THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW BY HENRY CODMAN POTTER, D.D., LL.D. BISHOP OF NEW YORK NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1902 Copyright, 1900, 1901, 1902, by THE CENTURY Co. Copyright, 1901, by The Churchman Co. Published October, 190S THE DEVINNE PRES TO JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN FINANCIER, PHILANTHROPIST, FRIEND TO WHOSE MUNIFICENCE THESE OPPORTUNITIES FOE OBSERVATION IN THE EAST WERE OWING, AND WHOSE CONSTRUCTIVE GENIUS, WHICH UPBUILDS AND NEVER PULLS DOWN, HAS INDICATED THE TASKS WHICH AWAIT WESTERN CIV- ILIZATION IN EASTERN FIELDS CONTENTS PAGE i. CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUN- DERS 1 n. THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES . . 41 HI. IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 71 iv. IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 103 v. IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 139 vi. INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 169 CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS THE traveler who has journeyed by steamboat from Hongkong to Canton by night wakes in the morning to a scene which he is not likely to forget. The condi- tions of life in China are unique in this, that they are but little limited by space. We are wont, in our Western world, to talk of the crowding and herding in great cities ; and in one aspect of these the East has no- thing to match them. The foundations there are so often insecure that buildings that climb up like ours into the air, with tens of stories piled, higher and higher, upon one another, are virtually unknown; but, on the other hand, we see, packed into a bullock-cart, huddled in a bamboo hut, literally heaped upon one another in a mud- walled hovel, in the streets, or on the road- side, numbers of people who ordinarily, in 4 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW our world, whatever their circumstances of poverty or degradation, would not endure such crowding for an instant. This char- acteristic, however, in the Chinese reaches its climax when one sees their life in boats. And the startling idiosyncrasies of that life are revealed with no more comic or tragic distinctness both, in fact, are there often strangely and pathetically intermingled- than among the crowded denizens of a Chi- nese house-boat. And nowhere are these to be observed in more impressive proportions than in the great sluggish stream on whose banks is the city of Canton. Crowded as is the popula- tion of any Chinese city, Canton in this must surely be preeminent, and in the case of the great throngs that pack her dark and narrow streets and their darker and nar- rower habitations, this teeming flood of life overflows its bounds and spreads itself in a vast mass of boats on which tens of thou- sands of people pass their whole lives, men, women, and children almost trampling upon one another, and preserving them- selves from being crowded into the stream to drown by an ingenuity which is not easily intelligible. Indeed, as a matter of fact, they do not always succeed in doing so. Life is not accounted of much value in CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 5 China ; and its enormous surplus of popula- tion, which under the present conditions the land can but poorly support, is depleted, whether by drowning or otherwise, without awakening much concern or causing much grief. On the morning when I first saw Canton, looking from my cabin window I found our steamer surrounded by an apparently end- less flotilla of Chinese house-boats, and stood fascinated by the almost myriad life with which they teemed. No one who has not seen it has ever seen anything like it. The boats are twenty or thirty feet long, and are shop, kitchen, freight-house, bed- room, nursery, store-room, all in one, with sometimes a family of fifteen or twenty persons to crowd and strive, eat and sleep, fight for the opportunity to earn their scanty wage, by day or night, and often to be born and die in them. The children swarm like ants, and almost before they can speak are tied to an oar and made to pull it. But when they are not tied thus they are sometimes hustled over the side of the boat. They sink out of sight, and that is the end of them. To this frequent occurrence there is, how- ever, one exception. Now and then you will notice a toddling little creature to 6 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW whom is attached a small balloon. If it tumbles into the water the balloon supports it ; it is fished out with a long pole, cuffed and scolded by its irate parent, but saved. And this is simply and solely because "it" is a boy ! If it were a girl, the parent would see in its removal a gracious providential interposition, and would say, in the Chinese manner, "It is ordered." If one follows, now, along that slender thread that binds the Chinese house-boat boy to his balloon, he will find, I think, a clue to much of Chi- nese character and Chinese history. The people of China are not peculiar in prizing boys more than girls, for that, alas! is a characteristic of many Christian nations and families. They are, however, peculiar in their reasons for doing so. With us one wants to perpetuate his name ; to shield, by the industry or prowess of sons, the widow and daughters that he may leave behind him; or to join with his own energy and en- terprise that of another of his own name and lineage. But with a Chinese parent the concern is quite different. He expects, in- deed, that his son will take care of him in his old age, and, in fact, filial duty in this respect is carried to somewhat grotesque lengths, as is witnessed by a legend current in China that a married son, with whom CHINESE TEAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 7 lived his widowed mother, said to his wife on one occasion : ' ' My income will not sup- port my mother, you and me, and our child. It is the will of Heaven, therefore, that we sacrifice our child to our mother, and we will bury it alive ' ' ; which on preparing to do by digging a grave in which they pro- posed to bury the child alive, they came upon a pot of gold which it was revealed was hidden there for their enrichment in reward for their filial conduct! But, as I have said, a boy's life is precious to a pa- rent not merely because of the care which he is bound to give a parent in his old age, but because it is the supreme duty of the son, after his parent is dead, to make the annual offerings upon which the conditions of the parent 's life beyond this world must, according to Chinese theology, depend. And so the little baby boy toddling about the crowded house-boat of the meanest peasant has a balloon fastened to his tiny person, not as a token of any especial ten- derness on the part of his parent, but rather in what might be called a forecasting spirit of other-world thrift, by means of which the parent provides for his future interests after he is dead. It is in this curious combination of indi- rection, insensibility, and selfishness that 8 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW one must needs find the clue to a great deal of Chinese character. No one can come into contact with this people, see them in their own homes, or go ever so little below the surface of their national history, without recognizing that they are marked off from other races by certain wholly unique and quite distinctive traits. No more interest- ing or timely study than those traits can invite the Western student. Timely, I say, because whatever may have been the situation a little while ago, in the matter of the relations of China to the rest of the world, no intelligent ob- server can be insensible to the fact that not only have they begun to change, but that in the near future they are destined to be changed more and more rapidly. No one who is at all familiar with the attitude of the Western world, by which I mean, for my present purpose, the civilizations of Europe and America, can be ignorant of the fact that, to Western ideas, to com- merce, the arts, international intercourse, China was regarded fifty years ago as largely inaccessible. The Great Wall of China was commonly accepted as no inapt image of the great life of China. True, we had books like M. Hue's travels, as we have had since then Williams 's "Middle King- CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 9 dom"; but as we read them we only re- ceived a fresh impression, concerning China and the Chinese, of impenetrability. Their manners, their traditions, their men- tal processes, all these seemed to be what, largely, their public highways still are im- passable. It is told by an acute and singu- larly just and impartial observer of these Orientals 1 that when the coolies in a par- ticular neighborhood in North China learn that a foreigner is journeying their way, they are in the habit of going out into the highways and digging holes and pitfalls in the roads which render them impassable. The unsuspecting stranger plunges incon- tinently into these, and then the neighbors appear with profuse protestations of sym- pathy and surprise, and having, with Ori- ental deliberation, pulled him and his bul- lock-cart out of the pit, fill the pit up at their leisure, and after the whole process is completed charge him a good round sum for their services. Not unlike this has been the experience of students and travelers in China, who have sought to find their way through the curious impasse of the Oriental mind, and who have vainly struggled to dis- cover the clues which would explain to them the manifold eccentricities of Chinese do- 1 The author of " Chinese Characteristics." 10 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW mestic and social life, the principles upon which its cities and provinces are governed, its rules of conduct regulated, its more serious views of human life determined. There is little doubt that, besides that ele- ment in all this which is unconscious and traditionally characteristic, there has been, with the Chinese people, a good deal of de- liberate intention. They have not wanted to understand us, and they do not wish that we should understand them. Sometimes, undoubtedly, it is true that what seems ob- scure in their modes of speech or of reckon- ing is only seemingly so, and that, at bot- tom, they are more accurate than we. A Western traveler in China was, on one occasion, loud in his indignation at the igno- rance, the stupidity, or the duplicity which represented to him that the distance be- tween two places was not the same from east to west as from west to east, nor the same in wet weather that it was in dry. But it was pointed out to him that distance in a journey was equitably measured by the time that it took to make it, and that a jour- ney from east to west must needs be longer if it was up-hill rather than down-hill, or if made in wet weather and over heavy clay roads rather than in dry weather. Nobody, it should be said in passing, will ever be CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 11 just to the Chinese mind or to Chinese modes of expression who does not bear in mind the difference in Eastern and West- ern modes of thinking of which this is an illustration. But when this is said, it must still be owned by any one who has had experience of the children of the Flowery Kingdom that they are often purposely obscure, and that they do not always want to understand us or to be understood by us. Two tem- peramental peculiarities explain this, which are too often little accounted of. One is their enormous contempt for the outside barbarian, and the other is their imperturb- able contentment with their own life and land and all that belongs to them. One en- counters the Chinese often long before he has reached their own land. They are servants in a California household, work- men on some great Western railway or mining enterprise, or cabin-' ' boys " on some Pacific steamship. I wonder whether those who have met them under these vari- ous conditions are as sensible of their mild but unmistakable contempt as I have been. They may be perfectly civil and readily obliging, I have always found them so, but, beneath that mask of stolidity which one can almost never penetrate, there 12 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW gleams sometimes an elusive hint of a cer- tain calm scorn with which they listen to you as you convey to them your wishes, and with which, with languid and machine-like accuracy, they fulfil them. "The best ser- vants in the world," cries some superficial and unobservant traveler ; and as one hears him he recalls that characteristic personage in one of Mr. Thackeray's "Letters to a Young Man about Town" (a classic for the instruction of our youth, which one could wish might be republished with every new crop of boys), where Mr. Brown is discours- ing to his nephew on the subject of the way in which wise women manage their hus- bands. "Your father, my dear Bob," says Mr. Brown, "thinks your mother a fool. Alas, poor man! How meek she is; how she never disputes with him; and yet with what a mild contempt for his masculine stupidity she most accurately measures and manages him!" But no woman's con- tempt for her husband ever matched a Chinaman's contempt for the "white devil ' ' who is his master. And the misfor- tune has been that, in our intercourse with these people, we have not recognized how natural and, from their point of view, how reasonable this is. "Young folks think old folks are fools, but old folks know that CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 13 young folks are fools," is a proverb on which most of us have been reared; and yet we forget that to the Chinese the oldest of the Western nations is very young, and in fact vulgarly modern. You say to your Chinese domestic, ' ' Why did you not put salt in the fish-cakes?" And he answers you blandly, though greatly, it is to be feared, to your exas- peration, "We do not put salt in fish- cakes." But why should you be angry? His usages are some thousands of years older than yours. Indeed, he knows very well that a few hundred years ago, so far as you or your ways are concerned, there was neither ancestral habit, usage, nor custom to appeal to. And then, under all these con- ditions, he can keep his temper, and, too often, you cannot. Chinese imperturba- bility is surely without its equal. The sto- lidity of our own native Indians has been supposed to be preeminent, but any one who has seen the Chinese in their own land will recognize, I think, another and, in its way, a much higher quality than this; for ordinarily there is no sullenness in it, but rather a bland and beaming, if often irri- tating, good nature, which is as fine as it is exasperating. I was witness of a scene in an interior city in China which, as an illus- 14 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW tration of this, was not without its elements of mortification for the foreigner who watched it. A party of Americans had gone into a leading shop and had selected various articles, for which, after having in- quired their prices, they offered a lump sum far below that asked for them. It was courteously but firmly declined, with the in- formation that the prices in the establish- ment were fixed, and that the rule was to make no reductions. I should be glad if I could forget the scene that followed, in which the things selected were rudely flung about, and finally some of them hurled at the proprietor's head with epithets more forcible than refined. But, through the whole odious scene, the shopkeeper was un- moved, and his placid and serene dignity undisturbed. One who realized what such self-command might easily cost could not but realize also what an element of power it must needs be in the race and people that possessed it. We come also here, I cannot but think, upon one of those large psychological facts which go so far to explain the history of the Chinese empire. Think of it for a moment ! There it has endured, all these thousands of years, undisturbed amid the tremendous revolutions that have upheaved other em- CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 15 pires and changed the face of the civilized globe. One need not be unmindful of what, in the progress of civilization, has else- where conie out of national or racial rest- lessness, to recognize what a tremendous force of conservatism has been the Chinese conviction that one empire contained all in the world that was worth having, and that the only way to look at the rest of the world was to look down from the top of the Great Wall. But alas for such complacency ! the Great "Wall is rapidly becoming a crumbling ruin, and, even in the regard of its own people, is plainly destined to be, before long, no more than a venerable historic memorial. The processes by which this has thus far come to pass are a part of current history, and I need not do more here than cursorily allude to them. The first view of the ordi- nary traveler leads one, indeed, to suppose that the changes that are to transform China are coming to pass very rapidly, and the stranger entering the port of Shanghai or Hongkong concludes that the great Asi- atic empire has already largely lost its traditional characteristics. Nothing could be more remote from the facts. The treaty ports are no more than the homes and ware- houses of foreigners at least so much of 16 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW them as at first strikes the eye; and the traveler has need to make but a short jour- ney into the interior, no matter where he may land, to find the teeming millions of the land untouched in any smallest degree by the habits, the beliefs, or the ideas of the outside barbarian. It is undoubtedly true, however, that this is not likely to continue ; and thought- ful observers and older foreign residents in China merchants, missionaries, and others were agreed, as far as I encoun- tered them, in their impression that changes hereafter would be likely to come much more rapidly than heretofore. But though prejudice has begun to yield, it is undoubt- edly true that it will not yield rapidly, and that anything like a progressive movement from within is far more improbable than among any other people in the world. When I entered China there were most in- teresting rumors of the rise and growth of the young emperor's party, of the interest- ing personnel of its leading adherents, of their wide reading of recent English and American literature dealing with questions of political, social, and sociological interest, of the aspirations of the youthful sovereign, and of the hopeful outlook in China for something answering to constitutional and CHINESE TEAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 17 representative government. But in a few months the whole movement had appar- ently come to grief; the representatives of the "Young China" party were in hiding or fugitives; the dowager empress, it was said, had put an effectual extinguisher on the whole business, and our quondam guest, Li Hung Chang, was "strengthening his fences" on the old and cleverly corrupt lines. It is inevitable that any great social or political movement in China should be marked by such reactions. For, first of all, it must be remembered that of political unity, in our sense of the word, the empire of China knows little or nothing. Its vast and various provinces, extending from the frigid to the torrid zone, have no binding quality of custom, language, or religion. The dynasty that rules is a Tatar dynasty. But the Manchurian represents, rather, the greatest traditions of the empire. And this single illustration is sufficient to indicate what is true of the larger whole. Those of us in America who enjoyed the acquain- tance of Chinese students, merchants, or others resident in our own land during the war between China and Japan must re- member the surprising apathy with which, when we ventured to refer, sympatheti- 18 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW cally, to Chinese naval or military disas- ters, our expressions of sympathy were re- ceived. We were calmly informed that our Chinese friends did not come from the provinces that had been invaded or the coasts that were threatened; that, in fact, they knew very little about them, and evi- dently cared less. The burning resentment with which an American would hear that foreign troops were landing upon the coast of Florida or invading the territory of Cali- fornia, though none of us might ever have seen, and did not know a soul inhabiting, the one or the other, this, apparently, was a sentiment which to a Chinese was incon- ceivable. And yet it is difficult to imagine how any great national movement can come to pass until a country, whether an empire or a republic, has what Kossuth called national solidarity. A still further difficulty in the way of a great movement in the direction of social or political progress in China is the large absence of any considerable discontent with existing conditions. The government of China has not inaptly been called a gov- ernment by "squeeze." In no community, common as bribery or corruption is in po- litical affairs, especially in the East, is there so much of it as in China. It be- CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 19 gins at the top and extends all the way down. The emperor squeezes the gover- nors of provinces ; the provincial governors squeeze the magistrates; and the magis- trates squeeze the people. If you have a case before the local justice, who is ordina- rily magistrate, chief of police, and tax-col- lector all in one, you will do well to bring your little present with you. Often the magistrate takes a present from both sides. Sometimes he has the grace to return the gift of the man against whom he decides; but if you were to quote to him Solomon's aphorism to the effect that ' * a gift blindeth the eyes, ' ' he would blandly assure you that in his country, on the contrary, it quickens and clears the vision ; and the curious thing about the whole business is that, ordinarily, the suitor agrees with him, and that the community is, on the whole, entirely satis- fied with the present condition of things. Of course such a state of affairs is not universally prevalent; and, equally of course, the contrast between Chinese and European communities in close proximity, as, for example, at Hongkong, Shanghai, and elsewhere, must sooner or later impress the intelligent native, but far less than one would suppose. The Chinese hates our cleanliness, our wide streets, our police pro- 20 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW tecting the feeble and restraining personal violence ; and, like a child in a nursery when you have put it in order, thinks that you have only spoiled what to him was fair. Tell him that, if he will let it, civilization- Western civilization will drain his towns and cleanse his dwellings and sanitize his whole life, where now he cannot move or breathe without filth and crowding, his an- swer is Mr. Harold Skimpole's, in "Bleak House," to the friend who, on visiting his apartments, exclaimed, "Why, Harold, you can't swing a cat here," "But I don't want to swing a cat here. ' ' And that attitude of mind, for the time being, at any rate, is an intellectual impasse you can go no farther. It cannot be disguised, however, that in these regards there are in China occasional tokens of progress, and that they are begin- ning to multiply. As producing these, there are various causes, such as the influ- ence of commercial intercourse, the intro- duction of Western scientific and mechani- cal inventions, but first of all, as many candid observers have frankly acknow- ledged, the influence of the missionary. I know how much challenge this statement may produce, but if the character of the witnesses and their testimony are consid- CHINESE TEAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 21 ered, I believe it cannot be impugned. That there have been mistakes in mission- ary enterprises in China cannot, however, be denied, and these might, I think, in many cases where they are still persisted in, be wisely recognized and remedied, as they easily may be. In his interesting and, on the whole, impartial work on the East, the present viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, al- ludes with considerable reserve, but with sufficient explicitness, to some of these which have long existed. Generally they refer to the somewhat careless disregard of local or national prejudices by which our modern missions have been widely charac- terized. I confess I cannot see why such disregard should be indulged in. At home and among ourselves we are all agreed that people cannot always do things that are in themselves entirely innocent, if they are liable to be misunderstood; and it might well be a rule with all our missionary au- thorities that in the matter, for example, of the conventionalisms of mission stations, unmarried women, traveling missionaries, and the like, the missionary should not vio- late Chinese social conventions, which, how- ever contemptible they may seem to us, are too widely and deeply rooted in heathen lands to be lightly disregarded. 22 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW Again, the modern missionary to a peo- ple whose nobility are its scholars should be a man of education and of refinement. The ceremonial of Chinese life is doubtless often irksome, but a man with not only the instincts but also the training of a gentle- manand, unfortunately, the two things do not always go together will not lightly disesteem it. And yet again, the modern missionary, like his greatest predecessor, the Apostle Paul, may wisely strive to understand and respectfully to refer to the religion that he has come to supplant. If it be true, as Christian scholars and missionaries have owned, that "no student of history, no ob- servant traveler who knows human nature, can fail to be impressed to the point of deep awe with the thought of the marvelous re- straining power which Chinese morality has exerted upon the race from the earliest times until now," 1 it would certainly seem to be worth while for teachers from other lands, who are invading China with the proclamation of a still higher standard of morality, at least respectfully to compare it with that which they aim to supplant. "It would be hard," says Dr. Williams, "to overestimate the influence of Confucius in 1 "Chinese Characteristics," pp. 207, 208. CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 23 his ideal princely scholar, and the power for good on his race which this conception has ever since exercised. The immeasur- able potency, in after ages, of the character thus portrayed, proves how lofty was his standard; and the national conscience has ever since assented to the justice of his por- trait." It is another Christian scholar of recognized authority who has said: ''The teaching of Confucianism on human duty is wonderful and admirable. It is not per- fect, indeed. But on the last three of the four things which Confucius delighted to teach letters, ethics, devotion of soul, and truthfulness his utterances are in har- mony with the law and the gospel. A world ordered by them would be a beautiful world. ' ' And yet the most ardent champion of the Chinese would not care to maintain that, in any such sense as this writer used the word ' ' beautiful, ' ' the empire of China is a beau- tiful world. First of all, it is rotten through and through with political corruption. ' * To what purpose," said a Chinese official of himself and his associates, ' ' would you turn us out of office? If you did so, you could only replace us by successors who would steal more than we do." Again, it is weighted down by a social and moral apa- 24 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW thy which is all the more appalling because it still worships its old teachers worships them while it openly and flagrantly disre- gards their teachings. There can be no moral debasement for a nation greater than this. And now, what of its future f As I began by saying, the doors that have been so long closed against other nations are at length being slowly forced open. England and Germany and France and Russia and the United States have all discovered a keen interest in this ancient people, and a touch- ing anxiety, each one of them, that the future of China should not fall into the hands of any of the others. With an almost sublime force of inertia China has resisted successive incursions, and has held fast to her ancient traditions with unexampled te- nacity. But now at last they are yielding ; and a beginning having been made, no one can now predict how fast the revolu- tionary forces of Western civilization may advance. When in Japan I was assured by one closely connected with a great embassy at Peking and warmly interested in our national successes that the efforts prose- cuted by a group of American capitalists with remarkable persistency to secure con- cessions for a great Chinese midland rail- CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 25 way were inevitably doomed to failure. It was only three weeks later that, on the jetty at Shanghai, I was informed by an Ameri- can gentleman who had been largely con- cerned in conducting the necessary negotia- tions that the whole business of securing those concessions was then happily and sat- isfactorily concluded. Well, the rest will sooner or later follow, not speedily, it may be, but nevertheless in- evitably. When the late Mr. Brigham' Young gave in his adhesion to the construc- tion of a branch of the Union Pacific Rail- way from Ogden to Salt Lake City, a shrewd observer is reported to have said, ''That means the death of Mormonism," and he was right. Mormonism, it may be urged, still survives, but only as an extinct memorial of a strange delusion and a very clever leader. And little by little, as mod- ern ideas, fashions, freedoms, push their way into the heart of China, the vast organ- ism will begin to take on a new life ; and as the blood of other peoples flows through its traffic, its arts, its literature, its pleasures, its laws and customs, China will begin to take on not only new manners, but new morals and new ideals. Will they be better or worse? Would that one could be quite sure about that! 26 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW But alas ! there cannot be racial tranf usions without the consequences that forever at- tach to such processes. A clever writer, whose work it was my fortune to encounter for the first time in the Chinese seas, pub- lished, not long ago, the story of a poet who, when lying mortally ill, was by a clever suggestion all but miraculously revived by the transfusion of a considerable amount of blood drawn from the arm of a coster- monger. He recovers rapidly, and returns speedily to rude health. But, to his dismay, he discovers not only that he has lost his taste for claret and developed an inordinate thirst for beer, but that his poetry has taken on a redundancy of most atrocious slang, without the employment of which he finds it impossible to write a line. The illustration may seem extravagant, but it certainly has a message for Western nations that are to-day dealing with an effete civilization. We may give China railways and manufactories, and a thou- sand cheap and clever inventions which are, it sometimes seems, the dominant note of our Western civilization. We may make them discontented with their own simpler customs and their more frugal and infre- quent personal indulgences. More than this, we may not only sell to them the CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 27 weapons of war and armed ships and the rest, but we may which is quite another thing teach them how to use them. The question still remains, and it is, as I shall endeavor to show, quite a different question in China from what it is, for example, in India, what will they do with this new knowledge and these new powers? Multi- ply the open doors into China, and you must needs multiply the doors that open out of China; and has the American nation ever realized that the time may easily come when the question whether the Chinese will come here, or go or stay, may be taken altogether out of our keeping, and that by the Chinese themselves? I do not underestimate our numbers, our wealth, our prowess; but in the long run, in warfare, Napoleon's pro- fane maxim as to Providence and the strongest battalions has in it a grim ele- ment of truth. Nobody appears to be quite clear how many people there are in China; but it seems generally to be agreed that there are at least some four hundred mil- lions, and these four hundred millions have one very considerable element of superi- ority as fighters over Western peoples they are profoundly indifferent to pain or death. It may be well for us to realize that, after we have civilized them by grid- 28 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ironing their land with railways and filling their homes with "Yankee notions," we may have to reckon with a Chinese dragon of proportions rather more formidable than those that are rampant at the doors of Chi- nese temples. But surely there is a nobler view, whe- ther of our opportunities or of their risks, than this. However much China may want open ports and machinery and im- proved sanitary conditions in streets and houses, she wants some other things in- finitely more. One of these is the awaken- ing of her human sympathies. In the ab- sence or paralysis of these the testimony of those who know her best would seem to show that she has no match. It is enough to be seized with a contagious disease in China to be practically abandoned. The sick person is placed in a solitary room with a jug of water; the door is shut and fas- tened, and the only attention he gets is twice a day, when some one peers in through a narrow opening and prods the patient with a pole to see whether he is not yet dead. The author of "Chinese Char- acteristics," who has drawn for us, I be- lieve, much the most vivid and accurate portrait of the Chinese people, relates how it is customary for one afflicted with any CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 29 natural or acquired blemish or defect to be reminded of the fact. 1 One of the mildest forms of this practice is that in which the peculiarity is employed as a description in such a way as to attract public atten- tion. "Great elder brother with the pock- marks," says an attendant in a dispensary to a patient, "from what village do you come?" It will not be singular if the man whose eyes are afflicted with strabismus hears an observation to the effect that "when the eyes look asquint the heart is askew," or if the man who has no hair is reminded that "out of ten bald men nine are deceitful, and the other would be also if he were not a fool." In this instance there is not only that indifference which is careless how it gives pain, but that insensi- bility which is unable to perceive how in- consistent is such unfeeling speech with even the most elemental principles of good manners. And marching with such charac- teristics is the national indifference to the sufferings of children, especially if they be girls, and to women, invariably if they be daughters-in-law. With an enormous cere- monial in all their social intercourse, the neglect or impatience of which on the part of foreigners fills the Chinese with an im- 1 " Chinese Characteristics," p. 197. 30 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW mense contempt, there is ordinarily the most profound indifference concerning the griefs and misfortunes that touch anybody else than their own family. And, along with this characteristic, in such marked contrast with the ruling ideas in Christian lands, there is among the Chi- nese one supreme want which, whether in art, in literature, or in human conduct, is equally conspicuous. They are a people with their eyes in the back of their heads. Their ideals, so far as they have any, are all behind them. They know nothing of a divine discontent. Complacency, abso- lute, invariable, all-pervading, is the su- preme note of Chinese life and character. That a thing was is reason sufficient to the ordinary Chinese mind that it should con- tinue to be ; and that anybody who has not been hired to do so should concern himself with even a curiosity, much more an en- deavor, that it should be better, is to the Chinese mind only an excellent joke. M. Hue, in his masterly work on China and the Chinese, relates that in 1857, at the period of the death of the Emperor Jao Kuang, he was " traveling on the road from Peking, and one day, ' ' he says, ' * when we had been taking tea at an inn in company with some Chinese citizens, we tried to get up a little CHINESE TKAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 31 political discussion. We spoke of the re- cent death of the emperor, an important event which, of course, must have interested everybody. We expressed our anxiety on the subject of the succession to the imperial throne, the heir to which was not yet pub- licly announced. 'Who knows,' said we, 'which of these sons of the emperor will have been appointed to succeed him? If it should be the elder, will he pursue the same system of government? If the younger, he is still very young, and it is said that there are contrary influences two opposing parties at court. To which will he lean?' We put forward, in short, all kinds of hypotheses, in order to stimulate these good citizens to make some observa- tion. But to all our suggestions and in- quiries they replied by shaking their heads, puffing out whiffs of smoke, and taking great gulps of tea. This apathy was becom- ing almost provoking, when one of them, getting up from his seat, came and laid his two hands on our shoulders in a manner quite paternal, and said, smiling rather ironically: 'Listen to me, my friend. Why should you trouble your head and fatigue your heart with all these vain surmises? The mandarins have to attend to affairs of state ; they are paid for it. Let them earn 32 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW their money, then. But don't let us trouble ourselves about what does not concern us. We should be great fools to want to do po- litical business for nothing.' 'That is very conformable to reason, ' said the rest of the company; and they then pointed out to us that our tea was getting cold and that our pipes were out." I submit that here M. Hue has not suffi- ciently stated, if he sufficiently recognized, another element in the reserve of his Chi- nese auditors, which courtesy may have re- strained them from expressing. What busi- ness was it of his I Who were these imper- tinent strangers and foreigners, the Chinese doubtless said to themselves, who pushed their way into a country that neither invited nor welcomed them, and insisted on dis- cussing its domestic affairs in a promis- cuous company in an inn? And if, as has since happened, the inquisitive foreigners became more and more numerous; if they not only challenged Chinese customs, but persisted in introducing their own; if they ran railways through Chinese graveyards, thus outraging the most sacred traditions and beliefs of the people among whom they ruthlessly forced their way, is it any won- der that among that slow-moving, slow- thinking, but intensely conservative and CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 33 exclusive people there has grown up a re- sentment of foreign ways, and a hostility to all foreign persons, which has at length found its expression in acts of violence and bloodshed at which the whole civilized world to-day stands aghast? That a religious hatred is also a large element in this hostility there can be no smallest doubt; nor, I think it must be owned, need there be any wonder. Not long ago, at the two-hundredth anniver- sary of the Venerable Society for the Prop- agation of the Gospel in Foreign . Parts, in London, Lord Salisbury delivered an address which was much criticized at the moment for its somewhat cautionary if not fault-finding tone. I confess I wondered when I read it that he had not put his cau- tions a good deal more strongly. Briefly, the situation is this. Missionaries from Christian countries go into heathen lands, and, while resident or going about in them, demand the protection of the consuls, min- isters, and ambassadors of their own coun- try, to which they are undoubtedly entitled as long as they are going to and fro on their lawful errands. But suppose this interven- tion is invoked when they are violating the traditions and doubtless often uncon- sciouslyputting contempt on very tender 3 34 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOBEOW and sacred usages or beliefs ; and suppose, still further, that this intervention is in- voked and even demanded not only for themselves, but for their converts. These converts, it must be remembered, are Chi- nese subjects, amenable to Chinese law; and yet a recent correspondent 1 from China tells us that "the Roman Catholic Chris- tians were often oppressed by non-Chris- tian members of their community, and as a result the church appointed two of her priests to attend to no other duties except the investigation of evidence in case of liti- gation, and the conduct of such cases as they thought unjust before the official. The fact that they had official rank, and the other very important fact that they were foreigners, added to their power, and they were thus able to meet the official not only on his own ground, but with the additional power of understanding foreign law. The Christians were therefore enabled to obtain justice.'* Now, that is a very innocent-looking paragraph, but if one looks a little closer he will see how much it really means. In con- nection with certain missions, it seems, there is a privileged class. They are not amenable to the ordinary jurisdiction of the 1 Mr. I. T. Headland, in "Harper's Weekly." CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 35 ordinary civil authority. They have suc- ceeded in having created for themselves a sort of extraordinary civil authority for their own people, consisting of a foreign priesthood, foreign, at any rate, in their commission and allegiance, whether hap- pening to be Chinese or French in their race and lineage is of small consequence. These persons are described as having "official rank," that is, Chinese official rank; some of them are reported to be in authority practically equivalent to that of a viceroy ; and they can take a criminal out of the ordinary processes of the civil law, as applied to natives who are not Chris- tians, and deal with him at their own dis- cretion. Let us for a moment turn such a situa- tion "the other end foremost." Let us suppose it to be the Buddhists of India who are sending missionaries to America; it is said that they have set about doing so. They ingratiate themselves with the civil authorities, and get certain of their number appointed police magistrates. There is a considerable conversion of native Ameri- cans to the religion of Buddha, and these, when they fail to pay their taxes or other- wise to obey the law, are tried by Buddhist magistrates, who take care that they are 36 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW always very gently dealt with. I do not say that there may not have been in China wrong and injustice toward Christian con- verts. But I do say that if such methods of protecting Buddhist converts were to obtain among us it would provoke an upris- ing, which we for our part would maintain to be abundantly justified by the conditions which had provoked it. It is not necessary for me, I hope, to add that there is undoubtedly a great deal of missionary work in China which is not open, on account of the adroitness or usur- pations of its methods, to any criticism whatsoever. But even such work, because it is the work of foreigners, must reckon with that inveterate hostility to foreigners of which no one who has not seen it close at hand can have any adequate conception. That the Chinese should hate Americans, who, having shut the American door inex- orably in their faces, have now turned around to force open the Chinese doors, ought not to be to us a matter of surprise. That that hatred extends, and for reasons that they do not disguise, to all foreigners, no one who reads the following extract from the " North China Daily News," which I encountered in Shanghai in No- vember last, can doubt. CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 37 (Translated from a leading native paper.) THE INSATIABLE GREED OF WESTERN NATIONS. LET CHINA BEWARE ! FOREIGNERS have for many years united them- selves, and have been laying their plans with regard to China. Originally they availed them- selves of the plea of the mutual advantages aris- ing out of commerce to induce China to open treaty ports at which they could trade. Next, under pretexts of various losses, in order to en- rich themselves, they compelled China to pay certain indemnities. To-day they are mooting the questions of railways and mines, and using them as a pretext to get our country from us. Their purpose is, trusting in their strength, to partition out and divide among themselves our country. Like chess-players, who place their pieces preparatory to attacking and vanquish- ing the enemy, they have arranged their forces; like fishermen, who first of all silently throw the net into the water and then gather out the fish, they are preparing to catch China. They believe they have, and perhaps do possess, the ability to divide China like a watermelon. They have already seized and they hold the most im- portant positions, with a view to this end. First by insinuating that mutual gain would result therefrom, they have arranged treaties with us, which was obviously the beginning of our calam- ities. 38 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW In the present dispute between Russia and England, ruin for China lurks. In reality it is only a quarrel about the partition of China. In- deed, the surrounding circumstances are con- verging to this partition. Foreigners are ever scheming for this. Their discussions tend to the same results. The signs of this impending ca- lamity, moreover, are all too apparent within our own borders. But the opportunity to parti- tion and snatch from us our country will be made by outsiders. If, then, China is to regain her original power, she must arouse herself and mend her ways. If she exerts herself to her full ability, she will then be able to foil the strate- gies of her enemies ; if she will but exert herself to any extent, she can ward off, for a time at least, the actual partition. Then the violence with which foreigners insult us, although it ap- pears to be all-powerful, will turn out not to be so, and our distress will really be no distress at all. But alas! there is a fatal tranquillity that arises from a condition of coma, a darkness aris- ing out of a state of crass ignorance, so that, though dangers like falling mountains threaten us, many seem unable to observe the impending ruin. True, there are earnest scholars of the empire, but they only smite the breast and weep tears of blood more bitterly, indeed, than in the days of the Tribulation of Ki. Let our reader then clearly understand that the attitude of all foreigners toward China is guided by one prin- ciple; they unite their energies and combine their forces in order to gratify their one ambi- CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 39 tion, which is to partition and rob us of our country. Such has been the cry with which, of late, China, north and south, has rung. We have seen and are seeing some of the bloody fruits of this inflamed national hatred. May a large wisdom and a temper other than that of mere revenge deal with the Chinese question as the essential equities involved in it demand. We are told that the destiny of China is to be partitioned up among the great powers. There could not be a more stupid or shameless policy. A nation, like a man, has a right to be until she has demonstrated unmistakably her in- competence to administer her own affairs with equal justice to all. It cannot be maintained that China has so far descended the path of national decay and disintegra- tion. She is stained with a long record of dishonored and discredited officials, cor- rupt, mercenary, and unscrupulous. Alas ! is the record of other people unstained in this regard? She has been guilty of the gravest crimes against international rights and comities. Let her be punished for them as she deserves. But let not the mad acts of ignorant and inflamed revolution- ists be made the pretext for pulling down 40 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW a venerable and historic civilization, whose younger and worthier sons are just now turning toward the light. Hands off, gen- tlemen, kings, emperors, and presidents, until a people, stirred at length by the vision of nobler ideals, shall show us what they can do for their own regeneration. II THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES II THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES IN Le Sage's "Bachelor of Salamanca" th^re is recounted a series of stirring incidents which issue in the arrival of the hero, Don Cherubin de la Ronda, in Mexico, in which, for a time, he leads a vagrant life, and in which, for a still longer time, he holds an official position of considera- ble importance. The book is interesting, though characteristically coarse reading, and as throwing a very helpful side-light upon not only usages, but standards, cere- monious, commercial, or moral, of the Span- ish rule in Mexico, it is of enduring value. For nothing can be plainer to one read- ing the volume than that, to use a modern vulgarism, the Spaniards were not in Mex- ico, or in any other colony, "for their health." The ordinary term of office of a governor was five years, and, however poor a man came to the colony, he was expected to leave it a man of independent fortune. 43 44 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW When Don Cherubin de la Ronda's friend and patron, the Count de Gelves, retires from the viceroyalty of New Spain, the former relates that "finally we set out from Mexico, and it may be said that on the day of our departure we presented a spectacle to the Americans which gave ample scope for their curses. The wags, at seeing two hundred mules loaded with bales, mostly of silver, made themselves a little merry at our expense, and we repaired with^ their money to Vera Cruz" which goes af good way to explain the long-suffering patience of the natives under Spanish rule. And no estimate of the Philippine, any more than of the original Mexican situa- tion, or of the people with whom chiefly the former is concerned, can be even mod- erately intelligent which leaves this feature out. Spain found the islands as the fruit of that fine spirit of adventure which will forever preserve her name illustrious. Columbus was not a greater hero nor a more daring explorer in his way than was Magellan in his. But neither Magellan nor the men who followed him, as indeed such an incident in their history unmistakably reveals, rose above the spirit of their times. That the aims of the Spanish-American and Spanish-Pacific ventures were not THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 45 those of colonization so much as of mere conquest is plain enough. True, the church went in the ships with the soldiers, and the priest and his paraphernalia were often landed first of all. But, without impugning the spirit or the purposes of the reverend clergy of that day, it is enough to say that, having startled the simple savages among whom they landed with their unfamiliar ceremonies, they seem to have done little or nothing to teach or to protect them. When Manila was occupied by the Span- iards the historian tells us that they first of all established a system of taxes to be im- posed upon the natives, and later built hos- pitals for their own soldiers, penitentiaries for the punishment of the recalcitrant, and war-ships to enforce their decrees. Of schools and the development of industries we hear nothing, nor, indeed, do the Span- iards seem to have contemplated the latter as practicable among the untutored sav- ages. And yet, later experience has dem- onstrated that in handicrafts, the mechanic arts, and kindred industrial pursuits the native Filipino has exhibited unusual apti- tude. The factory-hand of to-day, in such cotton-mills as I visited, is usually a lad or a girl under seventeen or eighteen years of age. Yet I was assured by their Scotch 46 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW overseer that they learned their somewhat delicate and intricate tasks, which involved the manipulation of machinery easily dis- arranged or misdirected, in about half the time that a European boy or girl would acquire the same knowledge. But of development along lines that, to our American thinking, are those which alone are legitimate in the work of coloniza- tion, it is plain that the Spanish conquerors had no conception, or, if they had, regarded it with not the slightest interest. The pages of Philippine history, from the year (1521) when Magellan landed on the north coast of Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, down to our own time, have, indeed, little else to record than successive struggles for a group of islands which the most cursory inspection proved to be rich in natural re- sources, and for the possession of which, before a great while, Chinese, Dutch, and English in turn vigorously and more or less successfully contended. It would be in- teresting to speculate upon what would have been the history of the islands if the British fleet which, under Admiral Cornish, on September 22, 1762, arrived before Ma- nila had maintained the hold which the land forces under General Draper, a little later, established there, and which was only re- THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 47 laxed when, after the ratification of the treaty of Paris in February, 1763, Manila was evacuated. It is undoubtedly probable that, had Brit- ish control of the islands been maintained, their history would have been more pros- perous and peaceful than it subsequently proved to be. Whatever we may deny to her, England has the genius of coloniza- tion. And yet, if, in 1762, she had retained possession of the Philippines, it is by no means certain that she would have ruled them more easily than did Spain. Britain's more signal triumph as a colonizer has been in India, and in India she has the difficult task of dealing with different tribes, rulers, and tongues. But the local divergences in these respects can in no degree be compared with what Spain found in the Philippines, nor can the original conditions be consid- ered at all similar. India had a civilization, however we may disesteem much that dis- tinguished it. It had a religion which, how- ever much of it was clouded by supersti- tion, was still the parent and propagator of great ideas. But the civilization of the na- tive tribes of the Philippines was utterly unworthy of any such name, and their re- ligious ideas were at once pagan and pue- rile. Mr. Foreman, to whose admirable 48 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW work 1 I shall have occasion more than once to refer, relates that in the year 1881 he had occasion to visit a village in Upper Pampanga which the Spanish authorities had established as a kind of model for the elevation and instruction of the Negritos. They were housed in bamboo and palm-leaf huts of excellent sanitary construction, and supplied with food and clothing for a year, with instruction in tilling the soil and other industries. But at the end of a year or two they had fled to the mountains, and no per- suasion could bring them back to anything that separated them from the low animal- ism and the nomadic habits which were their ancestral inheritance. Now, this, it must be borne in mind, was after Spain had been in possession of the Philippines for more than three hundred years. It is quite true, of course, that this has not been the history of Spanish colonization in all the islands or in connection with all the tribes. I shall never forget the pro- found impression which was made upon me when I entered the harbor of Manila. The spectacle of solid and stately structures, forts, arsenals, municipal halls, churches, viceregal palaces, and the rest, was worthy of any port of Spain, distinctly recalling, l " The Philippine Islands," by John Foreman, F.R.O.S. THE PEOBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 49 indeed, impressions which I had received when entering the harbors of Cartagena, Malaga, and Barcelona. And when one goes to and fro in Luzon, and to a greater or less degree in others of the Philippine Islands, he sees manifold material evi- dences of commercial, municipal, civic, and ecclesiastical activity. The question at once arises, Why has it accomplished so little, and why, on the whole, is the type of civilization which one finds in the Philip- pines so low and in some instances so ex- ceptionally debased? These are questions which the nation which has assumed the burden of governing these islands has need to ask and to press until it shall have an answer. In that answer, if it is soluble at all, we shall find the solution of the Philip- pine problem. It is partially answered as soon as we have intelligently recognized the elements that went to make up the Spanish civiliza- tion. Whatever Spain might have hoped to do or to be to the Philippines, she could not have expected to create among them a social order or to introduce and establish moral standards that were higher than her own. Those that she did introduce were translated to the people whose soil she in- vaded and whose tribes she undertook to 60 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW rule by four powerful agencies : the army, the civil ruler, the church, and commerce. In speaking of them I shall content myself mainly with the testimony of her own wit- nesses. And, first, the army. Substantially the first knowledge that the Filipino had of the Spaniard was as a soldier. The men who came in ships and who first landed on his shores came as the servants of those who sailed in them as the conquering hosts of Spain, and when, as at Cebu, these con- querors first landed, they disclosed the pur- pose for which they had come by seizing and sacking the first town that they entered. The natives were declared Spanish sub- jects, their king was dethroned, and the grandson of the Spanish leader, the daring Legaspi, was despatched to take possession of Luzon. The Spanish historian has ob- scured this latter transaction by chronicles that are curiously contradictory, but he may believe who can that the native rulers of Luzon surrendered their territory, their in- dependence, and their tribute to invading foreigners who used no other weapons than persuasive speech. From the beginning, though the records were written by Spanish hands, the pages of Philippine history are stained with blood, chiefly the blood of in- THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 51 nocent and guileless savages, entrapped, terrified, robbed, and ravished by civilized and nominally Christian soldiers. It is not altogether surprising that their descen- dants do not welcome the advent of the Christian soldier to-day. Naturally enough, conquest was followed, for a time at any rate, by a rule that was largely military. As the colony was di- vided and subdivided into provinces and military districts, the chief authority was usually a military officer who gladly re- signed his rank for an office which, while it ordinarily had attached to it a stipend of but three hundred dollars, afforded in- definite opportunities for personal emolu- ment. In his ' ' Noticias de Filipinos, ' ' Don Eusebio Mazorca, in an unedited manu- script, 1 dated 1840, in the archives of the Bauan Convent, Province of Batangas, states that "there are candidates up to the grade of Brigadier who relinquish a $3000 salary to pursue their hopes and projects in [provincial] Governorship," and of the qualifications for these positions T. Comin, in 1810, wrote: "In order to be a Chief of a Province in these Islands, no training or knowledge or special services are neces- sary. . . . It is quite a common thing 1 Foreman's " The Philippine Islands," p. 230. 52 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW to see a barber or a Governor's lackey, a sailor or a deserter, suddenly transformed into an Alcalde, Administrator, and Cap- tain of the forces of a populous province without any counsellor but his rude un- derstanding, or any guide but his passions 'sin otro consejero que su rudo entendi- miento, ni mas guia que sus pasiones.' m Comin was subsequently Spanish consul- general at Lisbon. With absolute power, with a native in- capacity even to conceive of an equitable exercise of authority, ignorant, self-willed, and wholly irresponsible, it can easily be imagined that this military rule did little to win or elevate the people whom it pre- tended to govern. Our own American theory, still widely prevalent more shame on us! in certain parts of our own land, that "a negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect/' was apparently the highest view of his duty that the ordi- nary Spanish military officer was capable of conceiving. To amuse and indulge him- self at whatever cost to the community over whom he was placed, and then to wring from the conquered province the last peseta that could be squeezed from the peasant whom he terrorized, this was the founda- 1 Foreman's " The Philippine Islands," p. 231. THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 53 tion for civil rule in the Philippines which was laid by that military rule which pre- ceded it. It is not greatly surprising, therefore, that when the civil ruler took over the tasks of the military governor the situation was not greatly improved. He was the creation of the Spanish government at Madrid, and that conception of the object of his appoint- ment which I have indicated at the begin- ning of these pages was undoubtedly a leading, if not the principal, motive. The appointments to places of trust and respon- sibility, such as were those of military gov- ernors, alcaldes, or other prominent magis- trates, were in the gift of the Spanish cabinet, and when a cabinet officer went out, his favorites went out with him. The sys- tem, in a word, was our own, save as the lat- ter is feebly and intermittently qualified by civil-service regulations ; and the uses which a government officer made of his place, if more glaring and unblushing, especially, for example, in cities, than those which we are familiar with at home, were of substan- tially the same character. The authority that I have already quoted, Don Eusebio Mazorca, 1 describing the official processes in this connection, says: "The Governor 1 Foreman's " The Philippine Islands," p. 242. 54 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW receives payment of the tribute in rice paddy, which he credits to the native at two reals in silver per caban. Then he pays this sum into the Eoyal Treasury in money, and sells the rice paddy for private account at the current rate of six, eight, or more reals in silver per caban, and this simple opera- tion brings him 200 to 300 per cent, profit. ' ' One is not surprised to hear that officials on retiring from office took with them, when they returned to Spain, large sums, three or four times exceeding their total official emoluments. Under such a system of civic corruption at the top, it inevitably followed that the rottenness reached all the way down. One is irresistibly reminded of our police sys- tems in cities, with their political ' ' bosses, ' ' by an experience of the author I have al- ready quoted. In 1885 he bought a small estate which had been leased to a tenant whom the purchaser found at the moment in the Manila jail for a violent assault. Three months later the man was at large, and he was soon after appointed governor of his own village. It is not to be supposed, however, that such a state of things existed without the mechanisms and processes of the law by which it ought to have been restrained or THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 55 corrected. The difficulty was that the courts and the usual legal processes and personages were as corruptible as the higher officials. "I knew," says Foreman, 1 "a man in Negros Island a planter who was charged with homicide. The judge of his Province acquitted him, but fearing that he might be again arrested on the same charge, he came up to Manila with me to procure a ratification of the sentence in the Supreme Court. The expenses of the legal proceedings were so enormous, that at length he was compelled to fully mortgage his plantation. Weeks passed, and he had spent all his money without getting justice, so I lent his notary 40Z. to assist in bringing the case to an end. The planter returned to Negros apparently satisfied that he should be no further troubled, but later on, the newly appointed judge in that island, whilst prospecting for fees by turning up old cases, unfortunately came across this, and my planter acquaintance was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment." The narrator of this incident naively informs us that ' ' the family lawyer, proceeding on the same lines, had still a hope of finding defects in the sentence to reverse it in favour of his client." How could it be otherwise when, i "The Philippine Islands," p. 268. 56 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW a little earlier, we are informed that if a case had been tried and judgment given under the civil code a way was often found to convert it into a criminal case ; and when apparently settled under the criminal code, a flaw could be discovered under the Laws of the Indies, or the Siete Partidas, or the Koman law, or the Novisima Recopilacion, or the Antiguos fueros, decrees, royal or- ders, Ordenanzas de buen Gobierno, or some others by which the case could be re- opened? Such a state of things throws an interesting side-light upon the charming innocence of those American commission- ers who, in the recent treaty of Paris, vir- tually reenacted the above Philippine sys- tem of civil and ecclesiastical law. One is tempted to say that the prayer from the bench, "May God have mercy on your soul ! ' ' might not only fitly follow a criminal trial, but precede a civil one. Any description of the Philippine situa- tion would, however, be gravely incomplete which omitted that other element in it which was neither military nor civil, but ecclesi- astical. We ought not to fail to recognize, in reviewing it, those earlier motives of missionary zeal which found undoubtedly a welcome sphere in all the splendid range of Spanish conquests. The heathen peoples to THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 67 whom the conquerors came were in pagan darkness, and a Christian and Catholic monarch owned the obligation to impart to them the religion which was identified with the history of his people and the founda- tions of his throne. That the methods which were employed to this end were not always or often those which to-day would receive the unqualified sanction of the de- scendants of those who invoked them is only to say that the ideas of Christian expansion, whether Latin, Greek, or of the Reformed communions, were not those which intelli- gent people of any Christian fellowship would to-day approve. A religion of exter- nalism and a propaganda of force went hand in hand ; and that their fruits were not manifest in regenerated characters or in a pure and righteous social order was simply because no seed was sown which could have produced such fruits. But the gravest as- pects of the ecclesiastical history of the Philippines appear when we turn to look, in the pages of their own historians, for the influence, whether of institutions or of in- dividuals, in bringing to pagan tribes no- bler ideals and a doctrine or practice re- sembling even in some remote degrees those of the brotherhood of Jesus Christ. For this it ought distinctly to be said that at 68 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW first the church was only indirectly respon- sible. The civil and military authorities soon discovered that in the Philippine Isl- anders they had a people extremely sen- sible to external impressions, ignorant, credulous, and superstitious. From the awe with which they witnessed rites and ceremonies unfamiliar, but dramatically impressive, they passed readily and swiftly to awe and fear of those who performed them, and the civil ruler found himself in- voking ecclesiastical terrors because often no others proved to be so effective. Out of this it not unnaturally grew that the ec- clesiastic came, in time, to unite both sacred and secular functions, the church has too readily in every age assumed them both, and the prelate and the priest became, sooner or later, the magistrate and the judge. In such capacities the village pas- tor took on ultimately the character of a government agent, and, as such, it was within his discretion arbitrarily to grant or to refuse his official signature to documents which without it had no value. Or he could, as a guardian of the public safety, denounce to the authorities as a dangerous person one whose presence in the district was inconvenient to himself, and presently, by order of the governor of the province, THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 59 the obnoxious person disappeared es- corted to prison or banished to a distant island. That these things and others like them were largely due to the malign influence of the so-called religious orders Heaven save the mark! has repeatedly and very re- cently been denied with a coarseness and vulgarity of vituperation to which I need not here further refer than to say that to minds capable of forming a dispassionate opinion upon any subject it was sufficient evidence of their truth. Other evidence, however, there is in the history of the Phil- ippines, abundant, continuous, and of indis- putable authority, most of all to those who have ventured to challenge it. The Jesuits were expelled from the Philippine Islands in the year 1768 by virtue of an apostolic brief of Pope Clement XIV. 1 It is quite true that they were permitted to return in 1852, but only on condition that they should confine their labors to strictly educational and missionary work. And these were un- doubtedly the least obnoxious of the orders, the others the Austin Friars, Recoletos, Dominicans, and Franciscans being iden- tified with incidents in the social and do- royal decree setting forth the execution of this brief was printed in Madrid in 1770 (Foreman). 60 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW mestic life of the Philippine people, the cor- ruption of their households, and the adroit sequestration and appropriation of their property, which will continue to make any attempt by the government of the United States to avoid or evade the question of the friars an utterly vain and futile one. On the relations of these orders to one an- other an amusing side-light is thrown by an incident in the history of the Dominicans, by whom, in 1778, the province of Panga- sinan was spiritually administered, while that of Zambales was allotted to the Reco- letos. The Dominicans therefore proposed to the Recoletos to cede Zambales to them, * ' because it was repugnant to them to have to pass through Recoletos territory in going from Manila to their own province." The 1 ( Recopilacion de las Leyes de Indies" shows that it at length became necessary to forbid these amiable brethren to have any part in civil government. 1 I have thus rehearsed the influences which had so much to do with creating the situation which existed when the fleet of Admiral Dewey found its way into Manila Bay, because only so can one get an intelli- gent view of a problem which has in it un- usual elements of delicacy and difficulty. J Ley 46, tit. 14 (Foreman). THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 61 Those who accept unreservedly a policy of colonial expansion, concerning which I have myself seen nothing in our recent history to change opinions formed long ago, are fond of pointing to the achievements of Anglo-Saxon colonization in other lands, and of asking why we may not match them. If there were no other answer to that ques- tion it might be found in that quite excep- tional unlikeness in the Philippine situation to situations, such as that in India, where the colonizing power has had to deal with a people that, whatever its tribal differences, is largely homogeneous. But an especial difficulty in the Philippine situation, which includes tribal differences running all the way, as in the case of the Negritos, from the extreme of barbarism to conditions, as with many of the Tagalos, of semi-civilization, is that you have those most perplexing com- plications which arise out of the superim- position upon the native tribes of a civiliza- tion partly Japanese, 1 partly Chinese, and overpoweringly Spanish, whose influence, whatever it may have been for good, must be owned by an impartial student to have 1 It is not generally known, perhaps, that so late as 1896 the Katipunan, a secret patriotic society of the Filipinos (persistently misrepresented as a masonic order), sent a deputation to Japan to present a petition to the Mikado praying him to annex the Philippines. 62 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW been never such as to create in the native mind a faith in the government as the friend of liberty and equity, or an affection or respect for rulers as the dispensers of justice or the exemplars of blameless living or honest dealing. In a word, there has been nothing in the past history of the Fili- pino to educate him to value or to imitate liigh ideals of official authority or civic, social, or domestic self-restraint. It is not surprising that these peoples should have been impatient under a condi- tion of things in which law and religion and their official representatives stood for so little that boded anything but evil to them. The revolutionary movement repre- sented by Aguinaldo and those associated with him was therefore to have been antici- pated, and had had, indeed, its repeated forerunners. The practical question was, and is, What did it amount to, what was its worth? There is no question in connection with the Philippine problem more impor- tant than this, nor any concerning which the effort to create an erroneous impression has been more strenuous or more persistent. The comparisons between our own strug- gle for independence and that of the young guerrilla warrior have been frequent and eloquent. Their only defect is that the THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 63 facts which warranted any such comparison were so largely wanting. I say nothing here of the just doubts which any one ac- quainted with the history of the Filipino leader must needs entertain, whether as to the integrity of his record or the honesty of his purpose. I maintain that it is simply, an intolerable impertinence to compare him or those who are about him with the men who were the leaders in our struggle for freedom and who laid the foundations of the republic. The warrant for a struggle for freedom must be found in something more than the mere passion to be free from an irksome yoke, or else any desire to break out of wonted restraints and the chafing limitations of hated social order becomes straightway a sacred aspiration with which we are bound to sympathize, and in which we are bound to cooperate. I venture to speak with some warmth on this subject, because my knowledge, through correspon- dence and personal interviews with those who have stood, not only in the Philippine Islands, but in America, Japan, and China, as the representatives and spokesmen of the revolutionary movement there, has ex- tended over nearly three years and has in- cluded a considerable variety of individ- uals; and I am constrained to say that 64 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW it has only deepened my conviction that, whatever elements of equity there may be in the Philippine struggle for freedom, the leaders have not yet appeared who could be seriously considered as competent to lead or organize it. Under these circumstances the duty of the government of the United States does not seem to be obscure. Through the blun- der of the naval commander who, after his splendid achievement in destroying a Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila, failed to see that his task there was at an end, we have assumed another and a much more difficult one. We have had no training for its discharge; we have a very inferior mechanism for its accomplishment ; and we are cursed with political traditions which make it doubly difficult to perform it suc- cessfully. But at this writing there is no honorable way out. To throw up our task now would be a cruelty to those whom we abandon, and a confession of our impotence which would disgrace us before the world. The element of time in the whole melan- choly business is that which has trans- formed essentially its aspect. We must go on now, whether or no we find the task more expensive in men and means, and less profitable commercially, than originally we THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 65 expected. Noblesse oblige. A great nation cannot abandon a weaker people which it has, before all men, adopted as its ward without confessing that, great as it claims to be, it has nothing to impart, nothing to sacrifice, in order to give freedom and good government to those who have not forfeited all claim to such gifts because they have looked for them in the wrong direction. I would not minimize the difficulties or the costliness of the task. I have elsewhere than in these pages l recognized our consid- erable inadequacy for it. But that inade- quacy consists rather in our instruments than in the absence of those informing prin- ciples which must forever determine the value of any instruments, and which are. forever at the foundation of all good gov- ernment. The greatest glory, as a history of administration, of our Civil War was that after we had blundered, and had bred swindling contractors and shoddy manufac- turers and smuggling, and incompetent generals, then, like some great creature breasting the waves, we shook ourselves free from them, and rose above them, and did the tasks, and fed and moved the armies, and fought our battles, better and 1 See an address before the Church Congress, 6 October, 1899. 66 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW better. And, best of all, we searched for and found the men, and lifted them from their obscurity, Lincoln, Stanton, Grant, and their peers and successors, who did the thinking and planned the marching, and fed and moved the armies that won through to victory. I am not one of those who believe that the people of the United States have lost the capacity to repeat such achievements. There are many who will never cease to regret our original blunder in the Philippine Islands. But they are not so despairing of their country as to believe that she is so far gone from original right- eousness that she has in her no virtue left with which to educate those distant islands for freedom; and meanwhile it is just as well to remember that her rulers have never intimated that this government has any other purpose in regard to them. But we shall gravely blunder if we mini- mize or evade any one of the difficult tasks which are before us. There are influences that will tempt the leaders of political par- ties to do this, which it would be the crud- est folly to ignore. If we are ever to win the confidence and mold the characters of these island peoples we must recognize the injustices from which too long they have suffered, and set about to right them. We THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 67 must not with one hand proffer them free- dom freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of worship and take it back with the other. And we must there- fore courageously face such questions as, for example, What has the government of the United States to say to a pronuncia- mento like this! "You must reject and condemn the ma- sonic sect, so frequently rejected and con- demned by the supreme pontiffs. "You must also reject and condemn lib- erty of worship, liberty of the press, liberty of thought, and the other liberties of perdi- tion, condemned and rejected by the pon- tiff. "You must also reject and condemn lib- eralism and also modern progress and civ- ilization, as being false progress and false civilization. "You must utterly abominate civil mar- riage and regard it as pure concubinage. "You must also condemn and reject the interference of the civil authorities in any ecclesiastical affairs, so much in vogue nowadays. ' ' I take these instructions from a lately published pamphlet in Manila. This pam- phlet was issued without duly expressed church authority, until the organ of the 68 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Roman Catholic Church in Manila, a Span- ish newspaper called the "Liberastus," admitted the fact that the Jesuits had pub- lished it. 1 There is not the slightest occasion to in- voke theological or ecclesiastical rancors in connection with questions raised by such a publication as this. But it should also be said that there is as little for being deterred by any fulminations of that sort of thunder, now happily reduced to the dimensions and substance of the sheet-tin rattled for a simi- lar purpose behind the scenic stage, from considering calmly and dispassionately what it bodes to the rights and liberties of those whom it seeks to terrorize, or to the free institutions which it will be our sacred duty as well as our privilege to plant among them. Our tasks, at the best, in the Philip- pines are not easy ones. It will be neces- sary, at the outset, to have it definitely un- derstood that they are not to be obstructed by influences and societies of whose enor- mous power for mischief and corruptness the history of the Philippine Islands is the melancholy and tragic record. As to what American rule has already achieved in our new possessions, I am glad to affirm here what correspondence extend- 1 New York "Evening Post," May 16, 1900. THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 69 ing over two years, the testimony of respon- sible and impartial witnesses of all classes, and personal observation have led me to be- lieve in regard to our army and our civil servants in the Philippine Islands. That there have been no unworthy or ill-con- ducted individuals among them would be to demand that the standard of conduct, for example, in Manila should be higher than it is in Washington or Boston. I do not be- lieve that it is, but I do believe that it is quite as high. The soldiers do not love their work in the Philippines, I should not, if I had to do it, but they do it, as I more than once saw, so as to earn the evident con- fidence of the communities among which they are stationed, and to give proof to these of the spirit and purpose of our pres- ence in the Philippines. Time alone can demonstrate how far we may be able to per- suade a fickle, restless, impulsive, unreason- ing people, embittered by many wrongs received at the hands of those we have ex- pelled, or ought to expel, to trust us, to learn from us, and under our patient tute- lage to grow into the stature of competent citizens in a self-governing state. m IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN Ill IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN MY traveling companion in Japan was a gentleman of various culture and of artistic tastes. These latter found in Japa- nese architecture and decorative drawing certain resemblances to American art and the recent work of well-known American artists which, to my cruder intelligence and more imperfect culture, were not discerni- ble, and which led him to active investiga- tions for the confirmation of his theories. They took us, one morning, into a curio- dealer's establishment, and soon immersed my friend in a huge pile of portfolios, the contents of which I was soon constrained to confess were to me neither interesting nor even intelligible. Under these circum- stances, taking advantage of my compan- ion's absorption in a hideous drawing of a Japanese interior, which to my ignorant scrutiny violated every law of perspective and every principle of the harmony of col- 73 74 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ors, I quietly slipped out of the shop, and after a few steps found myself in one of the greater highways through which to-day throbs the various life of the capital of modern Japan. There was local color enough there, though a good deal of it was not Japanese ; and presently I found myself before a shop-window not unlike such a one as might be found in our own New York Third or Eighth Avenue the window of a place primarily for the sale of newspapers and periodicals, but incidentally for almost anything and everything else. Here, con- spicuously displayed among other prints and pictures, was suspended a huge broad- side, such as comes sometimes with the London "Graphic" or "Illustrated News," representing the assembled sovereigns and rulers of the world. Their grouping had in it a large suggestion, and furnished to the student of political history a very useful lesson. In the center of this august group was seated the Emperor of Japan, and gathered about him in respectful attitudes were kings and queens and presidents, among whom was our own chief magistrate, placed in what apparently, according to Japanese art, was a position of appropriate obscurity on the extreme left of the em- peror, while standing behind the imperial IMPEESSIONS OF JAPAN 75 chair in which the Mikado was seated (this struck me, I confess, as curiously contra- vening the Japanese traditions of good manners) was the late venerable and ven- erated Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India, whose years and un- exampled reign, if not her sex, would seem to have entitled her to one of the chairs in which, as I observed, the young German Emperor and our own President were rep- resented as lounging. But the chief value of the picture lay in the help which it gave to the traveler in recovering his political perspective. If a modern publisher should make a lithograph of the rulers of the world for American consumption, I presume he would put our own President in the center, just as in the Transvaal a Boer publisher getting out any- thing of the sort would have put Oom Paul there. The thing, in other words, for the traveler to learn from such an incident is that Japan only like the rest of the world, after all, in that takes itself quite seri- ously. We Americans, on the contrary, do not, as a rule, take Japan at all seriously. The thing that irritated me in my country- men, and quite as often in other foreigners, wherever I met them in Japan, and often, too, in what I read in the books about Ja- 76 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKEOW pan, was that so many people thought it necessary to take everything that they saw or heard there as a part of a huge opera bouffe. It was my good fortune when in Tokio, through the courtesy of Colonel Buck, our most able and capable minister plenipotentiary to Japan, to have the rare privilege of witnessing the opening of the Japanese Parliament by the emperor in propria persona. My companion and I were, with the exception of the diplomatic corps, the only foreigners present; and I confess I thought the occasion one of most impressive dignity and interest, albeit 'the costumes both of the nobles and of the mem- bers of the House of Commons were Euro- pean instead of those of the charming out- lines and coloring usually worn by persons of distinction in Japan. Speaking, how- ever, of the occasion to a member of a for- eign legation, a little later, his only obser- vation was, "Did you ever see such a droll collection of old hats I " I could not refrain from replying that, if the hats were old, the ideas inside of them, as their wearers swarmed in to their places, were both new and already fermenting; and I should be tempted to say that the man or nation that does not take Japan seridusly is on the way to a considerable surprise. IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 77 And yet the elements of lightness and gaiety, along with self-complacency, if not large conceit, of which I have spoken, are undoubtedly distinctive of Japanese char- acter. As to the former, that note of vi- vacity, cheerfulness, and even playfulness which the foreigner so often remarks, its tokens perpetually recur. The conditions of life in Japan, for the great majority of its forty millions of people, are inevitably narrow and hard. It has not been, until lately, a nation of various resources or of commercial productiveness. The great ma- jority of its people must subsist directly upon the soil, and from this they get little more than the simplest food and the scanti- est raiment. And yet the stranger in going to and fro among them is struck with their smiling faces and the merry laughter that he so often hears, amid surroundings and in connection' with tasks and burdens which, it would seem, would press all joy out of life. Added to this, there is a disposition to adorn the simplest things and to enrich the homeliest duties with a certain quaint prettiness which gives to them an almost attractive aspect. It is said that the art of making and pouring out tea, in the life of a young Japanese girl, is encompassed with so much variety and even intricacy 78 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW of ceremony that it takes two years prop- erly to acquire and practise it. Such a fact is somehow symbolic of much more. The humblest tasks have in the doing of them a rhythmic usage, and the relation of this to certain kinds of work most remote, one would say, to anything like artistic form was shown in a very curi- ous way by a controversy which was going on in certain Japanese newspapers while I was in Japan. A correspondent had written to one of them to complain of the condition of the railway between Yokohama and To- kio, and was answered by some one who wrote in demurrer of his criticisms, evi- dently under official inspiration. Mean- time, however, a foreigner had taken a hand in the discussion, and touched, as it would seem, the nerve of the whole busi- ness. He had observed, he said, the Japa- nese track-layers at work, and had watched their methods when they were repairing the road-bed of the railway in question. The roughness of the road, with the consequent jumping or jolting (5f the railway-carriages, was owing, as he pointed out, to the ine- qualities of the road-bed, and to the loosen- ing of the ties or timbers which rested upon it. This, he explained, could be remedied only by redistributing the earth upon which IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 79 the ties rested, and, above all, by careful and intelligent repacking of the soil and stones beneath and around the ties; and then he added that when Japanese work- men undertook this task they worked in groups of three or four, all of whom used their picks in unison and struck their blows in obedience to the sound of some rhythmic measure. But such a method, as he showed plainly enough, was wholly unsuited to such an end. The loosening, gathering, dislodg- ing, replacing, and repacking of stones and soil under a railway-tie could not be done otherwise than as it was done by the indi- vidual workman using his tool and direct- ing his work quite independently of any other tool or hand, just as from moment to moment the situation revealed itself and the exigency demanded. There must be the intelligent observation first, and then the independent action of the independent and individual mind and hand. Undoubtedly one saw in the Japanese method, in this particular case, the survival, and the appli- cation under conditions to which they were utterly inappropriate, of those older meth- ods of labor in which the laborer worked as a machine, chained together with other laborers in a group or gang, in which no man thought for himself, but in which each 80 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW man repeated mechanically the movement and gesture of his neighbor, softening it, as so often one hears among Oriental peoples, with some monotonous but rhythmical chant, which was droned or sung as uncon- sciously as all the rest. At such a point the mind inevitably reached out to recognize the difference between such work, with all its inevitable defects and limitations, and that other freer labor where the worker wrought by himself, thought for himself, and aimed the blow, not as any fixed and formally recurring rhythm demanded, but as the free judgment and the free hand en- joined and directed. Yet one could not but see, now and then, how effective in its way was the older usage ; and behind it there shone often the tokens of an exceptional power. If I were asked to say, of all that I saw in Japan, what that is that lives most vividly in my memory, I should probably shock my artis- tic reader by saying that it was the loading of a steamship at Nagasaki with coal. The huge vessel, the Empress of Japan, was one morning, soon after its arrival at Nagasaki, suddenly festooned I can use no other word from stem to stern on each side with a series of hanging platforms, the broadest nearest the base and diminishing as they IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 81 rose, strung together by ropes, and ascend- ing from the sampans, or huge boats in which the coal had been brought alongside the steamer, until the highest and narrow- est platform was just below the particular port-hole through which it was received into the ship. There were, in each case, all along the sides of the ship, some four or five of these platforms, one above another, on each of which stood a young girl. On board the sampans men were busy filling a long line of baskets holding, I should think, each about two buckets of coal, and these were passed up from the sampans in a continu- ous and unbroken line until they reached their destination, each young girl, as she stood on her particular platform, passing, or rather almost throwing, these huge bas- ketfuls of coal to the girl above her, and she again to her mate above her, and so on to the end. The rapidity, skill, and, above all, the rhythmic precision with which, for hours, this really tremendous task was per- formed was an achievement which might well fill an American athlete with envy and dismay. As I moved to and fro on the deck above them, watching this unique scene, I took out my watch to time these girls, and again and again I counted sixty-nine bas- ketsthey never fell below sixty passed 82 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOEKOW on board in this way in a single minute. Think of it for a moment. The task I ought rather to call it an art, so neatly, sim- ply, and gracefully was it done was this : the young girl stooped to her companion below her, seized from her uplifted hands a huge basket of coal, and then, shooting her lithe arms upward, tossed it laughingly to the girl above her in the ever-ascending chain. And all the while there was heard, as one passed along from one to another of these chains of living elevators, a clear, rhythmical sound, which I supposed at first to have been produced by some bystander striking the metal string of something like a mandolin, but which I discovered, after a little, was a series of notes produced by the lips of these young coal-heavers them- selvesdistinct, precise, melodious, and stimulating. And at this task these girls continued, uninterruptedly and blithely, from ten o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon, putting on board in that time, I was told, more than one thou- sand tons of coal. I am quite free to say that I do not believe that there is another body of work-folk in the world who could have performed the same task in the same time and with the same* ease. And what does it mean? For that is the IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 83 point of this incident, and of all that thus far I have said. It means that in one aspect of them, at any rate, the Japanese are not what most of us have been wont to account them a feeble folk. Again and again, dur- ing my visit to Japan, I encountered certain of my own countrymen and others who have been for a shorter or longer time resident among them, from whom I heard more or less amusing illustrations of the blunders which Japan has made in what many ac- count its overhasty adoption of Western ways. I was told, for instance, that so in- flamed was Japan with a sense of its suc- cesses as a sea-power that, after its late war with China, and after it had received from the latter the war indemnity due to it, it had promptly proceeded to invest the whole sum in the building or buying of new ships, leaving no provision whatever for the costly maintenance of these ships, each of which, if as large as our own Olympia (and many of them are), could be kept in commission and ready for active service only at an ex- pense of about a thousand dollars a day. Now, undoubtedly, this was very poor financiering unless the government was satisfied that in some other way than by economizing the Chinese indemnity fund it could provide for manning and running 84 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW these ships. But surely the hypothesis is at least admissible that they might be able to do so. It is undoubtedly true that in con- nection with its transformation during the last quarter of a century Japan has been spending too much money; but I appre- hend that already her own shrewd finan- ciers have found this out, and that measures will be devised to meet the emergency. Meantime the significant thing is that, whatever this new empire arising out of the old has done, she has done well. There may have been too much slavish imitation of Western methods at first, and the effort too rapidly to adjust these to an Oriental people may, in some instances, have re- sulted in grotesque failure. But the. Japa- nese are a people quick to learn, and no national or local vanity has prevented them from recognizing and correcting their own blunders. On the other hand, their suc- cesses have been too marked and note- worthy to be belittled or ignored. Again and again while in the national capital I saw regiments of soldiers marching through the streets, turned out in all re- spects with remarkable excellence, and car- rying themselves after a fashion, and re- flecting a precision and efficiency of drill, worthy of any army in any land. If in the IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 85 future history of the far East there is fight- ing to be done, I venture to predict that the army as well as the navy of Japan will give a good account of itself. And what are the chances? It has been said that Japan has been made drunk with its successes in China, and that if, as is likely, it should seek to force another issue with China, that huge empire, roused at last, and with its four hundred millions of people to draw from, would wipe it out. But is it likely ? So far from its being so, there are, I apprehend, other possibilities of a far more portentous character of which as yet foreign statesmen have taken but little account. In a letter l written not long ago from Tokio I find these words : We who live in Japan and have many opportu- nities of ascertaining the views held by publi- cists about the Chinese problem believe that we are in a position to speak with some confidence. "What we see before everything is that the states- men of the country do not credit the possibility of the Middle Kingdom's [China's] complete disintegration. They think that its territorial dimensions may be reduced, but they think also that there must always remain a solid residuum, guaranteed from disruption by the homoge- neity of the race, by its vast resources, and by 1 In the Hongkong " Telegraph," December 17, 1899. 86 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW its long history of autonomy. Japan under- stands that it is a matter of life and death to her nascent industries to prevent any large encroach- ments upon Chinese dominions by powers which employ protective tariffs to close their markets. She does not want the irreducible minimum of the Chinese empire for her commercial vis-a-vis. Then comes the question, To what lengths is she prepared to go, and what methods does she think feasible, for the conservation of the Middle King- dom ? Here also there is a notable consensus of opinion among her leading politicians. They think that what China needs before everything else at present is a strong army and a strong navy, the weapons for self-defense. She already possesses materials for an army; they require only to be molded into shape. Japan is best fitted to undertake that task. The letter then goes on to deal with the question of a navy for China, and con- cludes : These are the practical questions that press for immediate settlement, according to the view of Japanese publicists. The questions of finance and general reform would be national corollaries which Japan does not seem to consider incapable of solution. This is a significant utterance, and its significance is increased by the fact that it IMPRESSIONS OP JAPAN 87 appears in a Chinese, not a Japanese, jour- nal, and that its suggestions are preceded by the statement: The Chinese commissioners Lin and Ching have now left Tokio. Ostensibly their journey to Japan had a purely commercial object; they were instructed to make a careful investigation of the trading and manufacturing methods that Japan is following with success. But in reality their main purpose was to ascertain the possi- bilities of an alliance between the two Oriental empires. A very little reflection will enable one to see the enormous possibilities that lurk in language such as this. Just now the West- ern world is saying to itself: "At last the huge Chinese empire is on the eve of disin- tegration. The great wall is broken down. The haughty seclusion has been invaded. There is the carcass, and there already the Western eagles are gathered together- Russia, England, Germany, France, with our own national bird hovering near at hand. It will not be a great while before the attending physicians, to change the figure, will diagnose the disease as requir- ing vivisection, and will divide the remains between them." It does not seem to have occurred to anybody that China herself may 88 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW wish to have a voice in the matter, or if it does, we are just now being told that she is an empire made up of such heterogeneous and mutually indifferent principalities that there is no remotest prospect of binding them together in any common effort for preserving the national autonomy. But those who say so in America, at any rate forget their own very recent history, and how our States, east and west, though di- vided by a distance of three thousand miles, were bound together, despite their diverse interests and. traditions, in one splendid and heroic struggle for the life of the Re- public. And if it should be asked, "What evidence is there that there exists anywhere in China to-day any such national sentiment as our own Civil War disclosed?" I think that question is sufficiently answered by the following extract which I take from a lead- ing Chinese journal published within the last few months: Foreigners have for many years united them- selves, and have been laying their plans with regard to China. Originally they availed them- selves of the plea of the mutual advantages aris- ing out of commerce to induce China to open treaty ports at which they could trade. Next, under pretext of certain losses, in order to en- rich themselves, they compelled China to pay IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 89 certain indemnities. To-day they are mooting the questions of railways and mines, and using them as a pretext to get our country from us. . . . In the present dispute between Russia and England ruin for China lurks. In reality, it is only a quarrel about the partition of China. Indeed, the surrounding circumstances are con- verging to this partition. Foreigners are ever scheming for this. The signs of this impend- ing calamity are all too apparent within our own borders. ... If, then, China is to re- gain her original power, she must arouse herself and amend her ways. Does it need to be pointed out that be- tween language such as this, translated from a native Chinese journal, and the visit of Chinese envoys to the capital of Japan, with the account of which I have prefaced it, there is likely to be a close con- nection? It would seem from it, at least, that that large apathy with which we have been wont to credit China is no longer a characteristic of the situation. It would seem as if this vast empire were at last awakening and arousing herself nay, more: that for the first time in her history she is recognizing her deficiencies, and reaching out for help and guidance from a powerful neighbor in correcting them. Supposing, now, that she gets from Japan 90 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW that help and guidance, we may be sure that Japan will be clever enough to make her pay for it. Indeed, the article which I have just been quoting goes on, at the close, to say: In regard to Japan, the Japanese secretly de- manded Amoy, and, further, they have secretly laid plans to usurp authority over the whole province of Fu-kien. Is not this proof enough that Japan also seeks to have her "sphere of in- fluence" in China? This indicates clearly enough that China recognizes the thirst for empire which burns in the breast of her neighbor. But it does not lessen the significance of words in which, in this same article, referring to Japan, this Chinese correspondent says: It must be remembered that Japan is a coun- try whose inhabitants are our brothers. We and they are companions who ride in the same car- riage. Precisely ; and when once the Chinese peo- ple as a whole grasp this fact, and when they consent, as they have now so lately indicated their readiness to consent, to learn the arts of war on sea and land from their clever and resourceful and most am- IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 91 bitious neighbor, then let the West, in our homely but expressive phrase, clear the track for the inevitable changes that are destined to come to pass. It is this view of Japan that I confess to-day most of all interests me, and that I think must interest any student of history, ancient or modern. There is something fascinating in this picture of an ancient people, nobody knows quite how old or, with certainty, whence derived, awakening at last out of the slumber of its antiquated puerilities and superstitions, rousing itself from the paralysis of its ignorance and in- sularity, reaching forth to our Western life, its art, its letters, its science, its mechanical ingenuities, seizing their significance in its relations to the upbuilding of our Western civilizations with a marvelous rapidity, and then transferring them, with a rapidity scarcely less marvelous, to its own soil and its own life. "Alas," cries the artistic traveler, "how horrid to have all this Japanese charm and color despoiled by the introduction of our hideous American modernisms, noisy, fe- verish, and mechanical!" I think the ap- prehension is unnecessary. On the after- noon of the day on which occurred that opening of the Japanese Parliament to 92 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW which I have already referred, I spent an hour with a Japanese statesman of great distinction, to whom I ventured to convey my sense of the dignity of the function of the morning, adding, however, the expres- sion of my hope that the prevalence of European costumes, uniforms, evening dress-suits, and the like, which distin- guished it, was not an indication of a fash- ion which was to prevail in Japan, where the national dress of both sexes is so much more graceful and beautiful than our own. "Oh, no," he laughingly replied, "I don't think it will. The emperor, as you saw, wore the dress of a European general ; but you may be sure that as soon as he got back to the imperial palace he took it off as promptly as possible." And in this there is a suggestion of what will continue to come to pass in Japan. At first it was natural enough that a people impressed with the value of those Western forces in which it had been so long and so conspicuously deficient should, in the effort to appropriate them, appropriate much that was accidental rather than essential, and in many instances for the moment mistake the relative value of the two. But all this will right itself in time indeed, has already begun to do so. ' ' Our men will be likely to IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 93 adopt your dress, for it is a better working- dress than their own ; but our women no. ' ' And in this there was much discernment; for the dress of men among the Japanese has too much flowing drapery to make it a good working-dress, while, on the other hand, the dress of women, especially of el- derly women, has in it so much of what might be called the large charity of reserve but here I perceive that I am entering upon a domain in which my abundant igno- rance would make me an easy prey to femi- nine criticism, and I forbear. I wish, however, that in this connection I might give the substance of a conversation which I had with the distinguished states- man whom I have just quoted. The two foremost men in Japan to-day, for intel- lectual force and high qualities of leader- ship, are the Marquis Ito and Count Okumo. The former was kind enough to intimate his desire to see me and to make an appoint- ment to that end, of which, however, my en- gagements prevented me from availing myself. With the latter I had for a good part of an afternoon a conversation which was altogether unreserved, in which I was permitted to ask all sorts of questions, and throughout which I was impressed with the rare penetration, grasp, philosophic' can- 94 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW dor, and statesmanlike sense of proportion of an unusually elevated and courageous thinker. Happy would it be for Japan if her policies could be directed by so firm and competent a hand. Count Okumo was full of hope for the future of his people; was not insensible to the dangers of the hasty superimposition upon an Asiatic people of Occidental forms of government; and described in a very interesting way the tentative experiments which were in progress for the purpose of training the people in some of those earlier departures from pure paternalism which are involved in the erection of something like an elective system in connection with municipal rule. Did he not apprehend, I asked, that among a people for so many generations wonted to the feudal system, with its tribe or clan and its tribal ruler, there would be danger of the reassertion of the power and influence of the feudal lord as against the freedom and purity of our elective system I Yes, he answered, he recognized that danger, though he recognized also, laugh- ingly, that it lurked in other systems where the feudal lord or chief was sometimes de- scribed as a ''boss"; but he believed that a higher and wider education was the remedy IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 95 for that, and that the secret of the correc- tion of political as of other evils lay, first of all, in the intelligent recognition of them. And in this connection it was interesting to have pointed out to me by our able minister to Japan the schools for girls and young women which the count had founded and maintained at his own expense. There could be no better witness to his large faith in the nobler future of his own people. At the foundation of all national greatness lies a competent motherhood, and it is a note of the highest promise that so wise a leader should have recognized that fact and set about providing for it. That, in connection with the progress of Japan in these directions, there has been of late an impatience of her earlier teachers along these and other lines of Western progress, has excited considerable com- ment, and a not unnatural irritation in the United States. A little while ago Japan could not have too much or too many of us. "But now," as an aggrieved American manufacturer said to me, "we no sooner build their factories for them and teach them how to run them than they dismiss our superintendents and pack them home again. ' ' And why should they not ! They are building factories and maintaining 96 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW them for their own profit, not ours; and I apprehend that American unpopularity in Japan is due, at any rate partly, to our over-eagerness to seize opportunities which the people themselves have discerned or created, and of which they themselves not unnaturally desire to reap the benefits. Personally, I cannot say that I encountered any evidence that foreigners are not as well treated and as cordially welcomed in Japan as they are, say, in Germany or France. The best that the world has is now, so far as they have awakened to the value of it, within their reach ; and if the process of as- similation is as rapid as the process of appropriation, no one may undertake to predict the measure of their future achieve- ment. They have great and largely unde- veloped national resources, exceptional en- ergy, a curiously quick prehensile quality in all mental processes, and a boundless ambition. And yet all these will not make a great nation, and that other thing which does they are confessedly without. I say i ' confessed- ly," because in a leading journal of Japan I found the following remarkable words: We have recently ventured to call attention in these columns to the demoralizing effect of IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 97 the present transition of this country from old to new. We do not pretend to have done any- thing like justice to a question so complicated and so difficult to deal with ; but we believe that no sober-minded student of contemporary life and thought in this country, be he a Japanese or a foreigner, will dispute the fact that our people are now passing through an extremely critical period of their moral development. Nor will any such person be disposed to deny that the symp- toms of the moral malady as revealed in various walks of life are sufficiently grave to demand serious reflection on the part of the leaders of thought and action among us. Now the question is, What is the remedy, or is there any ? Before, however, proceeding to talk of the remedy, it would be well to see if the patient is at all con- scious of the gravity of his situation, for in the case of all moral diseases the awakening of the patient to the danger to which he is exposed is the essential condition for the efficacy of any remedy that may be applied to his complaint. From various indications noticed in public life as well as in private intercourse, we are led to conclude that the national consciousness is be- ginning to feel that something is wrong with the country in matters of conduct and belief. There have never been wanting men who have warned their countrymen against the moral danger to which they were exposed. Leaders of thought and reform like Mr. Fukuzawa, Mr. Sugiura, and some others have been calling the attention of the people to this very subject during the past 7 98 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW fifteen years or more. But the warnings of these moralists have hitherto failed to produce any marked impression upon the nation ; it is neces- sary that the evils of the times should make a certain progress in order that their real signifi- cance may be brought home to the generality of the people. Sufficient progress now seems to have been made in this undesirable direction, for, as already stated, there are unmistakable indications that the thinking portion of the peo- ple is slowly awakening to the reality of the situation. As to the question of the remedy, a large num- ber of our readers will, we presume, answer that nothing but religion will save the Japanese from utter moral degeneration. Or, to put it in a con- crete form, they will say that the only hope for us lies in our conversion to Christianity. We certainly recognize in Christianity a form of re- ligion inculcating a lofty standard of morality, powerful as a motive power. We recognize in it a factor which has played an important part in the development of European civilization. But, admitting all these things, we cannot be- lieve that it will ever succeed in getting a firm hold upon the minds of the educated class. Men of this class have for centuries lived and died under a system of morality which inculcates vir- tue for virtue's sake and entirely dispenses with supernatural sanctions of any sort. The result of acquaintance with the sciences brought by the new civilization has certainly not tended to turn IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 99 the educated Japanese from their traditional attitude of mind on religious matters. If there is little hope for the adoption of Christianity by the educated sections of the peo- ple, is there better hope in that quarter for Bud- dhism? We should say decidedly not. Bud- dhism in its pure form has never been able to make much headway in Japan. As we pointed out in these columns some two years ago, it has only been able to obtain a footing here by adapt- ing itself to and humoring the original beliefs of the people. It has certainly done much good to Japan ; and utterly degenerate and hopelessly ignorant as are the majority of its priests, it is the professed religion of the bulk of the peo- ple and will die hard. But the days of its vigor are long since past ; there is nothing to encourage the hope that it will yet revive, at all events in such a form as to touch the imagination and in- fluence the life of the educated class. As to Shinto, we may dismiss it altogether out of our consideration. It can hardly be called a religion, and as a system of morality it is hope- lessly encumbered with a mass of legendary lore which will hardly bear the light of scientific criticism. The reader will doubtless ask, "If you reject the help of all religions, what is your remedy for the complaint you speak of?" To be frank, we have to confess that we cannot think of any specific cure for the present case, unless some teacher of extraordinary gifts makes his appear- 100 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ance among us to preach moral truths with a force and authority which belong to true genius. If there has been a serious moral relapse among us, it has been the result of the shock occasioned by our contact with a new civilization. In the general confusion that has attended our effort in breaking loose from the old order of things, it was natural that we should have fallen into the error of carrying Vandalism into the domain of moral life. The evil results of that error have now reached a point at which the na- tional consciousness cannot help awakening to the gravity of the situation. It will be impossible, I think, for any thoughtful person, whatever may be his creed or want of creed, to read these words without a sense of their profound pathos. This ancient people, waking with a new life, becomes conscious that neither arms nor battle-ships nor machinery, neither railways, factories, nor constitutional gov- ernment, make a great state ; because none of them, nor all of them put together, pro- duce that essential righteousness which is the essential strength of nations as of men. Misconceiving what that is for which the supernatural stands in the Christian re- ligion, the writer whom I have quoted fails to recognize that the supreme power of that religion lies in the fact that it furnishes IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 101 precisely that for which, unknowingly, he asks a "teacher of extraordinary gifts . . . to preach moral truths with a force and authority which belong to true genius" to do this, and infinitely more than this, by the spell of a divine Personality that touches and conquers the heart of man to- day even as it did when that spell first broke upon the moral consciousness of men two thousand years ago. For that, though as yet it but imperfectly discerns it, the new Japan is waiting. May the day be not long distant when from the lamps that Christian hands have lighted, and still more from the lives that Christian men and women have lived there, it shall see and own its coming Teacher, Saviour, King! IV IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA IV IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA IF one were asked to express in a single phrase that which exists in the Western mind as its distinctive conception of the land and the people included within the geographical boundaries of what we are wont to describe as India, it would oftenest be done, I imagine, by calling it the land of mystery. Western peoples are ordinarily, it may be presumed, as ignorant of China or Japan as they are of India ; and travelers have probably been as often obliged to cor- rect their earlier impressions of either of these countries in the light of a fuller knowledge. But no other people have in them so much that has been inscrutable, and that continues to be so, as those various tribes and states that extend from the Rus- sian frontier to the Indian Ocean. And the interesting thing is that this ele- ment of mystery does not disappear with closer observation or more intimate ac- 105 106 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW quaintance. It would be a small thing to say that my Bengali servant was inscruta- ble to me after several weeks of his con- stant companionship by day and by night, in travel, rest-houses, dak-bungalows, and inns, on shipboard, and in those frequent and quite unreserved conferences which are indispensable in travel between a for- eigner and one who is guide, valet, and interpreter all in one. Any traveler would say, doubtless, that to understand the occult mental processes and cryptographic speech of any foreign servant is easily beyond the cleverness of the most experienced mind- reader. But this inability to comprehend, and still more to forecast, the mental pro- cesses of these Orientals is, I have found, unreservedly admitted even by those who have known them for a generation. Indeed, the dramatic element of British rule in In- dia largely consists in that absence of certainty as to the character, motives, or possible conduct of those over whom they are set which I have often heard admitted on the part of their rulers. It is this that must needs lend to the land and to its people an exceptional and peren- nial interest. As in the costumes and cus- toms of other Eastern nations there is forever wanting that note of almost star- IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 107 tling picturesqueness which salutes the stranger in India, so it is with all that costume and custom stand for. Prodi- gal wealth, Oriental splendor, subtlety in speech and action, inexhaustible craft, un- wearied furtiveness, swift and secret re- venges, hot passion and its reckless blow, far-seeing purposes and their marvelous adroitness of scheme and instrument, the tragedies of racial or tribal ambitions, the carelessness of life in warfare, the unspeak- able perfidies of intrigue in the lives of kings and courts, the surface gentleness and obsequiousness, and the hard glitter of undying hatreds that gleam beneath them these are some of the elements that long ago made up life in that strange land, and that are a long way from having van- ished out of it to-day. Under these circumstances, the presence of British rule in India, and the story of its achievements, is of its kind one of the most wonderful things in human history. It does not in the smallest degree matter that what has come to pass was not always a thing of forecast or the fruit of a set purpose in the beginning ; the marvelous thing is that, with no hesitating or unequal steps, it has come to pass. And, indeed, this is, in its way, one of the most impressive and significant f ea- 108 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW tures of the whole Anglo-Indian historic evolution. The " Honorable East India Company" came into existence somewhere about the beginning of the seventeenth cen- tury. It was when Elizabeth was queen, and when that great renaissance that stirred England coincidently with her emancipation from Latin ecclesiastical tra- ditions and the benumbing influence of Latin standards of morals and conduct was throbbing through the veins of a great peo- ple and kindling all the avenues of her life, domestic, social, civic, and commercial, with the glow of a new and nobler life. "The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading to the East Indies, ' ' as the corporation was styled, began in a modest way by sending out to the East a few ships to purchase silks, spices, and other Indian products. As the trade grew, an ambassa- dor was sent by King James to Jahangir to conduct such negotiations with the In- dian ruler as should best protect and foster the nascent commerce. That was the begin- ning. What a splendid galaxy of sailors, soldiers, rulers, statesmen, merchants it has been that, step by step, has built up the great empire of to-day ! In tracing its his- tory it is instructive, and especially for Americans, who have but lately embarked IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 109 upon a similar enterprise, to see that that history was clouded by features as little honorable as they were equitable. The earlier Indian governor had no salary, and the art of the ' ' grand squeeze, ' ' as the Chi- nese describe it, was remorselessly applied, too often, by one who was the depositary of a largely irresponsible power. The Honor- able East India Company was for more than two hundred years a corporation whose British servants obtained and held their places largely by pure favoritism, and whose methods, it must be owned, were often eminently characteristic of officials holding place quite independent of their merits. Under these circumstances, the only wonder is that the "Honorable Com- pany ' ' was able so successfully to hold what from time to time it acquired, and to push its enterprises and its acquisitions to such large and enduring successes. The expla- nation must be found in the fact that, cor- rupt and unscrupulous as the earlier meth- ods of the East India Company may often have been, on the whole they were on a higher plane than those of the native princes whom they supplanted. Of the rule of these, it must be owned, the story was ordinarily a tragic and cruel one. The first British settlers in India 110 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW found the land rent and divided by inter- nal dissensions, and its ruling powers in a state of constant warfare upon one another. In these wars the native princes learned, after a time, to seek the aid of those small bodies of the East India Company's troops, both European and native, which the com- pany had found it necessary to organize for the protection of its own settlements. When, however, such aid was given, it had to be paid for in one way or another; and thus the grants of land were made on which, afterward, were built Bombay, Calcutta, etc. As the student of Indian history will remember, these were not always securely held, and caste prejudice, racial prejudice, and the conquering propensities of tribal leaders led occasionally to attacks upon the English settlements, such as the sack- ing of Calcutta by Siraj-ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal, with all the consequent horrors of the prison called the Black Hole, into which one hundred and forty-six Euro- peans were driven at night, and out of which only twenty-three persons were taken alive the next morning. But during the fol- lowing year (1757) Clive won the battle of Plassey, the English were supreme in Bengal, and India began to see the begin- ning of the end. IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 111 Of the end, did I say? But who will be bold enough even to-day to prophesy the end? I shall speak later of the reasons which would seem to make it impossible, with any considerable degree of certainty, to forecast that end ; but in the meantime I wish to refer to some of the conspicuous features of British rule in India which make it, as I conceive, the greatest object- lesson in colonial government in the history of the world. And in order to appreciate the situation, both as it existed originally and as it exists to-day, it must be remembered that India is not in any sense a homogeneous country. The Indian empire contains 1,560,000 square miles and a population of two hun- dred and eighty-seven millions, and these extend from the eighth to the thirty-seventh degree of north latitude, and from 67 east to 99 east longitude. It follows, of course, that there are great diversities of climate, soil, custom, and lan- guage, as there are also of native rule and religion. Even to-day the languages of the north and south are wholly different, and when I asked my Bengali servant, who was a native of central India and had traveled with me there, to accompany me to the southern provinces, he very properly urged 112 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW that he could be of little or no use to me, be- cause he could not speak the languages of those provinces. More than this, as the modern student will see if he looks at a map of India and traces the ancient sovereign- ties for which its provincial names once stood, these various sections of the Indian peninsula were divided from one another by a score of petty sovereignties whose mu- tual hatreds were at once deep and malig- nant. Indeed, the way in which these sur- vive to-day in India, where, superimposed upon them all, is the strong hand of British rule, is at once tragic and pathetic. The traveler in India is early arrested, in his scrutiny of the natives, by the curious mark painted down, or across, their foreheads a round red disk, a yellow bar with displayed ends, three white stripes, and the like, in an endless variety of combinations. These are very commonly mistaken by the for- eigner as designations of caste, but they are nothing of the sort. They are tribal designations, and they still assert them- selves, though the tribal ruler prince, nawab, raja, whatever he may have been has long ago been dethroned, or is to-day as, if he exists at all, he so often is no more than the stuffed and bedizened simu- lacrum of a tribal ruler. Such signs are a IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 113 dramatic witness to the intensity of that tribal bond with which, in the future his- tory of India as in the past, the conquer- ing power must reckon. It was with this vast and heterogeneous, not homogeneous, people that the Anglo- Saxon had to deal when the East India Company began to trade with the Indian peninsula, and among whom it has won its most splendid successes. I do not speak of other colonial settlements in India, French, Dutch, or Spanish, because they have largely disappeared, and because the sur- vival of that other power which has super- seded them has been eminently a survival of the fittest. One of these days, the time has not come for it yet, some dispassion- ate student will write a comparative history of colonization, and will point out the ele- ments that have contributed, where coloni- zation has succeeded, to its success. It is quite certain that "originally, in the case of India and the East India Company, they did not in any considerable degree exist, any more than, in the case of the French colonies, they exist in Algeria to-day. The first aim of a great commercial corporation was, naturally enough, commercial gain; and while Warren Hastings was undoubt- edly not the monster that Burke painted 114 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW him, yet so long as the East India Company had large and undefined and exclusive rights in India, it is not surprising that they should have abused them. The Brit- ish Parliament did wisely when it annulled the East India Company's charter of 1600, and later followed the lead of Pitt, in 1784, in passing his India bill, and, later still, in taking those successive steps that trans- ferred the custody of India to the crown. It is difficult for one who visits India for the first time to realize that this was done so lately as 1858. That was the year follow- ing the Mutiny; and the bloody history of the Mutiny prepares the modern student to understand something of the Indian mind and temper. As Sir W. Hunter, than whom no higher authority in Indian history ex- ists, has put it: During seven hundred years the warring races of Central Asia and Afghanistan filled up their measure of bloodshed and pillage to the full. Sometimes they returned with their spoil to their mountains, leaving only desolation behind ; some- times they killed off or drove out the former in- habitants and settled down in India as lords of the soil ; sometimes they founded imperial dynas- ties, destined to be crushed each in its turn by a new host sweeping into India through the Afghan passes. The precise meaning of inva- IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 115 sion in India during the last [eighteenth] cen- tury may be gathered from the following facts: It signified not merely a host of twenty to a hun- dred thousand barbarians on the march, paying for nothing and eating up every town and cot- tage and farm-yard; burning and slaughtering on the slightest provocation, and often in mere sport. It usually also meant a grand final sack and massacre at the capital of the invaded country. And besides these wars from without were the intestine conflicts in which Hindu fought with Hindu, Mohammedan with Mo- hammedan, and each with the other. The readers of Macaulay will remember his de- scription of the unspeakable brutalities of the Mahrattas. The story of the bloody ravages of Pindarees, of the Sultan Mo- hammed Shah of Gulbarga, and of the Hindu Maharaja of Vijayanager (the first- named of whom swore an oath on the Koran that he would not sheathe the sword until he had put to death a hundred thousand infidels), is told by Meadows Taylor in his ''Indian History" with a ghastly detail that no one who has read it can recall with- out a shudder. It was amid such a condition of interne- cine warfare and unrest as this that the first English settlers in India found themselves. 116 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ' I may not attempt to trace here the succes- sive steps by which British rule has built up in that land the present structure of order, peace, and security. But however men may differ about the wisdom or originality of those successive steps, there can be no question as to that which is their founda- tion-stone. I was exceptionally fortunate, while in India, in coming into more than ordinarily close contact with educated na- tives, both Hindu and Mohammedan, who spoke to me often with marked unreserve of the rule under which they lived, and of the rulers who administered it. I suppose no- body who reads these pages will expect me to say that they spoke always with enthusi- asm of the one, or with affection of the other. They did nothing of the sort; and indeed I have observed that in our own be- loved land and under our own honored rul- ers it cannot be said to be an invariable experience that we refer to the law or to the administrator of the law in terms of either admiration or approval. In other words, criticism and fault-finding, whether con- cerning the rule or the ruler, would appear to be considered as a primary function of the modern citizen. Well, it is not greatly different in India, Why should it be? It is a land of newspapers, of free speech, and IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 117 of much public and published fault-finding of officials and their decisions, great and small. We should say that among ourselves this is wholesome and normal, and far more to be desired than smothered discontent or a concealed smoldering hostility. I do not see why it should not be so in India, espe- cially when one takes into consideration an additional element in the situation there which is, in fact, of all the most important. As I have said, I conversed with great unreserve with many natives concerning British rule in India, and influential men among them expressed themselves to me with great freedom. They had grievances to rehearse and officials and their acts to criticize, but this one thing, from first to last, always and everywhere, was plain that they recognized that with the mainte- nance and permanence of British rule in India marched the safety of life and prop- erty, freedom to go about unmolested on one's honest errands, the peace and good order, in one word, of the social fabric. They would like to see the old dynasties, sovereignties, greater or lesser principali- ties and powers with which in other days their race or family had been identified, re- stored? Yes, perhaps, if it could 'be done without too great a cost. But the cost? 118 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW To face that it was plain enough they had no stomach. Under the present conditions the humblest Indian servant knows this one fact, which of all others is of paramount consequence to him: he is no longer the creature of another man's whim; his life, his property, his right to go to and fro, his family ties, his task or employment- all these things are within his own control. That he knows. And he knows that British rule in India has given this to him and se- cured it to him. He knows that underneath all the dealing of this alien race with him and his there lies the broad stone of justice ; that no man, stranger or home-born, may wrong him with impunity; and that, how- ever weak he may be, he need be the favor- ite of no prince, the fawning tool of no ca- pricious rule, in order to secure for himself and those dear to him their rights and his own. Now, then, carry this consideration from the lowest to the highest in the Indian social scale. With a consummate tact and wisdom which cannot be too highly praised, the present ruling power in India, instead of sweeping into oblivion with its strong hand the various powers which it had su- perseded, has dealt with each one of them, great and small, in accordance with this IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 119 large law of equity. If a state or a ruler had in them anything to conserve, the im- perial authority has conserved it. If a ma- haraja showed himself amenable to reason, and willing to hold such power as was intrusted to him from a power above him which was strong enough to maintain his just right, some modus Vivendi was speed- ily devised by which the status quo ante was maintained. Around the person of the Viceroy of India, by gradual but sure pro- gressions, the great Indian princes have been drawn in a Council of State for the consideration of common interests and the maintenance of common rights. Doubtless there are sometimes restlessness, impa- tience of the dry Western rule, resentment, and smoldering enmity. But suppose that the powers which once ruled India could recover their old sovereignties, there is not one of them that does not know that the next step would be to fly at one another's throats. It does not seem to have occurred to people who are fond of prophesying that British rule cannot hope to maintain itself in India, because it is an alien rule, and who sagely remind us that when once the man is found from among themselves who can unite the various Indian states and nation- alities of the elder time, this united India 120 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW will be strong enough to sweep the Saxon out of his country, root and branch it does not, I say, seem to have occurred to these clever seers that the present rule in India has built up a strong and wide-spread con- stituency to whom such a prospect is only and wholly distasteful. For when some such great revolutionary movement had ac- complished its purpose and the last Briton had been either butchered or expelled from India, then there would arise the question which to-day the educated and, above all, the wealthy native would ask himself, in the spirit of a modern Frenchman, "Et apres?" A great Indian merchant with whom I became acquainted, and who felt, I suppose, that he might express himself to an American with such freedom as he might not otherwise indulge in, referred with some feeling to the fact that, except undef limited and special conditions, the people of India were not trusted with arms, nor al- lowed to govern themselves. "But, then," he said, with that quick mental turn which is so curious a characteristic of the Oriental mind, ' ' if we were permitted to govern our- selves, it would take a great deal of money and time and involve a great many risks, while, now, British imperialism does it all for us and leaves us free to go about our IMPRESSIONS OP INDIA 121 business with, perhaps, a greater sense of security than we should otherwise have." As a matter of fact, there was no "per- haps ' ' in his mind whatever. He was a rich man, and he knew there was no slightest question of surmise that if British rule were to vanish out of India, security for him and his would speedily vanish with it. An observer of romantic tendencies might easily deplore this, and ask, "Is the old heroic, if often barbaric, spirit of India a vanished quantity?" I may not under- take to answer that question. One thing is certain: British rule in India has taught its people to value peace, the safety of life and property, and the privilege of going quietly and securely about one's business. I am not sure that we who call ourselves of the superior races are indifferent to these things. But that rule has taught the people of India a great deal more. I suppose that to a certain class of minds the temper that prompts one to fly at his neighbor's throat and to resent an injury with a blow will always be regarded as the * * heroic ' ' spirit ; but there is another view of heroism which it is to be hoped will continue to have its disciples, and which holds that self-re- straint and courageous endurance, self- 122 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW reliance and a noble patience under inju- ries, that temperance, frugality, industry, and discontent only with ignorance, evil, and injustice, may also have in them some element of heroism. At any rate, that is the lesson which British imperialism has been teaching India, and which India most needed to learn. Let me here anticipate the traveled critic who has seen the short, brusque, and some- times violent ways of the British soldier or the British cad with a native servant or coolie or inferior of whatever class. No- body who has been in India needs to be told that, with the relations existing there, such things are inevitable, but nobody who knows anything about the facts needs any more to be told that such acts are limited by an authority and punished with an im- partiality which in the case of the govern- ment of a conquered people by the con- quering nation is absolutely unique. There is, in this connection, if any one desires it, an opportunity for comparison in the case of the treatment by the Boers of the blacks in South Africa which has in it a whole vol- ume of meaning. Such wanton cruelty, such habitual brutality, as are notoriously characteristic of the Boers' treatment of their native servants have no more place in IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 123 India than the practices of the thugs or dakoits; and the humblest native in India knows that, in the case of whatever injustice he may experience from those above him, he has a court or civil magistrate where his appeal will have a swift and impartial hear- inga court in part, at least, of persons of his own race, and an attorney, if he chooses, of his own speech and lineage. Indeed, the system of civil jurisprudence as, with unexampled wisdom and equity, it has been built up in India, is one of the most marvelous features in all its modern history. Both the Hindu and Mohammedan governments, it must be remembered, were pure despotisms. An Indian ruler looked upon his kingdom as his private property, from which he was at liberty to exact what he could and spend it as he pleased. He could, personally, deprive his subjects of liberty, property, or life itself, as he saw fit. One illustration of this will suffice : The Governor Ahmadabad, about the year 1646, invited the principal directors of the Eng- lish and Dutch trading companies to an enter- tainment, of which, as usual, displays of danc- ing-girls were among the chief features. One party having danced themselves out, another was sent for, but for some reason they refused 124 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW to come. They were then forcibly dragged into the presence of the governor. He listened to their excuse, laughed at it, and immediately com- manded his guards to strike off their heads. They begged their lives, but in vain, and the exe- cutions were immediately proceeded with in the presence of the guests. Horrified by the spec- tacle, the strangers could not conceal their emo- tions, whereupon the governor burst out laugh- ing, and asked them what it was that had disturbed them. 1 In contrast to this sort of despotism, the same writer tells us that to-day in India the meanest coolie is entitled to all the solemn formalities of a judicial trial; and the punish- ment of death, by whomsoever administered and on whomsoever inflicted, without the express decree of the law, is a murder for which the highest officer of the government is as much ac- countable as a sweeper would be for the assas- sination of the governor-general in durbar. 2 In other words, human life is to-day more secure in India than in Kentucky. But when you have secured justice, you have not necessarily secured progress. In- ertia may paralyze endeavor, and an exag- 1 "The Indian Empire: A Handbook," etc., p. 38. 8 Ibid. IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 125 gerated conservatism successfully resist the aspirations of national development. And here the problem in India was the more dif- ficult because the racial traditions and ten- dencies of the people were all on one side. Therefore the quiet determination, the steady and undaunted perseverance, which have overcome these racial characteristics, which have awakened a wholesome ambi- tion, developed local enthusiasms, educated and wisely directed particular energies and activities, are something which challenges the warmest admiration. One of the most picturesque spots in India is Darjeeling, that superb elevation from which one gets the incomparable vision of the Himalayas, with the matchless peak of Everest in the far distance. But quite as wonderful in its way is the journey thither, over a railway that climbs a height of six thousand feet from the plains below, surmounting engi- neering difficulties, all the way, which are a wonder to the traveler and a perpetual study to the civil engineer. And as one traces these successive conquests, he sees in them no inapt symbol of what the ruling power in India has been doing all over the land: building its highways, widening and deepening its watercourses, fertilizing its deserts, draining its swamps; the builder 126 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW everywhere of schools and colleges, hospi- tals and infirmaries; inspiring its agricul- ture, grading and replanting its forests, founding and developing manufactories; and over all shedding the light of a pure and undefiled religion in the midst of a people darkened and besotted by centuries of ignorance and superstition. In the cow- temple or the monkey-temple at Benares one may see what the religion of the Hindu can do to touch with the spell of a higher hope an immortal nature, and in the Church of England schools at Agra, as I saw them, one may see what Christianity does do. And in all this organized effort and per- sistent endeavor the finest element is not the machinery, admirable as so often that is, but the man. My journeyings through the East brought me in many ways and in widely diverse places in the Straits Set- tlements, in Benares, and in Arabia, as well as in India itself in contact with the Brit- ish official, than whom there is no finer specimen of public servant in all the world. It was my privilege, too, to make the per- sonal acquaintance of a large number of such officials from the highest to the lowest; and from one extreme to the other, wher- ever I encountered them, they were dis- tinguished by three invariable character- IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 127 istics which are of foremost value, I venture to think, in making a competent public servant. 1. The first of these that impressed me was the sense of responsibility. The American traveler who has had any ex- tended opportunities for observing public servants, in whatever capacity and of what- ever nationality other than his own, must, I think, have been sensible of this. Our own national note just here is too often that of flippancy, illustrating itself now by the levity, now by the audacity, with which a diplomatic representative will treat a duty or an occasion which certainly was worthy of something more than either. A fine specimen of American independence and contempt for effete rulers has been cited in the anecdote of the ambassador who is said to have replied to an Oriental potentate who sent for him to say that he understood that a newspaper in the United States had spoken disrespectfully of the Sultan: "A newspaper in the United States speak dis- respectfully of your Majesty? Why, sir, there are twenty thousand newspapers in the United States that give your Majesty h 1 every morning. ' ' But that such a style of diplomatic intercourse could be seriously regarded as anything else than insolent and 128 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW vulgar, no intelligent person will care seri- ously to urge. It was, however, character- istic of its kind, and it was a dramatic illus- tration of an incapacity to appreciate the representative responsibility of a public servant. Of the absence of this incapacity, public service in India is an impressive example. Wherever one encountered that service it was marked by simple dignity, by a careful regard for the accuracy of an official statement, by a painstaking en- deavor that the demand for official action or intervention should rest upon the sure basis of justice, equity, and right legal pre- scription, and, what was often best of all, by a scrupulous, considerate, and patient courtesy, which perpetually reminded one that the individual had learned to sink him- self, his own swaggering self -consciousness, ease, sensitiveness, or preferences, in what was due from him as the servant of a great state and the representative of a great peo- ple. It was this one note that, wherever one came in contact with a government official of whatever rank or class, lent to what he did an explicit character of distinction. 2. And higher and finer even than this was what, for want of any other term to de- scribe it, I may call the note of sympathy. The distance between an Eastern and a IMPEESSIONS OF INDIA 129 Western mind must be measured, somebody has said, not by miles, but by centuries. With all our best endeavors, I presume we shall never be quite able, with our nurture and ancestry, to attain the Asiatic's point of view. But to strive to get nearer to it, to be considerate and patient in view of our remoteness from it, and, best of all, forever to recognize the common humanity which underlies all racial distinctions, and in the brotherhood of which alone we can hope to build the kingdom of the future, this is the endeavor which India's great rulers, Hastings, Wellesley, Cornwallis, the Law- rences, Lord Dalhousie, and their greater and lesser compeers, have splendidly and consistently illustrated. Not long before I visited northeastern India, its mountain region had been desolated by unparalleled storms which had caused not only enormous destruction, but, in some instances, appal- ling loss of life. In connection with one of these, there had been some remarkable ex- hibitions of heroism in the rescue of per- sons in peril; and the commissioner of a certain district decided that these deserved some formal and official recognition, and arranged for the presentation of gold med- als to certain civil and military officers, policemen and others, who had so distin- 130 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW guished themselves. Among these the case of two natives, coolies, was brought to his notice, who had at the repeated risk of their own lives and with rare gallantry saved the lives of some English women and children. The commissioner, after due in- vestigation, decided that these two men were eminently deserving of the gold medal of honor, and that it should be conferred upon them. But the presentations were to be made by a high official of the general government in a public hall, in a town near to the scenes of disaster, and before a great throng of the foremost people of the prov- ince, and beyond the breech-cloth the coolies had no clothes. In this dilemma the commissioner himself, and at his own ex- pense, had them suitably habited, and they appeared side by side with men of high rank, and received the decoration which they had so justly won. "And now they wear it," said a near kinswoman of the commissioner, "and wear usually almost nothing else. They are desperately poor, and rarely earn more than four annas [eight cents] a day." "But they will not keep the gold medals long," I said; "their poverty will, I imagine, soon induce them to part with them. " " Never, ' 'was the swift answer, given with flashing eye. "They IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 131 will never forget how they won them and who gave them to them." And I believe her. The government of India and its offi- cial representative meant, henceforth, to these men that which had made the hum- blest and least dowered lives in all the land sharers in glory and honor and civic im- mortality with the highest. How wise the tact, how sure the insight, how resistless the spell of that human sympathy that could here first discern its opportunity and then use it with such rare felicity! 3. But public servants may have the sense of official responsibility and the grace of personal sympathy, and yet be without that chief qualification for the public ser- vice which consists in trained capacity. And here has been the preeminent quality of Indian public service of whatever kind. The history of the Honorable East India Company's service was of another kind. Then a "pull" was the chief requisite to admission. But the time came when Eng- land learned what every other country that has undertaken to aolminister foreign dependencies will have to learn that without a competent and competently trained civil service colonial possessions are simply a school for every dishonesty and a screen for every injustice. No man 132 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW is appointed to any place whatever in India without a certain preliminary training, and, when that is concluded, the application of certain definite and searching tests to verify the results which such training is supposed to produce. The only objection to which this system is open, if I have read aright the arguments in our own country and es- pecially upon the floor of Congress, is that it is liable to produce an official class or caste, which will hold the public offices as a sort of hereditary possession, passed on from one set of office-holders to another, to the exclusion of that rare and gifted body of men who are the tools of our congress- men and senators in primary meetings, political conventions, and State legisla- tures, and whose services can be properly rewarded only by their appointment, on the nomination of these political lights, to po- sitions for which they have never been trained and for which, oftener than other- wise, they have not the remotest qualifica- tion. Well, it would be interesting if some one would take the trouble to compare even with the best specimens of our own public servants an Indian public servant of the second or even the third generation, men whose fathers, like Lord Roberts 's, were public servants there themselves, and who, IMPEESSIONS OF INDIA 133 in grave emergencies and in the long-con- tinued discharge of the gravest responsi- bilities, have illustrated characteristics that are so utterly remote in their high qualities of excellence from our own patent Con- gress-made article as to be to such a crea- ture altogether unintelligible. It would be unjust to conclude this chap- ter without recognizing dangers in the fu- ture of India, which are inseparable from the social situation in that part of the Brit- ish empire, and which will need for their solution a large wisdom and, it may be, a still larger courage. One of these, it must be obvious, is likely to follow from that ra- cial transfusion which almost literally to- day is coming to pass in India. Through licit or illicit unions of the ruling race with the natives there is now in India a consider- able population of mixed blood, of which I observed little was said, but concerning which one would think there must needs be on the part of reflecting persons consider- able thought. This element, which is de- scribed by the general term "Eurasian," represents a community which has parted company with Asiatic traditions, and which in manners, dress, and ambitions is appar- ently altogether identified with those for- eigners whose racial inheritance in part it 134 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW shares. From this class comes in large numbers that element which is represented in India in civil posts of minor responsi- bility, in the preservation of the public peace, in the administration of railways, etc. They are usually found to be fairly efficient and trustworthy, and they are not unnaturally ambitious of official place and social position so far as either of these is within their reach. Naturally, their only hope or expectation in these directions is from their European connections, as, ob- viously, their intermarriages or more ir- regular domestic relations with Europeans have inevitably cut them off from the na- tive races and castes of whatever desig- nation. At present this element in India is a dis- tinctly subordinate and inconsiderable one ; but the causes which have already made it so evident a factor in the problem of the future seem likely to make it increasingly so. If I were a statesman concerned with the future of India, I should watch it closely and not without considerable apprehension. As it exists at present it does not impress one as greatly efficient or formidable in any direction. But it is not difficult to conceive that a time may come when native races in India, awakening from their lethargy, may IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 135 address themselves to the acquisition of a modern civilization, and agencies and in- struments of revolt or aggression which, they now despise ; and when aware, as they already are, that there is no real fellowship between the Eurasian and European ele- ments in India, they may make such terms with the former as, appealing to their cu- pidity or their ambition, may make them formidable allies in some large and united effort for ridding the land of its foreign rulers. History furnishes just here paral- lels which I need not recall ; and in the mat- ter, preeminently, of revolutions which are both social and political, history repeats itself. To-day the Eurasian in India be- lieves that his interests are \dentical with those of its rulers. But the time may easily come when, weary of waiting for a recog- nition which as yet has never come, and which is likely to continue to hold him at arm's-length, and itself aloof from him, the man of mixed blood may turn to the people of that other blood which he has not been allowed to forget still flows in his veins, and confederated with which he may one day prove himself a potential factor in the empire-building of the future. There is still one other element in the problem of India which one cannot over- 136 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW look if lie would I mean the religious ele- ment. The traveler who has followed his guide into the temples of Burma, India, and Ceylon must surely have brought away with him impressions which time can never efface. Some of them are pathetic, others, as at the Burning Ghats at Benares, are profoundly tragic, but all of them, to any sensitive mind, are intensely repulsive. It seems inconceivable, at first, that any sane human being can find in rites that are so puerile, so tawdry, and so inane, anything that expresses in any worthy way any re- ligious idea. It is in vain that one is re- minded that in many of these heathen temples there is much that recalls similar rites and instrumentalities in forms of Christianity that affect a very venerable authority for what they do. One can only say, so much the worse for such forms. But the thing that is of chief consequence in the whole dreary business is its profound hold upon the faith and affections of millions of people, and the meager impression which as yet a higher civilization, which is itself the product of a purer form of faith, has made upon it. It is at this point that our popular im- pression of the influence, e.g., of Christian institutions and especially of Christian IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 137 missions is, I am disposed to think, erro- neous. Said a member of the Oxford Mis- sion in Calcutta, with a fine courage for which one could not sufficiently honor him, "We had been here three years before we made one convert"; but he added, "When one remembers what his departure from his old fellowships cost him, one need not won- der." Nor, indeed, can any one who under- stands what an absolute expulsion from all earlier ties, fellowships, and recognitions on the part of kindred or friends such a step involves. But, on the other hand, one who understands what has been going on all the time since England entered India will recognize that slowly but surely old traditions have been weakening and old lines of separation disappearing, so that, step by step, the dawn of a better and a brighter day is drawing near. I should be violating personal confidences if I should furnish the evidence of this which came to me in private conversation with Brahmans of high rank and official station; but I vio- late no confidence in saying that, among the most thoughtful and clear-sighted of these, it is coming to be more and more clearly perceived that the task is a hopeless one which claims to be able to hold the minds and faith of a people who read and think 138 THE EAST .OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW to the outworn shibboleths of a corrupt and sensuous paganism. And meanwhile the work which Christian missionaries of many names but of one noble aim are doing in all these lands, in schools, in homes, in hospi- tals, in nurseries, in colleges, and in the hearts and lives of shame-bowed and sor- row-burdened men and women, is above all praise, as it is above all price. Much of the best of this work is our own. And herein and hereby is the divinest transfusion of all the transfusion of the divinest Life of all into theirs who still walk in darkness and the shadow of death. May God, who has inspired it, crown it with complete success ! IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS DURING a recent voyage across the Pa- cific, our evenings in the steamer's fine saloon were often beguiled by the music of various races and tongues. A modern ship's company has as little homo- geneity in nationality as in interests; and to a traveler of philosophic temperament few things are more interesting than to note the ways in which this fact at first betrays itself, only to melt away before a great while, if there be the opportunity of a long voyage, into a kindly and neighborly tem- per which enforced proximity makes both sensible and mutually agreeable. Our transatlantic racers, it is true, offer little or no chance for anything of this sort. The voyage is scarcely begun before it is ended, and the conventions of social reserve, and sometimes the memory of rather painful experiences, conspire to beget in the trav- 141 142 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEKOW eler a habit of repression, if not of exclu- siveness. But in a long Pacific voyage it is different People who are destined to be two or three weeks together in the same ship and at the same table sooner or later conclude to make the best of the situation, and one and all bring out their store of amusements or accomplishments for the common benefit. It is to this that we owed, on an evening that will always be memorable, the privi- lege of listening to some Hawaiian songs accompanied by a running commentary both descriptive and historical, to which I am bound to say I am indebted, in its larger suggestions, for the outlines of this chapter. The singer and performer for he was both was an American gentleman whose name, if I were at liberty to record it here, would be familiar to many American ears ; and he brought to his task a rare and most individual charm. He was born in Hono- lulu, of an ancestry identified with the ear- liest missionary history of the Sandwich Islands, and he united in himself the fine insight of his New England forefathers and the sunny vivacity of Oahu. The in- strument which he used was a primitive guitar consisting of a wooden bowl with metal strings across its open face ; the notes IMPEESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 143 were produced by a manipulation analo- gous to that of a banjo ; and along with this he undertook to give a brief history of the evolution of Hawaiian music. Some of us had heard it or thought we had while in the islands, and had been much struck with both its plaintiveness and its tunefulness. It was a rude shock to learn that, in its primitive and unadulterated form, Ha- waiian music had neither characteristic; and that for the obvious reason that it consisted in thumping the bottom of the wooden bowl and twanging a single string. The performer then illustrated how these elementary modes of expressing musical ideas had been influenced by the incom- ing of civilization; how the Hawaiians had caught the airs of the missionary hymns and modified them by their own in- terpretation of them; and finally how, as the element of civilized life became more pervasive and potential, the music of the native and the manipulation of his instru- ments took up into themselves everything and it was apparently not much that was intelligible to the native mind, even to the last negro or music-hall melody. The whole was a parable of really large suggestiveness. For one could not but see in it how what had come to pass in connec- 144 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW tion with something that, after all, was a very small part of a people 's life, was that which had taken place in other and far graver aspects of that life. There was, in other words, first the primitive simplicity and barbarism of that life, with all its charm and all its dreaminess ; and then, step by step, there came to be, out of the mere babel of primal instincts and acts, like pri- mal noises, something increasingly com- plex, increasingly pathetic, and sometimes, alas! increasingly tragic. For one cannot read the story of the abo- riginal days of these beautiful islands with- out being sensible first of all of their charm. In their merely natural aspect this, in its almost dramatic contrasts, has a unique fas- cination. As the Hawaiian Islands rise out of the sea to the vision of one who sees them for the first time from the deck of a ship, their aspect is both rugged and august. The mountain-ranges are distinguished by great strength of outline and boldness of proportion ; and, as seen against the sky, as we saw them, with the moon rising behind them, have in them something indescriba- bly mysterious and noble. But as they are more nearly approached, they are seen to be clothed almost to their summits with a rich verdure, and this has a singularly gra- cious quality of softness and depth. IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 145 This feature in the landscape seems somehow typical of the people. Their his- tory reveals them as distinguished by char- acteristics of great savagery and cruelty; but their ordinary aspect, and their un- spoiled manner toward strangers, where it still survives, is one of an individual and most unusual charm. No one who has seen them will find himself tempted to compare them to any other people or race. Wher- ever they derived the traits of form and feature that distinguish them, and their racial origin is hidden in considerable ob- scurity, they do not resemble the races or people from whom they are supposed to be sprung. The race found by the first ex- plorer, Juan de Gatan, commander of the Spanish exploring expeditions sent out when the ships of Spain dominated the waters of the Pacific, was Polynesian; but it has not been claimed that any other Poly- nesians closely resembled them. It is un- doubtedly the case that, during their long occupancy of the beautiful islands in which they found their home, they underwent those changes which, as Buckle in his ' l His- tory of Civilization" has shown, are as in- evitable as the effect of climatic and kin- dred influences. In a latitude in which the range of the thermometer, all the year round, is ordinarily between 75 and 85 146 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW F., it is not probable that great robustness or aggressive vigor would be developed; and it has not been. On the other hand, in a region singularly favorable to the develop- ment of almost every variety of tropical and semi-tropical fruits and flowers, without the arid and desolating influence of long droughts, it was equally to be expected that this rare beauty and affluence in every nat- ural environment should find its reflec- tion in the singular softness, grace, and beauty of the people. The mountains make them strong and stalwart, their height, grace, and symmetry of physical develop- ment are especially noteworthy, and their plains, fertile, flowery, and ever verdant, make them soft and indolent and self- indulgent. No stranger can see them for the first time, disfigured as they now too often are by the hideous costumes of our modern civilization, without being dazzled sometimes by a beauty of form and feature and of expression which, to an artist's eye, when they are seen in their own lovely set- ting, is a perpetual delight. * * Here, ' ' such a one would be tempted to say, "is some- thing like the original Garden of Eden, as it might have been." Yet the earlier and tribal history of the people was neither beautiful nor engaging. IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 147 In the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, a foun- dation which owes its existence to the wise munificence of a Hawaiian princess who was, at the time of her death, the wife of an American merchant in Honolulu, we may see not alone the emblems and implements of domestic life, but those others which in the history of the most primitive peoples are the symbols of its religion. Along with these one may read, too, if his curiosity leads him in such a direction, the story of that strange admixture of grotesque be- liefs, rites, and priestly terrorism which repeats a story that, alas ! in the history of the world's religions, is as old as the race. Two elements go, ordinarily, to make up these religions, and they were not wanting in the Hawaiian Islands. One of them has been superstition, a blind terror begot- ten by persistent misinterpretation of the forces of nature, with its invariable accom- paniment of a belief in the power of evil spirits in earth and air and sky; and the other the cleverness of unscrupulous men who, as priests or religious teachers, per- petuated among the people a blind fear, which by the adroit manipulation of charms and amulets, and, above all, by the mysteri- ous influence of the taboo, they maintained and deepened. We are accustomed to as- 148 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW sociate that word " taboo" with the idea of prohibition; but, as a matter of fact, it stood for a whole code of religious rites, ceremonies, and privileges, as well as re- strictions, which covered every man's life, reached out to and controlled the disposi- tion of his goods, appropriated to so-called religious uses, if it saw fit, the products of his fields and fishing-grounds, and, in its extreme form, when it became a part of the worship of the people, sent the king for days and nights to the temple in a continu- ous act of worship, while the altars reared under the trees reeked with the blood of human sacrifices. It was characteristic of a note of singular brutality in the religion of these island peoples that, in a silence which, if it could, muzzled the mouth of every man, woman, and child, beast and fowl, the priest killed a hog, and then put to death a man. The hog was then roasted and eaten, and the people returned thanks after the feast by putting to death another man! Such conceptions and usages prepare one to find among a people whose they are a morality of the very lowest type ; and of the unnamable vices of a race with singularly engaging traits of disposition I may not speak here. They are a tragic commentary IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 149 upon the theory that heathen peoples, so far as their religion is concerned, may wisely be left to themselves, and that efforts to better them lead them only to exchange one set of vices for another; and are, inci- dentally, a no less interesting commentary upon the relative value of religious cere- monial, and of those great informing and inspiring principles which touch the springs of conduct rather than direct the rules and instruments of worship. A stranger who had landed in one of the Ha- waiian Islands when they were as yet un- trodden by the white man might easily have formed a conception of them as an ex- tremely devout people. They never built a canoe or used a new fishing-rod without offering a prayer and making a sacrifice to their patron god. Much more, if a house were to be built or a boat to be launched, was the priest invoked and the sacrifice offered. But in pathetic contrast with such usages was the fact that those two most august facts of life, as we view it, marriage and death, were unattended with any reli- gious ceremonial whatever. And in this striking departure from the custom of other pagan peoples we have a very impressive demonstration of the essential animalism of the people. 150 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW In the most picturesque of the many interesting collections assembled in the Bishop Museum at Honolulu are specimens of the superb plumed spears and robes worn by the chieftains and sovereigns of the Hawaiian tribes. One of them is a mag- nificent canary-colored vestment made of feathers of inimitable richness and deli- cacy, and behind these are seen the vari- ous insignia which denoted the rank and achievements of these hereditary chief- tains, one of whom became in time their king. For here, as so often elsewhere, the political evolution seems to have been from an association of heads of tribes who be- came in time vassals to one who was stronger and cleverer than the rest. The Hawaiian chiefs found their master, after long periods of warfare with one another, in that powerful ruler of the island of Ha- waii who, having first conquered the whole of his own island, pushed his victories over the other islands, and demonstrated in many ways the qualities of a really great sovereign. His statue has wisely been placed in front of the Government Building in Honolulu, and no one who looks at it will refuse to own that its original was justly called * ' Kamehameha the Great. ' ' To this man, wise, strong, and courageous, his peo- IMPRESSIONS OP THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 151 pie owe a lasting debt ; and under his hand there came to them, for the first time, the enjoyment of those individual rights which under a feudal government are unknown. How welcome they must have been, we can realize only when we contrast the original condition of such a primitive people with our own. The artist, the poet, the senti- mental traveler, are fond of reminding us how much of the world 's earlier beauty and simplicity civilization in its advance has spoiled. Yes, it may be so, from a super- ficial point of view; but how would our artistic or sentimental friends have enjoyed a condition of things in which, when their own feudal chief went abroad, they and their families were obliged to be prostrate on the ground face downward, and where it was death for a common man to remain standing at the mention of the king 's name, or when his sovereign's old coat was car- ried by? Civilization, when it enables a man to call not only his soul, but, when the tax-gatherer is done with it, his property his own, has ill-educated us to appreciate the condition of a people among whom two thirds of all that they produced was the property of the chiefs, big and little, who ruled over them. We may be reverting to such a type as this in our great cities, with 152 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW their greater imposts, but happily we have not gotten there yet. This leads me naturally to the next and, to many minds, more interesting period in Hawaiian history when its peaceful seclu- sion was at length invaded by alien influ- ences which, in a comparatively short time, have largely changed its aspect and pros- pects. The first intrusion, as we have seen, was Spanish, but it was speedily followed by the visit of Captain Cook in 1778, and later by that of Vancouver. Cook ac- counted himself the discoverer of the Ha- waiian Islands, and as a compliment to an English peer who was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty, gave them the name by which school-boys have oftenest known them, the Sandwich Islands. The sentimental moralist who has reached this point in the history of newly discovered territory has, as I have inti- mated, a tempting opportunity for raising the question how far civilization has really elevated the character of the savage. In the case of the Hawaiian Islands there is a great deal that lends itself to such a dis- cussion in the painful history of civilized commercial invasion, and the most repul- sive features of this are to be found in con- nection with both the naval and commercial IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 153 marine of the nations that, from their re- discovery by Cook, sought a foothold in these gems of the Pacific. I need not re- hearse that history here. It has, alas! its familiar counterpart all around the world; but it has also this honorable sequence, that there was speedily awakened in many American hearts the purpose to give to the Hawaiian Islands that strong foundation of Christian morality which can alone make either a community or a nation enduringly great. I may not trace here the history of Chris- tian missions in the Sandwich Islands, but I may at least say, as one wholly outside of the communions by which originally they were initiated and conducted, that no one can visit these islands without recognizing the noble work which Christian missiona- ries have done there. By a curious confu- sion, a habit of jesting allusion to the "sons of missionaries" in the Hawaiian Islands has, in many minds, been associated with the missionaries themselves, and perhaps it may be worth while for an outsider to say how much in his judgment it amounts to. I suppose that in Honolulu, as else- where, the sons of missionaries have turned to secular callings, and I presume they have conducted themselves with shrewdness and 154 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW success. It is difficult to see why they should not have done so ; and if a mission- ary 's residence in the Hawaiian Islands gave his son a business advantage there, it would seem natural enough that he should have embraced it. I have heard in other foreign fields bitter words about the mis- sionaries, and in one instance took the trouble to follow these complaints and sneers to their source. It was said that missionaries took advantage of opportuni- ties to push their way into business agen- cies, and so to crowd out men whose liveli- hood these agencies were. On inquiry I found that the whole basis for these whole- sale charges was that one missionary in a foreign land who had lost his voice there had turned to a secular task which was offered to him, and which it was found that he could do better than the man who stood next to him in competition for it ; and that was all there was to it. Under such circum- stances, the whole superstructure of mis- representation crumbled to the ill-smelling fragments of business jealousy. In the same way I found, on inquiry in Honolulu, that a good deal of the bitterness against missionaries had to do with their coura- geous witness against the glaring immorali- ties of their own race. They have been IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 155 contemptuously described as, there and elsewhere, living in luxury and indolence, and their homes as illustrating what, to the natives among whom they labored, was a prodigal expenditure. Well, yes, when one is living among a community whose ward- robe consists of a bit of cotton cloth, and their daily menu a bowl of rice or taro, a rocking-chair and a pair of cotton sheets may seem bloated self-indulgence; but the question whether a civilized human being is called, in order to do missionary work, to accept barbarian standards of decency or modest comfort would still remain to be answered. A much more interesting and more im- portant question, whether in the Hawaiian Islands or anywhere else, is the question, What was the influence of these Christian missionaries and those who came after them upon the manners, habits, beliefs, and ideals of the people to whom they came? At the base of the state, it forever needs to be remembered there is the family; and the first thing that Christian households, largely drawn from New England ances- tries, spoke to was, so far as it existed at all, the Hawaiian conception of the family. We were shown in the streets of Honolulu a wooden house which had been made in 156 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW New England and shipped piecemeal to its destination. It was as delightful a bit of incongruity as could be imagined, with its two stories, white clapboards, green blinds, narrow windows, low ceilings, and the rest. One perspired at the thought of the suffer- ings of those who had summered in that hot second story, and wondered at the per- sistence of provincial type that could have done so stupid a thing. But also one could not but straightway remember how much else that was fine and high had persisted along with it, how much patient courage and steadfast self-sacrifice had gone to the acquirement of the heathen speech, had wrought with the pagan mothers and chil- dren, and day by day had held up before that wild and lawless savagery the pure and strenuous examples of gentleness and godliness and unswerving devotion to duty. That that large expenditure of labor and money has produced in the Hawaiian Isl- ands enduring results, no one who knows them will pretend to question. But along with them there were coming to pass political changes of equal and last- ing import. I have spoken of Kamehameha I, whose statue stands in front of the Gov- ernment Building in Honolulu, and whose noble presence proclaims him every inch a IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 157 king. It is not easy to imagine what would have been the fate of civilization in the Ha- waiian Islands if this sovereign and his vassals had antagonized it. But the king, if not the feudal chiefs, had the rare dis- cernment to see how much of order, secu- rity, and prosperity the white man could give to his people, and to welcome changes from an arbitrary paternalism, which ri- pened under his successors into something like a constitutional form of government with definite land tenures, the dethrone- ment of the heathen priests, and, under Kamehameha III, in 1833, the proclamation of a bill of rights, and the creation, a few years later, of an executive ministry, a ju- diciary department, and the promulgation of a constitution. In other words, a race of savages gradually organized itself into a state ; and, in the whole process of organi- zation, it is but just to say that our own in- stitutions and our own progress and devel- opment under them exercised a paramount influence. But, alas! you cannot make a state by a constitution, and our own times have had no more dramatic illustration of this than the Hawaiian Islands. That able ruler, Kame- hameha I, who had the wisdom to discern that the foreign peoples who had found 158 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW their way to his shores were the product of institutions which he and his might wisely borrow, was followed by successors, male and female, who had neither his prudence, his principles, nor his genius for statesman- ship. There were five Hawaiian rulers in the Kamehameha succession, but when, in 1874, Kamehameha V, the last of that dy- nasty, died, the situation became gravely complicated. There was, as I have indi- cated, a legislative body, and this, after much delay, proceeded to the election of David Kalakaua, who received the suf- frages of a considerable number of his own countrymen, but especially of the Ameri- can residents. Opposed to him, however, was Queen Emma, of late years so familiar a figure in Hawaiian history, the widow of Kamehameha IV. Queen Emma was the representative of the anti- American senti- ment in the island, and besides the consid- erable British sympathy which ranged itself on her side, she had a large following of various nationalities and of not very fragrant record. In a word, the lines were drawn and the battle set in array for that long struggle, the latest issue of which re- sulted so recently in the annexation to our own Republic of what was not long before the kingdom of Hawaii. IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 169 I may not trace the history of that strug- gle here, but I may perhaps be permitted to state the conclusions which I think almost any dispassionate student of history must inevitably reach in regard to it. In the first place, it is important that the materials out of which this new state had inevitably to be made must be clearly recog- nized. There were, to begin with, the na- tive populations. Their characteristics have already been in some measure indi- cated, and these, it is to be remembered, have not at any time revealed any consid- erable substantiveness of character. The native Hawaiian was kindly, but cruel; graceful, but essentially savage ; and super- stitious to an almost incredible degree. It has been charged that when the people re- ceived Christianity they gave a cordial welcome to both its teachers and its teach- ings; but I apprehend that there can be little doubt that both pagan beliefs and superstitious practices still survive in what are reckoned as Christian households. An intelligent observer to whom I am much indebted, Captain Lucien Young, U. S. N., 1 says: "The idols have been destroyed or hid away, but in secret haunts, concealed from the public gaze, the natives practise The Real Hawaii,'' p. 73, passim. 160 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW their incantations and believe in the mys- teries of their time-honored religion." When it is remembered that many of these are most intimately associated with their usages as to alleviating pain or healing or warding off disease, it can readily be seen how difficult it has been to uproot them. The physician attached to a Christian mis- sion or civilized community in those islands, when called to the bedside of a native pa- tient, has had to battle not only with the disease, but with the persistent faith, if not of the patient, then of his whole household and all his neighbors, in a science of medi- cine which consisted in propitiating some offended deity by the sacrifice of a pig, and sometimes (as late as 1820) by the sacrifice of a child. Nor does this seem surprising when one comes to understand the charac- ters of the gods, who, as conceived by their worshipers, were certainly embodiments of cruelty and bestiality. No description of the rites of worship which the first visitors to these islands found there could be ad- mitted to the pages of a decent publication ; yet long after the earlier rule of savage chieftains had been superseded by consti- tutional forms of government, some of these survived in the royal household; and a queen who professed to have unreservedly IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 161 accepted the Christian religion kept about her the kahunas, or priests and heathen doctors, as her closest friends and advisers. With this background of unredeemed heathenism to build upon, it was not more natural that it should reappear under new forms of civic order than that these, in turn, should be made the opportunity for every unscrupulous adventurer who had the auda- city to ingratiate himself with this simple people or to lend his cleverness to the tur- bulent or revolutionary tendencies which from time to time appeared among them. The American residents and others who, in 1875, elected Kalakaua as king, chose, I suppose, the best available man ; but he was not even a pure Hawaiian, being reputed to be the illegitimate son of a negro cobbler who came to the Sandwich Islands, no one seems to know on what errand, from our own Boston! This certainly was pretty poor stuff out of which to have made a king, and it throws an interesting light, inciden- tally, upon the sometime struggles of our Anglican brethren to maintain in the isl- ands an " ancient dynasty"! But I refer to it now because it helps to explain what, in the subsequent history of the govern- ment, came to be such a curious and con- stantly recurring characteristic of the suc- 11 162 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW cessive cabinets, administrations, and the like. Kalakaua's chief counselor and mentor was an ex-Mormon missionary of such unsavory character that his own com- munity had expelled him one who, after having swindled his Mormon associates and apostatized from them, fled to Honolulu and devoted himself to inflaming the na- tives against the whites. This man stands foremost in a long series of disreputable men, Americans, Englishmen, and of what- ever other vagrant race that drifted into the islands, who in any political crisis came to the surface, always as fomenters of dis- cord, friends of unbridled license, and leaders of every vicious element in the community. In reaching a conclusion as to what was our duty as a nation to these peo- ple, it is impossible to leave out of sight such obvious considerations as those facts which I have rehearsed suggest. I am not a disciple of a policy of imperialism, but I confess, in view of the situation as it existed in the Hawaiian Islands when they voted to seek annexation to the United States, I am unable to see what else we could have done than to grant their request. For their position in the Pacific indicated that if they are not strong enough to rule themselves, they belong rightfully under that protection which we, of all other peo- ples, can best give them. Whatever earlier civilization, Spanish, English, or French, found them, seized them, or sought to en- rich itself from them, we alone earliest recognized a duty to them, and sought, by bringing to bear upon them the highest and most transforming influences, to discharge it. We alone strove to build up among them a civilization which had for its foundation some other motive than the passion of con- quest or the love of gain. We alone gave them schools and teachers, and the good physician with the Christian home. We alone enriched them with those who, what- ever may be said of their descendants, lived pure and noble lives, and did among them good and lasting work. After these, it is true, have come the trader, the land-specu- lator, the sugar-planter, and the rest; and possibly it may be as well that the authority of the United States should stay in the Ha- waiian Islands to regulate them, as well as to protect its own international rights. International rights, I say, for as to the growing importance of these there can be no smallest doubt. One need not be dazzled or blinded by the glamour of imperial ex- pansion in order to recognize that no re- public such as ours can draw a line round 164 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW its domestic territory and ignore its duties and its opportunities with reference to the rest of the world. We must trade with other countries than our own; and if we have anything good that they have not, we must needs wish, and, even though there should be pecuniary profit in it, may rightly wish, to impart it to them. But we cannot do this unless we can get at them, and we cannot get at them without the physical re- sources and conveniences which shall ena- ble us to do so. Now, the Hawaiian Isl- ands stand preeminently for one of these conveniences. No traffic with the great East can be maintained, except at almost ruinous cost, without some foothold between its coasts and ours for a Pacific coaling- station, and no greater opportunity for the enlargement of certain departments of agri- culture and trade than the Hawaiian Isl- ands afford could easily be discovered. If we do our duty toward them, we shall find our interest in doing it, and to that duty and to those toward whom we are to dis- charge it there is no great world-power that is so near as we. Geographical, commer- cial, and moral considerations here seem all to point one way. But, alas ! it would seem as if the people toward whom we are to discharge such duty IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 165 would soon cease to be. There is one mys- terious effect of civilization upon weaker races concerning which the historian and the psychologist have yet to give us more light. The United States, since its people first went to the Sandwich Islands, has car- ried on no exterminating war. With shame and confusion it must be owned that it has taught them many vices, or rather perhaps it would be more true to say it has cor- rupted them with the taint of forms of those vices which were distinctly its own. But, on the other hand, it has given them the arts, and learning, and civic order, and the examples of industry and thrift. But it cannot be said that they have prized the learning highly or widely profited by it. For no reason which can be directly trace- able to us, it must be owned that they are a decaying race, and their more recent statis- tics reveal this with dramatic significance. According to Captain Young, 1 whom I have already quoted, the eight islands composing the Hawaiian group have a total population of 107,000, of which, however, only 35,000 are Hawaiians. There are 10,000 people of mixed descent, in part Hawaiian; the rest are Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and other Europeans, of which last, with i " The New Hawaii," p. 327. 166 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW Americans, there are 14,000. In other words, nearly two thirds of the people of these islands are other than Hawaiian. That this proportion is likely to be in- creased along the same line seems probable, and the time seems likely to come when the native Hawaiian, like the native North American Indian, will have disappeared. Who they are who will ultimately be dominant in his place it is not easy to fore- cast. At any moment the United States may close its Hawaiian doors to those races which, of the Eastern world, are nearest to the islands, and which are now represented there by a large proportion of the popula- tion some twenty-four thousand Japanese and fifteen thousand Chinese, who to-day, in fact, taken together, make an element larger than that represented by the Ha- waiians themselves or any other peoples. Both these races have brought to the Ha- waiian Islands forces and qualities which, originally, were foreign to the native peo- ple. As the eye ranges the distant hill- sides which flank the rear of Honolulu, it is arrested by the shining patches of ordered verdure which, terrace upon ter- race, climb up along their slopes; and the inquirer is told, in every instance, that these IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 167 are the farms and market-gardens of the Japanese, who have in so many like places taught the soil to yield its increase where it never did before. Such qualities, in any people, are sources of power and wealth; and when it is remembered that behind the Japanese have come the Chinese, whose thrift in the Eastern world is a proverb like that of the French or Germans in the Western, it is plain that their influence upon the future of the Hawaiian Islands must be deep and lasting. Already, in the case of the Chinese, has their capacity for agricultural work revealed itself in the vast sugar-plantations which American and other capital has acquired and is adminis- tering with characteristic skill and profit; and already there are tokens of the wealth which, aided by this foreign labor, these can extract from a rich soil and from singu- larly favorable climatic conditions. So the problem is set: the mixture of races, energies, industries, and of the higher moral qualities which these various strains, ancestries, and activities stand for. There are other theaters in which the same drama is being played out under much broader and, it may be, more complex con- ditions, but not in which a more interesting 168 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW or indeed dramatic experiment is being made. It will be for the government and the people of the American Republic to demonstrate that they are equal to a task in itself so delicate, and in its consequences so grave and important. VI INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS VI INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS EELIGIONS ONE advantage in being a citizen of the United States, which has not perhaps occurred to all of us, is that the American traveler is likely to see the great East in its most impressive perspective. Unlike Euro- pean travelers, he does not ordinarily ap- proach it through the Suez Canal, but across the Pacific. And the happy result which this will secure to him will be this: that he sees, first Japan, then China, and last India. An artist would tell him that he has thus secured the crescendo of color- Japan, with its charm of prettiness and de- tail ; China, more massive but more somber ; and then India, with its wealth of color and outline, which culminate at last in Ceylon. A very considerable part of this impres- sion will be derived from Indian architec- ture; and in all respects the most splendid effects in architecture are those achieved in 171 172 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW the temples, with their mass of decoration, and their infinite richness of detail and color wrought out in gold and lacquer enamel. Inevitably, the mind reaches back of the structures and fabrics, the temples and the palaces, to the people. What are they like ; what do they believe ; what of their future ? What does religion, with them, stand for, and how far do we of the West understand them or their beliefs, and do justice to either? These are questions which, espe- cially as they relate to Christian missions, must needs interest us. Indeed, what more fascinating vista could there be than that which opens before him who, to-day, turns his feet, on whatever errand, to those lands and races which, of late, in such wonderful ways, are having all their doors flung open to the world! Whatever else was true of the men who, as missionaries, first set on foot that mighty invasion of the heathen world which from such small beginnings has grown to such noble and stately propor- tions, this certainly was not true, that they had then advanced to such a recognition of the presence of God even in heathendom as led them, first of all, to seek for sympathetic contact with it. We cannot read the story of what they said and of how they wrought INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 173 without recognizing, in all early missionary enterprises, in modern times, a very im- perfect apprehension of the fact that God has not left himself anywhere without wit- ness among men, and that their little sys- tems who dwell or have dwelt in pagan lands, whether of philosophy or religion, while but broken lights that were destined to have only their brief day-in that most like so many of our own! were, after all, yet broken lights of God; dim glimmers of the fuller splendors of a coming day. It is in this, on the other hand, that I think our noblest progress has been made. The comparative study of religions has brought to light, for every student who has pursued it with thoroughness and candor, at least two clear convictions one that God has had, in all human history, many ways of re- vealing himself; and the other that there is, after all, no wholly right method of mis- sionary endeavor other than that which St. Paul pursued on Mars Hill when, as he passed by, he saw an altar to the unknown God. Not ridicule, nor denunciation, nor contempt, was his method; but recognition recognition of the deep want of man and of the often honest though often blunder- ing methods of men who sought to find an answer to it! 174 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Need I tell those to whom I am writ- ing that this must needs become the method, not only in the domain of religion, but in all other undertakings in connection with which we of Anglo-Saxon lineage are turn- ing our faces toward those new lands and peoples that beckon us to-day? It must begin in the domain of religion, because re- ligion lies at the foundation of all national life and personal conduct, and it must begin there by being just and speaking the truth. I can best make my meaning clear, at this point, by an illustration; and in choosing it I think you will agree with me that I am selecting an institution which lies at the basis not only of religion but of all social order. It was my privilege, little more than a year ago, to spend some months in India, and, while there, it was almost instinctive to seek such light as was available upon the family life of a people that, whatever we may say of their defects, have disclosed in a long and memorable history some of the most noteworthy traits that mark a great race and a really high civilization. For, the family life is, after all, the key to all the rest. In studying the history of another Eastern people, not so numerous as that of India, but marked from their earliest ex- istence with strong and fine traits I mean INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 175 the Hebrew-it is impossible not to recog- nize how powerfully and how enduringly the principles which determined the organi- zation of the family and the laws that gov- erned it have influenced and determined the whole progress of its growth and achievement. It was the glory of our Puri- tan ancestry that, in an age that had largely lost them, it set about restoring some of those more dominant notes of the Hebraic household which made the families of Israel such mighty forces in the world; and no man who cares to understand those forces that lie among the foundations will be in- different to those facts which reveal the law of the home and, e.g., the place of wo- man in it anywhere. Well, what have we usually been told on these points as to the situation among these various peoples who may be largely de- scribed as inhabiting the peninsula of India? It must be owned, I think, that whatever the sources of our information, the popular impressions of Western peoples have ordinarily been that, so far as the do- mestic life of India is concerned, it has been one of uniform cruelty, lust, and degrada- tion. The custom of child marriage; the hideous usage of burning widows, known as "suttee"; the studied maintenance of 176 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW conditions in which women lived in rigid seclusion, in profound ignorance, and under a masculine rule at once without shame and without pity; these are tradi- tions in which I presume you were brought up, as I was. It is enough to say of them, one and all, that our popular impressions of them are an often grotesque distortion or exaggeration of the facts. I was so for- tunate, more than once, as to make the acquaintance of native East Indians of dis- tinguished rank and varied culture. More than once they introduced me to their fami- lies and presented me to their wives and daughters. In all such cases they were, I beg to say, persons who retained their an- cient religion, Buddhist, Mohammedan, or Parsee, as the case might be, and who had no keener enthusiasm than that which cher- ished their national, racial, and religious traditions. They answered questions about their homes and children, and the laws that governed them, and they gave me chapter and verse in their sacred writings for what they told me in regard to them. Now, then, let us look at some of these testimonies as indicating not what may have been, and doubtless was, a degraded practice, here and there for if we were judged by these our own record in the courts of the civilized INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 177 world would not be an unsullied one-but the law or rule of life set for many millions of people in its authoritative documents. The extracts which I shall quote are taken from the laws of Manu Manu being the semi-divine lawgiver of the East, whose works, constituting the Veda in its broader sense, fall into three general divisions of Sacred Ceremonial and Domestic. From these last I take those laws which define the place of woman in the economy of East Indian life: MANU. "Where women are honored, there the Devas (gods) are pleased; where they are dishonored, no sacred rite yields rewards. Ill, 56. Where female relations live in grief, the family soon wholly perishes; but that family where they are not unhappy ever prospers. Ill, 57. In like manner, care must be taken of barren women, of those who have no sons, of those whose family is extinct, of wives and widows faithful to their lords, and of women afflicted with dis- eases. VIII, 29. In order to protect women and Brahmins, he who kills in the cause of right, commits no sin. VIII, 349. One's daughter is the highest object of ten- 12 178 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW derness; hence if one is offended by her, he must bear it without resentment. IV, 185. A maternal aunt, the wife of a maternal uncle, a mother-in-law, and a paternal aunt, must be honored like the wife of one's spiritual teacher; they are equal to the wife of one's spiritual teacher. II, 131. (In India the wife of a spiritual teacher is regarded as a living goddess.) Toward the sister of one's father and of one's mother and toward one's elder sister, one must behave as toward one's mother; but the mother is more venerable than they. II, 133. But the teacher is ten times more venerable than the sub-teacher, the father a hundred times more than the teacher, but the mother a thousand times more than the father. II, 145. I apprehend that if that last rule or precept of Mann's were propounded in some Amer- ican homes we should find it rather strong meat for some "heads of families"! But it is said that there are customs and usages in India, such as child-marriage, which are monstrous and altogether inde- fensible. Most surely they are, if they ex- ist as they are popularly represented to exist. But suppose that we obey the excel- lent maxim which enjoins, "audi alteram partem," and hear what a witness of their own has declared, placing himself on record INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 179 the other day in Carnegie Hall in New York in these words : l It is said that the greatest curse is the child- marriage in India, and that it is sanctioned by religion ; but this is not true. Religion distinctly forbids it, and in many parts of India so-called child-marriage is nothing but a betrothal. The betrothal ceremony takes place some years before the real marriage ceremony ; sufficient cause may prolong the period of betrothal for even three or four years. In Northern India the real mar- riage does not take place until the parties are of proper age; it is attended with music, feast- ing, and the presentation of gifts. A betrothed wife stays in her father's house until the time of her real marriage. In Southern India, customs are not the same; many abuses have crept in, and child-wives are often given to their hus- bands at too tender an age. The Hindoo law does not prevent the remarriage of the betrothed wife after the death of her betrothed husband ; but it says that under such circumstances the parents of the betrothed wife commit a sin, as of giving false witness before the court of justice. In this connection, the following remarks are abridged from " The Women of India," published by the Madras Christian Litera- ture Society: i " Woman's Place in Hindoo Religion," a lecture by Swami Abhedananda. 180 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW It is not surprising that people should cling with tenacity to customs supposed to be sanc- tioned by ancient religious authority, and it has been said that in India every custom, whether unintelligible, or positively indefensible, be- comes a religious question. Dewan Bahadur R. Ragunath Row has probably said all that can be said on this subject, in the two editions of his pamphlet, "The Hindoo Law of Marriage," pub- lished first in 1882, and in his reply to a review of that pamphlet by two learned Madhva pun- dits, as well as in more recent papers; and his countrymen must read and judge for themselves. Happy will it be for Hindoos if they can conclusively prove that their religious books do not require them to break the laws of health and reason and morality. If they do require it, so much the worse for the laws, and all one can say is that such laws cannot be inspired ; at any rate, they can have no binding inspiration and au- thority for those who now admit these evils. A book of laws, however sacred it may be held, ceases to be of abiding authority if those laws are out of harmony with intellectual, social, and moral progress. Is it not irrational to suppose that the Laws of Manu a code compiled, accord- ing to the latest computation, 1400 years ago with its minute and childish formalities, its fan- ciful, unequal, and retaliatory penalties, such as mark the 'earliest forms of criminal legislation, its uniform leniency shown to a certain class of the community, and its entire subordination of women, should be fitted to regulate society in INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 181 the nineteenth century? Though there is much that is majestic, benevolent, and beautiful about the code, are there many among those who have become accustomed to more humane and juster laws who would like to live under it in the pres- ent day ? The conservative Hindoo, however, clings to antiquity, and, in the matter of child-marriage, those who protest against it have antiquity on their side. Kama married Sita; Krishna mar- ried Rukmini ; Arjuna married Draupadi ; Nala married Damayanti, not as children, but as grown up women. And as for the Hindoo re- ligious books themselves, a careful study of them seems to show that infant marriages "form no part of a religious institution in India." The very mantras that the Smritis prescribe to be chanted during the marriage ceremonies clearly indicate that the bride should be a woman, and not an infant. The second religious basis of child-marriage is the doctrine of the Shraddha, or the ceremo- nies that follow the funeral rites. Orthodox Hindoos believe that if they do not leave sons behind them, who will offer food for their souls after death, they cannot reach heaven; if they can secure this, they may rest satisfied. But in- telligent men do not believe that balls of rice and flour can have any effect on departed spirits ; that any ceremonies or sacred places can acceler- ate the progress of disembodied relatives to hea- ven. According to the Hindoo law, it is better for 182 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW a girl of a high caste to remain unmarried for life than to marry one who is not of noble birth, or from a family of the same caste, or one who is unqualified or illiterate. Well, I am not clear that while there is no law among us of the nature of this last precept, we have not a similar tradition which, to many minds, has quite the force of law! But again; at this point I hear some one ask : ' ' This is all very well ; but what have you to say about the hideous practice of 1 suttee,' or the self-burning of widows?" Believe me, it is not of the smallest conse- quence what I have to say on such a subject, but rather what they who are accused of such a custom have to say. And here, again, I summon the accomplished gentle- man and scholar who has already testified, Swami Abhedananda. In the address from which I have just quoted, and which I have yet to hear challenged, he says : Self-burning of widows was not sanctioned by the Hindoo religion, but was due to other causes, the fact being that when the Mohammedans con- quered India they treated the widows of the soldiers so brutally that the women preferred death, and voluntarily sought it. It is often said that the "Christian government" has sup- INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 183 pressed "suttee"; but the truth is that the in- itiative in this direction was taken by that noble Hindoo, Rammohun Roy, who was, however, obliged to secure the aid of the British Govern- ment in enforcing his ideas, because India was a subject nation. The educated classes among the Hindoos had strongly protested against the priests who supported this custom (which pre- vailed only in certain parts of India), and ef- forts had been made to suppress the evil by force; but as it could not be done without offi- cial help, appeal was made to the Viceroy, Lord Bentinck, and a law against "suttee" was passed. Thus the evil was practically sup- pressed by the Hindoos themselves, aided by the British Government. And if I am met at this point by the ob- jection that this is the mere assertion of a partizan Oriental, whose statements must needs be taken with large allowance, let me quote one of the most eminent English au- thorities in the same connection, Sir M. Monier Williams. Says this learned Ori- entalist and devout Christian scholar: "It was principally his (Raja Rammohun Roy's) vehement denunciation of this prac- tice, and the agitation against it set on foot by him, which ultimately led to the abolition of 'sati' throughout British India in 1829. J>1 1 " Brahmanism and Hindooism," p. 482. 184 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW I need not pursue these illustrations fur- ther. It is enough to say that every one who cares to do so in a painstaking and can- did spirit will be continually surprised to find how wide-spread in Christian lands, and in minds that we are wont to call intelligent and sufficiently educated, has been the mis- apprehension which has prevailed as to customs and beliefs among peoples of alien race and faith. Do we ask, now, how this misapprehen- sion has come about? I answer that it has had a threefold cause: in ignorance; in a not altogether unamiable passion for exag- geration; and most of all, I am persuaded, in a constitutional incapacity on the part of the Western to understand the processes of the Eastern mind. Ignorance, pure and simple, has been a potent factor in our misapprehensions about Oriental foreigners. Those who have lived longest among them will tell you of that secretive, if not furtive, habit of mind and of speech which so widely prevails in the East ; by which we, with our all but hope- less Western literalism, are so easily mis- led, and which offers, I may add, so strong a temptation to one with an often merely playful impulse to amuse himself at the expense of another's credulity. There is a INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 185 legend lingering still, I think, at the capital of the Republic, that a British traveler, on asking a native whose was the ghastly statue of Washington which will be remembered as sitting very inadequately clad in the neigh- borhood of the Patent Office, was told that it was a statue of ' ' Sitting Bull, ' ' and that the stranger promptly entered the fact in his note-book. It would be interesting to know how much of our knowledge, e.g., of China, for the last two hundred years, was derived in the same way, and of the same accuracy. The Abbe Hue's "Travels" have been con- sidered a mine of authentic information; and yet, nothing is more evident to one who reads them than the extreme difficulty which this accomplished scholar found, anywhere, in obtaining trustworthy infor- mation. Suspicion and distrust of the for- eigner are instincts to which even we our- selves are liable; but we cannot possibly measure their force in minds whose every tradition has trained them to abhor all foreigners, and who have seen in the curi- osity of the alien only a menace or a sneer. And then, next to ignorance in the West- ern observer of Eastern peoples, has been the inevitable tendency to exaggeration. The huge inductions from small groups of facts; the hasty generalizations upon the 186 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW basis of a chance incident; the desire for dramatic effect in literature or in mission- ary addresses; the cheerful willingness to believe the worst and not the best of one whom we call indeed our brother or our sister, but whom by no possibility we could be induced to treat as such ; the knowledge that if one comes back from a foreign land without a traveler's tale, painted in strong colors and of tragic proportions, he is not quite fulfilling the expectations of the home public; all this, together with the further fact that books and discourses about for- eigners are not criticized, as they should be, by foreigners, has made it easy for the modern peripatetic philosopher to create a monster in literary portraiture, and then persuade us to accept it as a photograph! And then, finally, there has been a great deal that has been brought to the West from the East which is the product of that abso- lute incapacity, on the part of the Western, to understand Eastern mental processes. The East thinks pictorially; the West liter- ally and logically. The East abhors a strict construction of language; the West lusts after it with a strange and stupid opacity as to all the traditions of the language which it interprets. The East continually employs indirections, without a thought of INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 187 deliberate untruthfulness. The West for- ever construes them as if they could have no other motive than to deceive. Under such circumstances the wonder is, not that the West and the East have so often misun- derstood each other, but rather that they have understood each other at all. "How far is it to the next town?" you ask the inn- keeper, from whom you have hired your conveyance in China; and he tells you that it is fifteen miles. You hire your carriage at so much a mile, and then, when, having made your visit to the neighboring town, you return to your starting-point, you find that the innkeeper has charged for a jour- ney of fifteen miles going, and twenty-five miles returning ! And then you call him a liar, a thief, and a swindler, until he calls your attention to the fact that your journey going was down Mil all the way, and took two hours, and, returning, up hill all the way, and took four, and that he is justly entitled to be paid for the time of horses and servants and the extra wear and tear to both of a heavy grade all the way home. In a word, all the equity is on his side, and you have simply misunderstood him ! It is a homely parable, but it is pertinent, in our dealings with Oriental peoples from the be- ginning to the end. 188 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW And yet, when it has all been said, the glorious fact still remains that our Western civilization, literature, and most of all re- ligion, have something to give to the peo- ples that have them not, of incomparable value and potency. One cannot but feel sometimes as if what Dr. Horace Bushnell called the "out-populating power" of the Christian stock were one of its divinest notes. Said a distinguished Chinese pro- fessor in the Imperial University of Pekin to an eminent American missionary: 1 "Why should we not send missionaries to your country?" The missionary replied: "By all means; send them, and make the experiment." "But would your people receive them?" he asked. "Certainly," was the answer; "and their message would be heard and weighed." Do you suppose this accomplished Chinese scholar set about such a work? No. He was proud of his race and his religion ; but he did not believe in the latter ardently enough to make the smallest effort to propagate it. He was a Confucianist, and believed in some over- ruling power which he called "Strength" or "Tien"; and he had some notion of a life to come, as evidenced by his worship a Dr. W. A. P. Martin, President of the Imperial Tuner- wen College, Pekin. See "The World's Parliament of Religions," Vol. II, p 1139. INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 189 of his ancestors : but between him and that passion for souls, on fire with love for whom a Divine Redeemer died, such as sent Mills and his heroic companions forth to die for God, there was a great gulf, to pagan mind and heart immeasurable and impossible. And so, we of this twentieth century and this Christian Republic see our calling. In all those new and largely untrodden realms whose portals are opening to us to-day, there is much to deplore, but much, let us not forget it, to respect. Some of us here can recall the smile of mingled mirth and derision with which, a few years ago, it was announced that the Mohammedans were preparing to send missionaries and estab- lish a Mohammedan mission in the city of New York. We were so superior in our Occidental virtue that the whole thing seemed a huge joke. And yet, thus far, Christianity has utterly failed to control the vice of drunkenness. The great cities of this land are dominated, not by their churches or their universities, but by their saloons; and Christian lands, wherever they are to be found, are dotted, 1 as a Chris- tian scholar has said, "with poorhouses, asylums, jails, penitentiaries, reformato- ries, built to deal with evils, nine-tenths of i Dr E R. Sunderland, " The World's Parliament of Religions," Vol. I, p. 630. 190 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW which are said to be caused directly or in- directly by the drink habit, which Christen- dom fails to control and is powerless to up- root." But Mohammedanism in Oriental lands does control it. Said Isaac Taylor, after declaring that "Mohammedanism stands in fierce opposition to gambling and makes a gambler's testimony invalid in law," "Islam is the most powerful total abstinence association in the world." And so, I repeat, we may see our calling. Goethe declared long ago that he who knows but one language knows none I commend the maxim to those zealous gentlemen who are kicking the classics out of our colleges and substituting for them courses of botany and civil engineering and Max Miiller ap- plied the same maxim to religion. Heirs of a great faith, it belongs to us to learn from it so much at least of the law of the brother- hood of humanity as shall enable us to treat other faiths, other philosophies, other man- ners than our own with courteous consid- eration; and then, charged with great treasures, beckoned forward by great ex- amples, humbled and instructed by past blunders and failures, to turn to the new and larger tasks that are before us with a high hope and a great patience 1 University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. APR 2 41989 A 000058161 I Univej Soi Lil