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Title: Changing China
Author: William Gascoyne-Cecil
Florence Gascoyne-Cecil
Release Date: January 19, 2013 [EBook #41878]
Language: English
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Produced by Al Haines
BY THE REV.
LORD WILLIAM GASCOYNE-CECIL
ASSISTED BY
LADY FLORENCE CECIL
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1912
Our interest in China was first aroused by a letter from an old school-fellow, Arthur Polhill, who, with heroic self-denial, has spent the best part of his life in China as a missionary. Subsequently I joined the China Emergency Committee, who in 1907 invited us to go out to the Shanghai Centenary Conference. That visit led naturally to a tour in China, Korea, and Japan. When we returned we found that great interest was being felt at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the movement in the Far East; a Committee was formed to study the whole question, which accepted provisionally the idea of encouraging the foundation of a Western University. Before finally accepting the idea it was felt that some one ought to go to the mission centres of China and find out the opinions of the missionaries working on the field, and at the same time sound the Chinese Government and see whether it would be favourable to the scheme. As a result of these deliberations, the Committee asked us in 1909 to go out again, this time on behalf of the United Universities Scheme. On our return it was suggested that if we put our report into the form of a book it might possibly excite interest in the whole question, especially in the University scheme. We were deeply impressed with two great facts—the greatness of the need of Western education from a Christian standpoint and the vital importance of immediate action.
Not only did we seek information from English and American but also from French and Italian missions as occasion offered. We tested and compared this information by the information we got from that most enlightened and able body of men who form the consular body in China. We are especially grateful to Sir John Jordan, by whose great diplomatic skill both the position of England and the goodwill of the Chinese are maintained.
It would be impossible even to record the names of all with whom we conversed, but our thanks are especially due to the following friends, not only for their generous hospitality, but also for the patient and kind way in which they instructed us in the many difficult aspects of the Chinese problem:—
Sir John and Lady Jordan, British Legation, Peking. H.E. the late Chang-Chih-Tung. H.E. the late Prince Ito. H.E. Tong-Shao-Yi. H.E. Tuan-Fang. H.E. Liang-Ten-Sen. Sir Robert Hart. Sir Walter and Lady Hillier. Sir Robert and Lady Breedon. Dr. Aspland of Peking. Dr. and Mrs. Avison of Seoul. Dr. and Mrs. Baird of Pyeng-Yang. Bishop and Mrs. Bashford of Peking. Mr. Blair of Pyeng-Yang. M. et Mme. Boissonnas, French Legation, Peking. Mr. Bondfield of Shanghai. Miss Bonnell of Shanghai. Mr. and Mrs. Bonsey of Hankow. Dr. and Mrs. Booth of Hankow. Miss Brierley of Wuchang. Bishop Cassels of West China. Mr. U. K. Cheng of Nanking. Dr. and Mrs. Christie of Mukden. Mr. Chun Bing-Hun of Shanghai. Mr. and Mrs. Clarke of Newchwang. Dr. Cochrane of Peking. Consul-General and Mrs. Cockburn, late of Seoul. Miss Corbett of Peking. Mr. Deans of Ichang. Mr. and Mrs. Deeming of Han-Yang. Dr. Du Bose of Soochow. Mr. Ede of Shanghai. Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Foster of Wuchang. Consul-General and Mrs. Fraser of Hankow. Mr. and Mrs. Gage of Changsha. Dr. and Mrs. Gibb of Peking. Dr. and Mrs. Gillieson of Hankow. Dr. Glenton of Wuchang. Bishop and Mrs. Graves of Jessfield, Shanghai. Dr. and {v} Mrs. Hawks Pott of Jessfield, Shanghai. Consul and Mrs. Hewlett of Changsha. Mr. Hollander of Hankow. Mr. and Mrs. Hoste of the C.I.M. Dr. Huntley of Han-Yang. Mr. and Mrs. Jackson of Wuchang. Monseigneur Jarlin, Pe-T'ang, Peking. Dr. Griffith John of Hankow. Miss Joynt of Hangchow. The late Miss Keane of Shanghai. Dr. and Mrs. Keller of Changsha. Consul and Mrs. King of Nanking. Dr. and Mrs. Lavington Hart of Tientsin. Mr. M. T. Liang of Mukden. Mr. and Mrs. Littell of Hankow. Dr. and Mrs. Lowry of Peking. Mr. and Mrs. MacIntosh of Tientsin. Dr. and Mrs. Macklin of Nanking. Dr. Macleod of Shanghai. Dr. and Mrs. Main of Hangchow. Consul-General and Miss Mansfield, late of Canton. Dr. Martin of Peking. Mr. and Mrs. Meigs of Nanking. Miss Miner of Peking. Archdeacon and Mrs. Moule of Ningpo. Mr. Mun-Yew-Chung of Shanghai. Dr. and Mrs. Murray of Peking. Mr. Norris of Peking. Mr. Oberg of Shanghai. Miss Phelps of Hankow. Mr. Arthur Polhill of the C.I.M. Miss Porter of Peking. Bishop Price of Fukien. Deaconess Ransome of Peking. M. et Mme. Ratard, French Consulate, Shanghai. Mr. Ready of Changsha. Dr. and Mrs. Gilbert Reid of Shanghai. Dr. Timothy Richard of Shanghai. Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts of Shan-hai-kwan. Mr. and Mrs. Ridgley of Wuchang. Bishop and Mrs. Roots of Hankow. Dr. and Mrs. Ross of Mukden. Miss Russell of Peking. Bishop Scott of North China. Mrs. Scranton of Seoul. Mr. and Mrs. Sedgwick of Tientsin. Mr. Shen-Tun-Lo of Shanghai. Mr. and Mrs. Sherman of Hankow. Mr. and Mrs. Smalley of Shanghai. Mr. and Mrs. Sparham of Hankow. Mr. Sprent of Newchwang. Mr. Squire of Ichang. Mr and Mrs. Stockman of Ichang. Mr. and Mrs. Symons of Shanghai. Taotai J. C. Tong of Shanghai. Taotai S. T. Tsêng of Nanking. Mr. James Tsong of Wuchang. Mr. and Mrs. Turley of Mukden. Bishop Turner of Korea. Mr. and Mrs. Upward of Hankow. Dean and Mrs. Walker of Shanghai. Miss Wambold of Seoul. Consul-General Sir Pelham and Miss Warren of Shanghai. Mr. Warren of Changsha. Mr. Watson of Mukden. Dr. and Mrs. Weir of Chemulpo. Dr. and Mrs. Wells of Pyeng-Yang. Consul and Mrs. Willis of Mukden. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson of Changsha. Mr. Yih-Ming-Tsah of Shanghai. Père Recteur of Ziccawei, Shanghai, and many others.
The following books were consulted:—
Among the Mongols: by James Gilmour, M.A. Annuaire Calendrière pour 1909. Appeal, An: by H. E. T'ang-K'ai-Sun. Buddhism in China: by Rev. S. Beal. Catholic Church in China, The: by Rev. Bertram Wolferstan, S.J. Catholic Encyclopædia of Missions. Century of Missions in China: by D. MacGillivray. China and the Allies: by A. Henry Savage Landor. China in Transformation: by A. R. Colquhoun. China's Book of Martyrs: by Luella Miner. China's Only Hope: an Appeal by her greatest Viceroy, Chang-Chih-Tung. Chin-Chin: by Tcheng-Ki-Tong. Chinese Characteristics: by Dr. Arthur Smith. Chinese Classics, The: Legge's Translation. Chinese Empire, The: by Marshall Broomhall. Chinese Shi-King: by Jennings. Chinese, The: by J. S. Thomson. Development of Religion in Japan: by Knox. Diplomatic and Consular Reports, 1905-1908. Early Chinese History: by H. J. Allen. Educational Conquest of the Far East, The: by Lewis. Education in the Far East: by Thwing. Embassy to China: by Lord M'Cartney. Four Books, The: Anonymous. Griffith John: by R. Wardlaw Thompson. John Chinaman: by E. H. Parker. History of China, The: by Boulger. Indiscreet Letters from Peking: by Putnam Weale. Les Missions Catholiques Françaises aux XIX. Siècle: by Père J. B. Piolet, S.J. Life and Works of Mencius: by Legge. Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission, edited by Marshall Broomhall. Mission in China, A: by Soothill. Mission Methods in Manchuria: by John Ross, D.D. New China and Old: by Archdeacon Moule. Original Religion of China: by John Ross, D.D. Pastor Hsi: by Mrs. Taylor. Railway Enterprise in China: by P. H. Kent. Religions in China: by Edkins. Religious System of China: by J. J. M. de Groot, vol. v. Sidelights on Chinese Life: by MacGowan. Taoist Tests. Things Chinese: by J. Dyer Ball. Troubles de Chine, Les: par Raoul Allier. Uplift of China, The: by Arthur Smith.
CONTENTS
CHINA IN TRANSITION
CHAP. PAGE
I. WHAT HAS AWAKENED CHINA? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
II. WHAT CHINA MEANS TO THE WORLD . . . . . . . . . . 20
III. ORIENTAL AND OCCIDENTAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
IV. FOREIGN RELATIONS OF CHINA . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
V. CHINESE CIVILISATION--ITS WEAK SIDE . . . . . . . 56
VI. CHINESE CIVILISATION--ITS GOOD SIDE . . . . . . . 70
VII. RAILWAYS AND RIVERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
VIII. THE CITIES OF CHINA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
IX. OPIUM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
X. THE WOMEN'S QUESTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
XI. CHINESE ARCHITECTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
RELIGIONS OF CHINA AND THE MISSIONARY
XII. RELIGIONS IN CHINA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
XIII. CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY AND WESTERN CULTURE . . . . . 163
XIV. INTERVIEW AT NANKING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
XV. ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSIONS IN CHINA . . . . . . . . . 183
XVI. OTHER MISSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
XVII. THE EFFECT OF WESTERN LITERATURE IN CHINA . . . . 207
XVIII. MEDICAL MISSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
XIX. MOVEMENT IN KOREA AND MANCHURIA . . . . . . . . . 232
XX. THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA . . . . . . . 242
THE NEW AND THE OLD LEARNING
XXI. EDUCATION, CHIEFLY MISSIONARY . . . . . . . . . . 253 XXII. GOVERNMENT EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM . . . . . . . . . . 266 XXIII. THE SAME IN PRACTICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 XXIV. DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF EDUCATION . . . . . . . 293 XXV. THE NEED OF A UNIVERSITY EXPLAINED . . . . . . . . 305 XXVI. THE NEED OF A UNIVERSITY EXPLAINED (continued) . . 317 XXVII. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
APPENDIX
WILL RUSSIA BE REPRESENTED ON THE MISSION FIELD? . . . . . 329 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
For centuries China has been the land that never moved. It had a political history full of wars and bloodshed, of intrigue and murder; periods of prosperity and enlightenment; periods of darkness and desolation; but the country remained essentially the same country. There might be some small alteration in its customs, but China was distinctly unprogressive. And everybody who knew China ten or fifteen years ago was prepared to prophesy that it would continue to remain unprogressive.
Many a missionary speaks of the China that he used to know as a very different land from the China of to-day. It used to be a sort of Rip Van Winkle land that had slept a thousand years, and showed every sign of remaining asleep for another thousand. Mrs. Arnold Foster told us that when she first came to Wuchang she used to see the soldiers dressed mediævally, learning to make faces to inspire terror in the hearts of the adversary. Monseigneur Jarlin, the head of the French mission in Peking, described the China of olden times by saying that in his young days all Chinamen had a rooted contempt for everything Western. Theirs was the {4} only civilised land. The West was the land of barbarism. Now, he added, the positions are reversed; every Chinaman despises China, and is convinced that from the West comes the light of civilisation. Arch-deacon Moule tells how he sailed out to China in a sailing ship, and found a land absolutely indifferent to the existence of the West—more ignorant of the West than the West was of the East, and that, when he was young, was saying a great deal; and now he finds himself in a land that has telephones and motor cars and takes an active interest in flying machines.
China has fundamentally altered. She used to be absolutely the most conservative land in the world. Now she is a land which is seeing so many radical changes, that a missionary said, when I asked him a question about China, "You must not rely on me, for I left China three months ago, so that what I say may be out of date."
China is now progressive; yes, young China believes intensely in progress, with an optimistic spirit which reminds the onlooker more of the French pre-Revolution spirit than of anything else. And this intense belief in progress shows itself at every turn; the Yamen runner has become a policeman, towns are having the benefit of water-works, schools are being opened everywhere, railways cover the land. One may well ask what has accomplished this change, what has awakened China?
Perhaps, like many other great events in history, {5} this change of opinion in China should be attributed to more than one cause. There are two chief causes. One may be small, but it is not insignificant; the other is certainly great and obvious. The less appreciated factor that is causing the regeneration of China is Christianity; the larger and more obvious factor is the new national movement.
The cause of the new national movement was the sense of humiliation brought about by political events culminating in the battle of Mukden, where a flagrant act of insolent contempt for the laws of neutrality was felt all the more deeply because China had to submit to that which she was powerless to resist.
The events of the last few years are so well known that I must ask the indulgence of the reader in recapitulating them. China, confident in the number of her people, which reached to a quarter of the world's population, attempted to assert her rights of suzerainty over Korea against Japan. She had not realised then that Japan was no longer an Eastern power, where knights with two-handed swords did deeds of valour and won for themselves everlasting renown. And when at Ping-yang the armies met, the Chinese General ascended a hill that he might direct the armies of the Celestial Empire with a fan. He conceived the battle to be merely a small affair, where a fan could be seen by all the officers engaged. The result was, of course, that the German-trained Japanese army had a very easy victory. The war ended in the taking of Port Arthur by the Japanese, {6} and China was in the humiliating position of having to appeal to Western countries to secure her territory.
So far, however, the sting of her humiliation gave to China a sense of resentment against all foreigners, rather than a sense of repentance for her own shortcomings, and the missionaries found hostility to their work in every part of China. That hostility resulted in the murder of two German Roman Catholic missionaries in Shantung. The well-known action of Germany in demanding a cession of territory as a punishment for this murder may have been a good stroke of policy, but it has brought but little honour either to Germany or to Christianity. In fact it may be regarded as a most regrettable action from a missionary point of view, for it convinced the Chinese that the missionary was but a part of the civil administration of a hostile country, and that if China was to be preserved from the foreigner, missionaries must be induced to leave the country. A deep feeling of national resentment spread over the land, which was encouraged by some in authority. The direct connection between Government patronage of the anti-foreign movement and the German occupation of Kiauchau can be deduced from the fact that the Governor who was responsible for the awful murders in Shansi had been Governor of Shantung when Germany took Kiauchau.
The result of this bitter feeling was the creation of a secret and patriotic society which concealed the nature of its propaganda under a name with a double {7} meaning. The Boxer Society was, as its name suggests, apparently an athletic society—a society which had for its object the encouragement of the art of self-defence. But the name had another signification. Its real object, as a Chinaman explained to me, was to "knock the heads of the foreigners off." It was a religious as well as a political movement, however. It had its prophets, who did wonders or were thought to do them, and its disciples were believed to be invulnerable to any Western weapon. It protested against the movement towards Western ideas, which it regarded as immoral; it condemned and destroyed everything Western, from straw hats and cigarettes to mission houses and railways; its disciples believed that the spirits that defend China were angry at the introduction of Western things, that they were withholding the rain so necessary to the light loess land of that district, and that the only way they could be propitiated was by the sacrifice of a Western life or by the destruction of a Western building. One of the things that precipitated the siege of Peking was the apparent success of such an action. In pursuance of their faith, the Boxers set a light to the rail-head station of the half-made Hankow-Peking railway, a place called Pao-ting-fu; the station was a mere wooden barrack, and blazed up merrily with an imposing column of smoke; hardly had the smoke reached the heavens, when the sky was overcast with heavy thunder-clouds, and in a short time the thirsty land received the long-wished-for rain, and the Boxer {8} prophets pointed with sinister effect to the heavenly confirmation of their doctrine.
It is necessary to remind the reader of the religious aspect of Boxerdom, so that he shall realise what its fall meant to many Chinese. Really their faith in it was wonderful. A Boxer, for instance, at the siege of Peking walked composedly in front of the Legation, waving his sword and performing mystic signs; the soldiers first of one then of another Legation fired on him with no effect; probably his coolness put out their aim. Another example of their credulity was told me at Newchwang. The Russians had occupied Newchwang, and, more suo, were pacifying it; they were shooting all the Boxers on whom they could lay hands, and, I am afraid, a great number who were not Boxers. They chained one of these fanatics to a stone seat with the intention of executing him; but they thought they might get some useful information out of him, so they asked an Englishman who spoke Chinese perfectly to make inquiries of him, giving him authority to offer a respite as a reward. He went to the prisoner, and sitting down by him, tried to induce him to save his life by giving information, but he was met by a contemptuous refusal; and when he pointed out that the firing party was there, the misguided man merely said, "I am a Boxer, and their bullets cannot hurt me." Another minute, of course, proved his error. But his firmness showed the reality of his conviction.
Sometimes this fanaticism had curious results. {9} A Boxer prophet assured the village that no works of the West could hurt him, no bullet could harm him, no train could crush him. As a railway ran near the village, he and all the inhabitants adjourned thither to put his invulnerability to the test. The daily train came puffing along, as the Boxer, waving his sword, stood right in its path. The driver was a European, and seeing some one on the line, pulled up his train to avoid running over him. The Boxer pointed to the train triumphantly, and the astonished villagers became Boxers. There was, however, a sceptic who refused to believe, so next day they repaired again to the line, and the Boxer again made his passes and uttered his charms. Alas for him! this time the driver was a Chinaman, and he was not going to stop his master's train because a coolie fellow got in the way, so he put on full steam and cut him to pieces, and the village deserted the Boxer faith to a man.
With the relief of Peking, the Boxer Society fell; but the popular view was not that Boxer teaching was false, but that the spirits behind Western religion were stronger than those behind Boxerdom. So one of the immediate results of the fall of the Boxers was to establish the spiritual prestige of Christianity; the second result was to inspire the Chinese with a respect for the military power of the foreigner. The Boxers had failed, the foreign powers had taken Peking, the Son of Heaven had become a fugitive; all this was gall and {10} wormwood to the Chinaman. The sack of Peking was especially felt, both because of the wanton destruction that was committed—one informant told me he saw a vase worth £200 smashed into a thousand atoms by a drunken soldier—and because the enlightened Chinese knew very well that no civilised city is sacked at the present time, and that they were being treated as no other race is now treated.
Yet the old spirit of pride prevented them learning completely the full truth. The thinking Chinaman was still disposed to attribute the victory of the West to the superior fighting powers of Western men. A Chinese gentleman, explaining the fear his people have of Europeans, said, "They regard you as tigers." The troops who sacked Peking were to the thinking Chinaman but another example of the well-known truth, that those nearer the savage state fight better than civilised men, and really, considering the behaviour of some of the European troops, no surprise can be felt at this conclusion; it needed another lesson to make them finally and thoroughly realise the superiority of our civilisation.
The bitterness of their next humiliation made them ready to learn as they had never been before in the whole of their history, and events provided them with teachers who taught them that the cause of this humiliation was their refusal to accept Western ideas, and that if they would maintain {11} their independence they must learn the art of war from their conquerors.
After the siege of Peking came the Russo-Japanese war. The Russians had long been known and feared by the Chinese; they were to the Chinese mind the embodiment of the warlike and blood-thirsty spirit of the West; they were hated for their cruelty and feared for their prowess. The awful story of the massacre of Blagovestchensk in 1900 was still present to the popular mind. The story was this. The Amur divides China from Siberia. When the Boxer movement broke out the Russians required all the Chinese to go to their side of the river; but with sinister intent, they removed all the boats, so that no one could cross. The Chinese pointed this out, and the respectable merchants of the town presented a petition saying they were ready to obey the Russian Government in everything, but without the boats they could not do so; but the Russians insisted that boats or no boats, they must cross the Amur; they protested, but in vain; a half-circle was formed round them by the soldiery, and the whole Chinese population of the city was driven into the river at the point of the bayonet.
The Japanese were also well known to the Chinese; they had been till lately, when the Western movement had altered everything in Japan, their pupils in civilisation. The Japanese believed in Confucius, used Chinese characters, worshipped in Buddhist temples, sacrificed to ancestors, in fact {12} were in Chinese estimation a civilised race, though inferior of course to themselves.
When these two antagonists met in Manchuria, the war could not fail to make a deep impression on China. To begin with, it was an insult surpassing that of the sack of Peking to the Chinese amour propre, to have the war carried on in Manchuria. Russia and Japan were disputing over Korea, and both nations were at peace with China. Russia might have invaded Japan; Japan might have invaded Russia, or both might have met in Korea, but what they did was to select a province of a neutral State and decide that there should be the scene of conflict. What made this more striking was that they agreed to respect the neutrality of the rest of China; in fact they selected their battle-ground with the same equanimity as if China and her national rights did not exist.
But the deepest impression made on the Chinese was by the victory of the Eastern over the Western. The Japanese demonstrated that there was no essential inferiority of the East to the West, and that when an Eastern race adopted Western military methods it proved itself superior to the most powerful of the Western races. This was the lesson the battle of Mukden taught the Chinese, and which convinced the anti-foreign party in China, that however much they might hate the foreigner, they must adopt Western methods if they would retain their independence. The result was that the progressive and {13} anti-foreign parties found themselves at one. Both agreed that Western ideas were necessary. The first, because they believed in Western progress; the second, because they felt that the only way to preserve China from the hated foreigner was to learn the secret of his military power. The first thing to be done was to study Western education, and then they could hope to hold their own against the Western races, as Japan had more than held her own against the Russians.
I believe the battle of Mukden will prove one of the turning points in the history of the world. Few of us have any conception of the bitterness of the humiliation of China. People speak of Russia as having been humiliated, but my experience is that the Russians looked at the whole question as a colonial war in which a bungling Government embroiled their country—a war which, if it demonstrated the incapacity of their officers, proved the courage of their soldiers. But the humiliation of China was intense. When one remembers the position that the Emperor occupies in China; when one also remembers the reverential feeling that exists towards ancestors, one realises what it must have meant to the Chinaman that the site of the tombs of their Emperors should have been the scene of that titanic struggle between the East and the West. But the result of that humiliation was to burn in the lesson that Japan had taken the right course, and that, however hateful were {14} Western ways, they were a necessity, and that every lover of China must do his best to introduce them into the Empire.
Of course there are many Chinamen—nay, I should think a vast majority—who intend to preserve to China the essential points of the Confucian civilisation; they mean to accept Western ideas only in so far as they are necessary to struggle against the West. Some, no doubt, definitely admire the West, but most are anxious for a compromise; they want to preserve China with its customs, with its essential thought, but to strengthen it by foreign knowledge and a foreign military system. The exact degree of what should be preserved in China and what should be destroyed and replaced by Western innovations, differs according to the age and the temperament of the thinkers, but the principle is most generally accepted—Western thought must be grafted on to Eastern civilisation. When we remember the size of China, we may well ask ourselves what effect this policy will have on the rest of the world. We have at present a period of reflection, for how long we cannot tell. The task of welding East and West into one whole is in practice proving difficult, and at present failure is very often the result; but with Japan as a successful example, and with the threat of national extinction and foreign domination before them, the Chinese can never give up the effort; and whatever the exact result may be, I think one may assert {15} without rashness that not only will it fundamentally alter the whole of China, but through China affect the whole world.
While detailing the causes which have created the national movement which is now inducing China to make every effort to perfect her defences against foreign aggressions, we must not forget that the awakening of China has a higher side, and one which we can attribute directly and indirectly to Christianity. The influence of Christianity can be traced back to the seventh century when missions of Nestorian Christians came to Thibet and China; they left behind them, it is true, no converts, but their influence was probably felt through the power that Lamaism had had over a great part of the Eastern world. A learned Japanese, discussing this subject, said that no one could study Lamaism and Buddhism without realising how intimately it had been in touch with some form of Christianity. Later on the great Roman Catholic missions, initiated by St. Francis Xavier in the thirteenth century, began to work in China, and have slowly but surely raised up a large population who have been Christians for many generations. Their missions were interrupted by persecutions, but with varying and lately increasing success they have maintained themselves ever since. In 1807 the pioneer of Protestant missions, Dr. Morrison, began his work and the translation of the Bible into Chinese. The work increased, his mission was followed by other missions, which pursued {16} a policy even more influential in altering the opinion of China; not only did they with great heroism preach the Gospel in every province of China, but they took two actions which have affected China in a very special degree.
First the American missions made the very greatest effort to get hold of intelligent Chinese men, both Christian and non-Christian, to teach them Western knowledge, so that they might understand how intimately Christianity was connected with Christian thought. The result of their efforts has been that there are a considerable number of enlightened Chinese gentry who are either Christians or who have a great sympathy with the Christian side of Western civilisation. Sometimes they educated these men in China, sometimes they induced them to go to America for their education; and there they were brought into contact with the intense, yet rather narrow, New England Christianity. I had the honour of meeting many of these men in China, and I was convinced that they have no small part in her awakening.
The English and American missionaries, under the leadership of Dr. Williamson, inaugurated a second policy, which has had far-reaching results in causing the changes in China. The Christian Literature Society was started to supply the Chinese with translations of the best Western literature. They were followed by Chinese imitators who were also Christians, and who founded a Chinese Commercial {17} Press. These two bodies have given to China a vast amount of Western literature, the first on philanthropic lines with the definite intention of spreading Christianity, the second on a commercial basis but with the intention of presenting to their fellow-countrymen the purer and more beautiful side of Western thought. The publications of these two bodies reach, I am told, to every educated man in China. If the humiliations of public events made the Chinese willing to study Western civilisation, it was these men who afforded them the means of studying and understanding the best side of that civilisation.
But perhaps those who have done most to give the Chinese a proper conception of Christianity are the Bible Societies, especially the British and Foreign Bible Society. Ever since, with the optimism of faith, the translation of the Scriptures by Dr. Morrison was published in 1814, they have been scattering the Christian Scriptures throughout the whole of China, from Mongolia to Tonkin, and I am told that those Scriptures are read by men in the highest positions and with the most conservative antecedents in the whole empire. It cannot be doubted that the indirect fruit of their work has been very great indeed. China has, through the agencies of these bodies, been brought into close contact with Christian thought, and has at last realised the true nature of our religion.
Lastly, there has been the influence of those who {18} died for the Christian faith during the many persecutions to which Christianity has been exposed, and which culminated in the Boxer persecution. If Germany, by her action in Shantung, put before China a false and most repellent view of Christianity, the heroic sufferings of the martyred missionaries, both yellow and white, presented Christianity to a wondering world in its purest aspect. After those thousands of Christians had suffered in Shan-si, the Home bodies, especially the China Inland Mission, refused to take any compensation for the blood that had been shed in the cause of the Gospel. The Chinese were then convinced that the German presentation of Christianity was not the only one; if Germany could look on Christianity only as a stalking horse behind which she could creep up to her prey, the English-speaking races had a holier ideal to teach and one which was more consonant with the words of the Founder of our religion. The sufferings of the Christians were intense, their heroism was great, but the result has been commensurate with their efforts, and an awakening China looks to our countries, not solely to teach her the art of war and of killing men, but also to teach her the great thoughts and the great religion which has before her very eyes proved capable of producing such noble men and women.
The awakening of China has two aspects. From one aspect China is awakening to the value of the science and the arts of the West; from the other {19} China is awakening to the fact that there is in the West a power which comes from goodness, and that goodness has its root in Christian faith. It is this twofold aspect of the awakening of China which is so important to bear in mind, for if she is to share in our civilisation in the future, it is both our duty and our interest to see that this great world-movement is encouraged to develop on its higher side.
The day is past when any one in Europe, whether Christian or non-Christian, can be indifferent to what is happening in China. The Christian has indeed been for a long time alive to the importance of these developments, but the ordinary citizen with no strong religious views has usually neither displayed nor felt any interest in a country separated from us by so many miles and by such an untraversable gulf in thought and language. If the Christian has urged the importance of Chinese missions, his neighbours have answered by asking him why he cannot leave the Chinese to themselves and to their own religion. Whatever justice the opponent of missions in times past may have thought he had for this view, he cannot now maintain that the Chinese question is one which may be put on one side by any thoughtful man. The movements of this vast mass of humanity, amounting to a quarter of the population of the world, cannot but fail to have a very real and vital effect on the whole civilised world.
The revolution that is affecting China brings Europe and America into close contact with a {21} country equal to Europe in size, and not far inferior in productive power. A few years ago China was so far away that except as an outlet for trade it had little interest for people here. The voyage occupied many months and was esteemed a hazardous journey, owing to the dangerous coasts and typhoons of the China seas. Now a train-de-luxe conveys the traveller in a fortnight across Asia to Peking, and if the accommodation on the Chinese part of the railway is not altogether luxurious, the traveller remembers that it is far superior to that on the first railways opened in our own land. The journey is of course tedious, but the fact that business men in the north of China are talking of always spending their summer holidays in England, will show how close China is now to Europe. It is no exaggeration to say that in reckoning distance by the time it takes to complete the journey, China is nearer to England than London was to Scotland in the days of Dr. Johnson, while in point of comfort and convenience there is no comparison. The journey from London to Peking is far easier at the present day than the journey from London to Edinburgh in the days of Johnson's famous trip to the Hebrides.
If in this way we are getting closer to China, we are still more growing closer in thought. No longer can we speak of a gulf that separates us from China. Every year English is becoming more and more the language of educated men in {22} East; even though we cannot read their books, they are reading ours either in translations or in the original. Japan has set the example of having English taught universally in her high schools, and now China is following her example. A foreigner, talking about Esperanto, remarked: "What would be the use of making an universal language? English, at any rate in the East, is the universal language." That barbarous patois, "pidgin" or business English, lives still in China. It consists of English roots, enlarged by the addition of Portuguese words, put into Chinese idiom and pronounced Chinese fashion. But "pidgin" English is fast giving way to pure English, spoken most commonly with a marked American accent.
If this growing proximity of China compels the attention of the civilised world, the virgin wealth of her mineral resources and the cheapness of her labour have excited the cupidity of the Western capitalist, and it is daily more obvious that China must become the centre of international politics, therefore the extent to which she will affect the rest of the world should be a matter for careful consideration. India, it will be urged, has long been in contact with Europe, and the effect on Europe is small. Why should there be any difference when another Oriental race comes in close proximity with Europe? Putting on one side the fact that India has, both in trade and in politics, had a very great effect on England, it can be answered that there is an essential difference between the {23} brown inhabitants of India and the yellow race. The former are, through religion or custom, unable to accommodate themselves to the conditions of Western civilisation; the latter have shown themselves such adepts at accepting Western life that they have excelled the white man, to his great annoyance, in his own civilisation. The Chinaman, who is forbidden to enter America, Australia, and South Africa, is refused admittance, not because he has been untried or because he has been tried and found wanting, but because he has been tried in the three continents and found by all who have tried him eminently efficient—so efficient that if he were allowed to continue in those countries, he would soon render the presence of the white settler unnecessary. He has been tried in three just balances and been found of such value that the white voter is unanimous in demanding his exclusion. But even the most aggressive Chinese exclusionist can scarcely hope to exclude him from his own country, and the Chinaman who stays at home is probably a better man than the Chinaman who goes abroad.
Western civilisation may be expected to grow with equal rapidity in China as it has in Japan. Obviously Japan is the precedent that China will follow rather than India, whether Hindu or Mohammedan.
A few years ago a man would have been classed as an eccentric who dared foretell that Russia would be defeated by Japan. When Japan talked about going to war with Russia, Russia laughed. Who {24} can tell how we shall speak of China a few years hence? For Japan after all is only the same size in population as Great Britain, but China is eight times as large.
There are three ways in which China may affect Europe. Militarily, she may menace her by her enormous armies enlisted from her vast population. Commercially, she may afford an outlet for our trade far greater than we possess at the present time, and perhaps be a competitor in trade and a place where the capital of Europe will be invested. Morally, she may either depress or elevate our social morals. Perhaps the reader may be inclined to smile at the idea of China being in a higher moral condition than Europe, so as to be able to react on her beneficially, but stranger things have happened; and if Europe follows the example of France in deterioration, and China continues to advance with the same rapidity, China might easily excel Europe in morals.
Let us first deal with the question from the military point of view. The military authorities who know the Chinese seem to be equally divided in opinion; many are confident that they are an unwarlike race, others maintain and bring evidence to prove that under competent officers they have great military qualities.
A few years ago, for instance, the development of the military power of China was regarded as a possible danger to the world, and especially to England or Russia. It was pointed out that China might easily {25} descend with a huge army on to India in the distant future, or she might turn her arms northward and conquer the wide districts of Siberia. Now the popular view is the reverse, and the military power of China is regarded as a thing incapable of great development. A Japanese diplomatist with whom we discussed the question ridiculed the idea of the yellow peril and smiled at the suggestion that China could ever be a nation great in war. Certainly her present military power can be safely ignored except in Manchuria; whether that power is capable of development is a moot point. Believers in the war-like possibilities of China point out that as a matter of fact China is by right of conquest suzerain to such warlike races as the Tibetans and the Ghurkas, and that her empire reaches as far as Turkestan. In answer it is urged that the victors were not the Chinese, but the conquerors and present rulers of the Chinese, the northern Manchus; who, till they were absorbed by Chinese civilisation, spoke a different language and wrote a different character.
The Manchus are far from being extinct, though through years of sensual indulgence they have lost their virility; but the discipline of religion or the call of a national emergency might restore the war-like qualities of the race. It was only in 1792 that the Chinese, under Sund Fo, defeated the Ghurkas, and we must allow that a race who could defeat these gallant soldiers must be skilled and brave in war. On the other hand I was assured that the Manchus, {26} so far from showing any courage in the war with Japan, were the first to flee, and that they differ in nothing from the Chinese except that they are pensioners and ride horses. Those who disbelieve in the courage of the Chinese say the Chinese never had any courage except of a passive order; that they would endure suffering against any race on earth, and that their whole history tells that tale; that they have been subject in turn to the Mongols, the Kins, and the Manchus; and that the period of the Ming dynasty when they were free, was only because the Mongols had reduced every nation within many thousands of miles to subjection, and then they themselves had fallen a prey, not to the Chinese arms directly, but to the enervating and destructive effects of Chinese civilisation which rendered them absolutely unable to fight.
Those who argue in this way point to that great feature of Chinese scenery, the fortified wall. That Great Wall of China, climbing hill and dale, was built to keep the northern and warlike tribes from harrying the peace-loving and industrious Chinaman. Behind that wall lie nothing but fortress after fortress; every city is walled, and those walls tell their own tale. A warlike race never dwells in walled cities. When the traveller enters Japan after visiting China, the first thing which strikes him is the absence of walled cities. The villages and towns lie along the roads as they do in our own country instead of clustering behind the tall and gloomy walls of China. {27} Again, those who say the Chinese will never fight, point out that they have never been able to reduce two savage races right in their midst, the Maios and Lolos. One devoted missionary who had spent many years of his life in the thankless task of attempting to approach these savage Lolos, gave us an interesting account of the relation between the Lolos and the Chinese which certainly does not show that the Chinese have much military skill. The Lolos are a sort of Highland caterans who live in the mountains in the west of China, and from time to time raid the peace-loving Chinese villages. The Chinese then retaliate by organising a large force, who advance on the Lolo country and burn their villages. The Lolos rarely offer any direct resistance, as they realise they are hopelessly outnumbered, but take an opportunity to raid another village and to slaughter hundreds of defenceless Chinese. If the forces are anything like equal, the Lolos will fight, and even sometimes when the forces are wholly unequal. On one occasion seven Lolos and two women put to flight three hundred Chinese soldiers, killing forty and wounding many more. The Chinese consequently live in considerable fear of those Highland barbarians, whose fierce yells and savage onslaught produce absolute panic in their troops.
Officers who have commanded Chinese troops seem generally to believe in their capabilities. Gordon, for instance, spoke in the highest terms of the soldiers who formed his "ever victorious army," and the {28} English officers who commanded the Weihaiwei regiment and those who commanded the Chinese volunteers at the siege of Peking spoke equally well of their men. It is reported that the Chinese soldiers at the siege of Tientsin would carry the wounded back out of the range of fire when no European soldiers could be found ready to perform this dangerous task, but of this story I could find no first-hand confirmation. But whether the Chinese in times to come will develop an efficient army or whether they do not, the most competent judges affirm that Chinese military greatness will always make for peace; that they will never wage a war of aggression; and that, so far from being a menace to the world, they will prove to be a security for the world's peace in the Far East. In fact it is the continuance of China's military weakness rather than the growth of her military power which is most likely to disturb the political atmosphere. China is far too rich a prize to be safe if unguarded, and the acquisition of her wealth will always prove a temptation to her needy neighbours.
The integrity of the Chinese empire is for many reasons a most desirable thing, and that integrity can best be maintained by an increase of China's military power.
One of the reasons why this is so much to be desired is from the commercial effect which China may have on the rest of the world. If the vast masses of her singularly excellent workmen are to be exploited by powers who have no thought for either {29} hers or the world's welfare; if the sweated den of the alien is a menace to the healthy conditions of the working man in London; if the policy of such philanthropists as Lord Shaftesbury has been at all beneficial to the world at large, the sudden introduction of hundreds of thousands of ill-paid but efficient working men to the great Western market will have a deleterious effect on the social conditions of the civilised world. It is obviously far more simple to bring the factories to China than to bring the Chinaman to the factories, and this will be freely done if ever the flag of the foreigner waves over China. The great advantages that China can offer of cheap labour, cheap coal and cheap carriage, coupled with the security of a European flag, will have the effect of attracting to China a very large number of the world's industries. If this is done gradually, so that the internal market in China increases proportionally, this will not result in any evil to other nations. China will share in the wealth of the world, and will be at once a large producer and a large consumer; but if before Western civilisation has been assimilated by the working classes Western factories are extensively started in China the result will be one of those dislocations of social conditions which we include under the name of sweating.
Western conditions of labour in Western countries may be deemed by some to be hard, but no one can doubt that if Western conditions of labour were forced on a population which did not understand them, they {30} would have a tendency to become definitely oppressive. The Chinese coolie will, I fear, be as little able to maintain his ground against the foreign contractor supported by the arms of a foreign power, as the Congo native is to maintain his rights against his Belgian oppressor; and unless Western powers have the humanity and wisdom to resist those of their own nations who will clamour to make money out of Chinese labour, Western dominance in China is not to be desired by Western wage-earners.
HANKOW, THE CHICAGO OF CHINA. RIVER AT LOW WATER, 600 MILES FROM THE SEA. HAN-YANG IRONWORKS
One of the most impressive sights in China is the Han-yang Ironworks. They employ three thousand men, and are owned by a body of Chinese capitalists. They have found it worth while to triple their plant within the last two or three years, and one can hardly wonder when one realises that, though the labourers are paid a very high rate according to Chinese scale, they only get sixpence a day, and even allowing that it requires three Chinamen to do the work of one Englishman, which is a higher proportion than is generally claimed, obviously there is a very large margin of profit to be made by the owners of the works. It is worthy of note that the Chinese have been unable at present to produce any native engineers; sixteen Europeans of various nationalities manage and control the works, though they are owned by Chinese, but the skilled work is all done by Chinese. For instance, we saw a man straightening the rails with a steam hammer; it was very skilled work, and I was told he was making 7d. or {31} 8d. a day. If any social reformer, if any one interested in the condition of the working classes, has time to consider this question and to escape from that parochial mind which so distorts the importance of things, he will see that the conditions of the working classes in Europe will depend to a greater degree on the proper development of the social conditions of China than on any factor at home. To put it briefly, if the fourth of the labour of this world is living under sweating conditions, the other three-fourths may consider themselves lucky if their income is not cut down by 25 per cent.
On the other hand, if the development of China is allowed to pursue its normal course, and education and enlightenment are encouraged to proceed by equal steps with material well-being, the commercial conditions of China, so far from being injurious, will prove beneficial to the world at large. The internal market, for one thing, will tend to keep pace with China's productions. If China exports, she will also import; the volume of trade will no doubt be enormously increased, and that trade will bring prosperity to China and to those other countries who are trading with her. Her people will gradually grow accustomed to Western conditions, and, if China maintains her independence, those conditions will not be allowed to become too onerous to the poorer classes. The wealth of another country does not injure her neighbours; it is rather her poverty which injures them. There is always the danger that the poorer country {32} will drain the capital from the richer country, and that a rich country becomes harsh to a poor country in the same way that the creditor is harsh to the debtor; certainly it would be most undesirable if a sudden industrial expansion in China paralysed many industrial undertakings in England by depriving them of the capital they needed for enlargement, and it would be equally undesirable to have any industrial undertaking in China controlled by a Board of Directors in London, whose one object was to increase their dividends, and who were ignorant of and therefore indifferent to the injury that might be incidentally done to the welfare of thousands of Chinese who fell under their power.
And this brings me to the third point of how China may affect the rest of the world. She may, and most probably will, degrade the moral tone of Europe. On the other hand, it will be quite possible that she may act as a moral tonic. We scarcely realise the nature of the chains that bind one part of our civilisation to another. To hear men talk, one would suppose that the great factors in the government of mankind are the laws and regulations made by kings and popular assemblies; but a deeper inquiry must show that it is only the smaller part of a man's life that is controlled by law, the greater part is controlled by custom or fashion which is enforced, to use the technical term, by the sanction of public opinion. Consider, for instance, the customs of dress, or of manners, or the hours we keep, or the way we {33} refer to things, or even our very thoughts—they are all subject to this power; the State does not generally command any particular dress, yet there is a large and increasing measure of uniformity in dress. You may go from Asia to America, from Vancouver to Vladivostock, and you will see uniformity in the rules of dress. This uniformity is all the more remarkable, because its laws, instead of being fixed and stationary, are constantly altered; indeed, in comparison with the power of fashion, the powers of the greatest autocrat or of the most efficient public office are as nothing. The autocrat may give an order; the public office, with its endless clerks and forms, with its miles of red-tape, may try to see that order carried out; but may quite possibly fail. But fashion, issuing her capricious orders, has no office, no clerks, no printed forms that have to be filled up to secure obedience, yet her subjects yield such willing service that they seek for information from every quarter as to the nature of her commands, and when they know them, they count neither money nor comfort to be of importance compared with obedience to their mistress. The world, while it wonders at its own submission, enlarges or reduces its clothes, alters its head-gear, and further, will even change its manners, its speech, and its thoughts. The latest fashion-book is but the exaggeration of a world-power; the same power that compels women to tighten their skirts and widen their hats, makes their husbands talk about socialism and observe Empire Day. The power of fashion lies in {34} this, that while every one obeys, no one is conscious of any difficulty in obeying; the chains with which fashion binds this world may be so strong that the strongest nature cannot break them, yet they are so light that the most sensitive natures are not conscious of their restraint.
But this great power of fashion has its limits, and those are the limits of our civilisation. The mandate of the dressmaker may reach from Siberia to Peru, but it has no power in Mohammedan, Hindu, or Confucian lands; the Turkish lady still veils her face, the Hindu still adheres to his caste, the Confucian up to this moment still preserves his queue and his blue robe, but if China accepts our civilisation this must change. The modern Chinaman dresses in Western fashion; the loose flowing garment of China acts as a sort of barometer by which the extent of European pressure can be tested; up-country they are as loose as ever, but in Shanghai, wherever Chinese dress is still preserved, it has grown tight. A change typical of what may happen if the union between the civilisations takes place without any guidance may now be seen in the streets of Shanghai; the dress of the women is shaped in the Chinese fashion, they wear the traditional coat and trousers, but the cut of those garments offends both East and West alike by their great exiguity.
Every one would allow that Western fashions, or, at any rate, men's fashions, must to a great extent affect China, but there is a deeper thought beyond; {35} Western fashions will not merely affect Chinese dress, but they will also affect Chinese thought, and when they have incorporated Chinese thought into Western civilisation, when the conquest is complete and China and the West are one, a reaction will take place, and that which has subdued China to the yoke of Western fashion will give in its turn power to China to control the Western world. Without suggesting for a moment that Peking fashions will take the place of Paris fashions, or that the Englishman will grow a queue, I do suggest that there are many precedents in history for expecting that such a moral force as the Chinese reverence for parents, or such an immoral position as the Chinese contempt for the working-man, will not be without its effect on the Western world. Again and again it has been pointed out by both missionary and Government official, that so great is the power of China, that she brings into subjugation to her thought any one who is long resident in her country. If it should happen that the Western world should neglect the Chinaman when it has the opportunity of teaching and directing him, longing as he is to learn about Western civilisation, the punishment of the West will be that she will, in years to come, be influenced for evil by the power of the great Celestial Empire. If, on the other hand, the East should turn towards Christianity, and, taught by Christianity, should learn to live a higher life, the example of her faith and of her morality will in years to come react beneficially on the Western world.
The West cannot either by right or through self-interest ignore the problem that China has to solve. From being the most conservative country in the world, she has become a country in which there is rapid change. The whole civilisation of this vast country of 400,000,000 is becoming fundamentally altered by the importation into it of ideas and thoughts which are not native to her, and which have been created by a system of religion and by a history belonging to nations very different to herself. The full difficulty does not present itself till after some thought. The problem is quite different from that which has been before mankind in other parts of the world. China is trying to accept Western civilisation, but there is a danger that it will be without Christianity. I know that many Europeans living in Tientsin and Shanghai, who give but little thought to the problems before them, somewhat vaguely hope that in the near future China will become a European nation; but a little consideration must convince everybody that this is impossible. We have also already shown that China is quite determined—in fact, she has no alternative—not to {37} remain the old conservative country that lives on ancient traditions, that looks back two thousand years for all teaching in the arts of government.
If China, therefore, is neither to become Western nor to remain what she is, of necessity she will have to blend the two civilisations together and to take a part from each. The Chinese themselves, with a sanguineness for which they have no warrant, are quite certain that this is an easy matter. They tell the inquirer that they have considered it well, and that they see their way completely through it. They intend to select from Europe only those things that are advantageous to the race, and they expect to have no difficulty in weaving these incongruous elements into their own very complete system of thought. Statesmen seriously say that three or four months' extra study will enable the educated Chinaman to learn all that is necessary of Western civilisation, and then those who have acquired this knowledge can return to China and teach their fellow-countrymen; and it is impossible to convince the Chinese that the uniting together of two different webs of thought is a matter of extreme difficulty, and, it may be added, of extreme risk. The pleasing dream that you can arbitrarily select the good points of West and East and weave them into one is the very reverse of the truth. What naturally happens is the very opposite. There is a tendency to preserve that which is bad and not that which is good in two different systems of thought when they are united into one. The reason {38} probably is that as the bad has its common origin in the wickedness of human nature, it belongs to both systems of thought, and therefore both the Chinaman and the Western meet on common ground when they meet in vice or vileness. On the other hand, the virtues of both are the result of moral cultivation resting on authorities which are not recognised by either. Therefore the tendency is to waive all moral obligations as resting on controverted grounds. Whatever may be the cause, the result is obvious—the Westernised Oriental, unless a Christian, is as a rule only one shade better than the Orientalised Western.
While the careless thinker hopes generally that good will come out of the union of the two, he is as a rule terrified lest there should be any tendency to mingle Western with Eastern thought in any one of whom he is fond. A leading man at Tientsin, extolling the healthy climate of the place, related how he had kept his children there ever since they were born. His friend from home, ignorant of life in a Chinese port, said in an appreciative way, "How nice it must be for your children to be able to speak Chinese; I suppose you encourage them to learn it?" The dweller in China turned on him in anger and said, "Thank God, my children do not know one word of Chinese; I would send them home to-morrow if I caught them learning a single sentence." This enthusiasm for ignorance of the language of a great nation is extraordinarily difficult to understand until the danger of the mixture of Eastern and Western thought {39} is realised. Experience has taught those who have lived in China that it is only a few that can come unscathed through the terrible trial of having to live in two moral atmospheres.
One of the most striking books that has ever been written is "Indiscreet Letters from Peking." The book is marvellous in the power it has of bringing before the eyes of its reader those awful scenes during the siege of Peking, but it is far more wonderful in the character that it imputes to the hypothetical narrator—a character typical of a man who is equally at home in England and in China; and in that character is portrayed a true but curiously unpleasant picture of the characteristics of both races. The narrator has the courage of a lion; he is absolutely without any sense of honour. He fires at an adversary under the flag of truce. He misuses a Manchu woman who in the horrors of the sack throws herself on his mercy. He connives at the breaking of a solemnly pledged word of honour by a soldier. The character is not overdrawn; characters such as these are common in a mixed world, and it is natural that English people should fear that their children should grow up so unutterably vile. But if the Englishman fears for his child, ought he to ignore the welfare of the country in which he lives, and can we pass over this whole problem as something that does not concern us; for what he fears for his child will happen to the whole Chinese nation.
The blending together of the East and the West {40} may be accomplished with the ease which the Chinaman expects—but not in the way in which he or anybody else could wish—it may be accomplished by the eradication of all that is good in either race, on the common ground of vice and sin and evil and cruelty; unless, indeed, the efforts of those who are now labouring to weave together that which is good in both civilisations are supported. The difficulty of preserving the good points and high qualities of Chinese thought is only equalled by the difficulty of introducing the splendid traditions of the West and grafting them on to the Chinese stock. What success has followed the efforts of those who are thus labouring is rather to be credited to the intensity of their efforts, to their single-hearted purpose, to their ready self-denial, than to the ease or simplicity of their task.
No man of any feeling or any conscience could pass indifferently by a single individual eating the berries of a deadly plant, unconscious that they were poison. What shall be said, then, if we allow, not only one individual but a fourth of the population of the world, to eat of a deadly poison which must deprive them of all happiness and of life, which must condemn them by millions to the misery of the very blackest darkness, where the only motives known are selfishness, lust, pride, and cruelty, for this is what certainly will happen to China if she accepts the materialism of the West.
Western thought is very powerful. The way it has dominated the forces of nature gives it a great {41} prestige. As the Chinaman learns about steam and electricity, about the telephone, the flying machine, radium, and a thousand more Western inventions, he cannot fail to be impressed, he must admit that these people have knowledge. Do not for a moment imagine that, after such an illumination, he will be able to go back to the works of Confucius and learn again the old maxims, many of which are antipathetic to Western thought—yes, even more incongruous to Western than they are to Christian thought. How will he, for instance, read Confucius' condemnation of war when the Japanese and Germans and Russians are shouting into his ears, "By war ye shall live and by war alone."
In an interview I had with that great statesman, Tong-Shao-Yi, he said, "We respect Confucius because he has never taught any man to err." Unlike the teaching of Christianity, Confucius preaches that the test of truth is worldly success, and therefore by that test his preaching will be tried and found wanting by the materialist. The materialist will say, if Confucius never taught men to err, how is it that the Western nations who are ignorant of his teaching have succeeded, and that China, who outnumbers them greatly, and who after years of education and training and of following faithfully his teaching, has failed? How is it, they will ask, that she is so powerless, that were it not for European jealousies she could not stand a day before the least warlike of these Western nations? The Confucian {42} will answer, "He taught us to despise war, and that is why we are weak." The materialist will certainly retort, "So he has taught you to err." Confucianism must fall before Western materialism. I do not speak of Buddhism, for that is falling so quickly that its influence may be said to be almost gone. China will be left stripped of religion, robbed of her old ideas, and not clothed with new ones, wandering into all the misery and humiliation that vice and sin can bring upon mankind, till the curse of her millions in misery will go out against the harsh unfeeling West, who could leave her thus blind and helpless without a guide.
The call is great. Those who have knowledge have no right to keep it to themselves. The Christian and the Confucian agree in this, as they do in much else, that all knowledge must be shared. One of the purposes of this book is to arouse my readers to the importance of taking some action. Had they had an opportunity of going to China and seeing things for themselves, I would only have asked them to think; but as there are many who have not had that opportunity, I would try and show them the transitional condition through which China is passing, the danger of that condition ending in disaster, a disaster wide as the world itself. I hope to show them what is being done at the present time to lead the Chinese empire into safe paths, and to illuminate her with the highest knowledge of the West. Many efforts have been made, and there has been much success. I {43} am glad to testify publicly to the heroic and self-denying character of the missions, but those who are most successful are those who frankly say China can never be led by aliens.
No race loves the alien, and the further away the alien is in blood and language the less he is loved; therefore the Chinese above all races are least fitted to be led by the European, as they differ from him in most racial characteristics. If they are to be led by their own race, their own race must be fit to lead them. They must have leaders who understand the whole of Western knowledge, and will be able to take what is true and leave what is false. A Japanese thinker said the other day, "Our people have made a great mistake—they have taken the false and left the true part of Western thought." Let us hope that China may be preserved from such an error, that she may learn Western knowledge so thoroughly and so well that she may be able to distinguish the good from the bad, the beautiful from the vile in our system of thought.
It is impossible to study any Chinese question and ignore the relations of China with foreign powers. They are always curious and generally unique. Certainly any one who goes to China for the purpose of studying the mission question cannot but be struck at the extraordinary treaty rights possessed by missionaries. In most countries the teacher of religion has no peculiar rights. He is, alas! more often bullied than favoured by the modern State, even if that State should profess itself well inclined towards religion. Therefore one would naturally expect in China, where Christianity is reputed to be disliked, that those who teach it would have to contend with every form of disability that a hostile State could inflict.
A feeling of marvel comes over the mind when one realises that in this land of contradictions the persecuted missionary enjoys quite peculiar privileges. The ordinary foreigner cannot, for instance, travel in China except by the courtesy of the Government—a courtesy, indeed, which is never refused; but a missionary may travel freely. The ordinary foreigner has no right to stay in any {45} town in China with the exception of the treaty ports; a missionary may stay where he likes. The ordinary man cannot buy land; the missionary has a right to purchase land for the purpose of teaching Christianity.
So it came about, when we were in China, that His Majesty's Consul, with all the might of England at his back, was unable to buy a suitable site to erect a house where he could bring his wife. He was living in a temple, and temples in China are not very comfortable. I should explain to the uninitiated that every Buddhist temple has guest-rooms attached to it—Chinese rooms largely composed of wooden screens; and these temples are let out as residences by a people whose faith has less hold upon their affections than their purse. Now, ladies are not as a rule prepared to live in a house with paper partitions in a climate where the winters are extremely cold; so the Consul asked a missionary to buy a piece of land on which he could erect a suitable house, and he had almost succeeded when the Chinese Government found out that the land was not to be used for missionary purposes and refused to allow the sale. This does seem a strange situation when one remembers that had that Consul resigned his appointment and joined a missionary body, he could have bought the land and settled his wife comfortably in four solid stone walls, but because he was England's representative and not a missionary he had to shiver between wood and {46} paper screens, and this in a country which is supposed to hate missionaries.
The explanation of this curious situation is really twofold. First, the hatred that the official bears for the missionary is not of such an intense character as to induce him to offer a very strenuous resistance to the missionaries who desire to buy land; and secondly, missionaries have peculiar and special rights secured to them by a series of treaties among the most curious in the history of diplomacy.
In 1844 the Americans got by treaty a right to the free exercise of the Christian religion in the open ports. This right, sufficiently remarkable in itself, has often been stipulated by a State for its own nationals resident in a foreign country, but I doubt if it has ever before been known for a country to insist on the right of preaching a religion to somebody else's citizens. This was obviously an interference of the sovereign rights of China.
It was pushed even further in 1860. The French and English had just completed the sack of the "Summer Palace," and whatever the justice or the injustice of the war may have been, China had tasted her first great lesson of humiliation from the hand of Western powers, and was in no condition to resist any of their demands. The English and the French made treaties, most of them concerned with commercial and military matters with which it is not necessary to trouble the reader, and the French had a condition which was quite reasonable, that the {47} Chinese should restore all the buildings that had been destroyed in the late troubles; the wording of the clause was so vague that it could be made to apply, and did apply, to any building which had been destroyed at any previous time in the history of China, but the most remarkable part of the clause needs further explanation. The French had as their interpreter a very able Jesuit, Père Delamarre, and as the French Minister could not read Chinese, he had to trust his interpreter with regard to the Chinese version, and this man inserted into the treaty two other provisions, one securing that Christians should have a right to the free exercise of their religion all over China, and the other that French missionaries should have the right to rent land in all the provinces in the empire and to buy and construct houses. When this pious fraud was discovered, the French Minister thought it would do no good to denounce his interpreter, and therefore the treaty was treated by the French as binding and never questioned by the Chinese; the other powers profited by it under the "most favoured nation" clause.
The Roman Catholics a few years later pushed the wording of this treaty to its uttermost. Their missions had been at work for 150 years or more, and they could prove a great number of confiscations which had to be made good by the Chinese. Just at that time in France Napoleon III. was trying to establish a doubtful title by the help of the Pope, {48} and it was his policy to push in every way the interests of the Roman Catholics. China had felt the weight of European armies and she was unable to resist these claims, and so it came about that the very country which now is the centre of free thought was the means of forcing Christianity upon the Chinese through fear of her armed power.
Can you be surprised at the answer I got when I asked a Chinese statesman, who I knew was sympathetic with the teaching of Christianity, why China, who had always professed, and to a very great extent had practised tolerance, should persecute Christianity? His reply was, the Chinese did not hate Christianity, and were indeed tolerant of missions, but they still disliked them, because Christianity is the religion of the military races, and they had a historical tradition that the advance of Christianity was connected with war.
This bad reputation has been intensified by the action of the Germans. No reasonable man can condemn the Germans for wishing to enlarge and develop their trade. We can understand the patriotic German saying that it was the duty of Germany to establish good government in Shantung, but it is very hard to understand how any one can defend the taking of Kiauchau on the ground that certain German missionaries had been murdered. The taking of Kiauchau by the Germans has completed the work begun by the French. Christianity and the foreign relations of China are {49} inextricably mixed up, and every Chinaman, believed till lately that Christianity was the religion which has led foreign nations to enter his land. "First the missionary, then the trader, lastly the gunboat," has been too often the order of advance. I am happy to be able to say that the Americans and the English have made great efforts to dissociate themselves from this evil, and have tried to avoid any appearance of such a connection. I was told that in Shansi, owing to the indemnity for the murders of missionaries being retained to China and spent on founding a University instead of being accepted by the missions, Protestant missions are very popular. "You have only to say you are an English clergyman," said my Chinese informant, "and every door will be open to you."
The present aspect of foreign affairs has tended to destroy the unfortunate connection between Christianity and foreign aggression. The two great powers whose armies have met in Manchuria have neither of them any interest in missions. Russia has never had any missions in China. She forbade them, I understand, because they were likely to embroil her in unnecessary wars. Japan, of course, has none. The Germans, who made the murder of missionaries the reason of aggression, have not many missionaries in China belonging to their nationality. China, therefore, is coming to look upon Christianity as not quite so dangerous a thing as it seemed when it was essentially the religion of the French and of the English {50} whose armies and navies then held China in fear. Still the political situation cannot but have great interest to the missionary. Even while he rejoices that the foreign relations of China and his work are not so intimately connected as they used to be, he must ask himself, what will the result to my work be, if in the great world struggle Japan or Russia should dominate? At present he fears Japan more than Russia; and his fears are shared, but for other reasons, by the Chinese.
The wildest and most ambitious schemes are accredited to Japan, I cannot say with how much truth. Her purse is empty, but she has far more courage and skill in war than most nations. If she possessed even one part of China she might add to her wealth to such an extent that no race could dare to oppose her, while if she governed China, her armies, supported by the wealth of that mighty empire, might threaten the stability of Europe. She is reported to have two regiments working as private individuals in Fukien, and to be prepared to seize the province in case of any disorder. The fact that there are many Japanese in the province, and that all the Japanese are trained soldiers, gives some cloak to this suggestion. The Fukienese speak a different dialect to the rest of China, and they have a natural geographical frontier, which would enable the Japanese to maintain themselves there if they were once established.
Again, the recent events have shown that they are preparing to exercise sovereign rights over Chinese {51} territory in Manchuria. On the other hand, Russia is arming; she is double-tracking the railway from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk, and she is getting ready again for a struggle in Manchuria; the gossip among the officers there is that there is to be a war; the Russians do not for a moment regard themselves as defeated; they think of the late campaign merely as an "unfortunate incident."
But the most important development in Russian policy is the proposed railway across Mongolia which will give Russia an entrance to the west of China and into Peking. It is hard to see how, if an advance were made along that line, Japan could in any way resist Russia; the whole breadth of China would lie between them. Meanwhile the Germans of the east have perfected a railway system which converts Kiauchau from being an out-of-the-way place which no one cared about, to a door into the very heart of China. In commercial circles in China it is reported that the Commandant of the Tientsin garrison suggested that the object of the building of the German Fleet was not so much to conquer England as to ensure that Germany should be able to maintain her position in the Far East and make full use of Kiauchau as a way by which her armies might enter China. When one looks at the map and sees how China is surrounded by these powers, and how they are pressing upon her, one realises why the Chinese are feeling that Western education is an absolute necessity, and that if they are to maintain their {52} independence they must understand the arts of war. A great Viceroy was reported to have said that he frankly expected China to be conquered, and to learn from her conquerors the Western arts which would in turn enable her to dominate the West; for this has been her history in the past, that may be her history in the future, and I think that the nations, who propose to conquer her, will do wisely if they consider what might be the result of her influence on them.
China is trying to defend herself by building a navy and creating an army. The navy is rather an opéra bouffe concern; every now and then she talks of having ships; the representatives of all the shipbuilders of the world fly to Peking and try in every way to induce China to buy a fleet which they offer to provide at the very shortest notice, but at present she has none. She has, as a practical step, created a training school of officers. It consists only of some 140 men, and is taught by two British officers lent her by our navy. They said that there was the greatest difficulty in getting the Chinese to be practical; they induced the Government at last to put an old ship at their disposal. For a long time this was refused, and when it was granted it was regarded as a most wonderful and original departure. The Chinese way of training naval officers would have been to have instructed them on literary subjects, and to encourage them to write essays and poems on the sea. To take them out on {53} the Yangtsze in a ship and actually to show them how a ship was managed, was a wholly new idea, but one of which they approve under the impulse of the modern fashion of doing things in accordance with Western traditions.
As to the army, its exterior is certainly not prepossessing; far and away the most efficient part of it has been created by Yuan-Shi-Kei in Manchuria, and the Chinese are very anxious to show it to the passing traveller. Both times when we passed through Manchuria, on every station were armed guards, and in one case they were inspected by a General who was travelling in our train. He was saluted by the officers in charge in Chinese fashion, which is a modified form of a kow-tow, and consists to all intents and purposes of a curtsey. It had a distinctly funny appearance to see the officers in charge of the guards curtseying as we steamed into the stations. Down at Nanking the army was far less smart—in fact, it had the appearance of being a very disorderly rabble; I understand when the Empress died it was regarded as such a danger that those in authority put the broad Yangtsze between them and a possible mutiny.
The real danger to China as regards foreign relations is that her bad finance or her own want of discipline may bring about a state of internal disorder which may compel the interference of foreign powers. Last year this nearly did happen. Two regiments mutinied and seized a town on the {54} Yangtsze; they stopped all communications with the outside world, and to all intents and purposes were in a fair way to commence a rebellion. Close by them were several other regiments who might be expected to throw in their lot with them, and the position was very critical. The missionaries inside the town were in fear of their lives, and with difficulty managed to communicate with the British Consul and to tell him of their plight. He ordered a gunboat to go down, and the presence of the gunboat intimidated the mutineers. At the same time the Governor of the city showed remarkable courage in going round the town pacifying the mob. The authorities were able to move in two other regiments, who had no sympathy with the mutiny. The mutineers were disarmed and the incident closed. But such an incident may occur at any moment. The condition of the country is such that anywhere a rising may occur, and the fire once alight may be hard to extinguish; the result of the conflagration must be that the powers must enter to secure the safety of their nationals.
Altogether poor China is in a dangerous position in regard to her foreign relations; all round her echoes the cry, "You must reform or disappear." Every railway that is made, every loan that is floated, every trade that is opened up, bring to China increased responsibilities in her foreign relations. If she by her good government and readiness to reform can show that she is able to maintain {55} order in her own land, and to give to foreigners an equal security to that they have in any other country, her empire may endure for many hundred years; but if she be found wanting at the present time and the corruption of her officials renders her unable to maintain order in her country or to fulfil her financial obligations, a new phase in Chinese history will be reached, which will, I believe, be of extraordinary danger to Europe; China will yield to the military might of the West only to rise again to dominate those who dominated her.
The missionary who looks at these dark clouds which surround China, the land of his adoption, feels that there is only one course to take, namely, the course that he is taking, to try and build up in China a high tone of morality, founded on religion, which may enable her to accept necessary reforms and to put herself abreast of other nations.
I do not suppose that we can have any conception of the amount of suffering which goes on at the present time in China. The first time we were in China I had the honour of meeting a Mr. Ede, who had just returned from distributing food in a famine-stricken district, and his description was truly terrible; the young men had walked away and found work in other districts, but the old people and the children had to remain. What had caused the famine in this case was characteristic of unreformed China; "China's sorrow," the river Hoang-ho, had done what it is ever doing, that is, it had flooded a district. When you pass over it, it looks most innocuous. It is wholly unable, as a rule, to fill its own vast bed, which is covered with delightful sands, reminding one more than anything else of the sea-shore at low tide; but this sand is what makes it dangerous, for it is not good heavy English sand, but a light sand which is called "loess," and when the river comes down in a flood—that is to say, when they have rainy weather in Thibet or the sun shines unduly on Himalayan snows—this sand is carried along with the water, {57} and it is asserted indeed that the river consists more of sand than of water; as the river slackens the sand is deposited and the bed is filled up, with the result that the next flood, taking the Chinese unawares, overflows its banks and reduces a huge district to poverty; they cannot sow their fields because they cannot see them. Of course the authorities should not be taken by surprise and the banks should be made up, and canals should be cut to take away the water in case of a flood; an enlightened Chinese engineer assured me he had a scheme for raising the level of huge districts of China by using this peculiar character of the Hoang-ho and turning its sand and water flood on to bare places, and he asserted that the results were most wonderfully successful, and that districts which were unfertile before, when well washed and covered up with this loess, became fertile. Still, however beneficial a flood may be to the land in the end, its immediate result is to starve the population who are flooded out, for they have no reserves of food.
In the case already referred to, the country was a long time under water, because a canal which should have drained it away was not kept clear. The money had been paid, but, as often happens in China, the work had not been done. The action that the authorities took was characteristic of Chinese government. China possesses the system of internal custom-houses—a system which the wildest advocate of Tariff Reform would hardly like {58} to see introduced into Europe; these custom-houses are called "Likin," and are a source at once of a great deal of profit to the provinces and of irritation to all traders. The Chinese used these custom-houses to engineer a corner in rice by which the area of scarcity of food was enormously increased and several officials amassed considerable sums of money; by the law of China it is illegal to export rice even from one province to another; this law was put in force, and the rice supply was cut off; at the same time early in the famine certain rich men bought up rice freely, with the result that it rose to a very high figure, so that round the area of famine and desolation there was an area of scarcity and shortage.
A large amount of food from all parts of the world was sent by the famine funds, but it was very difficult to induce the officials to allow the food to enter the famine district. They were filled with all sorts of scruples. They were afraid, for instance, that the steamers towing the barges full of food on a canal which had not before been opened for steamers, might excite the hostility of the population; they were courteous, they were diplomatic, but they were obstructive; and so it came about that while there was a famine in one district of China, in the other districts there was a very heavy surplus, of which they had difficulty in disposing. All this did not create the slightest surprise in those who knew China. When the story was told {59} us all the old Chinese hands merely said, "How like China," or "Just like them." This was our first insight into what the civilisation of China means, and therefore for the first time we realised the problem that is before the world—the problem which missionaries, with great devotion, are trying to solve.
Chinese civilisation is not, as many people imagine it to be, a mere courtesy title for a state in reality only a degree off barbarism. Many of my humbler parishioners, for instance, when we left for China, ranked the Chinese as something very near cannibals, and I do not think they would have been in the least surprised to hear that we had been roasted and eaten by the natives. The Chinese have perhaps a greater right to be called civilised than we have on this side of the world; their civilisation dates from eras we are accustomed to call Biblical. Confucius and Ezra represent contemporaneous ideas—ideas that are not wholly different in thought. While on the other side of the globe civilisation has been handed from nation to nation, and a civilised race has become barbarous and a barbarous race civilised, the Chinese, without making any very great advance, have steadily proceeded along a path of progress, and at the present time they possess a very carefully organised system of society. On paper the whole thing is perfect: the Emperor at the top, the Viceroys over each province, under them the Prefectures, and so down to the village community {60} in the country or the trade guild in the town. The system of government is so perfect that they claim that they are able to discover any individual wanted among those 400,000,000 of Chinese, unless his disguise is very perfect. When we were chatting over the revolutionaries and talking about a certain doctor dodging in and out of China at the risk of his life, I said that I wondered that there was any difficulty at all for a man who was bred in the country wandering where he liked, and I was assured that such was the organisation of the Chinese Government that they could lay hands even in the remotest village on anybody if they required him, and that the only way a revolutionary could hope to escape arrest was by a most perfect and complete disguise.
With this splendid organisation is joined great solidarity. The Chinese race are essentially one. If it were your duty to look through reports coming from China, as it has been mine, the first thing that would strike you would be its essential oneness; you will not find more difference between different parts of China than there is between England and Ireland. I do not for a moment mean to say that there are no differences between the Chinese—that would be untrue; but you will not find such a difference as one might expect from the diversity of geographical conditions. The civilisation is essentially similar. It is a civilisation with great merits. The population is sober, industrious, and perhaps I might add honest, {61} all lovers of China will certainly agree; but if you are writing, as I am, to people who have never been out of England, I think you will have to qualify the phrase with some such a one as "honest as compared with other Orientals," or "honest when contrasted with the Japanese."
They are also extremely obedient; their idea of the respect which should be paid to authority far exceeds that which prevails on this side of the globe. I think we may add with truth that great numbers of them are very loyal to their employers. But when this much has been said, the dark side of their civilisation must be added—it is essentially corrupt and cruel; the ideas of honour, purity, mercy are but too little understood. Missionaries assured us that there was no word for purity that could be applied to a man, while the same word stands for honesty and stupidity.
Yet this nation is in many ways well fitted for the mechanical age in which we live. What the owner of the factory wants is an industrious, sober, and obedient man, and he does not want, or at least does not realise that he wants, an honourable, pure, and merciful man. The Chinaman will be in his element in the factory; the long hours of monotonous toil will not be unpleasant to him; he is always sober—in fact, he is by nature and culture the ideal factory hand; and yet this is what constitutes his danger. He will tend to introduce into Europe the vices which are now desolating his own country, unless, indeed, {62} the European teacher can help him to eradicate those vices.
I have given you some idea of his corruption by the story told at the beginning of this chapter, but we heard many others all to the same effect. We went up the Yangtsze in one of the China Merchants' boats with an old Swedish captain who liked the Chinese and rather disliked the missionaries, so his evidence was not biassed by any wish to prove that our civilisation was more perfect than that of the Chinese. We asked him why it was that he being a European should be captain of a ship that was owned by Chinese, and largely used by them. He told us that the Chinese merchants had once tried to have a Chinese captain, but the moment the ship reached the first port of the Yangtsze, the custom officers were on board rummaging here and rummaging there. Very soon a large amount of contraband was found on the ship, put there with the knowledge of the captain. The consequence was the ship was fined and delayed. They tried Chinese captains again and again with the same result, and so they have been reduced to employ Europeans to secure honourable officers. He, however, had to confess that the Chinese distrusted the sobriety of the European officers, and assured us that the old comprador on board, one of whose duties apparently was to look after the passengers and take their tickets, was in reality a spy on them.
Perhaps the best instance of the corruption of the {63} Chinese is their action with regard to the currency. In the good old days the currency of China was the silver shoe or ingot, which had no exact weight, and had therefore to be weighed at every transaction. Below that was the copper currency, which had no fixed relation to the silver currency, but only the relation of copper to silver. A copper cash, therefore, represented only its actual value in copper. It was naturally a most unwieldy coin. The old books of travel in China give lamentable pictures of the traveller riding about with huge strings of copper cash almost crushing him with their weight. When the whites began to trade in China they introduced the Mexican dollar with its subsidiary coinage, and this was the common currency in all the ports until a few years ago; but when the Chinese began to Westernise they considered it inconsistent with their dignity not to have a coinage of their own. Led by the Japanese, and assisted by several firms whose speciality was the erection of mints and mintage machinery, they started mints all over the country, and they have kept these mints busy with the most funeste results. To begin with, they coined a dollar in imitation of the Mexican dollar, but even in this the mints did not agree. Some dollars are very light, some slightly below value, and some are nearly true. The first experience of the traveller is that he possesses in his pocket a set of coins which no one will accept, except at a great reduction. But the muddle goes further than that. It was very profitable coining light coins, {64} but it was still more profitable to do so in the lower denominations. The Chinese thought, or chose to think, that it did not matter what the intrinsic value of a 10-cent piece was as long as you wrote on it 10 cents. They have no bank or post-office where you have a legal right to get a dollar for ten 10-cent pieces, and the result therefore of recklessly coining the base 10-cent pieces has been not only to depreciate it with regard to the dollar, but to make it an uncertain value, so that you must go to the money exchangers almost every morning and ask for the rate of exchange between the dollar and the small silver pieces.
Of course at every step on this downward path the officials concerned made a great deal of money; their next step was to deal with the copper coin in the same way, so now there is no fixed relation between the copper coinage and the silver coinage, nor between the large copper and the small, and this is still further confusing, as the provinces having different mints have dollars of different values. And now I hear that they have begun to make money by debasing the old silver shoe coinage, which, though it is sold by weight, used to have a certain standard of purity, and they have issued cash which have no intrinsic value at all, and that do not represent the fraction of a coin having any intrinsic value. The result of this currency "Rake's Progress" has been to produce what corruption always does produce—widespread poverty. Everybody cheats. The stationmasters {65} along the line assure the European superintendents that the fares are always paid in the most debased coinage, and it is very hard to deny the probability of this. But of course the stationmasters take care if any coin comes to their hand which is not debased to do a bit of exchange on their own account.
If Chinese civilisation is corrupt, it is also cruel, not with the wild tempestuous cruelty of the savage, but with the cruelty of the civilised man who at once uses human suffering as the best engine for human government, and never cares to cure it unless he has some pecuniary object in view. The Chinese are inured to pain, and some people argue that they do not feel it to the same degree as Western nations. No doubt the sensation of pain is intensified in people of highly developed nervous organisation, and the Chinese have a nervous organisation of a very quiescent kind. I remember, when we first landed at Hong-Kong, being struck by a Chinaman who had chosen as his bed for his midday siesta an ordinary piece of granite curbing; and as you go along in the train every freight car that you pass has some one sleeping on it to protect it from robbery, and a truck of coals or a load of stone is obviously regarded as a most comfortable resting-place. Some of the doctors maintained that this was the case throughout their nervous system—they were insensitive to pain; others said that pain, like everything else, is a thing to which you can get accustomed, and that pain has played so large a part in their lives that they are {66} accustomed to it, and are not therefore afraid of it. Take, for instance, the foot-binding of the women; every family in China must be accustomed to hear the sobs and cries of the little girls as they are going through the first stages of foot-binding. Or take again the public flogging; all the working classes of China must be quite accustomed to the idea that men are flogged for certain offences till their flesh is of the consistency of a jelly. A doctor, describing the state in which men are brought into the hospital after such floggings, said that it was a difficult matter to avoid mortification setting in, and it was only with very careful treatment that they could be cured, the whole flesh having to slough away, being absolutely crushed and battered.
Yet this strange people are so indifferent to these horrors, that even those who suffer will laugh amidst their sufferings. We were told the following tale, whether true or not I cannot say. A man was being bambooed for an offence, and astonished the officials by laughing all the time; the more he was flogged the harder he laughed, till at last those who were punishing him stopped to ask him the reason of his mirth. "You have got the wrong man," he said. It is always a comfort to have a keen sense of humour.
I do not think there is anything more awful than the descriptions one has as to the indifference to suffering that is displayed by the average Chinaman. I remember a story told me by a sailor. As a ship {67} was being loaded, a man, obviously on the verge of death, came and asked for work, but failed to get it. Shortly after he was seen hanging about the ship, and at night they found him lying between some bales. He was turned out, but he constantly crept back, first to one place, then to another, till at last the sailor came to know his face quite well. One day, as the sailor went ashore, he was attracted by a little crowd looking at something, and this proved to be the poor fellow in his death struggle, lying in a gutter of water. He called the attention of a Chinese policeman to him. The Chinese policeman explained that he would move him when he was dead, as he had orders to remove all corpses, but that he could not move him while he was alive.
Dr. Macklin of Nanking told us story after story of the way in which the Chinese would leave people in a dying condition on the road. A little time ago he had ridden into an old temple, and there he saw a man apparently asleep, but on looking at him more closely, he saw that his eyes were wide open and that the flies were walking right across his eyeballs, showing that he was quite insensitive. He called to one or two men and asked them to help him to carry this poor sufferer to some house near, but they could not or would not find a house to keep him in; and so in the end Dr. Macklin determined to take him straight back to Nanking, which he did. There he administered a very heavy dose of quinine hypodermically, with the result that the man soon showed {68} signs of returning consciousness. It was a case of malignant malaria, and had he not been found by Dr. Macklin, the man must have been eaten by wild dogs or have died from the disease; as it was he recovered, and proved to be a hard-working young farmer who was in search of work, as his home had been ruined by a local failure of crops. He had apparently contracted malaria, and owing to his poor and ill-nourished condition it had gone hardly with him.
CHINESE CIVILISATION: ITS BAD SIDE—AN OLD BEGGAR. ITS GOOD SIDE—A GARDEN
But story after story was told us always to the same effect—that the quality of mercy is not highly esteemed by the Chinese. The appeal the beggar makes to you as he runs after you is the old Buddhist appeal, which after all is essentially selfish, as he beseeches you "to acquire merit" by helping him; we must remember that even this reason for mercy is despised by the gentry and literati of China as essentially belonging to Buddhism. Perhaps the most lurid stories that we heard were up river. One came from the country of the Lolos. The Chinese were going out to fight the Lolos, and the missionary saw them carrying a handsome young man bound on a plank so that he could not move—so bound that his head was thrown back. After certain ceremonies they cut the man's throat, and scattered the blood on the flags; it was a sort of human sacrifice. Another story we heard from some devoted Franciscan Sisters up at Ichang. They assured us that if a mother found her children {69} weakly, and she lost one or two, she would make up her mind that the reason they were ill was because an evil spirit had a grudge against her. She would then take one of her remaining children, and, in the hope of propitiating the evil spirit, she would burn that child alive. We could not believe this story was true; but that evening we saw some hard-working Presbyterian ladies, common-sense efficient Scotchwomen, and they assured us that it was quite true.
It would give a very false idea of the Chinese if great stress were not laid on the good side of their civilisation. They have many fine qualities, and in more than one point they are superior to the nominal Christianity of some Western countries. The first thing perhaps that strikes a foreigner when he is brought into contact with the Chinese is their great courtesy; their literati are such gentlefolk. Even the less cultured people have most refined manners; no one is ever rude; and one of the things they cannot understand is how we can esteem a rough, frank, honest man. There is a case when they would not appoint a certain Englishman to a commercial post, preferring a man of far less attainments and of much shorter service, because the former was rude. That was enough. It was no use telling them that his honesty was above suspicion, that he was a reliable business man, that he was very hard working, that he had many years of hard service behind him; they allowed all this freely, but they shrugged their shoulders and said, "The truth is, he is such a rude fellow, and he will give such very great offence by his bad manners," so they would not have him.
When a visitor enters a Yamen, he realises that his manners must be those of a most polished diplomat. Before him walks a servant, holding aloft his visiting card. One really ought to have special Chinese cards printed on beautiful sheets of red paper with queer-looking characters on them setting forth one's rank and name. However, in these days of admiration of the West, our poor little white cards are considered adequate. The Viceroy or official meets the visitor, enthusiastically shaking his own hands—the Chinese salutation—and bowing low; the particular door at which he meets his guest marks the amount of respect he wishes to pay him, and is therefore of some importance. In my case, when my host was favourable to higher education, I was received in the outer court. At every door there was a polite contest as to who should go through it first, and at last we found ourselves in a room where tea, dessert, champagne, and cigarettes were offered, although of the two latter I was unworthy. Then began the conversation. I found less stiffness once I had explained that I came to gather opinions about a scheme for education. After the stately interview was over there was an equally ceremonious leave-taking.
Though the methods of the Chinese in doing business may be exasperating to a Western whose time is money and who wants them to come to some immediate decision, they are invariably delightful and courteous in all their negotiations. This courtesy is all the direct result of Confucian teaching. Stress is {72} laid there on courteous behaviour, perhaps even to a degree which may strike the Western traveller as absurd. This courtesy, I understand, extends even to those of lower degree. Your servant in speaking to another calls him brother, and nothing makes the servant despise his master so much as seeing him lose his temper: it is to his mind a mark of our savagery.
The Chinese have higher virtues than courtesy. They are essentially industrious. You have only to look at a Chinaman's garden to realise the extent to which he possesses this quality. I am certain that those people who are proud of the culture of their kitchen gardens would be surprised and ashamed if they could compare them with those of a Chinaman. One passes garden after garden with rows of plants placed at even distances and every plant exactly the right distance in those rows, with never a weed to be seen all over the whole plot. Again in handicraft there is the same industry; you buy Chinese embroidery for a song in such a place as Changsha. No one will tell you that Chinamen ever object to length of hours; they are ideal men for work that needs care and accuracy.
Again they are very patient. A monotonous task is not at all unpleasing to them. An acute French observer used the word routinière in describing this characteristic. Even in intellectual work this liking for monotonous repetition will show itself. One of the doctors told us that he had the very greatest {73} difficulty in inducing his pupils not to perpetuate his most casual gestures when he was demonstrating. For instance, when teaching bacteriology, quite unconsciously he might from time to time put an instrument down on the table, and just touch it again. Months after he would find one of his pupils when doing the same experiment repeating every gesture he had accidentally made with careful imitation. It was clear that the student had monotonously continued to practice these gestures for no other reason but that he had seen his master make them. All those words which our writers on social subjects are so fond of inditing against the modern factory system have no meaning to the Chinaman. Those complaints about long hours at mechanical work rendering the worker little better than a machine are doubtless true of the white race, but are quite beside the point as applied to the Chinese. If the Chinaman is well paid in the factory he will prefer rather than otherwise that the work should be mechanical; he will not mind if the hours are long.
Again, he is cheerful and contented under very adverse circumstances. When we were being rowed in a native boat up the Yangtsze, and the men were straining every nerve against the current, while they were chilled by a drizzling rain, there was never a word of discontent; they were always cheerful and bright, good-tempered and merry.
Their highest quality is obedience, which is the result of their Confucian culture. The central virtue {74} of that teaching is obedience to parents, and they hold that doctrine to a degree which to the Western mind seems exaggerated. One of the grown-up sons of a Chinese clergyman did something which he considered unbecoming in a Christian; to the surprise of the missionary, he did not hesitate to administer a sound thrashing to his son, which the young man took without the slightest resistance, and in this action the clergyman was supported by the public opinion of the congregation. This quality gives to China its great power, and it is one of the points in which there is the greatest divergence between the teaching of the West and of the East. Every Chinaman points out to you how little Westerns care for their parents. I remember a Chinese gentleman explaining in a patronising way to the other Chinese that, strange though it seemed, he knew it as a fact that one of the commandments of our religion really was that we should honour our parents.
Were it not for this principle of obedience which is implanted in the mind of every Chinaman, the government of China would scarcely endure for a day; but he is taught from his earliest youth to obey his father, not as we teach in the West because the child is unable to think and understand, so that obedience to parents is a virtue which must fall into disuse as knowledge increases, but as an absolute duty, a duty equally incumbent on a man of forty as on a child of four. This principle is extended to that of civil government; the local {75} official is in their quaint phrase "the father and mother of his people," and the obedience to parents taught in childhood is therefore extended to those who govern. No Chinaman has any doubt but that the first duty of man is obedience to authority. Let us hope these qualities will ever endure.
What may happen, and, alas, I am afraid, is at the present moment happening, is that the two civilisations may be so blended together that the qualities of each may be lost and its peculiar virtues destroyed while its characteristic vices are preserved. The great qualities of obedience to parents, of courtesy to strangers, are being forgotten. The Chinaman educated in the States is rude and abrupt; he fancies that it is Western and business-like. Every Chinese gentleman to whom I talked, allowed that one of the worst results of Western teaching had been that a Westernised Chinaman was less obedient and respectful to his parents. On the other hand, the Westernised Chinaman does not acquire the peculiar virtues of the Englishman.
The superficial Chinese thinker wants China to learn only the material side of our civilisation, to profit by our mechanical excellence without learning anything of our ethics. His view is that the West is immoral but wealthy; he regards Europe as the place where there is no principle excepting money-worship, and therefore he argues that if you would Westernise China you must despise morality and seek for money. Chang-Chih-Tung voiced this thought when he said, {76} "Western education is practical, Chinese education is moral." If you try to argue with a thoughtless Chinaman who has perhaps never left China, and whose only experience of Western life is what he has seen in a treaty port, you will find that it is hard to convince him that Western education produces a high moral tone. After all we may, to a certain extent, be to blame for their want of appreciation of the morality of the West, for too often we show to the Chinese a very degraded side of our civilisation; and though I do not think that Shanghai at the present merits the term that was applied to it fifty years ago of being a "moral sink," yet undoubtedly the treaty ports, both by their constitution and by their geographical position, collect very unpleasant specimens of white civilisation. There are a certain number of men who spend a great part of their existence being deported from Shanghai to Hong-Kong, and from Hong-Kong to Shanghai.
One of the comedies in the tragedy of the extinction of the independence of Korea is illustrative of this point. The Emperor of Korea heard that the Western races were far more trustworthy than those of the East, and so fearing assassination after the murder of the Queen, he determined to enrol a corps of Europeans as a body-guard; he sent over officers to Shanghai with orders to enlist Europeans. Unfortunately for himself he did not take the precaution of sending with them any Western to help in the selection of the men. To Korean eyes all Westerns {77} look alike, and as they were offering good pay, they soon had their corps complete; they returned to Seoul, and the corps was installed with suitable uniforms, and, alas, rifles and ammunition. The moment the corps was paid, the greater bulk of them got drunk, and for the next few hours Seoul was distinctly an undesirable place of residence, filled with drunken men of all nationalities shouting and shrieking and firing loaded rifles recklessly in every direction. The poor Emperor trembled as he looked from his palace windows at his body-guard out on the drink, and he made up his mind that it would be better to take a reasonable chance of assassination by the Japanese than to risk the danger of being guarded by this inebriate troop of Westerns. With the help of the Consul the body-guard when sober were returned to Shanghai, and let us trust the Chinese heard the story and were convinced that in accepting Western civilisation they must be careful to avoid accepting the vices of the West.
At Changsha I heard a similar story, but with a tragic side, which one felt exonerated the Chinese for being rather incredulous as to the morality of our civilisation. Changsha, I should explain, is reputed one of the most bigoted cities in China; even at the present moment white women are advised not to walk through the streets. The Hunanese have a bold independent character, which makes them rather hostile to any foreigner or to foreign ways, and I am afraid that the story I am going to repeat will have {78} confirmed them in their conviction that foreigners are undesirable. Two white men belonging to one of the South European races—Greeks, I think—settled themselves down in defiance of treaty rights in Changsha, and at once opened a gambling hell. Very soon they taught the Chinese, who are as a race very addicted to gambling, new and most pernicious forms of that hateful vice. The Governor complained to the Consul; the Consul sent his officer down, accompanied by the police, to arrest the Greeks; the Private Secretary to the Governor informed the Consul of the tragedy that followed. The Consular officer warned the Greeks that they must give up their gambling establishment and go back to Hankow. They said they would not. He told them that if they refused he would arrest them, take them to the boat, and send them down by force to Hankow. They still refused, and he advanced, upon which one of the Greeks shot the officer dead. The Chinese police after their manner vanished, while the Governor's Private Secretary, according to his own account, spent most of the time of the interview under the table. The Greeks, seeing the coast clear, and realising that vengeance must come, took to the open country. The Chinese were told to arrest them if they could. Of course they had no difficulty in finding them, but to arrest them was a different matter. They mobilised two or three regiments, and surrounding the house in which the Greeks had taken refuge, they kept on firing at long range till they judged, from there being no signs of life, that they {79} must have killed them. They then carried off the bodies, but thought it better to describe the incident in an official document as a case of suicide from fear of arrest, lest they should be held responsible for the death of these murderers. The next Greeks that came up the river were sent down with a guard of forty men, and so terrified were the Chinese that they had to put them first-class, as no Chinese would have dared to have travelled with them.
There were several other stories told at Changsha to the same effect. The European that the Chinaman sees in that sort of place is too often one of those worthless men who has found his own country impossible to live in, and who hopes that his vices and crimes may escape unnoticed in distant China. Can one wonder that the Chinese are liable to misunderstand the West, and were it not for the saintly life of many missionaries, the high character and strict justice of our Consuls—yes, and the admirable discipline and management of such great undertakings as that of Butterfield and Swire—the evil would be incurable; but though there are many specimens of the bad, there are also not a few men who by their lives have testified before the Chinese to the greatness of our social and moral traditions and to the religion by which they are inspired.
The rivers and railways of China form a very marked contrast. The rivers represent the old means of communication, the railways the new, and the comparison between the river and the railway enables the traveller to compare new with old China and to realise the great changes that are taking place there and the transitional character of the phase through which the country is now passing.
Ancient China, as compared to ancient Europe, was a most progressive country, a very essential point to remember when we have to consider what will be the attitude of the Chinese with regard to modern progress. Theoretically they have always been progressive; practically they have passed through an age of progress and reached the other side. That age of progress improved very much their means of communication. China is naturally well endowed with rivers, and those rivers were infinitely extended by a system of canals. Of these the Grand Canal is the most perfect example. The traveller cannot sail along the Grand Canal and look at the masonry walls of that great work, or the high bridges that span it, without realising that in its time it was one {81} of the greatest works the world had ever seen. That canal, typical of modern China, is now in disrepair, but the spirit of the men who built it is not gone; it is the same spirit that now welcomes railways all over China.
The greatest of China's natural waterways is the Yangtsze-Kiang; it cuts right through the centre of China from the sea to Chungking and further; it has many important tributaries, which lead through great lakes and afford a very useful means of communication to vast districts in Central China.
Along that great river for six hundred miles, ships of the largest size can sail in the summer; battleships, though not of the largest class, can ascend to Hankow. Beyond Hankow the river is much shallower, and communication with Ichang is often interrupted in the winter by want of water. A thousand miles from the sea begin those wonderful gorges of the Yangtsze which are among the greatest wonders of the world.
Up to Ichang, the Yangtsze is still a big, rather dull yellow river, a vastly overgrown Thames, a mass of sandbanks, running through almost consistently uninteresting country; but after that thousand miles, it develops into a sort of huge Rhine. The river is still yellow, but it runs through green mountains and grey rocks. At times it swirls along with an oily surface dented here and there by whirlpools which tell of some sunken rock; at other times the grey rocks creep closer together and the yellow {82} Yangtsze foams itself white in its effort to squeeze through the narrow opening left. In quieter reaches of the river a house-boat or luban can be rowed or sailed. The rowing is rather jerky, the sailing delightful, and so the advance of the traveller is pleasant and uneventful; but when the boat reaches the rapids, the only way to get her through is by towing.
There is a temptation always to delay putting men ashore to tow—a temptation which ended in our house-boat being bumped upon a rock.
Our captain (we call him "lowdah" in China) had cleverly devised, by creeping along the side of the river under shelter of projecting rocks and then by dodging round the points, everybody shrieking and yelling as they strained at the oar, to avoid the necessity of towing; but a more malign whirlpool than the rest twisted us round till the oars on one side of the boat could not row because they were fouled on the rocks, and then another twisted us sideways on to a submerged rock, and there the current held us till the police-boat the Chinese Government supplies to foreign travellers kindly took our rope ashore and we were hauled off without apparently having suffered any damage.
These police-boats, or "red boats," are a great feature in travelling on the Yangtsze. They add enormously, to begin with, to the artistic effect, as they are furnished with an art-blue sail, which would rejoice the heart of an artist, but the nervous traveller {83} regards them with feelings of a warmer nature than those their æsthetic effect would arouse. They guarantee, if not the safety of boats and goods, at least the safety of his person amidst the terrible rapids of the river. If his boat should be wrecked and his goods become the property of the fishes, he knows that the "red boat" will dart into the rapids, and owing to its peculiar construction and the skill of the boatmen, will be able to rescue and return him, a washed and grateful traveller, to Ichang.
The excitement of passing the rapids is intense. It is a pleasurable sensation when you watch from the shore some one else passing through them; it is more exciting but less pleasurable to be on the boat itself at that moment. The excitement is largely a question of the size of the boat, whence the wisdom of taking a small boat even if it is less comfortable. To watch an eighty-ton junk being hauled through a narrow passage of foaming water is intensely thrilling. It is a matter of great difficulty owing to the rocky nature both of the channel and the shore.
The Yangtsze rises and falls some hundreds of feet in the year, and at low water the banks are a mass of rough rocks which remind one more of the sea than of a river. The men who tow are called trackers, and they have to climb over these rocks tugging and straining at the rope while a certain number of them, stripped to nudity, try to keep the rope clear of the rocks which constantly entangle it both on shore and in the water. It is splendid to {84} watch these men as they bound from rock to rock to disengage the rope from some projecting point, or as, leaping into the stream, they swim across to isolated rocks and extricate it from all sorts of impossible situations. Meanwhile the junk creeps up inch by inch, at times standing almost still while the water surges past her and makes a wave at her bow which would not misbecome a torpedo-destroyer in full steam. Woe betide the junk if the rope should foul and break in spite of the efforts of these men, for then she would be at the mercy of the current, and if it should so happen that there was no wind, the mariners on board have no command over her, and she must drift as chance will guide her till quieter water is reached. Of course if there is a wind they can haul up their sail, and then, though they will descend backwards down the stream, they will do it with dignity and safety. We passed a junk doing this. Her rope had apparently broken, her huge sails were set to a stiff breeze; as you watched her by the water she seemed to be sailing at a good rate forwards; as you watched her by the land she was travelling a good steady pace down stream. If she cannot hoist her sail because the wind is unfavourable, then she will rush back, inadequately guided by three huge strange-looking oars. The one at the bow, worked by six men, can twist her round like a teetotum, so that as she dashes down stream, the captain can select which part of her shall bump against the submerged rocks, which after all is but a poor {85} privilege, when you remember that eighty tons of woodwork banged against massive granite rock must be resolved into its constituent boards, whatever part of it strikes the rock first. The two other oars are even less helpful. With eight men at each, they can propel the boat at the rate of about three miles an hour; but what use is that when the stream is bearing the junk to destruction at twenty miles an hour. If the rope breaks, it is rather a question of good luck than good guidance. If there is no rock in the way, the junk happily sails down and is brought up in the quieter waters below the rapids. If there is a rock in the way, the junk arrives at the end of the rapid in a condition which would please firewood collectors but no one else. Those of the crew who can swim get ashore, and those who cannot are either picked up by the "red boat," or if there is not one there, they disappear; their bodies are recovered several days later lower down the river. From a Chinese point of view this is all a small matter; what is important is that a junk containing a valuable cargo has been lost. So frequent have been these losses that five per cent. insurance is demanded for cargoes going above Ichang.
GORGES OF THE YANGTSZE: AN AWKWARD MOMENT. JUNK NEGOTIATING RAPIDS. (Notice coils of bamboo rope)
Perhaps I ought to say one word about the rope on which the safety of the junk depends. It is made of plaited bamboo, which is extraordinarily light, and does not fray, though it is so stiff that it behaves like a wire rope. Its great lightness {86} allows of the use of ropes of enormous length. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that some of them are a quarter of a mile long. They are very strong, and therefore can be of wonderfully narrow diameter, but apparently they last but a short time, and every boat is furnished with coil after coil of bamboo rope ready for all emergencies. A horrible accident happens when owing to bad steering the trackers are pulled back off the narrow ledges cut into the face of the precipices, which at times border the river, so that they fall into the rapid.
They are an attractive body of men, these trackers. They leap over the most incredible chasms in the rocks, they climb like cats up the precipices, they pull like devils, while one master encourages them by beating a drum on board the junk, and another belabours them on shore with a bit of bamboo rope, which makes an excellent substitute for a birch rod, and yet withal they are cheerful. When it rains or snows they are wet through; when the sun is hot—and remember the Yangtsze is in the same latitude as North Africa—they expose their bent backs to the scorching sun; yet apparently they never grumble, but they wile away the hours of their labour with cheerful song. When they row or pull easily, the song is a weird antiphonal chant—it seems to be sometimes a solo and a chorus, sometimes two equally balanced choruses; but when the work becomes hard, the song changes into a wild snarl and they laugh a savage laugh as they strain and sweat to the {87} uttermost. I will complete their description by saying that their views of decency are those of Adam before the Fall, and that they preserve their strength by a diet of rice and beans with a handful of cabbages as a relish. At night they sleep on the deck of the junk on their rough Chinese bedding with only a mat roofing to keep the rain off them. And as I watched their cheerful demeanour, I felt more convinced than ever that the natural virtues of the Chinese are of the very highest order.
Perhaps I ought to say one word about the beauty of the gorges. I think in two points they excel. First, in the height of the massive cliffs, through which the Yangtsze has cut its way like a knife; the size of the river and the size of the cliffs are so much in proportion that the eagle circling above the gorge looks like a swallow, and the crowd of trackers appears as a disturbed ant colony. The other way in which the gorges excel in beauty is in colouring; at one point especially it was most remarkable—the rocks were red, the mountains when we saw them were purple, and the purple and red harmonising with the fresh green foliage of early summer and the deep yellow of the river, made a rich combination of tints in the landscape which could hardly be surpassed. It is typical of the state in which China is at the present day that a scheme should be on foot for building a railway which no doubt will render the gorges of the Yangtsze a silent highway, and, instead of hearing the wild song of the tracker or the savage beating of the tom-tom, {88} the lonely eagle will circle above a silent river on which the fisherman's bark alone will sail in the future.
For all schemes to tame the wild and fierce Yangtsze are clearly impossible. The river rises and falls more than a hundred feet with great rapidity, and no human hand could ever throw a dam across this mass of surging water. Possibly it might be used as a source of power for electrical work, but it is far more probable that the smaller rivers which fall into the Yangtsze will be chosen for that purpose. This district may be a tourist resort, and dwellers in the plains of China may seek coolness and beauty on one of the crags that overhang the river; the modern hotel may perch itself beside the ancient Buddhist temple; but the days of the river as a great commercial route of China are numbered as soon as the railway linking far-western Szechuan to the rest of China is completed. One wild scheme proposes that the railway should come from Russia straight down from Szechuan, in which case more than probably Szechuan will fall completely under the influence of the Russian Government.
One of the results of Westernising China must be to produce an industrial revolution. All those men, for instance, who make a living by leaping from crag to crag, from rock to rock, and swimming, struggling, rowing in that river Yangtsze will find their living gone. But not only will the railway make many poor who had a competence, but it must make many rich {89} who before were poor. In this case, for instance, all those commodities which are now extremely dear in Szechuan, because of the cost of transit, will fall in price, and there will be a period when there will be a wide margin of profit between the cost of importation and the conventional price the people are used to pay, and those who live by trade will grow rich.
What has happened in the West must also happen in the East. The introduction of steam did not make the official classes or even the working classes immediately rich. The people who immediately profited by improved means of production and communication were the great middle class; afterwards as the working class realised that the margin of profit would allow of larger wages, they compelled the masters to share these advantages with them. So it will probably happen in China. With the railway will come a rich middle class who will be a factor of growing importance in future China.
A great contrast between the Yangtsze and its wild gorges is the great trunk line from Peking to Canton which runs at right angles through the Yangtsze north and south, and must make Hankow, the place where it crosses the Yangtsze, one of the greatest cities in the whole world. The railway is only completed as far as Hankow. It runs from Peking right across the plains of China, which are so desolate in the spring and so fertile in the summer, and which depend for their fertility on the July rains. At every station a great Chinese inn is erected—that {90} is to say, a big courtyard with rooms round. At first, of course, trade was small; the Chinese village community has but little that it wants either to buy or sell; each community is to a great extent self-supporting. A farmer reckoned, I was told by a Chinese official, that if he had made 30s. a year, he had done well. That does not mean that he lived on 30s. a year, though in a country where men are paid threepence a day, one would almost have been ready to believe it; but it means that he had fifteen dollars a year to spend on things outside his daily food. His farm supplies him with food and drink and his vicious luxury, opium; his women make his clothes; it only remains for him to buy material for the clothes and the little extras that they cannot make, besides salt. He pays for the few things that he has bought, probably with the opium he produces, or in Manchuria with beans; but the trade has been of microscopical dimensions owing to the difficulties of transit.
When the railway is made he finds at the railway inn the Chinese merchant ready to buy and sell anything that he on his part is ready to trade. At first, such things as sewing cotton and cigarettes are the things that are traded against silk or opium, and then comes Chinese medicine and mineral oil, and so trade begins, and soon the Chinese inn becomes a market-place, and the railways begin carrying goods.
Of course the full development of the railway system must depend on the feeding lines and in what {91} we had in Europe before the railway system, and what the Chinese have not got, the feeding roads. In Manchuria—for China, like England, is more go-ahead in the north than in the south—they are already moving in this direction. The Russian railways, possessed now by the Japanese, are very busy carrying beans to Dalny, and soon the Japanese lines from Mukden to Antung will be equally busy, and the line from Mukden to Tientsin also will carry this crop. What they are now considering at Mukden is how they can arrange a feeding system of light railways, by which a bigger area of ground can be brought within reach of the railway system. To give some idea of the energy and progressive character of the officials in those parts, I may mention that they are already making inquiries as to the mono-rail system for such railways.
The Chinese have made up their minds to welcome railways, and though they would far prefer railways to be built with Chinese capital, they are of necessity compelled to accept European capital, since their fellow-countrymen want very high interest for their money. The Germans have taken very full advantage of the Chinese desire for railways, and have linked Kiauchau with the railway system of China.
The effect of all this must be very far reaching. To begin with, it will alter the influence of foreign powers. As the railway service is completed, Kiauchau will become a very much more important centre than it is now. If a railway that links Peking to Nanking, {92} or, to be accurate, to a town on the Yangtsze opposite to Nanking, is cut by a railway from Kiauchau, the result will be that Kiauchau will become the nearest ice-free port for an enormous district of China. This cannot fail to strengthen the German influence, and the German influence is connected, as we have already explained, too much with that political side of missions which has caused them to be distrusted by peace-loving Chinese. The Chinese will ask themselves, will there not soon be a missionary incident which will justify a further aggression by Germany along the railway, which lies so handy for a military advance, and they will be suspicious of any German missionary effort in that quarter.
But the effect of the railways is much more far reaching than any casual advantage that it may give to various powers, whether it be to Germany in Shantung, or to Russia or Japan in Manchuria, or to France in Yunnan, or to Russia in Szechuan. It will have two main effects. First and foremost it must place the whole of China in the same position that Shanghai and Tientsin occupy at the present moment—that is, it must make the whole of China a mixture of Eastern and Western civilisation. It may be urged that the rivers of China have already been the means of bringing East and West into close contact with one another, and yet that China remains still a separate and different country to the treaty ports.
The answer is, firstly, that it is comparatively only a short time since the river has been opened to foreign trade, and that a great advance has been made in the treaty ports, so much so that a man in the customs service living by the gorges of the Yangtsze described the difference between the treaty ports and the rest of China by saying, "A man who has only seen Shanghai and Hankow has never seen China." Secondly, a railway has a great educational effect. When a railway is first opened the Chinese crowd to see it; they get in the way of the engine, they are run over, they accuse it of malign powers, and then they come to the conclusion that it is after all only a machine, and they take readily to travelling by rail.
For instance, the railway from Tientsin up to Manchuria has already completely altered the conditions of culture in the north. It has enabled a large number of labourers to migrate every year to cultivate the fertile but icy districts of Manchuria, so that it is quite a sight to see truck-load after truck-load of farm labourers travelling like cattle, going up from the south to the districts of the north at the rate of three dollars for a twenty-two hours' journey.
Not only does the railway carry the Tientsin labourer in a truck to the Manchurian beanfield, but it also carries first-class the Chinese merchant who will buy the crop of beans to the advantage of the farmer and to his own greater advantage. The {94} Chinese are rich in traders, and such an opportunity would never be allowed to pass. Every year will produce a greater number of wealthy Chinese merchants, many of them very ignorant both of Western and Eastern knowledge, but probably some of them owning a respect for that knowledge whose lack they have felt in proportion to their own ignorance, for there is no man more inclined as a class to endow educational institutions than he who in his youth has felt the need of them.
China now needs help to found a University teaching Western knowledge. Once it is formed, there is every reason to believe that it will be endowed by the same class that has endowed similar institutions in our own country.
Nowhere is the transitional period through which China is passing more obvious than in the cities of China; many towns are still completely Chinese, but as you approach the ports you find more and more Western development. The contrast between towns is extremely marked. Shanghai or Tientsin are Western towns and centres of civilisation; the difference between them and such towns as Hangchow or Ichang is very great. The true Chinese city is not without its beauty—in fact, in many ways it is a beautiful and wonderful place. But to appreciate it eyes only are wanted, and a nose is a misfortune. The streets are extremely narrow passages, which are bordered on either side by most attractive shops, particularly in the main street. The stranger longs to stop and buy things as he goes along, but the difficulty is that it takes so much time; he must either be prepared to pay twice the value of the things he wants, or to spend hours in negotiation. There is one curious exception to this rule; the silk guild at Shanghai does not allow its members to bargain, and therefore in the silk shop the real price is told at once.
The shopkeepers are charming, and there are numbers of salesmen—salesmen who do not mind taking any amount of trouble to please. It is delightful, if insidious, to go into those shops; and one can well believe that if a Chinese silk shop were opened in London, and silk sold at Chinese prices, the shop would have plenty of customers. The quality of Chinese silk far exceeds that of the silks of the West. A Chinese gentleman mentioned as an example of this superiority that one of his gowns was made of French silk, and that it was torn and spoilt after two or three years; but that he had had gowns of Chinese silk for twenty years or more which were quite as good as on the day he bought them, and that he had only put them on one side because the fashions in men's garments change in China as they do elsewhere for ladies. The same gentleman related many interesting things about the silk trade. The quality of the silk is determined by the silk guild. This is much more like the guilds in mediæval Europe than anything that we have nowadays, and that is why China is not exporting more silk than she is at present. These silk guilds to a certain extent prevent the Chinese catering for European customers, as they will not allow or at any rate encourage the production of silks that would take on the European market. The West has many faults as well as many virtues, and one of its faults is that it no longer cares for articles of sterling value, which last long and for which a high price must be paid, {97} but it delights in attractive articles of poor quality at a low price. It is to be feared that the West may spoil some of China's great products as she has spoilt the great arts and productions of India.
But to return to Chinese streets. Next the silk shop will be the silver shop. Here again the work is admirable. At such a place as Kiukiang you can spend an hour or more bargaining, and watching the wonderful skill of the silversmiths as they turn out beautiful silver ornaments. It is pleasant to wander along and to look into the shops and see the strange things that are for sale—fish of many kinds in one shop, rice and grain in another, strange vegetables, little bits of pork, flattened ducks; or to glance at the clothes and the coats hung out, many of them of brilliant colours. The signs over the shops and the names of the merchants are a feature in themselves, illuminated as they are in vivid hues of red and gold, in those wonderful characters so full of mystery to the foreigner.
In a native city up-country the traveller is practically forced to go through the city in a chair. There are no wheel conveyances except wheelbarrows, and, except where there are Manchus, horses are quite unknown. Walking is profoundly unpleasant for a European, for as he walks along he is constantly jostled by porters carrying loads of goods on a bamboo across their shoulders; or cries are heard, and a Chinese Mandarin is carried past shoulder high, leaning forward looking out of his {98} chair perhaps with a smile, of contempt for the foreigner who can so demean himself as to go on foot like a common coolie; or perhaps it is a lady with her chair closely covered in and only a glimpse to be seen of a rouged and powdered face, for the Chinese women paint to excess, as part of their ordinary toilette. Next comes the water-carrier hurrying past with his two buckets of water; or perhaps it is some malodorous burden which makes a Western long to be deprived of the sense of smell. But in a chair a ride through a Chinese town is delightful; the chair-coolies push past foot-passengers who accept their buffets with the greatest equanimity, and from a comparatively elevated position the traveller can look down on the crowd.
But when the Chinese city is near a port, all this begins to change. The chair is replaced by the ricksha, and though in many ways it is less comfortable than a chair, the ricksha is after all the beginning of the rule of the West, being a labour-saving machine. One coolie or two at the most can drag a man quickly and easily where with a chair three or four bearers would be needed. Outside the old town will be built the new native town, and the new native town is built on European lines, with comparatively wide streets. In a treaty port the completed specimen of the transitional stage through which all China is passing is to be seen. Shanghai is a most delightful town, although it seems commonplace to those who live there, but {99} to a stranger it is a place full of contradictions and eccentricities. The first thing that strikes one in Shanghai is that none of the natives know any of the names of the streets. It is true they are written up in large letters both in English and in Chinese; but as not one of the coolies can read, they have not the very slightest idea that that is the name of the street—they call it quite a different name; and as they speak a different language both to that of the educated Chinaman and to the Englishman, there is no reason why they should ever learn the names given by them. The habitual way of directing a ricksha coolie is by a sort of pantomime, and there is always a great element of uncertainty as to whether he will get to his destination even with the oldest resident unless he knows the way himself. I arrived at Tientsin and tried to go and see Dr. Lavington Hart, whose college is known all over China, I may say all over the world, but the Chinese porter was quite unable to make the coolie understand where it was, and so we wandered about for some time till the coolie got tired and put me down opposite what fortunately turned out to be the house of a Japanese gentleman. I entered the house, and was surprised that the Chinese servant who met me did not altogether seem to expect me; but as he could not speak English and I could not speak Chinese, it was impossible to inquire if anything was wrong. I was just wondering why Dr. Hart should live in a Japanese house, {100} when the door opened and a Japanese gentleman walked in. Fortunately for me he spoke both Chinese and English well; so after explanations I was again sent on my road, and found Dr. Lavington Hart waiting dinner for me, and wondering how I had got lost. He then told me that I should have asked not for his college but for the hospital opposite, and that I should have asked not for the street but for the Chinese name of the doctor of the hospital who had been dead ten or fifteen years.
There is a moral in all this: it shows the state of confusion that exists in small as well as in large things. I asked several Englishmen why they did not accept the native names of the streets; their answer was that the coolies could not read them; and when I suggested that common sense would expect that the coolies' names should be taken for the streets, for after all that is how most of the streets in England were originally named, the suggestion met with no approval. These small matters show what a great gulf there is between the thoughts of the two races. If the coolies had been Italians or Germans or Russians, their names would have been accepted, or they would have been compelled to learn the new names.
Another example of the difficulty of carrying on the details of city life is afforded by a common spectacle at Shanghai. In the crowded streets you see a little crowd of policemen. The group consists of three splendid men, typical of three different {101} civilisations. First there is the English policeman; next to him is a black-bearded man, bigger than the first, a Sikh, every gesture and action revealing the martial characteristics of his race; then a Chinaman completes the group, blue-coated and wearing a queue and a round Chinese hat as a sign of office. The traveller wonders why this trio is needed till he sees them in action. A motor car rushes down one road, a ricksha comes down another, and a Chinese wheelbarrow with six women sitting on it slowly progresses down a third. All three conveyances are controlled by Chinamen, and when they meet, all shout and shriek at the top of their voices; no one keeps the rule of the road, with the probable result that the wheelbarrow is upset, the ricksha is forced against the wall, and the motor car pulled up dead. Then the police force comes into action. The Chinese policeman objurgates vociferously and makes signals indifferently to everybody; the Sikh policeman at once begins to thrash the Chinese coolie; meanwhile the English policeman at last gets the traffic on the right side of the road, quiets his subordinates, sees justice done, and restores order. Possibly if the matter had been left to the Chinese policeman, he would have arranged it in the end; the traffic in Peking was controlled entirely by Chinese policemen and was fairly well managed.
There is an extraordinary example of the want of consideration for the feelings of the Chinese to {102} be seen in the public gardens at Shanghai. There stands a notice which contains, among several regulations, first, that "no dogs or bicycles shall be admitted"; secondly, that "no Chinese shall be admitted except servants in attendance on foreigners." Considering that the land is Chinese soil, one cannot but wonder that any one who had dealings with the Chinese should allow so ill-mannered a notice to be put up. No Chinese gentleman would object for a moment if the notice had been to the effect that unclean persons and beggars should be excluded from the gardens; but to exclude the cultured Chinese merchant who is every whit as clean as his Western neighbour, or to exclude the respectable people of the middle class whose orderly behaviour is beyond suspicion, is as unreasonable as it is regrettable.
Again, the Shanghai municipality has no Chinese representatives upon it, though the great bulk of the population is Chinese, with the result that from time to time they come across Chinese prejudices and quite unnecessarily irritate the population which they govern. The Chinese have a principle that a woman shall be publicly punished only for adultery and open shameless theft; her "face" or dignity must be preserved; and therefore she should never be made to answer for her offences in open court, her husband or her father being held responsible for her behaviour and for her punishment. The right way of dealing with any woman who is charged with an offence is to do as we do in England with regard to children, to summon {103} not her but those responsible for her behaviour. I was assured by a Chinese official that the trouble which culminated in the Shanghai riots originated from disregard of this principle. The refusal of the Shanghai municipality to have Chinese representatives upon it is the more remarkable, as I was informed at Hong-Kong that they have such representatives, and find them most useful in assisting in the government of the Chinese. It is not surprising that Shanghai is a town to which it is diplomatic to make no reference in conversation with a Chinese gentleman.
There is more to be said for the mistrust of the Chinese Post-office and for the continuation of the curious system by which each nation has its own post-office. Nothing is more annoying to the traveller in Shanghai than the trouble he has to get his letters. If it should so happen that he has correspondents in many countries, he has to go to every one of the many post-offices in Shanghai, and they are situated in different parts of the town and in places very difficult to find. There is the Imperial Chinese Post-office, to which he first repairs, and where he will find letters from any correspondent in China; then with the greatest difficulty he reaches the English Post-office; after which he remembers that some of his friends may be on a holiday in France, therefore he must go to the French Post-office, and so on. When he asks why the Chinese Post-office cannot be trusted, he is told that the Chinese themselves will not trust their {104} post-office unless there be a European official in control, and that the old Chinese system by which letters are forwarded by private companies still continues in many parts of China, although they possess branches of the Imperial Chinese Post-office. Still the traveller wearily thinks at the end of his day's journey that without undue trust in another nationality, or any loss of national prestige, an International Post-office might be arranged in a town like Shanghai, with its vast travelling population.
Shanghai with its mixture of races, with its national antipathies and jealousies, is indeed one of the most attractive but strangest towns in the whole world. Every race meets there; and as one wanders down the Nanking road, one never tires of watching the nationalities which throng that thoroughfare. There walks a tall bearded Russian, a fat German, jostling perhaps a tiny Japanese officer, whose whole air shows that he regards himself as a member of the conquering race that has checkmated the vast power of Europe; there are sleek Chinese in Western carriages, and there are thin Americans in Eastern rickshas; the motor cycle rushes past, nearly colliding with a closely-curtained chair bearing a Chinese lady of rank, or a splendid Indian in a yellow silk coat is struck in the face by the hat of a Frenchman, who finds the pavements of Shanghai too narrow for his sweeping salute; one hears guttural German alternating with Cockney slang; Parisian toilettes are seen next half-naked coolies; a couple of sailors on {105} a tandem cycle almost upset two Japanese beauties as they shuffle along with their toes turned in; a grey gowned Buddhist priest elbows a bearded Roman missionary; a Russian shop where patriotism rather than love of gain induces the owners to conceal the nature of their wares by employing the Russian alphabet overhead, stands opposite a Japanese shop which, in not too perfect English, assures the wide world that their heads can be cut cheaply; an English lady looks askance at the tightness of her Chinese sister's nether garments, while the Chinese sister wonders how the white race can tolerate the indecency that allows a woman to show her shape and wear transparent sleeves.
Yes, Shanghai on a spring afternoon is a most interesting place; and yet as you turn your eyes to the river and catch sight of the dark grey warship, you realise that beneath all this peace and busy commerce lies the fear of the grim realities of war. China may assimilate the adjuncts of Western life, but she will never welcome the Western. The racial gulf that divides them is far too deep. It may be temporarily bridged by the heroism of a missionary; the enthusiasm of Christianity may make those who embrace it brothers; but the feeling of love will not extend one inch beyond the influence of religion; and those who ponder on the future as they watch the many-hued crowd that passes must grow more and more sure that the future of China lies with the Chinese alone; and however much as a race they may {106} be willing to learn from the West, they will as a race be led only by their own people. The Westerner may be employed; Western teaching may be learnt; Western garments may be worn; but, as a Chinese professor said, "The wearer will be a Chinaman all the same."
There was one marked difference in the cities of China as we saw them in our two visits, and this was the change that had taken place in the matter of opium-smoking. Opium-smoking in 1907 was such a common vice that you could see men smoking it at the doors of their houses. In 1909 opium-smoking hid itself, and those that smoked, smoked secretly, or at any rate less ostentatiously. I doubt whether so great an alteration has taken place in any country, certainly not of late years.
Each race has its peculiar vice; in fact, we may go further than that, we may say that it is a remarkable fact that the great bulk of mankind insists on taking some form of poison; in fact, it is only a minute minority which wholly abstains from this practice. The poisons used by mankind have different effects and have a different degree of toxic power, but the reason they are used is because in some way they stimulate or soothe the nervous system. Opium, alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, hashish, are examples of this widespread habit of humanity; but these different drugs have the most different effects on the welfare of man. Some seem to be wholly {108} innocuous if not beneficial, and others seem to be absolutely pernicious and to do nothing but evil; and further than that, one may say that a different preparation of the same drug or a different way of taking it produces differing results. A still more curious thing is that though all mankind is agreed in taking some poison, there is a marked, racial tendency to accept one particular poison and to detest others, and at times it seems as if the habit of taking one was sufficient to prevent another having any attraction.
As we went to China we passed through the Suez Canal, and heard what a curse hashish was in Egypt, and how the Egyptian Government had endeavoured to secure total prohibition of the use of this obnoxious drug, a course which was impossible owing to the great amount of smuggling that was facilitated by the wide deserts that surround Egypt.
When we arrived at Saigon (we were travelling by the French mail) we first came in contact with the terrible vice of the Chinese. A French lady was pointed out to us by a doctor, and he asked us to observe the odd glassy look of her eyes, the intense suavity of her manner and the contempt which she evinced for truth, and he told us that these were all symptoms of the vice of opium-smoking that she had contracted from association with the Annamites. The French for some mysterious reason seem more prone to acquire this vice than do our own countrymen, for though in 1907 it was rife in South China, {109} no one ever suggested that any English smoked opium at Hong-Kong.
As we went up to Canton crowds of people were smoking opium on the Chinese deck, and when we wandered round they had no objection to our standing watching the lazy process of dipping the needle into the treacle-like mixture, turning it round till a bead was formed, then putting it into the lamp to light and thence transferring it to the opium pipe, when after three whiffs or so the process had to be begun again.
The first effect of opium-smoking is to make a man intelligent and amiable. It is for this reason that opium-smoking—so the Chinese explained to us—is used largely in business. When business is difficult, and you cannot get three or four men to agree, the opium pipe is brought out, and after two or three whiffs the cantankerous people are reasonable, and the people whose dignity is hurt are forgiving, and business is easily and rapidly transacted. The next stage of smoking is stupidity. As you watch an opium-smoker in that condition he nods amiably at you with a rather imbecile look. The last stage is one of heavy senseless sleep. The habitual opium-smoker rarely passes the first stage, and its apparently beneficial influence constitutes its danger. Each man says to himself: "I will never take it to excess; I will merely use it and not abuse it; it makes life sweet to me and business easy."
I have always thought that those who condemn {110} opium have a tendency to prove too much in their argument. If it could be shown that the effects of opium-taking were invariably pernicious, it would be very hard to see how the vice could take such a hold as it has taken on the Chinese race; if the young men regularly saw that the older men were brought to inanity and death by the use of opium, they would themselves be terrified of contracting the vice, and it would not have spread as rapidly as it has done. The vice is essentially modern. Opium has only been grown in China for about seventy or eighty years, and it has only been imported in large quantities for a scarcely longer period of time. An inhabitant of Shansi told us that though every one smoked opium, and it was a terrible curse, his father remembered its introduction. Opium is certainly deleterious to the moral fibre of a race, and in many cases it produces death and misery; but there are a certain number of cases where no obvious evil effects follow from its consumption—cases when as a rule a man is well-nourished, for it acts most deleteriously on a man's powers of digestion. Men who have good food can better tolerate the effects of the drug, so a mission doctor explained, and their comparative immunity tempts others to follow their example. Men do not see at once the evil that will result, and so its use has spread by leaps and bounds. The Chinese Government have always theoretically resisted it, but their action has been hampered by their not being permitted to {111} prohibit its importation. For many years the pro-opium party in China used those treaty obligations by which China was bound to permit the importation of opium as a reason for stopping any efforts to extirpate the vice in the country. Not only were there always a great number of people in high places addicted to the vice, who were naturally unwilling to remove from themselves the opportunity of its gratification, but also there was a vast number of people who rapidly acquired a great pecuniary interest both in the maintenance and extension of this trade.
Unfortunately for humanity, opium was not only very injurious but extremely portable, and it therefore formed in a country where means of communication are bad a very useful article of exchange. The peasant farmer will grow most things on his little farm which he and his family consume—in most respects they will be a self-supporting community—but there must be a certain number of things which they will need to buy, and for which they must give something in exchange; that something must be portable. In many cases the only way of bringing your goods to the market is by carrying them on your own back. Opium, alas, forms, in soils which it suits, a most remunerative crop. The whole product of several fields can be carried quite easily on a man's back and can be sent down to the market, where it will find a ready sale, and the result of that sale will be invested in articles of which the farmer and his family have need.
Not only the farmer, but the trader, both Chinese and European, find it a most profitable source of trade. It was hard, and it is hard, to persuade the European trader that it is injurious to China, and to understand the reason we must turn back to the thought which was suggested at the beginning of the chapter, namely, that it is very doubtful whether the English race has any natural desire for the vice, while it is most patent that the Chinese have a peculiar national tendency towards this form of dissipation. When people have no desire for an intoxicant themselves, it is hard to persuade them that others may have a desire which may be beyond all power of restraint. The trading class mixes but little socially with the Chinese, and the people with whom they are brought in contact are very generally pecuniarily interested in the opium trade, and therefore they have neither the evidence of the Chinese nor of their own temptation to convince them of the insidious and dangerous character of this vice to the Chinese race.
The English race has long been conversant with opium. In the form of laudanum it used to be sold freely in the eastern counties. I have heard people describe years ago how the old women from the fen round Lowestoffe, or the marshes as they are there called, would call on market day at the chemist for their regular supply of laudanum, which they would take in quantities sufficient to make any ordinary person go fast asleep. It was used there, as it is used in many {113} countries, as a prophylactic against ague. The doctors now deny that it has any beneficial effect, but the people in the eastern counties used to think differently. But when I was a curate at Yarmouth I could find no traces of this vice; it had apparently been exterminated not by any social reform or moral movement, but by the superior attraction of alcohol; and in my day Yarmouth and the district round was terribly addicted to the national vice of intemperance. I noticed the same thing in Shanghai. The English know opium; most of them have out of curiosity tried a pipe; and they describe the effects as trifling or very unpleasant. One man said that he felt as if all his bones were a jelly; another that he felt as if he was floating between heaven and earth; a third that he found no pleasure in it at all, but that he had a "filthy headache" next day. On the other hand, if you go into the Shanghai Club you can see at once what is the attractive vice to the European at Shanghai; the whole of one side of the entrance hall was nothing more than the bar of an overgrown public-house. You will hear story after story which tells the same old tale that alcohol, especially in its strongest form, is the greatest pleasure and the worst danger to the Englishman abroad as at home.
If opium is unattractive to the white man, on the other hand alcohol is equally unattractive to the yellow man; in fact, their relative position is much the same. The yellow man has known of alcohol from the very earliest ages. Dr. Ross quotes the {114} second ode of the Book of Poetry as showing how well known drunkenness was to the Chinese: "Before they drank too much, they were dignified and grave; but with too much drink their dignity changed to indecency, their gravity to rudeness; the fact is, that when they have become drunk they lose all sense of order. When the guests have drunk too much, they shout, they brawl, they upset the orderly arrangement of the dishes, they dance about unsteadily, their caps are set awry and threaten to fall off, they dance about and do not know when to stop. Had they gone out before drinking so deeply, both host and guest would have been happier. Drinking gives real happiness only when it is taken in moderation according to propriety."
Drunkenness seems to have been extirpated from China by the same process that laudanum-taking was from the eastern counties, namely, it has given way before the more entrancing vice of opium-smoking. I was assured that the Tibetans do not share with the Chinese this preference for opium, and this is all the more remarkable because from their geographical position they have always been in close contact with India, which is apparently the home of the opium vice, but they have adhered steadily to the vice of drunkenness. The Chinese have free trade in drink; they have no licensing laws; any one may sell alcohol at any time of the day, in any place they like; and yet alcohol has so few votaries that you will scarcely see a drunken man from one end of China to another.
If the English commercial world is incredulous to the danger of opium to the Chinaman, not so the Chinese world. People will tell you that Orientals love to agree with you in whatever you say, but I heard a British Vice-consul flatly contradicted by a Chinese official when the Vice-consul expressed a doubt as to the danger of the vice, and I must say the Chinese disputant supported his contradiction with an argument which seemed to me perfectly unanswerable. He said: "Look at the Japanese; they are impartial spectators of the vice of alcoholism and opium-smoking; they are conversant with the worst forms of alcoholism that white men can show them. It is well known that white sailors are great offenders in this respect. Every port in Japan knows what it is to see a drunken sailor finding his way to his ship. They are equally conversant with the vice of opium-smoking. They have intimate contact with the Chinese; they know both the recent origin of this vice and its terrible ravages; and what do they do? Do they forbid both vices equally? No; they are so convinced that opium is so much more dangerous than alcohol, that they will not allow it to be introduced into their country for smoking purposes, and the smuggler is liable to five years' penal servitude. But the vice of alcoholism they treat as something which, though harmful, can never threaten their national existence."
Perhaps we who have suffered much more from the vice of alcoholism than of opium-smoking may be {116} inclined to think that while the Japanese are right in the opium question, they are acting imprudently in allowing alcoholism to gain such a hold on their people; but whether they are right or wrong, there can be no doubt that the Chinese official had justice on his side when he pointed out that to the Japanese mind the evils that opium-smoking had done to China were of a most serious character.
His Excellency Tang-K'ai-Sun spoke the Chinese mind when, in an eloquent speech at the Shanghai Conference, he told of the awful desolation that opium was bringing to his land. But it is unnecessary to quote the opinion of individual Chinamen; they are practically unanimous on this subject. One has only got to point to what China has done to show two things. First, that the curse of opium-smoking was far greater and more horrible than anything that we have experienced on this side of the globe; next, that there is latent in the Chinese character a vigour and an energy which, when it is called into action, despises all obstacles and acts so efficiently as to leave the world lost in astonishment. Realise what China has done. China is addicted to a vice which has a far greater hold upon her than alcoholism has upon us; she determines that within ten years that vice is to cease. The production of the poppy is to be diminished till none is produced; opium-smokers are to be held up to public scorn; opium dens—which are really the equivalent of our public-houses—are to be closed; all officials who take {117} opium are to be turned out of Government employ; the only exception that is made is for old men, and that exception was quite unavoidable. So vigorous was the action of the Government that men who have for forty or fifty years of their lives taken opium, tried to give it up; the result was in several cases that they were unable to support the physical strain; a great illness, even death, ensued; and so the edict was relaxed; men over sixty were allowed to continue smoking. When all this was published, every one smiled. They argued that China was trying to do the impossible. A vice like opium-smoking may be extirpated, but only after years of struggle. A generation must come and a generation must go before opium or any similar vice shows appreciable diminution.
We ourselves have not been unsuccessful in struggling against the vice of alcoholism; but consider the number of years since Father Mathew first spoke against drink. England may be growing sober, but it is by slow if steady degrees. But China hopes to accomplish in ten years what has taken England so many patient years of toil to effect partially. The idea that China could do this was regarded by most Westerns as almost laughable. In 1907, when the edict was first put forth, all those we met in China held this view; even missionaries, while they gave every credit to the Government for what it intended, shook their heads and foretold disappointment. We noticed as we passed along that {118} wonderful line that links Hankow to Peking and Peking to Harbin in 1907 that the country was beautiful with the white and pink crops of poppy, till at times one might imagine that the transformation scene of a London theatre was before us rather than the land of China, and remembering what we had been told, we also confidently expected failure to the edict which requires the destruction of so many miles of this pernicious if beautiful crop.
In 1909, when we again traversed the same country, we could not see a single poppy flower; not only so, but we made every effort to see if we could find a field. We went for a twenty mile walk at Ichang through the country, where no one could have expected a foreigner to come, and we only found one tiny patch of poppy, and one in which the ruthless hand of the law had rooted up the growing crop. As we went up the Gorges of the Yangtsze we scanned with a strong glass the hillside, and never once on those glorious mountains did we see any sign of opium cultivation. We asked about the officials; not only was the Government enforcing the law that officials must give up opium-smoking, but they were taking a more effectual action; they were requiring all those who were going to be officials to spend some time under supervision, to ensure that they should not be opium-smokers. Could any Western power hope to accomplish such a feat? Would the most extreme temperance reformer suggest that all public-houses should be closed, that the amount of barley {119} should be diminished every year till within ten years none should be grown, and that all the Government officials, from the Prime Minister downwards, should become total abstainers within that period? The reason of this vigorous action of China and its present success is to be attributed to two things: first, to the terrible and very real national fear that this vice will destroy the nation, as it has destroyed countless families and individuals; secondly, to the vast store of energy which enables China to accept new ideas and act vigorously on them.
The great revolution of thought that is going on has called forth this vigour. The China of yesterday was fainéant and unprogressive. The China that is emerging out of this revolution of thought is energetic, though possibly unpractical. The old traditions of Government are not lost, and they wait but for the man and the hour to enable China to act as vigorously as she has done in time past. Her action in this opium question may be ill-considered in some details; it may even fail; but it has shown the world that China is in earnest, and that she can act with a vigour which will cause wonder and envy on this side of the world. Every missionary reports that even high officials are coming asking to be cured of the opium habit. The missionaries have founded refuges where they receive and cure those who are ready to submit to the terrible ordeal, for their suffering is intense. Many quack cures are advertised. Some are definitely pernicious; for instance, the {120} morphia syringe has become a common article for sale in some parts of China. Some few may be beneficial. There is no doubt that the movement against opium is a great national movement, and is not the result of the action of any small or fanatical party. What China has done proves that this is so.
Let me close the chapter by a quotation from the ablest of the foreign representatives at Peking, Sir John Jordan. Writing to Sir Edward Grey, he says: "It is true that the Chinese Government have in recent years effected some far-reaching changes, of which the abolition of the old examination system is perhaps the most striking instance; but to sweep away in a decade habits which have been the growth of at least a century, and which have gained a firm hold upon 8,000,000 of the adult population of the empire, is a task which has, I imagine, been rarely attempted with success in the course of history; and the attempt, it must be remembered, is to be made at a time when the Central Government has largely lost the power to impose its will upon the provinces. The authors of the movement are, however, confident of success, and China will deserve and doubtless receive much sympathy in any serious effort she may make to stamp out the evil."
The desire for radical change is never so much to be dreaded as when it attacks the home life of a nation. That quiet life so often hidden away because of its very sacredness by the Eastern races is like everything else in China disturbed by the introduction of Western civilisation, and in no other part of human life will its two different sides be more apparent. Western civilisation without Christianity will destroy the home life as it destroys most Eastern things it touches, and will do little to construct a new life to take the place of the one it destroys. The Japanese complain that Western civilisation has destroyed both the modesty and the religion of their women, and Christianity has not yet been able to any great extent to reconstruct on the basis of true religion new ideals of feminine life. Therefore the Chinese, with all their enthusiasm for Western culture, are looking a little nervously at what they see has happened in Japan. They say that their home life is not now unbeautiful; even those who are disposed to admit that the life of the Western woman is founded on higher ideals than their own will not allow that their national home life deserves unmixed {122} condemnation. Everybody agrees that the wanton destruction of the laws which govern women's life in China may have a terrible result when Western civilisation is unwisely introduced, especially if it is made to appear to be a civilisation without religion. The missionaries see in this crisis the necessity for vigorous action; while thankful for the movement, they realise the responsibility it puts upon Christians to see that that movement is wisely directed. In the memorial from the Centenary Conference at Shanghai in 1907 to the Home Churches, they say:—
"The changed attitude of China towards female education and the place of woman, lays upon us great responsibilities. The uplifting of woman is a first need in the moral regeneration of a people, and one of the things in which Christianity has a totally different ideal from that which the religions of China have encouraged. The present change of national sentiment on the subject is one of the indirect but none the less striking changes that the slow but steady dissemination of Christian ideas in China during the past century has led to. Let it be remembered, however, that it requires the Christian motive power to make it successful and fruitful."
It is somewhat difficult to obtain information from the Chinese themselves as to the position of women. They are very averse to discussing the subject; in fact, it is not even regarded as good manners for a man to ask after the health of his most intimate friend's wife; and all the information that we could {123} get had for the most part to be obtained by Lady Florence Cecil through feminine sources. We may generally state, however, that the position of women in China is neither so low as that which they occupy in India or among the Mohammedans, neither is it in any degree so high as the position of women in Western lands. The woman is completely subject to the man; till she marries she is subject to her father, when she is married she is subject to her husband, and if her husband dies she is then subject to her son, and rarely re-marries. These are called the three obediences. She is not educated as a rule, because both public opinion and Chinese philosophy regard her as mentally far inferior to the man. We shall explain later on how in Chinese thought everything is divided into a good and an evil principle—a Yang and a Yin. The woman is distinctly Yin. She is therefore necessary to man, but at the same time inferior.
Again, with regard to the question of polygamy, her position is an intermediate one between the avowed polygamy of Moslem countries and the ill-maintained monogamy of many a Latin country. In Hong-Kong the position was explained by a Chinaman to me thus: that when a woman grew old it was regarded as her duty to provide a secondary wife for her husband's pleasure and as a companion for herself—a companion with a sense of servitude in it. If this was done in an orderly manner, it was absolutely approved by Chinese public opinion. If, {124} on the other hand, the husband, ignoring the wife's rights, should choose a secondary wife for himself and set her up in another house, his attitude would be regarded as distinctly doubtful by the respectable Chinese. In the same way if an official were appointed to a distant post he would probably not think of imposing upon his wife with her deformed feet the pain and discomfort of a long journey; he would most likely take a natural-footed woman, who will be for that reason a slave; in fact, one gentleman went so far as to say that he thought that the squeezed feet had a great deal to do with this institution of a secondary wife, because he noted that the secondary wives of all the officials when they were travelling were natural-footed women.
The secondary wife would be rarely a woman of good class; it is allowed to be an inferior position. On the other hand, if she bears her husband a son, and that son is recognised, all that son's relations, and therefore all his mother's relations, become relations of the father.
The curious tangle which such a position begets when brought into contact with the Christian idea is exemplified in this story. A rich Chinaman had three wives. By his lawful wife he had nine children; by the other two he had none; but his second wife was a woman of very strong character, and she was brought in touch with the missionaries by the Chinese wife of a European. She apparently ruled the house with a kindly rule to which all the others {125} bowed. She did everything in an energetic and vigorous way, and she studied Christianity till she was convinced of its truth, and then she demanded baptism. There was a great difficulty; she must leave her husband before she could be baptized. After considerable delay she accepted the condition, but resistance came, not alone from the man, but from the other two wives. They could not possibly get on without her; they were like sisters; and she must be allowed to return to the house. She refused, though the pressure was extreme. The man said that he had promised his ancestors that none of his children should be Christians, and that his own mother would not forgive him; but the woman held firm, and at last she was baptized. Her face was beautiful to behold while she was accepting Christianity and renouncing all that made life sweet to her. The husband was so moved by her fortitude that he signed a paper promising not to molest her, and yet to support her apart, so that she should not be in any need.
At the Shanghai Conference there were, curious to relate, many women who wished the Christian body to recognise existing polygamy among the Chinese. A sentence of the resolution proposed was that "secondary wives may be admitted to membership if obviously true Christians." Mr. Arnold Foster resisted the inclusion of these words, and they were lost. No doubt the Conference was wise in taking this line. It is most essential to maintain the purity {126} of the home life, and the difficulty that arises from secondary wives desiring to join the Christian Church can never be a very important one, as the vast majority of Chinese are monogamous.
A serious evil this custom creates is that of female slavery. Both in Japan and China one of the awful penalties of poverty is that a man is sometimes forced to sell his female children. These little girls are bought by prudent Chinamen, first to be servants to their own wives and then to act as secondary wives to their sons to prevent them going elsewhere. Sometimes they are kidnapped by men who make a regular business of this cruel traffic. Stories are told of boat-loads of these children being brought down the Yangtsze, concealed below the deck and terrorised to keep them quiet by one of their number being killed before their eyes. On one occasion a missionary suddenly saw a hand thrust through the planks of the deck, and on investigation he discovered a dozen children hidden below, and as it turned out they had been kidnapped, not bought, he was able to get them released. These slaves are the absolute property of their owners, and many are the tales told of the cruel and neglectful treatment to which they are subjected. In Shanghai the Chinese police will report such cases, and in consequence the ladies of the settlement have founded an admirable institution to which they can be brought. The Slave Refuge deserves all support. There the little girls are taught and cared for, and helped to {127} forget the terrible experiences some of them have gone through. Sad to relate, many of them have to be taken first to the hospital to be cured from the effects of the ill-treatment they have received. One poor little thing went into convulsions when a fire was lit in the ward; it was difficult to understand the reason, but when it happened again and the poor child uttered incoherent appeals for mercy, it was discovered that she thought the fire was lit to heat opium needles with which to torture her. Her system was too shattered for recovery, but many others get quite well and form a pleasing sight at work and play in the bright cheerful Refuge, with the happy elasticity of youth forgetting the injuries which in some cases have left on them permanent scars. But I fear the system of slavery continues very commonly all over China, and such a philanthropic effort as the Shanghai Slave Refuge can touch but a very small proportion of them. Probably when the little slaves are destined to be wives to their mistresses' sons they are treated less cruelly, and though employed as household drudges, do not live actively unhappy lives.
Without stating that women as a whole are miserable, I think it would be no exaggeration to say that they are infinitely less happy than their Western sisters. Many of the national customs militate against their happiness. The custom of child betrothal, for instance, condemns a woman to live completely subject to a man for whom she perhaps {128} has the greatest natural antipathy. Stories are told of brides committing suicide rather than leave their father's house to be married to men for whom they feel no affection; yet as a whole they accept their position, and a Chinese woman has neither the will nor the power to be untrue to her husband.
Again, the rule of the husband's mother is very often extremely harsh; the child-wife is little better than her drudge. On the other hand, when a woman grows older, her position is one of considerable strength. I was assured that they take a keen interest in the management of their husbands' properties, and often show themselves excellent business women. The position which the late Empress of China acquired shows that women's position is the very reverse of inferior when dignified by age.
And now before all this woman's world glitters Western civilisation; the greater dignity which is accorded therein to women is envied and the laws which restrain her are misunderstood. The Chinese women hear stories of Western life. At first such strange perversions are believed as that in the West women rule. One missionary explained that this absurd figment came from the rule of the late Queen; another attributed it to the custom men have when travelling in China of walking while their wives remained in the carrying chair. To the Chinaman such a course admits of but one explanation: the {129} woman must be greater than the man because she is carried while he walks.
Again, in Western China they learnt through their local press that girls and boys received a similar education in England, and they concluded that the dress must be also similar, and the missionaries were more amused than scandalised at seeing a Government girls' school turned out in boys' clothes. It was explained to us that this was far from being an uncommon custom in China; slave-girls who have been brought up with natural feet are habitually dressed as boys, and it is common now for fathers of small daughters with unbound feet to avoid the unpleasant taunts of the ignorant by allowing their daughters while they are children to wear boys' clothes.
Still on the whole the desire for imitation of the West has been very beneficial to the women of China, especially in this matter of foot-binding. This disgusting custom is going out of fashion among the enlightened and educated classes; two or three Chinese gentlemen assured us that this was so; and in a place like Shanghai, where the Western movement is very strong, the number of women with unbound feet is quite remarkable; the greater number of them naturally have had their feet bound, and as feet bound from infancy never become quite normal, they still have something of the tottering walk which used to be the admiration of every Chinaman; in fact, this tottering walk is preserved as a piece of {130} affectation. A lady told us that even her Christian girls' school was not above such a feminine weakness. As they walked to Church they would step out with the swinging stride that regular gymnastic exercises and a most comfortable dress have encouraged; suddenly the lady would see the whole of her school struck with a sort of paralysis which made them exchange their easy gait for the "tottering-lily" walk of the Chinese small-footed women. The cause is that the boys' school has just come into sight. I fear it must be admitted that foot-binding continues to be practised in the interior amongst the poorer women, who cling to the custom for fear of ridicule.
The most beneficial effect of the admiration of the West is the earnest desire that it has given to Chinese women for education. So keen is this desire that even married women will become children again and take their position in the class. Husbands who have received Western education are most anxious that their wives should share somewhat in their interests.
Lady Florence could see over girls' schools where a man's visit would not have been acceptable, so she visited many of all varieties, including two at Peking of a rather unusual description. One of them was carried on by a Manchu lady of high position, connected with a great Manchu prince. Her attitude generally towards the forward women's movement offends her family, as she lectures publicly on topics of the time. {131} Her school is small, and, alas, not very efficient, she having fallen into the usual fallacy amongst the Chinese of believing that a Japanese instructress must of necessity be efficient. Still her desire to give education to the children of the poor is worthy of nothing but commendation. She looked most impressive, being a fine big handsome woman, attired in the Manchu long robe with the ornate Manchu head-dress. The second school my wife saw was managed by another Manchu lady, and it seemed more orderly and more successful than the other. These two schools testified to a desire to improve the status of women. My wife visited many other schools, some belonging to missions of various denominations, which attracted the daughters and even the wives of upper-class men, who mixed quite happily with girls of lower degree, being all united in a fervent desire for education, the ruling desire now in China among women of all classes.
This desire for education is a great opportunity for the missionaries, and they appeal most eloquently in the message from which we have already quoted for help from their sisters in England. "We need more schools for girls and more consecrated and highly trained women competent to conduct such schools and gradually to give higher and higher instruction in them. We need more training schools, also, for Chinese women, to fit them to work among their sisters, and we need educated Christian ladies from our homelands for Zenana work in the houses of the {132} well-to-do. Such work would have been impossible a few years ago; now the visits of such workers would in many cases be cordially welcomed by Chinese ladies, and frequently they would be returned, for the seclusion of women in China is not at all as strict as it is in India. This, so far, has been a comparatively unworked sphere of usefulness in China, but it is one full of promise and of gracious opportunity in the present."
The difficulty of education is in one way increased and in another way decreased by the ignorance which many women have of reading the Chinese characters. A new system has been invented by which Chinese can be written in our letters as pronounced. This is called by the rather uncouth name of "Romanised." At the Shanghai Conference we were told wonderful stories of the incredibly short space of time in which women learnt to read by this system. A woman of sixty-seven learnt in two months; while one lady asserted that she had taught a boy to read between Friday and Wednesday, I may add inclusive. This extraordinary achievement is not quite so impossible as it would be with our more complicated languages. The Chinese have extremely few sounds, and their language is monosyllabic in formation. However, we do not ask our readers to accept this as the normal rate of education; still the thing is worth mentioning, because it is possibly the beginning of a great movement which may alter the whole of education in the Far East. The extreme ease with {133} which Chinese can be written in our letters may induce some daring spirit to advocate it as a system fitted for the education of the poor, though this is at present quite improbable.
A far darker side to the introduction of Western ways is the gradual naturalisation of the social evils of the West. Lady Florence had the privilege of seeing some of the rescue work undertaken by devoted missionary ladies in Shanghai. Being an open port, this town, in common, I believe, with the other semi-Westernised ports in China, bears a very bad character as regards purity of morals. The advent of the foreigner has done nothing but harm in this respect. Wonderful and horrible though it may seem, the vice-mart exists in the ports mainly in connection with the foreigners, who appear to have shown the way to the Chinese. There is a street in Shanghai, the Foochow Road, where terrible scandals occur almost openly; signs whose intention is veiled to the outsider by his ignorance of Chinese characters, boldly advertise the merits of various houses and their inmates. Formerly these wretched girls were even paraded in open chairs, but this has been stopped, though they are still carried about in closed chairs. The scenes in this street as night falls are a sad witness to the ill effect of Western ideas without Christianity. It must never be forgotten that the victims of this condition of things are literally victims. They have no choice in the matter. They are sold by their parents, even by their husbands, {134} into their terrible position; and though some may live a life of luxury, most of them are cruelly treated, beaten, tortured to prevent flight, and, as is proved by their subsequent conduct, they regard the life with absolute loathing.
Inspired by profound pity for these poor creatures, these excellent ladies started a Refuge for them with a receiving-house in the very midst of this locality of ill-fame. To this haven the poor things often flee even in the middle of the night, facing the unknown, undeterred by rumours of the evil intentions of the foreigners put about by their owners, rather than endure longer the life of degradation and misery to which they have been condemned. The missionaries receive them and pass them on to the "Door of Hope," the appropriately named Refuge, which restores them to hope and peace and happiness. There were to be seen some eighty young women living a hard-working simple life, contented and merry, and apparently never regretting for one moment the fine clothes and lazy luxury which many of them had renounced. The ladies teach them useful arts, instruct them in Christianity, and fit them for wives to Chinese Christians who will be good to them, and, understanding well that their former life was involuntary, are glad to have wives with a modicum of education. The ladies will allow non-Christians to mate with non-Christians, if of good character; but they will not permit any of their rescued flock to become secondary wives. {135} Two things are remarkable in this work of almost divine compassion—a relapse is practically unknown; and it is the Chinese who are most helpful in encouraging it—more so than foreigners; the Chinese often themselves suggest the "Door of Hope" to these girls, and help in police cases to save them from their brutal owners.
The risk that China runs at this moment in the home-life is the same as the risk that she is running in every other department of her national existence. If the materialist side of Western civilisation is the one that is the most apparent, it is scarcely possible that it will fail to do great damage to her home-life. A thoughtful Chinaman, talking about the whole question, argued in favour of a complete acceptance of Western ideas. He was afraid of a half measure. He said that there was no question that women in the West are restrained by a mass of conventions of whose value they are perhaps unconscious, but which are very apparent to those who have been brought up in a different civilisation. It is the existence of these conventions that makes their liberty possible. If the Chinese are to accept Western civilisation for their women, and he regarded this as inevitable, they must learn the conventions; and therefore his solution to the problem was that Chinese girls should be brought to England and brought up as English girls.
But many missionaries plead for the opposite policy. They say: "Let us preserve what is good in the Chinese home-life, let Christianity permeate {136} that life and make it beautiful, but do not destroy it. The Chinese home-life fits the Chinese race. The Westernised Chinawoman will combine the errors of both civilisations and the virtues of neither."
Without giving an opinion on this very vexed question, we may express a hope that a policy of prudence and moderation will govern the action of those who are concerned with women's education, for the degree of alteration which may be necessary in women's life to make them fitted to receive Western civilisation will be a matter rather of experiment than of theory. At any rate let Christianity precede any large alterations, for Christianity alone can make the life of a Western woman intelligible and consistent to her Eastern sister.
Among the many ways a nation has of expressing its thoughts and of showing its individuality, none is more valuable to mankind in general than its art.
Perhaps it can be said that every civilised nation has contributed to the common stock of art, and certainly China has done her share. The porcelain which is called after her name testifies to her pre-eminence in ceramic art, and should make Westerns cautious in expressing their contempt for a race which is generally acknowledged to be the originator of this industry. I will not attempt to express an opinion about the mysteries of this art, except to regret that the name of the country should be so attached to this product of her skill as constantly to cause confusion. When my friend Archdeacon Moule published his interesting book on "New China and Old," a lady wrote to him to say that she did not care for new china, but as she was a collector of old china, she would much like to read his book.
China has contributed to other forms of art as well. Her embroideries and her lacquer work are well known; her ivory carving and silver work have found a place in every collection. Her art, as we {138} might expect from a race which has been under artificial conditions of civilisation for many years, is distinctly artificial. In it you can see the spirit of a race who for many centuries have been taught to control themselves and to avoid the natural expression of their feelings. If it is artificial in form, it is pleasing in colour and superb in workmanship. There are few who will not agree that every effort should be made to preserve these arts from being injured by a false admiration of Western models. The only possible exception being modern embroideries, which might be considerably improved if more harmonious colours were blended together.
China excels in another art, though her excellence is not admitted either by the foreign resident or even by the native student. In certain forms of architecture she is unequalled. Yet when the Westerner comes to China he glories in bringing with him Western architecture, indifferent as to whether it is suited to the climatic conditions or is in itself beautiful. Take, for instance, the English churches of China. Could any form of architecture be less suited to a country like China, where the sun is frequently oppressively hot, than Gothic architecture? The large windows, the pointed arch, and the weak, open, high-pitched roof may be suitable in a country like ours which has little sunlight, and where a wet drifting snow will often force an entrance into the best-designed roof; but in a country like China, where the sun is the chief difficulty, some construction {139} should be preferred which renders a heavy and heat-proof roof possible. If antipathy to the Chinese necessitated a Western type of building, Italian or even Romanesque architecture might be selected, and a building with a massive roof supported on solid arches might resist the rays of the sun. But why not accept the Chinese architecture as eminently fitted for the climate?
If Christianity is to be assimilated by China and become part of their national existence, the buildings in which it is proclaimed should be essentially national. The intention of the Christian should be written clearly on the face of every landscape where the new and beautiful Chinese building rises up for the religion which is, as we maintain, as essentially fitted for the Chinese as it is for the English. We do not worship in a Roman basilica, but in the buildings that the northern architects have devised as suitable, both for Christian worship and for our climate. The new Chinese churches need not be replicas of the Chinese temples; the object of the building is different, therefore the building should differ, but there are many other forms in which it is possible for the architect to express in Chinese architecture the eternal truths of Christianity.
Again, why are all the schools and colleges erected on Western patterns. The Chinese are used to and prefer their own architecture, and from a sanitary point of view I hardly think it is inferior. The average Westerner in China has but one idea, and {140} that is that the Chinese must become like a Western nation or must remain untouched by Western civilisation. He absolutely refuses the suggestion that the architecture of China can be altered to suit modern conditions.
It is said that the thoughts of all nations are written in their architecture; that you can see the nobility of the Middle Ages in the Gothic cathedral, or the fulness of the thought of the Renaissance in the Palladian facade; certainly on the modern Chinese town the story of their change of thought is being rapidly written, perhaps with truth, but certainly not with beauty. The Western man absolutely despising all things Chinese refuses to erect any building which preserves even a detail of the national architecture; the Westernising Chinaman in faithful imitation erects Western buildings, but with this difference; whereas the buildings of the Western have some beauty—for instance, the cathedral at Shanghai is a noble building and the Pe-T'ang at Peking would not disgrace an Italian town, even the bankers' palaces at Hankow are not unworthy dwellings for merchant princes—the Chinese imitations of these Western buildings have but little beauty to commend them, and as far as I could understand they are really less serviceable than a true Chinese building.
No European resident in China will ever allow that Chinese buildings are either beautiful or useful, and if any one suggests that a Western house shall {141} be built in the Chinese style the suggestion is scouted as absurd; yet the British Legation at Peking is an old Chinese palace, and no one who has seen it ever doubts that it is one of the most beautiful buildings in the whole of China, and if this building has been found fitting for His Majesty's Representative, surely some such building might serve for others of less high station.
As to the spiritual ideals in Chinese architecture, who can doubt them when they look at some of the pagodas that the reverence of Buddhism has produced. These pagodas tell in every line of a nation that would reach up above mere utilitarianism to higher thoughts. The uselessness of the pagoda which so often annoys the practical Englishman is one of its chief merits. It stands there in all its beauty pleading with mankind for a love of beauty for its own sake and a belief in a beautiful spirit world. The whole of Buddhist thought is intimately connected with the love of beauty. When a Chinese gentleman was asked if the Chinese had any love of beauty, he said: "You will notice that their temples are always built in beautiful spots, so that they who worship in them should satisfy their love of beauty."
Even if the pagoda is merely regarded as a thing to bring luck to a town, it still merits admiration, for there must be something fine in a race that believes a beautiful thing can bring the blessing of the heavenly bodies on the earth. No one can {142} study the details of any of these pagodas without being confident that those who erected them had as their main object the erection of a beautiful building.
Or again, take the Temple of Heaven. Is there any monument in the whole world that has more feeling of beauty about it? The white altar lying uncovered testifies to the fundamental faith of the Chinese that there is a God in heaven who dwelleth not in temples made with hands, while the detail of the carving, though showing a certain sameness, yet indicates their belief that God must love beauty. To see the white Altar of Heaven together with the blue-roofed Temple beyond on some sunny day when the flowers are blooming and the dark green of the pine grove is in strong contrast with the light green of the spring herbage, is one of those visions of beauty which make a man dream and dream again of the noble future that may be before a race which has its holiest places in such lovely surroundings.
As most of the readers of this book may never have seen a Chinese building, perhaps it should be described. The architecture of the Chinese differs from that of the West in almost every detail. A Chinese town is a town without chimneys, and yet the absence of those chimneys which Renaissance architects made such a feature of domestic architecture is never missed, for Chinese roofs are curved and decorated with quaint figures; they are often {143} coloured, bright yellow if the building is an imperial building, or bright blue or blue and green with yellow lines, as taste may direct. Common houses have not such ornate roofs, but I am speaking of the houses which have some claim to architectural excellence. This great roof is carried directly on pillars, so that it is possible to have a Chinese house without walls, and these wall-less houses are most suitable to a country where the summer is hot. The massive character of the roof prevents the heat of the sun penetrating, and the absence of walls allows of a free current of air; if there are walls they are generally wooden screens filled in with paper, and the effect in some old Chinese houses is very lovely.
For winter weather these houses seem cold to us, but the Chinese have always believed in the open-air policy. They never heat their houses; they rely either on warm clothing or on a flue-heated bed at night; and as they are as a race very subject to consumption, probably this policy is one which is best suited to their constitutions. At any rate it seems strange that while we in England are advocating open-air schools, open-air cures, and sleeping with the window open, in China Western influence should be destroying the admiration for a splendid form of architecture, the characteristic of which was that while it was of great beauty, it also shielded the inmates from the intense heat of summer and gave them ample fresh air.
When some Chinese literati were questioned {144} about this architecture they freely confessed that they preferred their native buildings, but they seemed to think that a Western school could not be efficient unless it was held in a Western building. Missionaries and others being questioned on this point maintained that Western houses were in the end the cheapest, but the Chinese would not allow this. They said that a Chinese house would cost far more than a Western house if it were beautifully adorned with carving, but if it was built simply it would work out at less cost.
Chinese architecture is obviously a construction which lends itself to the use of iron. A Chinese building with iron substituted for wood would look as well, for they always paint their wood; this ought to be a very cheap form of construction in a land which is going to produce iron at a very low rate. The truth is that it is neither a question of cost nor of efficiency which makes the Chinese architecture despised; it is part of the great movement which expresses itself in stone and brick—a movement which is tending to bring the Eastern countries into misery—a movement which is planting in the East all that is commonplace, all that is hideous in the West, and that is destroying all that is beautiful in the East both in thought and colour and form. It is the counterpart of the movement which is destroying the faith of the Eastern nations and is only substituting the materialism which has degraded the West.
The real power of a race lies in its religion; other motives inevitably tend to egotism, disorganisation, and national death, and China is no exception to the rule; the strength and the weakness of China lies in her religion and in its absence. There are few nations who set less store by the outward observance of religion and yet there are few nations with a greater belief in the supernatural. On the one hand, the temples are deserted or turned into schools, and the Chinese are believed to have no other motives than self-interest. On the other hand, the whole of Chinese life turns round the relation of man to the spirit of his ancestors and to the spiritual world, and the Chinaman obviously believes that a man's soul is immortal and that its welfare has the very closest connection with the welfare of his descendant.
The commercial man will tell you that the Chinese are materialists—people who have no faith; and yet with glorious inconsistency he will explain that the difficulty of using Chinese labour abroad is that even the commonest coolie demands that his body shall be repatriated and shall lie in some place which will not hinder his son doing filial {148} worship to his spirit. The whole question of what the race believes is rendered more difficult of comprehension to a Westerner by the confused nature of that belief, and is complicated by the characteristic of the Chinese of mixing all religions together regardless of their natural incongruity. It is hoped that the reader will bear this in mind during the following explanation.
The religions of China are usually classed as three. Not three well-marked religions in our sense of the word, but three elements which tend to merge into a common religion. There are separate religions. A large number of Chinese, for instance, are Mohammedan, and they neither marry nor are given in marriage to the other Chinese; there is a very small Jewish community; and there is also a native Greek Christian village still tolerated by the Chinese, which was transplanted from Siberia as the result of a Chinese conquest in the days of Peter the Great; there are a quarter of a million Christians converted by non-Roman missions, besides a million belonging to the Roman Catholic Communion. But Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism put all together, form but a small part of the Chinese community, and the greater part of China believes, according to all orthodox expositors, in three religions—Buddhism, Taoism, and what is termed Confucianism.
This conglomerate of three religions consists in its turn of composite faiths. Buddhism in China is not like the Buddhism of Ceylon with its agnostic {149} teaching. Buddhism is divided into two great divisions—the "greater vehicle" and the "lesser vehicle." The "lesser vehicle" is known to the world as pure Buddhism; the "greater vehicle" contains many sects, all of which claim that the revelation extended to Gautama was only a partial revelation, and that the truth has been more fully revealed to those who succeeded him. This is called Lamaism, and in China has incorporated much of the idolatry which it supplanted and perhaps some of the Nestorian Christianity which succeeded it; in fact, the Buddhist temple in China is nothing more than an idol temple. Buddha of Gautama is always the principal idol; he is represented calm and without thought or trouble; he sits, the embodiment of peace and rest; but though he may be the first in the Buddhist temple, he is far from being alone; close behind him in popular estimation come two other deities, Amita and Kwannin. Amita, Amitobha or O-mi-to, is held by some to be the father of Kwannin, and is at once a guardian of the Western Paradise and the personification of purity; to this wholly mythical personage is attributed such virtue that the mere repetition of his name will secure salvation. In Japan a sect holds that every Buddhist law can be broken with immunity as long as there is faith in Amita. In China such statements are made as this: to follow the strict law of Buddhism is to climb to heaven as a fly crawls up the wall, but to attain Salvation by repeating {150} the name O-mi-to is like sailing heavenwards in a boat with wind and tide behind, at the pace of a hundred li an hour. There is a general agreement that adherence to the strict Buddhist law of chastity, honesty, truth, temperance, abstinence from anger and serenity of mind, is an ideal which is impossible at any rate for the laity. But the exact method of escaping this burden differs in various sects. The most popular is by a "saving faith" in Amita.
If the origin of this deity can be attributed to the personification of a spirit of purity, the origin of the next, Kwannin, is probably from some source outside Buddhism. She is the goddess of mercy, but whatever her origin, she at present represents the remnants of either the Nestorian or the mediæval Roman teaching. In Peking they have a curious image of her which any one might mistake for a Madonna, the truth being that there was at one time an intimate contact between Christianity and Buddhism, when many of the externals of the Christian religion and some of its doctrines were transplanted. The Buddhist temple with its altar in the centre looks strangely like a Christian church, and the Buddhist monks and nuns, with their rosaries and their regular hours for chanting and service, recall the Roman Catholic services; the picture of the Buddhist hell which stands in the great Mongol temple at Peking reminds one of a scene from Dante's Inferno, and among the many things the Buddhists borrow from Christian sources {151} are these two ideas, embodied in two idols, the goddess of mercy who intercedes for mankind, and the god of faith in whom the worshipper should put all trust and confidence. Besides these gods there are the god of war and the god of good-fellowship, probably taken from old heathen sources. Again, there are hundreds of Buddhas, or as we should call them, "saints," whose position is somewhere between human and divine, much the same position that the saints occupy in the mind of a Neapolitan peasant.
After Buddhism comes Taoism. Taoism is again a conglomerate faith. Technically it is the faith of Laotze, who was an opponent and a contemporary of Confucius. He taught a dualism which reminds the Westerner of the doctrine of the Manichees. Again, Western and Eastern thought have been confused; Manichees are known to have existed in China, and whether Manichæism originally came from the East or whether subsequently Chinese thought has been affected by Manichæism is hard to decide. At any rate, Laotze did not claim that his teaching was original; he was merely the prophet of an established school of thought. The greater part of China follows his rival and despises Laotze's teaching, yet the dualism that he taught is part of the essential faith of China, and a part which is most opposed to all that is good. He taught that good and evil were essentially divided, were halves, as it were, of one whole. He called them the "Yang" and the "Yin"—terms {152} which are in no way confined to the few disciples who now follow him. This division between good and evil makes up the mystery of the world—light and darkness, heaven and earth, male and female, each couple makes up one whole divided between good and evil; and so the world beyond is peopled with good and evil spirits, the "Yang" and the "Yin." Obviously such a faith has all the evil which we recognise in Manichæism, and its practical disadvantages are very great. For instance, the inferior position of women is defended as inevitable; they are "Yin." No mine must be sunk or cutting made for fear of angering the earth spirits, for as man is as essentially a part of the world as the earth, those earth spirits will avenge themselves upon him. Even such great men and such good Confucianists as His Excellency the late Chang-Chih-Tung are not insensitive to such a superstition. The town over which he ruled was divided by a steep gravel hill. A Western engineer recommended that this hill should be cut through to facilitate access from one part of the town to the other, and the Viceroy, ever ready to accept new and Western ideas of practical advantage, immediately ordered the suggestion to be carried out. Shortly afterwards a large wen developed on his neck, and, arguing that an evil spirit of the earth, who had originally made the gravel hill, was so angered at the destruction of it that he determined to re-make it on the neck of the offender, the Governor had the cutting filled up, and there it stands to this very day, a {153} witness of the evil influence that an evil religion can have on the greatest men of a nation. Taoism has now but few adherents, and yet there are many Taoist priests, since these priests are regarded as particularly efficient in dealing with the evil spirits in whom Taoism believes so fully.
The third religion is generally called Confucianism, and this may easily lead to a great misunderstanding, for under the term Confucianism two very different things are included. First, a belief in the philosophy of Confucius. This for the most part is outside what we are accustomed to call religion, and we shall have occasion to deal with it later on. Secondly, and more commonly, the spiritual beliefs of those who call themselves Confucians, and who, owing to his silence on religion, have to find other authorities for their faith. Sometimes they claim that their faith was the same as the faith of Confucius, that the background of his philosophy was the religion that they believe, but more commonly they accept it without any question. This religion is commonly mixed up both with Buddhism and with Taoism, but its essential doctrine is very distinct and has great weight in China, namely, that the spirits of men who are dead live and have influence over the lives of their descendants. I was told by a Chinese Christian that a religious Chinaman of the lower class never goes out without burning a stick of incense to the tablet of his father, and no one can go through Chinese towns without being impressed by the number of people who in that {154} poor country are kept hard at work manufacturing mock money to be burnt for the use of parents and ancestors.
The missionaries find that this doctrine is the hardest doctrine for Christianity to assail; and there are not a few who, despairing of success, suggest that the position must be turned, and ancestor worship must be Christianised and accepted as an essential part of a man's belief. The logical Western mind immediately wants to know what is behind the ancestor; if an ancestor is to have power he can only have it, says the logical Westerner, by being in contact with some higher power. One of the greatest missionaries that China possesses answers this difficulty by saying that the Chinese mind is not the Western mind; that he does not concern himself very much with remote speculation; he has not that itching longing to use the word "why," which is at once the glory and the difficulty of the Western mind, and therefore he looks at the spiritual world much as he looks at the earthly world; the man immediately over him in the town is the magistrate, and, to use the Chinese phrase, "is the father and mother of his people," and so over him in spiritual things is his father and grandfather. Behind the magistrate there is in his distant thought the prefect—the head of the prefecture or Fu town—a being who only comes into his village life when there is trouble and difficulty; he comes to punish, rarely to reward, and so behind his father and grandfather in {155} the spiritual world are the great clan leaders whom he worships at regular intervals with the rest of his clan. In civil government there are in a distant background a Viceroy with awful powers and awful majesty, and an Emperor whose very name is so divine that he scarcely likes to use it; and behind the clan leaders are many beings borrowed from Buddhism, relics of old idolatry, muddled up with Taoism; and in the dim and distant background is the Supreme Being—the Supreme Being Who rewards the just and punishes the unjust, Who can in no way be deceived, Who refuses the rain to the sinner and makes the land desolate, Who has power to dethrone the earthly Emperor and to place China under a foreign domination. This great and awful power is, however, so far distant that the average Chinaman thinks but little about Him.
The Temple of Heaven at Peking is the beautiful shrine of this Supreme Being. Here once a year, after spending a night fasting, the Emperor, as the father of his nation, worships the great God who made heaven and earth. The chief feature of this worship is that it is performed in the open air on a beautiful marble dais. No place in China is quite so lovely; it is the fitting shrine of the beautiful faith of China's most glorious days, a faith which though dormant is not dead. The traveller who stands there should remember that the worship which is here performed is as old as the date of the patriarchs and not un-akin to their religious {156} ideals; and if there are some things which are not sympathetic to the Christian idea, they are subordinate. In the main it is the worship of the One True Being.
This faith has no right to be called Confucian. There is great doubt about the faith of Confucius. He is silent about religion, or he refers to it only indirectly; it is no part of his teaching; but his indirect references to it apparently express a belief in a Supreme Being whom he calls "Heaven," a Supreme Being who has an influence on human affairs. He also recognises ancestor worship, but with such a dubious phrase that many Chinese and English scholars have doubted his meaning. Neither is this the faith of all the leading Confucianists in China, many of whom are professedly agnostics in matters of religion, and follow the teaching of Chu; but it is the faith, the ill-understood faith, of the great multitude of thinking and non-thinking Chinamen, and it is looked upon as the State religion of China. Its power over China is universal and yet insecure.
Many ages ago it was partially defeated by the more logical and more sympathetic faith of Buddhism. The fight was bitter, the persecutions were cruel, but Buddhism conquered. Now Buddhism fails. With its failure a vast mass of superstition, kept alive by the sacrifice to the ancestor, once more rises up and stands right in the path of progress—right in the way of civilisation. It was superstition that moved the Boxer, and this it was that lost credit when {157} Boxerdom failed. Story after story is told of the influence of this incoherent but vital mass of religion. The junk will dart across the bows of your steamer; there will be much whistling, reversing of engines, peremptory commands in English, abuse in Chinese; and when you inquire why the lowdah of the junk risked his cargo, perhaps his life, and put the steamer and its passengers in a state of excitement, if not in jeopardy, the answer is that every junk lowdah is afraid of the evil spirit that is following him, and if he crosses the steamer's bow he expects that the evil spirit, seeing a more worthy quarry, will neglect him and follow the steamer. The head of the Shanghai Telephone Company tells how he is not uncommonly met by some sleek well-to-do Chinaman who is most distressed because the shadow of a telephone pole falls over his door, so that as he goes out he passes beneath it, and that will bring bad luck. The houses in China stand unconformably with the road, because a certain aspect is lucky; a cracker is exploded to frighten the evil spirits away, and so on through tales innumerable.
The world around is full of evil spirits to the Chinaman. Every village has the witch doctor who is learned in the ways of these evil spirits. Diabolical possession is as present with them as ever it was in Bible times. Your hard-headed commercial man smiles when he relates these stories, incredulous that there can be any foundation for them; but those who have dwelt among the Chinese take much the same line {158} about these stories as we do about spiritualism. Much is folly, more is fraud; but behind both the folly and the fraud there is a mysterious reality. The faith of the masses of China in the spiritual world has never been encouraged by its philosophers. It owes its vitality to the fact that, as with us, so with them, manifestations of powers beyond this world are real if ill-comprehended, and connected too often with man's evil side. The Psychical Research Society will do well to inquire closely into many of these phenomena. Nothing convinced me of the reality of this belief more than the line that was taken by one of our English missionaries. He was speaking of diabolical possession, and he related the same story which one has heard so often that a man suddenly spoke as another personality; and then he added, "I realised that it was not he who was speaking to me, but the evil spirit within him;" and he went on, "I was afraid to speak to him, because if you speak to those who are possessed with an evil spirit, the evil spirit will take possession of you." It was strange to hear such a testimony to the reality of diabolical possession from an Englishman, but you will hear it from every Chinaman. Those who have read "Pastor Hsi" will remember how firm was his belief in such possession.
Against all this mass of the evil world the Chinaman has but one defence: his father and his ancestor belong to that world and they will defend him; and so the ancestor cult is intimately connected with this {159} belief in evil spirits. If the father does not bestir himself the son may come to harm—in fact, the main part of a Chinaman's religious idea centres round ancestor worship; and there is no such awful moment in a Christian convert's life as when he is required to destroy the tablet of his ancestors. A Confucianist cannot understand the missionary position; to his mind contempt for the ancestor only means a deep and spiritual scepticism, an absence of all faith in the supernatural, a negation of all sense of duty. A missionary recounted a story illustrative of this difficulty. He was travelling up-country in China, and his road lay along the same way down which a well-to-do merchant was travelling, and as they journeyed on side by side and met every night at the inns at which they put up, he noticed that the Chinaman eyed him askance; but as the missionary spoke Chinese well, and as travellers have many little wants which another traveller can supply, it was not unnatural that in spite of the mistrust manifested by the Chinaman they should fall gradually into more intimate converse. One night as they were sitting at an inn the Chinaman said to the missionary, "Do you know I thought you were a Christian, but I see you are a good fellow." The missionary assured him that he was a Christian, and did not deny that he was a good fellow. He felt, however, that there was some obstacle in the Chinaman's mind that kept them still apart, and as they journeyed on from day to day and had grown more intimate, the Chinaman said, "You know {160} people do tell such lies that one cannot believe a word they say." The missionary assented to this general proposition as true of all the world, but asked for a more immediate application. The Chinaman continued: "Well, I hope you will not be offended if I tell you the lies they tell about you—lies that I am afraid I believed till I met you and could see what a good fellow you are. They say—" but he broke off. "Pardon me, it is such a horrible accusation that I do not like to repeat it, even though I know that it is untrue." The missionary pressed him to tell what this accusation was, and the Chinaman continued apologetically, "I know that it is such a lie that I am ashamed that my people should tell such lies, but they do say that you Christians actually teach men to break up the tablet on which their father's name is written;" and the missionary realised all at once the depth of the conviction of the Chinaman and the wide gulf that separated him from Christianity. And so many and many a person who knows China best confidently asserts that Christianity will never become the religion of China till it permits and recognises this ancestral worship.
But now a new factor has entered into this problem. Western materialism is spreading its malign influence over China; the educated classes of Japan boldly profess that they have long since ceased to believe in any religion, and they are calling upon China with great effect to follow their example, and so the position changes altogether. Ancestor worship, {161} with all its accompanying superstition, tends to disappear where Western knowledge is taught. The Boxers were not untrue prophets when they told their people that they or Western civilisation, as they knew it, must leave China, and that they could not co-exist. The position is surely one that must excite the very deepest interest. It is scarcely conceivable that a race so deeply convinced of the realities of the spiritual world will, as a whole, accept the belief that there are no spirits. It is equally inconceivable that with modern Western education the people shall believe in the spirit that follows the junk, or in the spirit that is angered by a mining operation. The religious sentiment of China will, as it were, be turned out of doors by Western knowledge. There will be a terrible moment when, with all the insolence of youth, the young man refuses to believe in God or in a devil, and rushes into every wild anarchical and socialistic scheme to satisfy his craving for action.
It is a terrible moment, and one which one sees rapidly developing in Japan and among the Westernised Chinese; but beyond that terrible period there dawns a brighter day when China will reassert its natural sentiment and will accept Christianity as the only reasonable religion that is consonant with modern science and a belief in the spiritual world. The question of policy that needs solving is whether it is wise in the face of this great Western unbelieving movement to treat respect for {162} ancestors too drastically. Western education must remove its objectionable features and Christianity might accept the modified form of this belief which is not wholly inconsistent with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.
It is not realised in the West how much the modern movement in Japan owes its power and vitality to a native movement which welcomed change. In Japan Buddhism had failed, the one school of Confucianism which believed in change was dominant, and therefore it was a comparatively easy matter to introduce the extensive changes of Western civilisation. There was no religion with roots deeply entwined in the hearts of the people to oppose such a change. Shintoism had not yet been rediscovered and established, and it consisted merely of a mass of superstition, without any literature or organisation. Thus it was the combination of these facts, with the threatening attitude of Western powers, which made all the prophecies of men who knew the East untrue. No one understood the vital power of the movement in Japan. If, thirty years ago, some one had written a book to prove that Japan would one day defeat Russia, people would have laughed at the suggestion, and the authority of people who had lived in the East all their lives would have been quoted to prove that an Eastern race could never fully accept Western civilisation. The prophets were misled by {164} the precedent of India and Turkey. The Western civilisation is met there by religions whose tenets are opposed to Western thought, and as long as those religions hold, Western views will make but small progress; but in Japan there was no such religion, and in China to-day there is no such religion. The Buddhism of China, like the Buddhism of Japan, may satisfy the cravings for spiritual religion of the uneducated and the ignorant; but the thinkers of both races—the statesmen, the writers, the leaders—are uninfluenced by Buddhism. Taoism has contributed to the thought and superstition of China, but is in no way now an important factor in her development; the philosophy of Confucius is the one vital force in the land.
Its doctrines are in no way opposed to our civilisation; it teaches mainly that a man must be sincere to his own higher nature; it has a profound belief in the greatness of human nature, and a very inadequate explanation, therefore, of the failures of that nature. That man must be sincere, so that the full beauty of his nature may appear, is one of its main tenets, and that this beautiful thing must be decorated with knowledge is a natural corollary. It undertakes the reform of the world, by convincing the ruler of his duty, and through him compelling the ruled to tread the right path, contrasting here very strongly with the religion of our Bible, though perhaps not with political Christianity. All through its teaching there is an underlying suggestion that {165} subjects will obey their rulers not only outwardly but also inwardly in their opinions and convictions.
Confucianism does not believe in government by the people, of the people, for the people; but it believes very strongly in government for the people by the rulers. Many of its maxims might be cut out as texts, and hung up in the House of Commons with great appropriateness. It constantly pictures a well-ordered peaceful state, in which the dignity of government is well maintained, and where the working-man shall profit by his work through justice and peace, and the trader grow rich in confident security. In all this teaching it is not opposed to Western civilisation. Confucius advocates the reform of society by the action of the State. Thus the sanitary laws, the education laws, the temperance laws of the West are thoroughly consistent with the teaching of Confucius. Where that teaching differs from the West is that it disbelieves in democracy. Yet Confucianism cares nothing for a man's birth: all men are born equal to the Confucianist as to the Christian; and so Confucianism has, for many centuries, welcomed people of the lowest birth as Governors, if they could pass the requisite examinations, and, having given every opportunity to men of all classes to become officials, it entrusts them and not the people with the government of the country.
In another way Confucianism is opposed to Western civilisation. Confucianism believes intensely in the dignity of government; their classics are full {166} of examples of people who, at the risk of their lives, defied kings and maintained the dignity of their positions; and this doctrine of dignity is consequently very deeply ingrained in Chinese thought; it is in reality the base of that curious doctrine of "face" by which a man will do anything rather than confess that he is wrong. A great missionary recounts how his wonderful work at Tientsin was once threatened with destruction because a boy from the south of China knocked a boy from the north off his bicycle, with the result that the college was soon divided into two factions on the question as to who should pay for the injured bicycle. The matter was only with difficulty arranged by the President paying for the bicycle and charging it to the guilty boy; but the boy did not mind paying—he minded confessing that he was wrong. There was another case in this same college where a boy had been induced to confess privately his sorrow that he had wilfully insulted a master. He was prepared to suffer expulsion rather than confess his fault openly. He was miserable at the prospect of leaving the college, and when a great appeal was made to his better feelings to say that he was sorry, he shook his head sadly. At last he was asked, "Have you never allowed you were wrong in your whole life?" "No," he said, with a look of pride, "never." Odious and detestable as this doctrine is in private life, I think I have the authority of St. Augustine for saying that it is a maxim of good government that however wrong an {167} order may be, a superior should not confess his error, so necessary is this doctrine of dignity to government. Thus the Chinese expression "face" has been commonly accepted as a good English expression when speaking about governments.
No doubt it is this sense of dignity which gives such authority to the Chinese official. In many ways it may be an element of weakness. I was surprised to learn that the officials in the Yamen had never been in the shops of the city; it is beneath their dignity. Goods are brought to them and they buy in their own houses. For instance we were told how in Changsha two patriotic bas-reliefs were put up in a shop, one of them representing the Westerns bringing tribute to the Emperor of China, and the other depicting a Western woman, chained and dishevelled, being led in as a slave. Of course our very excellent and most efficient representative, Consul Hewlett, made instant representation to the Governor and the objectionable figures were removed; but the Chinese officials claimed that they were completely ignorant of what was happening in the shops of the town, because they never went there.
It is obvious that this high estimation of dignity makes much of Western government antipathetic to a Chinaman; he cannot sympathise with a civilisation which admires government by noisy agitation, vulgar posters, indecent journalism. Such an agitation as that in favour of women's suffrage is inconceivable and disgusting beyond words to the mind of {168} a Chinese thinker; that women, whose dignity is such that they should never be tried in a public court; that educated ladies, whose names, in China, must scarcely be mentioned owing to their exalted position, should wrestle in a public crowd and be arrested, is one of those mysteries in Western government that the dignified Eastern mind can never hope to understand.
Confucianism, considered by itself, is not unfavourable to Western civilisation, and its great influence in China will no doubt largely accelerate the Westernisation of that vast empire. For instance, the policy of education is one which has been followed by China for many a long year; all that the Chinese are doing is to alter the object of that education. It used to aim at giving men a complete knowledge of the Chinese classics; now it aims at giving them in addition a knowledge of the West and of natural sciences; and so such an eminent Confucian scholar and such an ardent Conservative as the late Chang-Chih-Tung was the foremost advocate for a Western education.
Again the development of the Press on Western lines takes place rapidly in China, where newspapers have long been known, and which boasts of being a country possessing the oldest newspaper in the world, the Peking Gazette. Translations of Western literature issued by the Christian Literature Society are read with avidity by a race that esteems literature highly, no matter with what subject it deals, {169} and who has no worse an epithet for one of its emperors than "book-burner."
Though Confucianism is not antipathetic to Western civilisation as a whole, and by its philosophy and literature encourages education in Western ideas, yet those ideas will, I fear, be fatal to that mighty system of ethics that has kept China together, and has enabled her to conquer her conquerors so many times. The countries that have never known Confucius are succeeding far better than the countries that have been taught by him. The fact that he always claimed that any race who followed his teaching would be prosperous, coupled with the fact that China, with her splendid resources and immense population, is far poorer and weaker than nations who know nothing of his teaching, is sufficient to bring its own condemnation to this philosophy. There is a marked difference in the teaching of Christianity and Confucianism in this respect. Christianity, by the example of its founder, teaches that the world must be reformed through the individual; and that the destruction of a State, whether it be Jerusalem or Rome, is only a painful incident in the upward advance of mankind. If every Western State were destroyed, the true Christian would only pause longer over his reading of the prophet Jeremiah; but when China, the home of Confucianism, realises her powerlessness in the face of the West, in sorrow and regret she will close the books of Confucius, as the books that guided the {170} State to destruction, even though that teaching was pleasant and beautiful.
A great Chinaman realised that this was the position of Japan, and told me that he did not believe that in Japan any one really believed in Buddhism or in Confucianism or in the new-found Shintoism; and that, as they had not yet accepted Christianity, they were in a state, odious to the Western and Eastern alike, of being without moral guidance in this world. The position of Japan to-day will, in all probability, be, both in regard to the constructive and destructive effects of Western civilisation, the condition of China to-morrow, unless indeed Christianity can fill the vacant place in Chinese thought. Never before has such an opportunity been presented to the Christian world as this vast mass of population included under the name of China, left homeless by the action of world thought.
Those millions of people, for instance, who yearn for a spiritual religion, and who have found in times past some comfort in the confused and corrupt faith of Chinese Buddhism, are now ready with open ears to listen to any one who is prepared to teach them a higher and more spiritual religion. The Confucian scholar who realises the debt that China owes to the teaching of the sage, and yet who feels that Western civilisation is sapping his authority and leaving China without a moral guide, welcomes readily the teaching of the moral philosopher who is prepared to show that Confucianism is essentially {171} right and has evidence of Divine truth within it, but that it only errs in not realising that the complete salvation of man can only be accomplished by those who appeal to his spiritual nature as well as to his moral sentiments.
If Christianity conquers China, one of her first actions will be to reinstate Confucius in the position from which Western materialism has dethroned him; but the task would be infinitely easier if Christians could take effective action at once. Every day that passes makes the position more difficult. Every Confucian scholar who shuts up his books and opens the books of the materialistic philosopher of the West, will prove an additional obstacle in the way of the Christianisation of China. The great danger is that the West, ignorant of what is happening in the East, will let this opportunity pass and allow Western materialism to establish itself as a force in China, as it has established itself as a force in Japan. The world is full of examples of lost opportunities; let us hope that China will not have to be added to that sad category.
The best view of the religion of China is to be obtained from the enlightened Chinese themselves, and their views will probably be of interest to our readers. It should be explained that one of the objects of our second visit to China was to inquire whether the Chinese officials would welcome the foundation of Universities in which Western knowledge could be taught, and whose atmosphere should be Christian. When the matter was first discussed in England it crept into the newspapers, and I immediately received an invitation from the Director of Chinese Students in London to discuss the subject with him. I had two interviews with him. What surprised me was that against all the opinion of the average Englishman who is conversant with China he did not regard the Christian character of the University as a deterrent, but he asked one question on which he apparently laid the very greatest stress. He inquired, "If a University is started in China on such lines as you propose, will you guarantee that the teachers are efficient?" I immediately assured him that the learned committees who were considering the question at both Universities would, whatever {173} else they did, never allow any one to go out as teacher unless he was most fully qualified. He then assured me that he had no doubt the scheme would meet with very great sympathy in China, and that he would give me letters of introduction to various people who would give the very fullest information on the subject. Among these was one to that most eminent man, Tuan-Fang, Viceroy of Nanking.
When I arrived at Nanking I presented my letter of introduction through the Consul, and the Viceroy most cordially invited me to tiffin at the Yamen. With further courtesy he sent his carriage to fetch me. We had a most sumptuous repast, at which about twenty officials were present, and in consideration of my being a foreigner some European food was provided. They appeared much pleased when I assured them that I appreciated Chinese quite as much as European food. We had a most pleasant luncheon, at which we discussed all manner of topics. I was asked to explain exactly the position of Oxford and Cambridge, and when I mentioned that Oxford was over a thousand years old, I had evidently established the reputation of my University far above that of all competitors. The Viceroy then admired the school system of England. He said the schools were "like a forest," and he assured me that he took the very greatest interest in education, and promised after luncheon to show me some of his schools. I expressed admiration of Chinese learning, and he told me it was divided into four {174} heads—morals, elegancy of style, philosophy, and manners. The respect that His Excellency had for Confucius did not prevent him from admiring other philosophers, especially Mih-Tieh, the philosopher who taught the doctrine of universal love. This was the more remarkable, because at Hankow the very same point had been discussed with some Chinese clergy over Sunday supper, and they had referred to this philosopher's works with considerable admiration, and had declared that his doctrine was much more consonant with Christianity than that of any other Chinese philosopher.
His Excellency then discussed the danger of a modern education. He quite realised the obvious evils that resulted from rashly encouraging Western education without an ethical basis. He said they had observed that those who returned from the West were less dutiful to parents than those who had remained in China. Then we had a long talk as to whether it was possible to assimilate the two and to give a man a perfect foreign and a perfect Chinese education. The difficulty felt was that men with a perfect foreign education were too often unable to write Chinese with sufficient elegance to satisfy the fastidious taste of the cultivated Chinese scholar. All this conversation was carried on at the dinner-table, chiefly through interpreters, with a crowd of Chinese servants, excluded from the room, but looking through a window to watch when our needs required their presence.
We discussed after tiffin the scheme for a University and the relations between Confucianism and Christianity. His Excellency was much pleased that I should take such interest in things Chinese, and immediately said that as I had come all the way to China to inquire into these things, I ought to receive every information. Turning to his secretaries, he told them that on the next day they were to provide scholars learned in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism to give me all the information that I required, and arranged that the Consul and I should return next day. He then suggested that we should go and inspect the school that was next his palace, and in which his own daughter was being educated.
The school was for children of the highest class, and contained only about thirty boys and thirty girls. He conducted a sort of informal examination which I should have thought must have been extremely trying for the children. His Excellency and myself came first, then two interpreters, and then about twenty officials. When the scholars were examined in Western knowledge, we were asked to put a question or to look at a copy-book; when they were examined in Confucian knowledge, His Excellency put the question, and the interpreters translated to me both the question and the answer. The intelligence of the children was of a very high order, and they were very attractive. The uniform of the boys resembled that of a French schoolboy, though the cut of the trousers showed that the {176} costume had been made by a Chinese tailor, probably after a Japanese model. The girls were dressed in grey coats and trousers and had natural feet; this was perhaps not quite so remarkable as it at first appeared when one remembers that the Viceroy is a Manchu, and the Manchus have never admired the distorted foot of a Chinese woman; but as they went through their musical drill one could not help thinking that the neat coat buttoned across and reaching to the knees over loose trousers was about as ideal a dress as has ever been invented for women. His Excellency did not fail to make his own daughter stand up, and asked her many difficult questions, which she answered very well in a calm and collected manner. After showing us these schools His Excellency said that we must stop a third day and see many of the other schools in Nanking.
Next morning I was most distressed to find that my friend Mr. King, His Majesty's Consul, was too unwell to attend the interview which I was to have with the learned men of Nanking, and so with some trepidation lest I should make sad faults in my manners without his kindly guidance, I drove up to the Yamen. There I was received by a crowd of officials, among whom were two great Confucian scholars with the Hanlin Degree, an authority on Buddhism and an authority on Taoism, whose knowledge subsequently proved to be extremely small.
The courtesy of the Chinese officials, the charm of their manner, the mixture of dignity and good nature {177} which is such a characteristic of their behaviour, makes controversy with them delightful. I do not think any one who has known them can be but greatly attracted by their courtesy and kindness. All Chinese are courteous, but the Chinese literati, perhaps naturally, greatly excel their fellow-countrymen in this charming characteristic. I should add that the two interpreters who were provided were men whose mastery of English was only equalled by their wide learning and pleasant address. One of them had been in England and was indeed a great traveller; he had ridden all through the passes which separate India from Chinese Turkestan; he belonged to a very great family, and traced his descent from one of the leading pupils of Confucius.
We discussed Confucianism first. I set the ball rolling by asking what was meant by the phrase "superior man." The position was a pleasant one; I was there to be instructed, and could therefore ask as many questions as I chose. The "superior man" is a translation of a phrase in the Chinese classics which perhaps might be better translated "ideal man"; at least so I gathered from these gentlemen; and that in the works of Confucius and Mencius his qualities are fully described. With great joy the whole party fell upon the question, and next minute they were engaged in a courteous polemic as to how exactly they should describe the "superior man," and the answer came that he must be a conscientious man, a man very true to himself, charitable, just and {178} truthful. When they were pressed as to whether wealth was at all necessary to the "ideal man," they indignantly repudiated the suggestion; the "superior man" might equally be a beggar sitting by the roadside or a Viceroy sitting in his palace. It was more interesting when they were asked whether he need be a learned man. There was some doubt and hesitation in the answers; the doctors again consulted with one another, and the answer came, "No, learning was not at all necessary." I asked whether the "ideal man" might be a non-Chinaman, and it was held that he might belong to any race. But the next question was far more difficult for them to answer. Nothing that they had said prevented the "superior man" being a Christian; a Christian might be true and conscientious and charitable. I quoted the case of a foreign doctor living in their city, and asked how he failed to come within their definition of the "superior man," but the Hanlin scholars could not agree; no Christian, in their opinion, could be a "superior man." But my interpreter added that he himself did not endorse this; to his mind any man who fulfilled the requirements should be classed as a "superior man."
We then changed the conversation to the question of "whether Confucius believed in God or not?" I had been instructed in this controversy by one of the most learned missionaries in China, Dr. Ross of Mukden. They maintained, as he told me they would maintain, that the Heaven of Confucius meant Reason. {179} But Reason cannot possibly punish the guilty, though the guilty might be punished by their want of Reason. And as Confucius refers in several places to Heaven as a power that punishes, the definition is obviously incorrect. It dates from a philosopher called Chu. Again the learned men were absorbed in controversy, every one enjoying such a discussion. The greatest number still held to the doctrine that Heaven meant Reason, but a certain number held that it meant a personal God. It ended in the controversy becoming quite heated, and in a copy of Dr. Legge's translation of the Chinese classics being fetched, so that I might fully understand their different points of view. In the end we agreed that there was a considerable force in the argument that Confucius believed in a personal God.
When I further asked how Reason could possibly punish a bad man when he was dead, and how it was that many a bad man, as we all know, died in wealth and prosperity, they answered that after death his memory was punished by his bad deeds coming to light. I suggested that if a man was dead this did not matter to him, and that Confucius' assertion that punishment followed sin implied a future life. When they were further asked whether Confucius taught that all secret sin should one day be made public, there was an eloquent silence, and we dropped the subject.
We then went on to discuss Buddhism, and a pleasant old gentleman leaning on a stick was {180} brought up to instruct me in the doctrine of Buddhism. It was obvious from the jocose and pleasant way the matter was treated, that this was very different ground to the philosophy of Confucius. Then, though everybody was courteous, everybody was keenly and seriously interested, but Buddhism was regarded as a most amusing topic; I was assured that only a few women believed in it, and that none of those in the room gave it the slightest credence. They explained to me why the Dalai Lama came to Peking. Two of the disciples of Buddha had been reincarnated, and the greatest of those two was the Dalai Lama, but it was impossible to tell in which baby the reincarnation took place without coming to the Mongol Temple at Peking; then lots were cast and the matter was settled. I had my doubts whether the old gentleman was accurate, but clearly no one else in the room had the smallest acquaintance with the subject; they made a marked difference between the Buddhism of the Lama Temple at Peking and that of the Monastery at Hangchow, which they called Indian Buddhism, and said the district was often named Little India; but when I tried to discover how many sects of Buddhists there were in China, or what was the nature of their tenets, I could get no information from these gentlemen.
His Excellency Tuan-Fang joined us at this moment and asked whether I could possibly read a Sanscrit manuscript that he had discovered, and {181} which, from the Chinese notes appended to it, he gathered referred to Buddhism. He also wished to discuss the origin of Chinese characters; he had a theory that they came from Egypt, and he showed many rubbings of hieroglyphics which he had had made from monuments in Egypt to prove his point.
But I wanted to ask some questions about Taoism. I had tried to understand Taoism and had found it extremely difficult, and I thought these cultured literati could give me some assistance. I was soon undeceived. Nobody believed in Taoism, and they knew nothing of its doctrine or of its worship. They suggested that the Taoist priests were often to be found in a Buddhist temple, but one scholar said that that was only because the Taoist priest liked to make a little money by selling incense sticks.
Then His Excellency turned the tables and began asking questions about Christianity. The thing that troubled him was that the Bible which he had read was in such poor style. He wanted to know whether I thought our Blessed Saviour habitually wrote in good style or not. I explained that He had originally spoken in Aramaic, which had been translated into Greek, and from the Greek into English, and then had been retranslated by Englishmen into Chinese, so naturally the Chinese version could but inadequately represent the full beauty of His words. It is worthy of notice how much the Chinese mind is attracted by all purely literary subjects, and how {182} little they care about physical science. For instance, when the Viceroy asked me about the sun standing still in the Book of Joshua, which led us into natural science, it was immediately obvious that this was a subject in which these gentlemen took no interest.
We then repaired to a sumptuous luncheon prepared entirely in Chinese fashion. The viands were exquisitely cooked, and comprised bird's-nest soup, shark's fins, white fungus, and all the usual Chinese delicacies. The hospitality of my host made me regret that the capacity of a human body is limited, and if it were not for the excellency of the Chinese cooking, dyspepsia must have been the result. Over luncheon we discussed all manner of topics, and I noticed how extremely sensitive my hosts were to the slightest want of manners. They referred to a mutual friend, a European, in the severest terms because he lacked in courtesy. They discussed also the question of foot-binding. They were convinced that the habit is being given up, and they assured me that it did cause girls excruciating agony. They said the younger generation of Chinese gentlemen would not marry women with deformed feet.
I left the Yamen a great admirer of the culture that could make men so pleasant. If they lacked directness as controversialists, they were most agreeable in their extreme civility and their imperturbable good humour. I shall always look back to my days at Nanking as some of the pleasantest of my life.
It is only just to put in the forefront of the influences that are Christianising and changing China the French, Italian, and other missions of the Roman Catholic Communion. Our first contact with the wonderful work which these missions are accomplishing was in French China, at that very interesting but most pestilential locality, Saigon. We were received with the greatest kindness by the Sous-Gouverneur at the French Government House, a palatial residence worthy rather of an emperor than a governor, compared to which Government House at Hong-Kong seemed but a cottage. Yet even there life was hardly bearable even under an electric fan. The heat was stifling. It had been impossible to drive out except in the middle of the night, and so we were entertained by being taken by night to see our first glimpse of Chinese civilisation, for the Chinese once dominated this country, and have left their civilisation behind them.
Driving back, our French host regaled us with stories of the people, and incidentally mentioned the great power which Christianity has in these colonies. We were much impressed by his {184} testimony to the efficiency of mission work, for the French official is far from favourable to the Roman Catholic Church. He told us not only was a large part of the country round Saigon Christian, but Christianity was such a vital thing that the Church had no difficulty in getting sufficient money to build splendid churches. Next day I called on the Bishop. He was a splendid type of Roman Catholic missionary, with his white beard and his courtly manners. We found several such in our wanderings, for Catholic missions are spread all over China, and have been founded many years. He spoke of the great success of the work, and thought that the hostility of the French Government was in some ways preferable to their patronage, for the personal lives of many of the officials are far from admirable. Their morality would better befit our Restoration Period than the twentieth century. A Governor's mistress was a person recognised and courted by official society, and it was perhaps to the advantage of the mission that in the native mind Christianity was dissociated from such evil doings.
I asked him how he supported the climate, which we had found barely endurable for two days. He replied that the climate was quite cool to the missionary who lived a chaste and temperate life, but that the Government found it terrible for their officials. This may be quite true, but still I think chaste and temperate Englishmen would find the climate of Saigon intolerable. We do not make {185} sufficient allowance in speaking of a healthy or unhealthy climate for the origin of the missionary. If he comes from Marseilles in the South of France, it is not perhaps wonderful that he should find the countries which are not hotter than his native land in the summer quite tolerable.
The history of Catholic missions is apparently to be divided into three periods. The first period terminates in 1742 and commences with the first mission of the Jesuits under Father Ricci in 1584. During this period the Roman Catholic missions, directed by a series of men of extreme ability, endeavoured and nearly succeeded in converting China from the "top downwards," for, owing to their wonderful scientific attainments, the missionaries received important posts under the Chinese Government. The fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by the Manchus only served to improve their position; they directed not only the Government astronomical observatory, but they even superintended the arsenal and became the cartographers of the empire. They had many adherents chiefly among the learned. Christianity, like Confucianism, had commended itself to the intellect of the country. In pursuit of this policy they endeavoured to harmonise Christianity with the thought of the literati of China; such a process was no doubt extremely dangerous, but they thought that it was possible to tolerate ancestor worship and the adoration of Confucius; whether they were right or {186} whether they were wrong, while they did it Christianity had many educated adherents.
Another kind of missionary next appeared in China, the Dominicans, who made up in fanaticism for what they lacked in wisdom. These men offended every prejudice of the Chinese; they taught the harshest and narrowest form of the Roman Catholic doctrine. The foot was to be made to fit the shoe, and not the shoe to fit the foot. There were riots and troubles, and the Dominicans blamed the highly placed Jesuits and freely accused them of having denied the faith and of having accepted high office as the reward for unfaithfulness. Appeals were made to Rome. Rome, many thousands of miles away, wavered, unable probably to understand either the controversy or its importance. The heroism of missionaries travelling over miles of sea and being shipwrecked in their endeavours to reach Rome reads like a romance. But in 1742 the matter was finally settled by Benedict XIV. in a Bull "Ex quo singulari," and the Jesuits were defeated—a defeat which was completed by their suppression in China in 1773.
With their defeat the Roman missions entered on the second period of their history. They were no longer directed by very able men, and they became rather the Church of the poor than of the rich. They experienced constant persecution, and, to gain weight and position, they finally accepted the French, who were then in the zenith of their power, as their {187} patrons. Such a course necessarily involved that they must do all they could to further the French interests, and the Roman Catholic missions became more and more an adjunct of French diplomacy, defended by France and on their side advancing the interests of the French. It is impossible to say exactly when this policy began. Louis XIV. had sent large gifts to the Emperor of China, but he does not seem to have had any intentions beyond giving countenance and weight to the Roman Catholic missions. Some one pointed out to Napoleon I. the great value of China, and the man of great ideas, always dreaming of that Empire in the East which he was never to found, clearly thought there was something to be made of this. He helped the missionary societies with funds—it is curious to think of Napoleon I. as the supporter of foreign missions. This act came, like most other French secrets of the time, to the ears of Pitt; and he managed that the information should reach the Emperor of China, and sent through a safe channel advice that the Emperor of China should look upon the Roman missions as dangerous and France as a "wicked power." Whether this advice would have been taken to heart or not is doubtful. Roman missions were unpopular in China; still they had powerful friends; but the discovery of one of their missionaries with maps of China intended for the use of foreign countries convinced her of the truth of the English suggestion, and Roman missions were put {188} down at the beginning of the nineteenth century with a relentless hand. In 1840 there broke out the first foreign war between China and the West, and after this Catholic missions became more and more an appanage of French policy. Whether the French had distantly intended the conquest of China, or whether they merely looked upon China as an outlet for her trade, they used the Catholic missions as a means whereby French interests should be pushed. Certainly the author of Les Missions Catholiques Françaises does not hesitate to suggest that France was rewarded for the protection of missions by an increased trade.
In 1842, as the result of a war, a treaty was signed to which we have before referred, and in 1860 it was followed by another. Both gave missionaries extensive rights. Can you wonder that the peace-loving Chinaman, looking back on history, finds it difficult to understand why the preachers of the gospel of love should have been so often followed by the armies and fleets of the military races of the West? The coping stone to this policy of propagating Christianity by the power and influence of a foreign nation was placed by an edict which just preceded the Boxer movement. That edict astonished even the Roman Catholics, for the author of Les Missions Catholiques Françaises au XIX. Siècle speaks of the extraordinary surprise it was to the Roman Catholic body. This edict ordained that bishops and priests should have official rank in China; that the bishops {189} should be equal in rank to viceroys and governors, and the vicars-general and the arch-priests should be equal to treasurers and judges, while the other priests should be equal to prefects of the first and second class; and that if any question of importance arose in connection with the missions, the bishop or missionaries should call in the intervention of the Minister or Consul to whom the Pope had confided the protection of the Catholics. The edict closes with three injunctions. First, that the people in general were to live at peace with the Catholics; secondly, that the bishops should instruct the Catholics to live at peace with the rest of the world; and lastly, that the judges should judge fairly between Catholics and non-Catholics.
This edict can perhaps be regarded rather as a victory of French diplomacy than of the Roman Church. French diplomacy had converted the whole of the Roman Catholic work into an agency for the national aggrandisement of France; the Roman Catholic Church had sold herself to the French Government; her old traditional policy of employing the powers of this world to propagate Christianity had involved her in this position; and she had presented Christianity to her converts as something which, however great its spiritual gain, had also very real temporal advantages. The Church was a great society which would defend you in this world just as it would give you promises of security in the world to come. So she had instituted a regular system by which her adherents were defended in any lawsuit or attack. {190} This interference in lawsuits was, however, not peculiar to the Roman Catholics. It is an old Chinese custom—a custom in which both Romans and other denominations have acquiesced; still it was exaggerated by the Roman Catholic Church till it brought down upon her the anger of the Chinese official world.
It is hard for a Westerner, with his ideas of an independent court of justice, to comprehend the system. A lawsuit is not regarded in China as a thing to be settled simply on its merits. They are only a factor in the decision. The general desire is that, if all things are equal, justice shall be done; but together with justice the judge has to consider the social position of the litigants and their power of vengeance or of reward. The best analogy to a Chinese lawsuit is an English election. If you read the speeches and addresses you will conceive that the whole desire of a candidate engaged in an English election is that justice should be done, but in practice you soon discover that the influence of individuals has to be considered as well. A candidate who always disregards justice is universally condemned; but a candidate who wilfully offends powerful people, who is not prepared to give and take, to sacrifice a conviction here, to push forward a little beyond the line of justice there, is equally unable to gain the suffrages of the voters; and in China the judge stands in the same position as the candidate does in England. If he is convinced that a certain {191} cause is backed by very powerful people who can secure him a better appointment and a higher salary, or who if angered might even succeed in getting him dismissed from his post, he decides the case in that litigant's favour. If, on the other hand, the parties are about equally matched in influence and power, like the English candidate he then considers the justice of the case; and therefore the first thing a litigant does is to try and secure all the influential support within his reach. Chinese officials told me that they have to have their cards printed with "for visiting purposes only" written on them, otherwise they are stolen and used without their knowledge in the furtherance of some lawsuit, and English Protestant missionaries confirmed the story.
Though this interference in lawsuits is a universal custom, its extreme use is peculiar to the Roman Catholics. To attack a Roman Catholic was to bring the whole strength of his mission, with the diplomacy of France behind it, against you. It was in furtherance of this policy that the Roman Catholics were anxious to hold official rank. An official will not speak to any one below his rank; the missionary finds access to the Viceroys very difficult; but if the Roman Hierarchy had this high official rank, the Bishop had only to pay a visit in his green official chair, when, by the strict etiquette of China, he must be received with all politeness, and his visit must be returned. To procure these privileges the Roman Catholics were prepared to sell to France the large {192} and undoubted influence they had among many thousands in China. There is a certain poetic justice in the Roman Catholic Church suffering from the actions of the French Government at home.
Still justice compels us to remember that they have not been alone in this policy. Missionaries of other faiths and other lands have both relied on the defence of foreign powers and have interfered with the lawsuits of their converts. A Protestant missionary from the Southern States of America frankly defended the system. He boldly asserted that non-interference in a lawsuit would be simply misunderstood by the Chinese. When he was young he had absolutely refused to interfere in a case where a widow was being oppressed, and a non-Christian Chinese gentleman had interviewed him, and after some circumlocution, had remonstrated with him on his hardness of heart, that he, a teacher of the religion of love, should neglect the widow in her necessity. Still, the Roman Church, as in Ireland, as in France, as in Italy, is an institution which is essentially political; and the traditional policy of the Roman Church has been followed in China with the invariable result, first, that when the power of the State is used to promote her tenets she grows strong, and next when that power is withdrawn or becomes hostile she feels the loss of the earthly support on which she has relied and apparently grows weaker. This is, however, only transitory; the Roman Church, for instance, is growing stronger, not weaker, now {193} that she has lost the support of French diplomacy, and the missions have entered upon their third epoch when they are preaching Christianity without any special support of a foreign government and are succeeding. For there are few bodies of people in this world who are more heroic and devoted than the Roman missionaries; they have died by fever, have been massacred, they live on a miserable pittance; I was told that one enlightened missionary, once a Professor in Paris University, lived on £12 a year; and their heroism and self-denial reaps a large reward.
Their most beautiful and most successful works are the orphanages which they maintain. They accept any of those children whom the Chinese mothers cast out to die, either because of their poverty or because they are girls. These children are brought up with infinite care and kindness, and are taught embroidery, lace-making, and other trades. No more beautiful sight can be seen than one of these orphanages, with the happy children hard at work and rejoicing as only Chinese rejoice in pleasant labour. When these children grow up they are married to Christians, and from them springs a native Christian population, which has never known any of the horrors of heathenism. As a rule they live in small societies. I believe there is an island on the Yangtsze which is entirely peopled by Christians. The work may be great, but the cost is great too. Many a life has been laid down so that these children might be Christians.
I recall one scene at Ichang. There rises near the town a great orphanage, and when we visited it, we found the French sisters looking weary and whiter than their white robes. An epidemic of smallpox had broken out in the orphanage, and out of 140 orphans, 28 had died of small-pox, besides which the sisters had suffered themselves from malaria. One could but admire the devotion of these women living far off from their own country, tending children whom no one else would tend, and gaining as their reward hatred and misunderstanding from the Chinese. A Bishop belonging to this mission had been murdered, and a lay brother told me that it was because they were accused of stealing children to make Western medicine out of their eyes. This strange slander arises apparently from the desire, which is not understood by the Chinese, to save and preserve the lives of other people's children. Chinese ethics have no place for such altruism. Your duty never extends beyond your own relations, either by blood or from official position. There is another reason, however, for this notion. The Roman Catholics have a system of native agents who are prepared to baptize any child, whether of heathen or Christian parents, who is dying. This system is very well organised. Some of these agents perambulate districts and some remain at fixed points. Perhaps not unnaturally the Chinese cannot understand this methodical search for dying children, and as a reason must be found, and as the reason that seems most probable to the Chinese {195} mind is some form of personal gain, they have invented this slander.
Whether we approve or disapprove the general action of the Roman Catholics—and our feelings are probably very mixed on this subject—we must recognise that they are a very great factor in the change that is coming over China. For centuries they have stood before the Chinese as associating with Christianity the science and the knowledge the Chinese have always admired. The wonderful work done by the Jesuits of the eighteenth century has established a tradition of excellent scientific work which is well maintained by the learned brothers of the Ziccawei Observatory. Many hundreds of lives have been saved at sea by the splendid meteorological service they have organised, and the sailor who cares nothing for Roman or for Protestant walks down on the Bund to see what the Ziccawei brothers can tell him about the probability of a typhoon. The benefit of their service, though great, is not limited to the number of lives of mariners that their science preserves; their science is an object-lesson to the Chinese—an object-lesson especially useful at a time when materialism is taunting Christianity with obscurantism.
Missionaries in the field do not entirely recognise the connection that exists between their own work and the work of other denominations. The man on the mission field sees his bit of work, and realises that it is a failure or that it is a success, but he does not {196} realise how intimately associated that success or failure is with world movements over which he has but the very slightest control. These world movements are dependent on many factors that must be beyond his direct knowledge, and one of the factors that influence the success of Protestant missions is the wide influence of Catholic work. Conversely every new Protestant mission that opens the door of a school or a college probably tends to augment the number of Roman Catholics in China. The question put to the Chinaman is not, "Will you be Roman or Protestant?" That was the question that was put to the European in the sixteenth century. The question is, "Will you become a materialist or a Christian?" And the answer he makes must be largely affected by his experience of the intellectual efficiency and high moral tone of those he calls Christians. I despair of persuading my Protestant friends that the reputation of the Ziccawei brothers is a valuable asset in evangelical work, and I equally despair of persuading the Roman Catholic that the splendid educational establishments of American Protestantism is one of the reasons why their numbers are increasing by leaps and bounds; but the Chinaman would probably think the remark self-obvious.
How small the differences appear that we think so profound was first brought home to me as we passed through the Red Sea on the French mail in company with a body of Coptic schoolmasters who were going to civilise Menelik's subjects in Abyssinia. {197} As it was Sunday morning these young men came up to me to ask an explanation of the ceremony of ship inspection which is performed with some pomp by the French captain on that day. With a wholly exaggerated idea as to the religiosity of the French they had concluded that this was a Christian ceremony, and when I had explained to them that on a French ship it was illegal to have a service, they were distressed, for they explained that though they had been educated in many different quarters, they were all in agreement on religious matters. One had been educated in the Protestant College in Beyrout, and another had been educated in the Jesuit College at Cairo, which, he added in explanation, is practically the same thing. This statement would be regarded as accurate by the average Chinaman.
At any rate, no one can doubt the importance of Roman Catholic work in China. They now claim to have over a million of adherents, served by nearly two thousand priests, and when one reads that they declare that they have made in Peking alone thirty-three thousand converts in one year, one realises what a power they are in the Christianisation of China. In the West such figures would mean the downfall of Protestantism, but in China such figures mean the growth of a common Christianity which all denominations can influence and in which all denominations can have a share. Remember, though a million Christians sounds a vast number, it is small compared with the four hundred millions who now form the population of China.
Though the Roman Catholic missions were first in the field by several centuries, it must not be supposed that they are now the only Christian influence at work. The work of other bodies is extensive and very important. The pioneer society was the London Mission, which began work under Dr. Morrison in 1807. Very soon after them the British and Foreign Bible Society began work in 1812. But no great mission work was undertaken till after the treaty of 1842. Then society after society sprang up. One of the earliest was the Church of England Missionary Society, which has a very extensive work, especially in Eastern China. Among the earliest of its missionaries were the two veteran brothers, Bishop Moule and Archdeacon Moule, who have for half a century ordered its ranks with courage and self-denial. The Presbyterian Mission was not long behind them, and the American Methodist Missions began work practically at the same time; and so missions have gone on increasing till there are over sixty missions, over and above the Roman Catholic Missions, at work in China, with a staff of over three thousand five hundred white workers and a {199} body of converts numbering over a quarter of a million.
The people who are opposed to missions will immediately say what a regrettable thing it is that Christianity should present such a picture of division to the heathen, and they will probably find a great number of people who are sympathetically inclined to missions and who cordially agree with them. There can be no doubt that it would be far better if the Christian Church presented a picture of unity to the whole world. It would be far better that we should all think alike; but if we cannot think alike, it would be a great mistake to seek for unity by encouraging people to suppress their convictions. Unity is very valuable, but it can never be so valuable as are truth and honesty. Far better to accept the truth and say that there is a difference of opinion rather than by denying the truth and concealing the divisions that really exist to give a false appearance of unity. If this is true of other parts of the world, it is even more true of China. Her national tendency is to regard conviction as of little importance, and on the other hand to lay great stress on uniformity. Perhaps one should say that this is the natural result of an autocratic government. Autocratic government naturally encourages the doctrine that everybody should agree with the autocrat. Now the advance of the West has been accomplished by encouraging liberty of opinion, therefore the people who are to expound the great doctrines of Western civilisation rightly appear before {200} the Chinese world showing a great diversity of view.
It is most regrettable when liberty is exchanged for tyranny, when the acceptance of one opinion involves the persecution of another, when Christians not only differ but persecute and thwart each other's efforts. This may be an evil in our own land, an evil which we hope will soon pass away, but in China that evil does not exist except between the Roman and the non-Roman bodies.
There are great differences of opinion. The extreme Ritualist position is ably represented in China, the ultra-Protestant position has equally able representatives, and I have seen them uniting in the Shanghai Conference in defence of the Apostles' Creed against a Latitudinarian attack. To the Chinese I think they present not the aspect of different bodies opposing one another, but rather different regiments of the same army intent on overthrowing the same enemy; and though they are clothed in a different uniform and use different weapons they serve under the same general.
TRAVELLING IN CHINA—OLD STYLE. A RAILWAY STATION—NEW STYLE
The American bodies are far the richest. Whether it is that the United States is a richer country than England, or whether it is that they are more liberal in their gifts to missions, or whether it is that they are more inclined to spend their money on Chinese missions, the result is certain, the American missions have every advantage that money can give. Their splendid educational establishments are a feature in {201} many towns. If the American missions have the advantage of the English missions in money, both British and American missions have an equal right to claim that they have as representatives in China a body of self-denying and enthusiastic men. It would be invidious to make any reference to the excellence of any special mission. Among the British missions, the London Mission claims indeed the greatest number of converts, though the Church Missionary Society does not come far behind it. Again, the Presbyterian Missions and the China Inland Mission have a large and growing work. The latter is a most curious development of missionary policy. The missionaries, differing in many doctrinal particulars, have agreed to co-operate under the name of China Inland Missions in the west of China; they have agreed not to oppose each other in any way, and to give each other mutual support. They are under the head of a director who organises and arranges their separate provinces. A great feature of this scheme is that they effect a large saving in the expenses of mission work by co-operation. A white man cannot live in many districts in China without a supply of medicines and some Western comforts; they arrange for the forwarding of these things, and help the missionaries in their journeys.
Bishop Cassels is at once a member of this mission and of the C.M.S. He is a splendid example of the courage that is necessary for missionary work. He has been through the Gorges of the Yangtsze twenty {202} times. Once he was unwise enough to forsake the small native boat in which he habitually travels and to entrust himself to a steamer, which, under the pilotage of a German captain, was going to attempt the rapids. They did very well till they happened to bump on a rock, when the captain lost his head, and instead of beaching her, he tried to anchor. The water surged in and soon put out his fires, thus preventing him from raising his anchor, with the result that the ship gradually filled and sank and the passengers had to swim for their lives.
The S.P.G. Mission is excellently manned, but suffers much from want of pecuniary support. I cannot help feeling that if it was but once realised how important it is that the capital of China, whither resort all the intellectual and ambitious men of China, should thoroughly understand the logical position and the reverent worship of the Church of England, that the necessary funds would be forthcoming. It is most desirable that China should understand that there is a via media between Rome and Protestantism.
Without wishing in any way to detract from the necessity for missions to other parts of the world, we may point out that China has at this moment a very special claim. No one would say that the mission work in India or in Africa demands within the next few years that the intellectual side of Christianity should be thoroughly explained, but this is actually the case in China. The intellectual men of {203} China who gather together at Peking are now demanding to know what truth there is in Christianity. They must be answered by men as intellectual as themselves, who will be able with courtesy and force to convince them that Christianity is a religion that is thoroughly consistent both with modern science and with the intellectual progress of the world.
No better mission to undertake that work can be conceived than the North China Mission of the Church of England. This mission, under the leadership of Bishop Scott, represents with dignity the tolerant and reverential attitude of the Church of England. One cannot help thinking that if he had a sufficiently liberal support, so that he could have a college where he could undertake the education of some of those future statesmen of China who are desiring to understand Western things, that his mission might be the means of encouraging a movement towards Christianity among the scholars and statesmen of China. That distinguished Baptist missionary, Dr. Timothy Richard, told me that he thought that the dignity of the Church of England, especially as so ably represented by Bishop Scott, might be a great asset in convincing the Chinese literati that Christianity was a religion which would harmonise with their love of order and dignity.
Of missions of other nations we saw one or two examples, but they are few in number if you except the Roman Catholic Missions. It is rather a pity that the Scandinavian Missions do not throw all their {204} effort into work in Manchuria; few races would endure the bitter cold of Manchuria better than they, and Manchuria is readier to accept Western ideas than perhaps any other part of China. She has felt and realised the pressure of the West, she has suffered under the burden of Russian domination, she has seen the Westernised armies of conquering Japan put to flight the northern invader. As we stood on the 203 Metre Hill and realised on that shattered hill-top how Manchuria has seen the full force of the destructive power of Western civilisation; as we counted the wrecks that then lay at the mouth of the harbour; as we looked at each shattered homestead, yes, and at the bones that were still unburied, we felt that the great land of Manchuria has a special need that some one should show her that Western civilisation can indeed produce something more lovely than shells and bayonets.
I am happy to be able to say that a splendid work is being carried on by the Presbyterian Missions; they have shown to the Northern Chinese another form of courage than that which was shown by the warriors of Russia and Japan. Two stories remain in my mind among many. First a story of the old days before Russia had made the Trans-Siberian Railway, before the Japanese had for the first time taken Port Arthur. A British mission doctor was at work. The Chinese, more suo, had determined to get rid of this example of the mercy of Western civilisation. They did not dare to kill him openly, so they sent a {205} messenger who feigned to have come from a sick man out in the country. The doctor and his Chinese dresser, unconscious of the plot, readily obeyed the summons. They noticed that a child followed them, and they did their best to induce him to go home, but he would not. When they arrived at the village inn they discovered that the sick man did not exist. They were in doubt what to do, when suddenly the door was thrown open and several of the soldiers of the Viceroy's bodyguard rushed in, and seizing the two, they declared that they had stolen a child to make medicine out of his eyes. They then proceeded to torture the doctor by tying his hands behind his back and suspending him by them to the roof. Such was the agony that the doctor lost consciousness. They then took him down, and he was put into a loathsome Chinese prison, where he was exposed to mental torture as severe as the physical torture which he had already endured. He was told that he would be beheaded, and every preparation was made, and then at the last moment he was taken back to the prison. This was repeated till they thought they had shattered his nerve, and then he was allowed to go free. With that calm courage which has so often characterised the action of the members of the missionary body he returned to his work fearless of death and torture.
Another story, which has its humorous side, was also told us. At the time of the Russian occupation of Newchwang, the Russians had, as we have {206} described above, been "pacifying" the town, and a crowd of terrified Chinese had taken refuge in the Presbyterian Mission compound, where there was only one lady. She, however, came from Belfast, and had all the courage of the Northern Irish in her veins. A body of Russian soldiers came towards the mission with the intention of shooting the Chinese. She took a horsewhip in her hand, and regardless of the loaded rifle or the bloody bayonet, commenced to belabour the soldiers with it. There are some things which are understood by all nations, and the use of the horse-whip was at once appreciated by the Russians, who fled before her, leaving her a victor and the saviour of her Chinese friends.
I know people say that women should not be exposed to the risks of a missionary's life, but the answer is that were women not employed, half the mission work would be left undone and the heroism with which women have endured death and danger has been no small factor in the spread of Christianity and in producing the change in China.
Among the influences that have awakened China, outside the great lesson of political events, none has been more influential than literature in its many branches. The Chinese have always been a literary race. They invented printing about the same time that the savage Saxons welcomed the first book written by the Venerable Bede, and the influence of literature has therefore held sway many hundred years in China. But for the last six hundred years there have not been many works of original thought produced in native literature. Most of their writings have been commentaries on the Classics following along the beaten paths, or works of poetry full of references to the Shi-King or the classic poetry of the Chinese. The literature of China is characteristic of her civilisation. It is confined by an artificiality which has its origin in an inordinate respect for the past and an absolute distrust of the future. Every book looks backward to the period when China's thought was pure and great.
This period continued till the Anglo-Saxon influence made itself felt through its missions. Very early in the history of Protestant missions it was {208} perceived that in a country like China some other appeal must be made than could be made by the white missionary. A nation reverencing the printed page to such a degree that men will carefully pick up a piece of paper and put it on one side rather than trample it heedlessly, for fear lest that piece of paper should contain words of wisdom, is obviously a nation that can best be reached through printed matter, and so Dr. Morrison, the pioneer of Protestant missions, devoted the greater part of his missionary life to translating the Holy Scriptures. The matter was not so simple as might appear to those who are only conversant with the civilisation of younger and less artificial races than the Chinese. It is not enough to translate a work into Chinese; the spoken language is nowhere used for literature. The literary language commonly called Wenli probably never was spoken, and is so full of artificial rules of construction that it is only after many years that a man can hope to write it efficiently. Chang-Chih-Tung says that it requires ten years for a Chinaman to become an efficient translator. That does not mean that it takes ten years for a Chinaman to learn English, but ten years for a man to be able to put into good Chinese the thoughts that he has learned from the West.
The written language of China, it should be remembered, is not a language in which sounds are portrayed by means of signs as it is with Western languages. Each character represents an idea, the only analogy in our language being the numerals and {209} some few signs we have for simple words such as "cross" or "and." Therefore when new ideas are developed new signs are required. These can be created out of old signs. For instance, I understand that a railway engine is called a fire carriage. This, by the way, caused great confusion of mind in a certain district to the Christian converts who were conversant with the story of Elijah, for some of them erroneously concluded that Elijah left this earth in a railway train.
Another instance of the difficulty of expressing new things was afforded when a certain mission started work in China. They were in some perplexity as to the title that they should choose for their society. They wanted to convey to the Chinese that their denomination claimed especially to feed the souls of men. They explained all this to an educated Chinaman, and quoted some well-known texts. He immediately wrote down two characters, and assured them that they represented what they had said about the spiritual food that they provided, and would also be very popular with the Chinese, as indeed it proved. The moment they opened the door of the chapel they were besieged by hundreds of Chinese of the poorer class, who, after listening for a short time, went away discontentedly. The missionaries found out afterwards that the title they had been given literally translated was "Health-giving Free Restaurant," a most attractive title to the hungry Chinaman.
There is indeed another way of representing new {210} words. The word can be borrowed bodily from another language and pronounced in a Chinese way, and the word-signs which best represent the sounds can then be employed. This is often done with proper names. For instance, a great Chinese statesman told me that he referred to Sir Edward Grey in his despatches to China by three signs which had the three sounds Ga La Hay, but this system is obviously open to misconstruction, because the reader might be tempted to give the words their normal meaning. I believe that such terms as X-rays and ultimatum have been so adopted bodily into the Chinese language. Ninety per cent., however, of the new word-signs which go to make up what the Chinese call modern style are new combinations of ancient ideographs.
One of the pioneers in this translation work said at the Shanghai Conference that the first thing a missionary had to do before he could convert the people was to convert the language. Until he had invented a new set of word-sounds to convey Christian ideas, the preaching of Christianity laboured under the very greatest disadvantage. The "term controversy," that is, the controversy as to what sign should be chosen to signify the Christian's God, was an example of this. It arose first in the Roman Communion and afterwards gave great trouble to other Communions. The choice lay between three terms—one signifying originally "Supreme Ruler," one "Heaven," and the last "Spirit," none of which quite {211} expressed our idea of God. What Christians felt was felt by other translators also, and one of the great causes of advance in China has been the formation of a language which can now thoroughly express all the ideas that are characteristic of the West. Many of these word-signs come from Japan. Japan, using the same written script as China, and having accepted Western thought, is more easily able to compose the word-sign necessary for its expression, and it is in this way among many others that the influence of Japan will be very important if not paramount in far Eastern countries.
Every missionary body has tried to produce Christian literature; the great difficulty has been to get the translator. The method usually employed is to get a Chinese graduate, too often not a Christian, and to make him, under careful supervision, write down the phrases rendered by the missionary into Chinese. Even so the difficulties are very great. The object of literature is differently understood in the West and in the East. A Chinese scholar who was very conversant with both languages explained the difficulties by the following anecdote. Engrossed in the study of Western knowledge he had neglected his Chinese literature, and was in imminent danger of failing in his examination. Happily for him the night before his examination he read a classical author much admired by connoisseurs but not much read owing to his great obscurity of expression. A particularly recondite {212} phrase dwelt in his memory because it had cost him so much trouble to discover its meaning. Next day he used the phrase in his paper, and when his paper was returned to him with the marks of the examiner upon it, it was obvious that it was this phrase, surrounded on all sides by the marks of his examiner's approbation, which had been the means of his passing that examination. Subsequently he went to Chicago University. "There," he said, with the quiet humour of a Chinaman, "I learnt that the object of an essay was to convey an idea in as simple a manner as possible. This is not the Chinese plan."
One of the pioneers in this work was the body which is now called the Christian Literature Society for China. Assisted by a brilliant staff, Dr. Timothy Richard has produced a great mass of excellent work which has profound influence on thought in China. No better test can be found of the wonderful work that they have done than the fact that the greatest statesman that China possessed, and also her greatest Confucianist scholar, should refer to one of their publications, The Review of the Times, as one of the causes of China's enlightenment. The Christian Literature Society has not, however, been the only labourer in the field. Good work has been done by the Religious Tract Society, which has depôts in various parts of China for the sale of good literature; and there have been other societies which have also published books, including the Mission Press, belonging {213} to the Roman Catholics, which is situated at Hong-Kong.
But in speaking of Christian literature we must not forget the various Bible Societies which have done such varied and excellent work in China, chief among which has been the British and Foreign Bible Society. Far beyond where the white missionary could reach, the productions of this Society have penetrated; even right across the deserts of Mongolia have their colporteurs carried their wares. Of the conversations which I had with various Chinese gentlemen one was especially remarkable as a testimony to their activity. My interlocutor was one of those fat lazy men who enjoy the good things of life and care but little for serious matters, and yet I was surprised to find that he was obviously acquainted with, at any rate, some of the tenets of the Christian faith, and I wondered how this indolent man had obtained such knowledge. I felt certain that his dignity would never have permitted him to have talked to a Christian missionary, much less to have listened to a Christian sermon. At last he incidentally mentioned that though a Confucianist he was well acquainted with the Gospel of St. Mark. I could not well ask him how he had obtained it, but no doubt it had come to him through the means of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
We happened upon another example of the influence of the Bible Society. We were coming down on the boat from Canton, and, walking on the Chinese {214} deck, I saw a man smoking opium and reading an English book. As I saw he knew English, I addressed him; under the influence of opium, he was wonderfully communicative. The book turned out to be St. John's Gospel, and he was reading about our Lord's Crucifixion. He had only picked it up because he wanted to improve his English, but he was deeply impressed by it, and his comments were most interesting. He asked me whether it was true that when our Lord was crucified He had stood alone against all the power of the Jews and the Romans, and when he received an answer in the affirmative, he added, "Then He must have been Divine, for no man who was not Divine could have stood alone." To the Chinese mind, which is incapable of any separate action, which is powerless unless it has the moral support of the Government, of a Guild, or even of a secret society, the story of the Crucifixion appeals most strongly as an example of Divine strength of purpose. This strange contrast between the opium-smoker and the Bible was typical of China. The forces of good and evil were wrestling together for the possession of that man's life; the forces of good having been put into his hands no doubt by the instrumentality of some Bible Society.
But the good work that has been directly done by all these societies has been greatly augmented by the good work that they have done indirectly through the medium of some of their converts. A body of Christian young men determined to start {215} a publishing house on their own account, the object of which should be that the published books, both translations and original works, should best convey to the Chinese mind lofty and noble ideas in Western thought. If these books were not intended to be definitely propagandist they were at least calculated to teach the ethical system of Christianity. The work of the Shanghai Commercial Press has had a great influence on the thought of China; from thence has issued forth a mass of literature both for schools and for the general public which has introduced Western thought to the Chinese. Many of our standard authors have been translated, and the Chinaman, moved by his love of literature, is now becoming intimately acquainted with every literary activity of our civilisation. When one looks at those strange word-signs it seems hard to believe that any one could read them with ease and rapidity; yet Chinamen say, though writing is a matter of great difficulty and requires much time, reading the characters is quicker than reading our system of printing, each idea being conveyed by one sign, instead of, as in our language, by many letters.
These signs are apparently things to which sentiment attaches. We heard a most interesting debate at the Conference of the Anglican Church at Shanghai as to the title by which the Anglican body should be generally known, and it was instructive to watch the differences between the views of the English and the Chinese minds on the question, as the debate {216} was translated by a most able interpreter, Mr. Tsen. We began with what threatened to be a rather dreary Anglo-Saxon debate between the High and the Low Church. One felt the old atmosphere of the sixteenth and seventeenth century of English history very present in the room. The debate was on the question as to whether the word "Catholic" should form part of the title. I need not detail the arguments that were advanced on both sides; they are too well known. Then we turned to the Chinese translation, and at once the fires of Smithfield and the thunders of the Reformation disappeared as by magic, and the blue-robed men from all parts of China woke up to an interest that was as extraordinary as it was instructive. We gathered, by means of our interpreter, two or three most interesting facts. First, there was unanimity in the room that the title should not in any way, indirectly or by allusion, convey the idea that the Anglican Church had anything to do with England. The view of China for the Chinese obviously commanded the assent of all in the room; even those who had been influenced the other way by their teachers, had to allow that the word Anglican would be fatal to the popularity of the Church. When "The Holy Catholic Church of China" was proposed as a title, it was suggested by the white men that it savoured of insolence, as implying that the other communions did not belong to it. This met with no favour from the Chinese. Their argument was simple; we are {217} all going to be one body in a short time, so the others can share in our title if it is a good one, and if it is not, we can share theirs. Then there was this feeling, which it was impossible for a stranger to appreciate, that each ideograph had a sentiment attached to it, and that therefore the title must be composed of ideographs which had not merely a suitable meaning but also a beautiful association. In the end they adopted for their title the ideographs that are used in the Creed for the Holy Catholic Church, not meaning thereby that they were the only branch of the Catholic Church in China, but that they were a true branch of the Catholic Church. There was another point made obvious to the onlooker, a point which will be dealt with further on in this book, namely, that owing to the different policies of the missions, the American body dominated in debate because they were represented by an extremely able body of Chinamen, while the English missions had as Chinese representatives only men of ordinary education.
But to return to the question of literature. Though literature has been instrumental in disseminating both the truths of Christianity and the noble ethical teaching of the West, it has also been instrumental in disseminating much that is evil and corrupt in Western literature. Perhaps it is not extraordinary that the Japanese bookseller finds that the erotic novel from Paris sells more freely when translated than the English story whose whole {218} motive depends on a proper comprehension of the Christian ethical position. The Dame aux Camélias, by Dumas, is the most popular of the Western works, and one cannot but tremble to think what incalculable injury such stories will do to a nation which does not understand the relative positions in which those works are held by men of high character in the West. Chang-Chih-Tung refers in one of his works to the apparent immorality of Western thought; and if we grant that books like these are typical of Western thought, we shall not be able to wonder at his conclusion. Through the distorted medium of such translations Western civilisation must seem wholly detestable. The Chinaman will naturally say, "Your boasted morality is merely a hypocritical covering for a profligacy which we should never permit in our land."
Not only are French novels translated, but all the works which Western thought has produced against the Christian faith. Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe" is a typical example. In literature, as in every other department of life in China, two elements of Western civilisation strive for mastery. On one side there are arrayed the powers of Christianity and the interpretation of Western civilisation as a product of Christian thought; on the other side lies materialism, and the explanation of Western civilisation as a natural result of evolution which is developing an irreligious but most comfortable world. If China listens to the first, she will become like other {219} nations, a great power, not only rich, but honourable, true, and merciful, the result of the teaching of Christian faith and ethics. If she listens to the second, the efficiency of China will be rendered terrible by a low morality, which will not only desolate and depress many millions, but even have a deleterious effect on the West which so mistaught her.
After literature perhaps we should place medical missions as one of the most effective ways of placing before the Chinese the difference between our civilisations and of showing them the truth and beauty of Christianity. There are three or possibly four reasons why medical missions are a right and effective way of conducting the Christian propaganda. First, they are an object-lesson of the love which Christianity inculcates. In school teaching we find that the object-lesson is the most efficient and easiest way of getting the human mind to understand a quite new idea; medical missions are object-lessons of the essential character of Christian teaching. Chinese ethics are very distinct in limiting the duty of man to certain well-known relations. They are five in number: the relation of the sovereign and minister, of the husband and wife, of the father and son, of the elder and younger brother, and of friends. No Confucian recognises the universal brotherhood of man; that is solely a Christian doctrine. Thus Confucius reproves the man who wishes to offer sacrifices to some one else's forefathers; that appears to him to be as officious as the duty of {221} offering sacrifices to his own ancestors is important; a man has no obligations to any one else but to those who stand to him in one of these five relations. Very different is the tone of the Apocrypha, which is not of very different date, and which puts burial of the dead among one of the first duties of man without specifying the necessity of any close relationship.
The action of missionaries in coming to China was therefore wholly misunderstood by the Chinese. They were regarded as merely the emissaries of foreign powers, sent to spy out the land. Considering the way in which the Roman Catholic missions did as a fact identify themselves with the foreign policy of France, one cannot altogether wonder that the Chinese attributed to their mission the selfish principles they themselves would have followed. The first purpose, therefore, served by medical missions is to demonstrate to the Chinese that Christianity has higher ideals than Confucianism.
Their second great object is one that must appeal to the heart of everybody who has been in China. It is impossible to work among the Chinese without being rendered miserable by the appalling amount of suffering and misery that exists at the present day. The poverty of England cannot be spoken of in the same breath nor can in any way be compared with the poverty of China. Deplorable as is the condition of many individuals in England, harsh as is the action of some of our casual wards, {222} any one who has studied both will freely allow that the poor in England are rich compared to the poor in China. Among the vast crowd that wanders along the North Road to London, you will scarcely see one without boots; there is scarcely one who does not get a piece of bread to eat when he is hungry; there are none who are suffering from untended wounds or unalleviated sickness. The workhouse infirmary will always open its doors, however harsh the Guardians, to those who are absolutely ill. But in China, starvation is quite common. Missionaries tell you how at certain junctures they have travelled along a road, passing man after man lying at the point of death, and those who are sick have too often no resource but to wait with patience the pain and death they foresee as their fate. The missionary feels, as he preaches the doctrine of love, that he cannot consistently ignore these suffering multitudes.
The third reason why medical missions are maintained is because they are a means of approaching people who otherwise would not hear the Christian truth. The man who has successfully healed the body has some reasonable hope to expect that the patient will accept that medicine that he offers to cure the soul. So medical missions have been started in every place. We visited many excellent medical missions, from chilly Mukden to torrid Canton. There are many stories told how in the days when the Chinese would not listen to {223} missionaries, the medical missionary obtained that hearing which was refused to his clerical brothers. I was told one medical missionary found that the moment that he was extracting teeth was the moment when he could best advance his teaching. I have never heard the story substantiated; unless the Chinese are very different from us, one would have thought that the teaching would have had a distinctly painful association. Perhaps he took as his thesis the extraction of sin from the character. His success was equalled by that non-medical missionary who had the advantage of having a set of false teeth; these he used to take out before the astonished coolies and replace them; then having attracted their attention by this manoeuvre, he took up his parable on the need for taking away their sins from them and for putting new life into them.
The Chinese coolie loves a jest, and once he is on the laugh he will, unlike his English brother, be much more inclined to attend to serious teaching. One of the missionaries who understands this trait of the Chinese best is Dr. Duncan Main of Hangchow, where we spent two most interesting days seeing his hospitals and work and visiting his patients.
There is no better testimony to his great work than his obvious popularity. Wherever he goes there are smiles and greetings. He explains as we walk who are the individuals who salute him. That great fat man who stands bowing and smiling is a {224} merchant of some wealth; his wife has been in the hospital; she has been tended by Dr. Main and by his skill has been cured. That old woman who stands by him smiling is another ex-patient. That young man with an intellectual face and a dark robe is an old medical student, now a doctor himself with a large practice, and he has settled near Dr. Main's hospital. And so his work increases and grows and the good he does must live after him. He takes us into the out-patients' room; they are a motley crowd, with strappings and bandages on various parts of their persons. While they are sitting there a lay-reader expounds to them the elements of Christian teaching. What a contrast to their minds must be the plain forcible teaching and the simple effective remedies and medicines of the Christians to the incantations and nauseous compounds of their native doctors. There is a great doubt as to what is the nature of many of the Chinese drugs. They always prescribe a vast number, many of which are apparently innocuous in their effect; they always give them in large quantities, and do not in any way attempt to isolate and extract the active properties of the things they use. You see a man eating a large bowl of some nauseous compound and you are told he is taking Chinese medicine. You ask a captain what his cargo consists of, and he tells you that it is largely made up of Chinese medicine. Some of the medicine seems to be prescribed on the principle of our old herbals; that is, there is a fancied resemblance between the plant and the disease. Others seem to {225} come from well-known remedies administered in various ways; ground-up deer's horns from the mountains of Siberia has probably much the same effect as chalk has in our pharmacopoeia. But there also seems to be some possibility that the Chinese doctors have certain useful remedies which are unknown to Western medicine.
There is a strange story told in Shanghai about a certain remedy for a horrible disease called "sprue." The story is well known to every resident in Shanghai, still it will bear repetition. A certain quack called "French Peter"—I do not know his proper name—habitually cured sprue. Cases which English doctors had absolutely failed to cure, and which threatened ruining a career or loss of life, he cured in a few weeks. He had two remedies—a white powder and a black draught. He himself was a most unattractive-looking man. My informant told me that his career was being threatened by this horrible disease, and that he was expecting to leave China in a week or two, when some one suggested that he should try "French Peter." When they met, "French Peter's" appearance was so unprepossessing that the sick man's courage nearly failed him. He had been for weeks on a milk diet, and the first thing that the man said to him was, "Look here, take these medicines and go and have a good beefsteak for luncheon." He decided to try them. He ate his beefsteak, he took the white powder and the black draught, and I think within three weeks was quite well. "French Peter" would {226} never tell his secret or where he got his remedies; at least he used to give different accounts to different people. I believe he is now dead, but on talking the matter over with some Chinese friends they assured me that the remedies were well known to Chinese doctors, and that "French Peter" had got them from one of their compatriots.
Dr. Main deals with his patients in the same cheery way that he addresses every one; a word or two suffices to discover the nature of their ailment. If the case is very serious, the patient is detained for further examination; if it is trivial, it is attended to at once by a native dresser. For the rest he himself prescribes.
Then he takes us up to the wards, and explains that the great difficulty is to get the Chinese to care for cleanliness. That is the same story in every hospital; they cannot believe it matters very much whether the thing is kept clean or not. The medical students will proceed to handle anything after they have washed their hands and think that the previous washing insures asepticism, regardless of the fact that they have touched many septic things.
Dr. Main's hospital is typical of mission hospitals—Dr. Christie's hospital at Mukden, Dr. Gillison's at Hankow, Dr. Cochrane's at Peking, and many others. There are also hospitals for women. We saw many; the first we visited, the Presbyterian Hospital at Canton, was a good example, impressing us not only by its efficiency, but also by the great service it performed to the suffering {227} masses of China by training women doctors, who are permitted to minister to their sisters when etiquette does not permit of male medical attendance. The lady who showed us round the hospital spoke English fluently; she was dressed in the dress of the Cantonese woman, which suited her profession admirably, as it consisted of a long black coat and trousers. Some hospitals are reserved for the very poor; at Nanking, for instance, Dr. Macklin showed us over his beggar hospital. He follows the parable of the Good Samaritan most literally, and wherever he finds a poor, starving, dying man, he brings him in. Clearly he cannot afford anything but a limited accommodation for these poor creatures, but he is on the whole most successful, and there is many a man whom poverty had brought near to death whose life he has saved. As one looked at those types of suffering humanity and realised the good that Dr. Macklin was doing, one felt that the days of saintly service were not over yet.
Another beautiful work is Dr. Main's leper hospital at Hangchow. It was a weird and strange experience to hear those lepers singing our old English hymns. Leprosy, as my readers doubtless know, does not often leave open sores; it slowly eats away the body while it leaves the skin intact; and so you see men without hands and arms yet with finger nails upon the stump, blind men without noses, and very commonly men whose voices are cracked and broken. These lepers are housed in an old temple, in one of the most beautiful situations in China—a {228} situation which is supposed to be the original of the landscape on the old willow pattern plates; and the beauty of their surroundings contrasts strangely with their hideous forms and harsh voices. There was an infinite pathos when by that blue lake and purple mountain, those harsh but plaintive voices sang the old tune of "Jesu, lover of my soul"; and though we could not follow the Chinese words, the faces of these poor sufferers were eloquent in expressing how fully they felt the meaning of that hymn.
But above all we should mention the great work that is being carried on by Dr. Cochrane at Peking. He has managed to induce all the medical missions in Peking to unite in founding a great hospital—a hospital which has received the approval of Government. This successful example of federation has solved a difficult problem. No doubt the efficiency of medical missions in many a town is impeded by their want of unity. A mission body will open a medical mission, and will send out a doctor or even two in charge; one doctor must go on his furlough, another is perhaps ill, and the result is that the mission is closed. The commercial community are rather ready to point out that the mission hospital is closed in the summer when there is the greatest need for it. The answer to the taunt is the policy of federation. While it is next to impossible to keep open the mission hospitals in an unhealthy climate with a limited staff, it is perfectly possible to do it if the staff is increased. Every doctor in Central and Southern China must {229} have a certain period of rest, otherwise he will not be able to stand the enervating effects of a semi-tropical climate; and however possible it is to keep white men at work for three or four years without a holiday, and I know commercial people claim that this has been done in certain individual instances, it is in reality the very poorest economy. The mission doctor is far too valuable a person to have his life cast away by such a foolish policy of extravagance. He must have his rest every year and his furlough every seven years. But it is not necessary that the hospitals should be closed if the staff is big enough; a certain number of the hospital staff can go on leave, and when they are rested, can come back and allow others to go in their turn. Dr. Cochrane has shown at Peking that such federation is possible, and the China Emergency Committee is making every effort to encourage a similar federation in other parts of China. Medical missions are splendid examples of Christian charity and love, but they are rather sad examples of the lack of unity among Christian men.
Analogous to the medical mission are the missions to the blind and the deaf. The blind are a striking example of how Christianity alleviates misery, for the blind in China learn to read more quickly than those who have sight. The teachers of the blind have invented a system of raised type by which the Chinaman can read every word that is pronounced in Chinese. It is not our letter system, which they {230} would find difficult to understand, but something after the nature of the Japanese system. Each syllable is represented by a sign; so, strange as it may appear, the blind man not having to study the character learns to read more quickly than the man with normal sight. There is an excellent school for the blind at Peking, under Dr. Murray's superintendence. There is another at Hankow, where we saw a most striking instance of the beauty of holiness. One of the masters at this blind school was a blind man himself; he was a most ardent Christian; he had been taught to play the organ, which, indeed, is a speciality at that school, many of the organists in the mission churches in Hankow coming from it, and one could not look upon his face without feeling a conviction that his spiritual vision was as clear as his physical sight was dark.
There is a fourth reason, and one which applies as much to educational missions as to medical missions, why both are fitting and proper ways to teach Christianity. Christianity claims to and does benefit the whole of man, not merely his spiritual side. Mankind cannot properly be cut up and divided into spirit, mind, and body. He is essentially one, and it is most necessary that those who are learning about our religion, should understand that while we claim every benefit should come from the spiritual part of our nature, we are prepared to show that we in no wise despise the body, which needs religious care as much as the soul. Neither are we careless about the {231} mind. So the three parts of mission work go hand in hand, for preaching and prayer will heal the ills of the soul, the medical mission deals with the ills of the body, and the educational mission makes the mind healthy and strong. We shall deal with the educational side of mission work later on.
One of the movements which will affect Christianity all over the East has had its origin in Korea. Just as the suffering and miserable heart of the individual man is that which Christianity finds most suitable for its home, so it is with a nation. It is at the moment of national adversity and humiliation that religious movements most readily rise. Korea had looked upon herself as the equal of Japan. From Korea came much of the civilisation which adorned Japan before the great Western movement. When Prince Ito with the eyes of a statesman was realising that Japan must either accept the domination of the West or its civilisation, Korea was immovably entrenched in her belief in her national greatness and in her contempt for the Western world. So Westernised Japan has overcome her ancient rival and teacher, and Korea is humbled to the very dust.
In many ways that humiliation is rendered more poignant owing to the lack of sympathy between the races. Though they both have taken their civilisation from China and have a common classical literature, they are diametrically opposed in many things. The Japanese are essentially a clean race. {233} They wash constantly; they will not enter a house with their shoes on their feet. No one who knows them will accuse the Koreans of excess in cleanliness. On the other hand, the Japanese very frequently lack modesty. Many are the stories that residents will tell; and we have seen the Japanese women clothed in the garb of Eve appear in the public bath and even in the street. On the other hand, the Koreans may be corrupt and immoral, but they are modest. The women of Seoul as they walk through the streets cover their faces with their green cloaks, till one almost thinks one must be in a Mohammedan land. Those green cloaks are a perpetual reminder of the ancient hostility between the races.
The picturesque story is worth telling. The Japanese, knowing of the absence of the Korean armies, determined to surprise Seoul. They thought they had succeeded, when to their amazement they saw the walls of Seoul covered with what they took for warlike Koreans. The ready wit of the women had saved their town. They had dressed themselves in their husbands' clothes and so deceived their hereditary foes. The Emperor rewarded them by giving them the right to wear the man's green coat, which they wear not in coat fashion, but over their heads, the sleeves partially veiling their faces; and as one wanders down the main street of Seoul and watches the modest but gaily-dressed crowd of Koreans—the women in their green coats with red ribbons, the men in white garments wearing their curious top-knots {234} and quaint hats—one understands the antipathy they must feel for the short, muscular, soberly-dressed Japanese who by his courage and daring has subdued them and now tramples on their national susceptibilities and ignores their national rights.
There are several missions in Korea, but there is one which, primâ facie, would call for no special remark. It ministers to the white-robed Koreans in the same way that many another mission ministers to these Eastern peoples—teaching and preaching. Externally there is nothing exceptional about the missionaries. I will not say that their mission is uninteresting, but it is unexciting. They are Americans by nationality and Scotch by name and blood, and they follow the national Presbyterian faith with all its cautious teaching, with all its prim simplicity. No one would regard them as the mission that was likely to create a great excitement or raise a great enthusiasm, neither indeed do they so regard themselves. Their conception of mission work was the sensible and reasonable plan of converting a sufficient number to make them teachers and preachers, and then having educated them, to send them out to convert their own fellow-countrymen. In 1906 and the beginning of 1907 they were filled with dark forebodings for the future of Korea. The temporary occupation of Korea by the Japanese was obviously going to be changed into a permanency. The murder of the Queen had shown what the Japanese would do, and the victory over Russia had shown what they {235} could do. Korea was at their mercy. Subdued yet not conquered in spirit, the missionaries, knowing their people well, foresaw that a bitter friction must arise between the two races; that rebellions and the consequent fierce repression must bring to their infant church a time of great trouble; and so, like the wise Christian men that they were, they took themselves to the Christian's weapon, namely, prayer. They earnestly prayed that in some way a great blessing should fall on their converts. That prayer was seemingly unanswered, the grasp of Japan was not relaxed. Except for the wisdom and gentleness of the great Prince Ito, there was nothing but oppression and sufferings for the Koreans. The Japanese army had learnt not only their military art but their statecraft in Germany, and the latter is traditionally harsh. Break, crush, and bully are the maxims which find general acceptance in the Prussian Court. Prince Ito, however, was a great admirer of English imperial policy with its maxims of justice to the weak, mercy to the conquered, and reverence for all national traditions; but Prince Ito could not control the Japanese soldiers, and the moans of the oppressed Koreans echoed throughout her land.
In the spring of 1907 the Presbyterian Mission held what is called its country class—that is to say, that the men who had been converted were summoned from all the country villages to the town of Pyeng-Yang, and there they attended for several days' instructions in the Christian faith. This {236} excellent rule enables Christians who believe but who are ignorant to acquire a more ultimate knowledge of the truths of Christianity. These meetings are wholly unemotional; they are in no sense revival meetings, nor even devotional; they are essentially educational. Their object is to teach and not to excite. For the Scottish-American has a double national tradition that knowledge is strength. These meetings had been held one or two days; they had followed their usual uneventful if beneficial course, and showed every probability of ending as they had begun, when one of the Koreans rose from the centre of the room and interrupted the ordinary course of the meeting by asking leave to speak. As he insisted, permission was given him. He declared that he had a sin on his conscience that forbade him listening to the teaching of the missionaries in peace, and that further he must declare this sin. The Presbyterian missionaries do not encourage this kind of open confession of sin, but still to get on with the meeting and to quiet him they gave him leave to speak. He then declared that he had felt some months ago a feeling of bitterness towards one of the missionaries, a Mr. Blair, who was our informant. Mr. Blair assured him that so far from feeling that there was any need for this confession he regarded the matter as trivial, and hoping again to bring the meeting back to the point he suggested that they should say the Lord's Prayer. Hardly had he uttered in Korean the words "Our Father," when {237} a sudden emotion seemed to rush over all those who were there present. The missionaries described it as at once one of the most awful and one of the most mysterious moments of their lives. They were not revivalists; they had not encouraged it; they did not believe in it; they disliked an emotional religion with which they had no sympathy; and here they were in the face of a movement which was beyond, not only their experience, but that of the greatest revivalists. They tried to stop it, but unavailingly. The Koreans, unlike the Chinese, always sit upon the floor, and as the missionaries looked out over the meeting from the platform on which they stood, they saw the faces of their converts racked with every form of mental anguish. Some were swinging themselves forward striking their heads on the ground, hoping, as it were, to obtain by insensibility peace from their torturing thoughts; some were in the presence of an awful terror; some were leaping up demanding to be heard, longing to free their souls from the weight they felt would crush them; others with set faces were resolutely determined not to yield to the inspiration of the spirit which suggested that they should gain relief by frank confession. The missionaries having failed to bring the meeting to a close, submitted to what they felt was the will of a higher Being, and the meeting went on till fatigue produced a temporary and a partial rest. Though the meeting was closed, the missionaries learnt afterwards that many {238} Koreans went on all through the night in agonised prayer.
The next day they hoped the thing was over, and that the incident might be reckoned among those strange experiences which workers in the mission field must occasionally expect to encounter; but not so—the meeting next night was the same as its predecessor. They noticed several interesting facts. One, for instance, was, that the women were far less affected than the men. The movement did not reach them till later, and never so fully. Another remarkable thing about this movement was that though the Methodists are by tradition a revivalist body, and though they have a vigorous mission working in that town, yet the revival only spread to their converts after many days, and then neither with the spontaneity nor the fire with which it had been manifested in the Presbyterian Mission.
Of the reality of the confession of sin there could be no doubt. One man, for instance, confessed to having stolen gold from a local gold-mining company, and produced the wedge of gold which he had stolen, and asked them to treat him as he deserved. The manager of the company luckily was a European, who wisely refused to punish a man who had so spontaneously confessed his theft. Many of the sins that were confessed would not bear repetition. Some confessed even to such awful sins as that of murder of parents. One man in particular, a trusted servant of the mission, resisted confession, and day by day {239} became more and more racked with mental agony, till the missionaries feared that his health would not endure the terrible strain of such mental anguish, and they advised him to make a free confession of his sins. At last he came to them with a sum of money in his hand; he had raised it by selling some houses which he had bought as a provision for his old age, and he confessed to the sin that was torturing him. He had done what is constantly done in the East—he had peculated. His position had been that of an agent whom the missionaries employ to make many of their small payments, and out of each of these payments he had taken "a squeeze." With these he had bought the houses which now he had sold. He left the missionaries happy in heart though empty in pocket.
This movement spread more or less over the Presbyterian missions in Korea, but never with such intensity as manifested at Pyeng-Yang. We heard it spoken of by a non-Christian Korean, a member of the Court of the Emperor of Korea. He had heard of it, and said men were saying this movement is a wonderful thing, for under its influence men confessed crimes of which even torture would not have induced them to own themselves guilty. A Chinese merchant also heard of it in Manchuria. The man came down to Pyeng-Yang, and happened to stop with the Chinese merchants. He mentioned that there were Christians in Manchuria, and the Chinese merchants immediately took an interest. When he asked what {240} they knew of the Christians, they answered, "Good men, good men." One of them was owed by a Korean twenty dollars, who would only allow that he owed ten, and the merchant having no means of redress, had written off the debt; but when this revival took place, the Korean came with the other ten dollars together with interest, and what of course would appeal even more to the Eastern mind, with the frank confession that he had lied. This practical illustration of the effects of Christianity greatly impressed the Chinese.
When we arrived at Pyeng-Yang the movement was over. We went to some of their meetings. They were very common-place ordinary meetings. All that struck us was that there was a tone of reverence, a sense of reality, which made one feel that Christianity was as sincere in Korea as it is in our own land.
The movement has spread from Korea to Manchuria. In Manchuria the movement had not quite the same spontaneity that it had in Korea; it savoured more of the revival meetings of the West. It needed the stirring words of a great preacher, Mr. Goforth, to start it, yet there were one or two curious manifestations of power. One is worth telling. One brother was heard expostulating with another; he was asking why his brother had, forgetful of his family dignity or "face," confessed to sins which brought not only himself but his family into disrespect. The other answered, "When the Spirit of God takes hold of a man, he cannot help speaking." {241} Two still more curious instances are worth recording: one in which two soldiers who were not Christians were so moved that they confessed their sins; another which seems to prove the presence of a force exterior to human influence or to the emotions caused by eloquence or moving hymns. An elder of the Church had forgotten or been detained from going to one of these meetings; when the speakers went to inquire next day why he had not been there, he asked them in return to tell him what they had done at the meeting, and they told him that many people had confessed their sins. He was deeply interested, and said: "I was sitting in my house at the hour of your meeting; I suddenly felt as if all my sins were laid before me, and I realised as I had never done before my many shortcomings."
And so the movement has spread through Manchuria to China. If it has lost something of its freshness, something of its force, it still remains a movement that may accomplish great things. No one who has read the history of the Wesleyan movement, and of the wonderful manifestations that accompanied its commencement, will look without interest and expectation for the work which this movement may accomplish. Let us hope that it will bring to China a sense of reality in spiritual things which the present materialist teaching threatens to eliminate from her national life.
At the great Shanghai Conference we always spoke of the "Church in China," implying thereby that there was to be one Christian body in the Chinese empire. This ideal is lofty and not impossible. There is a reasonable expectation that the great intellectual movement in China will render the Chinese very ready to accept new ideas, and the rate of conversion in China gives one reasonable hope that the new ideas may be Christian and not those of Western materialism. If China becomes Christian there will no doubt be a great tendency to accept the unity of Christianity as an essential doctrine. As a race they clearly tend towards union as much as the Anglo-Saxon race tends towards disunion. The British empire has been held together by its fear of its enemies; the Chinese empire has been held together through their natural love of union, which is the dominant characteristic of the race. Remove the enemies of the British empire and she will naturally divide, but force the Chinese empire apart and she will naturally return to one body. Chinese Christianity will, if it is truly Chinese, tend to one body. This truth, which I think would have been {243} allowed by the whole Shanghai Conference, opens up a train of thought which is full of foreboding and yet of hope.
One obvious criticism of what was said of the Church in China was kept largely out of sight at the Shanghai Conference, namely, that as the Roman Communion far outnumbers the whole of the non-Roman Communions put together, the Church in China, therefore, if it is to consist of all Christians, will be something very different to what the majority of those present at that Conference would like. Some men maintain that the Chinese love of unity will not go so far as to compel the union between Protestant and Catholic, and that in China the schism which has rent Christianity in twain in Europe will be continued. I would ask those who think thus if they think this is desirable even if it is possible. Once foreign influence and support has been removed, would not such a division soon produce a state of great friction, resulting probably in the destruction of the smaller body. But it is most improbable; a race which has habitually put together Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism will have no difficulty at all in uniting Romanism and Protestantism. I do not mean to say that Rome will conquer; it does not seem likely. The power of the Romans is great when they are preaching our common Christianity, but their peculiar doctrine of the pre-eminence of Rome is most unattractive to the Chinaman. After all, Rome is a very small place to a man who lives in China. Think how little {244} we know of ancient Chinese history, and realise how little China knows of the history of our civilisation. Home at the present day is to the Chinaman merely the capital of Germany's weakest ally. The reasoning of the universality of the Roman Church, always faulty, seems almost ridiculous in China. The Chinaman on one side is conversant with America, on the other side she is in touch with India, while on the north she has a frontier which stretches for thousands and thousands of miles between her and the great Orthodox Church of Russia. One's eyes naturally turn to this immense line of frontier between Confucianism and Christianity, and one wonders how any Chinaman can possibly think of Rome as the one Catholic Church. If the Roman Church, with its foreign domination and its tacit acceptance of the fact that only members of the Italian nation can receive Divine authority to guide the Church on earth, is unattractive to the mind of the man who lives in the Far East, on the other hand its ornate and dignified services must be most attractive to a race whose national philosophy puts pre-eminent weight on dignity and decorum in dress and demeanour. If the Roman Church could give up her Latin services, could frankly become a national Church which owed no obedience to any Pontiff outside China, one would regret the possibility but one would have to allow the probability of her complete domination over the Chinese empire. Again one's eyes turn to the northern frontier, and one asks oneself {245} whether that great Orthodox Church, the dignity of whose services is without parallel, and which frankly accepts the national Church as a reasonable Christian position, will not one day be a large factor in the future missionary work in China. After what we had seen and heard at the Centenary Conference, and after we had realised the great extent of the Roman work, we felt that till one understood why the Russian Church conducted no missionary work one could not understand the whole missionary problem; for when the Russian Church does undertake such work, her geographical position must render her important.
The whole of this question is of the greatest interest to the student of missions, but especially to an Anglican. The great value of the Anglican position has always seemed that, to use an election phrase, we offer a platform on which all those who call themselves Christian might possibly unite. The great rent which divides Protestant from Catholic seems not only to make it impossible for Latin Christians to unite with the Teuton Protestant Churches, but also renders it hard for the latter to unite with the great Churches of Eastern Europe. Of course all this has only an academic interest in England, but in China with its rapidly growing Christianity and an intellectual revolution surging forward to unknown possibilities, all this is of vital interest. What will Chinese Christianity be? Is it to be an ornate Christianity to which the converts {246} of Rome and possibly the converts of the Orthodox Church will adhere, an ornate Church sullied no doubt with the faults of her parents, a Church possibly attractive to the Buddhist, for he will not need to traverse any great distance in thought to enter her portals; or is it to be a great Protestant Church, cold and bare, vigorous and energetic, a Church in which the uniform of the Teuton mind will sit badly on the Chinese convert, a Church which may in many things represent truly the will of our mutual Master, but a Church which leaves the Oriental cold and miserable, while it practically tears from our Bible those endless chapters on the decoration of Temple and Tabernacle, those constant commands to an exact and ordered ritual.
I write with what the Germans call "objectivity"; the Teuton within me dislikes ritual; but the Chinaman is no Teuton, and the Chinaman loves ritual as much as any man on earth. No one who has been received by a Chinese Viceroy in his Yamen can have the very slightest doubt on this subject. If the Protestant bodies hope to force on the Chinese a non-ornate form of Christianity, they will be doing exactly what the Italian Church did to the Northern races, and which produced the great upheaval of the Reformation. The Reformation was essentially the rebellion of the Teuton mind against a forced acceptance of the Italian view of Christianity. To force on the Chinese converts a Christianity shorn of all ritual and display will produce in years to come some similar upheaval. {247} There is yet a third possibility. The Anglican position affords the means of avoiding such an upheaval, and of permitting a union of all Christians on the basis of an ornate service and evangelical Christianity. For while it permits a service equal in dignity to that of Rome or of Russia, it insists equally with the bodies who pride themselves on the name of Protestant on the supreme value of the Bible.
The very hope I have that Christianity will conquer China makes me fearful for the future. The age of persecution is past, the blood of the martyrs has been shed, and the seed of a Church freely sown. But after the age of persecution comes the age of heresy, and to preserve Christianity in China from future dangers, not only is union necessary, but a well-ordered Church bound by creeds, respecting tradition, which shall embrace all those Christians by whomsoever they have been converted who love the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The great danger I fear for the future Church in China is one of Eastern and not Western origin. I do not fear the domination of Rome. I doubt that the Protestant Communions will succeed in ultimately persuading the Chinese to worship God in a bare building and without vestments.
China and Japan will, if they are conquered by Christianity, be neither Protestant nor Catholic any more than we are Nestorian or Eutychian. Their divisions, their dangers, their struggles, will arise from a wholly different set of circumstances. I fear {248} the dangers will come from an effort to incorporate Buddhism and Christianity in one religion. This is all the more probable as it has doubtless happened before. Nestorianism and Buddhism are the probable parents of the present Chinese Lamaism. It is, however, not given for us to see into the future, but we can look back into the past, and we can see that our predecessors in the faith nearly invariably made the mistake of supposing that the old dangers were going to recur, and of therefore depending on the old measures of defence.
The future Church in the Far East must fight her own battles. She must solve her own problems. All we can do is to hand over to her the truth in all its fulness, and teach her to look for divine guidance, to forget such words as Protestant, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, and Anglican; to learn merely the word "Christian" and the word "Love." If Far Eastern Christianity will have its battles to fight, it will have also its message to give to the West, "that they without us should not be made perfect." It may be that the message of the East to the West will be that as God is One, so must His followers be; that strong and mighty as is the West, there is in her an element of the very greatest weakness; that the discord that reigns between Christian and Christian, between race and race, between class and class, is not the will of the Creator, but is the result of the national sins of the white races. The Far East, with its greater power of unity, {249} may illumine the West with a higher conception of this great virtue, and the world may be a far holier and happier place when the yellow race has preached to the world the great doctrine of peace on earth and goodwill to men.
I have before had occasion to refer to the great influence education has had on the awakening of China, and I think the Americans can fairly claim to have been the greatest workers in this field. The Roman Catholics have from time immemorial been most careful to train children in Christian truth, and they have wonderful institutions for this purpose. In 1852 the Jesuits founded the College of St. Ignatius for the education of native priests, and since that day they have founded many educational institutions. They have besides a very large number of primary schools, intended originally merely to preserve their converts from too intimate contact with the heathen world, and they have also many higher schools. In those schools they teach modern knowledge, making a speciality of teaching French, which they can do with great efficiency, as many of their number belong to the French nation. In the German sphere of influence there are Catholic schools where German is taught; but though the work is excellent, it cannot be compared with the work of the Americans, who were really the pioneers of higher education in China.
When the American missionaries began to arrive, a new departure was inaugurated in education. The school and college were no longer places where Christians were simply educated; they were places where Christians, confident in the truth of their teaching, gave away to heathen and Christian alike all the knowledge that the West possessed. The conception was bold; it was grand. It showed a statesmanlike grip of the situation and a courage which can only come from a consciousness of the strength of the Christian position, that Christianity was not a narrow religion fearing free inquiry. Christianity, on the contrary, was a religion which could only be appreciated by those who had the very fullest knowledge. These teachers boldly declared that ignorance was the mother of religious error, and therefore the duty of every Christian was at once to remove ignorance and to share with every one the knowledge that can alone make the world capable of truly appreciating God's power as manifested in every department of science.
So these schools and colleges grew up. Those who believed in this policy did not belong to any one denomination, though they did belong to one nation—America. There were many opponents to this policy. It was argued that the duty of the mission bodies was to preach the Gospel, and that however advantageous education might be, it was not the business of the Christian to give it; but whatever doubt there was then, facts have been too strong for those who {255} opposed the educational policy, and any one travelling through China realises more and more how the Mission that has spent money on education is the Mission that has the power of expansion. The Mission that has no educational system is always cabined and confined for want of money and men. They are always writing home to ask that another man shall be sent out; some one has broken down or some new opportunity for work has been opened, and so "they must press upon the Home Board the great importance of sending out at as early a date as possible one or more helpers." The Home Board is always answering those letters, expressing "every sympathy with their anxiety," but in reality pouring cold water on their enthusiasm, and pointing out that the supply of men is limited and that the supply of money is yet more limited. Thus the opportunity passes and the mission cannot expand. The same little church stands filled with converts; the same mission building houses the tired out and climate-stricken white missionaries. Such a mission, while inspiring the greatest respect for the heroism of the missionaries, arouses also a feeling of despair. How is it possible that a mission like this can really solve the problem of making Christianity a national religion? How can spiritual ministrations be performed by aliens, supported by alien money collected from a possibly hostile race?
A very different effect is made on the mind of the onlooker when he comes upon some mission that {256} has made education a speciality. There all is life, vigour and success. One of the most successful of the American missionaries, Bishop Roots, of the Episcopal Church of America, explained the system by which he is succeeding in making Christianity an indigenous religion. At his large college, presided over by Mr. Jackson, many are heathen. Some go through the college and imbibe a certain respect for Christian ethics, which will not only make them a benefit to China but will make an intellectual atmosphere sympathetic to Christian teaching. Some, however, will become Christians who will mostly go out into the world and take their place, and a high place too, in the leadership of the future China, as much owing to the excellence of the teaching that they have received as to the high morality which is produced by their Christian faith. Then there will be a few who will feel a distinct call to go out as missionaries to their own people. These men will have no temptation to become Christians for the loaves and fishes, because, owing to the excellence of the education that they have received and the great prosperity that is dawning over China, they could command a large salary in the open market. These highly-educated clergy are able to go out and put Christianity to the Chinese in a manner which no white man could hope to equal.
What Bishop Roots told me can be well illustrated by two little incidents. In Hankow, where his work is increasing by leaps and bounds, the Lutheran {257} Mission failed, and therefore it resigned the chapel to him. He accepted readily, and soon his Chinese clergy were preaching to crowded congregations. The second incident was this: I expressed a wish to make a present to one of these Christian scholars, and I asked what books he would like to receive. I was told that such books as Balfour's "Defence of Philosophic Doubt" and Haldane's "Pathway to Reality" were the kind that would appeal to such young men. Not only will these men carry the Gospel to their fellow-countrymen far more efficiently than can the alien, but they will to a great extent be able to live on the subscriptions of their congregations, and so the communion to which they belong will become not only self-propagating but self-supporting.
To understand the importance of this controversy the various aims of missionary education must be realised, and it is because those aims are different that the controversy has been confused and the value of education as an assistance to missionary effort in China misunderstood. There are really seven aims: three which are common to all missionary effort in all lands, and four which especially apply to countries like China which are passing through a transitional period of thought. The three which are common to all missionary effort are (1) evangelisation; (2) edification of the Christian body; (3) education of preachers and teachers. The four that are peculiar to China in her present transitional condition are (4) preparation of secular leaders; (5) leavening of the whole public opinion; (6) opposition {258} to Western materialism; (7) association of Christianity with learning.
The arguments for the first three are applicable to every land. Evangelisation can no doubt be carried on most efficiently before the mind has received any intellectual bias. The Jesuit priest is reported to have said, "If I have the child till he is ten, I do not care who has him afterwards;" and therefore, as in all the world so in China, the Roman Catholics have always made a great effort to educate children. They have preferred those who have had no home-ties, orphans and waifs, and have by this policy built up a huge Christian population numbering over a million. This population is thoroughly Christian in sentiment; they have never known an idolatrous atmosphere, and they live to a great extent by themselves in communities. While they are thoroughly Christian, they are also absolutely Chinese; no effort is made to Westernise the children in any way. From this great Christian body Catholic priests are drawn, and I believe so completely Christian are they, that no difference is made between them and white men by such an important body as the Jesuits. When other Christian bodies began missionary work in China they also started schools, but the difference of their schools was that they aimed much more at the second than at the first object. The school was not merely a place to attract homeless children and bring them up as Christians; it was also intended to edify and adorn with knowledge the children of Christians. {259} Non-Christians were largely admitted, but I think that I am right in stating that the object was much more edification than evangelisation. In a corrupt society like China, where all knowledge is intermingled with vice, it is inevitable that Christian schools should be erected for the Christian body, and it is equally inevitable that those who are non-Christians but who admire the schools greatly should try and enter them. The feature of these schools for the most part, though not invariably, in contrast to the earlier Roman Catholic schools, is that Western education is to a certain extent, varying in each mission, superadded to Chinese learning; and therefore, though the school is essentially a school for Chinese learning, the children as a rule learn something also of Western knowledge.
Out of these schools naturally arise others which have the third aim of missionary education as their object, namely, the preparation of preachers and teachers who in the future shall be the real missionary body of China. Every thinking man realises that the alien missionary can only exist in a brief transitional period. The true teachers of a race must be those who are linked to it by ties of blood and tradition, and nearly every mission has therefore set to work to create a native ministry which is sooner or later to take over the task of the conversion of China. This is regarded by many, nay, by most, as the great aim of missionary educational work. The degree of preparation, however, differs widely in different missions. {260} Some missions, drawing their teachers from the lower ranks of society, are quite content to give them an education which will enable them to lead and teach the lower class among whom they move; other missions held that the Christian teacher must not merely he able to lead the ignorant but must be able also to meet in controversy those who may be well equipped with Western knowledge; and therefore while in some missions the education of native pastors is conducted solely in Chinese, in others the teaching is in English, to enable the teachers and preachers to keep abreast with the thought of Western countries and to defend their land by pen and sermon as much against the errors of the West as against the superstition of the East.
It is in the preparation of these highly educated men that an opportunity is given for the fourth aim of missionary education in China: one which would not be applicable in every country, but which is vitally important in China, namely, the preparation of secular leaders in China. To understand the importance of this we must be always reminding our readers that China is in the midst of an intellectual revolution. She is passing through a period which is in some way comparable to the period of the Renaissance in Europe, but which exceeds it both in importance and in danger, because in Europe, as the name shows, it was essentially a reintroduction of forgotten but not new knowledge with its subsequent enlargement and development. In China {261} the revolution is caused by the introduction of foreign knowledge, which is absolutely inharmonious and in many ways opposed to native thought. In Europe the foundations of knowledge were always secure; it was only the superstructure that was altered. In China the very foundations are being uprooted; the result is that China is at the present without leaders, except for a narrow band of men, who owing to the foresight of some Christians in the past have received a Western education. There are plenty of old-fashioned leaders, who have led or failed to lead the sleepy China of years ago—men of considerable ability but in a state of great mental confusion, owing to their powerlessness to comprehend the many aspects of the civilisation which is being forced upon them and which is unnatural to them. They cannot understand our currency questions, our financial operations; they only dimly realise the possibilities and problems connected with military and naval armaments. They yearn for the years gone by, but an inexorable fate urges their country forward into new positions, which bring with them new responsibilities, new powers and new dangers. China demands men to lead her through this terrible state of confusion and change, and she turns round to find the men who understand Western civilisation, who have the character and the knowledge necessary to deal with all these problems. Just at this moment, any man of ability who has an intimate knowledge of Western things stands a chance of high {262} preferment. It may be that this demand will be satisfied by the number of students China has sent abroad to be educated, but the size of China and the great demand for men skilled in Western learning make many of those having a most intimate knowledge of China confident that this is an opportunity that is still open, that it is still possible to direct to some degree the minds and thought of those who will lead China as statesmen, as authors, and as men of learning. The production of these men can be carried on to great advantage in the same establishment as that in which the clergy are receiving their education; the educated clergyman, the future pressmen and statesmen of China are in this way brought in close contact with one another, and even from one establishment the good that may come to China is quite incalculable.
This brings us to the fifth great aim of education, the leavening of public opinion in China so that Christianity will find ground prepared for its sowing. The destruction of superstition, the production of Western ethics make Christianity a reasonable instead of an unreasonable religion to those who hear it preached. Clearly to leaven public opinion influence must be applied to those who will control such powers as those of the press and the school; the teacher and the writer are the men who should be especially aimed at; and to attain this aim, it is necessary to institute and maintain {263} places where higher knowledge is taught rather than only primary schools.
But there is another object, the sixth aim for education in China. One of the unpleasant features in the revolution that is going on in Chinese thought is the present introduction of Western materialism, which to judge by the example in Japan, will grow more rankly after transplantation. The West has a double aspect when seen from the East; it is a Christian world where women are pure and men are honourable; it is a rich world where there are no moral obligations. The first aspect is the one that is represented by the missionary; the second aspect is too often taught by the sailor and merchant classes; and when the Chinaman asks what is the thought and the base of Western teaching, the Japanese materialist, pointing to the example set by many Western lives, declares that Christianity in Europe is like Buddhism in Japan, a religion that at one time had many adherents but whose influence is fast waning, and it is in resisting this materialism that the Missionary College and University perform perhaps their most important task.
The men who are to do this work must be men most highly skilled in Western knowledge; they must understand science and be able to meet a follower of Haeckel in debate, they must be competent to discuss sociology with disciples of Herbert Spencer, and they must not be afraid to dip into the {264} study of comparative religion; in addition, they must be qualified to write excellent Chinese and to be firm in their Christian faith. The production of such men as these should also satisfy the seventh and last aim of Christian education: it will associate learning with Christianity in the minds of the Chinese. The keynote of Chinese thought is its great admiration for learning. In China there is no caste or class, no division except between the ignorant and the learned; if Christianity is associated with ignorance, its influence will be lost, and it is no mean object to make Christianity and knowledge in the mind of the Chinaman two parts of one great idea.
It is obvious that as missionary societies lay weight on one or the other of these objects, they will support a different kind of school. If their object is the first, they will seek to educate the orphan and the waif, and the school and the orphanage will be, as they are in the Roman Catholic body, intimately joined together. If the object is to edify the Christian body and to provide it with a suitable pastor, the missionary body will erect primary schools for Christian children and theological and normal schools to complete their school system. If, on the other hand, the missionary body aims at leavening the whole thought of China, of capturing China for Christ, or if it aims at defending China against the terrible pest of Western materialism—which will turn the light that China now has into black darkness and harden her for ever against Christian teaching—the High School, {265} College, and the University will be the objects on which the money will be spent. This last has been the object of the American bodies; and I think China owes a great debt of gratitude, under God, to the great width of thought and grasp of the situation that the American mind has exhibited.
One of the highest testimonials to the wisdom of the missionaries in inaugurating an educational policy has been given by the Chinese Government. Imitation is the sincerest flattery, and missionary education has its imitator in no less a body than the Chinese Government. The Chinese have always loved education, but the education they admired was the literary education which had for its commencement the Chinese character and for its end the Chinese Classics; their system of teaching was different from our own; they were far greater believers in learning by rote than the most conservative English schoolmaster who ever set a long repetition lesson to his pupils. It is a strange sight to see an old-fashioned Chinese school, the boys all shouting out at the top of their voices the names of the characters whose meaning they do not understand. An essential part of the performance is the clamorous shouting; the louder they shout, the harder they are working and the quicker they think they learn, so when the visitor surprises a class their voices are not raised above a pleasant and reasonable elevation, but after he has been {267} discovered by the class, the shouts increase in volume till the noise is only to be compared to the paroquets' cage in the Zoological Gardens.
Another peculiarity of the school is that all the pupils turn their backs to their master; the doctrine being that if they were allowed to watch their master, it would be perfectly impossible for him to detect their many little acts of dishonesty. The missionaries at first painfully imitated these schools; they felt that it was impossible to trust the children of their converts to the heathen atmosphere of a Chinese school, and at the same time they realised what great value and importance was placed by the Chinese on education. These schools led on to a sort of middle school called "shu-yuen," which existed in all big towns, which in its turn led on to four Universities, but they have been, I believe, for some time in an inefficient condition. Still for good or for evil the system was there, and long before our own new departure in education, the Chinese were quite accustomed to the idea that the boy who had sufficient ability might climb the ladder of learning, from class to class, from school to school, till at last he took the coveted Hanlin Degree. So high a value did the Chinese place on education, that it was possible, and it did indeed happen, that boys of the very humblest parentage climbed that ladder till they reached the most exalted positions.
The first sign of an alteration of this system was {268} the book that was issued after the Chinese-Japanese war by Chang-Chih-Tung. That remarkable statesman realised after China's crushing defeat that a general reform was absolutely necessary if she was to maintain her place among the free and independent nations of the world, and he wrote a book entitled "China's Only Hope," in which he strongly advocated the acceptance in some measure of Western education. His scheme is the one which practically obtains now in China, that is of making Chinese learning the foundation on which Western education is to be placed. He had a great disbelief, like most Chinese, in the difficulty of acquiring Western education. He writes: "Comparative study of foreign geography, especially that of Russia, France, Germany, England, Japan, and America; a cursory survey of the size and distance, capital, principal ports, climate, defences, wealth, and power of these (the time required to complete this course ten days)." It is very hard for the Chinese literati to understand the difficulties of acquiring Western learning. Chang was a man of no mean intellect, and one of the reasons why he was so anxious to preserve Chinese learning was because he realised the destructive effect Western learning has on Oriental faiths. He hoped to preserve the ethics of Confucianism and to attach to them the practical knowledge of the West, which he realised was a necessity for China. He summed up the position by saying, "Western knowledge is practical, Chinese learning is moral."
The immediate result of this book was absolutely the reverse of what its author intended. A million copies of the book had been issued, and it circulated throughout China. It raised a storm of opposition, and probably was one of the causes which produced the Boxer outbreak; but the failure of Boxerdom and the Russo-Japanese war convinced China that Chang-Chih-Tung was right, and his book may now be taken as the book which best expresses the intellectual position of the moderate reformer.
He first deals with that very difficult question of finance. He proposes to finance the schools with a wholesale disendowment of the two religions in which he does not believe, Buddhism and Taoism. He writes: "Buddhism is on its last legs, Taoism is discouraged because its devils have become irresponsive and inefficacious." He then suggests that seven temples out of ten should be used both as regards their building and their funds for educational purposes. But he has a sympathetic way of treating the disendowed clergy of China. He suggests that they could be comforted by a liberal bestowal of official distinction upon themselves and upon their relatives. Who can tell if Welsh Disestablishment would not be popular if all the clergy were to be made archdeacons and their brothers and fathers knights. But he has a historical precedent for disendowment—Buddhism has apparently experienced the process of disendowment three times; but as the last disendowment was {270} in 846, on our side of the world we should not regard it as a precedent of much value.
In establishing schools he adopts five principles. The first is one to which we have already referred, that the new and the old are to be woven into one, the Chinese Classics are to be made by some magical process the foundation of the teaching of Western education. The second is a very un-Western but possibly a sound way of looking at the question. He puts forward two objects of education: first, government; secondly, science. The first includes all knowledge necessary for the government of mankind—geography, political economy, fiscal science, the military art, and though he does not mention it, I suppose history. The second is natural science, and includes mathematics, mining, therapeutics, sound, light, chemistry, &c. The third principle is one that we rarely act on in our own country, namely, that the child shall be only educated in the subjects for which he has a natural aptitude. The fourth principle is one that applies absolutely to China; it is the abolition of what is called the three-legged essay, a complicated feat of archaic and artificial writing which only exists for the purpose of examination, something analogous to our Latin verses. The fifth principle shows that China is as far ahead of us in some ways as she is behind us in others. China has passed beyond the stage of free education to the stage of universal scholarship; all students are paid, and this has brought about a great abuse; {271} men study merely to obtain a living who have no aptitude for learning, and on whom educational money is really wasted, and so he abolishes payment.
His Excellency closes his advice with a suggestion that societies for the promotion of education should be formed. The Chinaman loves these little social clubs and gatherings. His chess club, his poetry club, his domino club, are national institutions. Why not, suggests His Excellency, have an educational club, or as I suppose we should call it, a mutual improvement society. Thus wrote the great Viceroy who more than any other man prevented the spread of the Boxer outbreak from desolating Central and Southern China. During that Boxer rebellion all advance was impossible, but after that overflowing flood of disorder was passed, the reforms suggested by Chang-Chih-Tung began to be seriously considered, and on January 13, 1903, an Imperial Edict was put forth renovating and organising, at least on paper, the whole educational system of China. It would not be China if there were not a great deal of sound sense in that edict; it would not be China if on paper the organisation did not seem to be perfect; it would not be China if as a matter of fact the whole scheme were not to a great extent a failure.
The scheme was very complete. It began at the bottom and continued through every grade of education to the top. First there were to be infant schools; these were to receive children from three to {272} seven years old, and their object was to give the first idea of right and to keep the children from the dangers of the street. These schools were to be succeeded by primary schools of two departments, and children were to enter the schools as they left the infant school when they were seven years old, and to continue in them till they were twelve. The subjects to be taught were morals, Chinese language, arithmetic, history, geography, physical science and gymnastics. At present there was to be no compulsory attendance, but that was looked forward to as the future ideal. The schools were to be free, and the money was to be produced either by taxes or by a raid on some endowments, notably endowments of religion or of the theatre—for theatres in China are endowed. Funds were also to be found by subscription, and titles and ranks were promised to those who shall open schools; unlike our own country, where, alas, the spending time on education for the poor is only rewarded by abuse. These primary schools would lead into higher schools, and these schools would be the last on the ladder of education, in which only Chinese subjects were to be taught. Above them were to be what they call middle schools, and the subjects to be taught are roughly those which are taught in our High Schools: the Chinese Classics, Chinese language and literature, foreign languages (one at least to be obligatory), history, geography, physics, chemistry, science of government, political economy, drawing, gymnastics; and after the example of Western schools, singing {273} would be also taught. These schools lead on to the superior schools in which higher branches of the same subjects are taught. These schools were to be divided into three sections. The first section consists of law, literature, and commerce; the second section of sciences, civil engineering, and agriculture; the third section of medicine. It is noteworthy that English is necessary for those who are learning the first two sections, while German is compulsory for those who are learning the third section—in either case a third language may be added; and these superior schools were to lead on to a University, in which there were to be eight faculties. The first faculty is essentially a Chinese one, and I suppose would be best expressed to our thought by "belles-lettres," but it includes such things as rites and poetry; the second faculty is that of law; the third, history and geography; the fourth, medicine and pharmacy; the fifth, science; the sixth, agriculture; the seventh, civil engineering; the eighth, commerce.
The University course was to take three years, and there was to be a University installed in each province. The educational system was to be perfected by two other institutions—a post-graduate college where research was to be undertaken, and a normal college which was to be divided into an inferior and a superior one for the purpose, the one of preparing schoolmasters for the village schools, the other for higher education. A far less ambitious scheme for the education of girls has been added to this by {274} an edict of 1907. If my readers have waded through this scheme I am afraid that they will have come to the conclusion that China has nothing to learn from Western powers, but rather she ought to be able to teach them how to perfect their own incomplete system of education; but alas, this scheme is only on paper. In the province where H.E. Yuan-Shih-Kai ruled the schools approach in some degree to the level of Western efficiency. In every other province that I visited or heard about, the results of this edict were markedly disappointing; the only exception being where the Universities had been organised, not in the form or terms of the edict, but by Western teachers acting on more or less independent lines. For instance, there is a splendid University which has been founded by Dr. Timothy Richard in Shansi.
That University has a curious history. After the Boxer massacres compensation was demanded by the Powers both for the buildings that were destroyed and for the missionaries that were killed. A certain number of the missionary bodies refused absolutely to take any compensation. Animated by the spirit of the early Christian Church, they would not allow that the blood that had been shed for the sacred cause could be paid for in money. At this juncture there threatened to be rather an impasse. The Western Government were insisting on compensation, and it was doubtful and uncertain how that compensation should be paid. The Chinese Government sent for the Protestant missionary in whom they had the {275} greatest confidence, Dr. Timothy Richard, and he made a suggestion which was at once acceptable to both the Chinese and to the missionary body, that the money should be devoted to the founding of a great University; for ignorance is the most common cause of fanaticism, and the terrible massacres enacted in China would never have taken place had China understood, as Chang-Chih-Tung did understand, that Western science and enlightenment were for the benefit of China; so this University was founded. It was founded under peculiar terms. It is under the government of China, and yet not completely so. Dr. Timothy Richard is for a certain number of years one of its governors, and he has for ten years at least the control of the Western side of the education. He is supported by an able staff, and the Rev. W. E. Soothill is the existing President. At the end of the ten years which are just running out, the status of the University is to be altered, and is, as far as I understand, to return to the ordinary status of a Government University. I need hardly say that this University has been highly satisfactory in its teaching, and lately it has sent many of its students to England to complete their education. It suffers, however, from the absence of a proper preparatory course. One of the difficulties that lie right in the way of Chang-Chih-Tung's compromise is the difficulty of finding time for a Western preparatory course, and that is only equalled by the difficulty of finding teachers. Without time and teachers the students {276} arrive at the University period of their lives with only a very elementary knowledge of Western subjects. This college can hardly be cited as a college of high governmental efficiency, but should rather be regarded as an example of the good that a man like Dr. Timothy Richard can do if he is only allowed scope.
Another Western University under Chinese Government control is the one at Tientsin, the Pei-Yang University. That University has the advantage of being well supported by efficient Government schools at Pao-ting-fu. One interesting detail about the Pao-ting-fu school—a fact indeed which in two or three ways should give us food for thought—is that it is controlled by a Christian who is allowed by the Government, against their own regulations, to carry on an active propaganda. He was the man who, when the missionaries were murdered at Shansi, at the risk of his life brought down a message from them written in blood on a piece of stuff. Perhaps it is not extraordinary to find that such a man is producing excellent work. The Pei-Yang University, however, falls far short of our ideals of what a University standard should be. Still, as far as it goes, it is very efficient. It is taught by a very effective body of professors. It has 150 students, and teaches law, mining, and engineering. The staff is American with very few exceptions. One of those exceptions is Mr. Wang, a Chinese gentleman who received his education in London. Very little philosophy is taught, {277} only three hours a week are given for Chinese learning, and the students are expected to acquire a sufficient knowledge of Chinese subjects before they come to the University. The American professors, who proved to be a delightful set of men, allowed that there was no real scientific training given in this school. They gave the same account of their pupils which you will hear in every Chinese school. They excelled in algebra, drawing, and in the most stupendous power of committing formulæ to memory. One of the difficulties of teaching a Chinese class is that they have so little difficulty in learning by rote that they much prefer learning the text-books by heart to trying to understand them. The Law School in the Pei-Yang University is taught by a man who has no knowledge of Chinese law. This is one of the small mistakes made by American educators in China, which I think must be somewhat misleading for China in the future. To learn nothing but Western law, and to imagine that that Western law can be applied directly to the Chinese people, is to make the same mistake that Macaulay so eloquently condemned in the old East India Company. Such a system of teaching can only make unreasonable revolutionaries.
These two examples of teaching institutions carried on under the Chinese Government by Western teachers are wholly exceptional, and though excellent in their way are unimportant, and having regard to the vast mass of the population of China are inconsiderable. What are five or six {278} hundred students to a population of four hundred millions.
I must reserve the account of what I saw of the schools under Chinese management, including the Peking University, to another chapter.
Any one who has read the preceding account of the intentions of the Chinese Government might be pardoned if he supposed that after four or five years those intentions had borne fruit in an efficient system of public education. But one who has resided any time in China would only smile at the suggestion that there should be an intimate relation between what the Chinese Government professes to do and what the Chinese Government does. A Manchu Professor whose European education had enabled him to appreciate rightly the weaknesses of the Chinese race, said with great candour, "In China we begin things, but we never finish them." I had the privilege of seeing over some twenty Government schools in China, and the truth of these words was very obvious.
My hospitable host at Nanking, His Excellency Tuan-Fang, hearing that I took an interest in education, declared that he would be very glad that I should see his schools. I expressed a regret that my ignorance of the language would impede me in thoroughly understanding what was being taught. He most hospitably said that I could myself examine {280} the pupils who were studying Western subjects, and who therefore spoke English or French, and that my wife should examine the girls' schools; that we should be accompanied by two interpreters as well as by the Director of Education, and that he would examine the schools in any branch of knowledge that I chose. So we sallied forth, a very imposing body, and I was asked to select what schools I should like to visit. Of course I selected the higher grade schools in which Western subjects were taught. The first school on which we descended was the Agricultural College. The teachers of Western subjects were two Japanese and one Chinaman. They were being taught in Chinese, but I had no difficulty in finding out in the first room we entered what they were learning, because the illustrations were well known to me, for they formed part of a book of elementary botany which I had at one time studied. I suggested to Mr. Tsêng, the interpreter, that the right course would be to ask the Japanese master to select his best pupils and that then he should examine them while I should suggest the questions. It soon became clear that all the Japanese teacher was doing was to teach them to copy the illustrations in the book and nothing else. For the first time we noticed what we afterwards discovered to be the invariable rule, that the Japanese are most perfect draughtsmen, and that every class taught by the Japanese always learnt to draw perfectly, though they learnt little else. The Chinese were rather pleased that the Japanese teacher cut such a sorry figure. We then {281} went to the next room. Again there was a Japanese teacher professing to explain the model of a steam-engine; again the pupils were obviously ignorant; again we bowed and they bowed and we left the room.
The next room had quite a different atmosphere. Obviously efficient work was going on. The men were learning elementary chemistry. The teacher was a Chinaman who had been trained in London and spoke English perfectly. He was as straightforward as he was efficient. He frankly said that the progress that his pupils had made was very limited because of the short time that they had been at work. We congratulated him on the efficient way he was managing his class, and were interested to hear afterwards that he was a Christian. More than once we came across Christian Chinese, and did not know till later that they were Christians, but were struck by their efficiency, which sprang doubtless from a high ideal of work.
We left the Agricultural College and then proceeded to a High School, which is the name that is given to a first-grade school that precedes the University, and which at present stands in its place. We had in this school much the same experience. A Japanese teacher was teaching biology and was dissecting a river mussel. This was done in such a position that only two men could see what was going on. I wondered at this. Then we found out that he could not speak a word of Chinese. He dissected the {282} mussel and professed to give a lecture on its anatomy to a pupil who understood Japanese, and then the pupil delivered the lecture to the rest of the class. My Chinese interpreters were of opinion that very little could filter through the class in this way, but the Director of Education smiled sweetly. He obviously felt that in some mysterious way Western education was percolating to the pupils under his charge. As we returned along the corridor I glanced in. The biological lecture was over; I expect it was the only one of the session, and the pupils went away with admirable pictures of the river mussel. If the Japanese teachers only set up for teachers of drawing, I am certain they would have no equals in the world. A little further on in the same building there was a professed teacher of drawing. The class was not a selected class, they were drawing from a cast of a well-known Greek statue, and the work was simply admirable. I am confident that, except in an art school, you would not find better work in Europe. In the next room there was a science teacher. To impress the Director of Education, he rashly set a machine for demonstrating the vibration of sound at work. The machine would not demonstrate anything, much to the joy of my Chinese friends, solely for the reason that he had not wound it up.
I should tire my readers if I were to go on describing room after room. I cannot of course be certain how far these Japanese teachers had taught science, but at any rate their pupils had not {283} acquired any knowledge, and I think we may easily be too hard on the Japanese. One must remember that they have to supply teachers for all their own schools. Is it likely that they will be either able or willing to send into other countries efficient teachers of Western education? It is not as if Western knowledge had been for long taught in Japan. Their schools are now many and they were few. I suppose no man, no great number of men at any rate, over thirty-five or forty, are equipped with an efficient Western education in Japan. One wonders why they allow their national reputation to be injured by supposing it to be possible for them to supply these teachers of Western knowledge. Political motive suggests itself as a reason why a country so proud and so ambitious as Japan should allow a course that must eventually injure her reputation as an enlightened power.
The next school we went over was very interesting. It was what is called a Law School. The men who are learning in this school will be the future officials of China; only, following the Chinese custom, they will rarely or never hold office in the province in which they were born and educated. They were men of some standing, and it looked strange to see all these senior men, over sixty in number, sitting like children at the school desks. They were dressed, in uniform, and were under a sort of military discipline. The senior pupil gave the word of command, and at once the class sprang to attention and saluted {284} us, while we bowed first to the teacher, then to the class, after which the examination began. They were chiefly taught by Chinese, and, as one might expect, were well taught in the Chinese Classics. We were informed that the Japanese teacher was teaching them Western law; but in answer to an inquiry he explained that he had not yet taught them any law, but that he was teaching them the Japanese language, since it was through the Japanese language alone a knowledge of Western law could be attained. The reason seemed very inconclusive especially when one remembers that the Japanese know and write Chinese characters, so that it is easy to get any work that is printed in Japan printed in the character which every Chinaman can read. I have before explained the peculiar merit of the Chinese character is that people who speak different dialects and even languages can read it equally well. I pointed all this out to my Chinese friends. I think their suspicions too were aroused. Certainly this experience lends colour to the suggestion that Japan hopes that the Manchu dynasty will be succeeded, not by a Chinese dynasty, but by a dynasty from a race whose courage, energy, and intellect has already humiliated Russia and China, and may not inconceivably dominate China, should, for instance, Germany and England go to war.
We then went to see some classes taught by Americans. Two things struck me in those classes. First, for some reason I cannot understand, unless {285} there was jealousy at work, the class was small compared with the enormous classes which I had seen elsewhere—thirty, twenty, or even fifteen were the numbers that white men were teaching. The other thing which struck me was that the selection of subjects might be improved. For instance, one of the teachers was teaching Anson's Law of Contract; one could scarcely see how a knowledge of the English law of contract could be very beneficial to a resident in China; and on looking over the book that another class was using, I found that they were being instructed how to buy an advowson in England. I cannot of course say that the class was actually taught this interesting information, but it was certainly in their text-book. Another text-book was a summary of the history of the world; it was issued by an American firm. On looking up the chapter which referred to China I found the most extreme expression that an American democratic feeling could prompt used with regard to the Emperor of China. I pointed this out to the Chinamen. Apparently no one had taken the trouble to glance through the books that were being used. Such action is regrettable, because it inevitably brings Western education into disrepute, and suggests it to be something essentially revolutionary.
Another curious experience was to find a Cantonese Chinaman teaching a science class in English because he did not know Mandarin. It will be one of the limitations to the usefulness of the Hong-Kong {286} University that the bulk of the students who attend it will be Cantonese-speaking Chinamen, and they will therefore be inefficient as teachers to the great mass of the Chinese empire. A University which hopes to produce teachers which shall teach the whole of China must be a University situated in Mandarin-speaking China.
It was waxing late after we had seen these schools. We had consumed a great amount of the day in partaking of a most excellent Chinese luncheon, where the only mistake I had made—at least the only one of which I was conscious—was in not being instructed in the nature of the entertainment. I had yielded to the solicitations of my host and had partaken largely of the first two or three courses. Later on in the luncheon I was divided between the desire to be polite and a fear that the capacity of the human body might be exceeded. Our host was the Director of Education, and my interpreter whispered to me that he had a great knowledge of cooking and that "he loved a dry joke." His skill as a Director of Education, especially of Western subjects, might be doubted; but as a kindly host and an amusing companion he would have few equals in our country. This aspect of the Chinese official too often escapes the Western critic; whether efficient or inefficient, they are always agreeable men. After luncheon he begged to be excused, as he had a visit of ceremony to pay; it was the birthday of a dear friend's mother. {287} His official robes were brought out, and clothed in them he took his seat in a sedan chair and left us.
We were taken on, rather unwillingly I fancied, to see the Commercial School. The hour of the classes was over, but still the school was really instructive. What was so remarkable about it was the extreme simplicity of the place where the boys lodged. The school is not maintained by Government, but by the rich Silk Guild of Nanking. Many members of this Silk Guild, I was assured, would only be able to read and write enough to carry on their business. They are a rich and powerful body, and this school is intended for their sons. The dormitory was a slate-covered building without any ceiling, and the beds were arranged like berths on board ship, one on the top of the other, with narrow passages between them. In this way, of course, a room was made to hold a perfectly surprising number of individuals. I could not help remembering the Church Army Lodging-house at home. If we arranged the beds as they were arranged in that room, though we should double or treble the number of travellers we could house, we should incur the wrath of the sanitary authority.
Very different was the Naval School. Here reigned efficiency, for the Naval School is under the partial control of two officers lent by His Majesty's Navy. The limit of their control was the limit of their efficiency. For instance, the Chinese Government sometimes refused to let their naval officers be shown an actual ship; their idea was much the same {288} as that of the lady who forbid her son to bathe until he had learnt to swim. The difficulty was very great for anything like practical instruction. Continual representations induced the Chinese Government to allow the boys to have a trip on the river in an old ship. The moment this was accomplished there was great self-congratulation on the part of the Chinese official; from resisting this reasonable suggestion they changed to self-laudation at the wisdom of accepting the plan. The efficiency of the teaching was not only hindered by the want of practical knowledge, which is of course fatal to naval efficiency, but these officers had also to complain of what so many other Europeans have to complain—first, that the people whom they were sent to teach did not know enough English, so that much of their time was spent in teaching elementary English; secondly, that their classes were not large enough. Far away the most effective way of using a Western teacher would be to use them as we saw them used in one school. The Western teacher was supported by two or three Chinese assistants; he gave his lecture in English, and the pupils took notes; then the assistants went round the desks, looked at the notes, and explained in Chinese all those points that the pupils had not fully taken in. This plan has another advantage, that it trains these Chinese teachers to continue the work of a Western teacher, and in some ways it is a more efficient system than the normal schools. The Western teacher of course exercises a general {289} supervision over his class and maintains order and discipline.
While I had been busy with the boys' schools, my wife had been busy with the girls' schools. She was taken over the Viceroy's School, the one already described where the little girls showed such surprising knowledge of the Chinese Classics. Her experience was less happy than mine. The children were being drilled by a Japanese instructress who could hardly play at all; she used a small gem harmonium, and the drilling was little better than a feeble country dance. The same instructress was responsible for a singing lesson; she played with one hand on a harmonium, and allowed the children to bawl as they pleased without either time or tune. All the pupils at this school were day scholars.
The interpreter who conducted Mrs. King, the Consul's wife, and my wife over this and the following schools had removed his own daughter to a mission school, thinking she would receive better teaching. As regards the musical part of the instruction there can be no question but that he was right. The next school she saw was also for the children of the gentry, who supported it by subscriptions. There were 140 girls, fifty of whom were boarders whose parents paid for their board. These fifty young ladies all slept in one room, and their toilet arrangements impressed my wife as anything but luxurious; the effect was more like a steerage cabin on a big liner than an ordinary school dormitory. The class-rooms {290} were all on the ground floor, leading from courtyard to courtyard in Chinese house fashion. The instruction seemed to be mainly Chinese, with attention paid to geography, drawing, and fancy work, English being taught by a young Chinese teacher in a rather elementary way. The mistresses appeared in dignified skirts, no doubt as a symbol of authority.
The last school she was shown was larger and less exclusive. It was well organised, the classes being arranged with sense and discrimination. There were 200 pupils of all ages and ranks, the school being a public one. They were mostly dressed in black. Ten lady teachers presided over this school, including a normal class with a male superintendent; the whole in Chinese buildings. The teaching comprised Confucian ethics, the Chinese characters, arithmetic, geography, drawing from flat copies, and English given by a young Chinese girl who had been educated in a Shanghai mission school.
The instruction seemed to be good on the whole. About one-fourth of the scholars boarded at the school. Attached to it was a kindergarten managed rather sleepily by two Japanese. Again the children's singing was hardly worthy of the name. My wife was impressed by the inferiority of the Government girls' schools to the mission girls' schools in almost every particular. Doubtless they will soon improve, but at present the Government does not seem able to obtain efficient teachers, and is much too inclined to spend vast sums on practically useless {291} apparatus—useless because the instructors do not understand how to use it.
Our experiences at Nanking were extremely interesting, but they were not exceptional. We saw over Government schools at Wuchang, again at Changsha, and also we saw something of the Peking University. At Changsha matters were not nearly so far advanced as they were at Nanking. There were the same Japanese teachers, one of whom taught English, but I could not get a single copy-book produced to show how far they had advanced in the knowledge of this language. There were the same American teachers; good men, but unable to do much owing to their want of knowledge of Chinese, and owing, as I said before, to a certain jealousy which prevented them having a sufficient number of pupils. The very excellent school which is carried on at Shanghai, under Western management, forms a good contrast to the others. This school does not profess to teach very advanced subjects, but it teaches ordinary English subjects most efficiently. The system is this: the boys are first taught in Chinese, while they are acquiring the rudiments of Western knowledge and of the English language; they are then transferred to a class which is taught in English by Chinese; here they acquire from their own countrymen a very thorough knowledge of English and a tolerable knowledge of Western subjects. In both these divisions of the school all explanations are given in Chinese. After they have acquired a good knowledge of English they are then {292} advanced to the class which is taught by an Englishman, who has some knowledge of Chinese; here they perfect their knowledge of English, and the teacher can if necessary explain a difficulty by the help of a Chinese word. Lastly, they are taught absolutely in English by an Englishman who need not know any Chinese, as it is never used.
At Wuchang the schools were similar to those of Nanking. The only school which was exceptionally interesting was the School of Languages. This was managed by a Manchu, who was prompt, exact, and efficient—in fact, the very greatest contrast to the usual Chinese official. He spoke French perfectly, as he had been brought up in Paris and spent some time in the West. In a few words he showed that he understood the problem of education in China. He told me that his nation would never succeed in teaching their nationals Western subjects until they selected teachers who had some experience in the knowledge and in the art of teaching, and that the habit of regarding all Westerners as capable of teaching all Western subjects must produce disaster. He boldly professed himself a Roman Catholic, and was one of several examples that came under my notice of the wonderful influence that Christianity has on the formation of a vigorous character. The boys had been very well taught in English and French, and I gathered in German and Russian as well. Certainly if China gets such men to lead her, she need have little fear of the power of the West.
The difficulties in the way of education differ in Government schools and in Mission schools. If the Chinese Government could unite the Government schools to the Mission schools, they would overcome all these difficulties, and they would have a most perfect system of Western education. Of all the difficulties lying in the way of Government schools, first and foremost is the fundamental weakness of China, that weakness which is endangering her national existence, a weakness which I fear she will never completely surmount until she accepts a higher ideal. For her weakness is the universal greed for gain. Resident after resident reported the same cause of weakness, that a Chinaman cannot resist taking his "squeeze"—that is, his commission. It is not of course so dishonest as it would be on our side of the globe, because a Chinaman is more or less avowedly paid by these commissions, and therefore in many ways they are rather equivalent to the fees paid by an Englishman to a Government office than to illicit commissions, the acceptance of which in this country is punishable by law. If it is not as immoral, it is almost as deleterious to efficiency, because it tends {294} to make officials unreasonable in their action. To ask the reason why things are done in China, is always to receive the answer that somebody got a "squeeze" thereby.
And so it is with education. As we wandered through room after room filled with apparatus sufficient to teach thousands of students, and of such a complicated nature as absolutely to confuse those students when taught, one longed that a tithe of this expenditure could have been used for that modicum of apparatus which is necessary to make not a few mission schools thoroughly efficient. Much of the apparatus has never got outside its packing cases, and perhaps a great deal had better permanently remain there, for nothing is so subversive to the proper teaching of men whose great defect is that they have never handled things with their hands, as to give them complicated apparatus to demonstrate the most recondite laws of science. A great scientific teacher, when consulted about the apparatus necessary for elementary science, advised plenty of bonnet wire, glass tubes, and one or two other little things of that sort. When one asks why the Chinese have been so lavish in their expenditure on apparatus which they cannot and will not use, the reply is the same old answer—somebody got a commission. Bui I think beyond that there is a real belief that education is a matter of expensive apparatus—a belief which is not altogether unknown on this side of the globe.
This brings me to the second great difficulty in the path of Government education. They will believe that an efficient education results rather from having an expensive building than from a competent teacher. I have before had occasion to refer to the extreme simplicity of the life of the Chinese. Many of the schools were housed, and very comfortably housed, in Chinese houses. The Chinese house always looks out on a courtyard, and courtyard is joined to courtyard by passages. The rooms are only divided from the courtyard by carved wooden screens whose interstices are sometimes filled with paper and sometimes not. They are eminently sanitary—in fact, to a large extent they fulfil the requirements of the "open-air cure." In one case in the courtyard were a lot of basins and ewers, and the boys were compelled to have a wash, which if extensive must, in the winter, have been extremely unpleasant. For all this I expressed my sincere admiration to my friend the Director of Education, but he received my compliment much in the same spirit with which a mother accepts your assertion that her child is far prettier in her every-day dress with tousled hair than she is in her Sunday clothes, as with hideous tidiness and pharisaic pomp she wends her way to church. My compliment was taken almost as an insult. I was then shown the ideal of China, a huge and hideous building, modelled on the architecture which white men deem necessary to enable them to support the tropical heat, to the fatal effects of which they are {296} so sensitive; massive walls to carry the heavy roof; huge arched verandahs where white people may get the breath of air they so need. Of what use are all these to a race who cannot understand what you mean when you speak of the heat being unhealthy, who, however sensitive to cold and wet, flourish in the warmth to which they have been accustomed all their lives? The Chinese do not admire this architecture for its æsthetic effect; they care little about its heat-resisting qualities. They like it because it is Western; because Western people are educated in such buildings; because, I suppose, they expect Western learning to work in some way through those massive stone walls to the minds of the pupils; and because they fancy Western ideas would be more easily understood in these hideous surroundings.
Thirdly, there is no serious effort made to get good teachers. At one time, I understand, they had in their service a very remarkable body of men—men like Professor Martin of Peking—whose knowledge was only equalled by the sincerity of their purpose. Lately they have been getting rid of these men as fast as they could, the cry of "China for the Chinese" being perhaps responsible for this movement; and they have endeavoured to replace them by Chinese subjects with but little success. They have therefore fallen back again on foreigners, largely on Japanese. These men are some of them very able and qualified teachers; some, on the other hand, have had little or no experience of teaching, and their inefficiency tends {297} to bring all foreign teachers into disrepute. Not only must the teacher have a special knowledge of the art of teaching, but a teacher of a race like the Chinese, with different traditions to our own, must well understand those traditions. We can best realise the enormous difficulty a Chinese student has of learning from a Western teacher by remembering how impossible it is for any of us to understand something that is put from a Chinese point of view.
If the Chinese Government want efficient foreign teachers, they must not pick up anybody, but they must hold out inducements to young men to come as teachers, and must give them security of tenure. If, for instance, the Chinese Government had in their service such an efficient body of men as could be found in the mission schools, they would have no difficulty. Another difficulty which stands in the way of the Chinese schools is their want of discipline. One of the most remarkable developments in China is the school strike. They have undoubtedly extraordinary powers of united action, but the school strike originates as much in the weakness of the teachers as it does in the remarkable power the Chinese race has of united action; you hear of it all over China, and it is sometimes ludicrous, sometimes serious. One school struck because the foreign teachers required the pupils to pass an examination of efficiency before they would give them a testimonial. This was deemed most incorrect by the {298} scholars, who held a doctrine which would be very attractive to our own undergraduates, that residence alone was a sufficient qualification for a degree. Many of the strikes take place for most occult reasons.
And this brings me to mission schools, for strikes take place equally with them as in Government schools. They occur in boys' and in girls' schools, and for the most un-understandable reasons. In one school the strike began because a Chinese teacher caught hold of a boy's queue and dragged him by it. The boy's "face" was injured, and his companions made common cause. Another strike took place in a girls' school because a girl was punished. Of course these strikes do not occur where there is an efficient and vigorous teacher. It was attempted, for instance, with Archdeacon Moule, but it only ended in the leaders being caned. Still, one mission had its school practically ruined by one of these strikes; it was the result of an intrigue by an unbelieving teacher who had been employed by mistake. These strikes are not a very great difficulty to the mission when it is in charge of efficient and experienced men; a little justice and firmness apparently soon disposes of any unreasonable resistance to authority, and tact and knowledge prevent any friction which may result from regulations that may be offensive to Chinese ideas.
A far greater difficulty in the mission schools is the question of finance. The Chinese for the most part pay their scholars; the result is that the mission school {299} has to compete not only against a free school, but against a school in which pupils are paid to come, and it appears as if it would be almost an impossibility for mission schools to support themselves against such competition. As a matter of fact it is usually found that so great a value do the Chinese put on the efficient education that they receive in the mission school that they are willing to pay a reasonable fee rather than be paid for the useless education given by the Government school. Still it makes finance a certain difficulty. Many of the schools are largely self-supporting; others rely on fees to find board and lodgings for the pupils and the salaries of the native teachers. So that every school more or less carries a great financial burden.
The great difficulty of mission schools at the present time springs partially from Government action. The ideal of every Chinaman is at present to be in the service of the Government; we must emphasise that word "at present," because undoubtedly, owing to the railway development of China, a wealthy commercial class must arise all over her land, as it has already risen in the great port towns. This class will be independent of Government and will be the class that needs Western education more than any other class, for they will be in intimate contact with the West. But at present those who seek a higher education hope for the most part for Government employment. One of the rules of Government employment is that the officials shall on {300} certain days repair to the various temples to represent the Emperor, and it is naturally held that such action is impossible for a Christian. Besides this, the Government makes it extremely hard if not impossible for a Christian to go to its University at Peking. All teachers and pupils in a Government school are required on the Emperor's birthday to bow down or kow-tow to the tablet of Confucius. Missionaries hold that such action is not consistent with the Christian faith, and therefore the mission school is very loath to send its Christian pupils on to the Government University.
It must, however, be stated that several Chinese scholars, including a Christian, have indignantly denied that the kow-towing to the tablet of Confucius implies anything more than the respect due to the greatest thinker that China ever possessed. We had the privilege of being shown over Peking University by an extremely able and pleasant Chinese gentleman, a Christian. He showed us the tablet of Confucius and explained to us the ceremony. It must be owned that externally there was but little that one could associate with the idea of divinity. The tablet was behind a glass case, and at first it suggested some sort of educational apparatus. The desks were placed at right angles to it, so that it did not actually occupy what could be regarded as the chief place in the room. The gentleman who showed us over strenuously denied that any of the pupils in Peking Government University could regard {301} Confucius as God. None were admitted to the University except those who were already well versed in the Chinese Classics, and they knew perfectly well that in these Classics Confucius said that he had no supernatural power; while the leading commentator on Confucius, the man whose teaching had more than any other influenced modern Confucianism, was avowedly an agnostic, and therefore, so far from regarding the tablet as divine, it would be nearer the truth to say that the greater bulk of the scholars disbelieve in the idea of God altogether, or at any rate hold an agnostic position with regard to it. When I put these difficulties to an eminent missionary the answer was, yes, but by a late edict they have made Confucius equal to heaven and earth, and so whatever doubts there were before have been resolved, and the Chinese Government has decreed to Confucius divine honour. I put this criticism to an able civil servant in the employ of the Chinese Government, and he answered that that decree was really intended to have the opposite effect. The Chinese are aware that they are as a matter of fact relegating Confucius to a secondary place in education, and they are therefore most anxious to propitiate the Confucian scholars. They have compromised the matter much on the same system that we use in the West with regard to some politician whose services have been valuable, but who is actually a hindrance in the House of Commons. Confucius has been given divine honours {302} as the worn-out politician in England is given a peerage; it is a form of honourable retirement. A very intellectual Chinese, however, expressed himself quite otherwise, saying that anybody who understood Chinese views would have grasped the meaning of making Confucius equal to heaven and earth. As heaven and earth induce the wealth of mankind, so has Confucius done by his teaching; as heaven and earth can change things and make things exist that were not, so with Confucius; but that Chinese theology regards heaven and earth as created by the one God, and therefore Confucius is put in the position of an exalted but a created being. What impresses perhaps the Westerner more than this rather recondite Chinese reasoning is the simple fact that while by the Government edict it is decreed that the tablet of Confucius shall be honoured by three bowings and nine knockings, it is also ordained that the schoolmaster shall be honoured by one bowing or kow-tow and three times knocking the ground with the head. The similarity of the salute to the schoolmaster and to the tablet of Confucius rather disposes of the idea that the act of reverence to the tablet involves worship. On the other hand, it is pointed out that this is the main ceremony that is observed in what are called the temples of Confucius; but when this was put to a Chinaman, his answer was that they were not temples, and if there had been any worship in those temples, they would have been frequented {303} as much by the women and children as by the men, but as a matter of fact they were frequented only by literati. When it was suggested that on occasion, however, there were sacrifices in these temples, he did not deny this, but changed the subject.
But we must not say that the respect and reverence offered to Confucius, whether it involves idolatry or not, is the only reason why Christian pupils are advised not to go to the Government Universities. There are two other great reasons. The first is an extremely practical one: the education in Government Universities is avowedly imperfect. The fact that the Government have subscribed to the English University at Hong-Kong and to the German College in Shantung show that they are aware of their own shortcomings. The second reason is that the racial characteristics of Chinamen demand that they should act as a body. An acute observer asserted that, as far as he was able to judge the matter, no Chinaman ever acted independently; and that therefore it is putting a burden greater than the race can bear to ask that Christians should maintain their Christianity when they are surrounded by an unbelieving and heathen atmosphere; and that, as a matter of fact, the result of sending students to Government Universities would, except in cases of men of very strong character, be to send them to unbelief. Yet a greater and simpler objection is that these Government Universities for the most {304} part do not exist, and that it is impossible for small institutions like that at Peking to take even a hundredth part of the students who are clamouring for Western education. But the mission schools have another and a newer difficulty, one which is causing the greatest heart-searching. This I must reserve for the next chapter.
The great danger that threatens mission schools, a danger which is increasing every year, is that the best pupils of these schools have to go to Universities in search of Western knowledge where they are exposed to the insidious attacks of Western materialism.
The teachers have at present no alternative; they have to send the best and brightest of their pupils somewhere to complete their education. It would be unfair on a boy to refuse to send him on, and if he is to receive a higher education, where can he get it but at some place where the atmosphere is distinctly anti-Christian.
There is in the East no place with a neutral atmosphere as there is in the West. In the West most people have had some Christian training, or at least they comprehend Christian ethics. So in a Western institution, even if the education be wholly secular, a Christian does not find everything antipathetic to his faith. But in the East the vast majority are non-Christian, and consequently the moral and intellectual atmosphere is hostile and antipathetic to a Christian. Here if an institution is non-religious it is probably not hostile to religion. {306} In the East if an institution is non-religious it is probably anti-Christian. At present the only University in action is that of Tokio, though we are promised others, and its ill effects have been so obvious that the Chinese Government have ordered a wholesale withdrawal of pupils from its unhealthy influence.
As we have already pointed out, Western civilisation is magnificent but it is destructive, and when taught without any constructive religious teaching it inevitably tends to destroy all spiritual ideas and too often also to pervert the moral ideals of the race. As the pupil goes through the mission school he learns within its walls to shake himself free from the haunting fear of demons which besets every Chinaman; he has slowly realised that God is holy, good and loving, and has either accepted Christianity or stands on the threshold of the formal acceptance; he has reached the end of the curriculum of the school or college and his brilliancy demands a higher education. Attracted by the reputation of Tokio, he goes to its University, and there he finds himself in an atmosphere where all the destructive thought of Europe grows rankly; the good God in whom he has learned to believe in the mission school follows in the track of the demons of his youth, and he is left believing in a world founded by blind chance, where ethics are things of service to restrain your neighbour but folly to follow yourself. "Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," is the lesson which is not perhaps taught in so many words, but {307} which none the less is forced into his mind; his views become those of Falstaff; all that is fine, all that is noble, flees from his life; though he no longer believes in the God of Love, he does not return to the belief in the demons of his youth; there is nothing in his world beyond getting rich or gratifying the flesh and laughing at those people who believe in higher ideals. He has been acquainted with and has learnt to loathe from his youth up the philosophy of Yang Choo. He has, for instance, despised such a sentence as this: "The people of high antiquity knew both the shortness of life and how suddenly and completely it might be closed by death, and therefore they obeyed every suggestion of the movements of their hearts, refusing not what was natural for them to like, nor seeking to avoid any pleasure that occurred to them, they paid no heed to the incitement of fame; they enjoyed themselves according to their nature; they did not resist the common tendency of all things to self-enjoyment; they cared not to be famous after death. They managed to keep clear of punishment; as to fame and praise, being first or last, long life or short life, these things did not come into their calculations." And now he finds that the philosophy of Yang Choo is as he supposes the newest thought of the great rich successful Western world; as he returns to his home and spreads abroad the poisonous doctrines that he has imbibed, the missionary wonders whether, after all, it would not have been better to have left the man to his primitive demonology.
The American mission bodies saw this danger from the first, and have already set up great educational establishments which to a certain extent supply this need. That great institution Bishop Graves' College at Jessfield, the Boone College at Wuchang, the British College at Weihsien, and Methodist Universities at Soochow and Peking, are all examples of good work. But they do not, any of them, bring the student up to what we call University standard, or what I understand is called in America the post-graduate course; what is felt is, that there is need of an institution in which the highest knowledge shall be taught, where the true aspect of Western thought shall be shown—not that aspect which is bringing France to destruction, not that aspect which makes Belgium unconcerned at the Congo scandals, but the aspect which both in America and in England we have always admired at least in theory, and in practice when we have been strong. The fundamental truth on which our civilisation rests is that God is good, and that therefore truth and progress are right and possible, and that the highest expression of the goodness of God is in His incarnation as it is universally taught by Christians of various views and of many denominations. The West owes to the East, if there is any common duty of man to man, to set before it the real truth as to the greatness of Western civilisation, namely, that it is the result of Christianity.
But missions are not anxious merely for a University {309} as a means of defence against the materialistic onslaught which threatens their work—they need it for many other reasons; for instance, the University would make it possible for all denominations to have highly educated native ministers. No student of missions can ever be content to regard them as an ideal arrangement. The conception of a race being ministered to spiritually by another race is obviously inadequate; it is open to many criticisms; there must be a confusion in the mind of the convert between what is national and what is Christian; one Chinese regarded Christianity with doubt because he had heard that the German Emperor is a Christian, and to his mind he is the embodiment of the fierce piratical Western races. The word which the Chinese use for robbers means red-bearded men, so associated, alas, is the Western race in China with war and rapine; it is easy for a member of the Western races to be misunderstood when he is talking about the religion of love. Would any English parish like as its Rector a Chinaman, even if he were saintly and went so far as to cut off his queue?
Setting aside the associations of the Western race, the Western race has great difficulty in speaking Chinese without making ridiculous mistakes. Who among us has not smiled when the Chinaman's inability to say the letter "r" has caused him to offer us "lice" to eat, but what must it be to the Chinaman when he hears the Western preacher lost amidst those mysterious Chinese intonations, and {310} therefore making some wonderful statement. A Chinese gentleman assured me that he had listened to a missionary extolling the virtues of a wild pig. Reverence forbids explaining what was really meant. If the ministers of religion are to be Chinese, it is obvious that they must be highly educated Chinese; to have religion taught by ignorant men in a country like China where learning is reverenced so profoundly, must be to condemn it as the religion of the coolie. The Chinese minister must be able to maintain his position, not only against the Confucian scholar, but against the Western materialist, and must therefore have an equally good education. Without saying that it is reasonable to expect that the Western missionary should be withdrawn within the next few years, I think it is wisdom for every mission body to aim at founding a body of educated native clergy who can free Christianity from the taunt of being a foreign religion, and who can, when the foreigner leaves China, take his place and uphold the faith.
If to have an educated native ministry is one great object of the University, another great and only less important object is the creation of an intellectual Christian laity who shall form and direct Christian public opinion. The school teacher, the writer, are only one degree less important, if indeed they are so, than the Christian minister; and if as China assimilates Western civilisation, she finds in her midst a body of men conversant {311} with the best side of that civilisation, able to interpret its mysteries to her, so that it does not become subversive to all spiritual religion and morality, it is more than probable that she will take those men and put them in high positions, and the grain of mustard seed will by their means grow into a plant which shall overshadow the whole of China. The other day I was reading how St. Grimaldi and St. Neots founded the University of Oxford in 886. Theology, grammar and rhetoric, music and arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, were the subjects taught. After a thousand years we are in a position to judge of the success of the experiment. Surely every one will wish to have a hand in founding a similar undertaking.
The foundation of this University cannot for two or three reasons be left to one body. In the first place, no one communion will be rich enough to undertake such a work; secondly, it might cause a certain narrowness of atmosphere; thirdly and chiefly, co-operation among Christians would afford an object-lesson to the Chinese of the real unity there is between them. We are constantly twitted with the fact that we confuse the heathen by professing the religion of love and then setting before them a mass of warring sects. If we can unite in the founding of such a University, we shall show that though we see the Christian truth in different aspects we have agreed that truth is one, and have in spite of our divisions a fundamental unity. When {312} this matter was referred to at the Shanghai Conference, considerable difficulty was felt among missionaries as to the terms on which such a University should be founded. It was agreed to refer it to the Committee on Education, and that Committee of Education has in the year 1909 welcomed the formation of such a University. Dr. Hawks Pott, who of all men in China can best speak as an authority on education, since he has organised and maintained that wonderful institution at Jessfield, warmly advocated its formation.
No doubt one of the reasons why the missionaries now see their way to the acceptance of this University is because a neutral body has come forward to initiate the undertaking. Committees of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have been sitting for many months considering the question with all the skill and ability which their great learning and technical knowledge enable them to bring to bear on this subject. Though of course they have a thorough knowledge of education in all its aspects, they were aware that they lacked knowledge of China and the Chinese, so for many months they heard and examined the evidence of any one who was thoroughly acquainted with China and with the conditions of missionary work. They devised a scheme which they thought would at once satisfy the workers in the mission field and be acceptable to the Chinese. The mere outline of the scheme is that this University should encourage the formation of denominational hostels, which shall {313} be under the control of individual missionary bodies, and which shall form colleges at the University; and while the University alone would concern itself with giving secular teaching from a neutral standpoint, the colleges would give Christian teaching to their pupils. In this way all conflict between missions would be avoided; each mission would continue to care for the pupils which it had hitherto sheltered and educated. To the University would accrue the great gain of having a supply of properly prepared pupils coming into it from the mission schools, one of the causes of disappointment of ill-considered University schemes being that there is no proper provision for a supply of pupils. In the West there are numerous secondary schools, and any University can easily find a sufficient number of pupils properly grounded in knowledge. In the East to erect a University without feeding schools is like building a house in the Chinese fashion roof first. The Yale University Mission found itself compelled to set up elementary schools to teach the elementary Western knowledge which was necessary before even the lowest grade of college work could be attempted. Western teachers are, as we have before explained, few and far between outside the mission schools, and therefore mission schools would both help and be helped by a University. The University completes the work they have begun, and returns the men to the mission to carry on its work with honour and efficiency. On the other hand, the mission supplies the {314} University with pupils, which after all are the prime necessity of education.
Another great feature of the Oxford and Cambridge scheme was that the University should aim to be a native University, and this no doubt was the side which attracted the Chinese. Instead of using knowledge, the common heritage of all men, as the means of imposing the domination of the alien on China, knowledge is offered by this University as essentially the thing which belongs to China as well as to any other race. If in the commencement the majority of the professors must belong to the Western race, it is to be hoped that many of its professors will soon come from China, and that when the University is well begun, and Christianity has become as national a religion as it is in our land, and Western civilisation has lost the right to describe itself by that epithet, and has become the civilisation of the East as of the West, then the University whose foundation is now being laid may be the great light of the future China.
Perhaps the most important part of the scheme is that which suggests denominational hostels as the proper solution of the difficulties that beset union and interdenominational work in the mission field.
There are obvious difficulties in arranging for a common religious teaching, and, on the other hand, it is very advantageous for the many mission bodies at work in China to show a united front against the new materialism and the ancient superstition. {315} Nothing so shows the power of Christian love as a union work of this nature.
We Christians are often taunted with our differences, and we are assured that many will support any scheme that makes for union and peace between the different elements of the Christian world. Here is a scheme which will tend to bring Christians together, and to induce that mutual respect and toleration which must be the foundation of a closer union. The baby must walk before he runs, and if the Christians of China can maintain such a University, their daily intercourse will greatly assist any further scheme for unity.
But there is another use in the hostel system which should not be overlooked. At all times one of the great hindrances to the education of young men is the tendency that they have to waste their strength in riot and wantonness. The Chinaman is perhaps more subject to these temptations than the Westerner. A student said: "We cannot work; we are too profligate." A Chinese statesman advised against certain towns as possible sites for a University because of their tendency to entice men into vicious courses. Far the most efficient way of opposing this evil is to make some one responsible for the moral welfare of the young men, and this is done in the hostel system.
Every hostel would be governed by some person who would make the moral welfare of the young men his peculiar care and study. The head of the hostel might or might not be on the teaching staff of the {316} University; but whether he taught or not, his first duty would be the care of the moral and spiritual welfare of those committed to his charge. He would give all his energy to reproduce the highest moral tone of a Western University.
This scheme is being tried in Chentu, where a union University is being started. And I believe it is in every way proving successful. Those who have not realised the size of China will be perhaps inclined to ask why not unite the two schemes? The simple answer to those who have travelled is that the distances are too vast. You might as well talk of uniting Oxford and Harvard, for those two Universities are about as far from one another in time as Hankow is from Chentu. Even when the railway is built the distances will be immense. The enormous distances of China are also a reason why it was impossible to amalgamate the Hong-Kong scheme and the Oxford and Cambridge scheme. Hong-Kong is now ten days to a fortnight away from Hankow, and such a different language is spoken there that the dwellers in Northern and Central China are often forced to use English to understand one another.
The University of Hong-Kong will be very beneficial to the colony, and is an example of the generosity of the merchants and citizens of that town; but as a means of naturalising the higher side of our civilisation it labours under the great disadvantage of not being either in China nor under the Chinese flag, nor of speaking the prevailing language.
The Committees at Oxford and Cambridge had not been without hope that the missionary world would accept the scheme readily once it was well understood.
They had had the advantage of many interviews with missionaries and others in London at their joint meetings so as to make it a matter of some certainty that a large portion of the Western educators of China would agree with them. But they were rather doubtful whether the scheme would be welcomed by the Chinese official world.
The commercial world in London that had dealings with China was rather pessimistic. They held the view that you only had to mention the word Christian or missionary to a Chinese official and it would have the same effect that the word rats has on a terrier. But as I have before related, we were agreeably surprised to find at the very outset that the Chinese official world were far from hostile, and that we were given, unasked, letters of introduction, whose contents I did not know except that they procured for us a welcome in China which was as surprising as it was delightful. I learnt in China that knowledge {318} and learning is so loved and respected that those whose object is its dissemination will ever find a ready welcome, and I learnt also that whatever may have been their sentiments in the past, in the present the Chinese have no hatred towards Christianity, but they regard it as one of the least odious parts of the Western civilisation which has become for them a necessity. I had also the privilege of seeing His Excellency Tong-Shao-Yi in London, and he did not discourage the plan.
When we arrived at Harbin we found an official ready to receive us who had been sent to welcome the scheme to China. His instructions were to accompany us to Kwangchangtzu and to watch over our comfort. As he only spoke Chinese, conversation was difficult; but with the aid of a member of the Imperial Customs we gathered the object of his mission. At Mukden we met with a similar civility. I was invited to dine at the Yamen. I shall always remember my drive to that dinner. At Mukden no carrying chairs are used, but a springless cart, in which the traveller, or more accurately the sufferer, reclines. I was late for dinner, so the order was given to the charioteer to drive quick, and as we bounded over the unpaved streets of a Manchurian town I had an opportunity of realising one of the minor discomforts of Chinese missionary life. At the Yamen the same civility was shown to the scheme, and next day Dr. Ross, my kindly host, took me to see a Manchu noble of high rank. He was more than encouraging. He first sounded the note {319} that I found vibrating through the whole of China. He asked why did not the West concern itself with such things as education, which benefit man, rather than with war, which produces such endless suffering and misery.
At Peking I met some great officials who all were favourable, but it was not till we got south that we encountered what can only be described as enthusiasm for Western education. One gentleman advised that such an institution should be started at once, and recommended the recall of all students studying in Western lands to fill its ranks. Another who was interpreting was not satisfied with the prudent official reply I received that the plan was good, but that I must make inquiries at Peking. He added: "Make inquiries at Peking; but if they refuse, go on with your scheme all the same." A body of young men who had been educated at Boone College sent a petition that the scheme should be forthwith undertaken, but perhaps the most remarkable experience was that which I had at Shanghai. I was entertained by thirteen of the gentry who had all received their education in the West. We discussed every aspect of the plan, and when I pressed upon them that one of the good results of the University would be that it would have a healthy moral environment, an old man turned to his companions and said: "We have ourselves had experience of this. The environment in which we lived when we were in the West was different from that in which we found ourselves when we returned {320} to Shanghai, and did not it largely affect our lives?" After we had talked some time the question was put plainly to them: "Would they support such a University?" One of them turned round and said: "Of course we should. It is obvious that if you will give us in China the same sort of University as there is in England, if only on the score of expense, we shall want to send our sons there; besides which no one likes parting from their children and leaving them in a distant land."
I discussed the matter with a Chinese statesman in Peking. I asked whether Peking would not be a good centre, but he was very adverse to the idea, because he said that Peking had such a bad moral tone that boys would not be able to do any good work, and that he himself far preferred that Chinese boys should be sent at ten years old to England to receive their whole education in our country. When we pointed out to him how, except in the case of a few rich men, such a course would be quite impossible, he said: "Then put your University right away in the western hills out of reach of the immoral influences of a town." There can be few more eloquent testimonies to the necessity of another University; nothing but a Christian University could succeed in creating the moral atmosphere, which this wise man saw was the power of the West. In the same conversation he gave a further testimony to the power of Christianity, all the more striking that it was uttered by a man who was not a Christian. He said: "Yes, {321} I have no doubt that all that is good in the West comes from Christianity."
All the officials we interviewed always ended their encomiums on the suggested scheme by a saving clause to the effect that, before we did anything, we must ask his Excellency Chang-Chih-Tung. When we passed through Peking the first time we failed to see him, and it was therefore with some anxiety I sought an interview with him on our return journey.
Chang was a figure in the politics of China whose importance it would be hard to over-estimate. Not that he had the reputation for being a peculiarly able man; in fact, some of the Europeans spoke slightingly of his mentality. His force and influence came rather from his moral qualities. He was the perfect type of Confucian scholar.
Wonderfully well versed in all the knowledge of the literati of China, he was far from despising any form of knowledge; in fact, he was one of the first of the statesmen of China to recognise the importance of Western education. When we were discussing with some leading merchants the want of integrity of many of the officials, they claimed Chang as an exception with enthusiasm. He had held the highest offices and still remained comparatively poor. His reputation for clean-handedness was enhanced by his age. In China the old are greatly reverenced, and an old, honest, and learned statesman combined three of the qualities most admired in China.
It was therefore with some trepidation that I {322} found myself going to see a man whose moral authority was so great that he could with a word mar or make the University scheme as far as the power of the Chinese officials extended, and in his case this was very far. I was alone, for owing to the rather heated debates that divided the British and Chinese Governments over the Canton-Wuchang Railway, it was thought advisable that no member of the Legation should come with me. I drove down to the north end of the city, and turning down a by-lane, scarcely wide enough for the carriage to pass, we drew up opposite a very modest dwelling. I was received by His Excellency's nephew, a man of extremely courtly manners; and as he conducted me across the yard I was struck by the simplicity of the house. The room, for instance, into which I was ushered had a brick floor, and was separated from the courtyard only by a paper and wood screen. Imagine what the intense cold must be in a Peking winter when the thermometer is somewhere below zero! The furniture of the room was equally simple. Two Chinese chairs of the Chinese guest-room pattern, standing on each side of the usual Chinese table, were supported on the other side of the room by a token of the ever-encroaching West in the shape of a common round table and some mongrel-looking stools, which looked as if they were productions of Japan palmed off as European.
As we sat and talked (for I was too early for my interview) my host told me all about his uncle's {323} family, and the while I wondered at the austerity of the dwelling of the greatest man in China after those of royal blood.
His Excellency was then ready to receive me, and we adjourned to another equally simple room where the usual table with tea, sweetmeats, and wine was laid out. Chang during the whole interview smoked a long pipe, which required all the efforts of what I took to be two boys, but who really were slave-girls, to keep alight. He wanted to know where the money was to come from. I assured him that there are many generous people in England and America who, desiring to leave a good name behind them, and convinced that education confers on humanity incalculable benefits, are willing to give largely to such a cause.
Then he inquired what line we should take with regard to Confucian learning; I said Christianity and Confucianism need not be opposed, and we should respect and encourage the teaching of the sage. He clearly approved, and gave me advice as to the course of study to be followed—first, Chinese letters, then foreign languages; and he advised as the site for the University some place near Wuchang and not Peking.
He then assured me that I might tell my countrymen that he approved of the scheme. "Who," said he, "could but approve of such a scheme?"
As I left he accompanied me across the courtyard, though I protested, and I felt I had been honoured {324} by this interview with one of China's greatest men. He was the embodiment of all that was fine in China. He belonged to an age that is passing away. The Chinese statesman of the future will learn Western luxury with Western knowledge.
One word in conclusion. I have tried to show the greatness of the crisis that is before us. The civilisation which has long been worn by the white man alone is now being donned by the yellow man, not as the result only of missionary effort, but as the result of those great world causes over which puny mankind has no control; and I have tried to show that all that we can do is to recognise and frankly accept this great fact, namely, that the members of the human race who are subject to and governed by our civilisation are to be nearly doubled, and that the second half will import into that civilisation not only new traditions, but a new racial personality, which must cause a fundamental alteration in many of its traditions and customs. We must not say that the movement will be shortly completed, for it has scarcely yet begun; but we have seen enough in the success that has attended the movement both in Japan and in China, to convince us that it will ultimately dominate the Far East. This movement may be for good or for evil; it may be for the downfall of the world, for the perpetual misery of mankind, if that which is evil in both civilisations is to be perpetuated and {326} that which is good is to be destroyed; or it may be for the benefit of mankind if, when the Christian civilisation welcomes the great yellow races, it accepts from them, as it has accepted from many other races, their characteristic virtues. Hitherto our civilisation has grown richer; every race it has conquered has added beauty to its traditions and nobility to its ideals. We may look forward with hope, if not with confidence, to its future. But if this momentous change in the history of the world is to be well directed, it can only be done by men of sincere Christian faith; and if the civilisation is to augment these benefits to mankind, it can only be by being more fully endued with the Christian ethics on which its whole greatness depends.
For the perpetuation of this ethic, for the education of the future thinkers of China, we suggest a University is needed; that University should not be founded by one race alone. Some may differ from us, and hold that other action is advisable. They may be right, but it behoves them to formulate their policy, because one thing seems certain—that a policy of inaction at the present moment is one which is fraught with risk, if not with disaster. If no one makes any effort to direct the thought of this vast unit of mankind into the right paths, it is improbable that good will naturally result. The fitting of Western thought to an Oriental race, while it must be chiefly left to the race itself, needs clearly the help of those who are conversant with the best aspects {327} of that Western thought and of its history. The missionary has done much, but he himself is the first to say, "I cannot do all; I must be supported by those who will teach my converts the fulness of Western knowledge." And so the missionaries have inaugurated a policy of education which is most successful as far as it has gone. The question before all well-wishers of China is, shall it go further; shall we show China the intellectual light by which we are walking, or shall we leave China to stumble in the darkness till she falls into deeper error.
Those who look forward to progress in this world must also look forward to breaking up the old evil traditions and to founding new ones; the old tradition, which limited love to citizens of the same State, which put bounds on charity, so that man did not love man unless he spoke the same language, or at least had the same coloured skin, is dying fast though it is dying hard. A new tradition is being founded, and must be further developed, in which, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the word love is taught as passing and transcending all bounds of race and language. The cultivation of this new tradition is vital to the existence of our civilisation. If love cannot bind races together, the improved arts of war will in time extinguish the civilisation that gave them birth. If we are to encourage international love, we can best do it by sharing together in international acts of mercy and generosity. The great Chinese race has need of the wealth of Western {328} knowledge. Let Western races join together to give them what they need, and in so doing they will not merely benefit China, though as China counts for a quarter of the population of this world, and is nearly equal to the number of men who have a right to call themselves civilised, that were no small merit; but they will do more, for they will by common acts of mercy and love bind each to each so that the horrid curse of racial hatred shall not be again able to divide them. The elements of good in one race will be brought in contact with the similar elements in another race; men will learn to trust men; and that which the thundering cannon can never compel, or the keenest wit of statesmen ever compass, will be accomplished by the obedience and simple faith of the Christian men and women of all races, and the world will be welded into one solid piece, where men can work without wasting their efforts in making machines to torture and kill their fellow-men, and where at last the prophecy shall be fulfilled: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks."
When it was settled that we should go to China to see what opportunities there were there for an educational mission emanating from our English Universities, we decided to go viâ Siberia, and stop at St. Petersburg and also at Irkutsk on the way. I had previously found the journey of fifteen days without a break exhausting to myself and still more so to my wife who accompanied me. The plan had also the advantage that it gave me an opportunity of trying to find out why the great Russian Church had never attempted any serious mission work in China. From a mere inspection of the map one would naturally have expected that the Christian power which had a frontier with China of thousands and thousands of miles would have been the most forward in that country in fulfilling the command of the founder of Christianity to give His message of happiness to every living man. In our previous tour we had been surprised to find that the missionary efforts of Russia were insignificant in China, though, strange to say, they were fairly vigorous in Japan. When we arrived at St. Petersburg I was fortunate enough to obtain letters of introduction to the courteous gentleman who then represented the imperial power in the councils of the Russian Church, M. Iwolsky, Procurator of the Holy Synod. One thing became evident; for the time being Russia is so much absorbed in politics as to be oblivious of other duties. Living in England, we can little realise the excitement and anxiety that filled the minds of many who dwelt in the far off villages of Russia, while they waited to hear whether or not they were to be engulfed in a revolution as dangerous {330} and as far-reaching as that which more than a hundred years ago overwhelmed France.
A lady described to me how she had sat in terror in her country house when all communication from St. Petersburg had ceased owing to the strikes, while the smoke of surrounding houses which had been set on fire by marauding bands told of the fate which might possibly await her. Now all that is over. The revolution—so they think in Russia—is a thing of the past; and Russia has entered on a course of conservative reform to which, if she adheres, will doubtless make her a prosperous and contented empire.
I gathered from some of my informants that the reasons why Russia had been backward in the mission field, and also why she was racked with revolution, were in reality the same, namely, that the Orthodox Church was not so vigorous and had not that hold on the consciences of the people that it ought to have. Not that for one moment Russia is ceasing to be religious. The attendance at Father John's funeral was quoted as disproving such a possibility. People of the working and middle classes came for miles to stand on a bleak cold day for long hours merely to catch a glimpse of the coffin which contained the mortal remains of a man who, according to their belief, lived more than any man in accordance with God's law. Russia is religious to the very core; but, like all religious nations, our own included, she longs to express her deep sincerity through diversity and not through uniformity. Alas! there are people in every nation who want to put us in one religious uniform and to march us like soldiers at the word of command straight into heaven's gate. In England this view only makes some good and narrow-minded people anxious to have such a thing as religious uniformity in our schools; but in Russia this doctrine has been more vigorously held, and is doubtless responsible for the waning power of the Orthodox Church. Mr. Pobiedonosteff, leader of the reactionary movement, nearly caused a revolution, and certainly {331} weakened the Church, by insisting on Uniformity and Orthodoxy. He believed that there could be but one form of religion in the State, and therefore he discouraged every other form of religious activity. Not only did he rightly forbid those strange wild immoral sects who practise and teach mutilation, but even the sober and devout followers of Lord Radstock were to be silenced. The result of such a policy was but too obvious. Religion was made odious by the insincerity which such a policy must foster, and the State became detestable to all earnest Christians who claimed the inherent right of every living soul to love and worship his Creator in accordance with his true convictions.
All this has now passed like a bad dream. People in Russia may believe what they like and worship God how they like. M. Iwolsky was most anxious that the world should know that he, the then representative of temporal power in the councils of the Russian Church, so far from encouraging the idea that Christ's Church can be controlled by a temporal power, however great, was most careful to maintain that in spiritual matters the Church is independent of the State, even if in temporal matters she submit herself to the authority of Government. Peter the Great abolished the Patriarchate; he added many, though not all, of the powers of the Patriarchate to the Crown; and therefore the Emperor represents the Patriarch in many ways. But it is wholly misunderstanding his position to say that in spiritual matters he is supreme. The Russian Church, like all other branches of the Church, is controlled and governed by councils, both general and provincial.
But M. Iwolsky had to confess that the power which the State wielded in the Synod of the Church was still very great. The Crown has three ways in which it can influence the council. First, though the members of the council are representatives of the Church, it is the Crown who decides (with the exception of the Metropolitans) who those representatives shall be; secondly, the Crown, through the Procurator, can forbid any action which {332} brings the Synod into conflict with the laws of the State; lastly, the Procurator, as representative of the Crown, must always be present at the debates of the Synod, and has always a right to express his opinion, even on spiritual questions. Such powers put together clearly give the Crown a control not only in things temporal, but, if it is desired, an influence in things spiritual as well. Still it cannot be too widely known that at any rate in theory the Russian Church is in things spiritual independent of temporal power. Most Englishmen would think, no doubt, that if the Church is to hold her rightful place in the hearts of Russians, she can only do it by relying on the power of preaching rather than on the power of the sword. Therefore it would be best for both Church and State if they had less to do with one another. English Churchmen will be glad to hear that there is some prospect of a Synod of the Orthodox Church being held, independently of the existing Holy Synod—a council which may rank as a General Synod of the Greek Communion, if other branches of the Orthodox Church are invited to join in its deliberations, of which there is some prospect. The object of this Synod will be to reform the discipline of the Church, a matter which is engaging, I understand, the sincere attention of the devout Christians of Russia. Few things bear truer witness to the weakness of the Church in Russia than the low moral tone which exists, as all witnesses aver, in every grade of Russian social life. The outward observance of the fasts and feasts and ceremonies of the Church, though admirable in itself, is perfectly consistent with a great deal of scepticism with regard to the truths of Christianity. It is not uncharitable to suspect such scepticism when a great profession of Christianity is accompanied by a low moral tone. The Church has felt her weakness and has sought the help of the State, and has therefore not succeeded in her mission.
Now happier days have opened for Russia which it is hoped may lead on to happier ones beyond. The State no {333} longer helps the Church by silencing her critics, by exiling those who cannot agree with her: the Buddhist who lately at the definite command of the Government had accepted Christianity has returned to sincerity and open profession of Buddhism. The Church no longer so supported by the State may feel her weakness, but she will grow rather than diminish in strength as she learns to use more and more the real weapon of Christianity, namely, the sacred truths of our religion published both by writing and by preaching. Russia is one of the great nations of the world. The Orthodox Church which dominates Russia is both true and faithful, and she will guide her people into prosperity and peace when she has learned to follow her Master's example and to order the sword drawn in her defence to be returned altogether to its sheath.
Nothing can be at present expected from the unorthodox bodies who until lately have been persecuted to such a degree that they have scarcely been able to exist. In external matters the Orthodox Church commands the obedience of the nation to a wonderful degree, but in controlling the deep convictions of the heart she lacks power. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the moral tone which prevails in Russian society. Perhaps it is not just or fair to take the capital of Siberia as a specimen of ordinary moral life in Russia, but one might well say at Irkutsk that all save the spirit of man is divine. We had been to a certain extent prepared by our previous tour to disbelieve in the horrors of the climate of Siberia, but what we saw and heard at Irkutsk has convinced me that Siberia should rank high among the places that are reckoned pleasant for human habitation. Siberia, or certainly the eastern part of Siberia, is not the dreary plain, wind-swept and miserable, that one read of in one's childhood. On the contrary, it is a land of constant calms and steady sunshine, a land of lakes and hills, and though it is cold, the cold seems but trifling in the glorious sunshine of a Siberian winter. I feel certain that if Lake Baikal were {334} somewhere within reach of London it would be one of the most frequented centres for pleasure-seekers. And from the point of view of wealth it is a most favoured land; a land where there is gold and where there is coal; a land where there is copper and silver, and where a hot summer ripens thoroughly all cereal crops. For sportsmen it seems a veritable paradise. The pheasant (or at least his brother) with whom we have long been conversant as dying of every disease in the moist coverts of England, lives wild in this dry and healthy climate. The wild boar and the wolf, the bear and many forms of the antelope and deer, are to be found on the borders between Siberia and China. The rivers are full of salmon and other fish whose names I cannot attempt to give.
If an Englishman were asked to choose whether he would live in St. Petersburg or in exile at Irkutsk, he would, I believe, have no doubt in deciding in favour of the latter, if—and that is a great if—the spirit of man were not so human and corrupt. We were told that there are six hundred women who are divorced in the jurisdiction of Irkutsk. Such a statement indeed seems incredible, but certainly the morals of the officers leave much to be desired. Vices go in flocks, therefore laziness perhaps accounts for the amazing state of things which exists in Irkutsk. The town is as full of officers as Eton is of boys. Epaulettes jostle you in the streets, you tumble over swords in the restaurants, and with all this force at the disposal of the authorities—for I conclude that some at least of these officers have soldiers under them—the streets of Irkutsk are unsafe after dark. Person after person warned us of the danger of being unarmed at night, at any rate in the by-streets. People are murdered in their own houses in the suburbs; women have their fur coats torn off their backs. One is aghast at the incredible slackness of the authorities, who instead of instituting a reasonable police force such as exists even in Chinese cities, allow the city to be watched at night by aged Dogberrys in huge fur coats armed with {335} rattles which they use incessantly. Certainly, though they may fail to frighten away robbers with this primitive weapon of protection, they succeed in interrupting the slumbers of the visitor. In the department of municipal activity the town is equally badly organised. The streets were under snow, and as upon a hard-seated sledge we leapt from hole to hole, we had at least the comfort of realising that in summer their condition must be even more trying.
It is unsafe to trust gossip, but I give it for what it is worth. We were assured that the only reason why the priceless wealth which Russia possesses in the gold mines of Siberia was not further developed was because of a similar official incompetence. There is said to be a great deal of secret digging for gold. Men disappear in the summer and reappear in the autumn with a pound's weight of pure gold, for the gold lies only about three metres below the ground. But if this primitive form of mining came to the knowledge of the Government it would put in force the mining laws which would then successfully stifle the industry.
It is needless to add that profligacy and laziness are not the only vices against which Russian Christianity has to contend. Their people have another in common with ourselves of which the Church is only too well aware and which it is making great efforts to suppress, namely, drunkenness. Actually on our journey we had an example of this vice which every one regarded as comic, but which might have been tragic. The train is brought suddenly to a standstill. There is something wrong. Everybody tumbles out of the carriage to look. A man is lying in the snow. At first it is thought he has been knocked down by a previous train. Further examination shows that it is only a man dead drunk lying right across the line—the result of keeping one of the festivals of the Church. Every one laughs; he is pulled out of the way, we climb back into the train, leaving him in the care of a priest, quite unconscious how near he has been to death. Drunkenness is a terrible evil in our own land, but its results are far more terrible in {336} this land of frost-bite. There are numbers of people without hands and feet begging in the street, and we were told that the general cause of these injuries was vodka. A man going home falls into a drunken sleep on the way: he awakes next morning with his hands and feet frost-bitten, or perhaps he never wakes again: the sleep of drunkenness merges into the sleep of death.
As one considers these things one realises why the Buddhist Bouriat and the Mohammedan Tartar still adhere to their ancient faiths.
I do not think an Englishman has a right to criticise other nations when so much remains to be done at home. Still one cannot truthfully say that, however numerous her churches or well-attended her services, the Orthodox Church directs Russia while she is powerless to make headway against these vices.
The great trials through which Russia has passed hold out every reason to hope that with liberty, purity of worship will be again established, and where there is purity of faith there must be mission work. No doubt the Government has hindered mission work; in fact, they have forbidden it in China. Christianity was to them so much the handmaid of the State as to be inconceivable outside the State; but all this is breaking down. The great mission work conducted in Japan to which I have before referred has shown that the Orthodox Church grows well on Eastern soil. The existence of a village preserving the Orthodox religion in the middle of China which has been spoken of above, has demonstrated at least the vitality of that faith among the Chinese nation. When the Russian missionaries cross the frontier they will not leave their own country weaker, but their work will be a token that Russia is purifying her faith and is advancing along the road that leads to holiness.
Abyssinia, 196 Accuracy of Chinese, 72 Agnosticism, 301 Agricultural College, 280 Aims of missionary education, 257 et seq. Altar of Heaven, 142, 155 America, 244, 254, 308 American Methodist Mission, 198 American missions, 16, 192, 200, 217 Americans, 234, 253 et seq., 277, 284 Amita, 149, 150 Amitobha, 149 Amur, The, 11 Ancestor worship, 153 et seq., 160, 161 Ancestral tablet, 159 Anglican Church Conference, 215 Anglicans, 216, 245 et seq. Anglo-Saxon race, 242 Anson's Law of Contract, 285 Antung, 91 Apocrypha, 221 Apostles' Creed, defence of, 200 Apparatus, 290, 294 Architecture, 137 et seq., 295 Art, Chinese, 137, 138 Association of Christianity with learning, 258 et seq. Autocratic government, result of, 199 B Baikal Lake, 333 Balfour's "Defence of Philosophic Doubt," 257 Bamboo rope, 85 Bambooing, 66 Beggar Hospital, 227 Belgium, 308 Benedict XIV., 186 Bible Societies, 17 Bible Society, British and Foreign, 17, 198, 213 Bible, style of, 181 Blagovestchensk, 11 Blair, Mr., 236 Blind, Missions to, 201 et seq. Boone College, Wuchang, 308, 319 Bouriat, Buddhist, 336 Boxer Movement, 7, 9, 18, 156, 161, 188, 269, 271, 274 British missions, 201 et seq. Buddha, 149 Buddhism, 148 et seq., 164, 170, 175, 179 et seq., 243, 248, 263, 269, 333 Buddhist temples, 45, 141 Bull, Papal, 186 Butterfield and Swire, 79 C Cambridge, 173, 312 Canton, 113 Canton Women's Hospital, 226 Canton-Wuchang Railway, 322 Cantonese dialect, 286 Cassels, Bishop, 201 Centenary Conference, 122, 125, 132, 200, 210, 242 et seq. Chair travelling, 97 Chang-Chih-Tung, 75, 152, 168, 208, 218, 268 et seq., 321 et seq. Changsha, 77 et seq., 167, 291 Characters, Chinese, 132, 181, 208 et seq. Chentu, 316 Chicago University, 212 China Emergency Committee, 229 China for the Chinese, 216, 296 China Inland Mission, 201 China Merchants' boats, 62 "China's Only Hope," 268 Chinese clergy, 174, 257, 259 et seq., 310 Chinese-Japanese War, 5, 268 Christianity in China tolerated, 45 et seq. Christie, Dr., 226 Chu, 156, 179 Chungking, 81 Church of England, 202, 203 "Church in China," 242 Church Missionary Society, 201 Cities, Chinese, 95 et seq. Civilisation, Chinese, 56 et seq. Classics, Chinese, 168, 207, 260, 270, 301 Cleanliness, difficulty with Chinese, 226 Clergy, Chinese, 174, 257, 259 et seq., 310 Cochrane, Dr., 226, 228 et seq. Colleges, 254 et seq., 303, 308 Commercial power of China, 29 Commercial Press, 16, 215 Commercial School, 287 Confucian teaching, 73, 156, 159, 163 et seq., 321, 323 Confucianism, 148, 153 et seq., 163 et seq., 175, 221, 243, 261 Confucius, 41, 42, 59, 156, 163 et seq., 220, 300 et seq. Copts, 196 Corruption of Chinese, 62, 293 Courtesy of Chinese, 70 et seq. Cruelty of Chinese, 65 et seq. Currency, 63 et seq. D Dalai Lama, 180 Delamarre, Père, 47 Diabolical possession, 158 Difficulties of education, 293 et seq. Difficulties of translation, 208 et seq. Director of Chinese students, 172 Director of education, 280 et seq., 295 Discipline, want of, 297 et seq. Divine honours to Confucius, 301 Dominicans, 186 "Door of Hope," 134 Drugs, Chinese, 224 Dumas, Dame aux Camelias, 218 Duty to parents, 74, 174 E Ede, Mr., 56 Edict against opium, 117 Edict, educational, 271 Edict on Confucius, 302 Edict on official rank for Roman Catholic missions, 188, 189 Edification of Christianity, 257 et seq. Education, 253 et seq. Education, Committee of, 312 Education of preachers, 257 et seq. Educational, 230, 231 Educational policy in China, 254 et seq. Emperor of China, 187, 275, 300 Emperor of Korea, 76, 239 Emperor of Russia, 331 Emperor, German, 309 Empress of China, the late, 128 Episcopal Church of America, 256 Ethics, Chinese, 70 et seq., 220 Evangelisation, 257 et seq. Ezra, 59 F "Face," 166, 167, 240, 298 Famine in China, 56 Fashion, power of, 33 Fashions in China, 34 Financial difficulties in schools, 298 et seq. Foot-binding, 66, 124, 129, 130, 182 Foster, Mr. Arnold, 125 Foster, Mrs. Arnold, 3 France, foreign policy of, 24, 187, 191, 221, 308 Franciscan Sisters, 68, 194 French officials, 184 "French Peter," 225, 226 French policy, 188 French ship, 197 French, the, 46, 186, 187, 188, 192, 253 Fukien, 50 G Gardens, 72 Gardens, public, Shanghai, 102 Gautama, 149 Geography, 268 Germans, 253 Germany, 6, 18, 48, 49 et seq., 235 Ghurkas, 25 Gillieson, Dr., 226 Girls' schools, 130 et seq., 289 et seq., 298 Goforth, Mr., 240 Gold in Siberia, 335 Gorges of Yangtsze, 81 et seq., 201 Gospel, St. Luke's, comments on, 214 Gospel, St. Mark's, Chinaman's acquaintance with, 213 Government educational systems, 266 et seq. Grand Canal, 80 Graves, Bishop, 308 Greek Church, Chinese, 148, 336 Green Korean coats, 233 Grey, Sir Edward, 120, 210 H Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe," 218, 263 Haldane's "Pathway to Reality," 257 Hangchow, 223 et seq. Hangchow, monastery at, 180 Hankow, 78, 81, 89, 140, 174, 226, 229, 316, 319 Hanlin scholars, 176 et seq., 267 Han-Yang Ironworks, 30 Harbin, 315 Hart, Dr. Lavington, 99 Hashish, 108 Heat at Saigon, 183, 184 "Heaven," 156, 178, 179, 210 Heaven, Temple of, 142 Hewlett, Consul, 167 High schools, 281 Higher schools, 272 Hoang-ho River, 56, 57 Home Board, 245 Home life, Chinese, 135, 136 Hong-Kong, 76, 103, 109, 183, 213, 283, 303, 316 Hunan, 77 I Ichang, 68, 81, 85, 194 Ideographs, 217 Ignatius, College of St., 253 India, 164, 244 India, comparison with China, 22, 23 India, home of opium, 114 India, Little, 180 Indian Buddhism, 180 "Indiscreet Letters from Peking," 39 Industry, Chinese, 72 Infant schools, 271 Inns, Chinese, 89 Intellectual side of Christianity, 202 Intonations, Chinese, 309 Irkutsk, 51, 329, 333 et seq. Ironworks, Han-Yang, 30 Ito, Prince, 232, 235 Iwolsky, M., 329 et seq. J Jackson, Mr., 256 Japan, 50, 121, 126, 149, 160 et seq., 170, 204, 210, 263, 283, 325, 329, 330 Japan and Korea, 5, 232 et seq. Japan and Russia, 12, 23, 49 et seq. Japanese, 61 Japanese, re opium, 115, 116 Japanese teachers, 131, 280 et seq., 295 Jarlin, Monseigneur, 3 Jessfield College, 308, 312 Jesuits, 185, 186, 253, 258 Jesuits, scientific attainments of, 185, 195 Jesuits, suppression of, in China, 186 Jews, Chinese, 148 John, Father, 330 Jordan, Sir John, 120 K Kiauchau, 6, 48, 51, 91, 92 King, Consul, 176 Kins, 26 Kiukiang, 97 Korea, 76, 232 et seq. Korea and Japan, 5, 12, 232 et seq. Korean women, 233 Kow-tow, 300 Kwangchangtzu, 318 Kwannin, 149, 150 L Lamaism, 15, 149, 248 Languages, School of, 292 Laotze, 151 Laudanum, 112 et seq. Law Schools, 277, 283 Lawsuits, Chinese, 191, 192 Lawsuits, interference in, 189 et seq. Leavening of public opinion, 257 et seq. Legation, British, 141 Legge's, Dr., Chinese Classics, 179 Leper Hospital, 227 Likin, 58 Literati, Chinese, 177, 186, 203, 321 Literature, effect of Western, 207 et seq. Literature Society, Christian, 16, 168, 212 Lolos, 27, 68 London Mission, 198, 201 Louis XIV., 187 Lutherans, 256 M Macklin, Dr., 67, 227 Main, Dr. Duncan, 223 et seq. Maios, 27 Manchu ladies, 130, 131 Manchuria, 12, 51, 53, 90 et seq., 204, 232 et seq. Manohus, 25, 176, 185, 279, 292, 318 Mandarin-speaking, 285, 286 Manichæism, 151, 152 Martin, Professor, 296 Materialism, Western, 171, 305 et seq. Medical missions, 220 et seq. Mencius, 177 Methodist colleges, 308 Methodists, 238 Middle schools, 272 Mih-Tieh, 174 Military power of China, 24, 25 Ming dynasty, 26, 185 Mission Press, 212 Missions, 183 et seq., 198 et seq., 220 et seq., 253 et seq., 305 et seq. Missions Catholiques Françaises, Les, 188 Modesty, lack of, in Japanese, 233 Mohammedans, Chinese, 148 Mongolia, 51, 213 Mongols, 26 Monotonous employment, love of, 73 Moral power of China, 32 Morrison, Dr., 15, 17, 198, 208 Moule, Archdeacon, 4, 137, 198, 298 Moule, Bishop, 198 Movement in Korea and Manchuria, 232 et seq. Mukden, 91, 226, 318 Mukden, battle of, 5, 13 Murray, Dr., 230 Mutiny, 54 N Nanking, 63, 67, 92, 297 et seq. Nanking, hospital at, 227 Nanking, interviews at, 172 et seq. Napoleon I., 187 Napoleon III., 47 Native ministry, 257, 259 et seq., 310 Naval school, 52, 287 Need of University explained, 305 et seq. Nestorians, 15, 149, 150, 248 Newchwang, 8, 205 North China Mission, 203 O Obedience of Chinese, 61 Obedience to parents, 74 Observatory Ziccawei, 195 Official rank for Roman Catholic Missions, 188, 189, 191 Officials, Chinese, 167, 172, 283, 299, 317 Officials, French, 184 Old, reverence for the, 321 O-mi-to, 149 Opium, 107 et seq. Opium, edict against, 117 Opposition to Western materialism, 258 et seq. Organisation of Chinese Government, 60 Orientals, 36 et seq., 61 Orphanages, Roman Catholic, 193, 194, 264 Orthodox Church of Russia, 244, 245, 330 et seq. Oxford and Cambridge, 173, 312 P Pagodas, 141 Pao-ting-fu, 7, 276 Pastor Hsi, 158 Patience of Chinese, 72 Patriarchate, the, 331 Pei-Yang University, 276 Peking, Blind Mission at, 229 Peking Gazette, 168 Peking, interviews at, 319 et seq. Peking, Lama Temple at, 180 Peking, Methodist University, 308 Peking, missions at, 203 Peking, Mongol Temple at, 150, 180 Peking, Roman Catholics at, 197 Peking, sack of, 10 Peking to Canton railway, 89 Peking, Union Hospital at, 226 Peking University, 291, 300 Pe-T'ang, the, 140 Physical science uninteresting to Chinese, 182 Pidgin English, 22 Pitt, 187 Pobiedonosteff, M., 330 Police, different nationalities of, 101 Port Arthur, 5, 204 Post-offices, 103 et seq. Pott, Dr Hawks, 312 Poverty in China, 221 Preparation of secular teachers, 257 Presbyterians and their missions, 69, 198, 201, 204, 235 et seq. Press, the, 168 Primary schools, 272 Procurator of Holy Synod, 321 et seq. Pyeng-Yang, 5, 235 et seq. Q Queen of England, the late, 128 Queen of Korea, murder of the, 76, 234 R Railways, 88 et seq. Rapids of Yangtsze, 82 et seq. "Reason," 178, 179 Red boat, 82, 85 Reformation, the, 246 Religions of China, 147 et seq. Religious Tract Society, 212 Renaissance, the, 260 Rescue work, 133 et seq. "Review of the Times," the, 212 Revival, 236 et seq. Ricci, Father, 185 Richard, Dr. Timothy, 203, 212, 274 et seq. Rickshas, 98 Ritual, 246 Rivers, 80 et seq. Roman Catholic missions, 183 et seq., 203 Roman Catholics, 46, 47, 148, 213, 243, 258, 292 Roman Church, policy of, 192, 243, 244 Romanised system of reading, 132 Rome, appeal to, 186 Roofs, Chinese, 142, 143 Roots, Bishop, 256 Ross, Dr., 113, 178, 318 Russia and Japan, 23, 49 et seq., 163 Russia in mission field, 329 Russia, Orthodox Church of, 244, 330 et seq. Russians, 204 et seq. Russo-Japanese War, 11 et seq., 163 S Saigon, 183, 184 Saigon, Bishop of, 184 Saigon, climate of, 184 St. Augustine, 166 St. Petersburg, 51, 329, 330 Sanscrit MS., 180 Scandinavian Missions, 203 Scheme, United Universities, 312 et seq., 317 et seq. School uniform, 175, 283 School, Viceroy's, 175 et seq. Schools, 253 et seq. Schools in England, 173 Schools in Nanking, 173 et seq. Scotch, the, 69, 234 Scott, Bishop, 203 Secondary wives, 123 et seq. Seoul, 77, 233 et seq. Shanghai, 36, 76, 95, 105, 113, 126, 129, 133, 140, 225, 291 Shansi, 6, 18, 49, 110, 274 Shantung, 6, 18, 92, 303 Shi-King, 207 Shintoism, 163, 170 Shops, Chinese, 96 et seq. Shu-yuen, 261 Siberia, 25, 148, 329, 333 et seq. Silk Guild, 95, 287 Slanders against missions, 194 Slave Refuge, 126 Slaves, 126 et seq., 323 Solidarity of Chinese, 60 Songs of trackers, 84 Soochow, University at, 308 Soothill, Mr., 275 Spencer, Herbert, 263 S.P.G., a via media, 202 S.P.G. Mission, 202 "Spirit," 210 Sprue, 225, 226 Squeeze, 293, 294 Starvation common, 222 Streets, Chinese, 97 et seq. Strikes in schools, 297 et seq. Summer Palace, sack of, 46 Sund Fo, 25 "Superior man," 177, 178 Superior schools, 273 Superstition, 156, 157 et seq. Supreme Being, 155, 156, 220 Synod of Russian Church, 331 et seq. Szechuan, 88, 92 T Tablet of Confucius, 300 et seq. T'ang-K'ai-Sun, His Excellency, 116 Taoism, 151 et seq., 164, 175, 181, 243, 269 Tartar, Mohammedan, 336 Temple of Heaven, 142, 155 Teuton mind, 246 Theatres, 272 Tibetans, 25, 114 Tientsin, 28, 36, 38, 61, 91, 93, 95, 99, 166, 276 Tokio, 306 Tong-Shao-Yi, His Excellency, 41, 318 Tonkin, 17 Torture of medical missionary, 205 Trackers on Yangtsze, 83, 86, 87 Trans-Siberian Railway, 21, 204, 329 Travelling, comfort in, 21 Treaties, 46, 47, 188 Tuan-Fang, His Excellency, 173 et seq., 279 Turkey, 164 U Union Hospital, 226 United States, 200 United Universities Scheme, 312 et seq., 317 et seq. Unity in China, 242 Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 312 Universities in Soochow and Peking, 308 University, Paris Professor, 193 University, Pei-Yang, 276 University of Oxford, 311 University government, 303 University government system, 273 University in Chentu, 316 University in China, 94, 172, 175, 263 University in Hong-Kong, 286, 303 University in Peking, 291, 304 University in Shansi, 274 et seq. University in Tokio, 306 V Viceroy of Nanking, 173 et seq. Vices, Chinese, 62 Virtues, Chinese, 72 W Wall, Great, 26 Wang, Mr., 276 War in 1840, 188 Weihsien, 308 Wenli, 208 Wesleyan movement, 241 West and East, 36 et seq. Western civilisation, two elements of, 218, 325 et seq. Wheelbarrows, 101 Williamson, Dr., 16 Willow pattern from Hangchow Lake, 228 Women, Chinese, 102, 121 et seq. Word-signs, 210 et seq., 215 Wuchang, 291, 292, 323 X Xavier, St. Francis, 15 Y Yale University Mission, 313 Yamen, 71, 167, 173, 176, 182, 246, 318 Yang and Yin, 121, 151, 152 Yang Choo, 307 Yangtsze, island on, 193 Yangtsze-Kiang, 53, 54, 62, 73, 81 et seq., 118, 126 Yuan-Shi-Kai, His Excellency, 274 Yunnan, 92 Z Zenana work, 131 Ziccawei Observatory, 195, 196
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