GENERAL EXPECTATIONS
With the opening of China as a Republic the progress to be made in
education will undoubtedly be stupendous. Missionaries will probably
find an ever-increasing field. Missionaries and educationists will
have a freer hand and be everywhere more greatly respected. They
will play more than ever an increasing part in uplifting the people.
Lord William Gascoign-Cecil has pointed out that if the West is to be
saved she must illuminate China, and he says unless that vast country
has attained the same standard as ourselves we must undergo a process
of degradation. Our civilisation grew up, like our old towns, under
the shadow of the Church; you will see in any country in Christendom
the village clustering round the church, the town round the
cathedral. Of late years big factory chimneys have been covered with
the smoke of industry; still, they have left their mark as much on
our civilisation as on our landscapes. But now a country which knows
nothing of church or cathedral is entering into that civilisation,
and the church and the cathedral become things of archæological
interest and nothing more, unless, indeed, the Church will take the
opportunity and conquer the industrial China that threatens the West.
"I do not mean," said Lord William Cecil, "only by sending out
missionaries, but also by teaching the future rulers of this great
industrial people the truth and value of a Christian civilisation.
The pessimist {31} says this is impossible, and thus sounds the knell
of our social legislation; but the Christian says the world is built
for progress, and the acquisition of China to our civilisation is our
opportunity for making the world a happier place. If we could at
this moment help the Chinese to value the high principles which
underlie our Western thought, China might be rendered happy by the
brilliant light of a Christian civilisation and the world saved from
a disaster of having labour sink from a Christian to a semi-Oriental
status."
And although the fall of the Manchu dynasty will open the pathway
into real progress in this land, we must agree that there is an
infinite pathos in the Child-Emperor, ignorant, innocent, abdicating
the throne which his forefathers had won, a mere pawn in the game
between Chinese and Manchus. But pathetic as this incident is, we
must not let its pathos obscure in our minds its more important
aspects; it is not only the abdication of an Emperor we have to
consider, but it is also the destruction of the conventional and
artificial Chinese civilisation before the vigorous civilisation of
the West. Vast China, with its four hundred millions of industrious
population, with its infinite resources of coal, iron, and other
minerals, with its traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Lamaism,
has become part, and a very large part, too, of Western civilisation.
We are indeed, during our generation, watching the making of history
wonderful in its possibilities. The following quotation from the
writer quoted may be intensely prophetic:--
"We are opening a new volume in the history of the world--a volume in
which strange and terrible things may be written; a volume which, on
the other hand, may contain a brighter story than any of us conceive
to be possible. How one longs to read that volume as it will be
written by the historian a hundred or two hundred years hence! Will
it run thus: 'From {32} this time the condition of the working class
of Europe began steadily to deteriorate, and though the short-sighted
statesmen of the twentieth century failed to appreciate it, this was
the inevitable result of adding to the working men of the world a
population remarkable for its industry and so inured to poverty that
its workers gladly submitted to conditions which the Western workmen
naturally and with justice refused'? Or will it run thus: 'The
decadent Christianity of the West, corrupted by luxury, divided by
sectional strife, received new life under the influence of the more
sincere Chinese Christianity, purified in the harsh school of
persecution and stimulated by the great political upheaval which
caused the deposition of the Manchu Emperor'?"
We cannot take down the volume, we cannot read to the end; we must
wait as year after year the pages are turned over, but we shall do
well to appreciate the importance of this page of contemporary
history.
China now will undergo before our very eyes a social and commercial
and educational transformation, and so speedily will events in the
main transpire that if one is to get the historical march of events
fixed in his mind it is necessary to read at once what has passed.
As soon as any national event passes now it falls speedily back into
history. We cannot keep pace with all that transpires. Changes pass
even us who live in China for the most part unnoticed. The face of
China whilst we look upon it takes on a new appearance.
It is well that we should read of the doings leading up to this great
era of transition.
{33}