China and the West

Dickinson, G. Lowes. Letters from a Chinese official [ID D29633]. (1)
I
Recent events in China have brought into new prominence at once the fundamental antagonism between Eastern and Western civilization, and that ignorance and contempt of the one for the other which is mainly responsible for the present situation. In the face of the tragedy that is being enacted, I have long held my peace. But a growing sense of indignation, and a hope, perhaps illusory, that I may contribute to remove certain misunderstandings, have impelled me at last to open my lips, and to lay before the British public some views which have long been crying for utterance. Of the immediate crisis I do not propose to speak. It is my object rather to promote a juster estimate of my countrymen and their policy, by explaining, as far as I am able, the way in which we regard Western civilization, and the reasons we have for desiring to exclude its influences. For such a task I conceive myself to be not altogether unfit. A long residence in England gives me some right to speak of your institutions ; while absence from my own country has not disqualified me to speak of ours. A
Chinaman remains always a Chinaman; and much as I admire in some of its aspects the
achievement of Western civilization, I have yet seen nothing which could make me regret that I was born a citizen of the East. To Englishmen this may seem a strange confession. You are
accustomed to regard us as barbarians, and not unnaturally, for it is only on the occasions when we murder your compatriots that your attention is powerfully drawn toward us. From such spasmodic outbreaks you are apt overhastily to infer that we are a nation of cold-blooded assassins; a conclusion as reasonable as would be an inference from the present conduct of your troops in China to the general character of Western civilization. We are not to be judged by the acts of our mobs, nor even, I may add, by those of our Government, for the Government in China does not represent the nation. Yet even those acts (strongly as they are condemned by all educated Chinamen) deserve, I venture to think, on the part of Europeans, a consideration more grave, and a less intemperate reprobation, than they have hitherto received among you. For they are expressions of a feeling which is, and must always be, the most potent factor in our relations with the West our profound mistrust and dislike of your civilization. This feeling you, naturally enough, attribute to prejudice and ignorance. In reality, I venture to think, it is based upon reason ; and for this point of view I would ask the serious and patient consideration of my readers.
Our civilization is the oldest in the world. It does not follow that it is the best; but neither, I
submit, does it follow that it is the worst. On the contrary, such antiquity is, at any rate, a proof that our institutions have guaranteed to us a stability for which we search in vain among the nations of Europe. But not only is our civilization stable, it also embodies, as we think, a moral order ; while in yours we detect only an economic chaos. Whether your religion be better than ours, I do not at present dispute ; but it is certain that it has less influence on your society. You profess Christianity, but your civilization has never been Christian; whereas ours is Confucian through and through. But to say that it is Confucian, is to say that it is moral; or, at least (for I do not wish to beg the question), that moral relations are those which it primarily contemplates. Whereas, with you (so it seems to us) economic relations come first, and upon these you endeavor, afterward, to graft as much morality as they will admit.
This point I may illustrate by a comparison between your view of the family and ours. To
you, so far as a foreigner can perceive, the family is merely a means for nourishing and protecting the child until he is of age to look after himself. As early as may be, you send your
boys away to a public school, where they quickly emancipate themselves from the influences of their home. As soon as they are of age, you send them out, as you say, to "make their fortune"; and from that moment, often enough, as they cease to be dependent on their parents, so they cease to recognize obligations toward them. They may go where they will, do what they will, earn and spend as they choose ; and it is at their own option whether or no they maintain their family ties. With you the individual is the unit, and all the units are free. No one is tied, but also no one is rooted. Your society, to use your own word, is "progressive"; you are always "moving on." Everyone feels it a duty (and in most cases it is a necessity) to strike out a new line for himself. To remain in the position in which you were born you consider a disgrace; a man, to be a man, must venture, struggle, compete, and win. To this characteristic of your society is to be attributed, no doubt, its immense activity, and its success in all material arts. But to this, also, is due the feature that most strikes a Chinaman its unrest, its confusion, its lack (as we think) of morality. Among you no one is contented, no one has leisure to live, so intent are all on increasing the means of living. The "cash-nexus" (to borrow a phrase of one of your own writers) is the only relation you recognize among men.
Now, to us of the East all this is the mark of a barbarous society. We measure the degree of
civilization not by accumulation of the means of living, but by the character and value of the life lived. Where there are no humane and stable relations, no reverence for the past, no respect even for the present, but only a cupidinous ravishment of the future, there, we think, there is no true society. And we would not if we could rival you in your wealth, your sciences, and your arts, if we must do so at the cost of imitating your institutions.
In all these matters, our own procedure is the opposite to yours. We look first to the society
and then to the individual. Among us, it is a rule that a man is born into precisely those
relations in which he is to continue during the course of his life. As he begins, so he ends, a
member of his family group, and to this condition the whole theory and practice of his life conforms. He is taught to worship his ancestors, to honor and obey his parents, and to prepare
himself from an early age for the duties of a husband and a father. Marriage does not dissolve the family; the husband remains, and the wife becomes a member of his group of kinsmen. And this group is the social unit. It has its common plot of ground, its common altar and rites, its tribunal for settling disputes among its members. No man in China is isolated, save by his own fault. If it is not so easy for him to grow rich as with you, neither is it so easy for him to starve; if he has not the motive to compete, neither has he the temptation to cheat and oppress. Free at once from the torment of ambition and the apprehension of distress, he has leisure to spare from the acquisition of the means of living for life itself. He has both the instinct and the opportunity to appreciate the gifts of Nature, to cultivate manners, and to enter into humane and disinterested relations with his fellows. The result is a type which we cannot but
regard as superior, both morally and aesthetically, to the great bulk of your own citizens in Europe. And while we recognize the greatness of your practical and scientific achievements, yet we find it impossible unreservedly to admire a civilization which has produced manners so coarse, morals so low, and an appearance so unlovely as those with which we are constantly confronted in your great cities. Admitting that we are not what you call a progressive people, we yet perceive that progress may be bought too dear. We prefer our own moral to your material advantages, and we are determined to cling to the institutions which, we believe, insure us the former, even at the risk of excluding ourselves from the latter.
II
In my last letter I endeavored to give some general account of the salient differences between your civilization and ours. Such differences have led inevitably to conflict; and recent events might seem to give some color to the idea that in that conflict it is we who have been the
aggressors. But nothing in fact can be further from the truth. Left to ourselves, we should never have sought intercourse with the West. We have no motive to do so ; for we desire neither to proselytize nor to trade. We believe, it is true, that our religion is more rational than yours, our morality higher, and our institutions more perfect; but we recognize that what is suited to us may be ill adapted to others. We do not conceive that we have a mission to redeem or to civilize the world, still less that that mission is to be accomplished by the methods of fire and sword; and we are thankful enough if we can solve our own problems, without burdening ourselves with those of other peoples. And as we are not led to interfere with you by the desire to convert you, so are we not driven to do so by the necessities of trade. Economically, as well as politically, we are sufficient to ourselves. What we consume we produce, and what we produce we consume. We do not require, and we have not sought, the products of other nations; and we hold it no less imprudent than unjust to make war on strangers in order to open their markets. A society, we conceive, that is to be politically stable must be economically independent; and we regard an extensive foreign trade as necessarily a source of social demoralization.
In these, as in all other points, your principle is the opposite to ours. You believe, not only that your religion is the only true one, but that it is your duty to impose it on all other nations, if need be, at the point of the sword. And this motive of aggression is reinforced by another still more potent. Economically, your society is so constituted that it is constantly on the verge
of starvation. You cannot produce what you need to consume, nor consume what you need
to produce. It is matter of life and death to you to find markets in which you may dispose of your manufactures, and from which you may derive your food and raw material. Such a market China is, or might be; and the opening of this market is in fact the motive, thinly disguised, of all your dealings with us in recent years. The justice and morality of such a policy I do not propose to discuss. It is, in fact, the product of sheer material necessity, and upon such a ground it is idle to dispute. I shall confine myself therefore to an endeavor to present our view of the situation, and to explain the motives we have for resenting your aggression.
To the ordinary British trader it seems no doubt a strange thing that we should object to what he describes as the opening out of our national resources. Viewing everything, as he habitually does, from the standpoint of profit and loss, he conceives that if it can be shown that a certain course will lead to the increase of wealth, it follows that that is the course that ought to be adopted. The opening of China to his capital and his trade he believes will have this result; and he concludes that it is our interest to welcome rather than to resist his enterprise. From his point of view he is justified; but his point of view is not ours. We are accustomed, before adopting any grave measure of policy, to estimate its effects not merely on the sum total of our wealth, but (which we conceive to be a very different thing) on our national well-being. You, as always, are thinking of the means of living; we, of the quality of the life lived. And when you ask us, as you do in effect, to transform our whole society, to convert ourselves from a nation of agriculturists to a nation of traders and manufacturers, to sacrifice to an imaginary prosperity our political and economic independence, and to revolutionize not only our industry, but our manners, morals, and institutions, we may be pardoned if we first take a critical look at the effects which have been produced among
yourselves by the conditions you urge us to introduce in China.
The results of such a survey, we venture to think, are not encouraging. Like the prince in the fable, you seem to have released from his prison the genie of competition, only to find that you are unable to control him. Your legislation for the past hundred years is a perpetual and
fruitless effort to regulate the disorders of your economic system. Your poor, your drunk, your
incompetent, your sick, your aged, ride you like a nightmare. You have dissolved all human and personal ties, and you endeavor, in vain, to replace them by the impersonal activity of the
State. The salient characteristic of your civilization is its irresponsibility. You have liberated
forces you cannot control; you are caught yourselves in your own levers and cogs. In every
department of business you are substituting for the individual the company, for the workman the tool. The making of dividends is the universal preoccupation; the well-being of the laborer
is no one's concern but the State's. And this concern even the State is incompetent to undertake, for the factors by which it is determined are beyond its control. You depend on variations of supply and demand which you can neither determine nor anticipate. The failure
of a harvest, the modification of a tariff in some remote country, dislocates the industry of millions, thousands of miles away. You are at the mercy of a prospector's luck, an inventor's
genius, a woman's caprice nay, you are at the mercy of your own instruments. Your capital is alive, and cries for food ; starve it and it turns and throttles you. You produce, not because you will, but because you must; you consume, not what you choose, but what is forced upon
you. Never was any trade so bound as this which you call free ; but it is bound, not by a reasonable will, but by the accumulated irrationality of caprice.
Such is the internal economy of your State, as it presents itself to a Chinaman; and not more
encouraging is the spectacle of your foreign relations. Commercial intercourse between nations, it was supposed some fifty years ago, would inaugurate an era of peace; and there
appear to be many among you who still cling to this belief. But never was belief more plainly contradicted by the facts. The competition for markets bids fair to be a more fruitful cause of war than was ever in the past the ambition of princes or the bigotry of priests. The peoples of Europe fling themselves, like hungry beasts of prey, on every yet unexploited quarter of the globe. Hitherto they have confined their acts of spoliation to those whom they regard as out- side their own pale. But always, while they divide the spoil, they watch one another with a jealous eye; and sooner or later, when there is nothing left to divide, they will fall upon one
another. That is the real meaning of your armaments ; you must devour or be devoured. And
it is precisely those trade relations, which it was thought would knit you in the bonds of peace,
which, by making every one of you cut-throat rivals of the others, have brought you within reasonable distance of a general war of extermination.
In thus characterizing your civilization, I am not (I think) carried away by a foolish Chauvinism, I do not conceive the inhabitants of Europe to be naturally more foolish and depraved than those of China. On the contrary, it is a cardinal tenet of our faith, that human nature is everywhere the same, and that it is circumstances that make it good or bad. If, then, your economy, internal or external, be really as defective as we conceive, the cause we think must be sought not in any radical defect in your national character, but in precisely those political and social institutions which you are urging us to adopt at home. Can you wonder, in the circumstances, that we resist your influence by any means at our command; and that the more intelligent among us, while they regret the violence to which your agents have been exposed, yet feel that it weighs as nothing in the scale, when set against the intolerable evils which would result from the success of your enterprise?
III
In one of your journals I recently read that "the civilization of China" is the ultimate object
of the nations of Europe. If so, the methods they adopt to attain their end are singular in- deed : but of these I do not trust myself to speak. Looting, wanton destruction, cold-blooded murder, and rape, these are the things which you do not, I know, here in England approve, which you would prevent, I am convinced, if you could, and which I am willing to set down to the license of ill-disciplined troops. It is for another purpose than that of idle deprecation that I refer to them in this place. The question always before my mind when you speak of civilization is this: What kind of men has your civilization produced? And to such a question current events in China seem to suggest an answer not altogether reassuring. But that answer I do not press. It may be that all culture, ours as much as yours, is no more than a veneer; that deep in the den of every human heart lurks the brute, ready to leap on its prey when chance or design has unbarred the gates. We at any rate, in China, lie under the same condemnation as you; and our reproaches, like yours, fly back to the mouths of them that utter them. I pass,
therefore, from scenes like these to normal conditions of life. What manner of men, I ask, are we, what manner of men are you, that you should take upon yourselves to call us barbarians ?
What manner of men are we? The question is hard to answer. Turning it over in my thoughts, hour after hour, day after day, I can hit on no better device to bring home to you something of what is in my mind than to endeavor to set down here, as faithfully as I can, a picture that never ceases to haunt my memory as I walk in these dreary winter days the streets of your black Metropolis.
Far away in the East, under sunshine such as you never saw (for even such light as you have you stain and infect with sooty smoke), on the shore of a broad river stands the house where I was born. It is one among thousands ; but every one stands in its own garden, simply painted in white or gray, modest, cheerful, and clean. For many miles along the valley, one after the other, they lift their blue- or red-tiled roofs out of a sea of green; while here and there glitters out over a clump of trees the gold enamel of some tall pagoda. The river, crossed by frequent
bridges and crowded with barges and junks, bears on its clear stream the traffic of thriving
village-markets. For prosperous peasants people all the district, owning and tilling the fields
their fathers owned and tilled before them. The soil on which they work, they may say, they and their ancestors have made. For see ! almost to the summit what once were barren hills are
waving green with cotton and rice, sugar, oranges, and tea. Water drawn from the river-bed girdles the slopes with silver; and falling from channel to channel in a thousand bright cascades, plashing in cisterns, chuckling in pipes, soaking and oozing in the soil, distributes freely to all alike fertility, verdure, and life. Hour after hour you may traverse, by tortuous paths, over tiny bridges, the works of the generations who have passed, the labors of their children of to-day; till you reach the point where man succumbs and Nature has her way, covering the highest crags with a mantle of azure and gold and rose, gardenia, clematis, azalea, growing luxuriantly wild. How often here have I sat for hours in a silence so intense that, as one of our poets has said, "you may hear the shadows of the trees rustling on the ground"; a silence broken only now and again from far below by voices of laborers calling across the water-courses, or, at evening or dawn, by the sound of gongs summoning to worship from the temples in the valley. Such silence ! Such sounds ! Such perfume! Such color! The senses respond to their objects; they grow exquisite to a degree you cannot well conceive in your northern climate; and beauty pressing in from without moulds the spirit and mind insensibly to harmony with herself. If in China we have manners, if we have art, if we have morals, the
reason, to those who can see, is not far to seek. Nature has taught us; and so far, we are only more fortunate than you. But, also, we have had the grace to learn her lesson ; and that, we think, we may ascribe to our intelligence. For, con- sider, here in this lovely valley live thousands of souls without any law save that of custom, with- out any rule save that of their own hearths. Industrious they are, as you hardly know industry in Europe ; but it is the industry of free men working for their kith and kin, on the lands they received from their fathers, to transmit, enriched by their labors, to their sons. They have no other ambition ; they do not care to amass wealth ; and if in each generation some must needs go out into the world, it is with the hope, not commonly frustrated, to return to the place of their birth and spend their declining years among the scenes and faces that were dear to their youth. Among such a people there is no room for fierce, indecent rivalries. None is master, none servant ; but equality, concrete and real, regulates and sustains their intercourse. Healthy toil, sufficient leisure, frank hospitality, a content born of habit and undisturbed by chimerical ambitions, a sense of beauty fostered by the loveliest Nature in the world, and finding expression in gracious and dignified manners where it is not embodied in exquisite works of art such are the characteristics of the people among whom I was born. Does my memory flatter me? Do I idealize the scenes of my youth? It may be so. But this I know: that some such life as I have
described, reared on the basis of labor on the soil, of equality and justice, does exist and flourish throughout the length and breadth of China. What have you to offer in its place, you
our would-be civilizers? Your religion? Alas! it is in the name of that that you are doing unnamable deeds! Your morals? Where shall we find them ? Your intelligence ? Whither has it led? What counter-picture have you to offer over here in England to this which I have drawn of life in China? That is the question which I have now to endeavor to reply.
IV
In attempting to lay before you a characteristic scene of Chinese life I selected for the purpose a community of peasants. I did so because it is there that I find the typical product of our civilization. Cities, it is true, we have, and cities as monstrous, perhaps, as yours; but they are
mere excrescences on a body politic whose essential constitution is agricultural. With you all this is reversed; and for that reason you have no country life deserving the name. On the one hand waste of common and moor, on the other villas and parks, laborers poorly clad, wretchedly housed, and miserably paid, dreary villages, decaying farms, squalor, brutality, and vice such is the picture you give, yourselves, of your agricultural districts. Whatever in England is not urban is parasitic or moribund. If, then, I am to give an impression that shall be candid and just of the best results of your civilization, I must turn from the country to the life of your great cities. And in doing so I will not seek to win an easy victory by dwelling unduly on those more obvious points which you no less than I admit and deplore. Your swarming slums, your liquor-saloons, your poor-houses, your prisons these, it is true, are melancholy facts. But the evils of which they are symptoms you are setting yourselves to cure, and your efforts, I do not doubt, may be attended with a large measure of success. It is rather the goal to which you seem to be moving when you have done the best you can that I would choose to consider in this place. Your typical product, your average man, the man you call respectable, him it is that I wish to characterize, for he it is that is the natural and inevitable outcome of your civilization. What manner of man, then, is he? It is with some hesitation that I set myself to answer this question. I am a stranger among you; I have enjoyed your hospitality; and I am loath to seem to repay you with discourtesy. But if there be any service I can do you, I know none greater than to bring home to you, if I could, without undue offence, certain important truths (so they seem to me) to which you appear to be singularly blind. Your feet, I believe, are set on the wrong path ; I would fain warn you ; and useless though the warning may be, it is offered in the spirit of friendship, and in that spirit, I hope, it will be received.
When I review my impressions of the average English citizen, impressions based on many
years' study, what kind of man do I see? I see one divorced from Nature, but unreclaimed by Art; instructed, but not educated; assimilative, but incapable of thought. Trained in the tenets
of a religion in which he does not really believe for he sees it flatly contradicted in every relation of life he dimly feels that it is prudent to conceal under a mask of piety the atheism he is hardly intelligent enough to avow. His religion is conventional; and, what ; s more important, his morals are as conventional as his creed. Charity, chastity, self-abnegation, contempt of the world and its prizes these are the words on which he has been fed from his childhood upward. And words they have remained, for neither has he anywhere seen them practised by others, nor has it ever occurred to him to practise them himself. Their influence, while it is strong enough to make him a chronic hypocrite, is not so strong as to show him the hypocrite he is. Deprived on the one hand of the support of a true ethical standard, embodied in the life of the society of which he is a member, he is duped, on the other, by lip-worship of an impotent ideal. Abandoned thus to his instinct, he is content to do as others do, and, ignoring the things of the spirit, to devote himself to material ends. He becomes a mere tool;
and of such your society is composed. By your works you may be known. Your triumphs in the mechanical arts are the obverse of your failure in all that calls for spiritual insight. Machinery of every kind you can make and use to perfection; but you cannot build a house, or write a poem, or paint a picture; still less can you worship or aspire. Look at your streets! Row upon row of little boxes, one like another, lacking in all that is essential, loaded with all that is superfluous this is what passes among you for architecture. Your literature is the daily
press, with its stream of solemn fatuity, of anecdotes, puzzles, puns, and police-court scandal.
Your pictures are stories in paint, transcripts of all that is banal, clumsily botched by amateurs
as devoid of tradition as of genius. Your outer sense as well as your inner is dead; you are blind and deaf. Ratiocination has taken the place of perception; and your whole life is an
infinite syllogism from premises you have not examined to conclusions you have not anticipated or willed. Everywhere means, nowhere an end ! Society a huge engine, and that engine itself out of gear! Such is the picture your civilization presents to my imagination. I will not say that it is so that it appears to every intelligent Chinaman; for the Chinese, unlike you, are constitutionally averse to drawing up an indictment against a nation. If I have been led into that error, it is under strong provocation ; and already I feel that I owe you an apology. Yet what I have said I cannot withdraw; and I shall not regret that I have spoken if I may hope that my words have suggested to some among my readers a new sense in the cry, "China for the Chinese !"
V
When I was first brought into contact with the West what most immediately impressed me was the character and range of your intelligence. I found that you had brought your minds to bear, with singular success, upon problems which had not even occurred to us in the East; that by analysis and experiment you had found the clue to the operation of the forces of nature, and had turned them to account in ways which, to my un-travelled imagination, appeared to be little short of miraculous. Nor has familiarity diminished my admiration for your achievements in this field. I recognize in them your chief and most substantial claim to superiority, and I am not surprised that some of the more intelligent of my countrymen should be advocating with ardor their immediate introduction into China. I sympathize with the enthusiasm of these reformers, but I am unable, nevertheless, to endorse their policy; and it may be worth while to set down here the reasons which have led me to a conclusion which may appear at first sight to be paradoxical.
The truth is that a study of your history during the past century and a closer acquaintance with the structure of your society has considerably modified my original point of view. I have learnt that the most brilliant discoveries, the most fruitful applications of inventive genius, do not of themselves suffice for the well-being of society; and that an intelligence which is concentrated exclusively on the production of labor-saving machines may easily work more
harm by the dislocation of industry than it can accomplish good by the increase of wealth. For the increase of wealth that is, of the means to comfort is not, to my mind, necessarily good in itself; everything depends on the way in which the wealth is distributed and on its effect on the moral character of the nation. And it is from that point of view that I look with some dismay upon the prospect of the introduction of Western methods into China. An example will best explain my point. When we began to construct our first railway, from Tientsin to Peking, the undertaking excited among the neighboring populace an opposition which quickly developed into open riot. The line was torn up, bridges were destroyed, and it was impossible to continue the work. We therefore, according to our custom in China, sent down to the scene of action, not a force of police, but an official to interview the rioters and ascertain their point of view. It was as usual a perfectly reasonable one. They were a boating population, subsisting by the traffic of the canal, and they feared that the railway would deprive them of their means of livelihood. The Government recognized the justice of their plea; they gave the required guarantee that the traffic by water should not seriously suffer, and there was no further trouble or disturbance. The episode is a good illustration of the way in which we regard these questions. Englishmen to whom I have spoken of the matter have invariably listened to my account with astonishment not unmingled with indignation. To them it seems a monstrous thing that Government should pay any regard whatever to such representations on the part of the people. They speak of the laws of supply and demand, of the ultimate absorption of labor, of competition, progress, mobility and the "long-run." To all this I listen
with more or less comprehension and acquiescence; but it cannot conceal from me the fact that the introduction of new methods means, at any rate for the moment, so much dislocation of labor, so much poverty, suffering, and starvation. Of this your own industrial history gives abundant proof. And I cannot but note with regret and disappointment that in all these years during which you have been perfecting the mechanical arts you have not apparently even attempted, you certainly have not attempted with success, to devise any means to obviate the disturbance and distress to which you have subjected your laboring population. This, indeed, is not surprising, for it is your custom to subordinate life to wealth; but neither, to a Chinaman, is it encouraging; and I, at least, cannot contemplate without the gravest apprehension the disorders which must inevitably ensue among our population of four hundred millions upon the introduction, on a large scale, of Western methods of industry. You will say that the disorder is temporary; to me it appears, in the West, to be chronic. But putting that aside, what, I may ask, are we to gain? The gain to you is palpable; so, I think, is the loss to us. But where is our gain? The question, perhaps, may seem to you irrelevant; but a Chinaman may be for- given for thinking it important. You will answer, no doubt, that we shall gain wealth. Perhaps we shall; but shall we not lose life? Shall we not become like you? And can you expect us to contemplate that with equanimity? What are your advantages? Your people, no doubt, are better equipped than ours with some of the less important goods of life; they eat more, drink more, sleep more; but there their superiority ends. They are less cheerful, less contented, less industrious, less law-abiding ; their occupations are more unhealthy both for body and mind; they are crowded into cities and factories, divorced from Nature and the ownership of the soil. On all this I have already dwelt at length; I only recur to it here in explanation of a position which may appear to you to be perverse the position of one who, while genuinely admiring the products of Western intelligence, yet doubts whether that intelligence has not been misapplied, or at least whether its direction has not been so one-sided that it is likely to have been productive of as much harm as good. You may, indeed and I trust you will rectify this error and show yourselves as ingenious in organizing men as you have been in dominating
Nature. But meantime we may, perhaps, be pardoned if even when we most admire we yet
hesitate to adopt your Western methods, and feel that the advantages which might possibly ensue will be dearly bought by the disorders that have everywhere accompanied their introduction. And there is another point which weighs with me, one less obvious, perhaps, but not less important. In any society it must always be the case that the mass of men are absorbed in mechanical labors. It is so in ours no less, though certainly no more, than in yours; and, so far, this condition does not appear to have been affected by the introduction of machinery. But,
on the other hand, in every society there are, or should be, men who are relieved from this servitude to matter and free to devote themselves to higher ends. In China, for many centuries past, there has been a class of men set apart from the first to the pursuit of liberal arts, and destined to the functions of government. These men form no close hereditary caste; it is open to anyone to join them who possesses the requisite talent and inclination: and in this respect our society has long been the most democratic in the world. The education to which we subject this official class is a matter of frequent and adverse comment among you, and it is not my intention here to undertake its defence. What I wish to point out is the fact that, by virtue of this institution, we have inculcated and we maintain among our people of all classes a respect for the things of the mind and of the spirit, to which it would be hard to find a parallel in Europe, and of which, in particular, there is no trace in England. In China letters are respected not merely to a degree but in a sense which must seem, I think to you unintelligible and over-strained. But there is a reason for it. Our poets and literary men have taught their successors, for long generations, to look for good not in wealth, not in power, not in miscellaneous activity, but in a trained, a choice, an exquisite appreciation of the most simple and universal relations of life. To feel, and in order to feel
to express, or at least to understand the expression of all that is lovely in Nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end. A rose in a moonlit garden,the shadow of trees on the turf, almond bloom, scent of pine, the wine-cup and the guitar; these and the pathos of life and death, the long embrace, the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that glides for ever away, with its freight of music and light, into the shadow and hush of the haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes us, a bird on the wing, a perfume escaped on the gale to all these things we are trained to respond, and the response is what we call literature. This we have; this you cannot give us; but this you may so easily take away. Amid the roar of looms it cannot be heard; it cannot be seen in the smoke of factories; it is killed by the wear and the whirl of Western life. And when I look at your business men, the men whom you most admire; when I see them hour after hour, day after day, year after year, toiling in the mill of their forced and undelighted labors; when I see them importing the anxieties of the day into their scant and grudging leisure, and wearing themselves out less by toil than by carking and illiberal cares, I reflect, I confess, with satisfaction on the simpler routine of our ancient industry, and prize, above all your new and dangerous routes, the beaten track so familiar to our accustomed feet that we have leisure, even while we pace it, to turn our gaze up to the eternal stars.
VI
Among Chinese institutions there is none that provokes the European mind to more hostile and contemptuous comment than our system of government. The inadequate salaries of our officials and the consequent temptation, to which they frequently succumb, to extort money by illegitimate means, is productive of much annoyance to foreigners ; nor have I anything to say in defence of a practice so manifestly undesirable. At the same time, I cannot but note that corruption of this kind is a far less serious evil in China than it is, when it prevails, among your-selves. With you the function of government is so important and so ubiquitous that you can hardly realize the condition of a people that is able almost wholly to dispense with it. Yet such is our case. The simple and natural character of our civilization, the peaceable nature of our people (when they are not maddened by the aggression of foreigners), above all, the institution of the family, itself a little state a political, social, and economic unit these and other facts have rendered us independent of government control to an extent which to Europeans may seem incredible. Neither the acts nor the omissions of the authorities at Peking have any real or permanent effect on the life of our masses, except so far as they register the movements of popular sentiment and demand. Otherwise, as you foreigners know to your cost, they remain a dead-letter. The Government may make conventions and treaties, but it cannot put them into effect, except in so far as they are endorsed by public opinion. The passive resistance of so vast a people, rooted in a tradition so immemorial, will defeat in the future, as it has done in the past, the attempts of the Western Powers to impose their will on the nation through the agency of the Government. No force will ever suffice to stir that huge inertia. The whirlwind of war for a moment may ruffle the surface of the sea, may fleck with foam its superficial currents; it will never shake or trouble the clear unfathomable deep which is the still and brooding soul of China.
If our people are ever to be moved, their reason and their heart must be convinced; and this
lesson, which you in Europe are so slow to learn, was embodied centuries ago in the practice and theory of our State. Government with us is based on the consent of the people to a degree
which you of the West can hardly understand, much less imitate. What you have striven so vainly to achieve by an increasingly elaborate machinery happens among us by the mere force of facts. Our fundamental institutions are no arbitrary inventions of power ; they are the form which the people have given to their life. No Government created and no Government would
think of modifying them. And if from time to time it becomes desirable to add to them such further regulations as the course of events may seem to suggest, these, too, are introduced only in response to a real demand, and after proof made of their efficacy and popularity. Law, in a word, is not, with us, a rule imposed from above ; it is the formula of the national life ; and its embodiment in practice precedes its inscription in a code. Hence it is that in China government is neither arbitrary nor indispensable. Destroy our authorities, central and provincial, and our life will proceed very much as before. The law we obey is the law of our own nature, as it has been evolved by centuries of experience, and to this we continue our allegiance, even though the external sanction be withdrawn. Come what may, the family remains, with all that it involves, the attitude of mind remains, the spirit of order, industry, and thrift. These it is that make up China; and the Governments we have passively received are Governments only so long as they understand that it is not theirs to govern, but merely to express in outward show, to formulate and define, an order which in essentials they must accept as they accept the motions of the heavens. China does not change. The tumults of which you make so much, and of which you are yourselves the cause, are no signs of the break-up of our civilization. You hear the breakers roaring on the shore; but far away beyond your ken, unsailed by ship of yours, stretch to the blue horizon the silent spaces of the sea.
How different is the conception and fact of government in the West ! Here there are no
fundamental laws, but an infinity of arbitrary rules. Nothing roots except what has been planted; nothing is planted but what must be planted again. During the past hundred years you have dismantled your whole society. Property and marriage, religion, morality, distinctions of rank and class, all that is most important and most profound in human relationships, has been torn from the roots and floats like wreckage down the stream of time. Hence the activity of your Governments, for it is only by their aid that your society holds together at all. Government with you is thus important to an extent and degree happily inconceivable in the East. This in itself appears to me an evil; but it is one that I see to be inevitable. All the more am I surprised at what I cannot but regard as the extraordinary inefficiency of the machinery
on which you rely to accomplish so vast a work. It is, I am aware, hard, perhaps impossible, to
discover or devise any sure and certain method of selecting competent men; but surely it is strange to make no attempt to ascertain or secure any degree of moral or intellectual capacity in those to whom you entrust such important functions ! Our own plan in China of selecting our rulers by competitive examination is regarded by you with a contempt not altogether undeserved. Yet you adopt it yourselves in the choice of your subordinate officials; and it has at least the merit of embodying the rational idea that the highest places in the Government should be open to all, rich or poor, who have given proof of ability and talent, and that they should be open to no others. Compared to the method of election it appears to me to be reason itself. For what does election mean? You say that it means representation of the people; but do you not know in your hearts that it means, and can mean, nothing of the kind ? What is really represented is Interests. And in what are Interests interested? Your reply, I suspect, will be, In
public abuses! Landlords, brewers, railway directors is it not these that really rule you? And must it not be so while your society is constituted as it is ? There is, I am aware, a party which hopes to bring to bear against these the brute and overwhelming force of the Mass. But such a remedy, even if it were practicable, does not commend itself to my judgment; for the Mass in your society is itself an Interest. The machinery which you have provided appears to aim at bringing together in a cockpit egotistic forces bent upon private goods, in order that they may arrive, by dint of sheer fighting, at a result which shall represent the good of the whole. It is perhaps the inveterate respect, in herent in every Chinaman, for the authority of morality and reason, that prevents me from regarding such a procedure with the enthusiasm or even the toleration which it seems commonly to arouse among yourselves. When problems of such vast importance have devolved upon, and must be assumed by, a Government, I cannot but think that some better means might have been devised for interesting in their solution the best
talent of the nation. And I am confirmed in this view by the reflection that I have met in your universities and elsewhere men who have profoundly studied the questions your Legislature is expected to determine, whose intelligence is clear, whose judgment unbiassed, whose
enthusiasm disinterested and pure, but who can never hope for a chance of putting their wisdom to practical effect, because their temperament, their training, and their habit of life, have un-fitted them for the ordeal of popular election. To be a member of Parliament is, it would seem, a profession in itself, and the qualities, intellectual and moral, which open the door to a public career appear to be distinct from, and even in-compatible with, those which contribute to public utility.