assume effective proportions during the spring of 1906. Now, Shanghai--the
"settlement," that is--was in a peculiar, an unfortunate, condition as
regarded the anti-opium crusade. I have already given, in an earlier
chapter, the estimate of Robert E. Lewis, general secretary of the Y. M.
C. A., at Shanghai, that there were, in 1906, nearly 22,000 places in the
international settlement, little and big, where opium could be purchased,
more than 19,000 of which kept pipes, lamps, and divans on the premises
for smokers. All of the dens which were openly conducted were paying a
regular license fee to the municipal government, amounting last year to
98,000 Shanghai taels, or about $70,000 in gold. It is against the law to
permit women or children to enter the smoking-dens, and a clause to this
effect is printed on the license as a condition in granting it; yet when
Captain Borisragon, the chief of police, was asked how many regular women
inmates were in the dens, he replied, in writing, that there were at least
3,200 women so kept, and doubtless a great many more who did not appear
on his records. When the tax and license department was asked why this
clause was not enforced, the reply was made, without the slightest attempt
at excuse or explanation, that when a license was issued to the keeper of
an "opium brothel" the clause prohibiting women inmates was erased.
These curious facts combine to present an appearance familiar to one who
has studied the municipal protection of vice in this country. It is asking
too much of human credulity to expect one to believe that this clause was
regularly erased for nothing. But apart from what individual graft there
may have been in it, that $70,000 in revenue was an item not to be lightly
given up by the hard-headed municipal council. And the amount of money put
into circulation by the patrons of these dens was also an attractive item,
as Shanghai sees things. The prevailing opinion among the foreigners of
"the settlement" was simply and flatly that the settlement could not
afford to close the dens. The leading English newspaper hastened to defend
the sordid attitude of the council by explaining that, as the licenses
were issued for a year, they had no right to close the places, at least
before the spring of 1908.
The interesting and significant fact is that while this miserable
condition of affairs was allowed to drag along in the international
settlement, where the white men rule, the Chinese native city, immediately
adjoining, was strictly enforcing the anti-opium edicts. The Chinese
authorities went about the enforcement in a thoroughly effective manner.
The date set for the closing of the dens was May 22, 1907. There was some
fear that the closing down might precipitate a riot, and, accordingly, the
authorities took measures to keep the populace in hand. Chinese soldiers
were placed on guard at the places where crowds would be most likely to
gather, the dens were quietly closed, padlocked, and the shutters put up;
and red signs, calling attention to the imperial edict prohibiting opium,
were pasted up on doors or shutters. It was quite evident that the
proprietors of these dens took the enforcement most seriously. Some of
them went immediately into other lines of business; others made their
places over into tea-houses.
[Illustration: IN AN OPIUM DEN, SHANGHAI]
[Illustration: OPIUM SMOKING]
So at Shanghai the Chinese warfare on the "foreign smoke" was waged
earnestly and effectively in the native city. The Chinese authorities
closed the dens--permanently, it seems fair to believe. And the only
result of their heroic action,--and it is an heroic action to suppress a
prosperous and thoroughly established branch of commerce in any city,--the
only result was that the opium business went over to the adjoining city of
the foreigners, who gladly accepted it, and took the money which had
formerly been spent in the native city. The foreigners live wholly outside
of and above Chinese law. They have their own strips of land, their own
courts, their own local government, all guaranteed to them by the treaties
which China has, at one time or another, been forced to sign. When the
Chinese first proposed to stamp out opium, these foreigners laughed, and
talked about the chronic insincerity of the Chinese government. When the
yellow men did stamp out opium in that native city a mile or so away,
these foreigners said that it would not be fair to the holders of licenses
to close down in the settlement. As I have had occasion to say before, the
Chinese are not fools. They grasped the significance of the situation, and
spoke out frankly. The local mandarins protested to the settlement
council. The native newspapers called attention to it. And all this clear
insight into an extraordinary situation and the frank comment on it were
communicated, by the routes and the means which I have described earlier
in this chapter, to the fifty or seventy-five million Chinese who are
directly influenced by conditions at Shanghai. Now, in the light of these
facts, in the light of what they see and know, it is time to ask, and to
ask with feeling--How can you hope to make those fifty to seventy-five
million Chinamen believe that our civilization, with its science, and its
whisky, and its keen grasp on "revenue," and its contradictory and
confusing teachings of Christianity, is superior to their civilization?
And if they do not believe that our civilization is superior, how long do
you suppose they will endure the treatment they receive from us? As time
rolls on, there will be more "Boxer" uprisings in China, more crazy and
disastrous protests against foreign domination and exploitation. When
these troubles come, it will be well to recall that Shanghai,--not the
individual inhabitants, but the government of that little "settlement" of
foreigners which lies upon the west bank of the Woosung River,--officially
and for profit maintained its traffic in the drug that is China's curse
after the Chinese had stopped their own opium traffic. It will be well to
recall it, because it is quite certain that the Chinese themselves will
not have forgotten it.
I have gone thus at length into the deplorable example which Shanghai, the
most important foreign settlement in China, exhibits to the struggling,
opium-ridden yellow men, because it is typical of the whole course of the
foreigner in China. In the next chapter we shall consider further evidence
in looking into the conditions of life and of the opium problem at
Hongkong and Tientsin. It is of course peculiarly unfortunate that
Shanghai, when the great opportunity came to extend a helping hand to
China in the opium fight, should have failed, utterly, ignominiously. But
the slightest acquaintance with the place is enough to make it plain that
Shanghai, as it has been and still is, is not likely to extend a helping
hand to anybody. The helping hand is not exactly what Shanghai stands for.
It really stands for the domination of the great Yangtse Valley, for the
exploitation of China, and, incidentally, for a sort of snug harbour for
criminals and degenerates. There can be no doubt that the fifty to
seventy-five millions of Chinese who come directly within the radiating
influence of Shanghai know this perfectly well. It is also quite likely
that these and the few hundred other millions who make up "the Middle
Kingdom" know perfectly well, that the complicated commercial
establishments of all the various foreign nations in China stand for
similar principles. And they doubtless know further that the very
important and very cynical gentlemen who represent the great and
prosperous foreign powers at Peking, are there for no other purpose than
diplomatically to put on the pressure whenever China chances to block a
move or gain a piece in this sordid and unholy game of chess. So perhaps
we had better give up, once and for all, any serious consideration of the
charges made by certain foreign powers that China is insincere in her
warfare on opium. Such charges and insinuations, coming from such sources,
hardly command respect.
It is plain that this greedy exploitation, going so far as even to snatch
a profit out of the opium struggle, is not a healthy basis of intercourse
between great nations. If the Chinese were a Congo tribe, or a race of
American Indians, this policy might pay commercially; for in that case it
would be a matter for the Christian nations of simply killing off the
Chinese or driving them off the land, and then of fighting among
themselves over the division of the spoils. But this policy, which
succeeds against weak and numerically small nations, will hardly succeed
in China. Driving four hundred million Chinese off the land would be a
large order, a very different thing, indeed, from wiping out a tribe of
"Fuzzy Wuzzys" with machine guns. All of the military observers with whom
I have talked in China show a tendency to grow thoughtful over the subject
of China's potential military strength. From the days of the T'ai Ping
Rebellion and "Chinese" Gordon's "ever victorious" army, down to the
review of 30,000 of Yuan Shi K'ai's troops, with modern weapons and modern
drill, in Honan Province in the summer of 1906, it has been plain that the
Chinese make splendid soldiers when properly led. And yet it seems to have
occurred to few white statesmen that the deepest interests of trade
itself, sordid trade, demand that China be treated fairly and that the
relations between China and the powers be established on a basis that
makes for mutual respect and for peace, rather than on a basis that makes
for exploitation, outrage, massacre, warfare, "indemnity," and smouldering
hate. John Hay saw over the balance-sheet, when he established the "open
door" policy. Elihu Root has seen over the balance-sheet in arranging to
waive the future claims of this country for indemnity money. And Lord
Elgin, for England, saw over the balance-sheet when he outlined that sound
policy which he was afterwards one of the first to violate--"Never to make
an unjust demand of China, and never to recede from a demand once made."
To-day it seems apparent that the great nations cannot be brought together
to agree on any really enlightened policy in China. Even had such a thing
been possible a few years ago, the untrustworthy methods of Russia and the
growing ambitions of Japan would make it impossible to-day. Nations which,
when brought together in a "Peace Conference," cannot even agree upon the
rules of war, will hardly forego the chance of seizing some special
advantage in the colossal grab-bag which is China. And so it seems likely
that the genial commercial adventurers and gamblers and vice promoters of
Shanghai will go on sowing the wind in China--and that the sullen hate of
those silent, observing millions of yellow men will deepen and smoulder
until the final day of reckoning, the day of reaping, shall come.
There is one ray of light which, to-day, illuminates the China Coast. It
is a small ray, when we consider the number of dark corners to be
illuminated, and yet there is the bare possibility that it may prove the
beginning of better conditions. Somewhat less than two years ago the
United States government established a wholly new institution, the United
States Court for China. L. R. Wilfley, one of the legal officers whom
Judge Taft had trained in Manila during his governorship of the
Philippines, was appointed the first judge of this court, and was sent
out, with a district attorney, a marshal, and a clerk, to administer
justice to Americans up and down the China Coast and along the Yangtse
River. By treaty, all American citizens are exempt from judgment under the
Chinese law, that peculiar jumble of tradition, superstition, common
sense, and Oriental severity. Formerly, justice had been dealt out in
courts presided over by the consul-generals and the consuls in their
respective districts.
Now it should be obvious to the most casual observer that the peculiar
conditions and the peculiar industries which thrive in the treaty ports
give rise to a considerable number of legal entanglements. There is, of
course, a large volume of legitimate business transacted on the Coast,
which gives legitimate employment to a few lawyers; but there is a volume
of illegitimate and semi-legitimate business which would also naturally
give employment to other lawyers. At the time of Judge Wilfley's
appointment one thing was clear to the enlightened heads of our Department
of State at Washington; the consular courts, thanks to the skill and
resource of the American lawyer on the Coast, were in a constant tangle of
perplexed inefficiency, and the American name was sinking steadily lower
in China.
It is likely that no American judge ever faced so peculiar and difficult a
task as that assigned to Judge Wilfley. It was his duty to take the place
of a lacking public opinion, and to raise the drooping prestige of his
country. He had behind him no settled code of laws, but merely a few
treaties and a few orders from the Department of State. He had not only to
judge cases between Americans, but also cases between Americans and
citizens of other nationalities, including the Chinese themselves. He had
to establish rulings on the most complicated matters of coastwise
commerce, in a land where coastwise commerce is involved with perplexing
local customs and superstitions. Above all, he had, from the start, to
fight a well-organized, well-entrenched band of shady characters who had
run their course for so long without anything in the nature of a public
opinion to hold them in check that they resented his advent as an
encroachment on their vested right to do as they chose. The last and most
perplexing of his problems was that in rooting out these evils he was in
danger at every turn of arraying against him the citizens of other
nationalities and even of arousing the active enmity of the courts and the
officials of other nations, most of whom had been content to let Shanghai
jog along in its easy-going, sordid way.
It is to Judge Wilfley's everlasting credit that, with a full knowledge of
the difficulties and dangers before him, he went straight to the heart of
the problem. Seeing that certain American lawyers had long stood between
the old consular courts and anything which could be called justice, he
set to work first to solve the problem of the lawyers. His campaign for a
higher standard on the Coast has not been without its humorous moments.
Mr. Bassett, his shrewd young district attorney, preceded him to Shanghai
to "look the ground over." The little group of American lawyers at
Shanghai made haste to get acquainted with him. One of the ablest among
them invited him, casually and informally, to dinner. When Bassett arrived
at the dinner he found himself, to his astonishment, confronted with
thirty or forty "leading citizens," including all the American lawyers and
several men of questionable business character whom he rather expected to
be prosecuting a little later on.
After the coffee and cigars, the host rose, and in a neat little speech
called on Bassett to tell the company something about Judge Wilfley and
what work he meant to do in Shanghai. It was a difficult situation. A
slow-witted man might have found himself in a fix. But Bassett, if I may
credit the account which reached me, was equal to the situation. He rose,
and looked around the table from face to face.
"Gentlemen," he said, "as I have come unprepared for this pleasure, I
shall have to fall back on story-telling. In the small hours, one morning,
two men who had been having rather too good a time were navigating from
street corner to street corner. Said Smith, 'Jonesh, shtime to go home.
Shgetting broad daylight. Theresh sun shining up there.'
"'No, Shmith,' replied Jones, 'you're mistaken. Tha'sh moon up there, and
it's night.' They staggered down the street, Smith insisting that it was
day, Jones insisting that it was night, until they met a fellow inebriate
clinging to a fire plug. To him they appealed their dispute. He heard them
out, and then looked thoughtfully up at the moon. For a long time he
puzzled over the problem, and finally, giving it up, turned to them and
said politely, 'Gentlemen, you'll have to 'scuse me. I'm a stranger in
town.'
"And, gentlemen," said Bassett, again looking about from face to face,
"you'll have to excuse me. I'm a stranger in town."
Judge Wilfley began by calling upon every American lawyer who was
practicing in Shanghai to bring a certificate of good moral character and
to pass an examination before he could be admitted to practice in the new
court. The examination was given, and only two of the lawyers passed. At
once there was a hubbub. The judge was attacked hotly. One of the lawyers
who failed to pass hurried over to this country, making a speech at
Honolulu, on the way, in which he insinuated charges of corruption against
Judge Wilfley. Shortly after his arrival at San Francisco, he prevailed
upon the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, on the Pacific Coast, to reverse
one of Judge Wilfley's decisions without having the facts of the whole
case in hand and without a hearing from the China court. He went on to
Washington, and within a month or two last winter actually got a bill
through the United States Senate reinstating all the disqualified lawyers.
The bill is before the House at this present session. He has conducted a
newspaper campaign against Judge Wilfley in this country since his return
last year. It seems only fair to call attention to these facts on a
fearless and able man, because Judge Wilfley is too hard at work in a
distant country to be able to defend himself. In the course of my travels
from port to port last year, it became clear to me that this new court was
the one uplifting factor in a distressing general condition.
Judge Wilfley, like his district attorney, seems to hold no visionary
theories, in spite of the high standard he has set. Before leaving China,
I made it a point to call on him and talk with him about the work he is
doing in the interest of the American name. He seemed to recognize clearly
enough that vice and depravity can no more be put down out of hand in
Shanghai than they can be put down out of hand in New York or Chicago or
Boston. But he maintained that the disreputably open flaunting of vice can
be stopped. In fining the "American girls" $500 (gold) each, and driving a
number of them off the Coast, his attack has been directed mainly against
the dishonourable use of an honourable phrase. In imprisoning or driving
away the American gamblers, he has been trying to put gambling down more
nearly to the place it occupies, in this country, as a minor rather than
as a major branch of industry. Judge Wilfley has undertaken an Herculean
task. It seems to be the hope of all that patient minority, the better
class of Americans on the China Coast, that he will be permitted to
continue his fight unhampered by political machinery "back home."
There are two other points, besides Shanghai, at which the two kinds of
civilization, Western and Eastern, come into contact--Hongkong and
Tientsin. Each is different from the other as well as from Shanghai; and
each plays a curious part in the opium drama. We shall take them up in the
next chapter.
VI
SOWING THE WIND IN CHINA--TIENTSIN AND HONGKONG
If you could avoid the suburbs of mud huts and walled compounds, and step
directly down from an airship on the broad piazza of the Astor House at
Tientsin (no treaty port is complete without its Astor House), you might
also imagine yourself in a thriving English town. Set about this piazza
are round tables, in bowers of potted plants, where sit Britishers,
Germans, and Americans, with a gay sprinkling of soldiery. Across the
street there is a green little park, where plump British babies are
wheeled about and children romp among the shrubbery, and where the Sikh
band plays on Sundays. There is nothing, unless it be the group of
rickshaw coolies at the curb, or the fat Chinese policeman in the roadway,
to recall China to the mind.
Yet Tientsin dominates all Northern China much as Shanghai dominates the
mighty valley of the Yangtse. The railways and waterways (including the
Grand Canal) all lead to Tientsin. It is Peking's seaport. The viceroy of
the Northern Provinces makes it his seat of government. The chief point of
contact between these Northern Provinces and Western civilization, it is
through Tientsin that the new ideas which are stirring the sluggish
Chinese mind to new desires and to a new purpose filter into one hundred
million Mongoloid heads.
The foreign settlement is simply a polyglot cluster of nationalities, each
with its "concession" or allotment of land wrung from a browbeaten empire,
each with its separate municipal government ruled by its own
consul-general, and the whole combined, for purposes of defense and
aggression, into a loosely knit city of seven or eight thousand whites
under the general direction of a dozen consulates. The British have their
polo, golf, and racing grounds; the French have their wealthy church
orders and their Parisian moving pictures; the Germans have their beer
halls and delicatessen shops. The Japanese, the Russians, the Italians,
the Austrians, all the powers, in fact, excepting the United States--which
holds no land in China--contribute their lesser shares to the colour and
the activity of this extraordinary place. And only a mile or two away,
further up the crooked river, lies the huge, sprawling Chinese city, where
nine hundred and fifty thousand blue-clad celestials--nearly a round
million of them--ceaselessly watch the squabbling groups of foreigners,
and by means of newspapers, travelling merchants, and the thousand and one
other instruments for the spreading of gossip, tell all Northern China
what they see.
Tientsin, then, like Shanghai, is a potent, an electric, force in its
influence on China. Whatever the Chinese are to become in their struggle
towards the light of day will be in some measure due to the example set by
these two cities, the only samples of Western civilization which the
Chinaman can scrutinize at close range. The missionary tells him of the
God of the Western peoples, and of how His Spirit regenerates humankind;
the Chinaman listens stolidly, and then turns to look at the samples of
regenerated peoples that fringe his Coast. What he actually sees will
stick in his mind long after what he merely hears shall have passed out at
the other ear. And these impressions that stick in the Chinaman's mind are
precisely the highly charged forces that are revolutionizing China to-day.
While still at Peking, I had picked up more or less gossip which seemed
to indicate that the Tientsin foreign concessions were setting an
unfortunate example in the matter of opium. In several of the concessions
there are thousands of Chinese traders who have crowded in the white man's
territory, in order to make a living. These Chinese districts demand their
opium, and they have always been allowed to have it. The opium shops and
dens are licensed, as are our saloons, and the resulting revenue is
cheerfully accepted by the various municipalities. When the Chinese
officials set out to fight opium last winter and spring, they asked the
foreign consuls to cooperate with them. This could be no more than a
friendly request, for the concessions are foreign soil, that have passed
wholly out of China's control; but it was obviously of no use to close the
dens of the native city if smokers could continue to gratify their desire
by simply walking down the road.
This request bothered the consuls. The Chinese had adroitly placed them in
a difficult position. A failure to cooperate would look bad; but revenue
is revenue, on the Chinese Coast as elsewhere. More, if they could play
for time, the enforcement in the native city, by driving the smokers over
into the concessions, would actually increase the revenue. So the consuls
played for time. They spread the impression "back home" that they were
going to close the dens. When? Oh, soon--very soon. There were matters of
detail to attend to. The licenses must run out. Then, too, perhaps the
Chinese proposals were "insincere"--a little time would show.