms of the treaty, the Liaotung peninsula was leased to Japan, giving her in Manchuria Port Arthur and the more valuable commercial port known to the Chinese, Japanese and Russians respectively as Ta Lien Wan, Dairen and Dalny.

Russia and Germany, however, united to oppose this cession of territory, and Japan had to return to China these two ports and the adjacent territory. What interested both Russia and Japan, as well as other Powers, more than anything else was the complete independence of Korea from China, America showed a great sentimental interest in this deal and was vastly pleased by it, and then, many years later, when Japan consumed Korea at a gulp, demonstrated that her interest was purely sentimental by registering no protest against Japan's flagrant breach of faith. England was, of course, guilty of the same hypocrisy, but, under the Anglo-Japanese alliance, could at least plead expediency, while America's only possible plea was that the " corn belt " legislators did not know where Korea was and that the United States could not endeavour to hold Japan to her pledges until they had found out.

From time immemorial China, both unable and unwilling to fight her own battles, has followed the weakling's policy of playing the remoter enemy against the nearer. After her humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan it was clearly enough understood in Chinese official circles that Russia had kept Japan out of Manchuria because she had earmarked it as her own,

and that Russia was a real menace to China's integrity as a nation, but Japan was very close at hand and too obviously powerful, while Russia was a long way off and not yet over-aggressive. China therefore decided to cultivate dear Russia assiduously, and Li Hung-chang was sent to Moscow to do his best in playing the Russians against the Japanese. As a result of this the Trans-Siberian railway was extended southwards through Manchuria, and Russia, in 1897, got leases on Port Arthur and Dalny which she had forced the Japanese to relin-quish to China, and also set about forcing her way into Korea. China was only slightly disturbed by this development. Her conceit inspired the belief that she could play Russia and Japan against one another at her pleasure until all the barbarians were exhausted, and that her inextinguishable greatness would then again be manifest throughout the territories over which these outsiders squabbled. The country, however, had many fronts to face and was losing on all of them. With a few arsenals and a few units of foreign-trained troops equipped with modern weapons, China was beginning to think that she had learned all there was to be learned about the barbarian's secret of power, and that the time had come for her to assert her superiority and resent their impertinences. This thought permeated the whole country, and from 1895 until 1900 outrages against foreigners became increasingly common.

After the war with Japan, China had foimd Russia a remote but useful enemy, worth placating and using, but had ignored Germany, who had joined Russia in forbidding Liaotung to the Japanese, because Germany was so far away that she could do China no real harm and was therefore entitled to no make-believe gratitude. It came as a very painful shock therefore when, in 1897, Germany seized the port of Tsingtao and the Kiaochow territory, and insisted upon building a railway into the heart of Shantung province. An anti-foreign riot had accounted for the murder of two German missionaries in Shan-tung, for whom the Chinese Government was ready to pay the conventional price and make the usual apologies, but Germany, piqued by China's attentions to Russia and her contempt for the remote Grerman Empire, did not wait to hear the usual

persiflage but took what she wanted and talked about it after-wards. This established a new precedent which threw all China into a panic.

The Germans won for themselves a respect which stands them in good stead at this moment. They demonstrated that they, alone among the foreign Powers who were edging in upon China, were neither sentimentalists nor simpletons, but were really dangerous. They shared with China's great conquerors and rulers the ruthlessness which prompted them to take what they wanted without pausing to negotiate or lay themselves open to cajolery and deception. Their stock rose to the head of the list, and has actually stayed there in spite of their defeat in Europe. The Germans enjoy, no extra-territorial rights in China now, but they enjoy the respect of the Oriental — in Japan as well as on the mainland of Asia — and are taken seriously where others are treated with polite indifference. The exercise of the mailed fist in Europe, where Germany came in conflict with peoples of her own breed but of purer strains (with less Slav and Wend and Lett in them), was a failure, but they have certainly demonstrated the value of the mailed fist in the East. Russia has imposed upon China in many ways and has perpetrated many high-handed outrages, but she has also cajoled China and has played the part of China's " good friend ", so that the unprotected Russian in this country, minus his extra-territorial rights, is a stray hound whom every coolie delights to kick. If we were all to relinquish our treaty rights and put ourselves at the mercy of the Chinese rifE-rafP, those who would naturally be kicked oftenest and hardest would be the Americans, because they have shown themselves the most amenable to cajolery, impertinence and outrage of any people in the East. Without rights the Germans, who seized Tsingtao on the slightest possible pretext and made a grand demonstration of "fright-fulness " after the Boxer episode, have never failed to get pre-ferential treatment from the Chinese, and, if they recovered in Europe, would enjoy the material support of every nation in Asia, including Japan.

The year 1897 abounded in concessions to the foreigners. Besides the Manchurian leases to Russia and the Shantung

w.w.c. p

leases to Germany, England increased her holdings on the Kuangtung mainland opposite Hong-Kong, Kuangchowwan was leased to France, and the notorious " spheres of influence " were defined as a preliminary to the division of China. Kuang-tung province and the whole Yangtze Valley went to Great Britain. To Germany was assigned the whole valley of the Huang Ho (Yellow River) and its tributaries. Russia was to control everything outside the Great Wall, and it was stipulated that no one was even to build railways in the direction of the Russian frontier without Russian concurrence. Japan was assigned Fukien, as an adjunct to Formosa, and France had a free hand in the provinces of Kuangsi and Yunnan. Tibet was still a bone of contention between England and Russia. The use of all navigable inland waterways was guaranteed to the Occidental Powers, and both gunboats and merchant vessels had the right to steam up any river in which they could find enough water to carry them.

The division and development of China by the various Powers was clearly indicated at this time, and there can be no possible doubt that it would have been immeasurably better for both China and the world at large if it had been consummated at this juncture. What the Chinese have lost since then through bad government, impositions and restrictions upon normal development, and what the world has lost through unspeakable confusion in China, could only be calculated in multiples of billions that would run to many lines. What China has gained through the restraint of the Powers, largely under American influence, and the introduction of the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, plus that of the self-determination of weaker nations, can only be put on the credit side of a Bolshevik account.

The Manchu court, dominated by the Empress-Dowager, was naturally loth to lose China as a piece of property immensely valuable to the Manchu tribes, and was therefore chiefly con-cerned with keeping it out of the hands of the rival savages from overseas. To the pure-bred Manchu, China was a pro-perty, a farm, a source of revenue. To the Emperor Kuang Hsii, more Chinese than his kinsmen, it was a Chinese nation.

I

KUANG HSti'S REFORM 227

The real Manchus were eager to preserve their property. The Emperor, noting the trend of events, was equally eager to pre-serve the State. These views were so wide apart that they found no point of contact.

Kuang Hsil, in 1898, came under the influence of a group of Chinese patriots, headed by the now famous K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, both Cantonese. He decided that if China were to survive as a nation she would have to change her gait and prove herself equal to the foreigners in an open race. He decided to throw overboard a lot of conservative prejudice and whip his country into line with the Occident. There was no blind anti-foreignism here and no silly business of imitation. He in-stituted a real reform movement on such an alarming scale that the Chinese, mad as they were in their search for some weapon to use against the non-conformist foreign intruder, could not endorse it. The Manchu court, of course, saw nothing in it but the sacrifice of the Manchu control of China, and therefore a total loss for the Manchus. The well-being of the Chinese and the political future of the Chinese State did not concern them at all. They failed to appreciate that in temperament and in congenital incapacity they were already Chinese and that they were bound to sink or swim with the Sons of Han. They wanted to preserve the Manchu tribal supremacy in the land they had conquered, and they moved the Empress-Dowager to support this position, which would have been quite a sound one two hundred years before when they had the physical and spiritual vitality to back it up.

At all events the Emperor Kuang Hsii was virtually deposed one hundred days after he had issued the first of his long series of reform mandates ; he was made a prisoner in his own palace, his Chinese advisers were either executed or forced to take refuge abroad, and the Empress-Dowager openly assumed con-trol as the one supreme Manchu authority. Kuang Hsii's reform measures, most of which were thoroughly sane and wholesome, were repudiated en bloc, and Manchu absolutism was reasserted with emphasis in a country already convinced that the Manchus had exhausted themselves, and had laid China open to foreign aggression. In the sight of the majority of the Powers then

dealing with China, her career had come to an abrapt end. So far as the Powers knew from their own experience she had no past worthy of respect, and no future of real interest to the world. The obvious duty of all those interested in the develop-ment of the country, whether from selfish or altruistic motives, was to " carve the melon ", as the Chinese put it, and give the slices a decent administration. But at this juncture America stepped in. John Hay, Secretary of State, came forward as the champion of China's territorial integrity, in 1899, just after America had defeated Spain, annexed Porto Rico, established a protectorate over Cuba and undertaken to bring the Philippines up in the way that they should go. He announced his famous " open door policy " to all the nations of Europe and the East, pledging them all to the embarrassing understanding that China should be allowed to go to pot in her own way ; to which doc-trine older and wiser statesmen reluctantly agreed. His reward was the Boxer movement in which China proceeded to butcher American missionaries with as much eclat as those of any other nationality. Some years later, when the Chinese still trembled at the mention of foreign military intervention, America was further rewarded for John Hay's kind services by the first boy-cott upon foreign goods, directed against the simple-minded and sentimental Americans in 1905, because of their restrictions upon Chinese labour immigration into California.

In 1904, China lost her grip upon another dependency when the British invaded Tibet and established relations which to all intents and purposes guaranteed the independence of this vast mountain area from China. The make-believe of Tibetan aflfiliation with China is still maintained to satisfy the Chinese in their conception of " face " and to relieve Great Britain of the charge of aggression, but China at this time has about as much to do with the affairs of Tibet as the American Govern-ment has with the internal politics of Liberia, except in the waste places of the extreme north, where the Mohammedan adventurers from Kansu have carved out their own spheres of exploitation to their own profit. Mongolia broke away from-China as definitely and finally aft«r the Revolution of 1911, under Russian influence, and subsequent Chinese efforts to

recover control have been subject to broad Russian jokes under both the Tsarist and Bolshevik regimes.

About the Boxer movement the world needs little instruc-tion. Thirty-odd purchaseable books have been put on the market, each giving the only authentic account of the affair in English. Of those printed in French, Russian, German, Italian and Japanese it is hard to obtain a complete record. This we can cheerfully leave to the bibliographers. What actually happened was that the numerous secret societies in China pledged to overthrow the Manchu regime, because it was origin-ally virile and healthy, came to hold the Manchus responsible for the advantages gained by the overseas barbarians in China, and therefore proposed to eliminate the Manchus and deal with the " foreign devils " directly. The Boxers had flourished as a secret society for many generations before they became trouble-some in Shantung, about the time of the German annexation of Kiaochow, but simply as an anti-Manchu society with no real anti-foreign or patriotic leanings. They developed a mad religion of their own, with gods borrowed from many cults, and persuaded themselves that the real converts were proof against iron.

A Manchu Viceroy in Shantung, the notorious Yu Hsien, patronized them when it occurred to him that they were growing in influence beyond control, and that they might be used against the foreigner, and helped them build up an organization which easily spread to many other provinces. John Hay's benevolent gestures had more or less stultified other foreign efforts to bring China to her senses, and every diplomat in the Orient was so busy trying to show his interest in China's territorial integrity and independence, that he had little time to devote to the adroit Manchu diversion of the Boxer movement against the foreigner. The Empress-Dowager, in her wily old woman's way, abandoned the Manchu stand that she had taken when she deposed Kuang Hsii, and became a full blown Chinese off-hand. As the mother of China, rather than the head of the Manchu clans exploiting China, she gave orders which saved her own folk and directed the insane Boxers against the foreigners. Yuan Shih-kai, act-ing on his own initiative, suppressed the Boxers in Shantung

with the greatest ease, executing a number of their " invulner-ables " as a proof that their religion was thoroughly bogus. Yu Hsien, the former Viceroy, was by no means degraded because of this showing, but was sent to Shansi where, in due course, he perpetrated against the missionaries the filthiest of all Boxer outrages. The writer has seen the porous paving slabs, saturated with Yu Hsien's blood, in the city of Lanchowfu, in Kansu, and the nick which the executioner's sword made when his head was sent flying by international decree, as have most of the travelled denizens of that half-civilized province in which Yu Hsien took refuge, and therefore knows why the roughest and wildest of China's outlying provinces is most solicitous about the safety and good treatment of the foreign guest. Kansu contributed the only real fighting force which came to Peking to support the throne when the Boxers had provoked interven-tion— Tung Fu-hsiang's Mohammedan cavalry, Turks by des-cent, Arabs by tradition — and they are therefore now among the few people in China who are cheerfully ready and willing to treat the foreigner as a friend and equal. They met their match in real fighting and they are willing to admit it. They sought no mercy and were ready to give none, but, with the fighting well over, they are more than eager to come forward and tell the world how they were defeated — something that no real, " face "-loving Chinese would do under any persuasion but the thumb-screw.

The Boxer outrages, supplemented by the siege of the Lega-tions in Peking, when the Manchus tried to rid themselves of the intolerable nuisance of equal foreign relations by exterminat-ing the foreign plenipotentiaries, ended in an international assault upon the capital — 20,000 mixed and disorganized troops against the resources of the self-esteemed four hundred millions — in which Peking was not only taken but most whole-heartedly looted, a purgative which has suf&ced the capital almost down to the present but is now strongly needed again.

The international expedition against Peking set out, in the first place, for the relief of the diplomats. Legation guards, mis-sionaries and other foreign residents of Peking who were besieged in the Legation Quarter and the Roman Catholic cathedral.

This object attained, all subsequent measures were punitive. It was never seriously suggested that the invaders should sup-plant the ruling dynasty or annex any part of China's territory, largely because all of China south of the Yangtze, under the leadership of a group of particularly intelligent and far-sighted Viceroys, who had come much in contact with foreigners and realized the folly of the Court's attempt to expel or exterminate the outsiders, had not only refused to take orders from Peking, but also had taken every possible measure to suppress anti-foreign agitation and protect foreign life and property. This was not because the south was any fonder than the north of the foreigner, or feared foreign aggression less, but because, through experience, the south gauged the strength of the foreign Powers more accurately. The war in the north, therefore, was essentially a war upon the Boxers and their Manchu patrons, and the results of it were certainly humiliating to both, but China at large was also penalized and has borne the burden of the terms imposed down to the present.

The flight of the Court to Taiyuanfu and Hsianfu, the exile of Prince Tuan, father of the heir-apparent, to Kansu, the execu-tion of a number of princes and ministers who had supported the Empress-Dowager's policy, the despatch of other Imperial princes to Germany and Japan to make formal apology for the murder of the Grerman Minister and a Japanese secretary, the erection in Peking of a massive stone arch to the memory of Baron Von Ketteler — all these were measures humiliating enough to the Manchus and to Chinese officialdom at large, but all were adroitly covered in official documents with the usual silly face-saving camouflage, and were much milder measures than any Oriental would have anticipated. The war indemnity of Tls. 450,000,000 was of course imposed upon the nation, that is upon the Chinese people at large, and the punitive measures carried out by the Germans and others from Peking naturally infficted hardships upon innocent persons for the most part. Prior to the collapse of Chinese resistance at Peking the Russians had also behaved with exceptional brutality in Manchuria, but once the objective was attained were most assiduous in currying favour with the Chinese, in the hope of winning special conces-

sions, and made it very difficult for the other allies to arrive at any terms at all. Missionary propaganda was largely respon-sible for the excited interest which the whole world took in the Boxer movement and therefore the relief and punitive measures, but once it was over the missionaries were more eager than any others to regain the good- will of the Chinese, and take advantage of their supposedly chastened state of mind, so the weight of their influence was against drastic measures. They are now inclined to shake their heads sadly over the injustice of some of the steps taken and to applaud loudly the return of portions of the indemnities for educational purposes.

It is nevertheless a fact that such drastic action as was mutu-ally agreed upon by the conquerors, or was taken independently by the several commanders, guaranteed the assiduous protec-tion of foreign life and property from one end of China to the other for nearly twenty years, provided a fair opportunity for trade development, and inculcated a respect for treaty obliga-tions in the Government which survived for some years the hurly-burly of the Revolution, and has only been broken down now by the insipid policy of ingratiation pursued by the Lega-tions in Peking. Had the measures taken and the terms imposed been somewhat more severe, more in keeping with Oriental tastes, China's troubles now would not have been such as to call forth this series of essays explaining what is wrong with her.

If the Boxer movement had come a few years before the enunciation of the John Hay " open door policy ", China would have been amicably divided into a half dozen protectorates, would by now have increased the wealth of herself and her people a hundredfold, instead of being divided by the Tuchuns and reduced by them to misery, poverty and confusion, and would have added no little share to the wealth and prosperity of the world. As it was, America had given the world the pitch for a world paean to China's integrity, and the other Powers had hypocritically joined so lustily in the chorus, and were so jealously watchful of one another, that none dared suggest a fundamental adjustment, and the Manchu Court was not only enabled to return from Hsianfu but was heartily supported by a dozen

diplomats in its cool assumption that nothing much had hap-pened.

The Emperor Kuang Hsii was of course responsible for noth-ing ; but the Empress-Dowager, who had patronized the Boxers and had published mandates ordering the extermination of all foreigners, executing in the most summary fashion all the advisers who disagreed with her, bore the responsibility for the whole catastrophe. It might have been impolitic to remove the Dynasty because this would have invited confusion, as it has done since, and would have left the Powers with no respon-sible head to execute their demands, but to let this old woman live, let alone return to her palaces and resume her complete authority, was undoubtedly an error for which China is now paying in misery and the world in loss of trade. Those who thought then, or think now, that China would have resented her deposition, her exile, or even her execution, are as ignorant of the Chinese character as the Foreign Offices which now dic-tate Western policy in China. China expected Oriental justice after her complete defeat, and if Kuang Hsii had been restored to nominal supremacy with an international commission of " advisers " to run the country for him in an efficient manner, China would have been pleasantly surprised instead of being contemptuously surprised.

CHAPTER VI (PART 4 OF 5)

Neither the Manchu Court nor the Chinese people were ready after the painful climax to the Boxer movement to show sufficient contempt for the foreigner to invite a further demonstration of Occidental power. The game was to move more slowly but surely. China had four great statesmen who had ignored the Empress-Dowager's orders to annihilate foreigners : Li Hxmg-chang, then in Kuangtung ; Chang Chih-tung, the Viceroy at Wuchang in Hupeh ; Liu Kun-yi, the Viceroy at Nanking ; and Yuan Shih-kai, who had made short work of the Boxers in Shantung. All were Chinese (not Manchus) and no one of them was in any sense of the word pro-foreign ; but all were fully aware that China had not yet a real insight into the elusive secret of foreign strength which would enable her to defy the aggressor and throw him back into the sea. They advocated before the Boxer movement cautious preparation, not spasmodic

and violent resistance, and when the Manchu Court's impulsive policy had ignominiously failed, their advice was accepted by the Empress-Dowager and their plan adopted as the wiser alter-native.

The old lady was no sooner back in Peking than most of the Viceroys submitted memoranda advising the deeper study of foreign ways and means as a step towards the accomplishment of the purpose in which she had just failed. The wording of their messages did not convey this exact meaning but this was their import. They were shown high favour, brought to the capital as direct go-betweens and otherwise entrusted with the direction of policy. Conciliation on the one hand and pre-paration on the other were the new rules of the restored Court. These policies were followed rigidly until the death of the Emperor and of the Empress-Dowager in 1908. The sweetest possible relations were maintained between the Powers and the Court. In 1904 Great Britain invaded Tibet, and China's hegemony over that obdurate people came virtually to an end ; but this only improved relations between England and China, and when the Dalai Lama came to Peking as a refugee a few years later he was heartily snubbed. An anti-American boycott was engin-eered in Shanghai in 1905, because of American restrictions upon Chinese immigration, and was allowed to run to some length because America had been so meek and mild that she really did not count, but was promptly suppressed when the United States showed a disposition to take it seriously.

The successes of the Japanese in their war with Russia had of course had something to do with inspiring this boycott. Although China was equally anti-Japanese and anti-Russian, and was only a little more helpful in a covert way to Japan than to Russia because Russia showed signs of being the stronger, the victory of an Asiatic people over a strong European Power suggested the thought to millions of Chinese that China's case was not absolutely hopeless. If Japan could learn enough of foreign methods to repel Occidental aggression and play the idle of the aggressor herself, there was no good reason why the vastly superior Chinese should not in time learn to do the same. Some of this renewed assurance was shown in the boycott of

American goods, but the Manchu Court had eaten enough " bitter-ness ", as the Chinese say, in the Boxer year to be cautious, and a number of senior statesmen were still alive then who knew that China's material development to the point where she could openly defy the West would be very slow indeed, and that it would mean national suicide to repeat the Boxer experiment before China was fully prepared and certain of her strength.

Interest in Japan was of course tremendously enhanced. The Chinese were convinced that the secret of her successes did not lie in the culture that Japan had borrowed from China, because this had been of no service to China herself in her encounters with the white barbarians. They did not give Japan credit for any qualities inherent in her own breed to account for her new-bom strength. In Chinese eyes the Japanese had always been a contemptible race and were much more commonly known as the " dwarf slaves " (ai-nu) than by their proper name. The only explanation of Japan's greatness, therefore, which satisfied China was that she had acquired secrets of power from the West which China had somehow overlooked. It also appeared that Japan had used these secrets with success while retaining her borrowed Chinese classical culture and tra-ditions, and had even strengthened the hold of the nationalistic Shinto religion upon her people. It naturally appeared that if China could find out what Japan had borrowed from the Occident and how she applied the knowledge that she had acquired, it would save China a lot of effort in experimentation, reduce the term of her apprenticeship, and hasten the day when she could put the foreigner where he belonged.

Japan, therefore, came to be the subject of assiduous study, and, as advisers in military matters, the Japanese became and have remained China's favourites. What the Chinese completely overlooked was that the Japanese inherited and kept alive physical and mental qualities and traditions which China had not had within historical times. Though intellectually inferior to the Chinese, the Japanese are not a passive people but a very alert, energetic and aggressive race. They have many vices in common with Orientals on the mainland, but timidity is not one of them. They are born fighters, and courage takes an

exceedingly high place in their scale of virtues. While the Manchu Dynasty was losing its hold and the people were being weaned away from allegiance to it, authority in Japan was being centralized and a nationalistic code was drilled into the people which, in this generation, has made them the most in-tensely, even selfishly, patriotic people on earth. Modern weapons and machinery and Western science were convenient tools in their hands and means to a definite end ; in China they have never been anything but dangerous playthings or intellectual exercises. Science in the West is of no particular value except as it waits upon the spirit of the various peoples. The same is true in Japan. Occidental wisdom has in Dai Nippon been made to serve the spirit of Japan and has provided a medium of expression for that spirit by means of which Japan has been able to attain greater internal cohesion, stricter national discipline, greater wealth at home and greater prestige abroad.

Japan has had access to nothing in the Occident that was not free to China, but the same material and scientific assets which Japan has imported to her own great advantage, have simply provided China's evil genii with media of expression. The modern machinery of war, in the use of which the Chinese are too conceited to take proper instruction, is not used to maintain internal peace, nor to defend the nation's honour and territories, but has served more and more every year to break down authority and the respect for authority, has provided both bandits and uniformed hordes wath means to loot and kill the unarmed farmers and traders, with the result that from one end of the country to the other commerce labours under such impositions and at such risk that consumers both in China and abroad are unconsciously paying an enormously heavy insurance and a hundred different kinds of taxes which appear upon no government financial statement.

Communications are so abused that they contribute much more to the impoverishment and confusion of the country than to its wealth. To modernize industry in any part of China but the communities under foreign control is to make one's business conspicuous and therefore to invite official attentions which mean extinction for any enterprise that is not capitalized by

powerful officials and therefore protected by them. Western ideas in politics are reduced to slogans and shibboleths which simply serve as apologies for official outrages against the public good. The new political creeds and " isms " of the West act upon the Chinese mind as the loco weed ^ acts upon the other-wise well-behaved pony, or, as the ts'ui ma ts'ao of the Mongolian plains affects the otherwise sedate camel. Such propaganda as the Soviet agents have been bringing into China during the past five years is responsible for more wild and incoherent thinking and talking, more confusion in the State, and more loss of national prestige than Moscow could hope to inspire in any Occidental country in a half-century. China's future has been much more seriously prejudiced by the ideas imported and peddled by such persons as Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Tagore and Karakhan, than by all the opium, morphia, heroin, cocaine and hashish imported or produced in China during the past three centuries.

In short, foreign contact with China has in every respect resulted in her undoing, which is what the Chinese themselves are only too ready at this juncture to claim. But they do not, by any means, admit that they have taken strong medicine which they were not prepared to assimilate and have ignored doctor's orders. Medicines which have been a wholesome tonic or a blessed relief to others have proved to be poison in China, but no Chinese will admit that it is because the nation's system was not prepared for them. They are happy now to discover that they suffer from foreign " Imperialism " and the curse of " unequal treaties ". In other words they assert that they suffer because they took strong medicine under the orders of a group of exceedingly dictatorial doctors when they should have been given the full bottle with no directions on it at all ; while the real truth of the matter is that the doctors have given China the bottle, full of dangerous stuff, and have then credited her with an intelligence in the use of it for which there was no ancient nor modern historical warrant. The Western Powers are very largely responsible for the present state of China, not because they have prescribed too much but too little. Instead of making ^ This is a Mexican weed which produces madness in horses.

her a hospital case under strict surveillance, they have indul-gently given her the run of the dispensary and trusted her to select her own medicines and cure herself, and she now blames them because the bottles were labelled and because, therefore, she was not permitted to fill her perfume spray with nitric acid and had to take a modicum of cod-liver oil tonic when her choice would have been sweet warm champagne.

Like many old ladies who like to challenge and defy their doctors, China has leaped into the arms of the opium-pill quack and is glad to hear from Mr. Karakhan, Soviet Ambassador, that she is the run-down victim of too much medical attention. " Imperialism " in China, unfortunately for the rest of the world, means only a gentle control, though it ought to be rigid hospital discipline. *' Unequal treaties " have proved to be the promises exacted (and consistently broken) from a temperamental old lady by a group of foolishly easy-going physicians.

In 1908, the Emperor Kuang Hsii and the old Empress-Dowager, Tzu Hsi, died, and the control of the State passed into the hands of a very decadent group of Manchu princes. They knew perfectly well that their dynasty was on the greased slide and they gave up all hope of saving it. Their only concern was to enrich themselves before the extinction of the line. China meant absolutely nothing to them, and there were very few real Chinese statesmen left upon whom they could have relied had they been moved to rehabilitate their government. Li Hung-chang, Prince Ching and Prince Kung were dead. The great Yangtze Viceroys were in their dotage, and the best though the most erratic of them, Chang Chih-tung, passed on shortly after the death of the Empress-Dowager. There were not enough big men to help them re-establish themselves, and, if they were going to feather their nests before the collapse, it was incumbent upon them to get rid of any capable persons who might stand in their way. Yuan Shih-kai, who had done ten times more than any other in the building of a modern army, was therefore dis-missed as too sick and decrepit to be of service, and, when he had retired to his paternal estate in Honan, decadent Manchuism had full fling in Peking for several years, China was deliberately wrecked and looted, and the Revolution was fully justified.

THE REVOLUTION OF 1911 239

It would take a very long book to tell the real story of the Revolution, and this is not a history of China. The South was most anti-Manchu because best aware that the Court in Peking was a real obstacle to the imitation of Japan in her defiance of Occidental aggression. South China was keenly interested in overreaching Japan by establishing in China a democracy along Western lines which should not only elicit the sympathy of the West but in which, supposedly, lay the one essential secret to Occidental power. A Chinese society, largely organized in Japan, the T'ung Meng Hui, directed revolutionary propaganda in South China and promoted the Revolution. In the more sedate and sober North there was very little sympathy with this scheme of Westernizing China and thereby fighting the West, but it was understood that the Manchus would have to go, and it was hoped that a native autocracy would replace the defimct alien dynasty. As against the revolutionary societies which moved the impulsive and erratic South, the North had in the Peiyang army an organization built up largely by Yuan Shih-kai which, it was assumed, could police and protect China until the Manchus were properly side-tracked and the southern extremists elimin-ated, after which the country would be ready for a new native dynasty and the reimposition of real discipline.

When the Revolution broke out in Hankow on October 10, 1911, the Peiyang army was of course ordered to suppress it, but it was immediately discovered that the officially super-annuated Yuan Shih-kai was the only man who could handle this force. He was therefore recalled from retirement to hold the South in check and secure for the Court better terms of abdication than they could have obtained from the southern fire-eaters. The Peiyang army could, at that time, have over-run the south and have re-established Manchu authority from one end of China to the other with the greatest ease, but Yuan Shih-kai and his subordinates had no reason to believe that the salvation of China had anything to do with the retention of the Manchus, while at the same time they had little sympathy with the extremists of the south who wanted to foreignize China by official decree that she might the better imitate Japan in her dealings with the Occident. Rigid military discipline was

Yuan's cure for China. Plug hats and porous-knit underwear appeared to be the southern prescription, with political and constitutional panaceas to match. In return for the election of Yuan Shih-kai to the presidency of the new Republic the North elected to learn a certain amount of persiflage about the will of the people, the rule of the majority, government of, by, and for the people, equality, liberty and fraternity, and what not, always hoping that these were psychic spasms which contact with reality would cure.

To the consternation of North China the foreign Powers appeared to be delighted with the southern inanities. The adoption of foreign underwear was hailed by the trade as a genuine symbol of progress. When the Chinese in Hawaii solemnly marched to the waterfront and threw their queues into the sea, the hat merchants, from Milan to Philadelphia, started envoys eastward with choice cheap stocks of Fedora, Homburg and cowboy Stetsons to meet the new demand. Japan did handsomely in cheap glassware, small foreign traders worked marvellous deals in old brocade and sable robes, and Mandarin beads became an article of trade of which the American customs had to take serious cognizance.

The missionaries took it upon themselves to be highly com-plimented. They and their converts had raised the standards of living and ideals. Instead of solid blackwood furniture, passed on from generation to generation, always beautiful and useful, the Republicans were using foreign furniture, built of camouflaged poplar and pine, and destined to warp in directions unknown to Einstein, painted over with tinted shellac and intro-duced into millions of Chinese homes as the proper furnishings of the " free and equal ". The passion for imitating the West in all things brought forth countless absurdities in attire, hair-cuts, house-furnishings and manners. The Chinese showed an amazing faculty for borrowing and adopting a great deal from the West that was useless and superficial and for overlook-ing almost everything that would have been of solid worth to them.

This tendency was and remains even more obvious in the political, literary and philosophical fields. The reformers

were in great haste to introduce all the forms and all the phrase-ology of democracy, particularly of the American brand. They showed great enthusiasm in the drafting of constitutions, codes, regulations and plans of every sort along Occidental lines, and they are still at it, despite the fact that all such documents are dead-letter before the ink is dry and that every one knows it. If any particular set of conditions in China becomes so scandal-ously bad that the Government or the local official has to take cognisance, instead of ordering and enforcing their immediate reform, a commission is appointed or a bureau established, providing a few hundred jobs for relatives and political dependents, and, after months of conversation, a set of regula-tions is evolved and solemnly published with a flourish which means : " There now, you Occidentals, please take note. That's as good a law as any of you have." And that ends it. No one pretends to observe or apply the new regulations unless it suits his convenience.

The fourth and last Chinese constitution, the criminal and civil codes, the mining laws, the trade-mark law, the regulations governing the army promulgated by the Ministry of War, and a hundred other documents that might be cited, are modelled on the best Occidental patterns and should long ago have restored peace and order in China if any person of position and influence had any thought of guiding his conduct by them. The form is there but the Chinese have never conjured the spirit into it. Law in China is a stuffed tiger, for museum purposes only, and was so from the hour that the Revolution was supposed to have succeeded. In spite of this the vast majority of foreigners in China, from the diplomats down to the missionaries, were flattered and deceived by this emulation in superficial matters, and Peking under Yuan Shih-kai was forced, because of the need of foreign money and the urgent desire for foreign recogniton of the new regime, to pretend approval and take a leading part in the Republican burlesque.

Yuan Shih-kai and all the senior officials in China were never-theless absolutely certain in their own minds that the Chinese people were not only unprepared for the sweeping changes that the southern radicals insisted upon and so many foreigners

W.W.C. Q

approved, but that democracy was absolutely unsuited to their needs and out of all harmony with their temper and traditions. They knew perfectly well, what it has taken most of us a long time to learn, that China can only make the most of herself when implicitly obeying orders under rigid discipline. To have defeated the South, however, would have meant the retention of the Manchus, whose strength and whose administrative capacity were both spent ; so the only possible course was to let the South believe that the Revolution had been a complete success, and then, with money in hand and the army reorganized, crush the South and restore authority, order and sanity. To this end Peking commenced, as soon as Yuan Shih-kai had been elected President by the provisional Parliament, to under-mine the power of the Revolutionary leaders and rob the new institutions which they had foisted upon the country of their authority. The radical element in Parliament was soon unseated and driven from the capital. Peking negotiated an international loan, and a new Revolution in the Yangtze Valley, inspired by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Huang Hsing and other extremists, was readily suppressed.

Foreign relations were meanwhile amiable enough. In their anxiety to learn all about foreign ways so that they might super-ficially conform to the new foreign standards, all classes of Chinese were bent upon cultivating every foreigner with whom they could come in touch, while Peking, equally devoted to centralizing authority and developing the country with foreign help, was scrupulously careful to observe the treaties and to extend not only protection but trade facilities and every courtesy to foreigners. The negotiation of the Reorganization Loan in April, 1913, put £25,000,000 at Yuan Shih-kai's disposal and was considered a great victory for the conservatives which the revolutionary South duly resented.

The American Government, which had shown a conciliatory spirit towards China in 1908, when a portion of the Boxer in-demnity was remitted for educational purposes, was blind as usual to real conditions in China and was most enthusiastic about the new Republic. American bankers were therefore prevented from participating in the international loan. Demo-

cracy in China, however, aroused no great enthusiasm or sym-pathy in Japan. The Japanese, being Orientals, were under no illusions. They knew it would not work and that it set a bad example to the small but growing radical element at home. Other Powers viewed the experiment with a mixture of mild enthusiasm and sagacious doubt, but were, on the whole, much more inclined to do business with an autocrat who got things done than with a body of young firebrand reformers who talked a great deal to no good purpose. They therefore had more sympathy for Yuan Shih-kai than for his antagonists.

Under Yuan Shih-kai's heavy hand China began to do extremely well after the futile revolution of 1913 ; and it began to be rumoured that this state of things would be made per-manent by the establishment of a new dynasty with the so-called President as the first Emperor. Japan did not like the Republic but she liked much less the prospect of a strong and prosperous China, with an independent policy, upon which she could not draw freely in the event of war as a source of supply. When Japan came into the war in 1914 and undertook to displace the Germans in Kiaochow, the astute Yuan realized that what Japan took she held, and was very eager to bring China in on the Allied side so that China would have the support of the Allies in any future dispute with Japan about the possession of the German holdings in Shantung. This Japan opposed strenuously, as can be imagined, and " high policy " dictated the rejection of Yuan's offer in deference to Japan's wishes. In 1915, after the fall of the German stronghold, Yuan was still strong, China was still moving forward under her President's autocratic rule, and there was still more talk of a monarchy. If China were going to be strong and free there were a lot of things upon which Japan was determined to get a permanent hold before it was too late. If necessary it was better to fight for them then, while Europe was too busy to interfere, rather than wait until China was strong and prosperous under an efficient autocracy and Europe back in the East in full force, so in the spring of 1915 she presented the now notorious Twenty-one Demands, followed by an ultimatum and a show of mobiliza-tion of her troops in China.

To reproduce the whole of the Twenty-one Demands, at this late date, and explain the significance of each to readers who take enough interest in China to read these essays, would cer-tainly be superfluous. From a Japanese militaristic point of view the presentation of these demands was then regarded as a defensive measure. Japanese statesmen now profess to deplore them and are pleased to hold the militarists responsible for what they pronounce an outrage against Chinese sovereignty ; but, with the exception of a few clauses which a revised military policy would now render superfluous, there can be little doubt that, given a similar opportimity and a similar Japanese outlook upon the world situation, Japan would do it all over again.

CHAPTER VI (PART 5 OF 5)

In the early spring of 1915 Japan had already gained, through association with the Allies, nearly all of the political and military advantage which the war could yield her. Japanese militarists are seldom interested in economic questions or in the welfare of their mercantile and industrial classes. Having got what they wanted in Shantung, through participation on the Allied side, the Japanese soldier-statesmen were by no means sure that they wanted to stay on that side or that the Allies would win. There were many occasions when both popular sympathy and national policy, as reflected openly in the Japanese press, veered around dangerously near the German point of the com-pass. Japan therefore had to be prepared, in the event of a change of afiiliation, or of a German victory, if caught on the Allied side, to stand alone in the Orient, with America an uncer-tain quantity that might drop into either pan of the scales. To defend herself, with any hope of success, a firm hold upon China, or a weak and docile China, then seemed absolutely essential. Japan is not self-supporting, in a military sense. She is poor in such essentials to a sustained defence as coal, iron and food. The needful supplies can be obtained from China in ordinary times but, in the event of war, a strong and inde-pendent China could make these necessities extremely difficult of access, while a strong and hostile China could ensure Japan's ruin at a stroke. Japan, therefore, undertook in presenting the Twenty-one Demands to assure herself a political hegemony over her neighbour which would reduce her to a state of abject

docility and, at the same time, to gain a hold upon China's supplies of iron and coal and her essential lines of communication with Japan which no one could challenge.

In peace time, with the various Occidental Powers free and alert in the safeguarding of their Oriental interests, this move of Japan's would have been a bold and dangerous step indeed. But the enemy Powers were safely bottled up by the Allied fleets, while Japan's Allies not only had their hands full, but were much more dependent upon her doubtful loyalty for success than she was, for her own security, upon them. America also was too profoundly interested in the European War and in its reverbera-tions within her own boundaries to challenge Japan's freedom of action in China. China, thanks to Japan's foresight, was a neutral, and therefore entitled to no special consideration in a feud with such a valuable ally as Japan. The opportunity was, for Japan, a rare and precious one, and she therefore took cold-blooded advantage of it and descended upon China, then giving some promise of regeneration and abiding most faithfully by her international obligations, with a series of outrageous demands which she brought to a head with her ultimatum.

Yuan Shih-kai was then a strong man with a well-disciplined army, and, when the terms of the ultimatum first became public, might easily have been carried into a war with Japan on the crest of a wave of unprecedented Chinese popular support. But China was not yet in a position to fight Japan and certainly not in a position to fight an ally of the friendly Powers. Belated publicity in Europe and America elicited a sympathy for China which forced Japan to mitigate her demands and to waive some (known as Group Five) which, if complied with, would have reduced China to the position of a vassal state ; but Yuan Shih-kai did not get the support that he expected from foreign public opinion, and was eventually forced, when Japan was mobilizing for an invasion, to accede to the Demands.

Indeed, Japan's opportunity was so well chosen that very few persons in the Occident were willing until long after the Armistice to face this event squarely and consider its signifioance. Great Britain's most trusted daily newspaper and America's greatest news agency both refused for many days to print accurate

reports of the terms of the Demands from their accredited corres-pondents, because they thought them fantastic, while the greatest British organ in the Far East to this day does not have in its files the text of the Twenty-one Demands. It need only be added that Mr. Lloyd George, Premier at the time of the presentation of the Demands, confessed at the time of the Paris Peace Con-ference that he did not know what they were, to show how little support China had to expect from the Occident at that particular jimcture. But in spite of the Occident's real absorp-tion and apparent indifference at that critical moment in Oriental history, there was enough interest aroused to check Japan's aspirations for the moment and also to leave what might be described as a lasting subconscious impression upon the minds of all Occidental peoples which has since profoundly influenced all British and American policy in the East, both for good and evil. Whether they were aware of it or not, the Occidentals from that moment all got it into their heads that China was eternally deserving of sympathy and that Japan could not be trusted — impressions which China apparently cannot wipe out, no matter how badly she behaves and how recklessly she forfeits sympathy, and which Japan cannot eradicate with consistent good behaviour.

In the foreign communities in the Orient these same impres-sions were by no means subconscious, but were founded upon tangible everyday experience and have been very slowly modified by China's demoralization on the one hand and by Japan's partial change of policy on the other. The habit of being in all things pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese is one in which the vast majority of Anglo-Saxons in the East are so deeply confirmed that when their faith in China is, for some reason, shattered, they do not swing round and become pro-Japanese and anti-Chinese, but rather conceive a bitter and often virulent dislike and contempt for all Asiatics. This phenomenon probably has its foundation in the well-known fact that while the Chinese is not, in a great many respects, admirable according to our way of looking at things, he is yet extremely likeable, even lovable ; while the Japanese, though he has undeniably admir-able qualities, is not — from our point of view again — in all

tilings admirable, while he very seldom indeed elicits liking, let alone affection. The average Occidental in the Far East, therefore, when he feels that his liking for the Chinese has been misplaced and betrayed, becomes unreasonably anti-Oriental like a misogynous old lover crossed in love. A very large pro-portion of the old residents of China, who perhaps loved too intensely and too blindly, have now retired from the conven-tional ranks of those pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese into a new class of unreasonably bitter anti-Asiatics.

This, however, is a digression. The more or less instinctive pro-Chinese and anti- Japanese prejudices of the Anglo-Saxons in East Asia were mightily confirmed by the Twenty-one Demands and were still further confirmed by a long series of events during the succeeding five years in which Japan adhered to her aggressive militaristic policy, and attempted to confirm and consolidate the position in China which she assumed in 1915.

The ingrained conviction that the Japanese cannot be trusted, so widely held by Europeans and Americans in the Orient, shared as it is by merchants, missionaries, journalists and diplomats, all of whom have reason to write to their homelands about political events in the East, has undoubtedly been reflected in all the Occidental capitals and has had a marked effect upon policy in the East, and therefore upon the course that China has been allowed to run in recent years. Since the Armistice the state of China has been inviting both financial and political intervention with increasing insistence, while the various Chinese Governments have furnished ample warrant for outside inter-ference with ever-growing wilfulness ; but war- weariness, burdens of debt and the well-known preoccupations of Peace in every European country have been, in all parts of the West, effective checks upon drastic action in the East. The importance of the China trade, and therefore the importance of a well ordered China, are by no means unappreciated within the circles that shape policy in either America or Europe, but the restoration of order by any other than diplomatic means and through any other than Chinese media has been pronounced a physical impos-sibility, time after time, by all of the Occidental Governments. Through all of these years Japan, by virtue of her proximity

to China, her military establishments adjacent to China and her military prestige in the country, could, at any moment, have put an effectual check upon China's general demoralization, have restored peace to the Chinese people, financial solvency to the nation, and could have paved the way for a stupendous growth in foreign trade which would have enriched China and have been a genuine relief to the whole world.

Such measures Japan has not been in a position, since the Armistice, to undertake without an international mandate, without the moral and financial support of the Western Powers, and, rightly or wrongly, the feeling persists in the East, and is reflected in the West, that Japan could not be trusted with such a mandate. It is felt that until the Powers are prepared to put an even more effective check upon Japan than would sufiice to restore order in China, Japan's Oriental propensity for " farm-ing " a monopoly, the Oriental disposition to take advantage of an absent and impotent partner, would inevitably prompt her to set up a regime of her own in China which would be a more effective ban upon the development of trade under free competition than any amount of Chinese misrule, turbulence and anti-foreignism. These are very unkind thoughts and may be rooted to some degree in prejudice, but are to a still greater degree founded upon a recorded knowledge of Japanese exclu-sionist tactics in Korea, Formosa and Manchuria and upon experi-ence in Japanese methods in China and Siberia during the war years.

Japan in China is certainly much less under suspicion now than she was five years ago ; but while she is duly credited with a change of policy in China, she is by no means credited in the Orient with a change of heart. It is clearly enough under-stood that, within the past five years, Japan's soldier-statesmen have abandoned the thought that to be self-reliant in war Japan must control the Chinese Government and the resources of the Yangtze Valley, and of Shantung and Formosa on the China coast. They seem to be convinced now that if their hold upon Manchurian resources and the lines of communications, via Korea, between Manchuria and Japan, is sufficiently firm, the rest of China is of no vital importance from a military point

of view, while the good-will of such Governments as China has been flaunting in the world's face would be a doubtful asset at best. This is not interpreted to mean, however, that Japan would not relish a trade monopoly in China nor that, given the oppor-tunity for establishing it, she would not resort to the same tactics which won her the suspicion of the Powers and the hostility of all foreign communities in China during the war. While a healthy China would be of enormous economic value to Japan, a strong and healthy China, unless under Japan's absolute hegemony, would still be a direct menace from the Japanese military point of view ; so that it would by no means suit Japanese statesmen, with whom military considerations always outweigh economic advantages, to restore order and prosperity in China except under a Japanese political monopoly, which no Oriental people could help converting into a commercial monopoly, in spite of their own best intentions.

The Occidental Governments, faced with the alternative of giving Japan a mandate to discipline China or of doing nothing, have for the various reasons outlined decided at critical moments in the past to do nothing. It is hard, where one's vital interests are concerned, to do nothing unless one can bring oneself to see nothing ; so the whole policy of the Occident in the East for some years has been to take China's demoralization lightly. To achieve this end has entailed a certain amount of self-decep-tion at every turn, a little misrepresentation here and there, the cherishing of many groundless hopes founded in the abilities of the Chinese people to work out their own salvation, and the dissemination of much tempered " news " to the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Such a policy of make-believe has suited the comfort and convenience of the Legations in Peking from beginning to end, and they have acquired a facility in glossing over calamities to foreign prestige and in misrepresenting the temper of the Chinese people which Chinese diplomats abroad have been severely tasked to emulate.

The net result of this negative policy, consistently pursued through a number of years, is that if the fate of Great Britain, or of the United States of America, were at this moment solely dependent upon the restoration of order in China through drastic

intervention, neither nation could elicit a warrant for such action from peoples steeped in misconceptions of the state of China, the temper of the Chinese people and the position of the foreigner in the Orient.

It would be childish, of course, to assert that this state of things is all the direct outcome of Japan's Twenty-one Demands or of Japan's subsequent activities in China, When the Great Powers of the Occident cease to be the arbiters of their own destiny in the East and are prepared to trace their failures to the isolated acts of any one Oriental country, without prescribing remedy or redress, they automatically forfeit their right to the consideration which they would like to enjoy in the Orient. For the same reason it is just as weak and futile to load the Russian Soviet with sole responsibility for the present situation, of which they have done no more than take a good chess-player's ruthless advantage. It must be obvious, however, that Japan's policy in China as pursued from 1915 to 1920 is to some degree both directly and indirectly responsible for the decline of Occi-dental prestige in the East and for the seemingly helpless and hopeless attitude in which the Great Powers face China in her present hostile frenzy. To much the same degree can the present state of China, particularly her obvious plasticity in Bolshevik hands, be traced to Japanese policy in the East during the years of Europe's complete war preoccupation. And in this connection again it must always be remembered that Japan-ese policy has played a part in China's undoing which it could not have played in a country lacking her hereditary weaknesses, as the writer has outlined them in previous chapters. At law, in Anglo-Saxon countries, the tempting helplessness of a victim is no extenuation of maltreatment and robbery, but we cannot help having a certain sympathy for a desperately hungry urchin who belabours a spoiled and pudgy boy and takes his cakes and apples from him while his wards are busy elsewhere ; and so we should probably have much the same sympathy with needy Japan in her relations with fat, pampered, and self-indulgent China, if we did not have certain vital interests of our own in the cakes and apples.

Yuan Shih-kai's collapse under the ultimatum which followed

the Twenty-one Demands undoubtedly weakened his position with all classes of intelligent Chinese. While continuing to resist Japan, he had nothing to fear from the forces in the country which were breaking down respect for authority, and he could have brought the country under the severest possible discipline, no matter in what terms he cared to interpret his authority as " president ". With his surrender to Japan, however, went much of his prestige among his own people. The more or less exotic elements that fomented disorder and resisted discipline in the name of democracy and constitutionalism, having had a taste of power here and there, and of the material joys that inevitably go with power in the Orient, immediately took a fresh interest in resistance to discipline and automatically came under the solicitous patronage of Japan.

Yuan Shih-kai and his immediate supporters, relieved of the diplomatic burdens which the Japanese demands had imposed, once more turned their attention to internal affairs and went ahead with their plans for the establishment of a new dynasty. The Republic suited Japan ill, because it set a bad example in the East ; but the possibility of China's revival under a vigorous absolute ruler suited her still less ; so, having in hand the desired documentary hold upon the special rights embodied in the Twenty-one Demands, she proceeded through different groups of agents to secure the failure of the monarchy restoration movement on the one hand, while giving it benign encouragement on the other. Chaos in China as a preliminary to Japanese con-trol was her immediate objective.

To capture the flighty fancy of the southern " constitution-alists ", Japan conceived and brought forth a movement, since then revived and handsomely fed on Soviet propaganda — the Pan-Asia movement. Japan cannot be credited with the ter-minology of Russian propaganda in the East, but she sowed the seeds of a crop of anti-Occidental feeling which Russia is now busily harvesting, and called upon all Asiatics to enlist under her patronage and present a united resistance to what the Reds now describe as the " imperialism of the capitalistic nations ". Outside of China the recruits were few and were limited to the few Indian agents in German pay who were foment-

ing anti-British and pro-Turkish feeling among the Moslems in various Asiatic countries. But in China the revolutionaries were captured en masse and the bitterly anti-Japanese South-erners of Sun Yat-sen's following, from highest to lowest, includ-ing those credited with much acumen and those credited with none, became fervent Pan-Asianists, acknowledging Japan's leadership in the movement. As this group coincided in all its personnel with that which, in the winter of 1915-16, frustrated Yuan Shih-kai's monarchy movement, forced him to abandon it and hastened his death, it is superfluous to try to establish a connection between Japan and the overthrow of the centre of Chinese power and discipline. She controlled the movers if not the movement ; and if her objective was attained without too obvious participation, it was no less surely achieved.

As we look back upon the situation now and see it in per-spective, it is clearly apparent that China's last hope of rehabili-tating herself and making a fresh start, perished with Yuan Shih-kai in the spring of 1916. It was not so obvious then. It appeared to many of us, who had no reason to suspect how utterly irresponsible and incompetent the Chinese can be when freed from rigid and ruthless discipline, that the way had been cleared for a genuine reconciliation between the conservative leaders of the northern army. Yuan Shih-kai's lieutenants who inherited some degree of his authority, and the madcap south-erners, obsessed by their " constitutionalism ", their Pan-Asianism, and other diseases of the recalcitrant spirit. It appeared that the way was clear for the evolution of a new firmly-knit China under democratic institutions. In the light of experience we not only know now that Japan was not having anything of the sort, but also that China was, for fundamental reasons not then so evident, wholly incapable of any such develop-ment.

Sun Yat-sen's large following of erratic reformers, and a few hundred thousand others who w^ere ready to imitate them in all but sincerity, had cultivated a contempt for authority and an irritable impatience under discipline which already rendered government in China by anything but the heavy hand a futility. The northern army chiefs, under the leadership of Marshal

Tuan Chi-jui (at the moment of writing, Provisional Chief Execu-tive of the Republic of China), were too chastened by the failure, collapse and death of their supreme leader, Yuan Shih-kai, to move other than cautiously, and, in all their endeavours to restore discipline by force, found themselves face to face with Southern " constitutionalism " in league with Japan, until, a few years later, when they had sold themselves body and soul to Japan in the hope of restoring discipline with her aid, they again found themselves opposed by the " constitutionalists ", backed by a more vociferous anti-Japanese movement than that which the Twenty-one Demands had called forth. In 1917, Chang Hsun's sporadic attempt to restore the Manchu imperial line in the person of the " boy emperor " Hsuan T'ung, was such a dismal failiire and promoted so many nobodies to high rank as " defenders of the Republic " that the idea of monarchical restoration was abandoned by the majority of its most ardent advocates, while republican shibboleths became the recognized slogans of gross misgovernment and of ambitious bandit enter-prise.

To review the history of China's swift degeneration from the time of Yuan Shih-kai's death to the present would serve no purpose. It would be a vast web of intrigue, as familiar as family chronology to the Anglo-Saxon resident of the Orient, but utterly bewildering to anyone unfamiliar with the names and personal characteristics of a few score prominent Chinese actors on the political stage, much less familiar to the Occidental reader than the members of the current Latvian Cabinet. Suffice it to say that, with China in a satisfactory state of confusion and demoralization, Japan commenced to establish her own hold upon the Chinese Grovernment and the Chinese Army by actual purchase in 1917, and that, by the spring of 1920, she had invested approximately £20,000,000, on little or no security, and had gained absolute control of the recognized Government, when her whole Chinese regime, including her Japanese equipped and trained Chinese army, was scattered at a blow beyond reassembly or repair by Wu Pei-fu.

The rest is not worth telling. Wu Pei-fu, a prodigy in his way, championed the utterly worthless Tsao Kun and his degenerate

following, under whom foreign prestige went into a permanent decline and Soviet-inspired nationalism and anti-foreignism became rampant. As Chinese history the only bright spots in the story of events from 1920 to the present are the records of Wu Pei-fu's military campaigns. But as each of his successes was followed by an accretion of bad internal government and by bolder Chinese encroachments upon foreign rights in China, even Wu Pei-fu's military enterprises are shorn of significance and glory. The collapse of this imusual figure in the autumn campaign against Manchuria, in 1924, through treachery and Japanese enterprise, ushered in, however, what must be con-sidered the most chaotic epoch in China's history in 1,200 years.

CHAPTER VII (PART 1 OF 4)

CHAOS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCE

THE history of what the Great Powers must regard as China's delinquencies during the ten years that have elapsed since Yuan Shih-kai's death, divides itself into two five-year periods. The first period, which closed with the collapse of what is called in the East the Anfu regime, the Jap-anese-controlled government in Peking under the leadership of Marshal Tuan Chi-jui, was one during which the central authority gradually lost control over the provinces, was less and less able from year to year to collect the national revenues, and was there-fore more and more dependent upon foreign loans. Respect for authority, discipline in all ranks of public life, and account-ability to Peking for public funds, dwindled away with increas-ing rapidity, and, with its authority curtailed by revolutionaries everywhere and by " independent " military chiefs in every province, Peking became less and less able to safeguard foreign lives, property, rights and special prerogatives, as guaranteed in the treaties, and found great difficulty in meeting financial obligations, except when served by foreign-controlled tax col-lectorates such as the Maritime Customs and the Salt Gabelle, and therefore resorted to indiscriminate borrowing both to pur-chase the fealty of provincial subordinates and their armies and to meet foreign obligations. While violations of the treaties and of financial bargains began to be numerous enough, especi-ally in the pro\'ince8, the Central Government at no time showed a disposition to repudiate foreign agreements of any sort but sincerely endeavoured to the best of its dwindling ability to retain the good-\\-ill of the Powers, discharge its obligations and enforce respect for the letter of the treaties without quibbling

about their justice or their infringement upon China's sovereign rights. The Powers therefore still retained a disciplinary check upon China which made for the security of foreign lives, property and commerce and, to a commensurate degree, for the prosperity and well-being of China.

During the past five years, however, the whole attitude of Chinese officialdom towards treaties and other bargains with the foreigner has undergone the most radical change, a change of attitude which has been reflected in all strata of Chinese society, to the serious discomfiture of all classes of foreigners resident in the country. The rapid breakdown of authority everywhere and a consequent growth of outlawry of every sort soon involved foreigners in all manner of physical dangers and losses of property. Since the authorities could not impose the usual drastic penalties nor exact the usual reparations from the local offenders, the idea became prevalent only too readily that the contempt and dislike for the non-conformist foreigner, which was only latent in all classes, could be vented upon the isolated and helpless outlander. The Chinese are a cautious race, so the growth of this idea has been slow, but nevertheless steady and sure enough.

The high authorities were at first desperately frightened by the growth of such ideas among the unruly and, in each case, made a desperate show of doing something about it, for they feared disciplinary action on the part of the Powers. Being unable in so many cases to do anything, they were driven to adopt a policy of procrastination and evasion, and it is almost wholly to the success of these tactics and the fashion in which our diplomatic agents in the East have tolerated such tactics ; have condoned the violation of treaties and all other bargains ; have apologized to themselves, their Governments, their nationals in China, and to one another, for flagrant violations of their guaranteed rights, that Chinese of all degrees are now in such an exultantly and defiantly anti-foreign temper that no foreign life and no foreign property in China, beyond the reach of gun-boats and landing-parties, can be said to be absolutely secure. Encouraged by the success of a policy of evasion and postpone-ment in the discharge of treaty and other obligations, Chinese

officialdom very shortly felt encouraged in adopting an attitude of bored indifference, then one of contemptuous indifference, then one of defiant repudiation of responsibilities, and now finally one of aggressive repudiation characterized not only by a contempt of treaty obligations but by vociferous demands for Chinese " rights " which all classes in China have done their best to forfeit over and over again.

The growth of the influence of the Russian Soviet's agents in the Orient has coincided, step by step, during the past five years with the decline in the prestige of the other Powers repre-sented in Peking, and it is now the fashion, in both the Press and in diplomatic circles, to attribute to Bolshevik influence this decline in prestige and also whatever is too obviously wrong with China to be comfortably ignored. While it is only too clear that the anti-foreign demonstrations in China, which are becoming more seriously distressing with every turn in events, are inspired by the Soviet's agents, and are, in parts of China, actually under their immediate direction, it must be clearly understood that the weak negative policy of the Occidental Powers has, from beginning to end, provided splendid openings for Bolshevik endeavour which otherwise, in a country of China's economic structure and political and social traditions, could not have gained a foothold. This must not only be realized by the Grovernments represented in Peking, but freely confessed to the world, because until mistakes in the past have been confessed and explained throughout the Occident, the Governments can-not, with popular approval, adopt a policy in the East which will restore order and sanity in China, put a brake upon Soviet enterprise, and restore that respect for foreign rights which is absolutely essential to the survival of foreign trade in the East.

Many apologies are offered, largely having to do with expediency and the state of Europe after the war, for the relaxation of foreign discipline in China at a time when donaestic discipline was going by the board ; but before anything can be done about the present situation the world must clearly understand that the present collapse of foreign prestige in China, while fundamentally due to China's own inherent weaknesses, can be

W.W.O. B

traced to an international attitude of indulgence and concilia-tion, and the inevitable Oriental reaction to indulgent treatment, much more directly than to any real hold which Russia has upon the minds or affections of the Chinese agitators.

To appreciate the character of what looks like the " bolshe-vization " of China, the observer from long range must under-stand that the spread of Russian influence in the East has noth-ing whatever to do with the spread of Marxian Socialism, except among an infinitely small fraction of students and school-masters who like to regard themselves as radical intellectuals. The Russians have had no interest in preaching theoretical communism in Asia (with the possible exception of Japan), but have devoted all their energies, in direct contravention of the efforts of their missionaries in the Occident, to the preaching and fostering of race hatred and of the most narrow-minded and poisonous sort of nationalism. In China there is absolutely no market for Marxian Socialism, since industrial organization can hardly be said to have arrived at a promising infancy ; and, in spite of the expenditure of huge sums of Russian propaganda money in the East, it can be asserted with absolute assurance that not one Chinese in a hundred thousand of those now guided in revolt against " unequal treaties " by Soviet propaganda has any clear idea of the meaning of Communism or any desire to learn the word's meaning. If, by acquiring a small vocabulary of Com-munistic " patter " and paying lip service to Bolshevism with-out troubling to understand it, as they have prattled of repub-licanism for thirteen years while forming no conception of its meaning, the Chinese can elicit some Russian moral and material support in their present hydrophobic campaign against the rest of the world, they are happy to talk of armies and Govern-ments of " the workers and peasants ", of " imperialism ", and of the " capitalistic nations ". And with this degree of adher-ence to Communism the Russian agents are thoroughly content, since they have not the slightest desire or hope of converting the Asiatic nations to theoretical Communism. The Chinese agitator's ready incorporation of this communistic phraseology in the other nonsense which he purveys, gives the Soviet propa-ganda material to use in Russia and the Occident, and is there-

fore welcome, but it means less than nothing to those who have lived in the East and who appreciate how the Chinese have delighted for thirty centuries in mouthing high-sounding but meaningless phrases.

Russia came into the East with the deliberate and well-adver-tised intention of wTecking the Occident and making it a fertile field for communistic enterprise, by promoting chaos in Asia and thereby rendering worthless the West's economic and com-mercial investments, upon which Great Britain and other Euro-pean nations depended for financial rehabilitation and the resumption of normal economic enterprise at home. In 1919, when Europe was beginning to react strongly against Communism as manifested in Bulgaria, Italy, and parts of Germany, the Third International conceived the happy plan of attacking Europe via Asia. As a first step, a certain Mr. PopofE, lavishly supplied with money, was sent from Moscow to Irkutsk, in Siberia, to recruit from among the Oriental colonies in Asiatic Russia and train small armies of Mongol, Korean, Chinese and Japanese propaganda agents, who could be sent into their respective countries after they had learned their parts and, with an abundance of gold in hand, foment trouble of any sort in any well-fertilized field, preaching the while the soft-hearted Soviet's tearful sympathy with the downtrodden, exploited Asiatic victims of " capitalistic Imperialism ". Similar work was of course carried on, from a Moslem Bureau, in Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, India, and Central Asia, along slightly different propaganda lines ; but it cannot be said that the direct effects of this work ever had any marked effect upon the Far-Eastern situation — not even in the strongly Mohammedan areas of north-western China.

Siberian Buriat Mongols were trained for the organization of a " dictatorship of the industrial proletariat " in the purely pastoral Mongol steppe country, then under abominably bad Chinese administration, with a revolt against " Chinese imperial-ism " as the immediate objective. Within a few months after the inception of this movement, White Russian activities in northern Mongolia afforded the Soviet an adequate excuse for military intervention. Soviet troops and Kalmuck mer-

cenaries occupied the administrative centres of northern and western Mongolia, set up an allegedly Red Mongol regime, and effectually alienated a vast territory from China which, in spite of agreements and promises so freely dispensed from Moscow, she is now further than ever from recovering. This and other acts of what might be called Soviet Imperialism in Manchuria, which have impinged more flagrantly upon China's sovereign rights than the combined activities of the Occidental Powers in the past ten years, are now receiving absolutely no attention in China for several reasons. The first is that the Soviet is not dispensing propaganda funds to advertise such facts, and natur-ally does not put them in the mouths of its ignorant agents. The second is that the nationalists who are helping Red Russia in the assault upon Occidental prestige, are discreetly silent because they imagine that they are using Russia now and can readily outwit her when she has served her purpose and her usefulness is passed. The third reason is that the notorious " Christian General ", Feng Yii-hsiang, who is in military control of the Peking area at the time of writing, and who delegates to the nominal Peking Government such authority and liberty of action as suits his convenience only, has received material support from Moscow, and, having virtually declared war upon Great Britain at Russia's behest in various proclamations, cer-tainly would not permit the administrative instrument under his control, the recognized Government of China, to challenge Russian encroachments upon China's sovereignty. So much for Soviet enterprise in Mongolia.

The Koreans were next in line. In 1920 and 1921, when Japan was shaping a new military policy in China, involving the partial abandonment of aggressive tactics in Shantung, Fukien and the Yangtze Valley, and concentrating upon the development of the resources of Korea and Manchuria, the Korean revolutionary movement was still intensely vital and well organized. It naturally became the Soviet's immediate ambition to cripple Japan, and, tlirough her, a certain amount of Occidental trade, by fathering and financing the Korean revolutionary activities. There were, ready at hand, some mil-lions of Korean emigres in Manchuria and Siberia, all bitterly

anti-Japanese, and nearly all of the hunter-farmer type, accus-tomed to the use of fire-arms in the forest country against bandits and ^ald animals. The task of trouble-making here looked easy, but no Soviet undertaking in the East has been such a complete failure. China's anti-Japanese attitude in 1919 and 1920 encouraged the Korean leaders of revolt against Japan to establish themselves in Shanghai, Peking, Canton, and other Chinese cities, so that the first Soviet agents out of Siberia appeared in China as emissaries to the Koreans rather than to the Chinese.

The Irkutsk Bureau's choice of agents was, however, unfor-tunate in that they were not persons of influence in any of the Korean revolutionary societies, so that the Korean leaders in China were concerned chiefly with the conversion of these Siberian agents to the " legitimate " revolutionary cause, and the addi-tion of their very liberal supplies of Russian gold to the revolu-tionary war chest. A few influential Koreans accepted the Soviet's invitation to visit Moscow, and came back to circularize the various Korean societies with scathing denunciations of conditions in Russia under the proletarian dictatorship. Korean guerilla bands in Manchuria, moving before the Japanese, crossed into Siberia, lent their services to the Soviet in 1921 and 1922, assisted greatly in the final Soviet occupation of Vladivostok, and were then so harshly treated that they became implacable enemies of the whole Bolshevik system. Russia, however, bought enough agents in the impoverished Korean revolutionary organization to create dissension and cripple the whole move-ment, thereby doing Japan an inestimable service, and assuring Korea's resignation to Japanese control for some years to come and the complete withdrawal of the " legitimate " leaders from the movement. A final conference between delegates of all Korean revolutionary organs and the Soviet agents, in Vladi-vostok, in the autumn of 1923, at which the Soviet offered un-limited support in the way of supplies of money and arms, resulted in a flat rejection of the Russian terms and a tacit abandonment of the Korean armed revolt against Japan. Hav-ing never cultivated among themselves the same blind self-conceit as the Chinese, there is not in Korea the same available

fuel for an anti-Occidental flare as in China, and since Korea will not sell herself to Russia for support against Japan, and is under no delusions about the blessings of Communism, Soviet enterprise among the Koreans, whether in Siberia, Manchuria or Korea proper, is probably less fruitful than among any other Asiatic people.

After the Koreans, in the original PopofE schedule as worked out in Irkutsk in 1919, came the Chinese, among whom the Soviet's support of tendencies diametrically opposed to their own communistic tenets has won them a control and a degree of success in chaos-making which they have achieved in no other Asiatic country.

The first Russian-trained Chinese who arrived in China in the winter of 1919-20 were able to do no more than form nuclei of little groups of would-be intellectuals, foreign trained for the most part, who were ready to adopt towards any new set of philosophical or economic theories much the same attitude of eager welcome as that of New York's Greenwich villagers towards a brand-new cult of lax sexology. But while these early stir-rings had absolutely no effect upon the Chinese mandarinate nor upon the Chinese Press, they did form little hives of dis-ordered psychic activity, within which the first Russian propa-gandists were able to establish dictatorial authority, chiefly by virtue of the wanton expenditure of starving Russia's gold reserve.

In the early spring of 1920 Russia was first represented in Peking by agents of the Dalta News Service, who professed to be the representatives of a legitimate service in the " Pink " Chita bufEer state, but who also handled, in a broad-minded and generous way, the genuine Moscow news perversions circu-lated in the name of the Rosta News Agency. It was not long before the leader of this group was known to represent the Moscow Soviet in a semi-diplomatic capacity, and to be exercis-ing an ever-increasing influence over a growing group of Chinese " intellectuals ". This pioneer's name was HodorofE, or Khodo-rofE, a Russian Jew of some legal training and great linguisitic accomplishments. Under the auspices of his seemingly bona-fide news agency, active Soviet agitators were firmly established

in Shanghai, Canton, and other important Chinese cities, and were busily undermining Occidental prestige long before any Chinese Government, central or provincial, had thought of using Russia, and the unplaceable Turanian mixed-bred Borodin, who after-wards became absolute master of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's mad policies in Kuangtung province, was a Rosta newsagent in Canton before anyone dreamed of taking Soviet propaganda seriously.

The Press and the diplomats were content ^vith the assurance, from 1920 until the very latest present, that since China pro-vided no field for Communism, there was no good reason for taking Soviet propaganda seriously. The fact that the "im-perialistic " Soviet might have one set of doctrines to preach in Russia and the Occident and another for Oriental consumption, was not seriously considered until, with the arrival of Mr. Leon Karakhan in Peking, September 2, 1923, it became ominously apparent that Moscow was not supporting brotherly love in the East but race hatred and aggressive Chinese nationalism. The two half -recognized Soviet diplomatic agents who preceded Karakhan in China, Yourin and JofEe, while men of influence and standing in Soviet Russia, neither antagonized the Occi-dental diplomats in Peking nor made a conspicuous effort to ingratiate themselves with the radically anti-foreign intellectuals, though they certainly smiled in a discreet way upon the growing nationalistic movement, and patronized the active work being done " unofficially " by the Rosta agents in Peking, Shanghai, and Canton. It was not, however, until Karakhan got into his stride in 1924, not until various Russian movements towards the subversion of good order in China were definitely directed into the anti-foreign, anti-treaty channel, under open Soviet patronage, which have culminated in 1925's grotesque orgy, that the Powers were reluctantly willing to admit and have it generally known that China was, to any dangerous degree, " bolshevized ".

In recapitulation, it need hardly be said that China is by no means inclined towards Communism. It need not be pointed out to any who are interested in the spread of socialistic doctrine that the Soviet has done less in China to propagate Communism than in the most insignificant European factory town. And it

must be obvious to those who read the news only intelligently that Russia is promoting and is backing in China a blind anti-occidental movement, with the sole object of crippling the great Western trading nations through the complete ruin of China. That the majority of the intelligent and articulate Chinese, who are actively aiding and abetting the Soviet's present crusade in their country, are clearly aware of the Soviet's motives, is absolutely certain. Anti-communist propaganda is a hopelessly useless weapon against them, because no expos6 of Russian insincerity will appeal to a people who frankly regard them-selves as qualified masters of insincerity, as the astute manip-ulators of the anti-foreign propaganda for which (in their estimation) the Russians are now foolishly paying.

To this state of mind the Chinese of all classes, as the writer has already said in many different ways, have been brought by a showing of diplomatic uncertainty and weakness, evinced largely in acts of hona-fde indulgence and generosity, on the part of the Great Powers represented in China during the past five years. It has unfortunately happened that nearly every act of abstract justice in China, every conciliatory gesture designed to win Chinese good-will on the part of one Power or another during recent years, has followed so closely upon Chinese violations of foreign treaty rights, outrages against individual foreigners, defalcations upon financial obligations or impertinent diplomatic pronouncements, that the Chinese of all classes were bound to associate them in the relation of cause and effect. Probably every Chinese outrage and every deliberate violation of the treaties and other bargains has been the subject of official protest by one Power or another, but the Chinese Government long since learned to pigeon-hole and forget unpleasant diplo-matic correspondence. Not only was there no penalty attached to ignoring foreign protests, but the Chinese were given good reason to believe that such a policy actually won them rewards. Chinese indifference to mere diplomatic action has indeed been so marked for several years past that the folk who do the routine work in the Legations in Peking have been much inclined to say " What's the use ? " when a protest is suggested. The result has been, as a prominent British resident of China recently

wrote to a London journal, that we do not even trouble to pro-test against the murders of our nationals.

It would be impossible •within reasonable space to give a his-tory of modern Occidental diplomacy in China and of Chinese reactions to diplomatic effort, because, like the Legation folk who are too weary to write protests, most of us have got too blase to clip and file records of outrages and the protests that they have elicited. A few isolated examples of foreign policy which have fostered trouble in China may, however, serve here as illustrations.

China's entry into the war on the side of the Allies in August, 1917, was of some value to all concerned, but to none so much as the Chinese themselves. The disintegrating Chinese nation acquired an international status as an ally which it made little attempt to justify by works, but by virtue of a nominal support of the Powers fighting Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey, China automatically acquired jurisdiction of the subjects of these enemy Powers which far-sighted diplomacy would have withheld from her. A century before the outbreak of the Great War it was discovered by the nations trading at Canton, who used to surrender their criminals to the Chinese magistrates, that to allow any Chinese to abuse and humiliate an Occidental, though he were a criminal of the lowest order, was to inspire in the Chinese of all classes an impudent assurance in their deal-ings with all other Occidentals which seriously prejudiced their comfort and security.

It was in recognition of this fact that what is known as extra-territoriality, the most cumbersome word in the Anglo-Chinese vocabulary, was established, by precedent first among ship-masters and later by treaty. The meaning of the term is that non-Chinese offenders against the law, whether it be the law of China or of their native lands, are not subject to Chinese juris-diction, but to their consuls, or courts, or whatever other organs are set up for their governance in the country. It was by virtue of actual experience with Chinese courts and not because of any initial prejudice that extra -territoriality was established. It was because Chinese maladministration not only resulted in cruel and unjust abuse of an untried offender, but because a

Chinese magistrate's unchallenged right to impose injustice inspired all other classes to emulation, that this awkward and expensive system was inaugurated.

Between China's entry into the war and the Armistice, enthu-siasm and prejudice obliterated these memories, and the Chinese, against their own inclinations, were urged to take measures against the much-respected Germans and Austrians, which they carried out under Allied diplomatic pressure with great trepida-tion. The internment and deportation of Gtermans in China, while justified as war measures when the Allies were so desper-ately on the defensive, appear now to have been gross errors in policy, because the Chinese were the executioners, and they were forced into a position in which they had unchecked jurisdiction over the enemy foreigners within their territories. Not only were the persons of Germans and Austrians subject to Chinese control, but their property as well was subject to confiscation. The enemy concessions in Tientsin and Hankow came under Chinese government, to the subsequent annoyance ad infinitum of other foreigners who had invested in property and set up businesses in these territories, and unscrupulous Chinese " com-missioners " had a foretaste of the wealth to be derived from the exploitation of the much richer British, French and Inter-national settlements in other ports. To take over and ruin the International Settlement in Shanghai would probably bank-rupt half a million Chinese merchants, and would have a stun-ning reaction upon British, American and French trade and home industry, but a few dozen officials of the regime then in control would become stupendously wealthy overnight, and much " face " would be made for the Chinese nation. So China, moved to higher ambitions by the confiscation of the German and Austrian concessions, not to mention the Russian which came later, unanimously howls for the retrocession of the con-cessions. This would be amusing if there were not so much potential tragedy involved.

It has been commonly acknowledged for many years that, during the growth of the Boxer movement in 1900, the only diplomatic agent in Peking who had either the foresight or the courage to face the storm squarely, was the German Minister,

Baron Von Ketteler. On a certain day, before the actual siege of the Legations was undertaken but when the majority of the diplomats were huddling together for comfort and security, this Baron Von Ketteler refused to be cowed, and set out on behalf of his more timid colleagues to keep an appointment with Chinese officials. He was murdered on one of the main streets of the Chinese capital by uniformed troops, to the infinite consterna-tion of his weak and purposeless colleagues. When the time for a settlement came, the German Government very justly insisted upon the erection, over the spot where he was killed, of a memorial arch (pailou), put up not only to the memory of Von Ketteler but also as a permanent reminder to the Chinese that such things were not done to diplomats. The Ketteler failou was for years a conspicuous " denkmal " to a really brave man, liked and admired by those who knew him and those who came after, and a massive sedative upon the spirits of those who craved aft^r an opportunity to humiliate the white man and gnaw his bones. But because Von Ketteler, dead eighteen years, had been a German, a horde of enthusiasts, fired as much by whiskey as by patriotism, undertook on Armistice Day, 1918, under the leadership of intoxicated French soldiers, the demolition of this monument, and, while they failed to do much damage, they loosened the stones so that the Chinese City Fathers agreed to have it taken down if the noble Allies would desist from blocking the highway and endangering their own and other valuable lives. In this arrangement the Allied Legations fatuously concurred.

The writer has had scores of opportunities to gauge the effect of the demolition of this monument upon the average Chinese mind in Peking, and has been so impressed by it that, in his own mind, he always dates the decline of foreign prestige in China from this incident. For every Chinese who understood what the war in Europe was about, and what the collapse of Germany really meant to the world, there were probably many thousands who saw in the removal of the monument, if not an actual vindication of the Boxer movement (which is what it truly did mean to a certain number), a symbol of the break-down of a foreign united front in China — visible evidence of a

CHAPTER VII (PART 2 OF 4)

state of war between China's hereditary enemies — which news from the very remote front had thereto failed to convey to the Chinese masses. While the Chinese and Manchus in high places had been well aware of the mutual jealousies that swayed the foreigners and had learned to avail themselves of them, the resignation of the Germans and Austrians to Chinese mercy was the first real incentive in many decades to the persecution of foreigners under foreign patronage and might have resulted much earlier in outrages against the rest of us if the Germans had not enjoyed in the East an enviable reputation for ruthless-ness.

When the Germans came back into China they were in such indecent haste to resume trade relations under legitimate condi-tions that they readily abandoned many privileges which they might have retained for the asking, and, in yielding up their extra-territorial rights, did not even secure to themselves the right to reside, own property, or trade in China outside the recognized treaty ports and concessions, within which, by virtue of their late war upon the Allies, they had no other rights than the latter chose to extend to them. In short, if the Powers which still hold and control concessions in China were to return these to the Chinese Government, the German business man would have no technical right, though his Government were a party to a trade agreement with the Chinese Government, to plant a foot upon Chinese soil or draw a breath of fetid Chinese air. Upon these technical points the Chinese are well posted, and while Germany's reputation for getting her own back still protects the German, Grermany's humiliating position in the East has fostered mightily the Chinese ambition to get some of us — who have not such a wholesome reputation for cruel vin-dictiveness but are better known for slobbering sentimentality — into the same helpless position.

It was not, however, in diplomatic victories over the ostra-cized Germans but in coolie-tb-moujik victories over the un-protected Russian that the Chinese at large gained most experi-ence and most assurance in the congenial business of humiliat-ing the foreigner.

During the five years of struggle for control of Siberia which

followed the collapse of the Kerensky Government in Petrograd, a steady stream of upper-class and middle-class Russian refugees poured into Manchuria and thence distributed themselves throughout Japan and all the cities of the China Coast. Some came with gold and jewellery, which kept them in comfort for a time. Others had foreign investments which yielded them small incomes, but the vast majority were either wholly or nearly destitute, knew no language but their own, were forced to live after the fashion of poor Orientals and to do work otherwise done by Chinese of the coolie class, or beg. Although the small foreign communities in China supported thousands of these poor folk who could find no work, helped others to find employment and liberally patronized all manner of Russian charities, there was much inevitable suffering which the Chinese did virtually nothing to relieve but which they soon learned to aggravate, taking delight in humiliating and abusing these poor folk to their own imagined aggrandisement.

The collapse of the various White armies under Kolchak and such guerrilla leaders as Ataman Semionoff and Baron Ungem, between 1919 and 1922, was followed in each case by the flight of thousands of disheartened and penniless ofl&cers and men into Chinese territory — Manchuria, Mongolia and Chinese Tur-kestan. All of these arrived in China in a state of abject depen-dence and were, from beginning to end, most abominably treated by the Chinese ofl&cials. Though for the most part good sol-diers, with splendid records in the field, most of these men were of peasant origin, and finding themselves beggared, leaderless and helpless in a strange land, were as meek and long-sufltering as cattle. Of this temper every Chinese coolie took delighted advantage, and knocking Russians about became a favourite Chinese sport throughout North China.

In all districts in which Russians were numerous the trucu-lence and contempt with which they were treated were soon extended to other foreigners. This was particularly true in northern Manchuria and Mongolia, though when it was known that they were not Russians but the nationals of Powers with gunboats and garrisons in China, there was for a time an attempt to discriminate between Russians and others, and one often

heard a bullying and swaggering uniformed coolie reduced to a state of abject apology by a reminder from one of his fellows that an intended foreign victim probably was not a Russian. Large bodies of these refugee troops in Chinese Turkestan for a time retained their arms, and were then most courteously and deferentially approached by the Chinese officials and military commanders, but when they had been cajoled into surrendering their arms, the leaders were imprisoned under horrible condi-tions, while the men were frightfully abused, and were finally paraded all the way across China to Manchuria in large bodies, herded through the streets of many cities under guard like criminals, so that the Chinese of many provinces could get the impression that the " foreign devil's " prestige was decidedly on the wane and China coming up in the world. The full story of the suffering of these men in Turkestan would make ghastly reading, but it is to be hoped that any foreign official commis-sion which ever discusses China's fitness to be given jurisdiction over the rest of us, will be liberally regaled with it.

Of this state of the Russians in China Moscow was of course fully informed, but as they were all White Russians, enemies of the Soviet, China's attitude towards them was actually condoned, and Mr. Karakhan, while assistant to the Commissary for Foreign Ai!airs in 1920 and 1921, repeatedly assured China of Russia's intention to abandon Russia's extra-territorial rights, return her concessions, cancel the Boxer indemnity to Russia, and other-wise enter upon "equal relations" with China.

After the fall of the Tsarist regime in 1917, the Russian diplo-matic and consular agents were confirmed in their posts by the new Republic, and the Russo-Asiatic Bank continued to be the official Russian financial organ in the Orient, but no such recog-nition to these representatives was extended by the Bolsheviks. All however continued to function in China as representatives of Russia as she should have been, rather than Russia as she was, for several years after Kerensky's collapse. As time went on, Russia as she should have been became less and less a tan-gible entity and more and more a tissue of vague hopes, while the Soviet Government came nearer and appeared to be more solidly real from month to month until, -with, the arrival of

substantial and highly articulate Soviet agents in the flesh in 1919 and 1920, China began to be decidedly nervous about the bearing of her continued recognition of the old Russian diplo-mats and financial agents upon her future relations with the new Russia. While the Allies were at open war with the Soviet in Siberia, and later, while France was still supporting anti-Soviet undertakings in the Ukraine and on the Polish frontier ; while Japan still had an expeditionary force in the Vladivostok area, and while Great Britain and America were technically if not actually, at war with Russia, it behoved China as an ally to move very slowly indeed in acknowledging the Soviet's grace-ful signals of friendship. The time finally came, however, when the old Russian diplomats in China actually ceased to represent anything but the disheartened White refugees in various parts of the world and a group of Parisian financiers which had con-trol of the branches of the Russo- Asiatic Bank outside Russia.

The position of the diplomats and consular oflBicers of the old regime in China came so near being absurd that the Powers could not seriously insist upon continued Chinese recognition. Yet they represented what had been a staunch Allied Govern-ment, whatever its other faults ; and the rights of old Russia, and of a prospective new Russia that was to supersede Bolshevik tyranny, had to be safeguarded in China. By the interchange of delicate hints and innuendos it was therefore arranged in September, 1920, that China should withdraw recognition of the old Russian Legation in Peking but should take over the adminis-trative and judicial functions of the Russian representatives, not in a confiscatory way, but as the trustees of a better Russia to come. It was arranged that Chinese officials should be ap-pointed who had had special training in Russian laws, language and customs, to act as trustees for a hypothetical new Russia and as guardians of the rights of a yet unborn heir to the Govern-ment with whom the Sino-Russian treaties had been negotiated. China further agreed to employ Russians of the old regime as advisers and assistants to all the newly appointed Chinese trustees of Russia's unforfeited rights.

It was quite clear to every one from the moment of this scheme's inception that the success of the new system was entirely depen-

dent upon China's good-will and good faith and that it left an infinite field for the exercise of unchecked bad faith. It may-seem now that the Occidental Powers, in the face of China's obvious desire to encroach upon the treaty rights of foreigners, were particularly weak and credulous in reposing such a trust in an increasingly impotent Chinese Government ; but it must be understood that in those days no one at home or abroad believed that the Soviet Government in Russia would live out the year, and it was confidently felt that a healthy and whole-some new Russia of some sort would shortly spring from the ashes of a self-consuming Bolshevism to resume a normal posi-tion in the East and relieve China of her trust before she had had much opportunity to abuse it. It was only later that it was fully appreciated that a step had been taken which had given Chinese ofi&cialdom much courage in pushing forward a policy of encroachment upon the treaties and which prompted the Chinese common people in many quarters to regard this surrender of the Russians to Chinese control as licence to brow-beat and abuse aliens wherever they seemed unable to protect themselves.

These and many other influences, to which the writer may have an opportunity to return later, undermined steadily the Occidental position in China, but the assurance which anti-foreignism was gaining among both officials and people was what might be called a sneaking assurance, a show of courage when the coast was clear and a desperate rush for the cover of humility whenever the Powers showed a disposition to rise up in concert and say " Boo ! " It was the effective check upon Japan's aggressive policy in China by the concerted action of the Powers at the Washington Conference in the early months of 1922, which really turned China's head and brought anti-foreignism into the open.

Whatever we think of the Washington Conference now in the Occidental countries, and whatever the contemporary purpose of it was in Great Britain and America, in the Orient it had only one significance. It was the descent of Nemesis upon Japan. In the sight of the Chinese, Japan was at Washington stripped of " face " before a council of the great Allied Powers

who had summoned her to trial for her breaches of faith with them in China during the war. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was cancelled as a preliminary to this trial, ostensibly to relieve Great Britain of embarrassment in the ensuing hearing at Wash-ington, and China was summoned as the star witness for the prosecution. Many of the decisions of the conference, made in what seemed to us simple justice to China, were regarded in the Orient as coals of fire heaped upon Japan and as tributes to China. The psychological effect of it was that China was not only relieved of the fear of Japanese aggression but contrived to convince herself that her intrinsic worth, at her own appraise-ment of it, had received world-wide recognition. This stimulus to a conceit, which has never been held in any sort of check, except by such abject terror as followed the failure of the Boxer movement, accounts for more of our difficulties in China to-day than the sum total of Bolshevist endeavour.

Among many other measures approved by the Powers in conference at Washington, Japan was brought to agree to the retrocession of the ex-German port of Tsingtao, with the leased Kiaochow territory, together with certain railway and mining rights, to China. Japan's privileged position in Manchuria, confirmed by the Twenty-one Demands, was not touched, but by way of giving China an abundance of " face ", it was promised that an international commission would visit China to consider the question of the abolition of extra-territoriality, that within three months of the ratification of the agreement by all con-cerned, a tariff revision conference would meet in China to agree to the terms of customs increases, and that the foreign post-offices in China, with certain exceptions, would be closed and their service turned over to the Chinese postal administra-tion. This last measure was interpreted in the East as a fur-ther punitive measure against Japan, because Japan's abuse of her own postal system in China was notorious, and was regarded as an accretion of " face " to China, in spite of the fact that the efficiency of the Chinese postal system was, and is still, entirely dependent upon rigid foreign control.

It must now be freely confessed that, while we fully appre-ciated the interpretation which the Chinese put upon these

w.w.c. s

decisions at Washington, all of us residents in China received them with whoops of joy and were lavish in Chinese circles with OUT congratulations. Japan had been such a nuisance during the war, and China still seemed so easily amenable to an exercise of moral force on the part of the united Powers, that no one whose opinion counted troubled to look into the future and gauge the effect of Japan's humiliation and China's veritable canonization upon the latter's latent self-esteem and budding contempt for the foreigner. Recent events in China are spec-tacular enough, under Soviet inspiration, to relieve us of the task of drawing diagrams of China's reaction to Washington's indulgences.

Almost coincidental with the publication of the international decisions in China's favour at Washington, came the announce-ment that France, Great Britain and Japan, following the example which America had set them in 1908, had determined to use either the whole unpaid balance of their Boxer indemnities, or generous portions of it, for the promotion of some such bene-volent work in China as education. These were unsolicited and unexpected bouquets which China received with a more and more disdainful condescension as she became accustomed to them until she entered upon the endlessly long controversy with France about the terms of the Boxer refund and the ex-change at which it was to be fixed, which took years in settle-ment, and fortunately delayed the fulfilment of some of the terms of the Washington agreement until China had had an opportunity to display the real disposition in which she accepted them. That this was anything but the gratitude which the Occident seemed to expect does not seem to be clear yet to the average Western mind.

Among othel" things promised to China at the Washington Conference, was the return of two almost worthless concessions (from a commercial point of view at any rate) : the British terri-tory of Wei-hai-wei on the Shantung coast opposite Port Arthur, occupied in pre-Boxer days by Chinese request, and the French concession of Kuangchowwan, nearly opposite the island of Hainan on the Kuangtung coast. The return of the French conces-sion was postponed by the argument over the terms of the return

of the French Boxer indemnity, but negotiations for the return of Wei-hai-wei were undertaken almost at once, by British request, and led almost immediately into an astonishing impasse. In the course of voluntarily returning the port and territory of Wei-hai-wei, which China had once begged Great Britain to occupy when she was looking for an ally against the Russians in Port Arthur, Britain wished to incorporate a few clauses into the agreement safeguarding British property investments in the port and reserving to her Asiatic fleet the right to use the bay and a barren island in the harbour as a Summer naval station, much the same right as the American fleet has enjoyed in the port of Chefoo for many years without any very definite under-standing. The Chinese official negotiator, a Mr. M. T. Liang, who is a very reasonable person with decent instincts, readily agreed to these terms, but when the completed agreement came before the Peking Government for ratification China was pleased, under the guidance of the foreign-trained Dr. W. W. Yen, then Foreign Minister, to deem herself insulted by the reservations. Protests against the agreement were inspired in Shantung Pro-vince and the students were schooled to make a most raucous din about a bargain which they did not in the least understand.

This situation was, for a time, rather bewildering to the British negotiators, and it was not until the Chinese came out into the open and announced that they wanted money if they were to accept the retrocession of Wei-hai-wei, that the situation became clear. The officials of the Peking Government were finally frank enough to intimate that since Great Britain expected to make a lot of " face " with the Chinese people by the return of Wei-hai-wei, and since the port was not commercially self-supporting and therefore could not be farmed out to an official exploiter at any advantage to Peking officialdom, Great Britain ought to arrange a " loan " for the upkeep of the port — pay Peking, in other words, for accepting a return of Chinese territory ! It is rather surprising, in view of other more inane diplomatic gestures, that Great Britain did not and has not yet met China's terms, but it so happens that the return of Wei-hai-wei is still at this time one of the " unfulfilled Washington promises ".

The unchecked use and abuse of the railways by the military

have for years provided Chinese throughout the country with ocular evidence of the fact that the foreign Powers had relaxed and therefore lost all disciplinary control over the central Government and the provincial authorities. China has six thousand miles of railways only, nearly all of which were built out of the proceeds of foreign loans, for which the lines and their equipment were security, while those built by independent Chinese enterprise are pledged for such large sums, owing to foreign firms which have supplied materials on credit, that their net earnings under favourable conditions would scarcely pay interest on their debts. All of the lines built with foreign capital are subject by agreement to some degree of foreign supervision and employ foreign technical experts in both the operating and accounting departments, without whom investments in Chinese railway securities would be poor investments indeed, because of incvirably slovenly, erratic and wasteful Chinese methods in any such organization, and because the collection of revenues which had to pass through many Chinese hands unchecked would soon yield the railway management little or nothing. Ten years ago, when foreign supervision was still taken seriously by the Chinese, the Chinese railways yielded astonishing returns on the investments in them. Foreign loans were served out of revenues with religious good faith and a rich surplus was left the Government from the earnings of all but one or two lines. If the railways had not been tampered with by the military during these past ten years, all railway bonds could have been redeemed by now, all new supplies could have been purchased with cash, and the mileage of the lines easily trebled.

Military interference has, however, reduced all these valuable properties to a pitiable financial and material state. Inter-party and inter-provincial wars have, year after year, interrupted all traffic on the main arteries of trade for months at a time, incalcu-lable damage has been done to rolling stock and machinery, revenues have been looted by the high militarists until loan service and improvements were out of the question, while there were not even funds for upkeep, and the road-beds deteriorated until one could go along a main line, traversed by heavy all-steel express trains, and pull spikes out of the rotten sleepers

with his fingers. At the first whisper of an impending feud, each war lord seizes and backs up on sidings hundreds of goods cars, a few dozen locomotives and a few trains of passenger coaches for the transport of his uniformed ruffians, while thou-sands of tons of goods ready for shipment rot in warehouses, great cities go without coal, manufacturies are closed and lay of[ thousands of workers, and all regular passenger service is dis-located. Express trains are held up and side-tracked for hours by the whims and fancies of some colonel's concubine in a special train, who cannot make up her mind whether to go or stay, or who has sent a squad of the Republic's noble soldiers to buy her a brand of hair oil which they cannot find. The writer has seen the fastest mail train in China held for twenty minutes by a pompous little upstart, holding a sinecure in some militar-ist's headquarters, because he had forgotten his spectacles and had sent his servant back for them. The writer once had an oppor-tunity to do a high and mighty person a favour, and upon his return to the capital, the general's valet held a train for three-quarters of an hour, in spite of all protest, until the station-master could attach a special car so that the writer could ride in solitary state in a carriage designed to carry a hundred, while scores of very decent folk of no particular standing were unable to find places. The sequel, as may be imagined, was that the writer, who deplored the situation, admitted and carried over a himdred " guests " and therefore had less room than if he had crowded into an ordinary coach, to the infinite disgust of the general's valet. On one journey in " war time " that the writer undertook with a high Chinese official, the latter, having secured a special car for us, gave orders that the train was not to stop at any of the stations on the schedule and offered the engine-driver ten dollars if he would get in an hour ahead of time on an 80-mile run, all of which was done. This was on a railway that has always been under particularly close British supervision.

It can be imagined what the position of the foreign railway employees, who are supposed to secure efficiency and therefore profits for the foreign investor, is under such conditions. An officious corporal, weighed down with two Mauser pistols and thirty pounds of ammunition, carries much more weight with

Btation and train employees tlian a foreign traffic manager, while lesser foreign functionaries who have attempted to inter-fere with the ordering of railway movements by private soldiers have, only too often, been subjected without redress to both verbal and physical violence. Even those who meekly agree to assist in forwarding the campaign of some Chinese warrior by arranging his train service for him, to the detriment of all other traffic, very soon discover that while technically in possession of full authority, a loquacious brakeman in greasy dungarees carries more weight in the control of military train movements than the supposedly omnipotent foreign manager of the com-mander-in-chief's transport service.

One has to be very familiar with the workings of the Chinese mind to understand that such a state of afiairs gives the greatest possible satisfaction to all classes of Chinese who are most seriously inconvenienced by it, because it contributes to the humiliation and discomfiture of the foreigner here and there. A whole trainload of intelligent Chinese, with important business at the end of the journey and miserable in consequence of delay, will show surly disapproval of a foreign railway employee's efforts to get the train through on time if, in so doing, he happens to come in conflict with a petty Chinese functionary's " sovereign right " to hold up traffic indefinitely in the name of some univer-sally detested Chinese military tyrant. On the railways in China, as in all other phases of foreign endeavour, this spirit is always in abeyance in the face of a foreign showing of either physical or moral force, but is mightily fostered by any display of weakness or good-natured toleration. Unfortunately for foreign interests, since active intervention is taboo, the railways are no longer tangible security (in the strict interpretation of the word) for foreign investments, since it would require an army of occupation to foreclose upon them. In fact, with the Chinese in their present temper, nothing in China is genuine security for an investment which cannot be brought within range of naval guns or naval landing parties, which eliminates everything but the offices of the Customs Collectorate in the various ports and treaty port real estate. Chinese railway bonds would for the most part have been utterly worthless long since if the

investors had not been represented by corporations, under the special patronage of the various Legations, and by the more powerful foreign banks upon which successive Peking Govern-ments have from time to time been dependent for financial support. Such corporations are able to worry the Chinese Government into meeting interest payments out of revenues other than railway funds, while lesser creditors, with less hold upon the Legations and banks, are left to whistle for their money. Content with satisfying the corporations representing the more conspicuous groups of railway bond-holders, the Legations, in what has been waggishly described as their lazy-fair attitude towards China's criminal abuse of her railways, have been pleased to limit their resistance to perfunctory protests and to feel satisfied with the collection of enough interest payments upon investments to keep Chinese railway bonds on the market and forestall inquiry from home into the state of China's com-mimications and the reaction which their ruin has had upon foreign prestige.

The railway situation alone is worthy of a book as illustration of the ineptitude of foreign policy in China, and it is hard to know where to begin and to end in trying to summarize it in a few paragraphs. One can only give isolated facts like the following : The Canton-Kowloon Railway, a British investment, has, under the benign administration of Sun Yat-sen's following, been little better than a streak of rust, with rolling stock almost totally ruined, from the frontier of the Chinese leased territory to the city of Canton, for at least three years past ; and were it not for the pressure periodically brought to bear by the British and China Corporation and the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank-ing Corporation, through the British Legation, upon the Chinese Government, when interest payments are due, the investors in Canton-Kowloon bonds would have long since discovered that, so far as the actual security was concerned, they might as well have bought Leningrad real estate. The fragmentary Hu-Kuang Railway, representing the results of British, American, German and other financial enterprise, was long since abandoned to the Chinese as a plaything, and its shabby remains pay no interest on the original international loan. The loan is semi-

annually served out of salt-tax surplus, which long ago officially ceased to exist, and annually out of whatever funds the Chinese Government can be forced to divert from other urgent chaises.

The Peldng-Hankow line, security once for Russian, Belgian and French investments, under French patronage, which would be a veritable gold mine under adequately protected foreign control, has been farmed by militarists since 1920, each section yielding something like $400,000 a month to local military potentates, irrespective of the line's earning capacity or the condition of its road-bed and rolling stock. That trains still run over this line is due entirely to the tenacious and optimistic hold which a few French employees still maintain upon their purely nominal posts in the administration.

In 1922, when the Manchurian dictator Chang Tso-lin was defeated by Wu Pei-fu, the Peking-Moukden Railway, a pro-perty which is security for a fairly heavy British investment and which was operated under British technical men, was rendered worthless for many months by internecine warfare, and was finally cut in half by Chang Tso-lin, who assumed independent control over the northern section of the line and took over, as a part of his independent service, the British employees on his section as he would have taken over so many rails, spikes and bolts. The integrity of the line, as a single foreign investment security, was smashed without more than a gesture of protest from the British Legation, and for two years one-half of the railway was run as a British security under the Chinese Government and the other half as a British security under an unrecognized outlaw, with so little emphasis put upon the British interest in either section, except when the Chinese had financial business to do with the holding corporation, that the general Chinese public had every reason to forget altogether the foreign claim upon the line and the right of. British employees to function in its direction. In the autumn of 1924 this railway, the Tientsin-Pukow and the Peking-Hankow lines, not to men-tion the Shanghai-Nanking, the Shanghai-Hangchow, the Lung-hai, the Ching-Sui and others, all in pawn to the foreigner in one way or another, came entirely under military control, were occupied for many months, to the complete interruption of all

CHAPTER VII (PART 3 OF 4)

legitimate commerce, and were most stupidly and destructively managed by the various militarists in complete indifference to the advice of foreign employees and in disdainful and contemptuous indifference to Legation protests.

Had there been no previous encroachment upon the decent administration of the railways by the militarists, this autumn orgy would have sufficed to set China's railway development back a good five years. The big steel cars of the one model train system, the " Blue Express," purchased through British agents from American builders as the very last word in Occidental railway efficiency and luxury, were carried down the Peking-Hankow railway by deserting units of Shensi bandits and used for a winter as winter quarters by half-savage coolies, who would previously have regarded an English pig-sty as a luxurious tavern. That these cars had not been paid for but were simply yielding interest to foreign merchants out of their earnings, according to a special arrangement, did not seriously distress the diplomatic folk concerned and certainly did not move the Chinese Government to any undue haste in their recovery. One wearies of citing examples of the decline of foreign prestige through an inadequate display of international interest in the railways which we have built in China and which the Chinese have been allowed to ruin, so we had perhaps better turn to some fresh though equally disheartening subject.

Nothing would be so calculated to arouse the rank and file of foreign residents in China to foaming frenzy as a complete record of the outrages perpetrated against the persons and property of individual foreigners, and of diplomatic failures in the exaction of prompt and satisfactory compensation. " Poor old China ", least deserving of sympathy because most inclined among allegedly civilized nations to abuse it, has been exempted from accountability for some hundreds of isolated and unatoned outrages which would have involved any more competent country in as many abject humiliations or disastrous wars. If one could add to a catalogue of these a brief statement of a thousandth part of the outrages perpetrated against the innocent Chinese common folk during the past five years by those whom we have recognized as their governors here and there, we should have

such a case against China as a nation as would fully justify her extermination in a crusade ; but China's appraised value to the rest of the world does not warrant such a lavish expenditure of ink and paper. A few cases only, not selected on their merits but because they happen to have fixed themselves in the writer's memory, must suffice to illustrate both China's disposition and the fashion in which we have diplomatically fostered it.

In the early spring of 1920, a certain Chang Chin-yao was military Governor of the Province of Hunan, and, while sup-porting an army of 40,000 mercenaries in the neighbourhood of Changsha, the capital city of the province, was clearing and banking a net income of something like $4,000,000 a month. Before he left Changsha, as a matter of fact, he made this exact sum at a single stroke by the imposition of a surplus tax upon rice export. In the face of a native revolt against his tyranny, his elaborate military organization collapsed very suddenly and the Governor himself fled to the town of Yochow on the Yangtze River, where, before escaping down river and finally to Japan, he reassembled some of his troops and systematically looted the town. Squads of men were sent out from his headquarters under officers to rob and murder, and one of these parties entered the grounds of an American Mission School, fully aware that it was occupied by foreigners. The missionaries were sitting on a verandah, and when the looters entered the gate, a Mr. Reimert went forward to meet them and ask them what they wanted. An officer thereupon drew his pistol and shot and killed him in cold blood. The looting party was afterwards taken back to the Governor's headquarters in an army launch. An American gun-boat, with the American Vice-Consul at Hankow on board, was very shortly on the scene, but Chang Chin-yao boldly refused to disclose the identity of the party or to punish the murderer. By way of contemptuous acknowledgment of the American official's protests, he had an innocent Hunanese coolie dressed up in soldier's uniform and executed as the mur-derer. Before the American State Department could be brought to sanction any sort of action, Chang Chin-yao was allowed to escape to Hankow, thence to Shanghai (living in foreign con-cessions in both ports), and thence to Japan.

After the bird had flown, the American Legation was given authority to fix the responsibility for the outrage upon Chang Chin-yao personally and to demand from the Chinese Government his arrest and punishment. The Chinese, of course, only had to say that the culprit was beyond their jurisdiction and that they had no extradition treaty with Japan. But this was not the end of it. In 1921 Chang Chin-yao returned to China, at Chang Tso-lin's invitation, and was established at Moukden, the capital of Manchuria, in great state as a high military adviser. This was tactfully ignored by the American Legation. At the end of the year, just before Christmas, Chang Tso-lin, who had usurped the function of Government, came to Peking as high dictator to create a Cabinet, and who should arrive wdth him, in a private car with his own bodyguard, but Chang Chin-yao ! This was immediately known to the American Legation but for some days ignored, though specifically mentioned in the Chinese papers ; while Chang Tso-lin was received at the Legation with almost obsequious honours. When the Legation was finally moved to remind the Chinese Foreign Office most reluc-tantly that Chang Chin-yao's trial and arrest had once been demanded, the Minister for Foreign Affairs had only to confess that he did not dare to approach Chang Tso-lin about the matter to end it, and Chang Chin-yao returned to Moukden in the same state in which he had come. He has for several years past been residing in Tientsin, under foreign protection, while develop-ing a huge estate and building a country mansion just outside the city.

Another conspicuous case, which was given much advertising by Trotsky, was that of an assault by a Chinese soldier named Li, a member of the bodyguard of the Ministry of War, upon a representative of British commercial interests in China, a Mr. A. J. Campbell, on the Peking city wall in the winter of 1923-4. As a preliminary to an understanding of this affair it must be explained that, since the Boxer rebellion in 1900, a section of the Tartar city wall which bounds the Legation Quarter and is absolutely essential to its defence in times of trouble, has been, by agreement with the Chinese Government, considered an integral part of the Quarter, is delimited by block-houses and

patrolled by foreign Legation guards and Chinese police in the employ of the Quarter. This section of the wall is much used by foreigners as a promenade, is open to their Chinese friends, but is kept clear of the Chinese riff-raff, as are ail other portions of the wall under purely Chinese jurisdiction. It must further be known that, according to the agreements which followed the Boxer outrage, no Chinese soldiers in imiform, armed or unarmed, are allowed in the Legation Quarter unless as attendants upon Chinese officials making official calls. This latter regulation long since became a dead letter, thanks to the failure of the Legations to insist upon its enforcement, and hundreds of uniformed men troop through the Quarter and loiter there daily, so that in these times a surprise attack would be exceedingly simple. Up to the time of the Li-Campbell incident the city wall had, however, been kept clear of them.

Mr. Campbell went up on the wall one morning to take a stroll and foimd a burly Chinese soldier there ahead of him who blocked his way and challenged him. Understanding no Chinese, but knowing that the fellow had no business there, Mr. Campbell simply pushed him out of the way and went on. The soldier then attacked his victim from the rear, beating him about the head with a bag of copper coins which he had prepared as a weapon. Mr. Campbell would have been very seriously injured had he not been rescued by American marines and Legation Quarter police, who came on the scene and overpowered the soldier. He was taken to the Legation Quarter police station, examined and held, pending the appointment by the Chinese authorities of persons competent to take delivery of his person. The British Legation of course demanded a public trial and the right to have witnesses present, but this was delayed for many weeks because the Chinese Government could not decide upon the organization of a court high enough to try a private soldier in the guard of the Ministry of War. In his various statements while under arrest. Soldier Li stated clearly enough that his purpose in entering the Legation Quarter and going on the wall was to attack a foreigner as a champion of China's sovereign rights, and it developed that he had somewhat similarly assaulted other foreigners, of other nationalities, in his endeavour to

prove that a Chinese coolie could and should commit outrages upon any " foreign devil " whom he happened to encounter. In this position, while trial was pending he had the support of the entire Chinese Press, which argued that the Legations ought to ofier apologies for the arrest and brief detention of this national hero. In support of this position Trotsky actually made a speech in Moscow and telegraphed congratulations for Soldier Li to China.

The trial was, of course, a farce. A British official witness was admitted so that he might have the chagrin of hearing an absurdly mild sentence passed, while representatives of the foreign Press were excluded. Against his sentence Soldier Li appealed and the appeal was granted, after which the public lost sight of the case. It need not be emphasized that if Soldier Li had similarly assaulted a Chinese of good standing, his superior officer would have had him shot without the formality of a trial and with general public approval. Old residents of China and all Chinese also know that if a similar outrage had been per-petrated ten years ago, the victim's Legation would have de-manded the culprit's immediate punishment, which would have been executed promptly and conspicuously, with a few Oriental trimmings not included in the demands, but designed to dis-courage a repetition of the ofience. The altered tactics of both the Legation and the Chinese Government in this case was a clear call to Chinese of all classes to go and do likewise.

Still more conspicuous, because it exposed the bad faith of the President of the recognized Republican Government of China and the relaxed hold of the Powers over a railway vital to the safety of the Legations in Peking, as well as the appalling weakness of British representation in Peking, was what is known as the Chen — Bessell case. It will be remembered that in 1900 the Legations were cut off from the outside world and besieged because the railway connecting Peking with Tientsin and the Coast was broken and occupied by Boxers and Imperial troops. In the subsequent Protocol, to the terms of which China was glad to agree, it was provided that the line was to be patrolled by foreign troops, each nationality holding a section so that it might be kept open in emergency. As a British-built and

financed railway a certain number of British employees also enjoyed executive authority as, in a sense, the representatives of the bondholders. It has always been very essential, there-fore, for more reasons than one, that foreign prestige on this line be rigorously upheld. The abuse of the line was, however, condoned by the Legations as far back as 1917 ; and from that time forward there was little respect for the tradition of foreign supervision, while the British employees were frequently defied and sometimes assaulted by Chinese soldiers. The climax was reached in February, 1924, when an Australian district trafiic manager, a particularly good-natured and long-suffering Mr. Bessell, was most brutally assaulted and suffered injuries from which he will never recover, while attempting to discharge his duty to the travelling public at Fengtai Station, an important railway junction a few miles from the walls of Peking. An express train, running from Peking to Tientsin on the regular schedule, was in Fengtai Station when a military special train, coming over the Hankow line from Paotingfu, bound for Tientsin and Taku, with a few women and a military bodyguard, pulled in and demanded right of way.

The Chinese stationmaster wished to send the passenger train on its way, but was threatened by the soldiery, so sent for Mr. Bessell, who supported him. Another foreign employee of the railway, who was Mr. Bessell's superior, happened to be on the passenger train and he advised Mr. Bessell to avoid trouble and let the military train go through first. This entailed some shifting and shunting and he was giving the orders for it when the officer in command of the military train, with his men, set upon Mr. Bessell, knocked him down and kicked him, inflicting serious internal injuries which kept him in hospital for some time and forced him afterwards to go on protracted leave^ In spite of the fact that there is a British military post at Fengtai, the Chinese military train went triumphantly on its way and the women and soldiers passed through Tientsin and arrived in Taku without interruption or challenge.

The incident was, of course, the subject of another protest. The highest Chinese authorities deliberately lied about the identity and rank of the officer who had assaulted Mr. Bessell,

HOLDING UP THE "BLUE EXPRESS" 287

and no effort whatever was made to arrest him at Taku. The information soon leaked out that he was a Colonel Chen, brother of one of President Tsao Kun's concubines, a coolie raised to military rank by virtue of this relation with a high militarist, and that he was at large in Taku, boasting about his assault upon a foreigner and his immunity from punishment. When this could no longer be denied, the Chinese Foreign Office admitted the man's identity and then, after much delay, announced that he had been tried, and sentenced to detention in his quarters. Colonel Chen, of course, became a Chinese newspaper hero, a good friend of the Moscow Soviet, and a champion of down-trodden China's " sovereign rights ", so every possible trick and subterfuge was resorted to by the highest Chinese authority to guarantee his immunity from punishment. When, after a delay of months, he was finally brought before a court, he was so disguised that Mr. Bessell could not swear to his identity, which all the Chinese papers thought was a huge joke upon a stupidly conscientious foreigner, and the trial and sentence were again a farce.

These incidents were subsequent to the Lincheng episode of the spring of 1923, and the Chinese handling of them was, in a sense, traceable to the effect upon all Chinese minds of the out-come of that affair. It probably has not been forgotten that, on May 6, 1923, the " Blue Express ", a fast train connecting Peking and Tientsin with Nanking and Shanghai, was held up by a small army of bandits near Lincheng Station in Shantung and that a British subject was shot dead, while twenty-six other foreign passengers of British, American, French and Italian nationality, including women in their night attire, were carried away into the hills and held until the bandits were incorporated into the national army and their commanders made officers of high rank. North China was, at the moment, preparing for the usual summer war, but this incident reduced the entire nation to such a state of breathless anxiety, that the war was com-pletely forgotten and was postponed for more than a year. For many days after the first announcement of this event all China waited despairingly but resignedly for foreign intervention on a big scale. Even the Soviet agents had nothing to say. They

thought that China was about to be subjected to wholesome disciplinary measures which would render the country a poor field for their endeavour.

It was a very short time, however, before the Legations, by hopelessly muddling the whole situation in ways too numerous to be reviewed here, gave the Chinese Government and people good reason to believe that nothing was going to happen and, finally, still better reason for regarding the whole affair as another national " victory."

Six months after this incident, when the Powers had pre-pared their demands for monetary reparation and adequate safe-guarding of the railways, all classes of Chinese had already recovered courage to resist them obstinately and to represent them to one another in the light of grave infringements of China's sovereign rights. While the Chinese quibbled and found reason for delay on the one hand, the Legations took to coaxing and bargaining on the other, until they were finally led into a position where they had to recognize the " legality " of Tsao Kun's openly purchased election to the Presidency in exchange for vague promises of settlement. A more contemptible bargain has never been struck between the plenipotentiaries of a dozen great Occidental Powers and a single notoriously rotten Chinese political faction. The Chinese were, of course, justified in an increased contempt for the Legations, and the Tsao Kun regime quite cheerfully broke its promises in the matter of the Lincheng settlement after the diplomats had appeared at the palace of the coolie dictator and bowed their recognition of his supreme authority over a nation which, in almost every quarter, pro-tested vociferously against the shamelessness of his so-called election by wholesale purchase, at $5,000 a vote, of a Parliament which had long since ceased to represent anything. It is no exaggeration to say that the Legations at this juncture completely forfeited and have never regained the respect and support of their nationals resident in China.

The news of subsequent incidents such as the Chen— Bessell and the Li-Campbell cases, the firing upon foreign river steamers, the kidnapping of missionaries and travellers, and the general hostility of the whole Chinese public, growing in courage of

expression and culminating in the so-called Bolshevist activities of 1925, are accepted as matters of course. It has been no great surprise that, while the Soviet agents have everywhere been tightening their hold upon the anti-foreign movement and prodding the Chinese on to treaty violations and a grand repudiation of all foreign obligations in emulation of Russia, have been at once denouncing " imperialistic " America, " imper-ialistic " Japan, "imperialistic" France and "imperialistic" Great Britain, while pointing out their weaknesses and urging China to take advantage of them, our Governments should be giving point to So\det urgings by letting treaties go by default, allowing China to float domestic loans on foreign-controlled securities while defaulting on legitimate loan services, promising and carrying out the return of Boxer indemnities with another Boxer movement growing visibly under their noses, assuring whoever would hear that they were ready to talk about the abohtion of extra -territoriality when prominent Russians and Germans were held for months without trial in Manchuria, and promising and preparing for tariff revision in China's favour while the high military patrons of the recognized Chinese Govern-ment openly declare war upon them. The above is a long sentence, taken in one breath, but it would take many such to give even a vague impression in the West of how much more OUT own diplomacy has done to undermine the security of our trade in East Asia than the most strenuous efforts of the Russian Soviet.

The handsome display of petty jealousies and of bad faith among ourselves in the face of China's growing determination to ruin us all is also directly responsible for China's adoption of the Russian Soviet as an ally in the face of international disapproval. There has probably been no time during China's decline of the past ten years when the consistent exertion of imited moral force by the Powers, on a solid diplomatic front, would not have restored China to her senses and re-established some degree of discipline and order. To such a spectacle China has not been treated, however, for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch for many years.

There has never yet, and probably never will be, a case of w.w.c. T

friction between China and any alien Power or group of Powers, when there were not groups of diplomats, merchants and mis-sionaries ready to forward some petty enterprise of their own and therefore curry favour with the Chinese by supporting them, when obviously in the wrong, in resistance to diplomatic efEort often designed to safeguard the interests of all. Soviet propaganda thrives upon such situations. When Great Britain seemed on the eve of endorsing an Anglo-Russian treaty which would have entailed a huge loan of ready money to Russia, of which a fair share was earmarked for anti-British propaganda in England as well as Asia, Mr. Karakhan kept Chinese anti-foreignism out of anti-British channels and, while his propaganda was anti-foreign in general, he concentrated upon " imperialistic " America, cursing the United States, which had no relations of any sort with Russia, with particular vehemence, which was duly echoed in all radical Chinese centres. He even had the effrontery to denounce America at Tsing Hua College, a training school for Chinese who propose to study in America, financed out of America's Boxer indemnity funds.

All of this seemed a huge joke to non- Americans and even to those British who were enjoying pleasant social relations with the emissaries of the Soviet. The anti-American turn which Chinese sentiment was taking under Russian stimulus seemed like a fitting visitation upon the sentimental Republic for its much advertised leniency in its relations with China, as it certainly was. Then when, in the spring of 1925, it sud-denly suited Russia's purpose for many obvious reasons to ignore America and her " imperialism " and train all her guns upon Great Britain with the object of making a grand killing, in keeping with which the Chinese suddenly became sweetly friendly with every one but the British and the Japanese, there were not lacking Americans, French and others, particularly American missionaries, more than ready to extend any amount of sympathy to China and help her and the Soviet twist the lion's tail. Japan was also eager to step out of line with Great Britain and make her own settlement with Chinese radicalism on her own terms, which the Russian agents quickly arranged for her, since it is the Soviet's policy in China now to concentrate China's

frenzy upon one victim at a time, while using the doubtful neutrality of the other prospective victims, all of whom can be relied upon to keep as well out of the arena as the Chinese will let them while currying favour for themselves.

During the recent years in which China has been so busy forfeiting and discovering *' sovereign rights ", a great deal has been heard in both East and West of the foreign land con-cessions, leased territories and colonies in China. The return of these to full Chinese jurisdiction is now unconditionally demanded by all classes of Chinese. Without exception they are intrinsically the most worthless patches of ground in all China, but, because of foreign enterprise and the protection which they have afforded enterprising Chinese from the rapacity and persecution of their own officials, they are now without exception the most valuable in the Orient. The original pur-pose of such land allotments as Shameen, Hong-Kong, Kowloon, Shanghai, Tientsin and Hankow was to segregate the intruding barbarians, well apart from respectable Chinese residential quarters, on the most worthless and unproductive sandpits, rocks, mud-flats and swamps within reasonable distance of the ports with which they expressed a desire to trade. Even the Legation Quarter in Peking was at one time a notoriously dis-reputable slum. The foreigners who insisted upon setting up establishments for trade in China were most literally put in their places. Theirs were outcast communities like the little beggardoms which cluster about all modern Chinese cities on abandoned dykes or in the vicinity of unw^holesome drains and refuse ponds.

After the establishment of extra-territoriality as an institution endorsed by treaty, jurisdiction over these outcast colonies was cheerfully relegated to barbarian authorities who seemed much better able to keep order within their own unruly ranks than Chinese yamen runners and senile night watchmen. It was not long, however, before Chinese traders discovered that the barbarians were good pay, kept better order than they enjoyed within their own walled towns, imposed no more upon trade, whether among the poor or the conspicuously wealthy, than a nominal tax, tortured no offenders in prison, dealt with

astonishing impartiality with all parties in a dispute, and per-mitted a man who had earned money to enjoy it and display his fine feathers without fear of official confiscation. In these little outcast kingdoms an energetic man no longer had to hide his prospering factory in a back alley and cover it with a front of sham poverty ; he did not need to bury his surplus silver and dig it up in the dark of the moon to buy smuggled supplies so that official runners would not discover his prosperity ; he did not have to fear the spiteful action of neighbours who might bring him before a hungry magistrate on a false charge so that his wealth would be discovered. He could put his money in the bank if he cared to, keep it as long as he liked, invest it how he liked, and fear nothing from a display of it. And so it was that thou-sands came to live and thrive under the foreign aegis, con-temptuous of their protectors always, ever resentful like those on the outside of extensions of concessions and settlements, always passively resistant to foreign regulation, ne"\^er grateful in any degree, and always ready to exploit to the last farthing those who ensured the safety of their persons and the security of their investments.

It was not long before it was also learned that a political offender was, in these barbarian communities, immune from the punishments and secure from the cruel and relentless vengeance of the Imperial Government. A man who had amassed wealth in a concession could buy an official post outside, exploit it with unspeakable boldness and rapacity, and then, if he took his cue in time, fly back to his refuge with his fortune and set himself up in tremendous state while merrily thumbing his nose at Peking. As time went on revolutions and all manner of political movements, good and bad, had their headquarters in the settle-ments. High officials bought and furnished estates in them, invested their money in foreign protected securities, and abused their official privileges all the more outrageously because they were sure of what is now known as a " funk-hole " in some community under foreign protection. The writer has noted and counted the abodes of some thirty notorious Chinese ex-officials in Tientsin, all bigger than the most resplendent houses of foreign merchant princes of the community, and there is not

one of these who ought not to be deprived of his privileges as a political refugee and who could not justly be charged and extra-dited by the Chinese authorities on some criminal charge. But those who would have to do the charging and demand extradition on any given date are invariably officials skating on thin ice with expensive funk-holes of their own, prepared against their inevitable collapse, so are loth to establish dangerous precedents.

It is not, therefore, on the ground of abuse of the conces-sions by Chinese political criminals that Chinese agitators are usually moved to condemn them and demand their retrocession. They are wanted by China, from wave to wave of political ascendants as they come and go, because their exploitation to the point of absolute ruin would provide rich loot for the recog-nized authorities, but most of all because the foreigners in them, though crowded to the outskirts by the rise in land values due to the exorbitant price of "funk-holes ", enjoy some degree of security against " nationalistic " abuse and humiliation which those outside do not. The Chinese mania for getting at the foreigner in a defenceless situation, so that a cowardly assault can be made upon him and he can be subjected to all manner of abuse and humiliation, has so obsessed the Chinese mind of recent years that treaty port merchants, most in debt to foreign pro-tection against the cruel greed of their own people, as well as owners of expensive funk-holes, are carried out of their senses and join in the general insensate clamour for the imconditional ruin of China's greatest ports.

CHAPTER VII (PART 4 OF 4)

In the face of this situation it was obviously the duty of the Powers which control and regulate concessions to have cleansed them long since of disturbing Chinese elements. Minor Chinese criminals, of no particular standing, and enjoying no political patronage, are readily surrendered from every foreign con-cession to the mercies of Chinese official methods or are simply expelled to shift for themselves until their outside enemies catch them ; but it is very rarely indeed that any official criminal who might by any chance be of future service to this or that Power, or who may have in the past perpetrated atrocities against a rival Power, is denied protection against his political opponents, his outraged countrymen or the agents of the Power

that would like to apprehend him. One of the few exceptions to this general rule was General Hsu Shu-cheng, whose soldiers must brutally abused foreigners of all breeds wherever they met them in Mongolia, who used the International Settlement in Shanghai for several years as a base for all maimer of deviltry in various parts of China, and who was only expelled from the settlement when his own superiors in his own party disowned him. His deportation was nevertheless covered by his former associates with an appointment as an " industrial commissioner " abroad and for nearly a year this particularly guilty and danger-ous ex-criminal, expelled as such from the Shanghai settlement by the decision of the consular representatives of a dozen or more Powers, has been touring Europe as a distinguished semi-official visitor, interviewing in each land ministers of state and high public functionaries of every sort — accumulating " face ", in short, which enables him to return to China and laugh lightly at his expulsion from the Shanghai community.

There are so many phases of mistaken foreign policy in the East which have directly or indirectly led to our own imdoing, that it is impossible here to do more than touch upon them, to indicate how they should be frankly faced and discussed in the homelands, and to cite a conspicuous case here and there by way of illustration. The writer has had a great deal to say of the mistakes of diplomats and consular folk because they reflect and carry out the policies of our Governments, which shape or rather should shape the tactics of all other classes of foreigners in China. It must not be concluded, however, that they are the only sinners. Journalists, merchants and missionaries have done much to undermine foreign prestige, in one way or another, and to befog fundamental issues in China and lead astray, in their judgments of various situations in the East, not only the general public in many Western lands but Governments as well. There are very few large foreign communities in China which do not have their purchaseable foreign journalists, doing propaganda work for one Chinese militarist or politican to-day and for another to-morrow, apologists for official crimes against the Chinese people and also for any ofEences which their masters of the moment perpetrate against foreign Governments or

individuals. By the same token there are no big foreign cor-porations in China which have not, independently or in league with their Legations and Consuls, " played Chinese politics " from time to time, to the immediate detriment of their rivals but to the ultimate detriment of all in their relations with the Chinese. All such endeavours are, of course, evidence to the Chinese of a lack of unity among those whom they regard as their common enemies and encourage them in their ancient game of playing one barbarian against another to the inevitable dis-comfiture of all.

Last in this recital, but by no means least in influence upon the trend of events in the East, come the missionaries. The merits and demerits of missionary endeavour in China have never been frankly surveyed in print "VN-ithout prejudice. It is indeed doubtful whether such a survey is possible because it is so very difficult to study the subject closely without becoming wholly partisan, on one side or the other, and bitterly resentful of opposition. The writer has no desire whatever to become a controversialist in this field, but it is impossible to avoid saying something of missionary influence in both the Orient and Occident when discussing errors in policy in China based upon misunder-standing of China's troubles. And from this point of view it is impossible also to avoid the conclusion that missionary influence has done its share of harm.

The missionaries in China occupy dangerous and isolated positions very often, but they also occupy the most privileged position of any class of foreigners resident in China, in that they alone have the right to reside and purchase land and houses outside the treaty ports, beyond which merchants may only venture as " travellers ", taking up no permanent residence and holding no property unless it be in the name of Chinese agents. More than this, the security and general well-being of the mis-sionaries in the remote interior have been guarded by the foreign consular folk more jealously than that of any other class of foreigners because, in their position, far removed from gunboat protection, their security is entirely dependent upon Chinese good-will or good faith in their discharge of their treaty obligations, so that the treatment of missionaries in the interior has always

seemed a fairly accurate index to the Chinese attitude towards foreigners, indicating like an aneroid the rise or fall of foreign prestige. A further reason for the o£&cial solicitude shown in their protection is their occasional value as " intelligence " agents and their constant value as the advance guard of foreign trade.

The last clause must not be misunderstood. Missionaries very rarely, if ever, carry on any sort of commerce with the natives in conjunction with their evangelical work. But while living in semi-Chinese style they import into the interior all manner of foreign goods for their own convenience and comfort, which serve as samples in communities ordinarily beyond the reach of the treaty port merchant and excite the interest of the un-travelled natives in many foreign imports, both useful and ornamental, of which they would not otherwise have heard.

Every Chinese is possessed by a ravenous curiosity, and, no matter how bitterly anti-foreign or anti-Christian he may be, his desire to pry into the manner of the " foreign devil's " living and being will finally drive him to call at a local mission, listen politely to the " doctrine " which is eagerly thrust upon him and hypocritically commend it as " good teaching ", while devouring every detail of the barbarian menage with a hungry eye and a memory upon which impressions are absolutely indel-ible. If he sees anything that particularly takes his fancy he does not hesitate to ask its price, uses and place of origin, all of which the missionary is glad to explain, not to make sales, but in the hope of earning his good-will and of eventually making an " inquirer " or a convert of him. Missionaries of each nation-ality naturally order and import, as far as possible, the " home-side " goods with which they are most familiar, so that each mis-sionary establishment is a little show-room of American, British, French or German goods in the heart of China which it behoves each Legation to maintain in the interest of its nation's trade. It may also be said that the vast majority of missionaries,, in their persons, households, and particularly in their medical work, which has grown enormously in recent years, inevitably set examples to the Chinese which raise the general standard of living about them and thereby indirectly create a demand for a

thousand and one articles which can only be had from abroad.

The privileged position of the missionary, in the sight of his own Consulate or Legation, which these paragraphs help to explain, was long since recognized, if not understood, by Chinese ofl&cials throughout the land, and through them by the people of every rank, so that they often enjoy in each comraunnity a semi-official position by virtue of which they wield no little influence. Their friendship is therefore sometimes a material asset, and this consideration has brought into the Christian fold no small number of more or less complacent believers, and into their mission schools the children of good families, in the face of the opposition of the Confucian conservatives. The mission schools have turned out an overwhelming proportion of those real or nominal Chinese Christians, subsequently educated abroad, who have come during the last decade to figure in Chinese politics, and by virtue of the traditional loyalty of the pupil to the teacher, which was once a very binding tie, have given many elderly evangelists, particularly British and American, a voice in Chinese public affairs and therefore an intense interest in them which diplomats and consuls have not ignored.

These same elders in the mission field are naturally regarded as oracles upon all subjects Chinese in those circles in the home-lands which support and advertise missionary endeavour in China, so that all church organizations, particularly in Great Britain and America, are solidly behind any policy agreed upon by the missionary veterans in China and bring the full weight of their unbelievably weighty influence to bear upon voters, legis-lators and ministers of state in the shaping of policy. Their influence is such that their contributions upon China to the most weighty organs of publicity are rarely rejected, while their authority upon any and every phase of Chinese life is accepted as absolute and their books are well published and have wide circulation.

Since the missionaries sincerely believe that China's political regeneration is solely dependent upon the conversion of all her officials and prospective public servants to Christianity, and since they have assumed that all Christian Chinese must inevitably make good officials, the beneficence of their influence upon Chinese

public affairs has seldom even been questioned in the West and has only recently been seriously doubted in the Orient. The events of the past five years have, however, inspired the gravest doubts in the minds of all but the missionaries themselves of the wisdom, from the purely selfish point of view of our trade and its security, as well as from a more altruistic concern for China's welfare, of converting Chinese to what they choose to interpret as Christianity.

However conscientiously and with however little prejudice we approach this subject, and however scientifically we study it, we cannot hope to have our conclusions accepted for a moment by a Christian missionary, because they might entail the final conclusion that Christianity, like liberty, or wealth, or steak and kidney pie, or sea food, or beer, is food for one man and poison for another, thereby denying the universality of its appeal and the Divine wisdom behind it. Those of us who are not missionaries have, nevertheless, been driven very near to just such conclusions by the unfolding of the careers of a score or so of China's most prominent Christian politicians and by the leading part played in mad, causeless, really purposeless anti-foreign demonstrations by both teachers and pupils of missionary educational institutions and even by the best known and most influential Chinese Christian evangelists.

Long prior to recent political developments there was a grow-ing feeling among foreign employers of Chinese in all capaci-ties, from house servants up, that Christian converts were unreliable. Some of this was prejudice, but the writer could cite several instances in which employers who were themselves good Christians and sympathetic supporters of mission work came, through unhappy experience with mission school pro-ducts, to prefer for any post at their command " an old-fashioned " Chinese to a half-foreignized Christian convert. Their faith in the universal appeal of Christianity was certainly not shaken. They simply concluded that mission school methods were wrong, that they did not impose sufficiently strict discipline, that they cultivated in the pupils a contempt for old Chinese standards which once had had a restraining influence upon weak or bad characters, and that their pupils were not sufficiently grounded

in Christian ethical tradition to make it a real check upon evil instincts or an effective shield against temptation. In these conclusions there was much justice and truth, but more recent developments in China have led us to doubt whether it was the whole truth. Some spirits poured into sherry casks and left there to season undoubtedly improve in their strange environ-ment and come forth as fragrant and appetizing cordials, while if seasoned in a vinegar barrel or a beer cask they would come forth as swill. So the flavour of Christianity, as we gain more and more experience in its peculiar Oriental brands, seems to depend very largely upon the container and very little upon the original spirit. French and Italian Catholicism, Scotch Pres-byterianism, British and American Wesleyanism, even the soberest sort of Quakerism, poured into Chinese vessels and seasoned there, seem to pour out as sour milk or corroding vitriol. A sincere analysis of this perplexing problem would, of course, prove that what we are trying in our missions to instil into the Chinese is not Christianity, but the Anglo-Saxon-ism, or Teutonism, or whatever one likes to call it, which several northern European races have by great and wholly un-Christian violence imposed upon the world as a standard, softened and tempered by both the gentility and degeneracy of Rome, Greece, Persia and Syria, which came with primitive Christianity, but which still has the same effects upon tender Chinese stomachs (these being their seats of wisdom) as sparkling Burgundy would have upon an ancient wine skin.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen, for instance, and for a very striking instance, was a very weak Chinese vessel filled with very strong Christian waters. The " father of the Revolution " got both his Chris-tianity and his political dogmas from missionary patrons, as did the leader of the all-devastating Taiping rebellion. On many occasions, in great danger, while bursting with his strong doc-trines, he was sheltered and saved through missionary influence, while senior missionaries were his staunch friends in England, America, Hawaii, Japan, Hong-Kong and China. Sun Yat-sen has since been the patron of Pan-Asianism, of Bolshevism and of every other brand of anti-foreignism which has been especially hostile to Christian endeavour in Asia. He no sooner rose to

eminence, as a result of the Revolution in which he took no active part, than he grew too Napoleonic for the Christian wife whom he had espoused and the children bred in less prosperous days, so he duly rid himself of his old wife, in Chinese fashion, was duly expelled from the Christian church of which he was a member, and thereafter contracted new alliances as a free non-Christian agent, in spite of which series of events he con-tinued to be patronized by hopeful missionaries, protected by them in seasons of distress, and flattered by them when at the zenith of his cruel and ruthless dictatorship in Kuangtung, even up to the time of his death, when he was China's most influential Bolshevist tool and the high priest of rampant anti-foreignism.

The missionaries were never given half the opportunity to take pride in Sun Yat-sen nor to advertise him as a St. Michael in shimmering regalia as the now notorious " Christian General " Feng Yu-hsiang has afforded them. This worthy, who not so long ago expressed his desire to fight Great Britain in defence of China's sovereign rights and in prosecution of a Soviet cam-paign against the " imperialism " of the " capitalistic powers ", is a great burly coolie, a coolie born and bred, with all the uncouth instincts of his class, but described to the writer less than two yeats ago by a septuagenarian British missionary for whose common sense the writer has the greatest possible respect, as a " perfect Christian gentleman ". The American Y.M.C.A. long ago selected this great sanctimonious peasant as a champion and virtually staked the whole future of that institution in China upon this man's career.

In his own interest as an aspirant to high military control, Feng Yu-hsiang has always maintained within the ranks of his following a rigid discipline and order which savoured of old-time China and was immensely satisfying to foreigners living within whatever bailiwick he controlled. Light-fingered re-cruits were shot or beheaded like Joshua's recalcitrant Philistines, that the taxable merchants of each community might be left to the tax-collectors of the high command alone. No com-munity could be looted by any but the serene commander, and since missions were patronized and foreign firms exempt from

THE "CHRISTIAN GENERAL" 301

exaction, the fame of the " Christian General ", the Cromwell of China, the Chinese St. Michael working prodigies in an Oriental realm of darkness, was spread, through Mission publications, missionary contributions to the Press, missionaries on leave in Britain and America, and missionary propagandists " lobbying " in Washington and Westminster, until the Protestant Christian world thought China conquered by both arms and truth, ydth nothing left to pray for in the Orient but the complete ascen-dancy of Feng Yu-hsiang and the conquest of the land by a militant Christian Church.

While Feng Yu-hsiang's official colleagues never credited him with sincerity nor thought him an immaculate official, but on the other hand had many tales to tell one another of his duplicity and greed, it was impossible to quote any of their stories against him in the English-language Press without calling forth a veritable storm of missionary protest. The few rumours of his alleged misappropriation of military funds in Honan in 1922, when he was said to have seized and pocketed the huge fortune of the military governor who preceded him, which crept into the Press, were completely overshadowed by accounts of his wholesale baptisms when missionaries from various societies and various quarters of the colintry were invited to make Christians of his soldiers in companies and battalions, sometimes as many as 800 in a day being admitted to the fold. The influential elders of the Protestant missions were invited to stay in his camp and conduct Bible classes among his officers, who had to appear and pretend a solemn interest in the Christian faith as a military duty.

The heads of the sagest of them were completely turned by these tactics, and when Feng came to discredit himself through treachery, first to President Li Yuan-hung in Tsao Kun's inter-est, then to Tsao Kim and Wu Pei-fu through conspiracy with the Japanese, and finally to his Japanese employers at the behest of the Russian Soviet, Protestant missionaries in China and Protestant churchmen throughout the world rallied solidly to his support on each occasion and filled the Press and the ears of legislators and statesmen everywhere with explanations and apologies. The Chinese, however, were not influenced by

missionary propaganda, and when Feng began to sail under his true colours, becoming less and less jealous of his Christian reputation as his political position warranted him in dispensing with it, especially after the collapse of Wu Pei-fu in the autumn of 1924, through his treachery, he was certainly the most cor-dially despised public figure in China. The Chinese attitude towards him was very shortly reflected by all classes of for-eigners, except the missionaries, and he was bitterly denounced in the English-language Press in spite of fervent missionary support. Even the Legation folk entertained no further illu-sions about his character, and the home Governments were regaled with imcomplimentary records of his doings. Being sensitive to foreign opinion, the " Chinese Cromwell " was very soon aware that he had lost for ever the respect and con-fidence of all classes of foreigners but his missionary patrons, and that even among them there were some who were coming to doubt him. There was therefore little further profit in pretending to be friendly with foreigners, so, being thorough in all things, he became more openly anti-foreign than any Chinese leader of influence connected with the Government in Peking. While completely dominating this organ of misrule in the spring of 1925, extending to the make-believe Government no more authority than suited his convenience, he boldly chal-lenged Great Britain to fight and denounced foreigners in China generally in proclamations which were a strange garble of Biblical quotations and Communistic patter.

Missionary training has not only been responsible for the leader of the Taiping rebelKon, for Sun Yat-sen and for Feng Yu-hsiang, but for a few dozen other official promoters of the intensely nationalistic, anti-foreign school who preach China's rights in good English and tell the most shocking falsehoods about the state of China not only in Peking, Shanghai and Canton but in every foreign capital. It would only foster ill feeling to list them, but the best friends of the anti-Christian Russian Soviet and the bitterest enemies of the " imperialistic " foreigner in China at this time, whose intensity of feeling and speech against the Occident frightens and bewilders more cautious and slow-moving Chinese officials of the old school,

are either professing Christians or foreign-trained men who received their early schooling under the missionaries, some of them as strays and waifs whom the missionaries took in and educated out of charity. It would of course be absurdly unjust to pretend that all Chinese Christian converts and all the pro-ducts of mission schools are of the same calibre, but the part which the missions have unwittingly played in rearing vicious enemies against our well-being in China and the future of our trade in the East, is much too big and conspicuous to be ignored.

The Anglo-Saxon residents in the East feel that the influence of the missionary propagandist in our home lands has been and remains an even more dangerous influence to us than that which he has exercised over a vociferous, but still limited, Chinese audience. The chief concern of the missionary in China is to improve his position among the Chinese as a teacher and preacher by winning Chinese good-will, esteem and gratitude. So when he is in his homeland it is his concern and remains the concern of all the churchmen who support him, to cultivate a sentimental regard for China and to influence Government in every possible act of conciliation, ingratiation, flattery and leniency. The writer has written enough to prove, to his own satisfaction at least, how demoralizing our friendly and easy-going policy has been in China , and there is no need to cite illustrations of the part which missionaries and churchmen have played in shaping such policies in both Great Britain and America. When anti-foreign outrages in China attract attention in the American and British Press, one has only to read missionary letters to the Press to imderstand the character of their concerted influence upon legislators and statesmen — direct influence in America, indirect in Great Britain.

A recapitulation of this very long but very sketchy history of foreign influence in China is perhaps unnecessary, so the writer will confine himself to re-stating its purpose. This story, as we know it and review it in much greater detail in the Orient, conveys to us the impression that the Chinese in their relations with the rest of the world, which are regarded by them as an intrusion to start with, do not want to deal with us on a basis of equality, which they are not equipped by nature or historical

experience to appreciate, but are, even in chaos, while displaying all their dirty linen in the front yard, as it were, striving to assert their traditional superiority and demanding recognition of it from the West. We entertain the conviction, in the light of China's own history and the history of her foreign relations, that fear and not goodwill made her a law-abiding member of the family of nations during the very brief periods within which she enjoyed this distinction, and that through misguided good-nature, sympathy and indulgence we have relaxed the disciplinary grip which we once had upon both Government and people at the very time when it was most needed to check the decline of respect for native authority, and have, thereby, not only fostered chaos in China but have given free rein to the latent anti-foreignism with which the Oriental invariably re-wards favours from aliens. The lesson to be drawn from these facts, as we see them, is that, if we hope to continue to trade in Asia (a hope upon which the immediate well-being of Great Britain and probably the future of America depend) we must sooner or later revolt against the spirit of charity towards China, which is interpreted as weakness and acknowledged with con-tempt, instead of thanks, and reimpose discipline by force or a show of force, as any sane master would in a disorganized and demoralized school.

This is easily and simply said, but it is unanimously agreed in all the diplomatic high places, where the situation and its needs are now so clearly understood that China would froth at the mouth to hear them stated, that it is not only a physical but a political impossibility. International jealousy and sus-picion are the first seemingly unjumpable thorn hedges. Bol-shevik influence working through union labour — ^the first folk to feel the pinch of the reaction of Asiatic hate-orgies upon commerce — is another lesser barrier to be jumped or levelled when circumstances dictate. But the most insurmountable of all obstacles is public opinion in England and America, lavishly fed for many years upon misinformation, sentimentally devoted to the fostering of democracy, Christianity and what not in China, and jealously concerned for China's sovereign right to go to perdition in her own way and carry all the intrusive for-

eigners in the Orient and their trade with her. It is clearly recognized by every Government in the Occident that the British and American peoples cannot at this late date be argued into an appreciation of real conditions in the East, but must be violently shocked into a sane perspective upon China by something like the Boxer movement of 1900.

This the Chinese of the old school always understood, and were therefore moved, while earning a reputation for a change of heart, to tread with cat-like softness when poaching upon foreign rights. But the present generation of Chinese leaders, stuffed with superficial foreign learning, drunk upon all the strange " isms " of the Occident and saturated with the most degenerate literature, political theory and philosophy of Europe, lacks the caution of the elders, and in its impetuosity lies our only hope. We are told in all the Government ojQEices of Europe and America, when we go to them in distraction, that things cannot get better until they get very conspicuously worse. We have therefore to be grateful to the firebrand element in China w^hich is driving furiously on towards the complete ruin of China as a nation, the utter collapse of foreign trade with this bad-boy people, and very possibly the martjrrdom of those of us who are foolish enough to live in China ; and out of great weariness of the spirit and something like Petronian good cheer in the face of what is coming, our toast is : " More power to their elbows ! "