{369}
_An old temple--Haunted--Wolf with green eyes--Loneliness--Death
of missionaries--Fear--Sanctuaries--“James Buchanan”--Valiant
farmers--Autumn tints--Famous priest--Sacrifice of disciples--Tree
conserving--Camels at my gate--Servants--“Cook book”--Enchanted
hills--Cricket cages--Kindly people--The fall of Belshazzar--Hope for
the future._
|And with two servants and the temple coolies to wait upon me I settled
down in the San Shan An, the Temple of the Three Mountains, the oldest
temple in this valley of temples, built long ago in the Sung Dynasty.
They said it was haunted, haunted by the ghost of a big snake, and when
the mud from the roof fell as so much dust on the stone floor, and over
me, my tables and chairs and bed, my boy stretched out his arms and
explained that the snake had done it. The snake, I found, always
accounted for dust. When my jam and butter disappeared, and
I suspected human agency, he said in his pidgin-English,
“I tink--I tink----” and then words failed him, and he broke out into
spelling, “I tink it R--A--T.” Why he could spell that word and not
pronounce it I do not know, but until I left I did not know that the
snake that lived in my roof was supernatural. I don't think even I could
be afraid of the ghost of a snake. The temple up above, the Language
{370}Officer's temple, was haunted by a wolf with green eyes, and that
would have been a different matter. I am glad I did not dare the wolf
with green eyes. For I was all by myself. The Language Officer, the
Good Samaritan, went back to Peking, and, except at week-ends, when I
persuaded a friend or two to dissipate my loneliness, I was the only
foreigner in the valley. Go back to Peking until the work I had set
myself to do was done, I determined I would not. It has been a curious
and lonely existence away in the hills, in the little temple embosomed
in trees, among a people who speak not a word of my language; but it had
its charm. I had my camp-bed set up on the little platform looking out
over the place of tombs, with the great Peking plain beyond, and there,
while the weather was warm, I had all my meals, and there, warm or cold,
I always slept. When the evening shadows fell I was lonely, I was worse
than lonely, all that I had missed in life came crowding before my eyes,
all the years seemed empty, wasted, all the future hopeless, and I went
to bed and tried to sleep, if only to forget.
And China is not a good place in which to try the lonely life. There are
too many tragic histories associated with it, and one is apt to remember
them at the wrong times. Was I afraid at night? I was, I think, a
little, but then I am so often afraid, and so often my fears are false,
that I have learned not to pay much attention to them. I knew very well
that the Legations would not have allowed me, without a word of warning,
to take a temple in the hills, had there been any likelihood of danger,
but still, when the evening shadows fell, I could not but remember
{371}once again, Sir Robert Hart's dictum, and that if anything did
happen, I was cut off here from all my kind. It was just Fear, the Fear
that one personifies, but another time, if I elect to live by myself
among an alien people, I do not think I will improve my mind by reading
first any account of the atrocities those people have perpetrated at
no very remote period. As the darkness fell I was apt to start and look
over my shoulder at any unexplainable sound, to remember these things
and to hope they would not happen again, which is first cousin to
fearing they would. At Pao Ting Fu, not far from here as distances
in China go, during the Boxer trouble, the Boxers attacked the
missionaries, both in the north and the south suburb, just outside the
walls of the town. In the north suburb the Boxers and their following
burned those missionaries to death in their houses, because they would
not come out. They dared not. Think how they must have feared, those
men and women in the prime of their life, when they stayed and faced
a cruel death from which there was no escape, rather than chance the
mercies of the mob outside. One woman prayed them to save her baby girl,
her little, tender Margaret, not a year old, her they might kill, and
her husband, and her two little boys, but would no one take pity on the
baby, the baby that as yet could not speak. But though many of those who
heard her prayer and repeated it, pitied, they did not dare help. It
is a notable Chinese characteristic--obedience to orders--and the
lookers-on thought that those in authority having ordered the slaughter
of the missionaries it was not their part to interfere. They told
afterwards how, as a brute rushed up the {372}stairs, the mother,
desperate, seized a pistol that lay to her hand and shot him. I am
always glad she did that. And others told, how, through the mounting
flames, they could see her husband walking up and down, leading his two
little boys by the hand, telling them--ah, what could any man say under
such terrible circumstances as that.
And in the south suburb the missionary doctor was true almost to the
letter of the faith he preached. As the mob surrounded him, he took a
revolver, showed them how perfect was his command over the weapon, how
he could have dealt death right and left, and then he tossed it aside
and submitted to their wicked will, and they took him and cut off his
head. But the fate of the women always horrified me most. It was that
that seemed most terrible in the dusk of the evening. They took two of
the unmarried women, and one was too terrified to walk--having once seen
a Chinese crowd, filthy, horrible and always filthy and horrible even
when they are friendly, one realises what it must be to be in their
power, one understands that girl's shrinking terror. Her they tied,
hands and feet together, and slung her from a pole, exactly as they
carry pigs to market. Is this too terrible a thing to write down for
everyone to read? It almost seems to me it is. If so forgive me. I used
to think about it those evenings alone in the San Shan An. And one of
those women, they say, was always brave, and gave to a little child her
last little bit of money as she walked to her death, and the other, who
was so terrified at first, recovered herself, and walked courageously as
they led her to execution outside the city walls.
When I thought of those women I was ashamed [373]of the Fear that made
me afraid to look behind me in the dark, made me listen intently for
unusual sounds, and hear a thousand unexplainable ones. I, in the broad
daylight, went and looked in the two sanctuaries that were at each end
of my courtyard, each with an image and altar in it. In both were
stored great matting bundles of Spanish chestnuts, and in the larger,
oh sacrilege! oh bathos! was my larder, and I saw eggs, and meat, and
cabbage, and onions, coming out of it, but I do not think anything could
have induced me to go into those places after nightfall. I ask myself
why--I wonder--but I find no answer. The gods were only images, the dust
and dirt of long years was upon them, they were dead, dead, and yet I,
the most modern of women was afraid--at night I was afraid, the fear
that seems to grow up with us all was upon me. By and by a friend sent
me out “James Buchanan”--a small black and white k'ang dog, about six
inches high, but his importance must by no means be measured by his
size. I owe much gratitude to James Buchanan for he is a most cheerful
and intelligent companion. I intended to part with him when I left the
hills, but I made him love me, and then to my surprise, I found I loved
him, and he must share my varying fortunes. But what is a wandering
woman, like I am, to do with a little dog?
[Illustration: 0524]
We went for walks together up and down the hill-sides, and the people
got to know us, and laughed and nodded as we passed. The Chinese seem
fond of animals, and yet you never see a man out for a walk with his
dog. A man with a bird-cage in his hand, taking birdie for a walk, is a
common {374}sight in China, so common that you forget to notice it,
but I have never seen a man followed by a dog, though most of the
farm-houses appear to have one or two to guard them. Here, in the hills,
they were just the ordinary, ugly _wonks_ one sees in Peking, not nearly
such handsome beasts as I saw up in the mountains. The farms in these
hills evidently require a good deal of guarding, for I would often hear
the crack of a gun. Some farmer, so my friend, the Language Officer,
told me, letting the “stealer man,” and anyone else whom it might
concern, know that he had fire-arms and was prepared to use them. At
first the reports used to startle me, and make me look out into the
darkness of the hill-side, darkness deepened here and there by a tiny
light, and I used to wonder if anything was wrong. “Buchanan” always
regarded those reports as entirely out of place, and said so at the
top of his small voice. But then he was always challenging _wonks_, or
finding “stealer men,” so I paid no attention to him.
At the first red streak of dawn, for the temple faced the east, I
wakened. And all my fears, the dim, mysterious, unexplainable fears born
of the night, and the loneliness, and the old temple, were gone, rolled
away with the darkness. The crescent moon and the jewelled stars paled
before the sun, rising in a glory of purple and gold, a glory that
brightened to crimson, the pungent, aromatic fragrance of the pines and
firs came to my nostrils, their branches were outlined against the deep
blue of the sky, and I realised gradually that another blue day had
dawned and the world was not empty, but full of the most wonderful
possibilities waiting but to be grasped. Oh those dawnings in the San
Shan An! Those dawnings after a night in the open air! Never shall I
forget them!
And the valley was lovely that autumn weather. Day after day, day after
day, was the golden sunshine, the clear, deep blue sky, the still, dry,
invigorating air--no wonder everyone with a literary turn yearns to
write a book in a valley of the Western Hills. And this valley of the
San Shan An was the loveliest valley of them all. It, too, is a valley
of temples, to what gods they were set up I know not, by whom they were
set up I know not, only because of the gods and the temples there are
trees, trees in plenty, evergreen firs and pines, green-leaved poplars
and ash-trees, maples and Spanish chesnuts. At first they were green,
these deciduous trees, and then gradually, as autumn touched them
tenderly with his fingers, they took on gorgeous tints, gold and brown,
and red, and amber, the summer dying gloriously under the cloudless blue
sky. They tell me that American woods show just such tints, but I have
not been to America, and I have seen nothing to match this autumn in the
Chinese hills. And I had not thought to see beauty like this in China!
I counted seven temples, and there were probably more. Up the hill
to the north of my valley, beyond a large temple that I shall
always remember for the quaint and picturesque doorway, that I have
photographed, was a plateau to be reached by a stiff climb, and here
was a ruined shrine where sat calmly looking over the plain, as he had
probably looked in life, the marble figure of a very famous priest of
the long ago. It is ages since this priest {376}lived in the hills,
but his memory is fragrant still. He had two disciples. I wonder if the
broken marble figures, one beside him and one on the ground outside the
shrine, are figures of them. There came a drought upon the land, the
crops failed and the people starved, and these two, to propitiate a
cruel or neglectful Deity, flung themselves into a well in the temple
with the beautiful doorway. Whether the rain came I know not, but
tradition says that the two disciples instead of perishing rose up
dragons. Personally I feel that must have been an unpleasant surprise
for the devotees, but you never know a Chinaman's taste, perhaps they
liked being dragons. The country people seem to think it was an honour.
There was a farmhouse just beyond this shrine, a poor little place, but
here on the flat top of the hill there was a little arable land, and the
Chinese waste no land. Far up the hill-sides, in the most inaccessible
places, I could see these little patches of cultivated ground. It seemed
to me that the labour of reaching them would make the handful of grain
they produced too expensive, but labour hardly counts in China. Up the
paths toiled men and women, intent on getting the last grain out of the
land. Off the beaten ways walking is pretty nearly impossible so steep
are the hill-sides, but of course there are paths, paths everywhere,
paved paths, in China there are no untrodden ways, and upon these paths
I would meet the peasants and the priests, clad like ordinary peasants
in blue cotton, only with shaven heads. My own landlord whom my boy
called “Monk,” and generally added, “He bad man,” used to come regularly
for his rent, and he was so fat that the wicked evidently flourished
like a green bay tree. All the priests, I think, let out their temples
as long as they can get tenants, and whatever they are--my landlord
had beaten a man to death--much must be forgiven them. They have gained
merit because, in this treeless China, they have conserved and planted
trees. Some little profit, I suppose they make out of their trees
because, one day in September, I waked to the fact that at my gate, how
they had climbed up the toilsome, roughly-paved way I know not, was
a train of camels, and they had come to take away the sacks that were
stored in the sanctuary under the care of the god. What on earth was
done with those Spanish chestnuts? They must have been valuable when
they were worth a train of camels to take them away.
[Illustration: 0530]
[Illustration: 0530]
As far as I could see there was no worship done in my temple, the
coolies, who carefully locked the sanctuary doors at night, were filthy
past all description. I tried to put it out of my thoughts that they
occupied a k'ang at night in the room that did duty for my kitchen, and
I am very sure that they were the poorest of the poor, but at night
I would see the youngest and dirtiest of them take a small and
evil-smelling lamp inside along with the god, but what he did there I
never knew. Only the lamp inside, behind the paper of the windows lit
up all the lattice-work and made of that sanctuary, that shabby,
neglected-looking place, a thing of beauty. But, indeed, the outside of
all the buildings was wonderful at night. In the daytime when I looked I
saw how beautiful was the lattice-work which made up the entire top half
of my walls. At night in the courtyard when only a single candle was
lighted {378}their beauty was forced upon me, whether I would or not.
Always I went outside to look at those rooms lighted at night. I walked
up and down the courtyard in the dark--“James Buchanan” generally hung
on to the hem of my gown--I looked at the lighted lattice-work of the
windows, and I listened to the servants and the coolies talking, and I
wondered what they discussed so endlessly, in voices that sounded quite
European.
They were good servants. The cook I know I shall regret all my days,
for I never expect to get a better, and the boy was most attentive. Any
little thing that he could do for me he always did, and the way they
uncomplainingly washed up plates never ceased to command my admiration.
I had only a camp outfit, the making of books may be weariness unto the
flesh, as Solomon says it is, but even then it does not make me a rich
woman, so I did not wish to spend more than I could help, and yet I
wanted to entertain a friend or two occasionally. This entailed washing
the plates between the courses, and the servants did it without a
murmur. I came to think it was quite the correct thing to wait while
the plates and knives for the next course were washed up. My friends,
of course, knew all about it, and entered into the spirit of the thing
cheerfully, but the servants never gave me away. You would have thought
I had a splendid pantry, and my little scraps of white metal spoons
were always polished till they looked like the silver they ought to have
been. My table linen I made simply out of the ordinary blue cotton one
meets all over China, and it looked so nice, so suitable to meals on
the look-out place, that I shall always cherish a tenderness for blue
cotton. {379}Indeed, but for the lonely nights when one thought, it was
delightful. I only hope my friends enjoyed coming to me, as much as I
enjoyed having them. Their presence drove away all fears. I never feared
the gods in their sanctuaries, I never thought of those who had perished
in the Boxer trouble or the possibility of the return of such days when
they were with me. I thought I had lost the delights of youth, the
joy of the land of long ago, but I found the sensation of entertaining
friends in the San Shan An was like the make-believe parties of one's
childhood. Sitting on the look-out place, away to the south, we could
see a range of low, bald hills. They were enchanted hills. The Chinese
would not go near them, for all that the caves they held hidden in their
folds were full of magnificent jewels. We planned to go over and get
them some day before I left the hills, and make ourselves rich for life.
But they were guarded by gnomes, and elves, and demons, who by their
nefarious spells kept us away, though we did not fear like the Chinese,
and we are not rich yet, though jewels are there for the taking.
Oh, those sunny days in the mountain temple when we read poetry, and
told stories, and dreamed of the better things life held for us in the
future! They were good days, days in my life to be remembered, if no
more good ever comes to me. Was it the exhilarating air, or the company,
or the temple precincts? All thanks give I to those dead gods who gave
me, for a brief space, something that was left out of my life.
There was only one blot. That imaginative document known as “Cook's
book” was brought to me afterwards. It wasn't a book at all, needless to
{380}say. It was written on rejected scraps of my typewriting paper, and
it generally stated I had eaten more “Chiken” than would have sufficed
to run a big hotel, and disposed of enough “col” to keep a small railway
engine of my own. Then the flour, and the butter, and the milk, and the
lard, I was supposed to have consumed! I did not at first like to
say much, because the servants were so good in that matter of washing
plates, and knives, and forks, and whenever I did remonstrate the boy
murmured something about “Master.” He was a true Chinaman, he felt
sure I would not grudge anything to make a man comfortable. The woman
evidently did not matter. She was never urged as an excuse for a heavy
bill. I put it to him that the presence of “Master” need not add so
greatly to the coal bill, and I put it very gently, till one day he
mentioned with pride that “Missie other boy was a great friend of his.”
And I, remembering Tuan's powers in the matter of squeeze, had gone
about getting these servants through quite different channels! But once
this knowledge was borne in on me, I became hardhearted. I threatened to
do the marketing myself.
“I talkee cook,” said the crestfallen boy, and he did “talkee cook,”
said, I suppose, Missie wasn't quite the fool they had counted her, and
presently he came back and returned me fifteen cents! After that I had
no mercy, and I regularly questioned every item of my bills.
But they were simple souls, and I couldn't help liking them. It seemed
hardly possible they could belong to the same people who had slung a
helpless woman from a pole like a pig, bearing her to her death, a woman
from whom they had had naught {381}but kindness. And yet they were. The
selfsame subservience that made them bow themselves to the Boxer yoke,
was exactly the quality that made them pleasant to me, who was in
authority over them. They were just peasants of Babylon, making the best
of life, deceiving and dissimulating, because deception is the safeguard
of the slave, the only safeguard he knows. And they certainly made the
best of life. It amused me to watch their pleasures, those that were
visible to my eyes. They had a little feast one night, with my stores,
I doubt not, and they caught and kept crickets in little three-cornered
cages which they made themselves. At first, when I went to the temple,
these cages were hung from the eaves outside, but as the weather grew
colder they were taken inside, and I could hear a cheery chirping, long
after the crickets had gone from the hills outside. It rained and was
cold the first week in October, and the servants, like the babies they
were, shivered, and suggested, “Missie go back Peking,” and one day when
it rained hard my tiffin was two hours late, and was brought by a boy
who looked as if he were on the point of bursting into tears.
[Illustration: 0537]
Certainly those temples are not built for cold weather. Everything
is ordered in China, even the weather, and the first frost is due, I
believe, on the 1st of November, and yet, on that day, I sat in the warm
and pleasant sunshine writing on the platform that looked away to the
enchanted hills, reflecting a little sorrowfully that presently I would
be gone, and it would be abandoned for the winter.
For after that unexpected rain, which for once was not ordered, the days
were lovely, and the nights {382}times of delight. The stars hung like
diamond drops in the sky, the planets were scintillating crescents, and,
when the moon rose, the silver moon, she turned the courtyard and the
temple into a dream palace such as never was on sea or land. It was
beauty and delight given, oh given with a lavish hand.
And the people I saw in the hills were the kindliest I had yet met in
China. I had little enough to do with them, I could not communicate
with them, and yet this was borne in on me. Whenever we met, dirty
brown faces smiled upon me, kindly voices with a burr in them gave
me greeting, I was regularly offered the baby of the farm-house at my
gates, much to that young gentleman's discomfiture, and whenever there
was anything to see, they evidently invited me to stay and share the
sight. Once a bridal procession passed with much beating of gongs, the
bride shut up in the red sedan chair, and all the people about stood
looking on, and I stayed too. Another time they were killing a pig, an
unwieldy, gruesome beast, that made me forswear pork, and I was invited
to attend the great event. The poor pig was very sorry for himself,
and was squealing loudly, but much as I wished to show I appreciated
kindliness, I could not accept that invitation.
And here in the Western Hills I sat in judgment upon the people I
had known of all my life and been amongst for the last ten months. Of
course, I have no right to sit in judgment but after all, I should be
a fool to live among people for some time and yet have no opinion about
them. And it seemed to me that I was looking with modern eyes upon the
{383}survival of one of the great powers of the ancient world, Babylon
come down to modern times, Babylon cumbrously adapting herself to the
pressure of the nations who have raced ahead of the civilisation that
was hers when they were barbarian hordes.
All along the Pacific Coast, on the west of America, and the east of
Australia, they fear the Chinaman, and--I used to say his virtues. I put
it the wrong way. What the white races fear--and rightly fear--is that
the Chinaman will come in such hordes, he will lower the standard of
living, he will bring such great pressure to bear, he will reduce the
people of the land in which he elects to live, the people of the working
classes, to his own condition--the hopeless condition of the toiling
slaves of Babylon. It has been well said that the East, China, is the
exact opposite of the West in every thought and feeling. In the West
we honour individualism. This is true of almost every nation. A man is
taught from his earliest youth to depend to a great degree upon himself,
that he alone is responsible for his own actions. Even the women of the
more advanced nations--it marks their advancement, whatever people may
think--are clamouring for a position of their own, to be judged on their
merits, not to be one of a class bound by iron custom to go one way and
one way only. In the East this is reversed. No man has a right to judge
for himself, he is hide-bound by custom, he dare not step out one pace
from the beaten path his fathers trod. The filial piety of the Chinese
has been lauded to the skies. In truth it is a virtue that has become a
curse. To his elders the Chinaman {384}must give implicit, unquestioning
obedience. His work, his marriage, the upbringing of his children, the
whole ordering of his life is not his business but the business of those
in authority over him. If he stepped out and failed, his failure would
affect the whole community. Whatever he does affects not only
himself, but the farthest ramifications of his numerous family. This
interdependence makes for a certain excellence, an excellence that was
reached by the Chinese nation some thousands of years ago, and then--it
is stifling.
This patriarchal system, this continual keeping of the eyes upon the
past, has done away in the nation with all self-reliance. A man must be
not only a genius, but possessed of an extraordinarily strong will-power
if he manage to shake off the trammels and go his own way unaided, if
he exercise the sturdy self-reliance that sent the nations of the West
ahead by leaps and bounds, though the Chinese had worked their way
to civilisation ages before them. Pages might be written on the
subservience and ignorance of the women.
“Oh but a woman has influence,” say the men who know China most
intimately. And of course she has influence, but in China it must often
be the worst form of power, the influence of the favourite, favoured
slave. The woman's influence is the influence of a degraded, ignorant,
and servile class, a class that every man treats openly with a certain
contempt, a class that is crippled, mentally and bodily. The Chinese,
be it counted to them for grace, have always held in high esteem a
well-educated man, educated on their archaic lines; but not, I think,
till this century, has it ever occurred to {385}them that a woman would
be better educated. A cruel drag upon the nation must be the appalling
ignorance of its women, the intense ignorance of half the population.
Things are changing, they say, but, of necessity, they change most
slowly. Knowledge of any kind takes long, long to permeate an inert
mass.
[Illustration: 0543]
We praise the Chinaman for his industry. But, in truth, we praise
without due cause. We of the West have long since learned of the dignity
of labour and if we do not always live up to our ideals, at least we
appreciate them, and judged by this standard the Chinaman is found
wanting. He does not appreciate the dignity of labour. The long nails on
the fingers of the man upon whom fortune has smiled proclaim to all that
he has no need to use his hands; his fat, flabby, soft body declares him
rich and well-fed, and that there is no need to exert himself. He is
a man to be envied by the greater part of the nation. The forceful,
strenuous life of the West, the life that has made the nations has
no charms for, excites no admiration in his breast. Manual labour and
strife is for the man who cannot help himself. And, man for man, his
manual labour will by no means compare with that accomplished by the
man of the West. Nominally he works from dawn to dark, really he wastes
two-thirds of the time, sometimes in useless, misdirected effort,
sometimes in mere idle loitering. He is a slave in all but name. His
life is dull, dull and colourless; he can look forward to no recreation
when his work is over, therefore he spins it out the livelong day. Home
life, in the best sense of the term, he has none, he may just as well
stay at his {386}work, exchanging ideas and arguing with his fellows.
Something to hope for, to live for, to work for, seems to me the great
desideratum of the majority of the Chinese nation, something a little
beyond the colourless round of life. The greater part of the nation is
poor, so poor that industry is thrust upon it, unless it worked it would
of necessity die; the struggle for life absorbs all its energies, gives
it no time for thought sufficient to raise it an inch above the dull
routine that makes up the daily round, but the country is by no means
poor, had it been there would have been no such civilisation so early
and so lasting in the world's history, no such fostering of a race that
now, in spite of most evil sanitary conditions, raises four generations
to the three of the man of the West.
China is a rich land and once she is wiser she will be far richer still,
for in her mountains are such store of iron and coal as, once worked,
may well revolutionise the industrial world.
Now the thought of revolutionising the condition of the industrial world
brings me quite naturally to the consideration of missionary effort.
For the last two hundred and fifty years the Catholic, and for the last
hundred years the Protestant Churches, have been working in China with a
view to proselytising the people. And converts are notoriously harder to
make than in any other missionary field. Still they are made.
To me, a Greek, it does not seem to matter by what name a man calls upon
the Great Power that is over us all--the thing that really matters
is the life of the man who calls upon that God. Now the missionaries,
whether they make converts, or whether they do not, do this, they set
up a higher standard of living. They come among these slave people, they
educate them, men and women, they care for the sick by thousands, and
by their very presence among them they show them, I speak of material
things, there is something beyond their own narrow round, and they make
them desire these better things. If the Western nations are wise they
will allow no poor missionaries in China, it is so easy to sink to the
level of the people, to become as Chinese as the Chinese themselves.
Personally, I think it is a mistake to conform to Chinese customs. The
missionaries are there to preach the better customs of the West and
there must be no lowering of the standard. The Chinaman wants to be
taught self-reliance, he wants to be taught self-respect, and, last but
by no means least, he wants to be taught to amuse himself rationally
and healthily. Now this in a measure, even this last, is what the
missionaries, the majority of them, are teaching him, though, doubtless,
they would not put their teaching in exactly those words, might be even
surprised to hear it so described. They are helping to break down the
great patriarchal system which has been stifling China for so many
hundreds of years. They are teaching responsibility, the responsibility
of every man and woman for his and her own doings.
And they are pioneers of trade, forerunners of the merchants who must
inevitably follow in their footsteps. There are those who will say that
they do not influence the more highly educated portion of the community,
but they come to those who need {388}them most. The rich can afford to
send their sons abroad, to pay for medical attendance. It is to those
of humble means that the schools and hospitals introduced by foreign
charity are an immeasurable advantage, a boon beyond price. For the man
who has once come in contact with these foreigners never forgets. He has
seen their possessions, humble in their eyes, wonderful in his, and in
his heart a desire is implanted--a desire for something a little
better than has satisfied his fathers. And slowly this little leaven of
discontent, heavenly discontent and dissatisfaction with things as they
are, will permeate the whole lump. China is daily coming more in
contact with the rest of the world. That world ruthlessly shuts out her
proletariat because it will not be pulled down. It is well then that the
proletariat should be levelled up. The process is slowly beginning when
the missionaries put into the hands of a labourer the Gospels, tell him
he is of as much value as the President in his palace, make him desire
to read, to wash his face to be just a little better than his fellows.
The creed he holds is a small matter, but it is a great matter if he
be no longer a slave, but a self-respecting man fit to mingle on equal
terms with the men of the West. Such a man will be more capable, more
ready to develop the resources of his own rich land; as a trader he
will be of ten times more value to the mercantile world for ever on the
look-out for a market. Whether the nations then need fear him will be
matter for further consideration. It is possible things may be adjusted
on a comfortable basis of supply and demand.
It would be unfair to give all credit for changing {3898}China to the
missionaries. They are only one factor in a general movement that her
own sons, the men of new China, have deeply at heart. The past is going,
but the great change will not be anything violent. The Boxer tragedy
awakened the Western world thoroughly to what it had always felt, that
an Empire like Babylon was unsuited to the present day, and they said
so with shot and shell, and China is taking the lesson to heart, slowly,
slowly, but she is taking it. She will have learned it thoroughly when
the need for change, the desire for better things, the power to insist
on a higher standard of living shall have come to her lower classes, and
then she will not change exactly as the Western world would wish, but as
she herself thinks best. The Chinese have always adapted themselves, and
in these modern times they will use the same methods that they have done
through the centuries.
There came forth the fingers of a man's hand and wrote upon the plaster
of the wall of the King's Palace, “_MENE MENE TEKEL UPHAR-SIN_.” In that
night was Belshazzar, the King of the Chaldeans, slain, and Darius the
Mede took the kingdom. So the men who made the Forbidden City sacred
have passed away, the Dowager-Empress who defied the West has gone to
her long home, the Emperor is but a tiny child, his Empire is confined
within the pinkish red walls of the Inner City, and the Republic, the
new young Republic with a Dictator at its head, reigns in his stead. But
the nation is stirring, the slow-moving, patient slaves of Babylon. Will
not a new nation arise that shall be great in its own way even as
the nations of the West are great, for surely the spirit of those men
{390}who built the wondrous courtyards and halls of audience of the
Forbidden City, who planned the pleasure-grounds at Jehol, who stretched
the wall over two thousand miles of mountain and valley, who conceived
the Altar of Heaven, the most glorious altar ever dedicated to any
Deity, must be alive and active as it was a thousand' years ago. And
when that spirit animates not the few taskmasters, but the mass of the
people, when it reaches the toiling slaves and makes of them men, the
nation will be like the palaces and altars they built hundreds of
years ago, and the rest of the world may stand aside, and wonder, and,
perhaps, fear.
THE END