THE SCOURGES OF CHINA.
It is the present war between China and Japan that has brought Korea to
our general notice; has caused us to ask and learn something of where
and what Korea is. It is this war that will largely open up Korea,
directly or indirectly, to Occidental travellers, to Occidental
adventurers, and to Occidental enterprise.
Whatever the ultimate effect of the war upon Japan the effect will be
far greater upon Korea, greater even than it will be upon China. China
is a huge place, and will, I think, change but slowly, no matter how
great her defeat may be, no matter how many and how sweeping the
concessions she may perforce yield to Japan. Korea is small and weak,
and may, if force enough is brought to bear upon her, change swiftly.
Korea has been now almost lost sight of in the present struggle; because
it has ceased to be the theatre of the strife. But the war concerns
Korea no whit less than it concerns China and Japan. This war is an
essential part of Korea’s history—the most recent scene in Korea’s
dramatic life.
With the war in the details of its action we are all very familiar, at
this moment. But I doubt if we are quite _au courant_ of the causes of
the war; and we have yet much to learn of the two interesting peoples
who are waging the war.
There are several reasons why China fell a fighting of Japan—China had
to, for Japan forced the war—China hates Japan—China, an important
part of China, was unnerved by a fearful plague and easily excited into
indulging in the dissipation of war. It was easy and comparatively safe
for Japan to make China fight, because China had for years so neglected
the art of war (if so holy a name may be attached to so often so unholy
a thing), that she was ill prepared to cope with any foe that was more
than a foe of straw; was ill prepared but did not know it. The Chinese
for long have not regarded warfare as the manliest of occupations.
Scholars, not soldiers, are their beau ideals, and the scum of their
populace fills the ranks of their standing army. Their officers know
little of military tactics, and are wont to direct, from behind the
curtains of palanquins, the actions of their troops.
Japan has fallen a fighting of China because she hates China; because
she dearly loves a bit of glory, and saw a splendid chance to gain it;
and because she too felt the need of a national stimulant: the course of
her true politics had not been flowing over smoothly, and she had been
badly unnerved by earthquake.
China is the home of the wild white roses, of supreme philosophy, and of
deadly pestilence. The recent plague in Hong Kong and Canton was merely
an outbreak of an inevitably recurrent pest which is the sure result of
the conditions of Chinese life. We are railing loudly just now against
Chinese dirt. I feel that Chinese dirt is very much less than Chinese
poverty. And it is a significant fact that the dirt and the poverty are
usually found together. The houses and grounds of the rich Chinese that
I have known in Singapore, in Penang, in Shanghai, and in Hong Kong,
have been models of order and neatness, if not (according to European
standards) of beauty.
The poorer quarters of the Chinese cities are undeniably filthy. But it
is the filth bred of overcrowding and of dire penury, and of the
inability of the government to cope with such enormous masses of
humanity, rather than of natural uncleanliness. It is an almost
infallible rule that only lazy people are dirty; sloth and filth are old
bedfellows. The Chinese are the most industrious, thrifty nation on our
globe; and I am convinced that the national dirt, the dirt of the poorer
classes, is their misfortune and not their fault.
But there the dirt is, and, like a thousand maggot-breeding filth-heaps,
it is constantly creating horrid germs of deadly disease.
It is very much to our national shame that the Chinese quarters of Hong
Kong are almost as filthy as the poorer parts of Canton. We are absolute
in Hong Kong; but we have done disgracefully little for the sanitation
of the native quarters in the island we have conquered.
And yet Hong Kong ought to be the healthiest city in the world, the
freest from pestilence. I know of no other city so admirably situated
for conditions of health. Aside from the beauty of the place, and
regarding it only as adaptable to healthy modes of human life and
residence, it is ideal. And our flag waves over Hong Kong. And yet but
yesterday a plague was raging there; only to think of which must make
the gorge of Christendom rise.
While the plague raged, no doubt everything was done that terror and
wisdom could devise. But the evil is deep-rooted, and it will not be
uprooted in an hour.
Except for their unavoidable proximity to the possibility of dire
disease (in which the Chinese are born, live, and die), the European
inhabitants of Hong Kong are in every way to be envied.
Alas! almost the latest duty of the _doyen_ of that Queen’s house was
the sending of a disinfecting party through the plague-stricken
districts of Hong Kong—a party including British soldiers, some of whom
were attacked by the seemingly invincible plague, and died a death
almost Chinese in its horror.
The conditions of well-to-do Chinese life are very pleasant in Hong
Kong.
But in the Hong Kong of the poor there is nothing much but a tragic
struggle for human existence, and misery, misery almost unalleviated,
and yet not quite unalleviated. The poorest, hardest pressed of the
Chinese have—more than most peoples—the love of home, the joy in work,
the affection for kith and kin that go far to alleviate any lot, however
hard. And they have other blessings—the poverty-cursed Chinese—they
have their festivals and their temples. The cobbler, who sits by the
wayside and works for a few sen, smokes now and again his tiny pipe of
opium; he burns his incense sticks and his red, paper prayers in the
joss-house, and once in every four years he contributes some mite of
work, of treasure, or of interest to the Söul festival.
Plagues fall upon China almost with a grim regularity; they crush into
terrible graves countless thousands. But China goes on, and the Chinese
go on; and, ignorant as they may often be of the laws of sanitation,
they remain for ever steadfast to themselves and to their country, and
to what they conceive to be for the best advantage of both. What nation
does more?
We have made many conquests in the East. But we have not been altogether
victorious over Asiatic disease. We have carried our flag in triumph
into the Chinaman’s Mecca—into Pekin. And we have knocked open the
doors of the emperor’s palace, knocked them open with the butts of our
rifles. We have made Shamien our own. We have made it bloom like a fair
English garden, and at the very gate of Canton; where it lies a mute but
eloquent reproach to the filth of the Chinese city. We have gained the
probably most beautifully situated city in the world—the city of Hong
Kong—and there we have built for our soldiers an almost ideal barrack.
But we have been powerless—we are powerless to-day against the
relentless outbreak of a Chinese plague. And Shamien—that proud spot of
our, perhaps, supremest Chinese triumph—reeks with the poisonous stench
that comes from Canton.
Alas! alas! We have paid a high price for our occupancy of Asia. We have
often sacrificed to her our children.
The history of China is spotted with plagues. And the sanitary condition
of many of the Chinese cities and the density of their populations are
such that we can scarcely hope for China a future much freer from such
plagues than her past has been.
Go into the native market in Hong Kong; see the burning sun pour down
upon the half putrid fish and a hundred unwholesome looking native
foods; see the dense, sweating, seething human mass that is packed in
among the stalls, and you will wonder that Hong Kong is ever free from
pestilence. But the European residents of Hong Kong are not, as a rule,
over familiar with the details of the native quarter. They live on the
Peak, or on the outskirts of the beautiful public gardens, where no
smells reach them coarser than the indescribable perfume of the
wisteria.
Nothing could be lovelier, happier than Hong Kong the European. It is a
place of charming bungalows, of superb verdure, a place of green hills
and of fanning breezes, a place of shady streets and sweetly fragrant
nooks.
Nothing could be more picturesque, nothing could be sadder than most of
Hong Kong the Chinese. It is a crowded place of deepest poverty. When I
have said that, I have said it all.
As I have said, the Chinese are not, I believe, greatly responsible for
either the gravity or the frequency of their epidemics. Poverty, extreme
poverty, commits most of the crimes against the Chinese health. People
who are too poor to buy soap cannot wash themselves, and much less their
clothes. People who can afford none of the necessities of health cannot
be blamed for falling ill. And the Chinese government, which is at the
fountain head the most paternal of all governments (but corrupt in many
of its branches), is unable to cope with the unavoidable poverty of
China’s overplus of humanity in those parts of the empire in which the
population is densest and most congested. It is a common mistake to
suppose that there are more people in China than China could support if
those people were equally scattered over her vast territory. But in the
great centres of Chinese life the people are overcrowded to starvation
and to pestilence.
Yes; things seem to be going rather badly in Asia just now—Mahommedan
and Hindoo strife, mysterious and ominous mango smearing, native
regimental insubordination, and buried treasure that refuses to be dug
up, are rife in India and Burmah. Siam is slowly, but I fear surely,
disappearing within the insatiable maw of France. China has been smitten
down by a dire plague. Japan has been torn with earthquake: and now a
black war cloud has broken over the Far East, drenching with its deadly
rain of bullets Korea, China, and Japan.
For centuries Korea has given China and Japan an excuse to exchange
discourtesies, and to vent a spleen, which for many hundreds of years
has sometimes slept, but never slept soundly, and much less died.
The Koreans have never of recent years been skilful in averting calamity
from themselves or from their country. The Japanese are as brave as they
are venturesome. The knight errant spirit that characterized old feudal
Japan has by no means died out of Japan the new, probably never will die
out of Japan. It is “bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.” The land
which was for so many decades the theatre of that dignified but horrible
butchery called Hari-Kari, is not the land of cowards. Hari-Kari, or
self-disembowelment, was looked upon in old Japan as a ceremonial of
more than religious importance. And, even now, numbers of the Japanese
deplore the abolition of Hari-Kari. It follows that the Japanese are
neither afraid to die, nor reluctant to fight against fearful odds. But
it is China who is fighting against fearful odds now. And yet I venture
to think that in the long run Japan will lose more, gain less than her
adversary. The Chinese are slow to anger. They are slower to forgive.
They are not fond of withdrawing from any position they have taken. They
are not prone to look at things through the eyes of others. They are not
easy to convince. The Chinese in things military are shockingly behind
the times, and the Japanese are splendidly up-to-date. But there are
qualities that are, in the long run, more apt to win an Oriental war
than being up-to-date.
China may cry, “Peccavi,” but she won’t mean it. Unless, indeed, she be
permanently crippled she will bide her time, watch her opportunity, and
fight again and to better purpose. Japan is China’s natural foe. China
has forgiven us, I verily believe, for forcing ourselves into Pekin and
for wresting from her Hong Kong. But she will never forgive Japan. And
why should she? Shame to any nation that forgives a Port Arthur!
In half a day the Japanese can steam from their own coast to Korea: but
also any Power in possession of Korea can steam from there to Japan as
quickly. Korea is certainly more necessary to Japan than to China. But
geographical propinquity does not necessarily constitute territorial
right; and so far as we can judge the merits and demerits of so
perplexed, so involved, so almost prehistoric, so Oriental a question,
China has more right to Korea than Japan has. But international right is
fast becoming (if it has not already become) a matter of national might,
and concerning Korea the question of the moment is not, as it was a few
months ago, “Who will fight the better, China or Japan?” but “How far
shall we let them fight?”
Russia has her eye upon Korea. Even the United States may crave to stick
a finger, a modest little finger, in this political pie.
What right have we to interfere in the quarrels of Eastern Powers? What
right have we? It is too late for us to think of that now. We have
kinsfolk in all those Oriental places, and shall have in the generations
to come. It is our supreme duty to protect them, even though to do that
‘great right we do a little wrong.’ Russia securely, strongly lodged in
Korea would not be an altogether desirable sight for British eyes.
And Korea, where does she come in in the present quarrel? Alas, she bids
fair to go out, unless indeed Europe should be sentimentally chivalrous
and forbid the disnationalization of one of the few remaining unchanged
countries of the old Eastern world, and decree that Korea should remain
yet a little longer a steadfast landmark upon the ever shifting sands of
history.
What rights have the Koreans in the matter? Alas, it is also too late to
ask that question. Their rights seem very apt to be torn into shreds
between the dragons of China and Japan, or else to be (as most Eastern
rights are) crushed into dust beneath the heavy but righteous foot of
advancing civilization.