In spite, too, of the agnostic teachings of Confucius and their own practical temperament, the Chinese are a very superstitious people and live in constant terror of evil spirits. The grossest superstitions prevail among them, while beyond any other people known to us they are stagnant, spiritually dead, densely ignorant of those higher levels of thought and life to which Christianity has raised whole classes in Europe and America.

Some people who are ignorant of the real situation in China are being misled by an anonymous little book entitled ''Letters From a Chinese Official.'' The author insists that Anglo-Saxon institutions are far inferior to the institutions of China. He declares that ''our religion (Chinese) is more rational than yours, our morality higher and our institutions more perfect,''

and that there is less real happiness in Europe and America than in China. As for Christianity, he regards it as quite impracticable. He holds that Confucianism is feasible and that Christianity is not, and much more to the same effect. There is strong internal evidence that the author is not a Chinese at all, but a cynical European. At any rate, the book is an ex parte statement of the most glaring kind, omitting the good in Europe and America and the bad in China. One who has visited the Celestial Empire gasps when he reads that the Chinese houses are ''cheerful and clean,'' that the Chinese live the life of the mind and the spirit to a far higher degree than the Christian peoples of the West, and that Chinese life has a dignity and peace and beauty which Europe cannot equal. ''Such silence! Such sounds! Such perfume! Such colour!''

the author rhapsodizes. Bishop Graves, of Shanghai, who has spent a quarter of a century in China and who is therefore presumably competent to speak, declares:

''Far be it from me to belittle the beauty of the Chinese landscape; but why did he not leave out that about the perfume? Why, you can smell China out at sea! However, it is just as easy to imagine the perfume as the rest of it, while you are writing. . . . Exaggeration is the most conspicuous note of these 'Letters.' Any one who has not seen China can test whether this book is true to fact by comparing it with any narrative of sober travel, and if he happens to live in China, his own nose and eyes are a sufficient witness. . . . The writer takes the worst of our morals, the weakest of our religion, the most debasing of our industrial conditions, the most pernicious of our vices, and against them he sets not the best that China can show, but an exaggerated picture which is false to fact. This is not argument but trickery, because it presumes on the fact that one's readers will know no better.''

Indeed, the Rev. Dr. C. H. Fenn, who has resided in Peking for ten years, writes that he cannot believe that the author of ''Letters from a Chinese Official'' is a sincere man.

He continues:

''I would be almost willing to assert that it is impossible for a man, brought up in China, then spending many years abroad, to return to China and write such a book in honesty and sincerity of heart. He could not possibly help knowing that nine-tenths of what he was writing about China was absolutely untrue, that her political, legal, social, domestic and personal life are rotten to the core, and that only in a few exceptional cases is any pretence even made of living according to the ethics of Confucius. It might be possible for an educated man, whose surroundings had always been of an exceptionally good character, and who had never gone outside of his own province or studied foreign books, to write with some enthusiasm of the beauties of Chinese life, but not for any one else.''

Still, at a time when the Chinese are being vociferously abused, it is only fair that we should give them credit for the good qualities which they do possess. I ask with Dr. William Elliott Griffis: ''In talking of our brother men, what shall be our general principle, detraction or fair play? Because lackadaisical writers picture the Christless nations as in the innocence of Eden, shall we, at the antipodes of fact and truth, proceed to blacken their characters? Shall we compare the worst in Canton, Benares or Zululand, with the best in London, Berlin or Philadelphia? Surely God cannot look with complacency or hear with delight much of the practical slander spoken among white folks and Anglo-Saxons of His children and our brothers.''

There has been too much of a disposition to think of the Chinese as a mass, almost as we would regard immense herds of cattle or shoals of fish. Why not rather think of the Chinese as an individual, as a man of like passions with ourselves? Physically, mentally, and morally he differs from us only in degree, not in kind. He has essentially the same hopes and fears, the same joys and sorrows, the same susceptibility to pain and the same capacity for happiness. Are we not told that God ''hath made of one blood all nations of men''?

We complacently imagine that we are superior to the Chinese.

But discussing the question as to what constitutes superiority and inferiority of race, Benjamin Kidd declares that ''we shall have to set aside many of our old ideas on the subject. Neither in respect alone of colour, nor of descent, nor even of the possession of high intellectual capacity, can science give us any warrant for speaking of one race as superior to another.'' Real superiority is the result, not so much of anything inherent in one race as distinguished from another, as of the operation upon a race and within it of certain uplifting forces. Any superiority that we now possess is due to the action upon us of these forces. But they can be brought to bear upon the Chinese as well as upon us. We should avoid the popular mistake of looking at the Chinese ''as if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul in a man's face.''[9] ''There is nothing,'' says Stopford Brooke, ''that needs so much patience as just judgment of a man. We ought to know his education, the circumstances of his life, the friends he has made or lost, his temperament, his daily work, the motives which filled the act, the health he had at the time--we ought to have the knowledge of God to judge him justly.''

[9] George Eliot.

We need in this study a truer idea of the worth and dignity of man as man, a realization that back of almond eyes and under a yellow skin are all the faculties and the possibilities of a human soul, to grasp the great thought that the Chinese is not only a man, but our brother man, made like ourselves in the image of God. Let us have the charity which sees beneath all external peculiarities our common humanity, which leads us to respect a man because he is a man; which, no matter what complexion he may have, no matter where he lives, no matter to what degradation he has fallen, will take him by the hand and endeavour to elevate him to a higher plane of life. For him we need an enthusiasm for humanity which shall not be a sentimental rhetoric, but a catholic, throbbing love, remembering that he is

''Heir of the same inheritance, Child of the self-same God, He hath but stumbled in the path We have in weakness trod.''

Ruskin reminds us that the filthy mud from the street of a manufacturing town is composed of clay, sand, soot and water; that the clay may be purified into the radiance of the sapphire; that the sand may be developed into the beauty of the opal; that the soot may be crystallized into the glory of the diamond and that the water may be changed into a star of snow. So man in Asia as well as in America may, by the transforming power of God's Spirit, be ennobled into the kingly dignity of divine sonship. We shall get along best with the Chinese if we remember that he is a human being like ourselves, responsive to kindness, appreciative of justice and capable of moral transformation under the influence of the Gospel. He differs from us not in the fundamental things that make for manhood, but only in the superficial things that are the result of environment. From this view-point, we can say with Shakespeare:--

''There is some sort of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distil it out.''

Those who are wont to refer so contemptuously to the Chinese might profitably recall that when, in Dickens' ''Christmas Carol,'' the misanthropic Scrooge says of the poor and suffering: ''If he be like to die, he had better do it and decrease the surplus population,''--the Ghost sternly replies:--

''Man, if man you be at heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Ah, God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!''

III

ATTITUDE TOWARDS FOREIGNERS--CHARACTER AND ACHIEVEMENTS

TO understand China's attitude towards foreigners, the following considerations must be borne in mind:--

First, the conservative temperament of the Chinese.

It is true but misleading, to say that they have ''no word or written character for patriotism, but 150 ways of writing the characters for good luck and longlife.'' For while the Chinese may have little love for country, they have an intense devotion to their own customs. For nearly 5,000 years, while other empires have risen, flourished and fallen, they have lived apart, sufficient unto themselves, cherishing their own ideals, plodding along their well-worn paths, ignorant of or indifferent to the progress of the Western world, mechanically memorizing dead classics, and standing still comparatively amid the tremendous onrush of modern civilization. I say comparatively still, for if we carefully study Chinese history, we shall find that this vast nation has not been so inert as we have long supposed. The very revolutions and internal commotions of all kinds through which China has passed would have prevented mere inertia. But when we compare these movements and the changes that they have wrought with the kaleidoscopic transformations in Europe and America, China appears the most stationary of nations. She has moved less in centuries than western peoples have in decades. The restless Anglo-Saxon is alternately irritated and awed by this massive solidity, not to say stolidity. There is, after all, something impressive about it, the impressiveness of a mighty glacier which moves, indeed, but so slowly and majestically that the duration of an ordinary nation's life appears insignificant as compared with the almost timeless majesty of the Chinese Empire.

Second, the vastness of China. Her territory and population are so enormous that her people found sufficient scope for their energies within their own borders. They therefore felt independent of outsiders. The typical European nation is so limited in area and is so near to equally civilized and powerful peoples that it could not if it would live unto itself. The situation of most nations forces them into relations with others.

But China had a third of the human race and a tenth of the habitable globe entirely to herself, with no neighbours who had anything that she really cared for. It was inevitable, therefore, that a naturally conservative people should become a self- centred and self-satisfied people.

Third, the character of adjacent nations. None of them were equal to the Chinese in civilization and learning, while in territory and population, they were relatively insignificant.

Even Japan, by far the most powerful of them, has only a tenth of China's population, while her remarkable progress in intelligence and power is a matter of less than a couple generations.

Until recently, indeed, Japan was as backward as China and was not ashamed to receive many of her ideas from her larger neighbour, as the number of Chinese characters in the Japanese language plainly show. As for China's other neighbours, who were they? Weak nations which abjectly sent tribute by commissioners who grovelled before the august Emperor of the Middle Kingdom, or barbarous tribes which the Chinese regarded about as Americans regard the aboriginal Indians.

Gibson translates the following passage from a Chinese historian as illustrative at once of China's haughty contempt of outsiders and of her reasons for it:

''The former kings in measuring out the land put the Imperial territory in the centre. Inside was the Chinese Empire, and outside were the barbarous nations. The barbarians are covetous and greedy of gain. Their hair hangs down over their bodies, and their coats are buttoned on the left side. They have human faces, but the hearts of beasts. They are distinguished from the natives of the Empire both by their manners and their dress. They differ both in their customs and their food, and in language they are utterly unintelligible. . . . On this account the ancient sage kings treated them like birds and beasts. They did not contract treaties, nor did they attack them. To form a treaty is simply to spend treasure and to be deceived; to attack them is simply to wear out the troops and provoke raids. . . . Thus the outer are not to be brought inside. They must be held at a distance, avoiding familiarity. . . . If they show a leaning towards right principles and present tributary offerings, they should be treated with a yielding etiquette; but bridling and repression must never be relaxed for conforming to circumstance. Such was the constant principle of the sage monarchs in ruling and controlling the barbarian tribes.''

It is not surprising, therefore, that when foreigners from the distant West sought to force their way into China, the Chinese, knowing nothing of the countries from which they came, should have regarded them in accordance with their traditional belief and policy regarding the inferiority of all outsiders.

The resultant difficulty was intensified by the indifference, to use no harsher term, of the foreigner to the fact that the Chinese are a very ceremonious people, extremely punctilious in all social relations and disposed to regard a breach of etiquette as a cardinal sin. ''Face'' is a national institution which must be preserved at all hazards.

No one can get along with the Chinese who does not respect it.

''It is an integral part of both Chinese theory and practice that realities are of much less importance than appearances. If the latter can be saved, the former may be altogether surrendered. This is the essence of that mysterious 'face' of which we are never done hearing in China.

The line of Pope might be the Chinese national motto: 'Act well your part, there all the honour lies'; not, be it observed, doing well what is to be done, but consummate acting, contriving to convey the appearance of a thing or a fact, whatever the realities may be. This is Chinese high art; this is success. It is self-respect, and it involves and implies the respect of others. It is, in a word, 'face.' The preservation of 'face'

frequently requires that one should behave in an arbitrary and violent manner merely to emphasize his protests against the course of current events.

He or she must fly into a violent rage, he or she must use reviling and perhaps imprecatory language, else it will not be evident to the spectators of the drama, in which he is at the moment acting, that he is aware just what ought to be done by a person in his precise situation; and then he will have 'no way to descend from the stage,' or in other words, he will have lost 'face.' ''[10]

[10] Smith, ''Rex Christus,'' pp. 107, 108.

Even in death this remains the ruling passion. Chinese coffins require much wood and are an expensive burden in this land where timber is scarce, for Confucius said that a coffin should be five inches thick. So the poorer Chinese thriftily meet this requirement by making the sides and ends hollow! Thus ''face'' is saved.

In these circumstances, it was very important that the relations of Europeans to China should be characterized not only by justice but by tact and at least decent respect for the feelings and customs of the people. The chief cause of China's hostility to foreigners undoubtedly lies in the notorious and often contemptuous disregard of these things by the majority of the white men who have entered China and by the Governments which have backed them.

There is much in the Chinese that is worthy of our respectful recognition. Multitudes are indeed, stolid and ignorant, but multitudes, too, have strong, intelligent features. Thousands of children have faces as bright and winning as those of American children. More strongly than ever do I feel that Europe and America have not done justice to the character of the Chinese. I do not refer to the bigoted and corrupt Manchu officials, or to the lawless barbarians who, like the ''lewd fellows of the baser sort'' in other lands, are ever ready to follow the leadership of a demagogue. But I refer to the Chinese people as a whole. Their view-point is so radically different from ours that we have often harshly misjudged them, when the real trouble has lain in our failure to understand them.

Let us be free enough from prejudice and passion to respect a people whose national existence has survived the mutations of a definitely known historic period of thirty-seven centuries and of an additional legendary period that runs back no man knows how far into the haze of a hoary antiquity; who are frugal, patient, industrious and respectful to parents, as we are not; whose astronomers made accurate recorded observations 200 years before Abraham left Ur; who used firearms at the beginning of the Christian era; who first grew tea, manufactured gunpowder, made pottery, glue and gelatine; who wore silk and lived in houses when our ancestors wore the undressed skins of wild animals and slept in caves; who invented printing by movable types 500 years before that art was known in Europe; who discovered the principles of the mariner's compass without which the oceans could not be crossed, conceived the idea of artificial inland waterways and dug a canal 600 miles long; who made mountain roads which, in the opinion of Dr. S. Wells Williams, ''when new probably equalled in engineering and construction anything of the kind ever built by Romans;'' and who invented the arch to which our modern architecture is so greatly indebted.

In the Great Bell Temple two miles from Peking is one of the wonderful bells of the world. It is fourteen feet high, thirty-four feet in circumference at the rim, nine inches thick and weighs 120,000 pounds. It is literally covered inside and out with Chinese characters consisting of extracts from the sacred writings, and the Rev. Dr. John Wherry, who is an expert in the Chinese language, says that there is ''not one imperfect character among them.'' The bell when struck by the big wooden clapper emits a deep musical note that can be heard for miles. Such a magnificent bell vividly illustrates the stage of civilization reached by the Chinese while Europe was comparatively barbarous, for the bell was cast as far back as 1406 in the reign of Yung-loh, and the present temple buildings were erected about it in 1578. The Germans began using paper in 1190, but Sven Hedin found Chinese paper 1,650 years old and there is evidence that paper was in common use by the Chinese 150 years before Christ. Until a few hundred years ago, European business was conducted on the basis of coin or barter. But long before that, the Chinese had banks and issued bills of exchange. There has recently been placed in the British Museum a bank-note issued by Hung-Wu, Emperor of China, in 1368.

The Chinese exalt learning and, alone among the nations of the earth, make scholarship a test of fitness for official position.

True, that scholarship moves along narrow lines of Confucian classics, but surely such knowledge is a higher qualification for office than the brute strength which for centuries gave precedence among our ancestors. A Chinese writer explains as follows the gradations in relative worth as they are esteemed by his countrymen: ''First the scholar: because mind is superior to wealth, and it is the intellect that distinguishes man above the lower orders of beings, and enables him to provide food and raiment and shelter for himself and for other creatures.

Second, the farmer: because the mind cannot act without the body, and the body cannot exist without food, so that farming is essential to the existence of man, especially in civilized society. Third, the mechanic: because next to food, shelter is a necessity, and the man who builds a house comes next in honour to the man who provides food. Fourth, the tradesman: because, as society increases and its wants are multiplied, men to carry on exchange and barter become a necessity, and so the merchant comes into existence. His occupation --shaving both sides, the producer and consumer--tempts him to act dishonestly; hence his low grade. Fifth, the soldier stands last and lowest in the list, because his business is to destroy and not to build up society. He consumes what others produce, but produces nothing himself that can benefit mankind.

He is, perhaps, a necessary evil.''[11]

[11] Quoted by Beach, ''Dawn on the Hills of T'ang,'' pp. 45, 46.

While the Government of China is a paternal despotism in form and while it is always weak and corrupt and often cruel and tyrannical in practice, nevertheless there is a larger measure of individual freedom than might be supposed. ''There are no passports, no restraints on liberty, no frontiers, no caste prejudices, no food scruples, no sanitary measures, no laws except popular customs and criminal statutes. China is in many senses one vast republic, in which personal restraints have no existence.''[12]