Even the Grand Vizier of Persia has paid a state visit to Japan.

Any hopes of India and Persia are likely to be vain, for Britain has a hold upon the former and Russia upon the latter which it would be Quixotic in the Japanese to attempt to break. The Islanders are not fools. But the Siamese, helplessly exasperated by the encroachments of the French, would doubtless be glad enough to enter into an alliance with Japan and China.

In 1902, the Crown Prince of Siam visited Japan, where he was most graciously welcomed, and increasing numbers of Japanese who know what they are about are obtaining increasing influence in the Land of the White Elephant.

Nor is it simply by sending Japanese to neighbouring countries that Japan is extending her power. She is encouraging Chinese students to come to her shores. Dr. David S. Spencer of Japan declares that 300 Chinese are studying the art of war in Japanese barracks. Dr. Sydney L. Gulick says that 5,000 Chinese are being trained in the schools of Japan for positions of future power in their own country. It is significant that Viceroy Yuan Shih Kai, the ablest and most far-seeing statesman in China, is reported in the telegraphic despatches of February 5, 1904, as having memorialized the Throne in favour of an offensive and defensive alliance with Japan to regain Manchuria from the Russians, while the North China Daily News represents Prince Su, Prince Ching, Na Tung, President of the Wai-wu-pu, and Tieh Liang as in favour of the same policy. Mr. Holcombe is of the opinion that ''the brightest spot in the outlook for China is in the increasing probability of alliance and affiliation with Japan. . . . Together these two great nations of the Far East may, and it is confidently hoped will, safely confront those Governments whose schemes are hostile to both, and prove their right to manage their own affairs and determine their own destinies.''[91]

[91] Article in The Outlook, February 13, 1904.

But whatever the immediate future may be, it is not probable that so huge and virile a population as the Chinese will be permanently led by a foreign nation. Even if partition should come, it would only hasten the development of those teeming millions of people, for foreign domination would mean more railway, telegraph and steamship lines. It would mean the opening of mines, the development of the press, the complete ascendency of Western ideas. Though China as a political organism might be divided, the Chinese people would remain-- the most virile, industrious, untiring people of Asia, and perhaps, after due tutelage, a coming power of the world. China's assimilative power is enormous. The black man may be dominated by the white and the Hindu by the English, but China is neither Africa nor India. It is true that the present dynasty is Manchu, but the Manchus are more akin to the Chinese than either the Russians or the Japanese. Moreover the Manchus have not tried to rule China from the outside, but have permanently settled in China, and while they have succeeded as a rule in maintaining a separate name, they have not made the Chinese Manchus, but instead they have themselves been prac- tically merged into the engulfing mass of China. ''Those who imagine that the vast population of the Empire will submit quietly to the partition of their country, or that any military force of moderate size could force it to acquiesce in such a scheme, know but little of the Chinese character, of their intense love of country, or of their unconquerable tenacity of purpose.''[92] The foreign nation that gets the Chinese, or even any considerable portion of them, will probably find that it has assumed a burden in comparison with which the Egyptian trouble with the Israelites was insignificant, and it is not improbable that the conqueror will some day find himself conquered.

[92] Chester Holcombe, article in The Outlook, February 13, 1904.

At any rate, portentous possibilities are conjured up by the contemplation of this mighty nation! There are upheavals compared with which our revolutions are but spasms. There are religions whose adherents outnumber ours two to one.

There is a civilization which was old before ours was born.

Are we to believe that these swarming legions were created for no purpose? Are their generations to appear and fall and rot unnoticed, like the leaves of the forest? Degraded, superstitious, many of them still are. But they need only to be organized and directed to do untold mischief. More than once already has a similar catastrophe occurred. Some prodigy of skill and genius has seized such enormous forces, given them discipline and coherency and hurled them like a thunderbolt upon Christendom. Sometimes the shock has been frightful, and before it the proudest of empires and the stateliest of institutions have reeled and fallen. This was the Titan-like achievement of Alaric, of Genseric, of Attila, and of Mohammed.

Yet Goths and Vandals, Huns and Mohammedans, combined, had not half the numbers upon which we now look.

Give the 426,000,000 Chinese the results of modern discovery and invention, and imagination falters. They have the territory.

They have the resources. They have the population and they are now acquiring the knowledge. China will fight no more like the barbarians of old with spears and bows and arrows, for despite the treaty of 1900 prohibiting the importation of arms, the Chinese are buying repeating rifles and Maxim guns, while in their own arsenals they are turning out vast quantities of munitions of war. The American consul at Leipsic, Germany, reports to the State Department that an Austrian company has just received an order for so large a number of small arms for the Chinese Government that it will take several years to fill it, even with additional forces of men to whom it has given employment. This is only one of many reports received in Washington within recent months that the factories of both Germany and Austria are busy supplying the Chinese with modern arms and ammunition. The armies of China will soon be as well equipped as the armies of Europe.

Incredible as it may seem, up to the year 1901, promotion in the army was often determined by trials of strength with stone weights, dexterity in sword exercises and skill in the use of the bow and arrow. But in that year, an Imperial Decree declared that such tests ''have no relation to strategy and to that military science which is indispensable for military officers,''

commanded that they be abolished and that military academies should be established in the provincial capitals in which the science of modern war should be diligently studied.

Not content with this, forty young men were sent to Europe in 1903 for the express purpose of studying the latest military and naval methods of the white man. And now Sir Robert Hart proposes not only a reorganization of China's civil service but the building of a first-class navy of thirty battleships and cruisers, and he thinks that the enormous sum of $200,000,000 a year can be obtained for this purpose by an increase in the land tax. Then, he declares, China will be enabled ''not only to make her voice heard, but to take an effective share in the settlement of questions in the Far East.'' The London Times rather contemptuously asserts that ''the entire project in its present shape is visionary from beginning to end.''

But Sir Robert Hart has spent fifty years in China, having entered the British consular service in 1854 and become Inspector-General of Maritime Customs in 1863. During the greater part of this long period, he has been an adviser of the Chinese Government and the most influential foreigner in the Empire. The recommendation of such a man is not to be lightly dismissed as ''visionary,'' especially when it is made to a people who have been taught by bitter experience that a modern armament is their only hope of defense against the foreigner. As late as the beginning of the year 1904, Russia ridiculed the idea that Japan could do anything against a western power, and all the rest of Europe as well as America, while admiring the pluck of the Japanese, confidently expected them to be crushed by the Slav. Wise men will think twice in the future before they sneer at the yellow race. If Japan in half a century could go from junks and cloisonne to battleships and magazine rifles, and to the handling of them, too, more scientifically and effectively than they were ever handled by a white man, why should it be deemed chimerical that China, with equal ability and greater resources and certainly no less provocation, should in time achieve even vaster results, particularly as Japan is not only willing but eager to teach her? ''We do not lack either men of intellect or brilliant talents, capable of learning and doing anything they please; but their movements have hitherto been hampered by old prejudices,'' said the Emperor Kuang Hsii. Precisely, and the stern, relentless pressure of necessity is now shattering some of those ''old prejudices.'' ''You urge us to move faster,'' said a Chinese magistrate to a foreigner. ''We are slow to respond for we are a conservative people; but if you force us to start, we may move faster and farther than you like.''

Some things may yet occur undreampt of in all our philosophy.

We observe the changing march of world powers, the majestic procession in which the pomp and glitter of thrones are mingled with the tears and blood of calamity and war. What a pageant! Yesterday, Chaldea, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome! To-day, England, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States! To-morrow, what? What, indeed, if not some of these now awakening nations! It is by no means impossible that some new Jenghiz Khan or Tamerlane may arise, and with the weapons of modern warfare in his hands, and these uncounted millions at his command, gaze about on the pygmies that we call the Powers! Christendom has too long regarded heathen nations with a pity not unmingled with contempt. It is now beginning to regard them with a respect not unmingled with fear.

There is not a statesman in Europe to-day who is not troubled with dire forebodings regarding these teeming hordes, that appear to be just awakening from the torpor of ages, and some thoughtful observers fear that a movement has already begun which will lead to great wars whose issue no man can foresee, and to stupendous reconstructions of the map of the world. The Emperor of Germany has painted a picture which has startled not so much by its art as by its meaning. ''On a projecting rock, illuminated by a shining cross, stand the allegorical figures of the civilized nations. At the feet of this rocky eminence lies the wide plain of European culture, from which rise countless cities and the steeples and spires of churches of every denomination. But ominous clouds are gathering over this peaceful landscape. A stifling gloom o'erspreads the sky. The glare of burning cities lights up the road by which the barbaric hordes of Asia are approaching.

The Archangel Michael points to the fearsome foe, waving the nations on to do battle in a sacred cause. Underneath are the words--'Peoples of Europe, keep guard over your most sacred treasures!' ''

Making all due allowance for the exuberance of Emperor William's imagination, the fact remains that his picture represents the thought that is uppermost to-day in the minds of the world's thinkers. All see that the next few decades are big with possibilities of peril.

''The rudiments of Empire here Are plastic yet and warm, The chaos of a mighty world Is rounding into form.''

One thinks instinctively of the words of Isaiah: ''The noise of a multitude in the mountains, like as of a great people; a tumultuous noise of the kingdoms of nations gathered together; the Lord of hosts mustereth the hosts of the battle.''

Plainly, the overshadowing problem of the present age is the relation of China to the world's future. Whether recent events have lessened the danger, we shall see in the next chapter.

XXVI

FRESH REASON TO HATE THE FOREIGNER

OF course, the victorious march of the Allies upon Peking, the capture of the city, the flight of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager and the humiliating terms of peace taught the Chinese anew their helplessness before the modern equipment of western nations and the necessity of learning the methods of the white man if they were ever to hold their own against him. But defeat, while always hard to bear, does not always embitter the conquered against the conqueror. On the contrary, there are evidences that the Chinese respect and like the Japanese far more since they were soundly whipped by them in 1894 and 1895. In considering, therefore, the effect upon the Chinese of the suppression of the Boxer uprising, we must bear in mind not so much the fact of victory by the Allies as the treatment which they accorded their prostrate foe. Was that treatment dignified and just? Did the soldiers of alleged Christian nations behave with the sobriety and fairness which so eminently characterized the Japanese troops after the China-Japan War? Have the Chinese reason to regard foreigners in the future as men who will sternly punish injustice and treachery, but who are at the same time as moral and humane and trustworthy as might be reasonably expected of the representatives of a higher civilization and a purer religion? For answer, let us turn to the conduct of the allied armies, led by experienced officers of high rank and working in harmony with diplomatic officials who were supposed to incarnate the spirit and methods of the most enlightened nations of the earth. The testimony of witnesses will be interesting.

Dr. Arthur H. Smith, who was in Peking at the time, writes:--

''Bating all exaggerations, it remains true that scores of walled cities have been visited by armed bodies of foreign soldiers, the district magistrate-- and sometimes the Prefect--held up and bullied to force him to pay a large sum of money, with no other reason than the imperative demand and the threat of dire consequences on refusal. In one case the Russians kidnapped the Prefect of Yung-ping-fu and carried him off to Port Arthur. At Ting-chou the French did the same to the sub-prefect, the only energetic magistrate in all that region, bearing him in triumph to Paoting-fu and leaving the district to Boxers and to chaos. At Tsang-chou the Germans came in force, looted the yamen of General Mei, the only Chinese officer of rank who had been constantly fighting and destroying Boxers for nearly a year, drove him away and released all the Boxer prisoners in the jails of the city, plundering the yamen of the friendly and efficient sub-prefect who had saved the lives of the foreign families close by the city. Is it any wonder that General Mei complained that s on eight sides he had no face left.' . . . The robbery of Chinese on the way home with the avails of their day's work has been systematically carried on by some of the soldiers from Christian lands. Even foreigners are 'held up' on the street by drunken soldiers, and it is becoming necessary never to go out without one's revolver--a weapon generally quite superfluous in almost any part of China.''

Bishop D. H. Moore, of the Methodist Church, who hurried to Peking as soon as the way was open, wrote:--

''You can hardly form any conception of the exposure and hardships under any but the American and Japanese flags. The English have scarcely any but the Sikhs, who are lustful and lootful to a degree. The Russians are brutal and the Germans deserve their reputation for brutality.

With Lowry and Hobart, I responded to the agonizing appeal of a husband to drive out a German corporal who, on duty and armed, had run him off and was mistreating his wife. The instance is but one of hundreds of daily occurrence. The French are very devils at this sort of outrage.

On the advance to Peking, beyond Tung-chou, they found married families-- men, women and children--cowering in barges on the canal and volleyed into them. Every man, every cart, every boat must fly a flag.

Coolies are cruelly impressed and often cruelly mistreated. The great Christian nations of the world are being represented in China by robbing, raping, looting soldiery. This is part of China's punishment; but what will she think of Christianity? Of course, our soldiers are the best behaved; but there are desperate characters in every army.''

Captain Frank Brinkley, the editor of the Japan Weekly Mail, penned the following indignant paragraph:--

''It sends a thrill of horror through every white man's bosom to learn that forty missionary women and twenty-five little children were butchered by the Boxers. But in Tung-chou alone, a city where the Chinese made no resistance and where there was no fighting, 573 Chinese women of the upper classes committed suicide rather than survive the indignities they had suffered. Women of the lower classes fared similarly at the hands of the soldiers, but were not unwilling to survive their shame. With what show of consistency is the Occident to denounce the barbarity of the Chinese, when Occidental soldiers go to China and perpetrate the very acts which constitute the very basis of barbarity?''

When I asked the Rev. Dr. D. Z. Sheffield, for many years a missionary of the American Board in Tung-chou, whether this statement was accurate, he replied that it was not only true, but that it was an understatement of the truth.

Fay Chi Ho, an intelligent and reliable Chinese Christian, gives the following account of what he personally saw:--

''I travelled with a British convoy going by boat, occupying quarters on a Major's boat with his Sikh soldiers and cook. I know that the Major was not a Christian man, for he smoked and drank all day long and was constantly cursing, striking and kicking his men, especially his cook. He also gave his orders in loud tones, with fierce mien and glaring eyes, and we all feared him exceedingly. Every day at noon the Major would take four Sikhs and go to villages several miles from the river for loot, always compelling me to accompany him as interpreter.

He would catch the first man whom he saw in a village and compel him to act as guide to the homes of the rich. So successful was he on these raids that by the time he reached Tung-chou, he had three new carts, three donkeys, five or six sheep, and much clothing and bric-a-brac.

''One day about noon, we reached a village from which most of the people had fled, and entering a home of wealth found there only a man about fifty or sixty years old who received us very courteously. Immedi- ately the Major demanded money, and the old man replied that though he had money it was not at hand. The Major then commanded his soldiers to bind him, while he himself went into the house to search for money.

He found several weapons, among them a revolver and a sword with a red scarf bound on the handle. So he insisted that the old man must be a Boxer, and shot him with his own hand as he lay bound. As usual he impressed ten or more young men in the village to carry his loot, then compelled the strongest of them to remain and drag his boats....

Later, my brother told me in detail how some Sikhs had come to the village one day, and, seizing him and several neighbours, had tied a rope to their queues, then stringing them together like mules, with men leading in front and driving behind, had taken them to the river bank to drag boats.

My brother had never done such work before. Wading in mud and water, sometimes up to his waist, with the whip lash to urge him on, he had dragged until nightfall, and then, not being allowed to sleep on the boat, had lain down on the wet river bank.''[93]

[93] ''Two Heroes of Cathay,'' pp. 154, 155, 158.

During my own visit in north China in the summer of 1901, I visited the hospital of the London Mission in Tien-tsin, immortalized by John Kenneth Mackenzie. I found that it was being used as a hospital for British soldiers who were suffering from venereal diseases. What a spectacle for the Chinese!

What a coarse travesty of the religion of the pure Nazarene that the land from which the great British missionary came should crowd with foul white men the hospital that he had built with faith and love and prayer! In the same city, the fine Y. M. C. A. building was almost deserted by the Chinese because it was so situated that to reach it they would have to pass through the Taku Road in the Foreign Settlement, a street which was a cesspool of vice, lined with saloons, dance halls and gambling hells, and its sidewalks so crowded with fast women--French, German, American and Japanese--and with drunken, quarrelling foreign soldiers, that no respectable Chinese, or for that matter no decent foreign woman, could traverse it without fear of insult or abuse.

In Peking for several months after the relief of the legations, even respectable American ladies, to say nothing of Chinese women, could not prudently ride out except in closed carts, so great was the probability of indignity at the hands of foreign soldiers; while at the entrance of famous palaces, the ''public is politely requested not to kick the Chinese attendants because they decline to open doors which they are forbidden to unlock''

--a request that the conduct of foreigners had shown to be far from unnecessary.

In the pillaging of property, savages could not have been more lawless than the white men from ''the highly civilized nations of the West.''

''It is not literally true that every house in Peking was looted. There were some places in obscure alleys, and in many of the innumerable and almost impenetrable cul-de-sacs with which the capital abounds, that escaped.

But persistent inquiry appears to leave no doubt of the fact that practically every yamen in the city has been rummaged, and practically there is nothing left of the contents of any of them.''[94]