of the new social organization--its great capacities for offensive or
defensive action in military directions, and its comparative
feebleness in other directions--should now be evident. All things
considered, the marvel is that Japan should have been so well able to
hold her own; and it was assuredly no common wisdom that guided her
first unsteady efforts in new and perilous ways. Certainly her power
to accomplish what she has accomplished was derived from her old
religious and social training: she was able to keep strong because,
under the new forms of rule and the new conditions of social
activity, she could still maintain a great deal of the ancient
discipline. But even thus it was only by the firmest and shrewdest
policy that she could avert disaster,--could prevent the disruption
of her whole social structure under the weight of alien pressure. It
was imperative that vast changes should be made, but equally
imperative that they should not be of a character to endanger the
foundations; and it was above all things necessary, while preparing
for immediate necessities, to provide against future perils. Never
before, perhaps, in the history of human civilization, did any rulers
find themselves [468] obliged to cope with problems so tremendous, so
complicated, and so inexorable. And of these problems the most
inexorable remains to be solved. It is furnished by the fact that
although all the successes of Japan have been so far due to unselfish
collective action, sustained by the old Shinto ideals of duty and
obedience, her industrial future must depend upon egoistic individual
action of a totally opposite kind! * * *
What then will become of the ancient morality?--the ancient cult?
--In this moment the conditions are abnormal. But it seems certain
that there will be, under normal conditions, a further gradual
loosening of the old family-bonds; and this would bring about a
further disintegration. By the testimony of the Japanese themselves,
such disintegration was spreading rapidly among the upper and middle
classes of the great cities, prior to the present war. Among the
people of the agricultural districts, and even in the country towns,
the old ethical order of things has yet been little affected. And
there are other influences than legislative change or social
necessity which are working for disintegration. Old beliefs have been
rudely shaken by the introduction of larger knowledge: a new
generation is being taught, in twenty-seven thousand primary schools,
the rudiments of science and the modern conception of the universe.
The [460] Buddhist cosmology, with its fantastic pictures of Mount
Meru, has become a nursery-tale; the old Chinese nature-philosophy
finds believers only among the little educated, or the survivors of
the feudal era; and the youngest schoolboy has learned that the
constellations are neither gods nor Buddhas, but far-off groups of
suns. No longer can popular fancy picture the Milky Way as the River
of Heaven; the legend of the Weaving-Maiden, and her waiting lover,
and the Bridge of Birds, is now told only to children; and the young
fisherman, though steering, like his fathers, by the light of stars,
no longer discerns in the northern sky the form of Mioken Bosatsu.
Yet it were easy to misinterpret the weakening of a certain class of
old beliefs, or the visible tendency to social change. Under any
circumstances a religion decays slowly; and the most conservative
forms of religion are the last to yield to disintegration. It were a
grave mistake to suppose that the ancestor-cult has yet been
appreciably affected by exterior influences of any kind, or to
imagine that it continues to exist merely by force of hallowed
custom, and not because the majority still believe. No religion--and
least of all the religion of the dead--could thus suddenly lose its
hold upon the affections of the race that evolved it. Even in other
directions the new scepticism is superficial: it has not spread
downwards into the core of things. There is indeed [470] a growing
class of young men with whom scepticism of a certain sort is the
fashion, and scorn of the past an affectation,--but even among these
no word of disrespect concerning the religion of the home is ever
heard. Protests against the old obligations of filial piety,
complaints of the growing weight of the family yoke, are sometimes
uttered; but the domestic cult is never spoken of lightly. As for the
communal and other public forms of Shinto, the vigour of the old
religion is sufficiently indicated by the continually increasing
number of temples. In 1897 there were 191,962 Shinto temples; in 1901
there were 195,256.
It seems probable that such changes as must occur in the near future
will be social rather than religious; and there is little reason to
believe that these changes--however they may tend to weaken filial
piety in sundry directions--will seriously affect the ancestor-cult
itself. The weight of the family-bond, aggravated by the increasing
difficulty and cost of life, may be more and more lightened for the
individual; but no legislation can abolish the sentiment of duty to
the dead. When that sentiment utterly fails, the heart of a nation
will have ceased to beat. Belief in the old gods, as gods, may slowly
pass; but Shinto may live on as the Religion of the Fatherland, a
religion of heroes and patriots; and the likelihood of such future
modification is indicated by the memorial character of many new
temples.
[471]--It has been much asserted of late years (chiefly because of
the profound impression made by Mr. Percival Lowell's Soul of the Far
East) that Japan is desperately in need of a Gospel of Individualism;
and many pious persons assume that the conversion of the country to
Christianity would suffice to produce the Individualism. This
assumption has nothing to rest on except the old superstition that
national customs and habits and modes of feeling, slowly shaped in
the course of thousands of years, can be suddenly transformed by a
mere act of faith. Those further dissolutions of the old order which
would render possible, under normal conditions, a higher social
energy, can be safely brought about through industrialism
only,--through the working of necessities that enforce competitive
enterprise and commercial expansion. A long peace will be required
for such healthy transformation; and it is not impossible that an
independent and progressive Japan would then consider questions of
religious change from the standpoint of political expediency.
Observation and study abroad may have unduly impressed Japanese
statesmen with the half-truth so forcibly uttered by Michelet,--that
"money has a religion,"--that "capital is Protestant,"--that the
power and wealth and intellectual energy of the world belong to the
races who cast off the yoke of Rome, and freed themselves from the
creed of the Middle [472] Ages.* A Japanese statesman is said to have
lately declared that his countrymen were "rapidly drifting towards
Christianity"! Newspaper reports of eminent utterances are not often
trustworthy; but the report in this case is probably accurate, and
the utterance intended to suggest possibilities. Since the
declaration of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, there has been a
remarkable softening in the attitude of safe conservatism which the
government formerly maintained toward Western religion.... But as for
the question whether the Japanese nation will ever adopt an alien
creed under official encouragement, I think that the sociological
answer is evident. Any understanding of the fundamental structure of
society should make equally obvious the imprudence of attempting
hasty transformations, and the impossibility of effecting them. For
the present, at least, the religious question in Japan is a question
of social integrity; and any efforts to precipitate the natural
course of change can result only in provoking reaction and disorder.
I believe that the time is far away at which Japan can venture to
abandon the policy of [473] caution that has served her so well. I
believe that the day on which she adopts a Western creed, her
immemorial dynasty is doomed; and I cannot help fearing that whenever
she yields to foreign capital the right to hold so much as one rood
of her soil, she signs away her birthright beyond hope of recovery.
[*No inferences can be safely drawn from the apparent attitude of the
government towards religious bodies in Japan. Of late years the
seeming policy has been to encourage the less tolerant forms of
Western religion. In curious contrast to this attitude is the
non-toleration of Freemasonry. Strictly speaking, Freemasonry is not
allowed in Japan--although, since the abolition of exterritoriality,
the foreign lodges at the open ports have been permitted (or rather,
suffered) to exist upon certain conditions. A Japanese in Europe or
America is free to become a Mason; but he cannot become a Mason in
Japan, where the proceedings of all societies must remain open to
official surveillance.]
*
* *
With a few general remarks upon the religion of the Far East, in its
relation to Occidental aggressions, this attempt at interpretation
may fitly conclude.
--All the societies of the Far East are founded, like that of Japan,
upon ancestor-worship. This ancient religion, in various forms,
represents their moral experience; and it offers everywhere to the
introduction of Christianity, as now intolerantly preached, obstacles
of the most serious kind. Attacks upon it must seem, to those whose
lives are directed by it, the greatest of outrages and the most
unpardonable of crimes. A religion for which every member of a
community believes it his duty to die at call, is a religion for
which he will fight. His patience with attacks upon it will depend
upon the degree of his intelligence and the nature of his training.
All the races of the Far East have not the intelligence of the
Japanese, nor have they been equally well trained, under ages of
military discipline, to adapt their conduct to circumstances. For
[474] the Chinese peasant, in especial, attacks upon his religion are
intolerable. His cult remains the most precious of his possessions,
and his supreme guide in all matters of social right and wrong. The
East has been tolerant of all creeds which do not assault the
foundations of its societies; and if Western missions had been wise
enough to leave those foundations alone,--to deal with the
ancestor-cult as Buddhism did, and to show the same spirit of
tolerance in other directions,--the introduction of Christianity upon
a very extensive scale should have proved a matter of no difficulty.
That the result would have been a Christianity differing considerably
from Western Christianity is obvious,--the structure of Far-Eastern
society not admitting of sudden transformations;--but the essentials
of doctrine might have been widely propagated, without exciting
social antagonism, much less race-hatred. To-day it is probably
impossible to undo what the sterile labour of intolerance has already
done. The hatred of Western religion in China and adjacent countries
is undoubtedly due to the needless and implacable attacks which have
been made upon the ancestor-cult. To demand of a Chinese or an
Annamese that he cast away or destroy his ancestral tablets is not
less irrational and inhuman than it would be to demand of an
Englishman or a Frenchman that he destroy his mother's tombstone in
proof of his devotion to Christianity. [475] Nay, it is much more
inhuman,--for the European attaches to the funeral monument no such
idea of sacredness as that which attaches, in Eastern belief, to the
simple tablet inscribed with the name of the dead parent. From old
time these attacks upon the domestic faith of docile and peaceful
communities have provoked massacres; and, if persisted in, they will
continue to provoke massacres while the people have strength left to
strike. How foreign religious aggression is answered by native
religious aggression; and how Christian military power avenges the
foreign victims with tenfold slaughter and strong robbery, need not
here be recorded. It has not been in these years only that
ancestor-worshipping peoples have been slaughtered, impoverished, or
subjugated in revenge for the uprisings that missionary intolerance
provokes. But while Western trade and commerce directly gain by these
revenges, Western public opinion will suffer no discussion of the
right of provocation or the justice of retaliation. The less tolerant
religious bodies call it a wickedness even to raise the question of
moral right; and against the impartial observer, who dares to lift
his voice in protest, fanaticism turns as ferociously as if he were
proved an enemy of the human race.
From the sociological point of view the whole missionary system,
irrespective of sect and creed, represents the skirmishing-force of
Western civilization in its general attack upon all civilizations of
the [476] ancient type,--the first line in the forward movement of
the strongest and most highly evolved societies upon the weaker and
less evolved. The conscious work of these fighters is that of
preachers and teachers; their unconscious work is that of sappers and
destroyers. The subjugation of weak races has been aided by their
work to a degree little imagined; and by no other conceivable means
could it have been accomplished so quickly and so surely. For
destruction they labour unknowingly, like a force of nature. Yet
Christianity does not appreciably expand. They perish; and they
really lay down their lives, with more than the courage of soldiers,
not, as they hope, to assist the spread of that doctrine which the
East must still of necessity refuse, but to help industrial
enterprise and Occidental aggrandizement. The real and avowed object
of missions is defeated by persistent indifference to sociological
truths; and the martyrdoms and sacrifices are utilized by Christian
nations for ends essentially opposed to the spirit of Christianity.
Needless to say that the aggressions of race upon race are fully in
accord with the universal law of struggle,--that perpetual struggle
in which only the more capable survive. Inferior races must become
subservient to higher races, or disappear before them; and ancient
types of civilization, too rigid for progress, must yield to the
pressure of more efficient and [477] more complex civilizations. The
law is pitiless and plain: its operations may be mercifully modified,
but never prevented, by humane consideration.
Yet for no generous thinker can the ethical questions involved be
thus easily settled. We are not justified in holding that the
inevitable is morally ordained,--much less that, because the higher
races happen to be on the winning side in the world-struggle, might
can ever constitute right. Human progress has been achieved by
denying the law of the stronger,--by battling against those impulses
to crush the weak, to prey upon the helpless, which rule in the world
of the brute, and are no less in accord with the natural order than
are the courses of the stars. All virtues and restraints making
civilization possible have been developed in the teeth of natural
law. Those races which lead are the races who first learned that the
highest power is acquired by the exercise of forbearance, and that
liberty is best maintained by the protection of the weak, and by the
strong repression of injustice. Unless we be ready to deny the whole
of the moral experience thus gained,--unless we are willing to assert
that the religion in which it has been expressed is only the creed of
a particular civilization, and not a religion of humanity,--it were
difficult to imagine any ethical justification for the aggressions
made upon alien peoples in the name of Christianity and
enlightenment. Certainly the results in China of such aggression
[478] have not been Christianity nor enlightenment, but revolts,
massacres, detestable cruelties,--the destruction of cities, the
devastation of provinces, the loss of tens of thousands of lives, the
extortion of hundreds of millions of money. If all this be right,
then might is might indeed; and our professed religion of humanity
and justice is proved to be as exclusive as any primitive cult, and
intended to regulate conduct only as between members of the same
society.
But to the evolutionist, at least, the matter appears in a very
different light. The plain teaching of sociology is that the higher
races cannot with impunity cast aside their moral experience in
dealing with feebler races, and that Western civilization will have
to pay, sooner or later, the full penalty of its deeds of oppression.
Nations that, while refusing to endure religious intolerance at home,
steadily maintain religious intolerance abroad, must eventually lose
those rights of intellectual freedom which cost so many centuries of
atrocious struggle to win. Perhaps the period of the penalty is not
very far away. With the return of all Europe to militant conditions,
there has set in a vast ecclesiastical revival of which the menace to
human liberty is unmistakable; the spirit of the Middle Ages
threatens to prevail again; and anti-semitism has actually become a
factor in the politics of three Continental powers....
[479]--It has been well said that no man can estimate the force of a
religious conviction until he has tried to oppose it. Probably no man
can imagine the wicked side of convention upon the subject of
missions until the masked batteries of its malevolence have been
trained against him. Yet the question of mission-policy cannot be
answered either by secret slander or by public abuse of the person
raising it. To-day it has become a question that concerns the peace
of the world, the future of commerce, and the interests of
civilization. The integrity of China depends upon it; and the present
war is not foreign to it. Perhaps this book, in spite of many
shortcomings, will not fail to convince some thoughtful persons that
the constitution of Far-Eastern society presents insuperable
obstacles to the propaganda of Western religion, as hitherto
conducted; that these obstacles now demand, more than at any previous
epoch, the most careful and humane consideration; and that the
further needless maintenance of an uncompromising attitude towards
them can result in nothing but evil. Whatever the religion of
ancestors may have been thousands of years ago, to-day throughout the
Far East it is the religion of family affection and duty; and by
inhumanly ignoring this fact, Western zealots can scarcely fail to
provoke a few more "Boxer" uprisings. The real power to force upon
the world a peril from China (now that the chance seems lost for
Russia) should [480] not be suffered to rest with those who demand
religious tolerance for the purpose of preaching intolerance. Never
will the East turn Christian while dogmatism requires the convert to
deny his ancient obligation to the family, the community, and the
government,--and further insists that he prove his zeal for an alien
creed by destroying the tablets of his ancestors, and outraging the
memory of those who gave him life.
[481]
APPENDIX
HERBERT SPENCER'S ADVICE TO JAPAN
Some five years ago I was told by an American professor, then
residing in Tokyo, that after Herbert Spencer's death there would be
published a letter of advice, which the philosopher had addressed to
a Japanese statesman, concerning the policy by which the Empire might
be able to preserve its independence. I was not able to obtain any
further information; but I felt tolerably sure, remembering the
statement regarding Japanese social disintegration in "First
Principles" (section 178), that the advice would prove to have been
of the most conservative kind. As a matter of fact it was even more
conservative than I had imagined.
Herbert Spencer died on the morning of December 8th, 1903 (while this
book was in course of preparation); and the letter, addressed to
Baron Kaneko Kentaro, under circumstances with which the public have
already been made familiar, was published in the London Times of
January 18th, 1904.
FAIRFIELD, PEWSEY, WILTS,
Aug. 26, 1892.
MY DEAR SIR,--Your proposal to send translations of my two
letters* to Count Ito, the newly-appointed Prime Minister,
is quite satisfactory. I very willingly give my assent.
[*These letters have not as yet been made public.]
Respecting the further questions you ask, let me, in the first
place, answer generally that the Japanese policy should, I think,
be that of keeping Americans and Europeans as much as possible at
arm's length. In presence of the more powerful races your
position is one of chronic danger, and you should take every
precaution to give as little foothold as possible to foreigners.
[482] It seems to me that the only forms of intercourse which you may
with advantage permit are those which are indispensable for the
exchange of commodities--importation and exportation of physical and
mental products. No further privileges should be allowed to people of
other races, and especially to people of the more powerful races,
than is absolutely needful for the achievement of these ends.
Apparently you are proposing by revision of the treaty with the
Powers of Europe and America "to open the whole Empire to foreigners
and foreign capital." I regret this as a fatal policy. If you wish to
see what is likely to happen, study the history of India. Once let
one of the more powerful races gain a point d'appui and there will
inevitably in course of time grow up an aggressive policy which will
lead to collisions with the Japanese; these collisions will be
represented as attacks by the Japanese which must be avenged, as the
case may be; a portion of territory will be seized and required to be
made over as a foreign settlement; and from this there will grow
eventually subjugation of the entire Japanese Empire. I believe that
you will have great difficulty in avoiding this fate in any case, but
you will make the process easy if you allow of any privileges to
foreigners beyond those which I have indicated.
In pursuance of the advice thus generally indicated, I should say, in
answer to your first question, that there should be, not only a
prohibition of foreign persons to hold property in land, but also a
refusal to give them leases, and a permission only to reside as
annual tenants.
To the second question I should say decidedly prohibit to foreigners
the working of the mines owned or worked by Government. Here there
would be obviously liable to arise grounds of difference between the
Europeans or Americans who worked them and the Government, and these
grounds of quarrel would be followed by invocations to the English or
American Governments or other Powers to send forces to insist on
whatever the European workers claimed, for always the habit here and
elsewhere among the civilized peoples is to believe what their agents
or sellers abroad represent to them.
In the third place, in pursuance of the policy I have indicated, you
ought also to keep the coasting trade in your own hands and forbid
foreigners to engage in it. This coasting trade is clearly not
included in the requirement I have indicated as the sole one to be
recognized--a requirement to facilitate exportation and importation
[483] of commodities. The distribution of commodities brought to
Japan from other places may be properly left to the Japanese
themselves, and should be denied to foreigners, for the reason that
again the various transactions involved would become so many doors
open to quarrels and resulting aggressions.