Dickinson, G. Lowes
(London 1862-1932 London) : Schriftsteller, Historiker, Philosoph, Lecturer in History King's College Cambridge
Name Alternative(s)
Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes
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Index of Names : Occident
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Literature : Occident : Great Britain
Chronology Entries (13)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
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| 1 | 1901.1 |
Dickinson, G. Lowes. Letters from John Chinaman [ID D15745]. (1) Prefatory note Of the following letters the first four have already appeared in the pages of the Saturday Review, and are reprinted here with the permission of the Editor. The remainder are now published for the first time. Letters from John Chinaman. 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 towards 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 endeavour, afterwards, 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 recognise obligations towards 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 recognise 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 honour 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 to 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 recognise 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 endeavoured 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 colour 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 recognise 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 people. 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 yet 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 endeavour 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 endeavour, 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 labourer 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 outside 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 and 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 indeed : but of these I do not trust myself to speak. Looting, wanton destruction, cold-blooded murder, and rape, these are 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 illdisciplined 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 endeavour 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 labours 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 labourers calling across the watercourses, 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 colour ! 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, consider, here in this lovely valley live thousands of souls without any law save that of custom, without 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 labours, 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 labour 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 unnameable 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 to which I have now to endeavour 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, labourers 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 is 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 upwards. And words they have remained, for he has neither 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 contented 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 !' When first I was 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 untravelled imagination, appeared to be little short of miraculous. Nor has familiarity diminished my admiration for your achievements in this field. I recognise 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 ardour their immediate introduction into China. 1 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 labour-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 neighbouring 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 recognised 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 labour, 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 labour, 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 labouring 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 forgiven 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 labours. 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 overstrained. 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 labours ; 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 yourselves. 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 cock-pit 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, inherent 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 unfitted 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 incompatible with, those which contribute to public utility. |
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Dickinson, G. Lowes. Letters from John Chinaman [ID D15745]. (2) VII To grave and fundamental distinctions of national character and life commonly correspond similar distinctions in religious belief. For religion is, or should be, the soul of which the State is the body, the idea which informs and perpetuates institutions. It is not, I am aware, in this sense that the word is always understood, for religion is not seldom identified with superstition. I propose, however, in this place to distinguish the two, and to concern myself mainly with what I conceive to be properly termed religion. But I note, at the outset, that among the masses of China superstition is as widely spread as among those of any European country. Buddhism and Taoism lend themselves with us to practices and beliefs as regrettable and absurd as any that are fostered by Christianity among yourselves. Our people, like yours, hope by ritual and prayer to affect the course of the elements or to compass private and material benefits ; they believe in spirits and goblins, as Roman Catholics do in saints ; they worship idols, practise magic, and foster the impositions of priests. But all this I pass by as extraneous to true religion. I regard it merely as a manifestation of the weakness of human nature, a vent for the peccant humours of the individual soul. Different indeed is the creed and the cult on which our civilization is founded ; and it is to this, which has been so much misunderstood by Europeans, that I propose to devote a few words of explanation. Confucianism, it is sometimes said, is not a religion at all ; and if by religion be meant a set of dogmatic propositions dealing with a supernatural world radically distinct from our own, the statement is, no doubt, strictly true. It was, in fact, one of the objects of Confucius to discourage preoccupation with the supernatural, and the true disciple endeavours in this respect to follow in his master's footsteps. 'Beware of religion,' a Mandarin says, meaning' beware of superstition ; and in this sense, but in this sense only, Confucianism is irreligious. Again, it is said that Confucianism is merely an ethical system ; and this, too, is true, in so far as its whole aim and purport is to direct and inspire right conduct. But, on the other hand and this is the point I wish to make it is not merely a teaching, but a life. The principles it enjoins are those which are actually embodied in the structure of our society, so that they are inculcated not merely by written and spoken word, but by the whole habit of everyday experience. The unity of the family and the State, as expressed in the worship of ancestors, is the basis not merely of the professed creed, but of the actual practice of a Chinaman. To whatever other faith he may adhere Buddhist, Taoist, Christian this is the thing that really matters to him. To him the generations past and the generations to come form with those that are alive one single whole. All live eternally, though it is only some that happen at any moment to live upon earth. Ancestor-worship is thus the symbol of a social idea immense in its force to consolidate and bind. Its effects in China must be seen to be believed ; but you have a further example in a civilization with which you are better acquainted I mean, of course, the civilization of Rome. This, then, is the first and most striking aspect of our national religion ; but there is another hardly less important in its bearing on social life. Confucianism is the exponent of the ideal of work. Your eighteenth -century observers, who laid so much stress on the ritual of the Emperor's yearly ploughing, were nearer to the heart of our civilization than many later and less sympathetic inquirers. The duty of man to labour, and primarily to labour on the soil, is a fundamental postulate of our religion. Hence the worship of Mother Earth, the source of all increase ; hence the worship of Heaven, the giver of light and rain ; and hence also that social system whose aim is to secure a general access to the soil. The willing dedication of all, in brotherhood and peace, to labour blessed by the powers of heaven and earth, such is the simple, intelligible ideal we have set before our people, such is the conception we have embodied in our institutions. And if you seek more than this, a metaphysical system to justify and explain our homely creed, that too we have provided for our scholars. Humanity, they are taught, is a Being spiritual and eternal, manifesting itself in time in the series of generations. This Being is the mediator between heaven and earth, between the ultimate ideal and the existing fact. By labour, incessant and devout, to raise earth to heaven, to realize, in fact, the good that as yet exists only in idea that is the end and purpose of human life ; and in fulfilling it we achieve and maintain our unity each with every other, and all with the Divine. Here, surely, is a faith not unworthy to be called a religion. I do not say that it is consciously held by the mass of the people, for in no State does the mass of the people reflect. But I claim for us that the life of our masses is so ordered and disposed as to accord with the postulates of our creed ; that they practise, if they do not profess, the tenets of our sages ; and that the two cardinal ideas on which every society should rest, brotherhood and the dignity of labour, are brought home to them in direct and unmistakable form by the structure of our secular institutions. Such, then, in a few words, is the essence of Confucianism, as it appears to an educated Chinaman. Far harder is it for me, though I have spent so long in Europe, to appreciate the significance of Christianity. But perhaps I may be pardoned if I endeavour to record my impressions, such as they are, gathered from some study of your sacred books, your history, and your contemporary life. In such observations as I have made I have had in view the question not so much of the truth of your religion of that I do not feel competent to judge as of its bearing upon your social institutions. And here, more than anywhere, I am struck by the wide discrepancy between your civilization and ours. I cannot see that your society is based upon religion at all ; nor does that surprise me, if I have rightly apprehended the character of Christianity. For the ideal which I seem to find enshrined in your gospels and embodied in the discussions of your divines is one not of labour on earth, but of contemplation in heaven ; not of the unity of the human race, but of the communion of saints. Whether this be a higher ideal than our own I do not venture to pronounce ; but I cannot but hold it to be less practicable. It must be difficult, one would think, if not impossible, to found any stable society on the conception that life upon earth is a mere episode in a drama whose centre of action lies elsewhere. An indifference to what, from a more mundane point of view, must appear to be fundamental considerations, a confusion of temporal distinctions in the white blaze of eternity, a haphazard organization of those details of corporate life the serious preoccupation with which would be hardly compatible with religion such would appear to be the natural result of a genuine profession of Christianity. And such, if I understand it aright, was the character of your civilization in what you describe as the Ages of Faith. Asceticism, monastic vows, the domination of priests, the petty interests of life and death overshadowed and dwarfed by the tremendous issues of heaven and hell, beggary sanctified, wealth contemned, reason stunted, imagination hypertrophied, the spiritual and temporal powers at war, body at feud with soul, everywhere division, conflict, confusion, intellectual and moral insanity such was the character of that extraordinary epoch in Western history when the Christian conception made a bid to embody itself in fact. It was the life-and-death struggle of a grandiose ideal against all the facts of the material and moral universe. And in that struggle the ideal was worsted. From the dust of battle the Western world emerged, as it had entered, secular : avowedly worldly, frankly curious, bent with a passionate zeal on the mastery of all the forces of nature, on beauty, wealth, intelligence, character, power. From that time on, although you still profess Christianity, no attempt has been made to christianize your institutions. On the contrary, it has been your object to sweep away every remnant of the old order, to dissociate Church from State, ritual and belief from action. You have abandoned your society frankly to economic and political forces, with results which I have endeavoured in an earlier letter to characterize. But while thus, on the one hand, your society has evolved on a purely material basis, on the other religion has not ceased to be recognised among you. Only, cut off from its natural root in social institutions, it has assumed forms which I cannot but think to be either otiose or dangerous. Those who profess Christianity and there are few who, in one way or another, do not either profess it only with their lips, and having in this way satisfied those claims of the ideal from which no human being is altogether free, turn back with an unencumbered mind and conscience to the pursuit of egotistic ends ; or else, being seriously possessed by the teachings of Christ, they find themselves almost inevitably driven into the position of revolutionists. For those teachings, if they be fully accepted and fairly interpreted, must be seen to be incompatible with the whole structure of your society. Enunciated, centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled, inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their tender and touching appeal to brotherly love than for their aversion or indifference to all other elements of human excellence. The subject of Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and destinies of imperial Rome ; the contemporary of Virgil and of Livy could not read the language in which they wrote. Provincial by birth, mechanic by trade, by temperament a poet and a mystic, he enjoyed in the course of his brief life few opportunities, and he evinced little inclination, to become acquainted with the rudiments of the science whose end is the prosperity of the State. The production and distribution of wealth, the disposition of power, the laws that regulate labour, property, trade, these were matters as remote from his interests as they were beyond his comprehension. Never was man better equipped to inspire a religious sect ; never one worse to found or direct a commonwealth. Yet this man it is whose naif maxims of self-abnegation have been accepted as gospel by the nations of the West, the type of all that is predatory, violent and aggressive. No wonder your history has been one long and lamentable tale of antagonism, tumult, carnage and confusion ! No wonder the spiritual and temporal powers have oscillated between open war and truces as discreditable to the one as to the other ! No wonder that down to the present day every man among you who has been genuinely inspired with the spirit of your religion has shrunk in horror from the society which purports to have adopted its principles as its own ! It is the Nemesis of an idealist creed that it cannot inform realities ; it can but mass together outside and in opposition to the established order the forces that should have shaped and controlled it from within. The spirit remains unembodied, the body uninformed. So it has been and so it is with this polity of yours. It purports to represent a superhuman ideal ; in reality, it does not represent even one that is human. It is of the earth, earthy ; while from heaven far above cries, like a ghost's, the voice of the Nazarene, as pure, as clear, as ineffectual, as when first it flung from the shores of Galilee its challenge to the world-sustaining power of Rome. The view which I have thus ventured to give, candidly, as I feel it, of the relation of your society to your religion, will, I am aware, be received by most of my readers with astonishment, if not with indignation. Permit me, then, to illustrate and confirm it by an example so patent and palpable that it cannot fail, I think, to make some appeal even to those who are most unwilling to face the truth. If there is one feature more marked than another in the teaching of Christ it is his condemnation of every form of violence. No one can read the Gospels with an unprejudiced mind without being struck by the emphasis with which he reiterates this doctrine. ' Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.' These are his words, and they are spoken in sober earnestness, not in metaphor, nor yet as a counsel of perfection, something that should be but cannot be put into effect. No ! they are the words of conviction and truth, backed by the whole character and practice of their author. The principle they embody may, of course, be disputed. It may be held as in fact it always has been held by the majority of men in all ages that force is essential to the preservation of society ; that without it there could be no security, no order, no peace. But one who holds this view cannot be a Christian, in the proper sense of a follower of Christ. If, then, as is undoubtedly the case, this view has been universally held throughout their whole history by the nations of the West, then, whatever they may call themselves, they cannot be truly Christian. Yet this consequence they have always refused to accept. They have interpreted the words of their founder to mean the reverse of what they say, and have conceived him, apparently without any sense of the solecism they were perpetrating, to be the defender and champion not only of their whole system of law, based as it is on the prison and the scaffold, but of all their wars, even of those which to the natural sense of mankind must appear to be the least defensible and the most iniquitous. In proof of what I say if proof be required I need not recur to historical examples. It will be enough to refer to the case which is naturally most present to my mind the recent attack of the Western Powers on China. That there was grave provocation, I am not concerned to deny, though it was not with us that the provocation originated. But what fills me with amazement and even, if I must be frank, with horror, is the fact that the nations of Europe should attempt to justify their acts from the standpoint of the Gospel of Christ ; and that there should be found among them a Christian potentate who, in sending forth his soldiers on an errand of revenge, should urge them, in the name of him who bade us turn the other cheek, not merely to attack, not merely to kill, but to kill without quarter ! What further proof is needed of the truth of my general proposition that the religion you profess, whatever effect it may have on individual lives, has little or none on public policy ? It may inspire, here and there, some retired saint ; it has never inspired those who control the State. What use is it, then, to profess that, in essence, it is a religion higher than ours ? I care not to dispute on ground so barren. 'By their fruits ye shall know them' said your own prophet ; and to their fruits I am content to appeal. Confucianism may, as you affirm, be no religion at all ; it may be an inferior ethical code ; but it has made of the Chinese the one nation in all the history of the world who genuinely abhor violence and reverence reason and right. And here, lest you think that I am biassed, let me call to my aid the testimony of the one among your countrymen who has known us intimately and long, and whose services to our State will never be forgotten by any patriotic Chinaman. In place of the ignorant diatribes of your special correspondents, listen for a moment to the voice of Sir Robert Hart : 'They are,' he says of the Chinese, ' well-behaved, law-abiding, intelligent, economical, and industrious ; they can learn anything and do anything ; they are punctiliously polite, they worship talent, and they believe in right so firmly that they scorn to think it requires to be supported or enforced by might ; they delight in literature, and everywhere they have their literary clubs and coteries for learning and discussing each other's essays and verses ; they possess and practise an admirable system of ethics, and they are generous, charitable, and fond of good works ; they never forget a favour, they make rich return for any kindness, and, though they know money will buy service, a man must be more than wealthy to win public esteem and respect ; they are practical, teachable, and wonderfully gifted with commonsense ; they are excellent artisans, reliable workmen, and of a good faith that everyone acknowledges and admires in their commercial dealings ; in no country that is or was, has the commandment "Honour thy father and thy mother" been so religiously obeyed, or so fully and without exception given effect to, and it is in fact the keynote of their family, social, official, and national life, and because it is so "their days are long in the land God has given them." Thus Sir Robert Hart. I ask no better testimonial. Here are no superhuman virtues, no abnegation of self, no fanatic repudiation of fundamental facts of human nature. But here is a life according to a rational ideal ; and here is a belief in that ideal so effective and profound that it has gone far to supersede the use of force. 'They believe in right' says Sir Robert Hart let me quote it once more 'they believe in right so firmly that they scorn to think it requires to be supported or enforced by might.' Yes, it is we who do not accept it that practise the Gospel of peace ; it is you who accept it that trample it underfoot. And irony of ironies ! it is the nations of Christendom who have come to us to teach us by sword and fire that Right in this world is powerless unless it be supported by Might ! Oh, do not doubt that we shall learn the lesson ! And woe to Europe when we have acquired it ! You are arming a nation of four hundred millions ! a nation which, until you came, had no better wish than to live at peace with themselves and all the world. In the name of Christ you have sounded the call to arms ! In the name of Confucius, we respond ! VIII Hitherto I have avoided any discussion in detail of the existing political and commercial relations between ourselves and the West, and of the events which led up to the situation we all deplore. I have endeavoured rather to enlist your sympathies in the general character of our civilization, to note the salient points in which it differs from your own, and to bring into relief the more fundamental and permanent conditions which render an understanding between us so difficult and so precarious. I cannot, however, disguise from myself that even a sympathetic reader may fairly demand of me something more ; and that if I am to satisfy him, I am bound, however unwillingly, to enter upon the field of current controversy. For, he may reasonably inquire, If it be really true that your people possess the qualities you ascribe to them, if they be indeed so just, so upright, so averse to violence, how is it that they have committed the greatest breach of international comity that is known in the history of the civilized world ? How is it that they have been guilty of acts which have shocked and outraged the moral sense of communities, according to you, less cultured and humane than themselves ? In reply, I will urge that I have never asserted that the Chinese are saints. I have said, and I still maintain, that if they are left to themselves, if the order to which they are accustomed is not violently disturbed, they are the most peaceful and law-abiding nation on the face of the earth. If, then, they have broken loose from their secular restraints, if they have shown for a moment those claws of the brute which no civilization, be it yours or ours, though it may sheathe, will ever draw, the very violence of the outbreak serves only to prove how intense must have been the provocation. Do you realize what that provocation was ? I doubt it ! Permit me then briefly to record the facts. When first your traders came to China it was not at our invitation ; yet we received them, if not with enthusiasm, at least with tolerance. So long as they were content to observe our regulations we were willing to sanction their traffic, but always on the condition that it should not disturb our social and political order. To this condition, in earlier days, your countrymen consented to conform, and for many years, in spite of occasional disputes, there was no serious trouble between them and us. The trouble arose over a matter in regard to which you yourselves have hardly ventured to defend your own conduct. A considerable part of your trade was the trade in opium. The use of this drug, we observed, was destroying the health and the morals of our people, and we therefore prohibited the trade. Your merchants, however, evaded the law ; opium was smuggled in ; till at last we were driven to take the matter into our own hands and to seize and destroy the whole stock of the forbidden drug. Your Government made our action an excuse for war. You invaded our territory, exacted an indemnity and took from us the island of Hong Kong. Was this an auspicious beginning ? Was it calculated to impress us with a sense of the justice and fair play of the British nation ? Years went on ; a petty dispute about the privileges of the flag a dispute in which we still believe that we were in the right brought us once more into collision with you. You made the unfortunate conflict an excuse for new demands. In conjunction with the French you occupied our capital and imposed upon us terms which you would never have dared to offer to a European nation. We submitted because we must ; we were not a military Power. But do you suppose our sense of justice was not outraged ? Or later, when every Power in Europe on some pretext or other has seized and retained some part of our territory, do you suppose because we cannot resist that we do not feel ? To a Chinaman who reviews the history of our relations with you during the past sixty years and more must you not naturally appear to be little better than robbers and pirates ? True, such a view is unduly harsh, and I do not myself altogether share it. A study of your official documents has convinced me that you genuinely believe that you have had on your side a certain measure of right, and I am too well aware of the complexity of all human affairs to deny that there may be something in your point of view. Still, I would ask you to consider the broad facts of the situation, dismissing the interminable controversies that arise on every point of detail. Which of us throughout has been the aggressor we who, putting our case at the worst, were obstinately resolved to maintain our society, customs, laws and polity against the influences of an alien civilization, or you who, bent on commercial gains, were determined at all cost to force an entrance into our territory and to introduce along with your goods the leaven of your culture and ideas ? If, in the collision that inevitably ensued, we gave cause of offence, we had at least the excuse of self-preservation. Our wrongs, if wrongs they were, were episodes in a substantial right ; but yours were themselves the substance of your action. Consider for a moment the conditions you have imposed on a proud and ancient empire, an empire which for centuries has believed itself to be at the head of civilization. You have compelled us, against our will, to open our ports to your trade; you have forced us to permit the introduction of a drug which we believe is ruining our people ; you have exempted your subjects residing among us from the operation of our laws ; you have appropriated our coasting traffic ; you claim the traffic of our inland waters. Every attempt on our part to resist your demands has been followed by new claims and new aggressions. And yet all this time you have posed as civilized peoples dealing with barbarians. You have compelled us to receive your missionaries, and when they by their ignorant zeal have provoked our people to rise in mass against them, that again you have made an excuse for new depredations, till we, not unnaturally, have come to believe that the cross is the pioneer of the sword, and that the only use you have for your religion is to use it as a weapon of war. Conceive for a moment the feelings of an Englishman subjected to similar treatment ; conceive that we had permanently occupied Liverpool, Bristol, Plymouth ; that we had planted on your territory thousands of men whom we had exempted from your laws ; that along your coasts and navigable rivers our vessels were driving out yours ; that we had insisted on your admitting spirits duty free to the manifest ruin of your population ; and that we had planted in all your principal towns agents to counteract the teachings of your Church and undermine the whole fabric of habitual belief on which the stability of your society depends. Imagine that you had to submit to all this. Would you be so greatly surprised, would you really even be indignant, if you found one day the Chinese Legation surrounded by a howling mob and Confucian missionaries everywhere hunted to death ? What right then have you to be surprised, what right have you to be indignant at even the worst that has taken place in China ? What is there so strange or monstrous in our conduct ? A Legation, you say, is sacrosanct by the law of nations. Yes ; but remember that it was at the point of the sword that you forced us to receive Embassies whose presence we have always regarded as a sign of national humiliation. But our mobs were barbarous and cruel. Alas ! yes. And your troops ? And your troops, nations of Christendom ? Ask the once fertile land from Peking to the coast ; ask the corpses of murdered men and outraged women and children ; ask the innocent mingled indiscriminately with the guilty ; ask the Christ, the lover of men, whom you profess to serve, to judge between us who rose in mad despair to save our country and you who, avenging crime with crime, did not pause to reflect that the crime you avenged was the fruit of your own iniquity ! Well, it is over over - over at least, for the moment. I do not wish to dwell upon the past. Yet the lesson of the past is our only guide to the policy of the future. And unless you of the West will come to realize the truth ; unless you will understand that the events which have shaken Europe are the Nemesis of a long course of injustice and oppression ; unless you will learn that the profound opposition between your civilization and ours gives no more ground why you should regard us as barbarians than we you ; unless you will treat us as a civilized Power and respect our customs and our laws ; unless you will accord us the treatment you would accord to any European nation and refrain from exacting conditions you would never dream of imposing on a Western Power unless you will do this there is no hope of any peace between us. You have humiliated the proudest nation in the world ; you have outraged the most upright and just ; with what results is now abundantly manifest. If ignorance was your excuse, let it be your excuse no longer. Learn to understand us, and in doing so learn better to understand yourselves. To contribute to this end has been my only object in writing and publishing these letters. If I have offended, I regret it ; but if it is the truth that offends, for that 1 owe and I offer no apology. Sekundärliteratur Kay Li : Letters to John Chinaman was published in 1901 after the Boxer riots and the European expeditions to suppress them. Dickinson uses the Chinese voice of the fictional 'John Chinaman' to comment on England. Comparing to the Western and Eastern civilizations, John Chinaman criticizes England's concern for economic gain. Instead, he is in favor of China’s concern for morality. China is constructed as a favorable alternative to Europe because it represents peace and stability, while Europe with her industrialization, progress, and materialism embodies strife and instability. Confucianism in the Letters is 'not a religion' but rather an ethical system directing and inspiring right conduct. The Chinese "are the most peaceful and law-abiding nation on the face of the earth", and "Confucianism has made of the Chinese the one nation in all the history of the world who genuinely abhor violence and reverence reason and right". |
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| 3 | 1902 |
Letter from G. Lowes Dickinson to Mrs Moor. 9 Febr. 1902. "My little J[ohn] C[hinaman] book is approved by many people whose approval I value, and that gives satisfaction. I am just beginning to realize that I have a certain faculty of appealing to what I call the 'life of the spirit', and that I have no other faculty. So I may as well do what I can in that line for the future, and let others, more competent, run the affairs of the nation." |
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| 4 | 1903.1 |
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. |
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| 5 | 1903.2 |
Dickinson, G. Lowes. Letters from a Chinese official [ID D29633]. (2) VII To grave and fundamental distinctions of national character and life commonly correspond similar distinctions in religious belief. For religion is, or should be, the soul of which the State is the body, the idea which informs and perpetuates institutions. It is not, I am aware, in this sense that the word is always understood, for religion is not seldom identified with superstition. I propose, however, in this place to distinguish the two, and to concern myself mainly with what I conceive to be properly termed religion. But I note, at the outset, that among the masses of China superstition is as widely spread as among those of any European country. Buddhism and Taoism lend themselves with us to practices and beliefs as regrettable and absurd as any that are fostered by Christianity among yourselves. Our people, like yours, hope by ritual and prayer to affect the course of the elements or to compass private and material benefits; they believe in spirits and goblins, as Roman Catholics do in saints; they worship idols, practise magic, and foster the impositions of priests. But all this I pass by as extraneous to true religion. I regard it merely as a manifestation of the weakness of human nature, a vent for the peccant humors of the individual soul. Different indeed is the creed and the cult on which our civilization is founded; and it is to this, which has been so much misunderstood by Europeans, that I propose to devote a few words of explanation. Confucianism, it is sometimes said, is not a religion at all; and if by religion be meant a set of dogmatic propositions dealing with a super-natural world radically distinct from our own, the statement is, no doubt, strictly true. It was, in fact, one of the objects of Confucius to discourage preoccupation with the supernatural, and the true disciple endeavors in this respect to follow in his master's footsteps. "Beware of religion," a Mandarin says, meaning "beware of superstition"; and in this sense, but in this sense only, Confucianism is irreligious. Again, it is said that Confucianism is merely an ethical system; and this, too, is true, in so far as its whole aim and purport is to direct and inspire right conduct. But, on the other hand and this is the point I wish to make it is not merely a teaching, but a life. The principles it enjoins are those which are actually embodied in the structure of our society, so that they are inculcated not merely by written and spoken word, but by the whole habit of everyday experience. The unity of the family and the State, as expressed in the worship of ancestors, is the basis not merely of the professed creed, but of the actual practice of a Chinaman. To whatever other faith he may adhere Buddhist, Taoist, Christian this is the thing that really matters to him. To him the generations past and the generations to come form with those that are alive one single whole. All live eternally, though it is only some that happen at any moment to live upon earth. Ancestor-worship is thus the symbol of a social idea immense in its force to consolidate and bind. Its effects in China must be seen to be believed; but you have a further example in a civilization with which you are better acquainted I mean, of course, the civilization of Rome. This, then, is the first and most striking aspect of our national religion; but there is another hardly less important in its bearing on social life. Confucianism is the exponent of the ideal of work. Your eighteenth-century observers, who laid so much stress on the ritual of the Emperor's yearly ploughing, were nearer to the heart of our civilization than many later and less sympathetic inquirers. The duty of man to labor, and primarily to labor on the soil, is a fundamental postulate of our religion. Hence the worship of Mother Earth, the source of all increase ; hence the worship of Heaven, the giver of light and rain ; and hence also that social system whose aim is to secure a general access to the soil. The willing dedication of all, in brotherhood and peace, to labor blessed by the powers of heaven and earth, such is the simple, intelligible ideal we have set before our people, such is the conception we have embodied in our institutions. And if you seek more than this, a metaphysical system to justify and explain our homely creed, that too we have provided for our scholars. Humanity, they are taught, is a Being spiritual and eternal, manifesting itself in time in the series of generations. This Being is the mediator between heaven and earth, between the ultimate ideal and the existing fact. By labor, incessant and devout, to raise earth to heaven, to realize, in fact, the good that as yet exists only in idea that is the end and purpose of human life; and in fulfilling it we achieve and maintain our unity each with every other, and all with the Divine. Here, surely, is a faith not unworthy to be called a religion. I do not say that it is consciously held by the mass of the people, for in no State does the mass of the people reflect. But I claim for us that the life of our masses is so ordered and disposed as to accord with the postulates of our creed; that they practise, if they do not profess, the tenets of our sages ; and that the two cardinal ideas on which every society should rest, brotherhood and the dignity of labor, are brought home to them in direct and unmistakable form by the structure of our secular institutions. Such, then, in a few words, is the essence of Confucianism, as it appears to an educated Chinaman. Far harder is it for me, though I have spent so long in Europe, to appreciate the significance of Christianity. But perhaps I may be pardoned if I endeavor to record my impressions, such as they are, gathered from some study of your sacred books, your history, and your contemporary life. In such observations as I have made I have had in view the question not so much of the truth of your religion of that I do not feel competent to judge as of its bearing upon your social institutions. And here, more than anywhere, I am struck by the wide discrepancy between your civilization and ours. I cannot see that your society is based upon religion at all; nor does that surprise me, if I have rightly apprehended the character of Christianity. For the ideal which I seem to find enshrined in your gospels and embodied in the discussions of your divines is one not of labor on earth, but of contemplation in heaven; not of the unity of the human race, but of the communion of saints. Whether this be a higher ideal than our own I do not venture to pronounce; but I cannot but hold it to be less practicable. It must be difficult, one would think, if not impossible to found any stable society on the conception that life upon earth is a mere episode in a drama whose centre of action lies elsewhere. An indifference to what, from a more mundane point of view, must appear to be fundamental considerations, a confusion of temporal distinctions in the white blaze of eternity, a haphazard organization of those details of corporate life the serious preoccupation with which would be hardly compatible with religion such would appear to be the natural result of a genuine profession of Christianity. And such, if I understand it aright, was the character of your civilization in what you describe as the Ages of Faith. Asceticism, monastic vows, the domination of priests, the petty interests of life and death overshadowed and dwarfed by the tremendous issues of heaven and hell, beggary sanctified, wealth contemned, reason stunted, imagination hypertrophied, the spiritual and temporal powers at war, body at feud with soul, everywhere division, conflict, confusion, intellectual and moral insanity such was the character of that extraordinary epoch in Western history when the Christian conception made a bid to embody itself in fact. It was the life-and-death struggle of a grandiose ideal against all the facts of the material and moral universe. And in that struggle the ideal was worsted. From the dust of battle the Western world emerged, as it had entered, secular: avowedly worldly, frankly curious, bent with a passionate zeal on the mastery of all the forces of nature, on beauty, wealth, intelligence, character, power. From that time on, although you still profess Christianity, no attempt has been made to christianize your institutions. On the contrary, it has been your object to sweep away every remnant of the old order, to dissociate Church from State, ritual and belief from action. You have abandoned your society frankly to economic and political forces, with results which I have endeavored in an earlier letter to characterize. But while thus, on the one hand, your society has evolved on a purely material basis, on the other religion has not ceased to be recognized among you. Only, cut off from its natural root in social institutions, it has assumed forms which I cannot but think to be either otiose or dangerous. Those who profess Christianity and there are few who, in one way or another, do not either profess it only with their lips, and having in this way satisfied those claims of the ideal from which no human being is altogether free, turn back with an unencumbered mind and conscience to the pursuit of egotistic ends; or else, being seriously possessed by the teachings of Christ, they find themselves almost inevitably driven into the position of revolutionists. For those teachings, if they be fully accepted and fairly interpreted, must be seen to be incompatible with the whole structure of your society. Enunciated, centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled, inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their tender and touching appeal to brotherly love than for their aversion or indifference to all other elements of human excellence. The subject of Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and destinies of imperial Rome; the contemporary of Virgil and of Livy could not read the language in which they wrote. Provincial by birth, mechanic by trade, by temperament a poet and a mystic, he enjoyed in the course of his brief life few opportunities, and he evinced little inclination, to become acquainted with the rudiments of the science whose end is the prosperity of the State. The production and distribution of wealth, the disposition of power, the laws that regulate labor, property, trade, these were matters as remote from his interests as they were beyond his comprehension. Never was man better equipped to inspire a religious sect; never one worse to found or direct a commonwealth. Yet this man it is whose naive maxims of self-abnegation have been accepted as gospel by the nations of the West, the type of all that is predatory, violent, and aggressive. No wonder your history has been one long and lamentable tale of antagonism, tumult, carnage, and confusion! No wonder the spiritual and temporal powers have oscillated between open war and truces as discreditable to the one as to the other! No wonder that down to the present day every man among you who has been genuinely inspired with the spirit of your religion has shrunk in horror from the society which purports to have adopted its principles as its own ! It is the Nemesis of an idealist creed that it cannot inform realities; it can but mass together outside and in opposition to the established order the forces that should have shaped and controlled it from within. The spirit remains unembodied, the body uninformed. So is has been and so it is with this polity of yours. It purports to represent a superhuman ideal; in reality, it does not represent even one that is human. It is of the earth, earthy; while from heaven far above cries, like a ghost's, the voice of the Nazarene, as pure, as clear, as ineffectual, as when first it flung from the shores of Galilee its challenge to the world-sustaining power of Rome. The view which I have thus ventured to give, candidly, as I feel it, of the relation of your society to your religion, will, I am aware, be received by most of my readers with astonishment, if not with indignation. Permit me, then, to illustrate and confirm it by an example so patent and palpable that it cannot fail, I think, to make some appeal even to those who are most unwilling to face the truth. If there is one feature more marked than another in the teaching of Christ it is his condemnation of every form of violence. No one can read the Gospels with an unprejudiced mind without being struck by the emphasis with which he reiterates this doctrine. "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." These are his words, and they are spoken in sober earnestness, not in metaphor, nor yet as a counsel of perfection, something that should be but cannot be put into effect. No ! they are the words of conviction and truth, backed by the whole character and practice of their author. The principle they embody may, of course, be disputed. It may be held as in fact it always has been held by the majority of men in all ages that force is essential to the preservation of society; that without it there could be no security, no order, no peace. But one who holds this view cannot be a Christian, in the proper sense of a follower of Christ. If, then, as is undoubtedly the case, this view lias been universally held throughout their whole history by the nations of the West, then, whatever they may call themselves, they cannot be truly Christian. Yet this consequence they have always refused to accept. They have interpreted the words of their founder to mean the reverse of what they say, and have conceived him, apparently without any sense of the solecism they were perpetrating, to be the defender and champion not only of their whole system of law, based as it is on the prison and the scaffold, but of all their wars, even of those which to the natural sense of mankind must appear to be the least defensible and the most iniquitous. In proof of what I say if proof be required I need not recur to historical examples. It will be enough to refer to the case which is naturally most present to my mind the recent attack of the Western Powers on China. That there was grave provocation, I am not concerned to deny, though it was not with us that the provocation originated. But what fills me with amazement and even, if I must be frank, with horror, is the fact that the nations of Europe should attempt to justify their acts from the standpoint of the Gospel of Christ; and that there should be found among them a Christian potentate who, in sending forth his soldiers on an errand of revenge, should urge them, in the name of him who bade us turn the other cheek, not merely to attack, not merely to kill, but to kill without quarter! What further proof is needed of the truth of my general proposition that the religion you profess, whatever effect it may have on individual lives, has little or none on public policy ? It may inspire, here and there, some retired saint; it has never inspired those who control the State. What use is it, then, to profess that, in essence, it is a religion higher than ours? I care not to dispute on ground so barren. "By their fruits ye shall know them," said your own prophets; and to their fruits I am content to appeal. Confucianism may, as you affirm, be no religion at all; it may be an inferior ethical code; but it has made of the Chinese the one nation in all the history of the world who genuinely abhor violence and reverence reason and right. And here, lest you think that I am biassed, let me call to my aid the testimony of the one among your countrymen who has known us intimately and long, and whose services to our State will never be forgotten by any patriotic Chinaman. In place of the ignorant diatribes of your special correspondents, listen for a moment to the voice of Sir Robert Hart: "They are," he says of the Chinese, "well-behaved, law-abiding, intelligent, economical, and industrious; they can learn anything and do anything; they are punctiliously polite, they worship talent, and they believe in right so firmly that they scorn to think it requires to be supported or enforced by might; they delight in literature, and everywhere they have their literary clubs and coteries for learning and discussing each other's essays and verses; they possess and practise an admirable system of ethics, and they are generous, charitable, and fond of good works; they never forget a favor, they make rich return for any kindness, and, though they know money will buy service, a man must be more than wealthy to win public esteem and respect; they are practical, teachable, and wonderfully gifted with common-sense; they are excellent artisans, reliable workmen, and of a good faith that everyone acknowledges and admires in their commercial dealings; in no country that is or was, has the commandment 'Honor thy father and thy mother' been so religiously obeyed, or so fully and without exception given effect to, and it is in fact the keynote of their family, social, official, and national life, and because it is so 'their days are long in the land God has given them.' " Thus Sir Robert Hart. I ask no better testimonial. Here are no superhuman virtues, no abnegation of self, no fanatic repudiation of fundamental facts of human nature. But here is a life according to a rational ideal; and here is a belief in that ideal so effective and profound that it has gone far to supersede the use of force. "They believe in right," says Sir Robert Hart let me quote it once more "they believe in right so firmly that they scorn to think it requires to be supported or enforced by might." Yes, it is we who do not accept it that practise the Gospel of peace; it is you who accept it that trample it underfoot. And irony of ironies ! it is the nations of Christendom who have come to us to teach us by sword and fire that Right in this world is powerless unless it be supported by Might ! Oh, do not doubt that we shall learn the lesson ! And woe to Europe when we have acquired it! You are arming a nation of four hundred millions! a nation which, until you came, had no better wish than to live at peace with themselves and all the world. In the name of Christ you have sounded the call to arms! In the name of Confucius we respond ! VIII Hitherto I have avoided any discussion in detail of the existing political and commercial relations between ourselves and the West, and of the events which led up to the situation we all deplore. I have endeavored rather to enlist your sympathies in the general character of our civilization, to note the salient points in which it differs from your own, and to bring into relief the more fundamental and permanent conditions which render an understanding between us so difficult and so precarious. I cannot, however, disguise from myself that even a sympathetic reader may fairly demand of me something more; and that if I am to satisfy him, I am bound, however unwillingly, to enter upon the field of current controversy. For, he may reasonably inquire, If it be really true that your people possess the qualities you ascribe to them, if they be indeed so just, so upright, so averse to violence, how is it that they have committed the greatest breach of international comity that is known in the history of the civilized world? How is it that they have been guilty of acts which have shocked and outraged the moral sense of communities, according to you, less cultured and humane than themselves? In reply, I will urge that I have never asserted that the Chinese are saints. I have said, and I still maintain, that if they are left to themselves, if the order to which they are accustomed is not violently disturbed, they are the most peaceful and law-abiding nation on the face of the earth. If, then, they have broken loose from their secular restraints, if they have shown for a moment those claws of the brute which no civilization, be it yours or ours, though it may sheathe, will ever draw, the very violence of the outbreak serves only to prove how intense must have been the provocation. Do you realize what that provocation was? I doubt it! Permit me then briefly to record the facts. When first your traders came to China it was not at our invitation; yet we received them, if not with enthusiasm, at least with tolerance. So long as they were content to observe our regulations we were willing to sanction their traffic, but always on the condition that it should not disturb our social and political order. To this condition, in earlier days, your countrymen consented to conform, and for many years, in spite of occasional disputes, there was no serious trouble between them and us. The trouble arose over a matter in regard to which you yourselves have hardly ventured to defend your own conduct. A considerable part of your trade was the trade in opium. The use of this drug, we observed, was destroying the health and the morals of our people, and we therefore prohibited the trade. Your merchants, however, evaded the law; opium was smuggled in; till at last we were driven to take the matter into our own hands and to seize and destroy the whole stock of the forbidden drug. Your Government made our action an excuse for war. You invaded our territory, exacted an indemnity, and took from us the island of Hong-Kong. Was this an auspicious beginning? Was it calculated to impress us with a sense of the justice and fair play of the British nation? Years went on; a petty dispute about the privileges of the flag a dispute in which we still believe that we were in the right brought us once more into collision with you. You made the unfortunate conflict an excuse for new demands. In conjunction with the French you occupied our capital and imposed upon us terms which you would never have dared to offer to a European nation. We submitted because we must; we were not a military Power. But do you suppose our sense of justice was not outraged? Or later, when every Power in Europe on some pretext or other has seized and retained some part of our territory, do you suppose because we cannot resist that we do not feel? To a Chinaman who reviews the history of our relations with you during the past sixty years and more must you not naturally appear to be little better than robbers and pirates? True, such a view is unduly harsh, and I do not myself altogether share it. A study of your official documents has convinced me that you genuinely believe that you have had on your side a certain measure of right, and I am too well aware of the complexity of all human affairs to deny that there may be something in your point of view. Still, I would ask you to consider the broad facts of the situation, dismissing the interminable controversies that arise on every point of detail. Which of us throughout has been the aggressor we who, putting our case at the worst, were obstinately resolved to maintain our society, customs, laws, and polity against the influences of an alien civilization, or you who, bent on commercial gains, were determined at all cost to force an entrance into our territory and to introduce along with your goods the leaven of your culture and ideas? If, in the collision that inevitably ensued, we gave cause of offence, we had at least the excuse of self-preservation. Our wrongs, if wrongs they were, were episodes in a substantial right; but yours were themselves the substance of your action. Consider for a moment the conditions you have imposed on a proud and ancient empire, an empire which for centuries has believed itself to be at the head of civilization. You have compelled us, against our will, to open our ports to your trade; you have forced us to permit the introduction of a drug which we believe is ruining our people ; you have exempted your subjects residing among us from the operation of our laws; you have appropriated our coasting traffic; you claim the traffic of our inland waters. Every attempt on our part to resist your demands has been followed by new claims and new aggressions. And yet all this time you have posed as civilized peoples dealing with barbarians. You have compelled us to receive your missionaries, and when they by their ignorant zeal have provoked our people to rise in mass against them, that again you have made an excuse for new depredations, till we, not unnaturally, have come to believe that the cross is the pioneer of the sword, and that the only use you have for your religion is to use it as a weapon of war. Conceive for a moment the feelings of an Englishman subjected to similar treatment; conceive that we had permanently occupied Liverpool, Bristol, Plymouth; that we had planted on your territory thousands of men whom we had exempted from your laws; that along your coasts and navigable rivers our vessels were driving out yours; that we had insisted on your admitting spirits duty free to the manifest ruin of your population ; and that we had planted in all your principal towns agents to counteract the teachings of your Church and undermine the whole fabric of habitual belief on which the stability of your society depends. Imagine that you had to submit to all this. Would you be so greatly surprised, would you really even be indignant, if you found one day the Chinese Legation surrounded by a howling mob and Confucian missionaries everywhere hunted to death? What right then have you to be surprised, what right have you to be indignant at even the worst that has taken place in China? What is there so strange or monstrous in our conduct? A Legation, you say, is sacrosanct by the law of nations. Yes; but remember that it was at the point of the sword that you forced us to receive Embassies whose presence we have always regarded as a sign of national humiliation. But our mobs were barbarous and cruel. Alas ! yes. And your troops? And your troops, nations of Christendom? Ask the once fertile land from Peking to the coast ; ask the corpses of murdered men and outraged women and children; ask the innocent mingled indiscriminately with the guilty; ask the Christ, the lover of men, whom you profess to serve, to judge between us who rose in mad despair to save our country and you who, avenging crime with crime, did not pause to reflect that the crime you avenged was the fruit of your own iniquity ! Well, it is over, at least, for the moment. I do not wish to dwell upon the past. Yet the lesson of the past is our only guide to the policy of the future. And unless you of the West will come to realize the truth; unless you will understand that the events which have shaken Europe are the Nemesis of a long course of injustice and oppression; unless you will learn that the profound opposition between your civilization and ours gives no more ground why you should regard us as barbarians than we you ; unless you will treat us as a civilized Power and respect our customs and our laws; unless you will accord us the treatment you would accord to any European nation and refrain from exacting conditions you would never dream of imposing on a Western Power unless you will do this, there is no hope of any peace between us. You have humiliated the proudest nation in the world; you have outraged the most upright and just; with what results is now abundantly manifest. If ignorance was your excuse, let it be your excuse no longer. Learn to understand us, and in doing so learn better to understand yourselves. To contribute to this end has been my only object in writing and publishing these letters. If I have offended, I regret it; but if it is the truth that offends, for that I owe and I offer no apology. |
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| 6 | 1912 |
Forster, E[dward] M[organ]. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and related writings [ID D27987]. (1934). If Dickinson visited America in the hope of self-development and India from reasons of curiosity, it was in a very different spirit that he approached China. He came to her as a lover, who had worshipped from afar for years. In a life which contained much disillusionment, Chena never failed him. She stood firm as the one decent civilization, and when he mourned over her it was not because she had disappointed him but because he had lived to see her destroyed by the violence and vulgarity of Europe. In his last years, her fate seemed to epitomize mankind's. If China could have been saved, he would have been persuaded that humanism is indestructible. His was an impersonal love ; no private relationship coloured it, although he became friendly with many individual Chinese. It rested upon natural sympathy and intellectual affinity. He once amused the students at a summer school by saying : "I am speaking to you about China, not because I know anything about the subject nor because I once visited the country, but because, in a previous existence, I actually was a Chinaman !” Roger Fry suggested that he should try a Chinese setting ; China was in the foreground politically, owing to the Boxer riots and the European expeditions to suppress them, and he had read Giles's Gems of Chinese literature and La cité chinoise by Eugène Simon. The suggestion bore fruit, the painful period of incubation ended, and at the same time as he was writing The meaning of good he produced the first four Letters from John Chinaman and sent them to the Saturday review, where they appeared anonymously. A correspondent of the Saturday review pointed out that the letters could not really be by a Chinese and there the matter seemed to end. He added some more letters, and after he had sailed for America the little volume, soon to be famous, was published by his friend R. Brimley Johnson, with a grotesque picture of a Chinaman on the cover. The presentation copies of this edition followed him over the Atlantic to Niagara of all places, and when he was lying in bed in the hotel there his brother Arthur entered in a state of great animation, saying "that he had been reading the book, and that is was 'wonderful'. He did not know it was mine, and felt a natural disappointment when I revealed the fact"… But the book would, I suppose, have fallen as dead as my others, if George Trevelyan had not quoted it in an article in the Nineteenth century, which excited some attention. People then began to speculate as to whether it was really by a Chinaman, and a good many copies were sold. It then penetrated to America, and there everybody seems to have accepted naïvely is Chinese origin… Besides being topical, John Chinaman is famous for the beauty of prose, and particularly for the sumptuous yet delicate passage beginning "A rose in a moonlit garden". When we parted at Chhatarpur, he went via Ceylon to Singapore, made a trip to Java and Sumatra, and then proceeded from Singapore to Hong Kong and Canton. As soon as he was among people whose features and physique were Mongolian, he felt happy. At Canton, Bob Trevelyan left him. Dickinson found Trevelyan a delightful companion, yet he probably gained by being left alone on the threshold of China. He was thrown on his own resources, and was obliged to look at a country about which he had hitherto only read, written and dreamed. Canton he loved. Then came Shanghai and politics and an interview with Sun Yat-sen ; he was too sensitive to be a good interviewer, and 'didn't get much out of him'. Then a solitary voyage of ten days on the Yangtse, in pouring rain, which kept him in his cabin and obliged him to play many games of patience. Then a long railway to Peking. At Peking he stopped several weeks, seeing much both of English and Chinese, and it would be possible, from his diary and letters home, to construct a complete account of his movements. But the movements of a tourist's body are not worth recording unless they generate movements inside his mind. Here are two typical reactions. The first is a rhapsody in free verse, such as often occurred to him while in the Far East. This particular poem records a visit to the Temple of Agriculture at Peking. A temple What do they hide ? The cypress Avenue and the coral wall, The green and amber roof, what do they hide ? A wooden plough and an altar consecrate to earth. An emperor once held the plough, An emperor made sacrifice. The coral wall is falling now, falling the amber roof, The cypresses decay, the alter crumbles ; Crumbles the altar consecrate to Earth ; But Earth abides. On the day previous, he had been taken to visit a very different type of temple. He writes of it to a friend : "Oh, but the most amusing thing I want to tell you, I went to a Chinese banquet, at which 'sing-song-girls' were introduces. They are in fact superior, accomplished and expensive tarts, rather pretty, and I shall suppose attractive to the normal man. But imagine me behaving as is expected on such occasions, with one of them on my knee at one time, and smoking the same cigarette ; really it was rather funny, though very embarrassing. And though the girls are to be had, I gather it is only if they like you, and for large money. Some of them were wearing pearls and diamonds. We adjourned to their house – I suppose really a superior brothel – and had a second feast of Chinese dishes, very trying to a weak stomach. Most people seemed to leave without anything happening. They were all very 'respectable' commercial Chinese. Leaving Peking with Dr [W. Perceval] Yetts [Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology University of London] on 17 June, he climbed, two days later, the sacred mountain of T'ai Shan. It was dusk when they reached the top. They slept in a temple, saw the full moon rise and the sunrise, and spent the next day wandering about. Moved by the beauty, freshness and antiquity of the mountain, he experienced once more the enhanced sensibility that came to him through scenery. Mistra had turned him to dialogue, the Yosemite has inspired him with the idea of interpreting America. On T'ai Shan his feelings were definitely religious. He desired to worship, like the thousands of pilgrims who had preceded him. To worship whom or what ? He discuees this in 'Appearances'. The same day he writes another verse rhapsody : On T'ai Shan Not for the young alone, Cuckoo, voice of the spring, Not for the young alone that liquid note : But for all whom the years have freed From the prison of youth and age, To the one Life freed that is not old nor young, The Life that on this spot Thousands of years have adored, Thousands of years and millions of men, as I now stand and adore, While you, cuckoo, sing. He descended from this altitude into rain and realism. They went on to Ch'ü-fou, where Confucius had been born, and were his descendant, the 76th Duke, still lived on a domain secured to him by the Chinese government. Their visit to the Duke had been officially arranged through the British Legation, but he slept, as so often happens in the East. His secretary asked them very politely to do their sight-seeing first, and Dickinson in his naïveté would have consented, but Dr Yetts saw they would 'lose face' and he sent a message that they regretted missing the Duke and would retire. The Confucian Duke was more trammeled by etiquette. He knew that if the visitors went away in this fashion he himself would 'lose face', and he immediately appeared fully dressed with his entourage – a handsomish rip of a man. An interview ensued, carried on amid much linguistic difficulty. How old was Mr Dickinson, why was he not married, why had he no beard, etc. ? Then followed a symbolic incident : the offering of a copy of 'John Chinaman'. What did the representative of Confucius make of the austere little volume ? Not much. An attempt was made to explain to him that the writer was a distinguished western sage, and he was understood to inquire what present he might give the sage in return. Asked for a set of rubbings of the Confucian portraits and inscriptions, he agreed graciously, and after an interminable interval produced some raspberryade. The visitors then took their leave and Dickinson had his first and last experience of a Chinese inn. It was not too terrible, there were no vermin, and he felt happy. A great deal of time was spent in calling on and being called on by 'the mandarin, whose attentions and courtesy were rather overwhelming in our humble shed', and who showed them over the temples and the great cemetery of the K'ung clan. The Duke's present has not yet arrived. |
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| 7 | 1912 |
Letter from G. Lowes Dickinson to Oscar P. Eckhard. King's College, 12 June 1912. "We had an Anglo-Chinese dinner on Monday. The secretary of the Chinese legation, Mr Kwei, was there. He sat next me and talked the whole time, and I hardly understood a single word. It was like a nightmare. One thing however I grasped after half an hour's explanation. He applied to my Letters of John Chinaman what I understood is a Chinese proverb : In another's wine cup I make my own complaint. This I think explains itself, and is quite true in its application. Mr Kwei got drunk before the end ; he began to embrace me, and I thought he would never have finished shanking hands. The net result is that I hope I shall get much assistance in my travels to China." |
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| 8 | 1912 |
Letter from G. Lowes Dickinson to Mrs. Webb. (1912). The cuckoos calling to one another across ranges and ranges of hills, bare and grey, green in the sun. And me lying on top of the most sacred mountain in China, where for four thousand years God has been worshipped, according to Chinese legend ; where certainly Confucius came, and emperor after emperor, and streams of pilgrims, year after year. A path lined with cypresses and flight after flight of rock-stairs brings you to the top. And there we slept in the temple with images of Taoist gods watching us and saw the full moon over the plain, and the sunrise. And I have had one of the great days that come now and again. I wish I could communicate it to you. But it evaporates in words, so I got this down to show I was thinking of you. |
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| 9 | 1913 |
Letter from G. Lowes Dickinson to Edward Morgan Forster. Peking, 8 June 1913. Dear Forster, China is a land of human beings. India, as it glimmers in a remote past, is supernatural, uncanny, terrifying, sublime, horrible, monotonous, full of mountains and abysses, all heights and depths, and for ever incomprehensible. But China ! So gay, friendly, beautiful, sane, hellenic, choice, human. Dirty ? Yes. Peking, the last day or two, is all but impossible even in a rickshaw – pools, lakes, of liquid mud. One understands the importance of the sedan chair, and the wall side, 150 years ago in Europe. Poor ? Yes. But never were poor people so happy (I speak with all the superficiality you care to credit me with). A Chinese home in Peking is beyond description exquisite : its courtyard, with trees and flowering shrubs, its little rooms and hall, paper-windowed, perfect in proposition and design, its gaily painted wooden cloisers. And you approach them by a slum. A level, rational people – a kind of English with sensitiveness and imagination. An immense background, I admit, of ghosts and devils – just to add spice to life – one prays to them, when things go a bit wrong ; otherwise one laughs at them. No reaches into the infinite ; but a clear, non-restricted perception of the beautiful and the exquisite in the Real. But the hand of the Powers, or rather the foot, is on her throat, I don't know whether she can pull through, Said one of them to me : 'Get up, you brute ! 'I'll get up', says China, 'when you take away your foot !' 'No ! You get up, and I'll take away my foot !' The same gentleman remarked : 'British rule in India is excellent – at water closets'. This, of course, is technically incorrect. He was mad, but a madman of genius. He called at 3, and talked till 7.30, when I had to dismiss him – remarking, at intervals, 'But I came to hear you talk' – whereupon he was swept away even more on the flood. Yes, China is much as I imagined it. I thought I was idealizing, but I now doubt it. Of Course, Lama priests are sturdy beggars and Buddhist priests aren't much better. Then the country ! Round Peking, it's Italy. You go out to the hills, and wander from monastery to monastery, each more exquisitely placed than the last. Happy people who have travelled in the interior tell even more wonderful tales. Hunan, Rose tells me, is a land of beautiful mountains, fields of flowers, and farmers tilling their own land who are also scholars and gentlemen. He told one of them about intensive methods of cultivating rice. And when they parted the Chinaman said : 'You, a stranger, have come to us and honoured and delighted us with your talk. I shall consecrate to you a corner of my farm, and try the experiment you suggest'. Then they are the only democratic people – in their manners as well as their institutions – perfectly self-respecting, perfectly courteous and friendly, and altogether declining to be hustled into doing anything they think unreasonable. If such a people could be lifted onto a higher economic level, without losing these qualities, we should have the best society this planet admits of. Whereas I believe everything in India will have to be, and ought to be, swept away – except their beautiful dress and their beautiful brown bodies – there they do score off the ugly but fascinating Chinese. But their caste ! And their whole quality of mind. No, it's all wrong. C'est magnifique – mais ce n'est pas la vie, any more than the Middle Ages were. I'm rather surprised at all this that has tumbled out of my pen. I suppose the 'Subconscious' has been working it up, unbeknown to me. Take it for what it's worth, and not too solemnly. It has truth in it – a little scintilla of that dry flint. Well, you did well in India. Does it seem like a dream, now you're home ? I must get on to Japan before long, but plans are difficult to make. If you write, best address at 11 Edwardes Square. Shall you write a book on India ? I shall write a book of essays called 'East and West', gracefully alluding, in a remote way, to facts. |
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| 10 | 1913 |
Letter from Roger Fry to G. Lowes Dickinson ; Paris, 1 June, 1913. The East is thoroughly ransacked by arts dealers and… one can learn more about the best things in Paris than in Beijing. I've just seen a show in Paris full of the most amazing things among them the fineset Wei dynasty statues from somewhere away in the West of China as fine as any ever done. The Chinese pictures Bob's got aren't much (tho' they're pleasant pretty things) but it's evident that the really big things are never accessible. The Chinese know too much about it for that. |
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| 11 | 1913.05.10 |
Letter from G. Lowes Dickinson to Roger Fry ; From a temple near Peking, May 10, 1913. I feel so at home. I think I must have been a chinaman once. I'm now in a temple in the hills west of Peking. And a sense of a most disnified contemplative life that I have ever met anywhere else. What a civilized people they have been. And how boundaries went in punishing them for it ! But I won't all that, it makes me too indignant. Peking is amazing. What I want to do is to take a room in a temple and spend a week there. |
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| 12 | 1914 |
Dickinson, G. Lowes. Appearances : notes of travel, East and West [ID D2720] Pt. II China First impressions of China. Some recent travellers have expressed disappointment or even disgust with what they saw or learned or guessed of China. My own first impression is quite contrary. The climate, it is true, for the moment, inclines one to gloomy views. An icy wind, a black sky, a cold drizzle. March in England could hardly do worse. But in Canton one almost forgets all that. Imagine a maze of narrow streets, more confused and confusing than Venice; high houses (except in the old city) ; and hanging parallel to these, in long, vertical lines, flags and wooden signs inscribed with huge, Chinese characters, gold on black, gold on red, red or blue on white, a blaze of colour; and under it, pouring in a ceaseless stream, yellow faces, black heads, blue jackets and trousers, all on foot or borne on chairs, not a cart or carriage, rarely a pony, nobody crowding, nobody hustling or jostling, an even flow of cheerful humanity, inexhaustible, imperturbable, convincing one at first sight of the truth of all one has heard of the order, independence, and vigour of this extraordinary people. The shops are high and spacious, level with the street, not, as in India, raised on little platforms; and commonly, within, they are cut across by a kind of arch elaborately carved and blazing with gold. Every trade may be seen plying jade-cutters, cloth-rollers, weavers, ringmakers, rice-pounders, a thousand others. Whole animals, roasted, hang before the butchers' shops; ducks, pigs even we saw a skinned tiger! The interest is inexhaustible; and one is lucky if one does not return with a light purse and a heavy burden of forged curios. Even the American tourist, so painfully in evidence at the hotel, is lost, drowned in this native sea. He passes in his chair; but, like one's self, he is only a drop in the ocean. Canton is China, as Benares is India. And that conjunction of ideas set me thinking. To come from India to China is like waking from a dream. Often in India I felt that I was in an enchanted land. Melancholy, monotony, austerity; a sense as of perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; a lost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly that is the kind of impression India left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of course, is the real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry, intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The natural man, working, marrying, begetting and rearing children, growing middle-aged, growing old, dying and that is all. Here it is broad daylight; but in India, moon or stars, or a subtler gleam from some higher heaven. Recall, for example, Benares the fantastic buildings rising and falling like a sea, the stairs running up to infinity, the sacred river, the sages meditating on its banks, the sacrificial ablutions, the squealing temple-pipes, and, in the midst of this, columns of smoke, as the body returns to the elements and the soul to God. This way of disposing of the dead, when the first shock is over, lingers in the mind as something eminently religious. Death and dissolution take place in the midst of life, for death is no more a mystery than life. In the open air, in the press of men, the soul takes flight. She is no stranger, for everything is soul houses, trees, men, the elements into which the body is resolved. Death is not annihilation, it is change of form; and through all changes of form the essence persists. But now turn back to Canton. We pass the shops of the coffin-makers. We linger. But "No stop," says our guide; "better coffins soon." "Soon" is what the guide-books call the "City of the Dead." A number of little chapels; and laid in each a great lacquered coffin in which the dead man lives. I say "lives" advisedly, for there is set for his use a table and a chair, and every morning he is provided with a cup of tea. A bunch of paper, yellow and white, symbolises his money; and perhaps a couple of figures represent attendants. There he lives, quite simply and naturally as he had always lived, until the proper time and place is discovered in which he may be buried. It may be months; it may be, or rather, might have been, years; for I am told that a reforming Government has limited the time to six months. And after burial? Why, presumably he lives still. But not with the life of the universal soul. Oh, no! There have been mystics in China, but the Chinese are not mystical. What he was he still is, an eating and drinking creature, and, one might even conjecture, a snob. For if one visits the family chapel of the Changs another of the sights of Canton one sees ranged round the walls hundreds of little tablets, painted green and inscribed in gold. These are the memorials of the deceased. And they are arranged in three classes, those who pay most being in the first and those who pay least in the third. One can even reserve one's place first, second, or third while one is still alive, by a white tablet. You die, and the green is substituted. And so, while you yet live, you may secure your social status after death. How how British! Yes, the word is out; and I venture to record a suspicion that has long been maturing in my mind. The Chinese are not only Western; among the Western they are English. Their minds move as ours do; they are practical, sensible, reasonable. And that is why as it would seem they have more sympathy with Englishmen, if not with the English Government, than with any other Westerners. East may be East and West West, though I very much doubt it. But if there be any truth in the aphorism, we must define our terms. The East must be confined to India, and China included in the West. That as a preliminary correction. I say nothing yet about Japan. But I shall have more to say, I hope, about China. II Nanking The Chinese, one is still told, cannot and will not change. On the other hand, Professor Ross writes a book entitled The Changing Chinese. And anyone may see that the Chinese educated abroad are transformed, at any rate externally, out of all recognition. In Canton I met some of the officials of the new Government; and found them, to the outward sense, pure Americans. The dress, the manners, the accent, the intellectual outfit all complete! Whether, in some mysterious sense, they remain Chinese at the core I do not presume to affirm or deny. But an external transformation so complete must imply some inward change. Foreign residents in China deplore the foreign-educated product. I have met some who almost gnash their teeth at "young China." But this seems rather hard on China. For nearly a century foreigners have been exhorting her, at the point of the bayonet, to adopt Western ways and Western ideas. And when she begins to do so, the same people turn round and accuse her of unpardonable levity and treachery to her own traditions. What do foreigners want? the Chinese may well ask. I am afraid the true answer is, that they want nothing but concessions, interest on loans, and trade profits, at all and every cost to China. But I must not deviate into politics. What suggested this train of thought was the student-guide supplied me at Nanking by the American missionary college. There he was, complete American; and, I fear I must add, boring as only Americans can bore. Still, he showed me Nanking, and Nanking is worth seeing, though the interest of it is somewhat tragic. A wall 20 to 40 feet thick, 40 to 90 feet high, and 22 miles in circuit (I take these figures on trust) encloses an area larger than that of any other Chinese city. But the greater part of this area is fields and ruins. You pass through the city gate in the train, and find yourself in the country. You alight, and you are still in the country. A carriage takes you, in time, to the squalid village, or series of villages, where are housed the 350,000 inhabitants of modern Nanking. Among them are quartered the khaki-clad soldiers of new China, the new national flag draped at the gate of their barracks. Meantime old China swarms, unregenerate, in the narrow little streets, chaffering, chattering, laughing in its rags as though there had never been a siege, a surrender, and a revolution. Beggars display their stumps and their sores, grovelling on the ground like brutes. Ragged children run for miles beside the carriage, singing for alms; and stop at last, laughing, as though it had been a good joke to run so far and get nothing for it. One monument in all this scene of squalor arrests attention the now disused examination hall. It is a kind of rabbit-warren of tiny cells, six feet deep, four feet broad, and six feet high; row upon row of them, opening on narrow, unroofed corridors; no doors now, nor, I should suppose, at any time, for it would be impossible to breathe in these boxes if they had lids. Here, for a week or a fortnight, the candidates sat and excogitated, unable to lie down at night, sleeping, if they could, in their chairs. And no wonder if, every now and again, one of them incontinently died and was hauled out, a corpse, through a hole in the wall; or went mad and ran amuck among examiners and examinees. For centuries, as is well known, this system selected the rulers of China; and whole lives, from boyhood to extreme old age, were spent in preparing for the examinations. Now all this is abolished; and some people appear to regret it. Once more, what do the foreigners want? The old imperial city, where once the Ming dynasty reigned, was destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion. The Tartar city, where before the revolution 3000 mandarins lived on their pensions, was burnt in the siege of 1911. Of these cities nothing remains but their huge walls and gates and the ruins of their houses. The principal interest of Nanking, the so-called "Ming tombs," lies outside the walls. And the interest is not the tombs, but the road to them. It is lined by huge figures carved out of monoliths. Brutes first lions, camels, elephants, horses, a pair of each lying down and a pair standing; then human figures, military and civil officers. What they symbolise I cannot tell. They are said to guard the road. And very impressive they are in the solitude. Not so what they lead to, which is merely a hill, artificial, I suppose, piled on a foundation of stone. Once, my guide informed me, there was a door giving admission; and within, a complete house, with all its furniture, in stone. But the door is sealed, and for centuries no one has explored the interior. I suggested excavation, but was told the superstition of the inhabitants forbade it. "Besides," said my guide, "the Chinese are not curious." I wonder? Whether or no they are curious, they are certainly superstitious. Apropos, a gunboat ran aground on the Yangtse. The river was falling, and there seemed no chance of getting off for months. The officers made up their minds to it, and fraternised with the priest of a temple on the bank. The priest one day asked for a photograph of the boat. They gave him one, and he asked them to dinner. After dinner he solemnly burnt the photograph to his god. And "would you believe it?" next day a freshet came down and set the vessel afloat. Which shows how superstitions are generated and maintained in a world so little subject to law, on the surface of it, as ours. My anecdote has brought me to the Yangtse, and it is on a river-boat that I write. Hour after hour there passes by the panorama of hills and plain, of green wheat and yellow rape, of the great flood with its flocks of wild duck, of fishers' cabins on the shore and mud-built, thatched huts, of junks with bamboo-threaded sails skimming on flat bottoms, of high cliffs with monasteries perched on perilous ledges, of changing light and shade, of burning sunset and the stars. Travelling by river is the best of all travelling smooth, slow, quiet, and soothingly contemplative. All China, I am informed by some pessimists, is in a state of anarchy, actual or latent. It may be. But it is difficult to believe it among these primitive, industrious people living and working as they have lived and worked for 4000 years. Any other country, I suppose, in such a crisis as the present, would be seething with civil war. But China? When one puts the point to the foreigner who has been talking of anarchy he says, "Ah! but the Chinese are so peaceable! They don't mind whether there's a Government or no. They just go on without it!' Exactly! That is the wonderful thing. But even that seems to annoy the foreigner. Once more, what does he want? I give it up. III In the Yangtse gorges At the upper end of the gorge poetically named "Ox Liver and Horse Lungs" I watched the steamboat smoking and splashing upstream. She had traversed in a few hours the distance I, in my houseboat, had taken three days to cover; and certainly she is much more convenient and much more comfortable. That, however, is not necessarily an advantage. What may be urged with some force is that travelling by steamboat is more humane. It dispenses with human labour of a peculiarly dangerous and strenuous kind. Twenty-eight boatmen are attached to my single person. A big junk may have a crew of two hundred. When the wind is not fair they must row or tow; and towing is not like towing along the Thames ! Suddenly you see the men leap out and swarm up a precipice. Presently they appear high above, creeping with the line along a ledge of rock. And your "boy" remarks nonchalantly, "Plenty coolie fall here. Too high place." Or they are clambering over boulders, one or two told off to disentangle the line wherever it catches. Or they are struggling along a greasy slope, their bare feet gripping the mud, hardly able to advance a step or even to hold their own. As a labour-saving machine one must welcome the advent of the steamboat, as one is constrained to welcome even that of the motor-omnibus. But from the traveller's point of view it is different. Railways and steamboats enable more of us to travel, and to travel farther, in space. But in experience he travels farthest who travels the slowest. A mediaeval student or apprentice walking through Europe on foot really did see the world. A modern tourist sees nothing but the inside of hotels. Unless, that is, he chooses to walk, or ride, or even cycle. Then it is different. Then he begins to see, as now I, from my houseboat, begin to see China. Not profoundly, of course, but somehow intimately. For instance, while my crew eat their midday rice, I stroll up to the neighbouring village. Contrary to all I have been taught to expect, I find it charming, picturesque, not so dirty after all, not so squalid, not so poor. The people, too, who, one thought, would insult or mob the foreigner, either take no notice or, if you greet them, respond in the friendliest way. They may, of course, be explaining to one another that you are a foreign devil, but nothing in their countenance or manner suggests it. The children are far better-mannered than in most European countries. They may follow you, and chatter and laugh; but at least they have not learnt to beg. Curiosity they have, and gaiety, but I detect no sign of hostility. I walk down the long street, with its shops and roomy houses far roomier and more prosperous-looking than most Indian villages and come to the temple. Smilingly I am invited to enter. There are no mysteries in Chinese religion. I begin to wonder, indeed, whether there is any religion left. For everywhere I find the temples and monasteries either deserted or turned into schools or barracks. This one is deserted. It is like a series of lumber rooms, full of dusty idols. The idols were once gaudy, brightly painted "to look like life," with beards and whiskers of real hair. But now their splendour is dimmed. The demons scowl to no purpose. To no purpose the dragons coil. No trespasser threatens the god behind his dingy curtains. In one chamber only a priest kneels before the shrine and chants out of a book while he taps a bronze vessel with a little hammer. Else, solitude, vacuity, and silence. Is he Buddhist or Taoist? I have no language in which to ask. I can only accept with mute gestures the dusty seat he offers and the cup of lukewarm tea. What has happened to religion? So far as I can make out, something like the "disestablishment of the Church." The Republic has been at work; and in the next village I see what it has been doing. For there the temple is converted into a school. Delightedly the scholars show me round. On the outside wall, for him who runs to read, are scored up long addition sums in our Western figures. Inside, the walls are hung with drawings of birds and beasts, of the human skeleton and organs, even of bacteria! There are maps of China and of the world. The children even produce in triumph an English reading-book, though I must confess they do not seem to have profited by it much. Still, they can say "cat" when you show them a picture of the creature; which is more than I could do in Chinese. And China does not change? Wait a generation! This, remember, is a tiny village in the heart of the country, more than 1000 miles from the coast. And this is happening all over the Celestial Empire, I suppose. I start to return to my boat, but have not gone a quarter of a mile before I hear a shout, and looking back find half the school following me and escorting their teacher, who speaks English. He regrets to have missed my visit; will I not return and let him show me the school? I excuse myself, and he walks with me to the boat, making what conversation he can. One remark I remember "China a good place now; China a republic." And I thought, as we exchanged cards, that he represented the Republic more essentially than the politicians whom foreigners so severely criticise. Anyhow, Republic or no, China is being transformed. And there is something other than steamboats to attest it. Which brings me back to my starting-point. On the steamboat you have no adventures. But on the houseboat you do. For instance, the other day the rope broke as we were towing up a rapid, and down we dashed, turning round and round, and annihilating in five minutes the labour of an hour. I was afraid, I confess; but the boatmen took it as a matter of course. In some way, incomprehensible to me, they got us into the bank, and, looking up, the first thing I saw was an embankment in construction the railway from Ichang to Chungking. When it is finished we shall go by train not even by steamboat and so see nothing except tunnels. Certainly, we shall not be compelled to pass the night in a small village; nor permitted to see the sunset behind these lovely hills and the moon rising over the river between the cliffs of the gorge. Nor shall we then be delayed, as I was yesterday, till the water should run down, and so tempted to walk into the country. I made for a side valley, forded a red torrent, and found myself among fields and orchards; green of mulberries, green of fruit trees, green of young corn; and above, the purple hills, with all their bony structure showing under the skin of soil. I followed a high path, greeted by the peasants I met with a charming smile and that delightful gesture whereby, instead of shaking your hand, they clasp theirs and shake them at you. I came at last to a solitary place, and, sitting down, watched the evening light on the mountains; and they seemed to be saying something. What ? "Rocks that are bones, earth that is flesh, what, what do you mean Eyeing me silently ? Streams that are voices, what, what do you say? You are pouring an ocean into a cup. Yet pour, that all it can hold May at least be water of yours." At dusk I got back to the river, and found that a wind had sprung up and the junks were trying to pass the rapid. There must have been fifty of them crowded together. They could only pass one by one; and the scene was pandemonium. The Chinese are even noisier than the Italians, and present the same appearance of confusion. But in some mysterious way an order is always getting evolved. On this occasion it seemed to be perfectly understood which boat should go first. And presently there she was, in mid-rapid, apparently not advancing an inch, the ropes held taut from a causeway a quarter of a mile off. At last the strain suddenly ceased, and she moved quickly upstream. Another followed. Then it was dark. And we had to pass the night, after all, tossing uneasily in the rough water. Soon after dawn we started again. I went across to the causeway, and watched the trackers at work twenty each on two ropes, hardly advancing a step in five minutes. Then the boat's head swung into shore, the tension ceased; something had happened. I waited half an hour or so. "Nothing doing," in the expressive American phrase. Then I went back. We had sprung a leak, and my cabin was converted into a swimming-bath. Another hour or so repairing this. Then the rope had to be brought back and attached again. At last we started for the second time, and in half an hour got safely through the hundred yards of racing waters into the bank above. At ten I got my breakfast, and we started to sail with a fair wind. It dropped. Rain came on. My crew (as always in that conjuncture) put up their awning and struck work. So here we are at i P.M., in a heavy thunder-shower, a mile from the place we tried to leave at six o'clock this morning. This is the ancient method of travelling 4000 years old, I suppose. It is very inconvenient! Oh, yes BUT! IV Pekin Professor Giles tells us, no doubt truly, that the Chinese are not a religious nation. No nation, I think, ever was, unless it be the Indians. But religious impulses sweep over nations and pass away, leaving deposits rituals, priesthoods, and temples. Such an impulse once swept over China, in the form of Buddhism; and I am now visiting its deposit in the neighbourhood of Pekin. Scattered over the hills to the west of the city are a number of monastery temples. Some are deserted; some are let as villas to Europeans; some, like the one where I am staying, have still their complement of monks in this temple, I am told, some three to four hundred. But neither here nor anywhere have I seen anything that suggests vitality in the religion. I entered one of the temples yesterday at dusk and watched the monks chanting and processing round a shrine from which loomed in the shadow a gigantic bronze-gold Buddha. They began to giggle like children at the entrance of the foreigner and never took their eyes off us. Later, individual monks came running round the shrines, beating a gong as though to call the attention of the deity, and shouting a few words of perfunctory praise or prayer. Irreverence more complete I have not seen even in Italy, nor beggary more shameless. Such is the latter end of the gospel of Buddha in China. It seems better that he should sit deserted in his Indian caves than be dishonoured by such mummeries. But once it must have been otherwise. Once this religion was alive. And then it was that men chose these exquisite sites for contemplation. The Chinese Buddhist had clearly the same sense for the beauty of nature that the Italian Franciscans had. In secluded woods and copses their temples nestle, courts and terraces commanding superb views over the great plain to Pekin. The architecture is delicate and lovely; tiled roofs, green or gold or grey, cornices elaborately carved and painted in lovely harmonies of blue and green; fine trees religiously preserved; the whole building so planned and set as to enhance, not destroy, the lines and colour of the landscape. To wander from one of these temples to another, to rest in them in the heat of the day and sleep in them at night, is to taste a form of travel impossible in Europe now, though familiar enough there in the Middle Ages. Specially delightful is it to come at dusk upon a temple apparently deserted; to hear the bell tinkle as the wind moves it; to enter a dusky hall and start to see in a dark recess huge figures, fierce faces, glimmering maces and swords that seem to threaten the impious intruder. This morning there was a festival, and the people from the country crowded into the temple. Very bright and gay they looked in their gala clothes. The women especially were charming; painted, it is true, but painted quite frankly, to better nature, not to imitate her. Their cheeks were like peaches or apples, and their dresses correspondingly gay. Why they had come did not appear; not, apparently, to worship, for their mood was anything but religious. Some, perhaps, came to carry away a little porcelain boy or girl as guarantee of a baby to come. For the Chinese, by appropriate rites, can determine the sex of a child a secret unknown as yet to the doctors of Europe! Some, perhaps, came to cure their eyes, and will leave at the shrine a picture on linen of the organs affected. Some are merely there for a jaunt, to see the sights and the country. We saw a group on their way home, climbing a steep hill for no apparent purpose except to look at the view. What English agricultural labourer would do as much? But the Chinese are not "agricultural labourers"; they are independent peasants; and a people so gay, so friendly, so well-mannered and self-respecting I have found nowhere else in the world. The country round Pekin has the beauty we associate with Italy. First the plain, with its fresh, spring green, its dusty paths, its grey and orange villages, its cypress groves, its pagodas, its memorial slabs. Then the hills, swimming in amethyst, bare as those of Umbria, fine and clean in colour and form. For this beauty I was unprepared. I have even read that there is no natural beauty in China. And I was unprepared for Pekin too. How can I describe it? At this time of year, seen from above, it is like an immense green park. You mount the tremendous wall, 40 feet high, 14 miles round, as broad at the top as a London street, and you look over a sea of spring-green tree-tops, from which emerge the orange-gold roofs of palaces and temples. You descend, and find the great roads laid out by Kubla Khan, running north and south, east and west, and thick, as the case may be, with dust or mud; and opening out of them a maze of streets and lanes, one-storyed houses, grey walls and roofs, shop fronts all ablaze with gilt carving, all trades plying, all goods selling, rickshaws, mule-carts canopied with blue, swarming pedestrians, eight hundred thousand people scurrying like ants in this gigantic framework of Cyclopean walls and gates. Never was a medley of greatness and squalor more strange and impressive. One quarter only is commonplace, that of the Legations. There is the Wagon-lits Hotel, with its cosmopolitan stream of Chinese politicians, European tourists, concession-hunters, and the like. There are the Americans, occupying and guarding the great north gate, and playing baseball in its precincts. There are the Germans, the Dutch, the French, the Italians, the Russians, the Japanese; and there, in a magnificent Chinese palace, are the British, girt by that famous wall of the siege on which they have characteristically written "Lest we forget!" Forget what? The one or two children who died in the Legation, and the one or two men who were killed? Or the wholesale massacre, robbery, and devastation which followed when the siege was relieved? This latter, I fear, the Chinese are not likely to forget soon. Yet it would be better if they could. And better if the Europeans could remember much that they forget could remember that they forced their presence and the trade on China against her will; that their treaties were extorted by force, and their loans imposed by force, since they exacted from China what are ironically called "indemnities" which she could not pay except by borrowing from those who were robbing her. If Europeans could remember and realise these facts they would perhaps cease to complain that China continues to evade their demands by the only weapon of the weak cunning. When you have knocked a man down, trampled on him, and picked his pocket, you can hardly expect him to enter into social relations with you merely because you pick him up and, retaining his property, propose that you should now be friends and begin to do business. The obliquity of vision of the European residents on all these .points is extraordinary. They cannot see that wrong has been done, and that wrong engenders wrong. They repeat comfortable formulae about the duplicity and evasiveness of the Chinese; they charge them with dishonesty at the very moment that they are dismembering their country; they attach intolerable conditions to their loans, and then complain if their victims attempt to find accommodation elsewhere. Of all the Powers the United States alone have shown some generosity and fairness, and they are reaping their reward in the confidence of Young China. The Americans had the intelligence to devote some part of the excessive indemnity they exacted after the Boxer riots to educating Chinese students in America. Hundreds of these young men are now returned to China, with the friendliest feeling to America, and, naturally, anxious to develop political and commercial relations with her rather than with other Powers. British trade may suffer because British policy has been less generous. But British trade, I suppose, would suffer in any case. For the British continue to maintain their ignorance and contempt of China and all things Chinese, while Germans and Japanese are travelling and studying indefatigably all over the country. "We see too much of things Chinese !" was the amazing remark made to me by a business man in Shanghai. Too much! They see nothing at all, and want to see nothing. They live in the treaty ports, dine, dance, play tennis, race. China is in birth-throes, and they know and care nothing. A future in China is hardly for them. V The Englishman abroad To write from China about the Englishman may seem an odd choice. But to see him abroad is to see him afresh. At home he is the air one breathes; one is unaware of his qualities. Against a background of other races you suddenly perceive him, and can estimate him fallaciously or no as you estimate foreigners. So seen, the Englishman appears as the eternal schoolboy. I mean no insult; I mean to express his qualities as well as his defects. He has the pluck, the zest, the sense of fair play, the public spirit of our great schools. He has also their narrowness and their levity. Enter his office, and you will find him not hurried or worried, not scheming, skimping, or hustling, but cheery, genial, detached, with an air of playing at work. As likely as not, in a quarter of an hour he will have asked you round to the club, and offered you a whisky and soda. Dine with him, and the talk will turn on golf or racing, on shooting, fishing, and the gymkhana. Or, if you wish to divert it, you must ask him definite questions about matters of fact. Probably you will get precise and intelligent replies. But if you put a general question he will founder resent-fully; and if you generalise yourself you will see him dismissing you as a windbag. Of the religion, the politics, the manners and customs of the country in which he lives, he will know and care nothing, except so far as they may touch his affairs. He will never, if he can help it, leave the limits of the foreign settlement. Physically he oscillates between his home, his office, the club, and the racecourse; mentally, between his business and sport. On all general topics his opinions are second or third hand. They are the ghosts of old prejudices imported years ago from England, or taken up unexamined from the English community abroad. And these opinions pass from hand to hand till they are as similar as pebbles on the shore. In an hour or so you will have acquired the whole stock of ideas current in the foreign community throughout a continent. Your only hope of new light is in particular instances and illustrations. And these, of course, may be had for the asking. But the Englishman abroad in some points is the Englishman at his best. For he is or has been a pioneer, at any rate in China. And pioneering brings out his most characteristic qualities. He loves to decide everything on his own judgment, on the spur of the moment, directly on the immediate fact, and in disregard of remoter contingencies and possibilities. He needs adventure to bring out his powers, and only really takes to business when business is something of a "lark." To combine the functions of a trader with those of an explorer, a soldier, and a diplomat is what he really enjoys. So, all over the world, he opens the ways, and others come in to reap the fruit of his labours. This is true in things intellectual as in things practical. In science, too, he is a pioneer. Modern archaeology was founded by English travellers. Darwin and Wallace and Galton in their youth pursued adventure as much as knowledge. When the era of routine arrives, when laboratory work succeeds to field work, the Englishman is apt to retire and leave the job to the German. The Englishman, one might say, " larks" into achievement, the German "grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, is freeliving, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, exact, routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be a pedant; it is not easy for a German to be anything else. For philosophy no man has less capacity than the Englishman. He does not understand even how such questions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer them. The philosopher wants to know whether, how, and why life ought to be lived before he will consent to live it. The Englishman just lives ahead, not aware that there is a problem; or convinced that, if there is one, it will only be solved "by walking." The philosopher proceeds from the abstract to the concrete. The Englishman starts with the concrete, and may or, more probably, may not arrive at the abstract. No general rules are of any use to him except such as he may have elaborated for himself out of his own experience. That is why he mistrusts education. For education teaches how to think in general, and that isn't what he wants or believes in. So, when he gets into affairs, he discards all his training and starts again at the beginning, learning to think, if he ever does learn it, over his own particular job. And his own way, he opines, must be the right way for every one. Hence his contempt and even indignation for individuals or nations who are moved by "ideas." At this moment his annoyance with the leaders of "Young China" is provoked largely by the fact that they are proceeding on general notions of how a nation should be governed and organised, instead of starting with the particularities of their own society, and trying to mend it piece by piece and from hand to mouth. Before they make a constitution, he thinks, they ought to make roads; and before they draw up codes, to extirpate consumption. The conclusion lies near at hand, and I have heard it drawn "What they want is a few centuries of British rule." And, indeed, it is curious how constantly the Englishman abroad is opposed, in the case of other nations, to all the institutions and principles he is supposed to be proud of at home. Partly, no doubt, this is due to his secret or avowed belief that the whole world ought to be governed despotically by the English. But partly it is because he does not believe that the results the English have achieved can be achieved in any other way than theirs. They arrived at them without intention or foresight, by a series of detached steps, each taken without prescience of the one that would follow. So, and so only? can other nations arrive at them. He does not believe in short cuts, nor in learning by the experience of others. And so the watchwords "Liberty," "Justice," "Constitution," so dear to him at home, leave him cold abroad. Or, rather, they make him very warm, but warm not with zeal, but with irritation. Never was such a pourer of cold water on other people's enthusiasms. He cannot endure the profession that a man is moved by high motives. His annoyance, for example, with the "anti-opium" movement is not due to the fact that he supports the importation into China of Indian opium. Very commonly he does not. But the movement is an "agitation" (dreadful word!). It is "got up" by missionaries. It purports to be based on moral grounds, and he suspects everything that so purports. Not that he is not himself moved by moral considerations. Almost invariably he is. But he will never admit it for himself, and he deeply suspects it in others. The words "hypocrite," "humbug," "sentimentalist" spring readily to his lips. But let him work off his steam, sit quiet and wait, and you will find, often enough, that he has arrived at the same conclusion as the "sentimentalist" only, of course, for quite different reasons ! For intellect he has little use, except so far as it issues in practical results. He will forgive a man for being intelligent if he makes a fortune, but hardly otherwise. Still, he has a queer, half-contemptuous admiration for a definite, intellectual accomplishment which he knows it is hard to acquire and is not sure he could acquire himself. That, for instance, is his attitude to those who know Chinese. A "sinologue," he will tell you, must be an imbecile, for no one but a fool would give so much time to a study so unprofitable. Still, in a way, he is proud of the sinologue as the public school is proud of a boy so clever as to verge upon insanity, or a village is proud of the village idiot. Something of the same feeling, I sometimes think, underlies his respect for Shakspere. "If you want that kind of thing," he seems to say to the foreigner, "and it's the kind of thing you would want, we can do it, you see, better than you can! ' So with art. He is never a connoisseur, but he is often a collector. Partly, no doubt, because there is money in it, but that is a secondary consideration. Mainly because collecting and collectors appeal to his sporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know all about it, except its aesthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannot see it. He has the flair of the dealer, not the perception of the amateur. And he does not know or believe that there is any distinction between them. But these, from his point of view, are trifles. What matters it that he has pre-eminently the virtues of active life. He is fair-minded, and this, oddly, in spite of his difficulty in seeing another man's point of view. When he does see it he respects it. Whereas nimbler-witted nations see it only to circumvent and cheat it. He is honest; as honest, at least, as the conditions of modern business permit. He hates bad work, even when, for the moment, bad work pays. He hates skimping and sparing. And these qualities of his make it hard for him to compete with rivals less scrupulous and less generous. He is kind-hearted much more so than he cares to admit. And at the bottom of all his qualities he has the sense of duty. He will shoulder loyally all the obligations he has undertaken to his country, to his family, to his employer, to his employees. The sense of duty, indeed, one might say with truth, is his religion. For on the rare occasions on which he can be persuaded to broach such themes you will find, I think, at the bottom of his mind that what he believes in is Something, somehow, somewhere, in the universe, which helps him, and which he is helping, when he does right. There must, he feels, be some sense in life. And what sense would there be if duty were nonsense? Poets, artists, philosophers can never be at home with the Englishman. His qualities and his defects alike are alien to them. In his company they live as in prison, for it is not an air in which wings can soar. But for solid walking on the ground he has not his equal. The phrase "Solvitur ambulando" must surely have been coined for him. And no doubt on his road he has passed, and will pass again, the wrecks of many a flying-machine. VI China in transition The Chinese Revolution has proceeded, so far, with less disturbance and bloodshed than any great revolution known to history. There has been little serious fighting and little serious disorder; nothing comparable to that which accompanied, for instance, the French Revolution of 1789. And this, no doubt, is due to the fact that the Chinese are alone among nations of the earth in detesting violence and cultivating reason. Their instinct is always to compromise and save everybody's face. And this is the main reason why Westerners despise them. The Chinese, they aver, have "no guts." And when hard pressed as to the policy of the Western Powers in China, they will sometimes quite frankly confess that they consider the West has benefited China by teaching her the use of force. That this should be the main contribution of Christian to Pagan civilisation is one of the ironies of history. But it is part of the greater irony which gave the Christian faith to precisely those nations whose fundamental instincts and convictions were and are in radical antagonism to its teaching. Though, however, it is broadly true that the Chinese have relied on reason and justice in a way and to a degree which is inconceivable in the West, they have not been without their share of original sin. Violence, anarchy, and corruption have played a part in their history, though a less part than in the history of most countries. And these forces have been specially evident in that department to which Westerners are apt to pay the greatest attention in the department of government. Government has always been less important hi China than in the Western world; it has always been rudimentary in its organisation; and for centuries it has been incompetent and corrupt. Of this corruption Westerners, it is true, make more than they fairly should. China is no more corrupt (to say the least) than the United States, or Italy, or France, or than England was in the eighteenth century. And much that is called corruption is recognised and established "squeeze," necessary, and understood to be necessary, to supplement the inadequate salaries of officials. A Chinese official is corrupt much as Lord Chancellor Bacon was corrupt; and whether the Chancellor ought properly to be called corrupt is still matter of controversy. Moreover, the people have always had their remedy. When the recognised "squeeze" is exceeded, they protest by riot. So that the Chinese system, in the most unfavourable view, may be described as corruption tempered by anarchy. And this system, it is admitted, still prevails after the Revolution. Clearly, indeed, it cannot be extirpated until officials are properly paid; and China is not in a position to pay for any reform while the Powers are drawing away an enormous percentage of her resources by that particular form of robbery called by diplomatists "indemnity." The new officials, then, are "corrupt" as the old ones were; and they are something more. They are Jacobins. Educated abroad, they are as full of ideas as was Robespierre or St. Just; and their ideas are even more divorced from sentiment and tradition. A foreign education seems to make a cut right across a Chinaman's life. He returns with a new head; and his head never gets into normal relations with his heart. That, I believe, is the essence of Jacobinism, ideas working with enormous rapidity and freedom unchecked by the flywheel of traditional feelings. And it is Jacobinism that accounts for the extraordinary vigour of the campaign against opium. Many Europeans still endeavour to maintain that this campaign is not serious. But that is because Europeans simply cannot conceive that any body of men should be in as deadly earnest about a moral issue as are the representatives of Young China. The anti-opium campaign is not only serious, it is ruthless. Smokers are flogged and executed; poppy is rooted up; and farmers who resist are shot down. The other day in Hunan, it is credibly reported, some seventy farmers who had protested against the destruction of their crops were locked into a temple and burnt alive. An old man of seventy-six, falsely accused of growing poppy, was fined 500 dollars, and when he refused to pay was flogged to death by the orders of a young official of twenty-two. Stories of this kind come in from every part of the country; and though this or that story may be untrue or exaggerated, there can be no doubt about the general state of affairs. The officials are putting down opium with a vigour and a determination which it is inconceivable should ever be applied in the West to the traffic in alcohol. But in doing so they are showing a ruthlessness which does not seem to be native to the Chinese, and which perhaps is to be accounted for by what I have called Jacobinism, resulting from the effects of a Western education that has been unable to penetrate harmoniously the complicated structure of Chinese character. The anti-opium campaign is one example of the way in which the Revolution has elicited and intensified violence in this peace-loving people. Another example is the use of assassination. This has been an accompaniment of all great revolutions. It took the form of "proscriptions" in Rome, of the revolutionary tribunals in France. In China it is by comparison a negligible factor; but it exists. Two months ago a prominent leader of the southern party was assassinated; and popular suspicion traces the murder to high Government officials, and even to the President himself. The other day a southern general was killed by a bomb. For the manufacture of bombs is one of the things China has learned from the Christian West; and the President lives in constant terror of this form of murder. China, it will be seen, does not altogether escape the violence that accompanies all revolutions. Nor does she altogether escape the anarchy. Anarchy, indeed, that is a simple strike against authority, may be said to be part of the Chinese system. It is the way they have always enforced their notions of justice. A curious example has been recently offered by the students of the Pekin University. For various reasons good or bad they have objected to the conduct of their Chancellor. After ineffectual protests, they called upon him in large numbers with his resignation written out, and requested him to sign it. He refused, whereupon they remarked that they would call again the next day with revolvers; and in the interval he saw wisdom and signed. Last week there was a similar episode. The new Chancellor proved as unpalatable as his predecessor. The students once more presented themselves with his resignation written out. He refused to resign, and, as the students aver, scurrilously abused them. They proceeded to the Minister of Education, who refused to see them. Thereupon they camped out in his courtyard, and stayed all day and all night, sending a message to the professors dated "from under the trees of the Education Office," to explain that they were unfortunately unable to attend lectures. This Chancellor, too, it would seem, has seen wisdom and resigned. How strange it all seems to Western eyes! A country, we should suppose, where such things occur, is incapable of organisation. But it is certain that we are wrong. Our notion is that everything must be done by authority, and that unless authority is maintained there will be anarchy. The Chinese notion is that authority is there to carry out what the people recognise to be common sense and justice; if it does otherwise, it must be resisted; and if it disappears life will still go on as it is going on now in the greater part of China on the basis of the traditional and essentially reasonable routine. Almost certainly the students of the University had justice on their side; otherwise such action would not be taken; and when they get justice they will be more docile and orderly than our own undergraduates at home. Another thing surprising to European observers is the apparent belief of the Chinese in verbal remonstrance. Under the present regime officials and public men are allowed the free use of the telegraph. The consequence is that telegrams of advice, admonition, approval, blame, fear, hope, doubt pour in daily to the Government from civil and military governors, from members of Parliament and party leaders. In the paper to-day, for example, is a telegram from the Governors of seventeen provinces addressed to the National Assembly. It begins as follows: "To the President, the Cabinet, the Tsan Yi Yuan, the Chung Yi Yuan, and the Press Association, When the revolution took place at Wuchang, the various societies and groups responded, and when the Republic was inaugurated the troops raised among these bodies were gradually disbanded. For fear that, being driven by hunger, these disbanded soldiers would become a menace to the place, the various societies and groups have established a society at Shanghai called the Citizens' Progressive Society, to promote the means of livelihood for the people, and the advancement of society, and the establishment has been registered in the offices of the Tutuhs of the provinces." Then follows a statement of the "six dangers" to which the country is exposed, an appeal to the Assembly to act more reasonably and competently, and then the following peroration: "The declarations of us, Yuan-hung and others, are still there, our wounds have not yet been fully recovered, and should the sea and ocean be dried up, our original hearts will not be changed. We will protect the Republic with our sinews and blood of brass and iron, we will take the lead of the province, and be their backbone, and we will not allow the revival of the monarchy and the suppression of the powers of the people. Let Heaven and earth be witness to our words. You gentlemen are pillars of the political parties, or the representatives of the people, and you should unite together and not become inconsistent. You first determined that the Loan is necessary, but such opinion is now changed, and you now reject the Loan. Can the ice be changed into red coal in your hearts? Thus even those who love and admire you will not be able to defend your position. However, if you have any extraordinary plan or suggestion to save the present situation, you can show it to us." Some of the strange effect produced by this document is due, no doubt, to translation. But it, like the many others of the kind I have read, seems to indicate what is at the root of the Chinese attitude to life a belief in the power of reason and persuasion. I have said enough to show that this attitude does not exclude the use of violence; but I feel sure that it limits it far more than it has ever been limited in Europe. Even in time of revolution the Chinese are peaceable and orderly to an extent unknown and almost unbelievable in the West. And the one thing the West is teaching them and priding itself on teaching them is the absurdity of this attitude. Well, one day it is the West that will repent because China has learnt the lesson too well. VII A sacred mountain It was midnight when the train set us down at Taian-fu. The moon was full. We passed across fields, through deserted alleys where sleepers lay naked on the ground, under a great gate in a great wall, by halls and pavilions, by shimmering, tree-shadowed spaces, up and down steps, and into a court where cypresses grew. We set up our beds in a veranda, and woke to see leaves against the morning sky. We explored the vast temple and its monuments iron vessels of the Tang age, a great tablet of the Sungs, trees said to date from before the Christian era, stones inscribed with drawings of these by the Emperor Chien Lung, hall after hall, court after court, ruinous, overgrown, and the great crumbling walls and gates and towers. Then in the afternoon we began the ascent of Tai Shan, the most sacred mountain in China, the most frequented, perhaps, in the world. There, according to tradition, legendary emperors worshipped God. Confucius climbed it six centuries before Christ, and sighed, we are told, to find his native State so small. The great Chin-Shih-Huang was there in the third century B.C. Chien Lung in the eighteenth century covered it with inscriptions. And millions of humble pilgrims for thirty centuries at least have toiled up the steep and narrow way. Steep it is, for it makes no detours, but follows straight up the bed of a stream, and the greater part of the five thousand feet is ascended by stone steps. A great ladder of eighteen flights climbs the last ravine, and to see it from below, sinuously mounting the precipitous face to the great arch that leads on to the summit, is enough to daunt the most ardent walker. We at least were glad to be chaired some part of the way. A wonderful way! On the lower slopes it passes from portal to portal, from temple to temple. Meadows shaded with aspen and willow border the stream as it falls from green pool to green pool. Higher up are scattered pines. Else the rocks are bare bare, but very beautiful, with that significance of form which I have found everywhere in the mountains in China. To such beauty the Chinese are peculiarly sensitive. All the way up the rocks are carved with inscriptions recording the charm and the sanctity of the place. Some of them were written by emperors; many, especially, by Chien Lung, the great patron of art in the eighteenth century. They are models, one is told, of caligraphy as well as of literary composition. Indeed, according to Chinese standards, they could not be the one without the other. The very names of favourite spots are poems in themselves. One is "the pavilion of the phoenixes"; another "the fountain of the white cranes." A rock is called " the tower of the quickening spirit"; the gate on the summit is "the portal of the clouds." More prosaic, but not less charming, is an inscription on a rock in the plain, "the place of the three smiles," because there some mandarins, meeting to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funny stories. Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. And so peculiarly Chinese! It was dark before we reached the summit. We put up in the temple that crowns it, dedicated to Yti Huang, the "Jade Emperor" of the Taoists; and his image and those of his attendant deities watched our slumbers. But we did not sleep till we had seen the moon rise, a great orange disc, straight from the plain, and swiftly mount till she made the river, five thousand feet below, a silver streak in the dim grey levels. Next morning, at sunrise, we saw that, north and east, range after range of lower hills stretched to the horizon, while south lay the plain, with half a hundred streams gleaming down to the river from the valleys. Full in view was the hill where, more than a thousand years ago, the great Tang poet Li-tai-po retired with five companions to drink and make verses. They are still known to tradition as the "six idlers of the bamboo grove"; and the morning sun, I half thought, still shines upon their symposium. We spent the day on the mountain; and as the hours passed by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. Sacred to what god? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, for there are as many ideas of the god as there are worshippers. There are temples here to various gods: to the mountain himself ; to the Lady of the mountain, Pi-hsia-yuen, who is at once the Venus of Lucretius " goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the sky," one inscription calls her and the kindly mother who gives children to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to the Great Bear; to the Green Emperor, who clothes the trees with leaves; to the Cloud-compeller: to many others. And in all this, is there no room for God? It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men worship the mountain, do they worship a rock, or the spirit of the place, or the spirit that has no place? It is the latter, we may be sure, that some men adored, standing at sunrise on this spot. And the Jade Emperor is he a mere idol? In the temple where we slept were three inscriptions set up by the Emperor Chien Lung. They run as follows: "Without labour, oh Lord, Thou bringest forth the greatest things." "Thou leadest Thy company of spirits to guard the whole world." "In the company of Thy spirits Thou art wise as a mighty Lord to achieve great works." These might be sentences from the Psalms; they are as religious as anything Hebraic. And if it be retorted that the mass of the worshippers on Tai Shan are superstitious, so are, and always have been, the mass of worshippers anywhere. Those who rise to religion in any country are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do not know that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form of religion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty and what lies behind it for the religion of a Wordsworth they seem to be pre-eminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many others like it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, the inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is loveliest all go to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills, perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in all the country, that charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy, as now in China, was the outward expression of the love of nature? "Great God, I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn." That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never have been wrung from him had he been born in China. And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of China "pro-Chinese," as they are contemptuously called in the East assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt, incompetent, even if it were true and is far from being true in any unqualified sense would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation of inadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, the superstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding its foundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Western civilisation, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers, and police; but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgarity never before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. It is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless architectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I have seen, all the building of man harmonises with and adorns nature. In the West everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent aesthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom of disease of the Soul. It implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the opposite is the case. The end is clear, though the means be inadequate. Consider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what the West will shortly do, once the stream of Western tourists begins to flow strongly. Where the Chinese have constructed a winding stairway of stone, beautiful from all points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up a funicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where the Chinese have written poems in exquisite calligraphy, they will cover the rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series of temples, each so designed and placed as to be a new beauty in the landscape, they will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they will because they have done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment. Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organisation, our medicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high a price for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantages they may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitive culture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks of civilising China. Would that China could civilise the West! |
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| 13 | 1914 |
Dickinson, G. Lowes. An essay on the civilisations of India, China & Japan [ID D27979]. Pt. II China When I landed in China, indeed, when I first saw the Mongolian type at Darjeeling, I was aware of a feeling as though an oppressive cloud had lifted. I realised then how strange and how tragic India had been to me, how utterly alien I had felt there. The brooding over the whole country of a spirit not merely religious, but religious in a sense so remote from anything religion has meant in the West; the tremendous forces antagonistic to man marching over the land, famine, plague, malaria, drought, flood; the handful of English camped there, fighting these things with so little help and so little hope; the gulf between rulers and ruled; the spirit of revolt, which yet seemed to have in it no real capacity or promise; all these things, felt sub-consciously even more than consciously, had lain like a nightmare upon me, clouding all the interest and all the pleasure of my travels. India was sublime, but it was terrible. China, on the other hand, was human. At the first sight of these ugly, cheery, vigorous people I loved them. Their gaiety, as of children, their friendliness, their profound humanity, struck me from the first and remained with me to the last. I can imagine no greater contrast than that between their character, their institutions, their habits, and those of the Indians. The Chinese are, and always have been, profoundly secular, as the Indians are, and always have been, profoundly religious. It is true, of course, that the Chinese have had religion, as the Europeans have had it; Buddhism came to them from India as Christianity came to us from Judaea, and Taoism was an indigenous growth. They have had also saints and mystics, as Europe has had them. But Buddhism and Taoism have never suited the Chinese character any more than Christianity has suited the European. Both Buddhism and Taoism quickly degenerated to mere superstition, systems of magic, imaginary means to obtain material ends. It was, and is, Confucianism with its rationalism, its scepticism, its stress on conduct, that expresses the Chinese spirit. Over India gleam the stars; over China the sun shines. Mankind is the centre of the Chinese universe, as the Absolute is the centre of the Indian. Confucianism may easily be translated into terms of Western positivism ; it could never be translated into terms of Hinduism. The religion of the mass of the Chinese has always been mere superstition, whereas in India, as I have said, it appears to be true that the superstition symbolises a real spiritualism. Ancestor worship is the centre of the Chinese system; but that, perhaps, ought not to be called worship at all. It is rather commemoration, and as such all educated Chinamen regard it. It is thus rather a social than a religious institution, and serves to bind the family together rather than to foster a spiritual life. Its bearing on life is a bearing on conduct, and it is but an intensified form of the feeling which, even in the West, leads a man of distinguished family to feel that he must try to be worthy of his ancestors. What distinguishes the Chinese attitude in this matter from that of the modern West is its backward rather than its forward look. Probably only the educated. To the mass, I expect, it is really "worship," in the sense that they expect to receive benefits from the spirits to whom they offer. We look to our descendants, they to their forebears. And the discrediting of Confucianism under the new regime is due to its supposed conservatism rather than to any idea that it is irrational and superstitious. In this matter of religion the Chinese have only to throw over their superstition and over the educated superstition never had any hold and they will be immediately in line with the West. In India, as we saw, things are far otherwise. For what is most characteristic and profound in the Indian spirit is antagonistic to and irreconcilable with rationalism and science. This, which I call the secularism of the Chinese attitude to life, is also expressed in their art. The art of India, in my judgment, has, as art, little or no value (this, of course, is a highly controversial opinion), but it is tremendously significant of the spiritual life of India. It is all symbolic, and it is symbolic of those grandiose abstractions in which the Indian mind delights. It expresses an over-world of spiritual forces of which the world of sense is a shadowy and illusory manifestation. It does not interpret, it negates the ordinary life and the ordinary consciousness. That is why it is so disquieting, so terrible, so monstrous to the western spirit. But the art of China is through and through human. It is the kind of art that Romans, too, or Englishmen might have produced, if they had been gifted with aesthetic genius ; the art of reasonable concrete-minded men, with a keen sensitiveness to the pathos and gaiety of human life, and the beauty and grandeur of nature. It is characteristic of Chinese landscape-painting that it should include representation of the human observer. Their artists do not, it is true, treat nature as a mere background to human life, as, for example, the great Venetian artists do; but neither do they treat it as the vehicle of tremendous supernatural forces, which is the spirit of Indian art. They treat it as a beautiful object, itself real, contemplated by a sane and sensitive human spirit. So with their poetry. It is of all poetry I know the most human and the least symbolic or romantic. It contemplates life just as it presents itself, without any veil of ideas, any rhetoric or sentiment; it simply clears away the obstruction which habit has built up between us and the beauty of things, and leaves that, showing in its own nature, revealed but not recreated. Chinese art and Chinese poetry have the spirit of Wordsworth and of the most modern literary movement in France. Their art is a realism, though not an actualism; a vision of what this life is as seen by those who can see it, not of some other world behind or above or outside it. The fundamental attitude of the Chinese towards life is thus, in my judgment, and always has been, that of the most modern West, nearer to us now than to our mediaeval ancestors, infinitely nearer to us than India. And the same is true, at bottom, of social institutions. China, so far as I know, is the only country whose civilisation has been for centuries, if not always, democratic. There has never been caste in China, there has been, I think, less even of class than in most countries. That equality of opportunity which is the essence of democracy, and which has been denied by every other civilisation, has been affirmed by China in theory, and to a great extent in practice, from the date at which her written annals begin. There has never been a priestly caste, there has never been a governing caste. The rich, of course, have necessarily had advantages in the race as they have with us, but the barrier between rich and poor has never been as great as it is in the modern West, and it has been at least as easy, probably easier, to rise from bottom to top. And this social fact is reflected in the bearing and manners of the Chinese. I have never been in a country where the common people are at once so selfrespecting, so independent, and so courteous. In America, for example, everybody appears to think it necessary to assure you that they are as good as you are by behaving rudely to you. Nothing of the kind obtains in China, for it would never occur to them that they are not as good. There is none of this selfconscious assertion of their rights; still less is there anything of that obsequiousness which one meets everywhere in India. The Chinese man is the democratic man. He is already, so far as his attitude to himself and to his fellows is concerned, what democrats hope the western man may become. His attitude is democratic, just as it is positive and secular. And this underlying and fundamental likeness to the man of the modern West is, in my judgment, far more important and significant than the superficial differences which are usually dwelt upon by western travellers and residents. There is one other important point in which China contrasts with India. China has been and remains politically independent and united. This statement needs some qualification, but it is essentially true. The Tartars and the Manchus have conquered China, but they have imposed on her nothing but a dynasty. They have adopted completely the manners, customs, ideas of the conquered. Of China it is truer even than of Greece that Capta Jerum victorem cepit. Not so India. The Mahometans, in spite of conversions, remain Mahometans, different in religion, different in sentiment, different in social institutions, from the Hindus. Nothing yet has brought the two communities into harmony; and their antagonism is still, and perhaps increasingly, an important factor in the Indian situation. Again, India, until the British conquest, has never been welded into a political unity. The largest native empires, like that of Asoka, the largest alien ones, like that of the Moguls, never included the whole peninsula. And, in addition, there have been always the vertical divisions of caste. But China, except for short periods, has been for two thousand years at least under one head; and though the provinces have had a very large measure of autonomy, they have been administered by officials appointed by the Central Government, and have recognised its existence by the payment of taxes. The various dialects of China, though unintelligible one to another, are varieties of the same language; and the common script has always given to the educated a common medium of communication, much as Latin gave it to mediaeval Europe. China has been a political unity, even though a loose one; and though this unity has not given rise to a strong national feeling, there is in China a basis for such feeling more real and more powerful than anything that seems to exist in India. For this reason, among others, China would not be so easy to conquer as India was, nor so easy to govern by any race that did not assimilate itself to Chinese customs and standards. I see, then, in China, so far as the most fundamental conditions are concerned, a far greater similarity to the modern West than to India. But, of course, points of similarity to India and of difference from the West do strike the eye. Like India, but unlike western Europe, China is predominantly agricultural, and the bulk of her people are peasants. Like India, and unlike the West, indeed to a much greater degree than India, she is untouched by industrialism. The era of railways, of mines, of factories, is but just beginning, and the immense resources of the country have hardly been tapped. Like India, and unlike the modern West, the family is the cardinal point on which all her social life and a great part of her government turns. And this family solidarity, while it fulfils many of the functions which in the West have to be undertaken by Government, is a very serious obstacle to the introduction of western forms of business for example, the joint-stock company. Still, these differences, important as they are, are comparatively superficial; and it would, I believe, for good or for evil, be much easier to westernise China than it would be to westernise India. The Chinese would only have to apply their attitude to life in a new way; but the Indians would have to transform theirs. The Chinese are already secular, practical, matter of fact ; they require, to westernise them, only a new technique. But the Indians require a new spirit. Although, however, as I have suggested, it would be easier to westernise China than to westernise India, the process of westernisation has not as yet gone so far in the one country as in the other. Effective contact between Europe and China dates only from the opium war.1 From that date the activities of the western powers in China have been continuous, discreditable, and indefensible. But though the powers have robbed China, have bullied her, have interfered with her independence and sovereign rights, have imposed upon her teaching which she did not want and trade which she thought disastrous and immoral, they have so far made no serious attempt to conquer and annex her. The servitude of China is financial; but the history of Egypt shows how easily financial may pass into political control. It may be so with China; the next few months or years will decide. But meantime and up to now China is independent. The activities, commercial and other, of the foreigners have been. In spite of Mr. Morse's apologies, I consider this to be the proper description of that war, mostly confined to the treaty ports. And though these are now very numerous and include a number of cities far inland on the Yang-tze, they are of course but isolated points in the vast territory of China. And even in these ports the western spirit has hardly touched even the externals of Chinese life. The foreign communities build their own cities outside the native city ; there they administer themselves, lead their own life as in Europe, their life of business and of sport, and never, if they can help it, enter the native city or any part of the interior of China. The British firms, who were first in the field, did and still do their business through themedium of Chinese merchants, and have no direct relation with their customers in the country. They never stir from the treaty ports, and they know nothing and care nothing about Chinese conditions except so far as these may react upon their business. "We see too much of things Chinese here," the agent of a British firm said to me, when I made some comment on the Chinese city. And the sentiment, I believe, is pretty general among Europeans in China. While these conditions prevailed there was nothing in the presence of the foreign traders which need have led to any radical change in Chinese institutions or ideas. But the conditions are now rapidly changing. The new enterprise, especially of Germans and Japanese, is sending bagmen acquainted with the language all over the interior of China. Oil and cigarettes are the pioneers of this commercial invasion. The skin-disease of advertisement is beginning to disfigure the face of the country, and German art nouveau appears in the stations of the railway from Tsinan-fu to Pekin. The grip of the West has begun to close, and will more and more be felt in the general dissemination of ugliness, meanness, and insincerity throughout the empire. More important, however, I think, than commercial enterprise in disturbing the secular tradition of China has been missionary activity. I did not, indeed, gather, and I do not believe, that China is in process of Christianisation or will ever be Christianised, though I have met Chinese Christians and, I think, sincere ones. But the missionaries have been the pioneers of western education, and it is western education that has made the revolution. All the new leaders have been educated, first at missionary schools and colleges in China, then abroad, mainly in Japan and the United States. And this education has produced a new and surprising type of Chinese. Nothing in my travels has struck and perplexed me more than this. China has always been regarded as the type of the unchanging. If ever there was a stable national character, a stable national mentality, it might have been supposed that it would be there, in a homogeneous people of the same stock, never conquered, or at least never affected in race, in manners, in laws, in language, by conquest; never interrupted or disturbed for centuries in their traditional ideas and their traditional manner of life. Here, surely, if anywhere, sudden revolution was impossible. Here change, if it came at all, would come by slow degrees, fighting its way against an immense and profound psychological immobility. But what happens in fact ? A Chinese taken as a boy and brought up in a missionary school, then transferred during the impressionable period of life to a foreign country to complete his education, returns to China transformed through and through. There is no vestige of conservatism left in him. He has adopted not only the manners, the dress, the speech, the very intonation of a foreign country; he has adopted its whole mental and moral outfit. There is nothing in China he does not want to transform, nothing he does not believe he can transform. This is particularly true of the Chinese educated in America. I met in Canton some of the chief officials of the revolutionary government, the chief justice, the foreign secretary and others. I was astounded. They were exactly like American undergraduates. Their whole mentality, so far as I could see, was American. They had not only the manners, the dress, the speech; they had the confidence, the light-heartedness, the easy and disconcerting superficiality. On the other hand, those educated in England were comparatively critical, sober, and cautious. Those educated in Japan, I was informed, had the revolutionary elan of that country; and when the second revolution broke out, the students that were in Japan crowded over en masse to join the revolutionary troops. The one student I met from Germany looked and spoke like a German. This conversion may, of course, be superficial. There may be underlying it an unchanged basis of Chinese character. But if so, it is the superficial part that is active in China. It is these young men that have made the revolution and established the Republic ; that are doing all they can to sweep away the old China, root and branch, and build up there a reproduction of America. There is nothing, I think, which they would not alter if they could, from the streets of Canton to the family system, from the costume of a policeman to the national religion. This attitude of theirs exasperates the foreigners, who seem as much disgusted and alarmed at the actual appearance of a new China as they used to be critical and censorious of the old one. But it is, after all, very natural. These young men find their country a prey to foreign aggression. They see that the only way to meet the foreigners is to meet them on their own ground, and they have before them the triumphantly successful example of Japan. It must, however, be admitted that there has not appeared in China any group of men of the capacity and power of the statesmen who piloted Japan into the new era. The young men have ideas in plenty, but they have no experience, and, it would seem, no practical capacity. Too often they have not character. For it is, I fear, indisputable, as it is undisputed, that many of the new officials and of the new legislators are corrupt as well as incompetent. Certainly it is remarkable and, so far as my knowledge of history goes, unique that in a great revolution in a nation of four hundred millions one man only should emerge with the capacity for government; and Yuan Shih Kai, I believe, will not appear to history to be more than an astute and tenacious opportunist. The recent revolution has exposed the incapacity and the lack of character of the southern leaders. And, however sympathetic one may be with the revolutionists, the question forces itself upon one whether we have not here another demonstration that old bottles will not hold new wine; that ideas derived from an alien civilisation may transform the brain, but cannot penetrate the soul of a different race. I suspect, at any rate, that in young China there is some dislocation between their convictions and their character, which makes them ineffective for action towards ends in which they genuinely believe. On the other hand, the problem before the republican revolutionaries is a vast one, and one which no country has solved without years of confusion and bloodshed. European critics are apt to forget this. It took France a century of successive revolutions and reactions before the Republic was definitely established. Two revolutions and a series of civil wars were necessary to get rid of the Stuarts in England. The surprising thing in China is that the dynasty has disappeared with so little effort and so little regret. For among all the possibilities of the future, the one which is universally repudiated is a Manchu restoration. Still, to get rid of the Manchus is one thing, to set up a new government is another. The breach of continuity has been complete, as complete as in revolutionary France. Nothing in Chinese history or tradition has prepared them for a representative republic, and it is quite possible that it is not under a republic that the new era, which in any case is inevitable, will be best inaugurated and furthered. At present, however, it must be admitted that republican institutions have not been given a fair chance. That, I believe, has been the weakness of the President's policy. Instead of endeavouring to gain the confidence of all parties in the National Assembly, and to get all to work together for the common good, he seems to have set out from the beginning to discredit the Assembly. When I was in Pekin the two Houses were meeting day after day and doing no business because a quorum could not be obtained; and this was due to the deliberate abstension of the Chin-Pu-Tang party, which is admittedly the party of the President, and which, no doubt, was in his pay. True, serious differences of policy had developed between him and the southern party. He had contracted the quintuple loan over the head of the Assembly in defiance of their protest and in violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the constitution. But the fact that he did so is precisely an example of what I should call his bad statesmanship. What is worse, he was believed to be privy to the assassination of Sung, the southern leader; and as the facts have never been allowed to come out in Court, he must continue to lie under that suspicion. If the National Assembly hitherto has been impotent and futile, the fault, I believe, lies rather with the President than with them.1 But these, after all, are. Since this was written, the President has dissolved all elective bodies in China, and made himself an absolute dictator, transitory conditions. The fundamental fact is that the revolution was accomplished by a handful of men educated in foreign customs and foreign ideas, and working with a mercenary army (for it is clear that the troops who have taken part on either side are mercenaries who transfer their allegiance from one party to the other according as they are paid). There is no national movement in China, for there is no Chinese nation, in the sense that there is an English or a French or a German nation. The Chinese, as I have already pointed out, though they have never been divided as India has, have never been united by a common political consciousness. Their social organisation has rested not on the central government, but on the family and the village. Government has been a mechanism imposed from above to make roads and canals, to do justice, and to collect taxes. And the comparative isolation of China for many centuries, the absence of wars waged for very existence, such as have built up the European system, prevented the formation of national sentiment by outside pressure. The Chinese have been the most peaceable, and, in many respects, the most civilised people the world has seen. They have not had, because they have not needed, a national self-consciousness, and they cannot improvise one in a moment. There can be no doubt, I imagine, that the mass of the people do not know what the revolution is about; and that they welcomed it less because it got rid of the Manchus than because it relieved them for a time from the payment of taxes. It does not, however, follow, as European critics often imply, that China can never acquire a political sense or work a constitution. Given education, a press, better means of communication, and in a generation the change might be effected. The Chinese, as experience has now shown, are the most educable of people; and this, no doubt, applies to the masses no less than to the handful who have hitherto had the opportunity. And the education has begun. In elementary schools modern subjects are beginning to be taught; geography, history, elementary science, the existence, the character, and the power of other nations. I myself, visiting a school in a small village on the Upper Yangtze, far from all foreign influence, found an English-speaking teacher who had been educated by missionaries, an English spelling and reading book, maps of China and of the world, and drawings of bacteria. These things must be taking effect. And those who seem still to think that the revolution in China is a mere flash in the pan, implying no radical transformation, are likely before many years have passed to be very much astonished. What may happen politically, whether the government be republican or monarchical, on the American or the French or the German model, is comparatively unimportant. The important thing is that the educational process has begun, the education both of events and of schooling ; and that to education the Chinese are eminently responsive. For good and for evil the old China is a thing of the past. The penetration by western ideas has begun, and whether it go faster or slower it will go far and go to the end. |
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Bibliography (9)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1901 |
Dickinson, G. Lowes. Letters from John Chinaman. (London : R. Brimley Johnson, 1901). = Letters from a Chinese official : being an Eastern view of Western civilization. (New York, N.Y. : McClure, Phillips, 1903). http://ia600305.us.archive.org/31/items/lettersfromjohnc00dickuoft/lettersfromjohnc00dickuoft.pdf. |
Publication / Dic10 |
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| 2 | 1903 |
Dickinson, G. Lowes. Letters from a Chinese official ; being an Eastern view of Western civilization. (New York, N.Y. : McClure, Phillips and Co., 1903). http://ia700303.us.archive.org/5/items/lettersfromchine00dickiala/lettersfromchine00dickiala.pdf. |
Publication / Dic16 |
|
| 3 | 1914 |
Dickinson, G. Lowes. Appearances : notes of travel, East and West. (London ; Toronto : J.M. Dent ; Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914). [Bericht seiner Reise 1912-1913 nach Guangzhou, Nanjing, Yangzi, Beijing]. http://www.archive.org/details/appearancesnotes00dickuoft. |
Publication / DickG1 |
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| 4 | 1914 |
Dickinson, G. Lowes. An essay on the civilisations of India, China & Japan. (London : Toronto : J.M. Dent, 1914). http://ia600200.us.archive.org/9/items/essayoncivilisat00dickiala/essayoncivilisat00dickiala.pdf. = Dickinson, G. Lowes. Indien, China und Japan : Betrachtungen über ihre Kultur. Übers. von Albert Malata. (Celle : Niels Kampmann, 1925). [Bericht seiner Reise 1912-1913 nach Guangzhou, Nanjing, Yangzi, Beijing]. |
Publication / DickL1 |
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| 5 | 1927 |
[Dickinson, G. Lowes]. Zheng yi yu zi you. Dikexun zhu ; Cheng Zhenji yi. (Shanghai : Shang wu yin shu guan fa xing, 1927). Übersetzung von Dickinson, G. Lowes. Justice and liberty. (London : J.M. Dent, 1908). 正義與自由 |
Publication / Dic14 | |
| 6 | 1929 |
[Dickinson, G. Lowes. Jin dai lun tan. Liang Yuchun yi. (Shanghai : Chun chao shu ju, 1929). Übersetzung von Dickinson, G. Lowes. A modern symposium. (New York, N.Y. : McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905). 近代論壇 |
Publication / Dic11 | |
| 7 | 1935 |
[Dickinson, G. Lowes]. Ou zhan qian shi nian jian guo ji zhen xiang zhi fen xi. Yang Yixi yi ; Lü Jin lu jiao. (Shanghai : Shang wu yin shu guan, 1935). (Han yi shi jie ming zhu). Übersetzung von Dickinson, G. Lowes. The international anarchy, 1904-1914. (New York, N.Y. ; London : Century, 1926). 歐戰前十年間國際眞相之分析 |
Publication / Dic12 | |
| 8 | 1969 |
[Dickinson, G. Lowes]. Xila de sheng huo guan. Digengsheng zhu ; Peng Jixiang yi. (Taibei : Taiwan Shang wu yin shu guan, 1969). Übersetzung von Dickinson, G. Lowes. Greek view of life. Übersetzung von Dickinson, G. Lowes. Greek view of life. (London : Methuen, 1896). 希臘的生活觀 |
Publication / Dic13 | |
| 9 | 2008 |
[Dickinson, G. Lowes]. "Zhongguo lao" xin zha : xi fang wen ming zhi dong fang guan. G. L. Digengsheng zhu ; Lu Yanming, Wang Yukuo yi. (Nanjing : Nanjing chu ban she, 2008). Übersetzung von Dickinson, G. Lowes. Letters from John Chinaman. (London : R. Brimley Johnson, 1901). = Letters from a Chinese official : being an Eastern view of Western civilization. (New York, N.Y. : McClure, Phillips, 1903). 中国佬信札 : 西方文明之东方观 |
Publication / Dic15 |
Secondary Literature (2)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1934 | Forster, E[dward] M[organ]. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and related writings. Foreword by W.H. Auden. [Reprint]. (London : E. Arnold, 1973). | Publication / Fors2 | |
| 2 | 1996 | Vore, Bob. Oliver Goldsmith's "Citizen of the world" and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's "Letters from John Chinaman" : changing perceptions of the Orient in Imperial England. In : Tamkang review ; vol. 26, no 3 (1996). | Publication / GolO11 |