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THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION
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THE
FAR EASTERN QUESTION
BY
VALENTINE CHIROL
ILoutiou
AIACMILLAX AND CO., Ltd.
NEW YORK : MACMILLAN & CO.
1896
The Ri^Iit of Translation and Reproduction is Reserrni
KiCHARD Cl.AV AND SoNS, LlMIiED.
LONDON AND liVNGAV,
PREFACE
Dear Mr. Walter,
I am indebted to you both for the opportunity of
studying the Far Eastern question on the spot at a
moment of exceptional interest, and for permission
to make the fullest use of the letters which I have
lately written on the subject for the Times, It is
therefore only a debt of sincere gratitude which I
am attempting very inadequately to discharge in
asking you to accept the dedication of this small
volume. I can put forward no other plea to recom-
mend it than an earnest desire to draw public
attention to a question which, for good or for evil,
must eventually affect the most vital interests of the
British Empire — commercial, industrial, and political.
The war between China and Japan has inaugurated
a new drama in the worlds history, of which only
the first act has so far been played. The scene is
vi 1M<EFACE
laid at present on the other side of the globe, but
the action in its further development and ultimate
consequences may reach into the home of every
working man in this country.
Yours sincerely,
Valentine Chirol.
To Arthur Walter, Esq.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
ENGLAND'S POSITION BEIORE AND AFTER THE WAR r
CHAPTER II
CHINA AFTER THE WAR 9
CHAPTER III
THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA 20
CHAPTER I\'
THE CHINESE CAPITAL , 34
CHAPTER \'
EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY AND THE TSUNGLI-YAMEN 45
CHAPTER \T
THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING (>2
CHAPTER \'!I
THE GENESIS OF MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IN CHINA jS
viii CONTEXTS
CHAPTER \TII
TAGE
THE FIXAXCIAI. POSITION OF CHINA 94
CHAPTER IX
FROM CHINA TO JAPAN Io8
CHAPTER X
AN(;i.O-JAPANESE RELATIONS 124
CHAPTER XI
INDUSTRIAL JAPAN 1 38
CHAPTER XII
THE COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL INTERESTS OF GREAT
KRITAIN 154
CHAPTER XIII
THE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 167
CHAPTER XIV
WANTED: AN IMPERIAL POLICY 179
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
TO FACK PACE
A CITY GATE, PEKING Frontispiece.
INSIDE PEKING, FROM THE WALLS JJ
PRISONERS IN CANGUES, PEKING 38
THE FRONT OF A FASHIONABLE SWEETMEAT SHOP IN PF.KLXC 40
BRITISH MARINES DETACHED TO GUARD H.M. LEGATION AT
PEKING DRILLING INSIDE THE COMPOUND 42
CHINESE GUARDS OUTSIDE H.M. LEiJATION AT PEKINCi ... 44
A CHINESE COURT OF JUSTICE 90
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
I'AOE
ON THE PEI-HO, GOING UP TO PEKING 36
A STATION MASTER ON CHINA'S ONLY RAILW.VY lOI
A CHINESE BRAYE MI
MAPS
MAP OF CHINA ^
,- End of I 'olmnc
MAP OF JAPAN j
THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION
THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION
CHAPTER I
England's position before and after the war
One of the last public speeches delivered on a
non-political occasion by the late Prime Minister
before the Government over which he presided
resigned office contained the following memorable
passage : —
We have hitherto been favoured with one Eastern question,
which we have always endeavoured to lull as something too
portentous for our imagination, but of late a Far Eastern question
has been superadded, which, I confess, to my apprehension is,
in the dim vistas of futurity, infinitely graver than even that
question of which we have hitherto known.
The only point open to criticism in Lord Rose-
bery's otherwise statesmanlike utterance, is that it
seemed to relegate to a remote future the necessity
of grappling with a crisis in the Far East which was
already at that moment big with momentous con-
sequences to the political and commercial interests
of the British Empire. The relief which the Prime
B
2 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Minister naturally felt at the termination of actual
hostilities between China and Japan can, however,
have only temporarily obscured his vision of the
ominous circumstances which attended the ultimate
re-establishment of peace. Even before he sur-
rendered office events had occurred at Peking which
must have convinced him that the final ratification of
the Treaty of Shimonoseki merely set forth some of
the terms of a new and vastly more difficult problem,
which, if it is to be solved without detriment to the
legitimate influence of Great Britain, calls for the
immediate exertion of the best efforts of British
statesmanship and diplomacy.
Until little more than a twelvemonth slq-q Great
Britain had enjoyed for upwards of fifty years — i.e.,
ever since she first broke down by force of arms the
great barrier of Chinese exclusiveness — an almost
undisputed ascendency in the Far East. Her
prestige as a great Asiatic Empire, the splendid
strategical positions which she holds at Singapore
and Hong-kong, the steady maintenance of a com-
manding naval force in the China seas, the over-
whelming preponderancy of her trading flag, the
magnitude of her commercial interests, of which an
import and export trade of some forty millions ster-
ling per annum conveys only a partial idea, the un-
rivalled prosperity of her settlements in the treaty
ports of China and Japan, the widespread diffusion
of her language as the lingua franca of the East —
all combined to secure for her a paramount influence
I ENGLAND'S POSITION 3
in those regions, which was almost openly recog-
nised by the two leading Powers of the extreme
Orient and tacitly admitted even by the great
Powers of Europe.
Within the following twelve months the situation
was completely changed, China and Japan had
been allowed to embark, in spite of the urgent
counsels of Great Britain, upon a sanguinary and
needless conflict, and the theory of China's latent
resources as a fighting Power, upon which our
Asiatic policy for some time past had been largely
built up, was violently shattered. Japan, on the
other hand, whose national evolution had been only
very imperfectly realised in England, triumphantly
asserted her claim to take a respectable rank
amongst the naval and military Powers of the world.
The overtures made by England with a view to
arrest the progress of hostilities during the earlier
stages of the war were rejected by the European
Powers whose co-operation she invited, whilst the
naval forces which they gradually collected in the
Yellow Sea displaced for the first time, to our detri-
ment, the balance of sea power in waters where we
had hitherto held undisputed sway ; and when the
two belligerents at last settled conditions of peace
which, if they did not actually injure, at least very
closely affected both the commercial and political
interests of England, she stood aside apparently un-
concerned whilst Russia, France, and Germany
stepped into the place which she had vacated as
B 2
4 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
arbiter gentium in the Far East. China, perhaps
for the very reason that she had clone but httle to
deserve it, had learnt to rely implicitly upon British
support, and when it failed her, at the crucial
moment, she resented with intensified bitterness
what she was pleased to call England's desertion of
her in her hour of need, and hastened to display,
chiefly at our expense, an unwonted measure of
gratitude for the assistance which she had un-
expectedly received from other quarters. In open
violation of a convention with England barely
twelve months old, she surrendered to French
pressure territories which we had ceded to her on the
express condition that they should not be transferred
to any other Power without our consent ; and to
Russia she, at least temporarily, signed away her
financial independence upon terms of which the full
import can at present only be measured by the
dictatorial tone in which their acceptance was en-
forced. It is doubtful whether even the heavy price
already exacted by France and Russia, at least for
the good offices of the Asiatic Triple Alliance, will
avail to teach China the value of the less grasping
friendship upon which she has turned her back.
For the time being, at any rate, such advantages
as can be derived from a dominant position in
Peking, are lost to us and transferred to political
and commercial rivals who have already given us
a taste of the spirit in which they intend to exercise
their ascendency over the decrepit Government of
I ENGLAND'S POSITION 5
China. For, if the Japanese victories have failed
to rouse China out of her lethargy, they have
exposed the full measure of her weakness, and left
her lying in the last extremity. A resolute hand
might still, perhaps, galvanize her into fresh vitality.
Otherwise her inheritance lies open, and the inex-
haustible resources in the shape of raw material and
labour with which nature has equipped her to be-
come the great industrial country of the Orient, if
not of the whole world, are at the mercy of the
strongest and the boldest.
It is useless now to waste words upon what might
have been if the British Government, better in-
formed by its technical advisers as to the real
value of China's naval and military armaments,
had exerted to the utmost the commanding influence
which it at that time still undoubtedly possessed at
Peking in order to save China, in spite of herself,
from the hazard of an unequal struggle. It is now
generally admitted that Japan was by no means so
anxious to precipitate a conflict as was at the time
assumed, and an emphatic admonition at Peking
that China, instead of being allowed to build upon
our benevolent neutrality, would, as far as we were
concerned, be left severely alone to bear the full
consequences of her own rashness would not im-
probably have induced her to make some conces-
sions in the sense of a condominmm in Korea which
Japan might have accepted as an adequate satis-
faction. Even at a later date England might have
6 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
at little risk taken upon herself, for the re-establish-
ment of peace, the responsibility of isolated action,
instead of vainly seeking to induce other Powers to
share it with her. There is good reason to believe
that in neither case would the rest of Europe at
any rate have seriously disputed her right to exer-
cise, in the common interests of all, an initiative
which had hitherto, by general consent, belonged
to her, if only in virtue of her transcendent com-
mercial interests.
A more open question is whether her Majesty's
Government was ill-advised in refusing to join
hands with Russia, France, and Germany when
they announced their determination to wrest from
Japan a portion of the spoils of victory. On
this point the late Government certainly seems
at least entitled to the benefit of the doubt. The
advantages of intervention from the Russian
point of view were obvious, and, in view of the
peculiar relations existing between Russia and
France, the latter could on general grounds
hardly withhold her co-operation, apart from the
special uses to which she has skilfully turned the
situation for her own account. Germany's action
is more difficult to explain, except upon the
assumption that she was mainly anxious to
illustrate, at the expense of the Franco-Russian
entente, the old adage that two is company
and three is none. But, if so, the illustration
has hardly turned out as she anticipated ; for
I ENGLAND'S POSITION 7
she has had but cold thanks and scant con-
sideration from her two associates, and she has
neither disturbed the harmony nor shared the
fruits of their partnership. England would prob-
ably not have fared better in this respect had
she followed in the wake of the three Powers,
and she would have gratuitously alienated the
friendship of Japan at the very moment when its
value was for the first time beginning to receive
adequate recognition. Though the advice which
we had to give Japan was not particularly
palatable, since we could not assume the responsi-
bility of encouraging her to reject the demands
of the three Powers, our friendly attitude not
only made it easier for her to submit to the
inevitable without loss of dignity, but it helped
also to remove a great deal of the widespread
irritation to which the spitefulness of certain organs
of the local English Press, and the peculiar con-
struction alleged to have been placed by the British
Admiral on the duties of a neutral fleet during the
early part of the war, had given rise amongst
so sensitive and excitable a people as the Japanese.
Moreover, our abortive attempts to arrest the
progress of hostilities had been construed in Japan
as indicating a desire to deprive her of the fruits of
her military successes, and our subsequent refusal to
interfere with the conditions of peace agreed upon
by the two belligerents afforded a signal proof of
the sincerity of our professions that the re-esta-
8 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION CHAP. I
blishment of peace on fair and equitable terms
had been the sole object of our perhaps ill-timed,
and certainly ill-fated, endeavours. Thus the path
already tentatively opened up before the war by our
generous treatment of the question of Treaty
revision in Japan has been finally cleared for the
better appreciation on both sides of the community
of interests which exist between the island empires
of the West and of the East. If this is the only
point upon which one may cordially congratulate
Lord Rosebery's Government, it is certainly one of
no mean importance. Nor would it be fair to hold
the late Government responsible for all the entries
which have to be made in the debit side of this
balance sheet. For whatever mistakes it may have
committed, they were largely the result of the mis-
calculations inherited from previous administrations
for a long time back.
But the consideration of past opportunities, neg-
lected or not, is apt to raise party controversies,
which mainly serve to obscure the paramount issue
— namely how, under the conditions actually exist-
ing in the Far East, British interests can best be
safeguarded in the future.
CHAPTER II
CHINA AFTER THE WAR
When I called upon Li Hung Chang at Tientsin on
my way back from Peking his first question was why
I had remained so much longer than I had originally
intended in the Chinese capital. I replied that I had
been looking for some sign of the awakening of
China. " I hope," rejoined the Viceroy with a
grim smile, " that your time has not been wasted."
In one sense certainly, as I assured his Excellency,
my time had not been wasted, for I had at least
satisfied myself that the search upon which I had
been engaged was a futile one. Nowhere in Peking
could the faintest indication be detected of a desire
to apply, or even of a capacity to understand, the
lessons of the recent war.
A more hopeless spectacle of fatuous imbecility,
made up in equal parts of arrogance and helplessness,
than the central Government of the Chinese Empire
presented after the actual pressure of war had been re-
moved it is almost impossible to conceive. Its position
was indeed an unenviable one. The conflict of Euro-
lo THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
pean interests was waxing fast and furious within its
gates. The new friends whose intervention had
unexpectedly mitigated at the eleventh hour the
penalty exacted by the conquerors were clamouring
for payment of their good offices. The remaining
provisions of the Treaty of Shimonoseki had still to
be carried out and Formosa formally handed over
to Japan, whilst the secret hope could not be re-
linquished that something might still be made out
of the forces of local resistance by inciting them
against Japan. Futile attempts had to be made to
postpone for a few months or weeks or days so
humiliating an ordeal for the Son of Heaven as that
of welcoming back to Peking the official representa-
tive of the victorious Mikado. The armed rabble,
ill-paid and half-starved, which had been gradually
driven together from distant parts of the Empire to
be a terror, not, indeed, to the Japanese, but to the
peaceful population of the frontier provinces, had to
be disbanded and bribed with some small pittance of
their arrears to go home in a good humour. The
powerful satraps on whose fluctuating loyalty depends
the slender authority of the central Government
over the provinces had to be alternately coaxed and
squeezed, whilst the loans which they had raised and
the bills which they had drawn during the war under
the splendid pretext of national defence had to be
met, renewed, or whittled down. The pressure
which had been exercised for obvious reasons durinof
the war to discourage any serious outbreak of anti-
II CHINA AFTER THE WAR ii
foreicjn feeline had to be relaxed in order to refute
the damaging imputation of too great subserviency
to European influence, and at the same time these
manifestations of national independence had still to
be kept within bounds, lest the long-suffering patience
of Europe should be put to too great a strain. In
and above all things the central Government had to
" save its face" — z'.^., to maintain those immutable
forms and appearances which, in the private as well
as in the public life of the Chinese, have nothing to
do with realities, but entirely overshadow them.
" Make see," as in his pidgin-English jargon the
Chinaman designates the art of making what is not
seem as if it were, is the beginning and the end of
Chinese statecraft. It stares at one from the mock
battlements of the Peking walls, where wooden
boards painted to look like the muzzles of heavy
ordnance fill the frowning embrasures, and with the
Vermilion Pencil it is written quite as legibly on
every edict initialled by the Emperor. Europe, it
must be admitted, had contributed certain features to
the situation which materially helped the central
Government to go on playing successfully its vener-
able game of " m^ke see." In the provinces at
least, if not in Peking, a construction could be
placed upon the intervention of the three Powers
which was eminently soothing to Chinese vanity.
The Japanese dwarfs had indeed been troublesomely
aggressive, but the Son of Heaven had only had to
raise his fino^er and beckon to the western vassals of
12 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
the Middle Kingdom and they had at once obeyed
his summons and swept the pigmies out of the
lorbidden territories. And who was likely to con-
tradict such a story ? Were not the Hunan troops,
who arrived at the seat of war after the conclusion
of the armistice, returning home convinced that the
mere rumour of their approach had driven the
Japanese to seek safety in flight before their invincible
legions ? Could not every coolie who had saved his
skin during- the war by stampeding at the first
sound of a Japanese bullet be trusted to save also
his own " face " at home by impressing his village
audience with a splendid story of imaginary victories
qzwrzLui pars magna fuit ? As for the dead they
tell no tales, and in a country where floods and
famines causing often greater loss of life than the
whole war against Japan are looked upon as a
Providential dispensation to keep down the numbers
of an all-too-prolific race, the "butcher's bill" is of
small account. It may be argued that, failing any
other evidence of the reality of their defeats, the
Chinese must at least credit the confessions of
disaster contained in public proclamations from the
Throne. But It Is doubtful whether these proclama-
tions ever filter down amongst the masses, and the
terms of exaggerated self-depreciation which even
the highest of the land are bound according to the
rules of propriety to use with reference to themselves
and to their own acts are seldom taken by their
cautious inferiors in any other than a Pickwickian
II CHINA AFTER THE WAR 13
sense. Moreover, owing to what one ot the ablest
students of Chinese character has appropriately
designated as its " intellectual turbidity," a China-
man has no difficulty in entertaining at the same
time two entirely opposite and irreconcilable
opinions.
Another circumstance which has largely con-
tributed to restore the self-complacency even
of officials best acquainted with the true state
of affairs has been the eagerness shown by
European capitalists and Governments to press
their financial favours upon China. As one of them
remarked to me, " You tell us that we are at
death's door, and that nothing can save us but
drastic reforms ; yet, reforms or no reforms, you
are willing, nay anxious, to trust us with your
millions." That a loan to a dying man may, in
given circumstances, be a specially lucrative
operation, or that the main point in such
matters is the soundness, not of the borrower's
health, but of the security he has to offer, was a
consideration which did not commend itself to
the Chinese mind. If Europe is so eager to lend
her money to China, China cannot have " lost
face " even with Europe, much less with her own
people. Even if the Chinaman allows that the
Chinese army and navy were hopelessly beaten,
what of that ? Have not other nations suffered
terrible reverses in the field and survived them ?
And why w^ere the Chinese beaten ? The Im-
14 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
perial edict says because a great sea-wave de-
stroyed the fortified positions of the Chinese all
along the coast. A learned general has written
a treatise to prove that China's reverses were
due to her desertion of the sound principles and
methods of war handed down by the ancients,
and to her ill-advised adoption of European
armaments. Accordingly, the hammer and anvil
were busy all over the Empire turning out an
endless supply of jinghals, a mediaeval sort of
matchlock, and the militant youth of Peking
could be seen practising every afternoon with
the bow and arrow under the city walls — an art,
by the way, of which the supreme object according
to Chinese notions is not so much apparently to hit
the target as to preserve a correct and elegant
posture whilst bending the bow. The corruption
and incompetency of certain high officials have,
indeed, been openly admitted and censured, and
in some cases even punished. But there is not
a single Chinese official who will openly admit that
the corruption and incompetency, and the disasters
which they have involved, are the result, and the
inevitable result, of a system of government
rotten to the core.
Nor can such an admission be expected from
the official classes, for their existence is bound up
with that of the system upon which they thrive,
and no scheme of reforms capable of regenerating
China can be devised which will not cut at the
II CHINA AFTER THE WAR 15
very roots of that system, and therefore threaten
their existence. But, if the official classes are not
likely to acquiesce in any practical recognition of
the principle that rights imply also duties, the
non-official classes seem, it must be confessed,
just as incapable of realising that they have rights
as well as duties. Docile to a degree seldom
paralleled even in other Oriental countries, they
accept the misgovernment of China as the natural
order of things. The masses are, of course,
profoundly ignorant of the existence of other con-
ditions elsewhere ; but the only difference to be
traced amongst those who have had a wider ex-
perience is that they look upon the misgovernment
of their country as a special and unfortunate, but
none the less immutable, dispensation of Providence.
A Chinese merchant who had lived for many years
in India admitted to me that China was in this
respect an ill-favoured country, " Plenty mandarins,
plenty lice ! " but he evidently regarded both
species of vermin as part of the scheme of creation
to which a Chinaman must patiently submit. The
singular indifference and aloofness with which the
non-official Chinaman contemplates the action of his
rulers, so long as it does not directly, immediately,
and tangibly affect his pecuniary interests or his
most cherished customs, is almost incomprehensible
to the Western mind. Within certain limits he
knows how to take care of himself and to check by
combination abuses which exceed the normal amount.
i6 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
But the conduct of public affairs in their broader
aspects he regards as something with which he can-
not possibly have any concern. It is the business
of the mandarins, and if they mismanage it that is
their look-out, not his. They may have mis-
managed the war with Japan, and they probably
have, for he has a shrewd idea of the worthless-
ness of his rulers. If so, they ought to be
punished for their wrong-doing, as all wrong-doers,
at any rate all those who are found out, ought
to be punished ; but that their wrong-doing affects
him — that he, the merchant, the artisan, the farmer,
will have ultimately to bear the cost of that wrong-
doing, he simply does not see. He himself is
honest, according to his lights, industrious, per-
severing, and, within certain limits, intelligent and
enterprising, and upon his own pursuits he brings
those qualities to bear with signal success. But
that his rulers should be expected to bring the
same qualities to bear upon the conduct of public
affairs, or that he has a right to demand it of them
because the public affairs are also his affairs,
is an idea which never enters his head. He
manages his shop or his farm, the mandarin
manages his Yamen, each one as best he can for
himself. It has always been so in China, and that
is with the Chinaman a sufficient explanation and
justification for anything. His intense conservatism
and pride rebel against the notion of any change,
even for the better.
II CHINA AFTER THE WAR 17
That a community of interests and reciprocity
of duties must exist between the different classes
of a well-ordered society is an idea entirely alien
to the Chinese mind. In fact, the language is
incapable of conveying a conception of the State
as representing the res ptiblica. When France
became a republic the Chinese litei'ati were un-
able to translate the word, and they had to adopt
a mere phonetic transliteration. As in the family
relations the duty of filial piety is impressed by the
parents upon the children without any corresponding
recognition of what parents owe to their children,
so in the social relations ample stress is laid upon
the duty of submission towards rulers, but no
thought is taken of what rulers owe to those com-
mitted to their rule. Nothing could be more charac-
teristic in this respect than the terms of the Im-
perial edict announcing the conclusion of peace.
The Son of Heaven declares, indeed, that he has
spent sleepless nights shedding tears over the
disasters which have befallen his armies and his
fleets, over the incompetency and corruption of
their leaders, and over the great sea-wave which
has swept away the coast defences. But, if he has
decided to abandon all attempt to restore the
fortunes of war, it is not, apparently, that he
shrinks from exposing his defenceless country to
the horrors of invasion, or from sending forth his
wretched subjects to be butchered in an unequal
struggle. No, the paramount consideration upon
c
i8 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap-
which the Imperial decision is based is his duty to
the Dowager Empress, " the venerable lady who, if
hostilities were renewed and Peking threatened by
the Japanese, would have to seek refuge in flight
and be exposed once more to the hardships of a
long and arduous journey." And, as far as public
opinion may be said to exist, this touching exhibition
of filial piety produces doubtless the desired effect
and saves the Emperor's " face." In the same way
the bullet of a Japanese desperado went far to
save Li Huno^ Chang's " face " and to invest with
the redeeming touch of dramatic effect a part which,
however patriotic from a Western point of view,
must have otherwise involved, from the Chinese
point of view, an irreparable loss of credit.
Life, according to the Chinese classics, is a stage,
and on this stage the Chinaman must above all
contrive to perform his part in strict accordance
with the rules of histrionic art, i.e. with the
traditional canon of Chinese proprieties. To ask
that he should win battles because he happens to
have been cast for the part of a general, or that he
should be an upright judge because he discourses
eloquently on the abstract beauty of justice, would
be an offence against that same canon of proprieties
which his audience, the Chinese public, would never
dream of committing. Foreigners are always com-
mitting this offence, and it explains in a great
measure the hatred entertained, especially amongst
the upper classes, towards them, and most of all
II CHINA AFTER THE WAR 19
towards the missionaries. Not only do these
barbarians refuse to accept the Chinese canon of
proprieties, but they actually set the scandalous
example of men and women trying to live up to
the standards which they profess !
Thus, insincerity practised as a fine art and self-
interest on the one hand, apathy and fatalism on
the other, ignorance and pride on both, combine to
uphold the traditional order of things against the
sternest lessons of experience, and the prospect of
any spontaneous awakening of China is as remote
after the war as it was before. The distant thunder
of the Japanese guns may have disturbed for a
moment the heavy slumber of the worn-out giant,
but the nightmare has passed away, and after the
vain attempt to stretch his inert limbs, he has sunk
off into a deeper sleep than ever. As a Frenchman
wittily put it, "Avant la guerre la Chine dormait
sur une oreille ; aujourd'hui elle ronfle sur les deux
oreilles."
c 2
CHAPTER III
THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA
There can hardly be a stronger proof of the
moral bankruptcy of China than her inability to
produce a single man at such a crisis in her
fortunes.
Of the powers that hold sway within the pink
walls of the Forbidden City little can be known.
The Emperor Kwang-Hsu appears to be a sickly
youth, with a melancholy but not unattractive
countenance, given to violent fits of passion, which
he gratifies in a relatively harmless way by smash-
ing his furniture. In the self-imposed seclusion of
his palace, within whose precincts only women and
eunuchs are allowed to dwell, he holds no com-
munication with the outside world except through
the high State officials, who, in the small hours of
the morning, approach him on bended knee to
present reports upon public affairs in which, it may
safely be assumed, the necessities of truth are
largely subordinated to the considerations of courtly
expediency. When he ^goes forth from time to
CH. Ill THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA 21
time to sacrifice in one of the Imperial temples ot
the capital, the streets through which he passes are
carefully cleared and guarded, the houses on either
side are shut off with heavy hangings, the ground
is strewn with yellow sand, and everything removed
which might offend the sensitiveness of Imperial
eyes or nostrils. Through the deserted thorough-
fares the Son of Heaven flits, generally in the
stillness of night, like a ghost, borne in a lofty
palanquin by a troop of bearers who have been
carefully trained beforehand to carry on their
shoulders an enormous bowl filled with water to
the brim without allowing a drop to overflow. In
Eastern countries generally the real power of the
Sovereign decreases in the same ratio as grows
the bondage under which he lives to the daily
tyranny of a soul-killing Court etiquette. Only a
century ago the Emperor Kieng Lung moved
freely amongst his people, and took an active part
in all manly pursuits. Even in the passionate
rescripts of the Emperor Hsien Feng, just before
the Anglo-French expedition, there were still traces
of a virility which seems to have since withered
away, under the influence, perhaps, of long female
regencies.
Until last year, notwithstanding her nominal
retirement after the present Emperor's marriage in
1889, the Dowager Empress undoubtedly con-
tinued to exercise a paramount authority. That
she possesses energy and ability of a high order
22 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
is proved by the skill with which she grasped the
reins of power, in concert first with the widow of
the Emperor Hsien Feng after his death in 1861,
and the tenacity with which she has held them
more or less continuously ever since, boldly breast-
ing or cunningly circumventing every obstacle that
successively arose in her path. She has often been
compared to Catherine the Great, and in every-
thing but the broader aspects of statesmanship the
analogy is not infelicitous — most of all, however,
in regard to the greed of power, extravagance, and
sensuousness common to both. The anniversary
of her sixtieth birthday was to have been celebrated
last autumn on a scale of unusual magnificence.
Large sums were sent up from every province,
and still larger sums were levied by the provincial
officials as the free gift of a grateful people. A
splendid road, which at least gives some idea of
what Chinese roads were like in the days of the
Empire's prosperity, was built from Peking to the
residence of the Empress Dowager near the Sum-
mer Palace for the Imperial procession to pass
over. The city gate giving access to it was
restored in all the pristine glory of quaintly carved
and painted architecture, and every house and shop
along the road blossomed out into a galaxy of
newly-gilded signboards and many-coloured wood-
work. But the disasters of the war shed a gloom
over the outward celebration, and, it is believed,
for a time at least, disturbed the filial piety of
Ill THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA 23
which it was intended to be the crowning illus-
tration. How far the Empress Dowager's influence
has been permanently shaken it is impossible to
say, but there were undoubtedly stormy scenes
within the palace of which an unmistakable echo
reached the outside world in the publication of a
memorial from one of the Censors vigorously
denouncing the baneful effects of " petticoat "
government. The very mild punishment inflicted
upon the author of this philippic showed the
sentiments expressed in it to have been viewed,
to say the least, with considerable leniency in the
highest quarters.
Of the high officials who form the central Govern-
ment at Peking I shall have more to say when I
come to deal with the Tsung-li-Yamen, or Board of
Foreign Affairs, and its relations with the European
representatives. Influential as some of them un-
questionably are, it is not in their ranks that the
two most conspicuous personages on the public
stage are at present to be found. The one is
Chang Chih Tung, now acting as Viceroy at
Nanking, and the other Li Hung Chang, the septu-
agenarian Viceroy of the home province of Chi-li.
Enemies to the knife, and representing two opposite
and conflicting tendencies, each of them possesses
qualities which at least lift him out of the herd of
sordid and crassly ignorant mandarins who form the
bulk of the ruling class.
Chang Chih Tung has the unique reputation of
24 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
having spent rather than acquired his fortune in
the pubHc service. Profoundly versed in Chinese
classical lore, an unrivalled mastery of language
brilliant and incisive has given him a reputation
and influence which could only be acquired in a
country where in the most literal sense of the word
it may be said that " Le style, c'est I'homme." He
is an ultra-conservative Chinaman and credited
with a fierce hatred of Europeans. But he is
sufficiently intelligent to appreciate some of the
results of Western science and industry, and he
would like to see China equipped with the weapons
of modern civilisation in order to wage war success-
fully against it. He it was who, perhaps, mainly
to overtrump one of Li Hung Chang's cards,
memorialised the throne in 1889 in favour of
constructing a great trunkline to connect Han-kau
with Peking, but he insisted with no less vehemence
that China must build her railways for herself and
with her own materials. His memorial was approved,
and at Wuchang, opposite Han-kau, whither he
had been transferred to carry out his scheme as
Governor-General of Hukwang, he set to work
with indomitable energy to erect immense factories
for the production of steel rails and railway material
of all sorts. Of the economic conditions necessary
to the success of any industrial enterprise he was
profoundly ignorant, nor would he listen to the few
European technical advisers whose services he had
been compelled to enlist. It has been a ruinous
,111 THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA 25
undertaking, but, if he has squandered upon it
all the public moneys he could lay hands upon,
he must at least be given the credit of having with
equal alacrity thrown his own private fortune into
the melting-pot. He was an ardent advocate of
war a oiitrance, and when peace was concluded
with Japan he stormed in his Yamen "like a wild
beast at bay." The proclamation of the Formosan
Republic is believed to have been partly instigated
by him, and he certainly had a considerable share in
organising and supplying the forces of local resist-
ance in the island. He is also suspected in some
quarters of having had a hand in fomenting the
anti-foreign riots in Szu-chuan. Be that as it may,
he is undoubtedly an honest fanatic, and, impractic-
able as he is, the sincerity of his crack-brained
enthusiasm and the cleanliness of his personal
character entitle him, perhaps, to more respect
than can properly be given to his better-known
rival.
Li Hung Chang is a man of a very different type.
Gifted with no mean intelligence and with a double
dose of Chinese cunning, he is too much of a sceptic
to allow prejudices or principles of any kind to stand
in his way. Brought more often than most of
his fellow-countrymen into contact with Europeans,
especially during his five-and-twenty years' resi-
dence at Tien-tsin as Viceroy of Chi-li, he has
rubbed up acquaintance with Western modes of
thought, and he has learned with some success.
26 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
the art of turning towards every European
whom he meets that facet of his character which is
most Hkely to impress his visitor. On proper
occasions he will shed crocodile's tears over the
iniquity of the opium trade, yet nowhere does the
cultivation of the native poppy receive more en-
couragement than in the province which he rules,
nowhere does the noxious plant thrive more
luxuriantly than on his own vast estates. He will
pen with the same unction a memorial to the throne
on the sacredness of Chinese traditions and a
preface to a book published for China by the
Society of Christian Literature. He will deplore
the lamentable periodicity of famines in China,
and nod eager assent when he is told that the
only remedy is to build railways which shall con-
vey to the stricken districts the surplus of other
provinces ; yet he failed utterly to cope with
the famine which broke out last winter in his
own province. Within sixty miles of Tien-tsin, on
the only railway line in China, famine fever carried
away 1,200 victims in one village, while a "corner"
in the grain trade was being engineered in the
Viceroy's Yamen, and train-loads of rice were
constantly passing down the line, under the very
eyes of a starving population, to fill not so much
the stomachs of the soldiers as the pockets of the
generals encamped at Shan-hai-kwan. With the
best spirit of modern civilisation Li Hung Chang
has probably less sympathy even than Chang Chih
Ill THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA 27
Tung. What he wants of it is only the outward
appearances and appHances. Plenty of coolies with
uniforms and weapons and a few European in-
structors picked up haphazard are enough to make
an army, ironclad ships and heavy guns to make
a navy. Of the complex administrative machinery
required to set modern armies and navies in motion,
of the honesty and ability which keep that machinery
in constant working order, of the internal discipline
which maintains its cohesion, he certainly appears
to have had no conception, at least until the war,
for no one was more amazed than himself at the
total collapse of his picked troops and costly ships.
It maybe doubted whether he has even now realised
it, when to those who urge that China must take a
leaf out of Japan's book his only reply is to inquire
petulantly whether the Chinese are expected to
wear European hats and clothes like the Japanese.
That corruption on the hugest and most unblushing
scale prevails amongst the friends and relatives who
form his social entourage and political supporters,
even his admirers do not deny ; and it is difficult
to believe that his own hands are clean when he is
known to have amassed in the course of a long
official career a colossal fortune reputed by many
to be the largest possessed by any single individual
in the whole world, and certainly in China. Yet
with all his shortcomings he is still the man whose
influence is believed to represent' the best that can
be looked for in China under existing conditions.
28 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
His knowledge of public affairs, both domestic and
foreign, is unrivalled amongst his countrymen. He
held throughout the last regency a high place
in the confidence of the Empress-Dowager. He
has been more or less directly associated with all
the negotiations which have taken place with foreign
Powers during the last twenty-five years, and if he
was not unnaturally reluctant to undertake the
painful mission of proceeding to Japan as a humble
suitor for peace, he unquestionably discharged it
with dignity. If the mainspring of his actions
must generally be looked for in his own personal
interests, he realises, perhaps on that account, all
the more clearly, the expediency of developing at
least the material resources of the country and
the necessity of calling in for that purpose the
assistance of foreigners. He has already shown
himself the leading spirit in the few industrial
and commercial enterprises started by his fellow-
countrymen. He has founded educational and
even charitable establishments of which it can at
least be said that they are unique in China. He
has built the only railway in the Empire. He was
the first to realise the utility of telegraphs. Above
all, what he does he does with a will. When the
first telegraph line between Tien-tsin and Peking
was being repeatedly cut and the poles pulled down
he was gravely told that these acts were committed
by the Fungshui, the mysterious spirits of earth
and water disturbed in their favourite haunts by
Ill THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA 29
a hateful European Innovation. Li Hung Chang
repHed that if he caught one of these Fungshui
interfering with the telegraph it would go badly
with him. The hint was sufficient. Neither
man nor Fungshui ever again tampered with the
line.
That Li Hung Chang can possibly be the
prophet of a great moral revival in China it is
difficult to believe. But it is equally difficult to
believe that any such prophet can arise out of
the ranks of the official classes. " Do men gather
grapes of thorns or figs of thistles ? " Their
existence is bound up with that of the system
which has produced them and upon which they
thrive, and the system itself is a tissue of im-
postures. From his youth the future mandarin
is taught that imposture rules the world — and not
only this world, but the shadowy world beyond.
He learns that his gods can be over-reached by
the merest trickery, for are not the lips of the
household o-od smeared over with treacle on the
day when he has to make his annual report to the
superior deities, so as to prevent any unpleasant
tales being told out of school, and that even the
duties of filial piety — the most sacred of all in his
eyes — can be just as laudably discharged at his
neighbour's expense as at his own, for what other
moral can he deduce from the story of the young
nobleman who has been held up to the admiration of
successive o-enerations for havinq; durincj a visit to
30 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
some friends stolen some oranges, instead of honestly
buying them at the nearest fruit stall, because for-
sooth he knew that his mother would relish them ?
He learns by rote an encyclopaedia of excellent
moral sentiments, a knowledge of which is the
"Open, Sesame" of public Mife, but once inside
the gates, and probably long before entering them,
he knows that to put such sentiments into practice
is the last thing which is expected of him. Famili-
arity with the Analects of Confucius will qualify him
to hold a public appointment, but it will not suffice
to secure him one. It is often assumed that, because
China has adopted from the most remote period the
principle of open competition for Government ap-
pointments, a sound democratic element must be
infused into its public services. Success in the
public examinations is certainly, with rare exceptions,
a condition precedent to any official appointment,
but it is by no means the only condition. One has
only to look down the list of the higher officials to
see how large a share of the good things is mono-
polised by influential clans and families. The
number of successful candidates always far exceeds
that of the vacancies to be filled. Unless some
happy accident serves them, those who have neither
money nor influence must needs wait till those who
have are provided for. The humbler literati must
look for a patron to help them on in their turn, and,
whilst they are gaining his favour by doing the
dirty work of his Yamen, whatever illusions they
Ill THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA 31
may have brought with them from the healthier
surroundings of their youth rapidly crumble away.
As soon as a Chinaman enters official life he belongs
to an oligarchy which stands entirely apart from the
rest of the nation, wrapped up in its hereditary
pride and bound together by the closest ties of self-
interest.
Of equally little value will the young mandarin
find the Analects of the Master in helping him to
hold with advantage to himself an appointment,
nominally worth a few hundred taels a year, which
he may have ultimately succeeded in purchasing by
the payment of thousands of taels in hard cash.
His first duty is to repay the honest bankers who
have advanced him the purchase-money on the
mere security of his prospects, with proportionate
interest. This is a recognised form of business, or
rather of speculation in China, and by no means un-
profitable. The bankers or syndicate have a lien on
the first year's profit of the promising young man-
darin whom they have undertaken to finance, and on
the other hand they take the chances of the borrower's
death or removal from office before the loan has been
repaid. His second duty is to put aside the amount
necessary to purchase a renewal of his appointment,
which is generally held on a three years' tenure. His
third duty is to save something on his own account.
Only when these duties have been adequately dis-
charged can he be expected to consider what duties
he may owe to the public interests committed to his
32 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
charge. Of the relative scale on which these various
duties are conceived the following instance may
serve as an illustration. A Hoppo, or native
Customs collector, for the province of Canton paid
500,000 taels for his appointment, nominally worth
a few thousand taels a year. His own profits dur-
ing three years' tenure of office amounted to over
three million taels ! Successful robbery on such a
gigantic scale would be impossible were it not
universal. From the Palace at Peking, through
the provincial seats of government into the Yamens
of the smallest officials in remote country districts,
from the heart of the Empire through its arteries
and veins into all its extremities, there flows a
constant stream of unutterable corruption. That
public corruption should breed also the worst forms
of private corruption is inevitable. Peking enjoys
in both respects an undisputed pre-eminence. It is
difficult to get even a glimpse of Chinese private
life, but the advertisements publicly displayed in
the streets of the capital show its moral atmosphere
to be as foul as the efiluvia which assail one's
nostrils. Over the gate of his Yamen or over the
door of his private residence the mandarin displays
his name and title, accompanied by an unimpeach-
able text ; but on its blank walls he tolerates pla-
cards which in any European country would fall
within the reach of the criminal law.
There is no rule without exceptions, and even
amongst the official classes of China there are
Ill THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF CHINA 33
doubtless individuals who, in both their private
and their public life, rise superior to the influences
which surround them. But they can do so only as
far as they are themselves personally concerned.
They cannot afford to challenge a conflict with the
whole class to which they belong. They may try
to keep their own hands clean, but woe betide them
if they try to impose such an inconvenient practice
upon others. With all the prestige of a great name
and a great position, Chang Chih Tung made the
attempt and failed. Li Hung Chang never even
made the attempt ; according to his more charitable
critics, because he was too clever, to waste his
energies on such a hopeless task ; according to
others because he never felt any personal disposi-
tion to undertake it. It may be doubted whether
the Son of Heaven himself could break down the
formidable resistance which the vested interests of
the official classes would offer to any comprehensive
scheme of reform.
CHAPTER IV
THE CHINESE CAPITAL
Peking may not perhaps be in every respect a
representative Chinese city, but such as it is, Peking
is the capital of the Empire, the abode of the Son
of Heaven, the seat of the central Government, the
residence of the foreign representatives, the focus of
all political interests, domestic and external. It may
not be fair to judge of China entirely by Peking, but
it would be well-nigh impossible to realise what
China is without having seen Peking. Even to
approach it from the coast is an instructive intro-
duction to a knowledge of China, for, if to reach
Peking by the most direct and frequented route is
nowadays a matter of no serious hardship or
difficulty except in winter when it involves a long
and arduous land journey from some ice-free port,
one cannot fail to be impressed with the evidence
that whatever of hardship or difficulty there may be
the Chinese are determined no effort of their own
shall reduce.
When, from the north or from the south, his
CHAP. IV THE CHINESE CAPITAL 35
Steamer has crossed the Gulf of Chi-H, the traveller
may consider himself lucky if he is not detained for
a day or two in unsuccessful attempts to get over
the bar at the mouth of the Pei-ho — "the heaven-
sent barrier" as the Chinese gratefully call it — or in
winding up the shifting bed of the river past the
Taku forts to Tien-tsin, the seaport of Peking.
There, unless he cares for a long and tiring ride, he
has to choose between the exquisite torture of a
ninety miles drive in a springless Chinese cart over
the scattered boulders and pitfalls of the Imperial
road, or the weariness of a native boat subject to all
the delays of adverse winds and unforeseen sand-
banks on the most tortuous of streams. If he decides
for the latter as the lesser of two evils, the Pei-ho
only takes him to within fifteen miles of Peking, and
from Tungchow he must ride, drive, or walk to his
destination, and he must, above all, time his arrival
so as to reach the city walls before nightfall. For
there is one thing at least which money will not do
in China. Nothing will open the gates of Peking
between sunset and sunrise.
He must indeed be a man of little imagination
who is not powerfully moved by the first sight of
that long line of stately battlements standing out for
miles and miles in bold relief against the sky. Un-
broken save by the curving roofs of the still more
lofty towers which at equal intervals surmount the
sixteen gates or mark the four salient angles of the
great quadrilateral, they conceal every trace of the
D 2
-.6
THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION
CHAP.
Strange world of barbaric splendour and immeasur-
able squalor which lies behind them. It is true
they are obsolete for all purposes of practical defence,
they are crumbling away in places, their armaments
are a sham ; of the area which they enclose barely
one-third is built over, the rest consists of waste
msm
ON THE I'EI-HO, GOING UP TO TEKING.
stretches of sand or of cultivated fields, but even
then the walls of Peking remain, or perhaps it is this
very blending of real and counterfeit grandeur which
constitutes them, a monument more impressive and
characteristic than any other of the colossal impos-
ture whose massive inertia has so long been
interpreted to indicate an overwhelming reserve of
unexerted strength.
IV THE CHINESE CAPITAL 37
The whole hfe of the city is concentrated in a few
densely populous quarters. The total population
formerly estimated at millions is now put down at
barely three quarters of a million. But what a
population it is that crowds the narrow lanes of the
bazaars in the Chinese city, that surges in and out of
the gateways which lead from the Tartar city into the
Imperial city, that flows in a ceaseless tide under the
pink walls of the Forbidden city ! — Mandarins of the
Peacock Feather, bloated eunuchs from the Palace
and ladies of fashion, borne swiftly along in curtained
chairs with the semi-transparent blinds drawn care-
fully down, or conveyed in hooded carts slung on
heavy brass-nailed wheels of which the precise build
and position indicate, like the crest or coronet of a
London barouche, the exact rank and precedence of
the owner ; officials of less high degree, well-to-do
merchants and women of the middle classes squatting
inside the clumsier carts which are the hackney cabs
of Peking ; humbler folk perched sideways on the
knife edge of omnibus wheelbarrows ; young bloods
on gaily caparisoned mules ; Yamen messengers on
horseback; files of heavily-loaded, long-haired camels
from Manchuria ; nimble, surefooted donkeys from
the neighbouring villages ; swaggering soldiers in
motley uniforms with heavy jinghals on their
shoulders ; yellow-robed Buddhist priests with close-
shaven pates shining like billiard balls in the sun ;
bird-fanciers with dainty pets in cages, the one
innocent passion of almost every Chinaman ; big
38 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION CHAP.
brawny coolies stripped to the waist with their pig-
tails wound round the crown of the head ; vendors
of sweetmeats, and vendors of rotten fish ; itinerant
auctioneers and pedlars of every description ; pro-
fessional beggars flaunting their hideous sores and
mutilated stumps, the stock-in-trade of a powerful
and wealthy guild over which a Prince of the Blood
presides ; astrologers and soothsayers, jugglers and
conjurers, each surrounded by a small crowd of
gaping admirers ; criminals stumbling along in
cangues, their heads protruding from a hole in the
heavy wooden board dependent from their shoulders,
on which are inscribed their offence and their
sentence ; women and girls with the enamel of last
week's or last month's paint and powder streaked
v/ith dirt and perspiration ; swarms of stolid, joyless
children, the boys in many cases dressed out as girls
in order to deceive the jealous deities whose wrath
disdains to wreak itself on the soulless sex; all
equally unwashed and malodorous, mandarins and
mendicants, princes and peasants, in silks or in
rags, but making up withal a picture of which the
kaleidoscopic fascination never palls.
Nor is the frame within which the picture is set
less strange or striking ; here a spacious thorough-
fare encumbered with tumbledown shanties and
matted hovels of bamboo, but lined on either side
with the daintily carved and gilded woodwork' of
monumental shop fronts and bright with a profusion
of gaudy signboards and flags and streamers and
Prisoneks in Cangues, Peking. {To face p. 38.
IV THE CHINESE CAPITAL 39
many-coloured hangings ; there a corner of the
mysterious pink walls behind which rise in the very
heart of the city as in an inmost sanctuary, the
yellow-tiled roofs of the Imperial palaces, the gilded
prison, self-imposed, of "the Solitary Man," ''the
August Lofty One," "the Lord of Ten Thousand
Years " ; there the deep archway of the Chun-man
gate leading out of the Tartar into the Chinese city
across the Beggars' Bridge, the squalid Rialto
of Peking ; there at the junction of some of the
busiest streets an elaborate triumphal arch, erected
to the memory of a virtuous maiden who, like one of
the classical exemplars of filial piety, used to strip
off her clothes at night in order to attract the
mosquitoes away from the couch on which her
venerable parents were reposing ; there a labyrinth
of narrow lanes, each more or less exclusively
tenanted by some particular trade, the great bazaar
of the Chinese city, where everything is bought and
sold from the priceless gems of Chinese art to the
foulest products of Chinese depravity ; there the
spacious enclosure of a Buddhist temple where,
enthroned amidst a strange assemblage of fierce and
sordid gods, the serene figure of Buddha the Com-
passionate seems invested with more than its usual
pathos ; or again in a stately grove of silver cedars
a severe and noble hall sacred to the memory of
Confucius, whose lofty aphorisms, carved in letters
of gold on the massive timber columns and panelled
ceiling read like the bitterest satire on the whole
40 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
social system which still masquerades under the
cloak of his high-sounding philosophy ; there, in the
official quarter of the city, the government Yamens,
buildings commonplace enough in themselves, but
to one at least of which dark and painful memories
will always attach, for it was behind the dull brick
walls of the Board of Punishments that the deed of
foul treachery, which in i860 delivered into the
hands of the Chinese a small band of gallant
Englishmen, was followed up by fouler deeds ot
torture under which the physical strength of
some, but never their stout hearts, succumbed ;
and ever and anon in the background, behind
palaces and hovels, above the painted roofs of the
temples and above the frequent verdure of the
trees looms the long-drawn line of the battlemented
girdle of walls gray and grim with the mystery of
aofes.
But unique as are the scenes which, attractive or
repulsive, on all sides fascinate and bewilder the
European traveller when he sallies forth into the
streets, it is at no small cost that he gratifies his
curiosity. All his senses are assailed at the same
time, his nostrils by the most pungent and loathsome
effluvia, his eyes by revolting sights, his ears by the
discordant din of a strangely uncouth tongue. In
the dry season he has to plough his way ankle deep
in dust, and in the wet season through pools of liquid
mud, dust and mud equally compounded of the un-
utterable filth of an undrained city where every
The Front oi- a Kashionahi.e Swff.tmeat Shop in Peking.
\ To face / afi-
IV THE CHINESE CAIM FAL 41
thoroughfare does duty for a sewer, where the door-
step of every house is used as a cesspool. Where-
ever he goes he moves in an atmosphere of hatred
and contempt. One by one every monument of
pubHc interest is being closed against him, and if he
contrives to buy his way into one of them, he not
infrequently has almost to fight his way out again.
In the beautiful park which surrounds the Temple
of Heaven the small English colony of Peking had
its cricket field for some years after the war of i860,
but now it is only from the nearest point of the city
walls that one can steal a glimpse of the azure dome
and white marble platform, where, on the night of
the winter solstice, alone and face to face with the
parental firmament, the Son of Heaven offers up
filial worship as the supreme mediator between
Heaven and earth. Most of the other temples are
equally forbidden ground, though in some cases, and
curiously enough, mainly through the friendly re-
lations of our missionaries with the Chinese priests,
one may obtain permission to visit them sitb rosa.
Even to the city walls access is nowadays prohibited,
albeit the guardians of the gates are seldom proof
against the offer of a small gratuity. Everywhere
except in the immediate neighbourhood of the
European legations, curiosity, mingled with undis-
guised hostility, dogs the foreigner's footsteps.
Actual outrages are rare, though outside the Anting-
man, the very gate which was surrendered to the
British forces in i860, a party of Englishmen riding
42 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION CHAr.
back to the city were greeted with a volley of stones
by Chinese soldiers whilst I was in Peking. But in-
sulting remarks and foul-mouthed curses are common
enough, and even when riding with the British
Minister and his usual escort of Chinese outriders, it
was occasionally advisable to put on pace in order
to avoid the unpleasant attentions of a noisy mob.
In its least offensive temper, a sovereign con-
tempt for the " outer barbarian " underlies the
boisterous humour of a Peking crowd.
To pass out of the turmoil of the Peking streets
into the trim compounds of one of the European
legations or of the few foreign residences in Peking,
is to enter all at once into an oasis of sweetness and
repose. Of these the most spacious and the
handsomest is unquestionably the British Legation,
once the palace of a Chinese prince, and still pre-
serving with the added comfort and orderliness of
European taste, the picturesque originality of Chinese
architecture. The familiar redcoats of British
marines drilling on the lawn lent perhaps an extra
touch of homeliness to the well-kept grounds. For
in view of possible troubles, most of the foreign
legations were provided last winter with a special
guard drawn from the fleets in the Gulf of Tchih-li.
They have since been for the greater part withdrawn,
but, it need scarcely be said, not, as the Peking
Gazette with its usual candour announced, because
the Chinese Government, which had tolerated their
presence during the war, had, upon the re-establish-
* — vS_—
'.^==:
IV THE CHINESE CAPITAL 43
ment of peace, ordered their withdrawal. Nor can
I forego the opportunity of placing it on record that
of all the foreign detachments sent up to Peking
none gave a better example of European discipline
and trustworthiness than our own marines, and none
left more friends and hearty well-wishers behind
them when they departed. As if to heighten the
contrast, the Chinese authorities had also assigned
to each legation a special guard of their own braves
who were encamped along Legation Street ; decrepit
old men and half-grown youths, the refuse apparently
of the coolies of the town, in ragged uniforms and
armed with every description of eccentric weapons,
who lay for the greater part of the day sweltering in
the foetid atmosphere of their tents or lounged about
the footpath lazily scowling at the " foreign devils "
whom they were supposed to protect, their evil
faces suggesting a new rendering of " Qiiis custodiet
ipsos custodesT
At night the gates, not only of the outer walls, but
of those which divide off the different quarters of the
city, are shut, and though it is estimated that as
much money as is spent on the lighting of London
goes into the pockets of the Peking Mandarins, a few
flickering oil-lamps only serve to make the darkness
visible. It is thoroughly typical of China that the
only telegraph station in Peking is situated, not
in the Tartar city, where the Palace, the foreign
Legations, the chief Government offices, and the resi-
dences of the principal officials are to be found, but
44 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap, iv
in the outer Chinese city ; and, as the gates between
the two cities are closed at night, Peking is practi-
cally cut off from all communication with the rest of
the world between sunset and sunrise.
I have attempted a slight sketch of the more
superficial features which in the eyes even of a casual
observer must differentiate the capital of the Chinese
Empire from that of any other State, Western or
Eastern, because they reflect, however imperfectly,
the still more profound differences which divide
off China from all other nations of the earth. A
knowledge of the surroundings amidst which Euro-
pean diplomacy has to carry on its daily work at
Peking, may afford a partial clue to the difficulties,
unparalleled elsewhere, with which it has to con-
tend as the interpreter of an unknown world of
thought and of ideas even more foreign to the
Chinese mind than any of the outward manifestations
of modern civilisation.
-f^fe^-^'^^^^iiZ^S . . Mil.
CHAPTER V
THE TSUNGLI-YAMEN
The representatives of the foreign Powers in
Peking have no sort of personal intercourse with
the Palace. After a long and stubborn struggle
they have, it is true, established their formal right
of audience on terms which are not yet perhaps alto-
gether satisfactory, but which are on the w^hole
compatible with their proper sense of dignity. The
heads of missions, accompanied by their staffs, pro-
ceed in state to one of the halls which form part of
the Imperial Palace, and, either singly or collectively,
as the case may be, they are ceremoniously ushered
by appointed dignitaries into the presence of the
Emperor, who sits almost impassive on a raised dais,
and barely acknowledges their profound obeisances
with a slight inclination of the head. The Minister
having read his speech in his own tongue, transla-
tions are read first in Chinese and then in Manchu,
the language of the reigning dynasty, and the
original is laid on a low table in front of the Emper-
or by the Secretary of State on duty, who, having
46 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
received it from the Minister's hands, carries it after
repeated prostrations up the steps of the Throne.
Until quite lately the Chinese official in question
always ascended for the purpose the side steps to the
right or left of the Throne, but M. Hayashi, the
Japanese Minister sent to Peking on the re-establish-
ment of diplomatic relations after the war, insisted
successfully that his credentials should be carried up
the steps actually facing the Son of Heaven — a de-
parture from former precedents to which the peculiar
circumstances of the case lent a special significance.
The Emperor usually whispers a few words in the
ear of the Secretary of State kneeling beside him,
who in turn conveys their purport, which is a merely
commonplace expression of courtesy and satisfac-
tion, to the foreign Minister. The audience is then
over, for the public audience is not followed, as in
other countries, and even in Eastern courts, by a
private audience in which more confidential commu-
nications may pass between the sovereign and the
foreign representative accredited to him. The
audiences at Peking are therefore mere formal cere-
monies, and their chief value at present is that they
convey a public recognition by the Son of Heaven
of the right of European Powers to treat with China
on a footing of complete equality. Except on these
occasions no foreigner ever sets foot within the
precincts of the Forbidden City.
The regular channel for communication between
the foreign Legations in Peking and the Chinese
V THE TSUNGLI-YAMI:N 47
official world is the Tsungli-Yamen, or Board of
Foreign Relations, which was first constituted in
1 86 1 after the Anglo-French expedition had wrung
out of the Chinese a reluctant assent to the estab-
lishment of foreign legations within the walls of
the capital. Prince Kung, a younger brother of
Hsien Feng, the then reigning Emperor, Kwei
Liang, a Senior Grand Secretary, and Wen-Hsiang,
a departmental Vice-President, were appointed to be
the members of the new Board, and the selection of
three such influential personages was regarded at the
time as implying a final abandonment of the policy
of mere haughty contempt which the Middle King-
dom had vainly striven to maintain towards the
" outer barbarians." If this expectation was never
really fulfilled, the composition of the Tsung-li-
Yamen has at any rate always indicated some
recognition of the importance which foreign rela-
tions were henceforth to assume in the affairs of the
Empire. By successive additions the number of its
members was gradually raised to ten, which has now
come to be regarded as the normal strength of the
Board, and it has been always closely identified with
the Chun-Chi-Ch'u or Privy Council (sometimes also
called the Grand Council), the highest department
of State, which transacts its business daily, or rather
nightly, between the hours of 3 and 5 a.m. in the
presence of the Emperor himself. Most of the
members of the Privy Council whose number, for-
merly five, was increased to seven during the
48 THE FAR EASTP:RN QUESTION chap.
Japanese war, are also members of the Tsungli-
Yamen, which deriv^es most of its influence and
prestige from this close connection with the Chung-
Chi-Ch'u. Half-a-dozen members or more attend
every day to transact business, and when an inter-
view takes place with a foreign Minister scarcely
ever less than three are present, not to speak of
secretaries, pipe-bearers, and servants who hand
round sweetmeats and cups of tea. The difficulty
of dealing with such an unwieldy body is obvious.
The chief anxiety of every member is to shirk
responsibility, and, though all ready enough to talk,
none will, if possible, take action.
Wen Hsiang, probably the ablest man who ever
held a seat in the Tsungli-Yamen, died in 1876,
and Prince Kung was left as the only original mem-
ber of the Board, of which he continued president
until he was disgraced in 1884 '^^ connection with
the Franco-Chinese conflict. Superseded by Prince
Ching, a collateral member of the Imperial family,
he lived for the following ten years in secluded
retirement, devoting his enforced leisure to the
building and repairing of Buddhist temples, and
apparently taking no part or interest in public
affairs. When the war with Japan broke out last
year he was suddenly recalled and restored to his
former posts of president both of the Tsungli-Yamen
and of the Privy Council. But he was then sixty-
three years of age, and old for his years. He was
no longer the man of mental vigour and bold resolve
V THE TSUNGLI-YAM£:N 49
who had conducted the peace negotiations with Lord
Elgin and had overthrown the Board of Regency
instituted on the death of his brother, the Emperor
Hsien Feng. His health also had grown feeble, and
his visits to the Yamen are rare.
Prince Ching, who since Prince Kung's return to
office has to content himself with the second place,
is a courtly Manchu gentleman slightly over fifty
years of age, but even judged by the Chinese stand-
ard, which must alone be applied to Chinese
statesmen, he has never shown any conspicuous
qualifications other than those of birth for the high
positions which he has held. In consequence, it is
believed, of considerable friction between him and
Prince Kung he has once or twice during the last
year applied to be relieved of his responsibilities, but
has always met with a decided refusal from the Em-
peror. His duties have, however, evidently ceased
to be palatable, and he has largely dropped his
interest in them.
Of the other members composing the Tsungli-
Yamen whilst I was at Peking only three call for
any special notice, and of two out of these three the
telegraph has recently announced the retirement.
Sun Yii Wen had been for ten years in the Yamen
and was generally regarded as perhaps the strongest
and most businesslike of all its members. He has
in a large degree that instinctive intelligence of
foreign affairs which must in China supply the place
of educated knowledge, and he is one of the few
E
50 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Chinese officials who have any understanding for
questions of commercial policy. Few important ne-
gotiations have taken place during his tenure of
office in which he has not played a leading part,
and generally in a spirit of prudence and conciliatory
moderation. It is by no means the least among his
titles to distinction in the eyes of his fellow country-
men that he is the father-in-law of the present Duke
Confucius, his daughter having married the eldest
lineal descendant of the Master. Hsii-Yung-I, who
has now accompanied him into retirement, is a man
of a very different type. An ultra-Conservative
Chinaman, he seemed to hold a permanent brief on
the reactionary side. Narrow-minded and intolerant,
his attitude was that of a pettifogging attorney, al-
ways on the look-out for a formal flaw in his adver-
sary's argument, and, rather than renounce the
satisfaction of a temporary and personal success, he
would recklessly sacrifice the larger interest at stake.
Having constant access in the twofold capacity of
Privy Councillor and Imperial Tutor to the person
of the Emperor, he had acquired in an exceptional
degree the confidence of the Son of Heaven. A
master of all the intricacies and formalism of Chinese
official style, he has probably drafted more Imperial
decrees than any other living Chinaman, and to his
ready pen quite as much as to his restless energy he
owed the formidable influence which he until recently
exercised over the Emperor's mind. To his inspir-
ation was generally ascribed the young Sovereign's
V THE TSUNGLI-YAM^N 51
incipient revolt against the imperious tutelage of the
Empress-Regent. He was the soul of the war party,
and he would have wrecked his country rather than
yield to the Japanese demands. Although in his
seventieth year, he looks scarcely more than fifty,
and his muscular, plebeian frame, no less than a
certain uncouth ruggedness of manner, distinguishes
him from his more courtly and weakly colleagues.
Another and greater distinction he also possesses.
Like Chang Chih Tung, whom he resembles, how-
ever, morally rather than intellectually, he is believed
to be above all pecuniary temptation. In fact he
represents the only type of patriotism to which a
Chinaman seems capable of attaining — a patriotism
which unfortunately manifests itself only in an un-
reasoning devotion to forms and formulse. Change
of any kind comes to be looked upon as in itself
wrong, and the past is worshipped at the expense
of the present and the future, merely because
it is the past. To this form of patriotism one
cannot at least deny the merit of sincerity, since
even Chinamen whose lives show no trace of any
higher ideal than those of their fellows are prepared
occasionally to die for it. When the present Em-
peror, who was placed on the throne as an infant by
a Palace coup de main, attained his majority a few
years ago and went for the first time to perform
before the ancestral tablets sacrificial rites for the
proper discharge of which he lacks, according to the
most rigid orthodoxy, the indispensable qualification
E 2
52 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
of direct lineal descent, a high Mandarin emphasised
his protest against this unlawful act of usurpation by
committing suicide before the eyes of the Sovereign
after having duly handed to him on bended knees
an elaborate treatise on the subject.
Another and entirely different school of politicians,
approximating rather to the Li Hung Chang type,
is represented in the Tsungli-Yamen by Chang Yin
Huan, a Cantonese and a protdgd of the Viceroy of
Chi-H, who has risen like him from the lowest rung
of the official ladder. As Chinese Minister to the
United States, Spain, and Peru, he has, however,
enjoyed wider opportunities than his patron of famil-
iarising himself with Western ideas, for which he, at
least in private, professes the most liberal admir-
ation. But the position to which he has risen is
generally ascribed not so much to the experience he
has acquired abroad as to his intimate acquaintance
with native methods of smoothing the path to official
promotion. Of an easy-going and self-indulgent
temperament, he is not likely to jeopardise his
chances in a vain attempt to undertake a task which
the late Marquis Tseng, on his return from Europe,
soon found it hopeless to persevere in. Pleasant
manners, an intelligent enjoyment of European so-
cial life, undoubted natural abilities, and an article
of which he assumed the authorship in Blackwood
on " The Awakening of China," secured to the
former Chinese Minister in London the reputation
of an earnest and enlightened reformer. With the
V THE TSUNGLI-YAM^N 53
dramatic instinct of his nation, the Marquis Tseng
played to the European gallery with conspicuous
success, and, consciously or unconsciously, threw a
prodigious amount of dust in its eyes. When he was
recalled to China and given a seat in the Tsungli
Yamen, our optimism knew no bounds. But the
Marquis Tseng of the Chinese Legation in London,
and the Marquis Tseng of the Tsungli-Yamen in
Peking, were soon shown to be two very different
people. It would be hard to say how far personal
inclination and how far superior pressure operated
towards the change, but it certainly presented all
the outward features of as pretty a case of socio-
logical " reversion " as could well be conceived.
It is, indeed, folly to expect that in such an atmo-
sphere as that of the Tsungli-Yamen European ex-
perience can form a title to anything but hatred and
suspicion. Of the ten members of that Board
Chang-Yin-Hsian has alone ever been outside of
China. Yung-Lu, the Governor of the city of Pe-
king, who acted for some time as Tartar General at
Hsian-Fu, is the only other member who has served
during his official career outside of the walls of Pe-
king. That is to say that the vast majority of the
officials entrusted with the foreign relations of China
have spent their lives in a city and amidst surround-
ings for which no sort of parallel could be found in
Europe outside, perhaps, of the darkest period ot
the Middle Ages, and even then the analogy would
be in many respects lame and inadequate.
54 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
' I was granted during my stay at Peking the
favour of an interview with the TsungH-Yamen —
a favour, I beHeve, never before granted to a
foreigner enjoying no official position — and during
a couple of hours I had the honour of discussing
with their Excellencies some of the burning ques-
tions of the day. The strongest impression which
I carried away with me was that the whole world
of thought in which the Western mind is trained
and lives seems to be as alien to the Chinese
mind as the language which we speak. The
wisdom of their sages, which is the Alpha and
Omega of their vaunted education, consists of
unexceptionable aphorisms, which have about as
much influence on their actions as the excellent
commonplaces which in the days of our youth
we have all copied out to improve our caligraphy
had in moulding our own characters. History,
geography, the achievements of modern science,
the lessons of political economy, the conditions
which govern the policy of Western States, the
influence of public opinion, of the press, of parlia-
mentary institutions, are words which convey no
real meaning to their ears. It is useless to
appeal to feelings of honour or of patriotism,
which, if they exist at all, take an entirely
different and to us inexplicable shape, and it is
equally vain to quote the teachings of political
history, for outside of their own immediate ex-
perience it is a sealed book to them. Their
V THE TSUNGLI-YAMEN 55
Excellencies talk glibly of the balance of power
in Europe, but Austria still seems to be hope-
lessly mixed up in their minds with Holland,
and of the two the latter apparently still occupies
as a colonial Power by far the higher position. An
incidental reference to Tunis elicited the fact that
they had never realised the existence of such a
State, or of an African Empire of France, though
they had acquired some information with regard
to the position of Egypt, presumably from French
sources. Nor is it easy to treat questions even
of material development with ministers, one of
whom deliberately maintained that China's im-
munity from railways had been the salvation of
Peking during the recent war.
Outside of its official relations with the foreign
representatives, the Chinese world knows nothing,
and wants to know nothing, of the Western world.
The members of the Tsungli-Yamen themselves
have scarcely any intercourse with the foreign
representatives at Peking beyond making a few
formal calls on stated occasions and offering them
an annual banquet at their official residence. One
or two may sometimes accept invitations to a
foreign legation, but no mandarin can frequent
a foreigner's house without exposing himself to
suspicion and obloquy. Even the unsuccessful
literati, who are driven to accept employment as
writers in the European Legations, will not
compromise themselves by showing any open
56 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
recognition of their employers when they meet
them in a public thoroughfare. The whole atmo-
sphere of Peking is saturated with hatred and
contempt of the foreigner, and the street urchins,
who shout opprobrious epithets or fling mud and
stones from a safe distance at him as he passes,
merely have the youthful courage of opinions which
their elders only venture to betray by a sullen
scowl or a muttered imprecation. The lower
classes, again, merely follow the example set by
the upper classes, and as I told their Excellencies
of the Yamen, in allusion to a recent experience of
my own, so long as powerful officials are afraid
to invite a foreigner inside their house without
cautioning him not to come in a chair or on horse-
back, but in a closed Peking cart, lest public
curiosity should be aroused, and his host " lose
face " with his neighbours, there can never be
that freedom and friendliness of intercourse out of
which in other countries arises between foreigners
and natives, with a better knowledge of each other,
a greater mutual consideration for each other's
feelings and interests. "You complain that we
misunderstand and misrepresent you because we
do not really know you, but you give us no
opportunity of knowing you, and you do not
disguise your reluctance to know us. You, the
rulers of the country, hold ostentatiously aloof
from us, and those whom you rule naturally take
their cue from your behaviour. Every nation, like
V THE TSUNGLIYAM^N 57
every individual, must have something to learn
from its neighbours ; but China is like a man who
should imacjine that he could learn what all his
fellow creatures were like by the continuous con-
templation and adoration of his own face in the
mirror." Their Excellencies bowed polite assent,
but Hsti-Yung-I looked as if my face at least was
one of which he had seen quite enough.
It is not, indeed, only the official representatives
of the European Powers whom the ruling classes
insist on keeping at arm's length. They are not
much more accessible to the Europeans in their
own employ. If there is one man whose services
ought to entitle him to the complete confidence of
the Chinese Government it is certainly Sir Robert
Hart, the Inspector - General of the Imperial
Maritime Customs. He has created the only
sound administration in China and given her the
only revenue upon which any credit can be opened
to her. Take away the foreign Customs revenue
and where could China hope to raise to-day the
ransom exacted by her conqueror ? Yet in spite
of this signal claim upon her gratitude, in spite of
the innumerable proofs of warm devotion to her
interests which he has given to her, it is impossible
to pretend that he has ever been granted the
position to which he, if any one, is entitled as a
proved friend and trusted adviser. And what is
unfortunately true of Sir Robert Hart was or is
equally true of Captain Lang and of every other
58 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
foreigner in the Chinese service who has reHed
only on his own disinterested loyalty for the
exercise of a healthy influence.
Li Hung- Chang is, according to recent reports,
to stay for the present as Grand Secretary at
Peking, and conduct in concert with the Tsungli-
Yamen the negotiations for the new commercial
convention with Japan under Article VI. of the
Treaty of Shimonoseki. Whether this must be
looked upon as an indication of his ultimate
restoration to favour, or whether his final disgrace
has been postponed until he has exhausted the full
odium of the treaty for which he, according to
Chinese notions, remains personally responsible,
the event must be left to show. The fact that the
leader of the reactionary party, Hsu- Yung- 1, is
described as having been dismissed from office,
whereas Sun Yu Wen has been allowed to resign
at his own repeated request, would look more
favourable for the opportunist school represented
by the Viceroy of Chi-li if the two new members
of the Yamen appointed to replace them, Weng
Tsung Ho, Tutor to the present Emperor, and Li
Hung Tso, Tutor to the late Emperor, did not
belong to the most reactionary clique of Palace
wire-pullers. Still more doubtful is it whether Li
Hung Chang's influence, if it prevails, will be
exercised, and, if exercised, will be sufficient to
introduce into the official circles of the capital the
more liberal spirit towards foreigners which he
V THE TSUNGLI-YAM£:N 59
has at least affected to display in his own Yamen
at Tient-sin, For the present his authority appears
to be openly flouted by the privileged advisers of
the Emperor, and the chief object of the Court in
summoning him to Peking, seems to have been to
subject him at greater leisure and less risk to the
familiar process of " squeezing," which every great
Mandarin has to undergo after he has sufficiently
enriched himself in the provinces — a process which,
in the case of Li Hung Chang, cannot fail, if
exhaustive, to be unusually lucrative.
Cramped and confined within such narrow limits
of official intercourse as I have just described, the
foreign representatives in Peking are almost entirely
cut off from those opportunities of social intercourse,
which in other countries help to extend their in-
fluence and widen their information. Nor is there
any organised expression of public opinion to which
they can look for guidance. Not a single news-
paper is published in the capital except the Peking
Gazette, an official record of Imperial decrees
and Government enactments, supplemented by a
more or less fabulous chronicle of events. Between
its lines may doubtless be read the secrets of the
hidden life of China. But, as has been pregnantly
suggested, is there not some cause for apprehension
that by the time the Western student of Chinese
life has assimilated himself to its conditions suffi-
ciently to penetrate its secrets, he will have in some
measure lost the power of conveying his knowledge
6o THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION CHAP.
in a form more intellicrible to the Western world
than the original logogriphs of the Peking Gazette ?
Nothing is more strange in China than the intel-
lectual fascination which so peculiar an environment
often seems to exercise over the European mind.
When during the course of a protracted residence,
the European has thoroughly familiarised himself
with the language and customs and habits of
thought of the people, he appears in many cases
to have undergone a certain brain transformation
which leads him unconsciously to lend a Chinese
value to statements and expressions, apparently
used in their European sense.
The great brick wall which China built up in
the Middle Ages against the invading hordes of
Central Asia is gradually crumbling away, and has
long since failed to serve its purpose, but the solid
wall of intellectual petrifaction and social isolation
within which Chinese statesmanship still seeks to
defy the pressure of mere diplomacy remains as
yet unbroken. I have dwelt at some length on
this point because, in the absolute imperviousness
of the Chinese mind to Western modes of thought
must be sought the causes of the failure of a
policy based, as ours has been for the last twenty
years, on a vain attempt to gain the confidence
and sympathy of China in a common interest of
peaceful progress. So long as no serious effort
was required of her she was astute enough to
humour our illusions and to listen with apparent
V THE TSUNGLI-YAM£n 6i
deference to our indulgent homilies. But the
language of friendly persuasion could have no real
or permanent hold upon her. It is no reflection
upon the ability of our diplomacy that French and
Russian diplomacy was able to achieve a temporary
success at Peking, for, though never actually over-
stepping the limits of diplomatic procedure, France
and Russia gave it clearly to be understood that
their action would not necessarily be circumscribed
within those limits. In the execution of the bold
and resolute policy agreed upon by the Cabinets
of Paris and St. Petersburg, M. Gerard and Count
Cassini were in a position to clinch every other
argument with that of physical force, and until
Chinamen have ceased to be Chinese, that is the
only argument of which they will fully understand
the value from European lips. The Chinese mind
and the Western mind revolve in different spheres
which have only one point of real contact, viz.,
physical force. From that vantage ground only
can China be dominated. This principle, which
had been too long discarded in England, and not
alone under Lord Rosebery's Administration, has
been once more, to some extent, applied to our
relations with China since Lord Salisbury's return
to power, and thus, at least to the extent within
which it has been applied, Sir Nicholas O'Conor
has already, before leaving Peking, had the satis-
faction of regaining the ground which he had never
ceased to contest even against overwhelming odds.
CHAPTER VI
THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING
A GREAT war not unfrequently affects the in-
terests and relations of neutral onlookers quite
as profoundly as those of the belligerents them-
selves ; but seldom has so sudden and dramatic
an illustration of the fact been witnessed as in
the changes immediately wrought by the war
between China and Japan on the relative posi-
tion of the foreign Powers at Peking. It is obvious
that the mere collapse of China, however momen-
tous in itself, cannot be looked upon as the sole
cause of so rapid a displacement of political power
as that which has recently taken place there to our
detriment. It has, however, disclosed the real value
of a hitherto unknown quantity, and shown it to be
far inferior to that which we had, on insufficient
grounds, chosen to assign to it. Before the war
the power put forth by Great Britain in the Far
East plits the unknown quantity representing the
latent resources of a friendly China was supposed to
be superior, or at least equal, to the power put forth
CHAP. VI THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING 63
by our rivals viiniis the same unknown quantity.
Now the value oi x is discovered, and we find it, on
the one hand, far inferior to what we had assumed,
and, on the other hand, transferred, such as it is, to
the other side of the equation. Nor is this all.
The rise of Japan as a considerable military and
naval Power introduces a new factor, or one at least
which we had been disposed until recently to ignore,
and one cannot yet feel quite sure on which side to
place it. To this extent the war has really dis-
turbed the old equation ; but in other respects the
main factors still remain the same, only the war
has placed them more conspicuously before our eyes,
and in a truer, if less flattering, light. The great
competing interests, political and commercial, remain
to-day as they were yesterday — those of England,
France, Russia, and, in a lesser degree, Germany ;
but to-day we are compelled to realise more forcibly
how fierce the competition has grown.
The interests of Russia are mainly and professedly
political. For the last two centuries her eyes have
been turned towards the East, though until the
Crimean war, and perhaps even until the last Russo-
Turkish war, they never swept far beyond the
adjoining regions of South-Eastern Europe and
Western Asia. In that direction the resolute atti-
tude of England and the issue of the Berlin
Congress curtailed the facilities for further expan-
sion which she had hoped to create by the treaty of
San Stefano. The subsequent revolt of Bulgaria,
64 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
the shiftiness of Servia, and the estrangement of
Roumania, together with the alHance of Austria and
Germany, opposed fresh barriers to any advance
upon Constantinople. But, if these events made
the immediate reaHsation of her traditional policy
in the shape originally contemplated impracticable,
they only incited her to find some new outlet for
the eastern trend of her energies. In the same
measure in which Russian activity in the Balkan
Peninsula and Asia Minor diminished during the
eighties, it increased in Central Asia. Here again,
however, in spite of such successes as the annexa-
tion of Merv and of the chief central Asian
Khanates, the expansion of Russia found itself
checked by the close alliance which had sprung up
between the Ameer of Afghanistan and the Indian
Government, and still more by the completion of
our new line of defence along the North-Western
frontier of India. Headed off once more by un-
expected forces, Russia's Drang nach Osten was
again merely deflected into new channels. She
seems at last in the nineties to have found in the
Far East the line of least resistance, which she had
so long been looking for. Marching with the south-
eastern frontier of her vast Asiatic dominions lies
an empire teeming with undeveloped wealth, yet
crumbling away with internal dry-rot, a prey in
every way ready to her hand.
How far Russia's plans had been formed in ex-
pectation of a speedy collapse of China it is difficult
VI THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING 65
to say, but though perhaps she alone shared with
Japan a thorough knowledge of Chuia's military
weakness, she would probably have preferred to
see its exposure postponed for a few years. Of
the magnitude of her plans she had been careful
to furnish little indication, beyond such as could
be gathered from the energy with which the con-
version of Vladivostok into a place of arms of the
first rank had been completed and the construction
of the Trans-Siberian Railway of late prosecuted.
Her diplomacy had never asserted itself with any
ostentation at Peking, and, though less yielding and
indulgent than our own, it had always displayed a
spirit of conciliatory moderation. During the
earlier stages of the war, and even up to the
signature of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Russia
kept her own counsel, though there is little doubt
now that before Li Hung Chang left for the
Japanese headquarters to negotiate the terms of
peace he had already been taken into her con-
fidence, and that when he agreed to the cession
of the Leao-tong peninsula he was aware of her
determination to forbid the fulfilment of the con-
tract. So great was the reserve which she main-
tained that the constant flow of reinforcements
going out to strengthen her naval and military
forces in the Far East passed comparatively un-
noticed. At last with a fleet more powerful, in
the opinion of many competent judges, than any
ever before concentrated in those waters and with
66 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
an army of 80,000 men ready for action on land,
she was in a position to speak, and in no uncertain
accents. The inherent weakness of China had
been proved to demonstration, and her senile
decay could no longer be allowed to jeopardise
the reversionary interests of Russia. By her inter-
vention Russia openly proclaimed her determination
to assume henceforth the guardianship of the
Chinese Empire until such time as by the laws
of nature, assisted or unassisted, the sick man of
the Far East should pass away and his inherit-
ance be formally appropriated. Russia's oppor-
tunity had come, and not those alone upon whose
assistance she might have naturally counted came
forth to improve it for her benefit.
The co-operation of France must be looked upon
in present circumstances as available for Russia
whenever and wherever the latter chooses to invoke
it. But in the Far East it is secured to her not
only by considerations of general policy but by a
special community of interests. France has gradu-
ally annexed considerable territories in the south-
eastern extremity of the Asiatic continent, which
she has already christened with the significant
name of " Empire d'Indo-Chine." If her possessions
have hardly yet attained to the dignity of an
empire, they hold the germs and the promise of
empire. Bordering on the three Chinese provinces
of Yun-nan, Kwang-si, and Kwang-tung, and
within easy reach of Szu-chuan, they possess in
VI THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING 67
the two important waterways of the Songka and
the Mekong unrivalled facilities for penetrating into
the heart of China. Her prestige, dimmed for a
while by the blunders which marred the substantial
success of the Tongking campaign, had been largely
retrieved by the boldness with which she had
handled the Siamese question ; but at Peking it
was still under the shadow of Lang Son. To
restore it by a sensational coup de tJiMtre and
sweep away the barriers which still hampered her
advance from the south, whilst cementing her
friendship with Russia by joint action, was an
achievement bound to commend itself not only
to the judgment of French statesmen, but to the
sentiment of the French nation.
That Germany should have joined hands with
France and Russia is more difficult to explain.
Whether or not she secretly hankers after terri-
torial acquisitions in the Far East, her interests
there have been hitherto mainly and avowedly
commercial. How these could be served by
alienating a good customer like Japan, even if
she be a prospective rival, without apparently
securing any countervailing advantage in China
it is not easy to conceive. If Germany expected
to arrest the growing intimacy of France and
Russia she must have been promptly undeceived.
At Tokio, where Germany had everything to lose
by the course upon which she had embarked, all
the outward appearances at least of complete
F 2
68 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION CHAP.
harmony between these strange alHes were main-
tained for a considerable time, if not up to the
present date. But at Peking, where Germany, it
must be presumed, looked for her reward, scarcely
a month had passed before she was politely
elbowed out and ignored by her two partners, and
the officials of the Tsungli-Yamen were not slow
to take the cue thus given to them. No sooner
had the intervention of the three Powers established
the necessary claim upon the gratitude of China
than France and Russia proceeded to monopolise
for themselves not only its substantial but its formal
manifestations. The French and Russian Ministers
suddenly discovered that they had in their pigeon-
holes official letters of which the war had delayed
delivery to the Emperor. On the one hand, there
was a letter notifying the accession of the Emperor
Nicholas II., and, on the other, one announcing
the election of M. Faure as President of the
French Republic. With a curious affectation of
impossible secrecy an audience was arranged, to
which the Russian and French Ministers proceeded
in great state. There they received, according to
their own account, in terms of unprecedented
cordiality, the solemn thanks of the Son of
Heaven himself for the great services rendered
to him by their respective Governments. This
was the first public intimation conveyed to Ger-
many that her company was no longer required
or desired. The negotiations with regard to the
VI THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING 69
Franco- Russian loan were soon to furnish further
evidence in the same sense of a still more sub-
stantial nature. The association, or, rather, the
complete fusion, of French and Russian interests
to the exclusion of all others was reflected in the
ostentatiously intimate relations of the French and
Russian Ministers. M. Gerard and Count Cassini
were the Siamese twins of Peking diplomacy. It
would be invidious to inquire whose was the ruling
mind of the two. The qualities of the one seemed
exactly to supply what the other appeared to lack,
and the two toQ^ether formed a whole to whose
conspicuous ability one could not as a spectator
refuse a tribute of admiration. It would not be
either right or just to infer that England and
Germany were a whit less adequately represented,
but, unfortunately, the political situation precluded
that close co-operation between them which might
have secured the success at least temporarily denied
to their separate and individual efforts.
But, if Germany might well feel aggrieved at the
cavalier treatment which she has received at the
hands of France and Russia, she has suffered only
negatively. Ours has been the positive loss.
Whether or not we might temporarily have miti-
gated Franco-Russian hostility by accepting the
part for which Germany volunteered, we have now
to reckon with that hostility as a stubborn fact.
The first-fruits of the Franco- Russian under-
standing were the convention, signed at Peking
70 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
on June 20, between France and China, by which
the latter not only gave away a territory ceded
to her by us little more than a year ago on the
express condition that she should not transfer it
without our consent to any other Power, but
actually recognised French claims over a province
which forms an integral part of the British Empire.
The districts made over to the French, as Mr.
Holt Hallet has recently pointed out, comprise a
far larger territory than w^as at first understood.
For besides Muang U-neua and Muang U-tai,
which lie in the upper basin of the Nam U, the
whole of the principalities of Kiang Hung in
the basins of the Nam Him and Nam La are
surrendered to the French. In fact more than
half of the Burmese Shan State of Kiang Hung
which we generously settled scarcely eighteen
months ago upon China to hold in trust for our-
selves, has been coolly handed over by her to
France. Nor is that all. Over and above this
gross violation of our Treaty rights, she has
entered into a series of engagements granting a
privileged position to the French in one of the
richest provinces of her Empire. There are few
regions in China containing greater mineral wealth
than Yunnan. Under the Convention of June 20,
Szumao, the most important trade centre in the
south-west of Yunnan, is to be thrown open to
French trade in the same way as the Treaty Ports
of China are now open to foreign trade generally.
VI THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING 71
A French Consul is to be allowed to reside there,
and telegraphic communication is to be established
with the nearest French station ; facilities are to
be given for the development of French trade on
the waterways and government roads which give
access to the ereat tea districts of Puerh and
I-pang; reductions in favour of French goods are
to be granted in regard to both customs and inland
taxation ; permission on terms to be subsequently
negotiated is to be given for carrying into Chinese
territory the French railways already existing, or
at present only projected from Annam and Ton-
king ; and last, but not least, it is stipulated that
none of the above privileges shall be extended by
China to any other foreign country. But even
more significant than the concessions wrung out
of the feebleness of China was the way in which
they were wrung out. England's preponderancy,
however much it might be ridiculed as a thing
of the past, was too fresh in the memory of the
Tsungli-Yamen for the distracted members of that
board to face with equanimity the prospect of
setting her at defiance. The pressure exerted
by the French representative, with his Russian
colleague at his back, in order to enforce the
immediate signature of the convention in the teeth
of England's protest gives the measure of the
importance which he at any rate attached to it.
In vain the Chinese officials begged for time to
at least consider the British Minister's objections.
72 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Their appeals only provoked M. Gerard to use
language of a more distinctly minatory character,
and the convention was signed by the President of
the Tsungli-Yamen practically under moral duress.
This convention has not yet, it is true, been ratified
by the Emperor of China, and, unless in the mean-
time some solution can be found compatible with
our rights and interests, one must hope that the
Chinese Government may still be deterred from ir-
revocably consummating such an act of international
bad faith. But whatever may be its ultimate deci-
sion, it cannot altogether undo the effects of its own
weakness in conceding, or of M. Gerard's high-
handedness in imposing, the discharge, at the
expense of others, of whatever obligations of
" gratitude " China may have contracted towards
France. The same methods moreover were shortly
to be called into requisition to elicit a further ex-
pression of Chinese "gratitude."
To meet the war indemnity due to Japan, China
required financial assistance on an unprecedented
scale. France and Russia realised with masterly
promptitude that, if they gave that assistance on
their own terms, the financial control of China would
pass into their hands. The only security which
China had to offer was the revenues, derived chiefly
from British trade, of an administration created and
maintained chiefly by British energy and ability.
Although that administration owed its existence and
continuance mainly to British influence, we had
VI THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING 73
never claimed to derive from it any exclusive advan-
tage. It was officially recognised as a Chinese
administration, under the title of the Imperial
Maritime Customs, its European staff was recruited
amongst foreigners of almost every nationality, and
every flag trading with China benefited on an equal
footing by its services. If the number of British
officials exceeded that of other foreigners in its
employ, and if the supreme management had been
entrusted to an Englishman in the person of the
Inspector- General, Sir Robert Hart, this was but
a natural recognition of the proportion which British
trade in the treaty ports of China bears to that of
other countries. The revenues of such an adminis-
tration were eminently fitted to form the basis of a
financial operation in which all the Powers desirous
of furnishing China with the means of putting her
house in order might have combined. Had France
and Russia been really anxious to prove the sincerity
of their professed disinterestedness, they would have
welcomed the opportunity of placing the independence
of China under the guarantee of international finance.
But nothing was further from their thoughts. British
and German financiers were prepared to join hands
with French and Russian, and to provide jointly
with them in one comprehensive operation the whole
amount which China requires for the fulfilment of
her obligations towards Japan. France and Russia
would not even allow the Chinese Government to
take any such proposals into consideration. They
74 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
had not only settled to their own satisfaction the
terms upon which an exclusively Franco- Russian
loan was to be made to China, but, even before
having secured the formal assent of the Chinese
Government, they had actually published the con-
ditions and announced the issue. The Tsungli-
Yamen vainly protested that it had only accepted in
principle the proffered assistance of Russia, and had
never intended to bind itself unconditionally. Even
Chinese statesmen could not help feeling that there
was something ominously unprecedented in a loan
forced down the borrower's throat at the point, as
it were, of the bayonet. But they had awakened
too late to the gravity of the situation. The only
concession which the Chinese struggled hard to
extract from their masterful protectors was the sub-
stitution of the guarantee of the French bankers for
that of the Russian Government on the face of the
loan. That the guarantee of the Russian Govern-
ment would still stand behind that of the French
bankers was, of course, a secret to no one, but the
Son of Heaven's dignity would at least not be
wounded by the Tsar's signature running across his
own seal of State. But even to that extent China
was not allowed to save her " face," The French
and Russian Ministers conveyed a significant hint
that the Leao-tong peninsula had not yet been
restored by the Japanese. A sharp turn of the
thumbscrew and the thing was done.
Whether or not the Franco-Russian loan was
VI THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING 75
accompanied, like the Franco-Chinese convention,
by secret provisions granting exclusive privileges to
the contracting parties, the financial leverage which
France and Russia thereby acquire was in itself an
adequate reward of the energy they put forth to
secure it. The reported creation of a Franco- Russian
bank at Shanghai would seem, however, to confirm
the belief prevalent at the time in Peking, that the
unpublished provisions of this financial arrangement
would prove quite as edifying as those already given
to publicity. What will be the ultimate success of
this strange attempt to assume a financial tutelage
over China must depend chiefly upon the ability of
France and Russia to follow up the advantage which
they have gained at the outset. From the enthusiasm
with which the first loan appeared to be taken up in
Paris there seemed little reason to doubt that they
need be guided in future dealings of the same nature
only by considerations of political expediency.
Holding henceforth the power of the purse at Peking
with the power of the sword behind it, Franco-
Russian diplomacy would have found itself armed
with a double-edged weapon against which all the
resources of diplomacy would have availed but little.
That such were the hopes at one time entertained
may be inferred from the stipulations by which China
not only debarred herself from raising any fresh loan
for a period of six months, but promised to give
France and Russia an option whenever the time
came for her to neofotiate another loan. In the
76 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
meantime, however, events which governments can-
not always control, have disturbed these calculations.
Political clouds in the Near East and a senseless
speculation in gold mines have once more produced
one of those chronic crises to which the Parisian
money market is so often subject. With the best
will in the world the French financiers cannot appar-
ently for the present come forward again to the assist-
ance of their Russian friends, and Russia is equally un-
able without their assistance to come forward again at
Pekino- in the unwonted character of a lender. In
these circumstances the field must necessarily be left
open to the English and German capitalists whose
overtures the Tsungli-Yamen was only a few months
ago so peremptorily compelled to reject. If they are
not disposed now to offer anything like the same terms
which they would have accepted in the summer
before two such formidable powers as France and
Russia had taken rank before them as creditors of
China, the Chinese Government will only have to
thank itself for the inevitable result of such hybrid
politico-financial engagements as those into which it
allowed itself to be coerced in spite of all friendly
warnings. Were it possessed of the real instincts of
statesmanship, it would not grudge the price it may
have to pay for an even partial recovery of the
financial independence which it had so seriously
compromised, but of course if it possessed any such
instincts it would not originally have signed its
independence away with such lightheartedness.
VI THE FOREIGN POWERS AT PEKING ^^
For our own j^art we may congratulate our good
fortune rather than our merits if in this matter
unforeseen circumstances have compelled Russia
and France to throw up the game at the very
moment when they had succeeded in dealing most
of the trumps into their own hands.
CHAPTER VII
THE GENESIS OF MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IN CHINA
What is commonly called the missionary question
in China adds, it must be admitted, no slight burden
to the responsibilities and difficulties of foreign and
especially of British diplomacy at Peking. No
question is perhaps enveloped in such a cloud of
prejudice. On the one hand there are many people
both at home and in China who, having no sympathy
with missionary work or being thoroughly convinced
of its uselessness in existing circumstances, look
upon the missionaries as busy-bodies and intruders,
who have only themselves to thank when their mis-
placed zeal brings them to grief. On the other hand
the missionaries themselves and their friends at
home are so profoundly impressed with the sacred-
ness of their task that in its performance they are
absolutely deaf to any considerations of human pru-
dence or political caution until in the throes of some
ghastly life and death struggle, the natural instinct
of self-preservation extorts from them a passionate
appeal to their fellow citizens for assistance and
protection. But to discuss the value or expediency
CHAP. VII MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IN CHINA 79
of missionary labour in China is neither practicable
nor useful. On a question which is approached by
different people from such opposite points of view,
the conclusions arrived at cannot fail to be conflict-
ing. Those who look at the preaching of the
Gospel to all nations of the earth as a Divine com-
mand which must be obeyed at all costs cannot be
expected to acquiesce in the judgment of those who
would measure the value of spiritual labours by
material results. Two points alone need be borne
in mind. First of all, foreign missionaries, whatever
we may think of them, are just as much entitled to
protection in the lawful pursuit of their calling under
the treaties to which China has subscribed as the
foreign merchant or the foreign official. Secondly,
even if, judged by a mundane standard, its material
results have not been proportionate to the amount
of blood and treasure expended, missionary work in
China is not only a proselytizing but also a human-
ising agency, and every missionary establishment is
a centre from which civilising influences radiate over
the whole area of its operations.
Herein lies to a Qrreat extent the secret of the
hostility displayed, especially amongst the official
classes in China, towards the missionaries. The
influence of Western civilisation, in whatever shape
it manifests itself, is an abomination in the eyes of
the rulers of China, whose days would be counted
were it ever to permeate the masses. The hatred
directed against the missionaries is only a peculiarly
8o THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
virulent form of the hatred directed afjainst Euro-
peans generally, and it is easy to understand why it
should be a peculiarly virulent one. Missionary
work is practically the only agency through which
the influence of Western civilisation can at present
reach the masses. The European merchant is
scarcely brought into contact with any other than
the trading classes, and his influence is at any rate
localised within the immediate vicinity of the treaty
ports where he resides. That of foreign officials is
mainly restricted within a similar area and confined
to the Chinese officials with whom he has to deal.
The missionary alone goes out into the byways as well
as the highways, and, whether he resides in a treaty
port or in some remote province, strives to live with
and among and for the people. The life which he
lives, whether it be the ascetic life of the Roman
Catholic missionary, or the family life of a Protestant
missionary with wife and children, is in itself a
standing reproach to the life of gross self-indulgence
led by the average Mandarin. But in the eyes of the
latter it becomes a public scandal when, in glaring
contrast to every vice of native rule, the foreign
missionary in his daily dealings with the people of
his district conveys a continuous object-lesson of
justice and kindliness, of unselfishness and integrity.
It is this aspect of missionary work which goads
the official Chinaman into fury, and incites him to
traduce the character of the missionaries by those
foul calumnies which invariably precede every out-
VII MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IX CHINA 8i
break of so-called popular feeling. That the feeling
which finds vent in anti-missionary riots and out-
rages is not really popular in its origin is patent
from the fact that in the rural districts, where the
influence of the official classes is relatively small,
scarcely a trace of it is ever seen. It is mainly con-
fined to the town and cities, where the mob is under
the immediate control of the Mandarins. There
they have " the stupid people," as with almost naive
arrogance they openly call the lower classes whom
they rule, in the hollow of their hands. No less
sickening than monotonous is the uniformity of the
methods employed by them to engineer an out-
break. The hold which the missionaries may have
acquired on the respect of even the dregs of
an urban population by the blamelessness of their
lives must first be weakened by spreading vile
rumours of unspeakable vices veiled under the
appearances of virtue. The Roman Catholic con-
vent and the family hearth of the Protestant
missionary are converted by the foul imagination of
their traducers into dens of abominable vice, and un-
fortunately, in the congenial atmosphere through
which they circulate, such tales find only too ready
credence. Where imposture and hypocrisy reign
supreme amongst the highest of the land, what
inherent improbability can there be for the
average Chinaman in stories which merely represent
the foreigner as an impostor and a hypocrite like
the rest ? When once the personal confidence
G
82 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
which the foreigner may have succeeded in inspiring
has been sapped, it is an easy task to inflame
against him the passions of the mob by a fresh
series of calumnies purporting to chsclose the real
objects of his mysterious presence in a foreign land.
That he should have left his far-off country only
to bear into a strange land a message of peace and
goodwill amongst men is an idea so alien to the
Chinese mind that it can never wholly grasp it. It
is naturally prone to suspicion, and what suspicion
more natural than that, behind all the appearances
of a harmless craze, there should lurk a sinister
design ? The medical services which so many
missionaries render impartially to the highest and
the humblest, in a country where no serious effort
is made to cope with disease, might be expected
to establish some claim on public confidence and
gratitude, but, as a matter of fact, there is no branch
of missionary activity which is so liable to malevo-
lent misconstruction. Medicine in China is still
largely looked upon as a black art akin to sorcery,
and, when one remembers of what loathsome in-
gredients the healing drugs of the Chinese medicine
man are often made up, one need not wonder at
the readiness with which the ignorant masses are
made to believe that remedies so efficacious as
those administered by the " foreign devil " must
be compounded of unutterably fiendish substances.
That cans of preserved milk are the boiled down
brains of Chinese children, that the eyes and other
VII MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IX CHINA 83
parts of the human body are the most potent sub-
stances employed in the European pharmacopoeia,
presents nothing incredible or even improbable to
the ordinary Chinaman ; for crimes of this nature are
sufficiently common amongst his own fellow country-
men to be duly mentioned in the penal code which
provides special forms of punishment for " murder
committed in order to obtain drugs from the human
body." When therefore placards, issued with the
explicit or implicit sanction of the local Yamen,
declare that a foreigner has actually been caught
red-handed in his barbarous laboratory ; when, as
was the case the other day in Szu-chuan, an official
message is sent by the provincial authority over the
Government telegraph announcing that living proofs
of these horrible practices have been produced in
open Court, can one be surprised at the results ?
Whilst a maddened populace wreaks a brutal ven-
geance in atonement of its imaginary wrongs, the
Mandarin either personally supervises, or is con-
veniently blind to, the scenes of arson, pillage, and
bloodshed which he or his superiors have prompted.
It is only in a few exceptional cases, chiefly
amongst subordinate officials, that the instincts of
common humanity assert themselves and a tardy
effort is made to provide the hunted victims with
a temporary refuge in the Yamen, or to secure their
retreat to some neighbouring city where the re-
sponsibility for their ultimate fate willl rest upon
more robust shoulders.
84 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Calumnies of this particular kind have preceded
and produced every serious outbreak from the
Tien-tsin massacre in 1870 to the most recent
outrages. They clearly appeal, in the opinion of
those who spread them, to a more responsive
chord than any other charge which can possibly
be brought against the missionary. Religious
fanaticism plays only a subordinate and acces-
sory part in them. The Mandarin is himself too
much of a sceptic, the ordinary Chinaman too
eclectic in his religious practices, for the mere
question of creed to produce such violent explo-
sions. People who combine a platonic adhesion
to the teachings of Confucius with the practice
of Buddhist or Taoist forms of worship, and,
indeed, often with that of both forms imparti-
ally, cannot be charged with religious exclusivism.
" Worship the gods as if they were present " is
an inscription constantly recurring over the gates
of Chinese temples, and in amplification of this
text the author of " Chinese Characteristics "
quotes two sayings current amongst the masses : —
" Worship the gods as if they came,
And if you don't it's all the same."
" Worship the gods as if they were there,
But if you worship not the gods don't care."
Under one of the greatest of her rulers
Christianity obtained open and almost official
recognition in China. Two centuries ago Jesuit
VII .MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IN CHINA 85
missionaries were the favourite and most trusted
advisers of the Emperor Kiang Hsi, and, had the
Vatican not been induced by their rivals to condemn
the concihatory spirit in which they sought to temper
the abruptness of a great rehgious transition, China
might have been gradually and peacefully opened up
to the influences of Christian civilisation. One of
the most interesting sights in Peking is the
ancient graveyard where these early pioneers of
Christianity elected to be laid to rest in tombs
of an orthodox Chinese type, surrounded by the
sacrificial emblems connected with the loftiest
of Chinese rites — viz., that of ancestral worship.
So wide and deep was the prestige of their great
names that up to the present day pilgrims still
occasionally travel from remote provinces of the
empire to burn incense and offer up sacrifices on
the funereal altar at their graves. Even now
it cannot be said that Christianity as a creed is
persecuted in China, Native Christians are not,
in fact, excluded qua Christians from official ap-
pointments, and, if they hold none of the higher
posts, it is partly because they are recruited
mainly amongst the less influential classes, and
partly because they disqualify themselves for
posts which, as most of the higher ones do,
involve participation in religious ceremonies in-
compatible with the creed they profess.
Alleged insults to some popular local deity,
and more often still the imputation of abomin-
86 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
able practices in connection with their own rites,
undoubtedly form part of the systematic vilifica-
tion by which popular feeling is manufactured
against the missionaries ; but fanaticism alone is
not sufficiently real or powerful to drive the
masses into revolt against those whom in their
cooler moments they will themselves acknowledge
to be their best friends. How is it, then, it may
be asked, that the victims of these outbreaks
seem to be invariably missionaries, whilst the
merchant is left unmolested and the European
traveller can penetrate as a rule unmolested into
the most distant provinces of the Empire ? The
answer is, I think, obvious. These outbreaks
are, in the first place, specially directed against the
missionaries for the reasons above set forth ; and
in the second place, the more remote districts
in which many of the missionaries reside afford
exceptional facilities for preparing them without
attracting the notice of any inconveniently vigilant
foreign official, and of carrying them out without
running too great a risk of direct and im-
mediate reprisals from any foreign Power. The
murder of Mr. Margary in Yun-nan, however,
showed that, where the presence of an official
foreio^ner was considered undesirable, similar and
even simpler means could be as readily and as
successfully adopted to remove him as if he were
only a mere missionary.
Nor can it be denied that the singular forbear-
VII MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IX CHINA 87
ance shown by foreign Powers, and especially,
perhaps, by England, in connection with these
periodical outrages, has in itself contributed to
their recurrence. For the last five-and-twenty
years their history has repeated itself almost year
by year. Riots have taken place, valuable
property has been destroyed, and, even where no
lives have been actually sacrificed, violence and
outrage have been done to innocent and unoffend-
ing people. The sequel has been invariably the
same. Representations have, of course, been
made to the central Government, commissions of
inquiry have been instituted, and, after months
and years of equivocation and evasion, in sheer
weariness of spirit, the execution of a few coolies
or underlings and a modicum of pecuniary com-
pensation have been accepted as an adequate
atonement for conspiracies which strike, and are
intended to strike, not only at the actual victims,
but at the influence and prestige of every one of
their fellow-countrymen, and indeed of every
European. For it is idle to imagine that China-
men really discriminate either between the
nationalities or the professions of the different
foreigners who live amongst them. The first great
blow struck with relative impunity at the safety
of European life and property was the destruction
of the French mission and the massacre, chiefly
of French priests and nuns, at Tien-tsin on June
29, 1870. At that time no direct telegraphic com-
88 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
munication existed between Tien-tsin and Europe.
If it had existed, or even if the facihties then
existing had been used with ordinary promptitude,
the course of European history itself might have
been changed. For, had the news of the massacre
been received in Paris before the war fever against
Prussia had reached its height, Napoleon III.
might have eagerly seized the opportunity of
deflecting into a less dangerous channel the French
craving for military adventure and of restoring his
own waning prestige by a crusade against China.
As it was, the despatches of the French Legation
were delayed in transmission to the nearest tele-
graph station, and the news arrived in Paris on
July 17, the day after the fatal declaration of war
had been launched against Prussia, France, with
other and more urgent difficulties and disasters to
face, was compelled to accept the inadequate
satisfaction which China agreed to tender, and
from that time to this no European Government has
cared or known how to insist upon that measure
of punishment which can alone prevent the periodical
repetition of similar outrages.
Yet a remedy must be found. The missionaries
have a right to go to China, and to China they will
continue to go, however undesirable their presence
there may be considered. Possibly, though it is
difficult to see how, the authority of our officials at
the Chinese Treaty Ports might be exerted to dis-
countenance the peripatetic zeal of missionary free-
VII MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IN CHINA 89
lances whose erratic propaganda is not controlled by
the experience of the more responsible missionary-
organisations. Possibly also the influence of the
latter might be more effectually brought to bear
upon their own subordinates to prevent them in
future from exposing their families, and especially
young girls and children of a tender age, to the
dangers which must always threaten isolated groups
of Europeans in remote provinces of the Empire.
But any such measures must necessarily be mere
palliatives. Even \i, per abstij-dinn, we could enact
any absolute prohibition of missionary enterprise in
China, such a step would only be construed by the
Chinese official world as a surrender of our rights,
and therefore as an act of weakness which would
certainly stimulate rather than diminish the aggres-
sive character of its hostility towards Europeans of
all classes. The missionaries, therefore, must re-
main, and so long as they remain, whatever amount
of tact they may display, however studiously they
may confine themselves to the task of doing good
according to their own lights, they will always be a
stone of offence to the Chinese Mandarin, who, so
long as he can do so with impunity for himself, will
continue to wreak his vengeance upon them by
houndinp; on to them from time to time an ignorant
and irresponsible mob. The remedy is simple
enough, and though its application may not always
be easy, it is the energy rather than the ability to
apply it which has hitherto too often failed us. The
90 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
central Government must no lonsfer be allowed to
shelter itself behind the difficulty which it constantly
pleads of exerting its authority over the provincial
Governors, nor the provincial Governors to dis-
charp-e the burden of Qfuilt on to their subordinates.
What is wanted is, after all, only the application of
a principle which no people recognise in theory
more fully than the Chinese — viz., that of responsi-
bility. In cases of treason, for instance, whole
families are cut off for one man's sin, and according
to the penal code quoted by Professor Douglas in
his interesting work on Chinese Society, " all the
male relatives of the first degree, at or above the
age of sixteen, of persons convicted — namely, the
father, grandfather, sons, grandsons, paternal uncles
and their sons respectively, shall, without any re-
gard to the place of residence, or to the natural or
acquired infirmities of particular individuals, be in-
discriminately beheaded." Nor, as he adds, is this
all. Every male relative who may be dwelling
under the roof of the offender, is doomed to death,
an exception being alone made in the case of young
boys on condition that they become eunuchs for ser-
vice in the Imperial Palace. In the same way the
highest official of every province is responsible
for the acts of every one of his subordinates, even
when his only fault is ignorance of their transgres-
sions. Let him be held responsible also, and above
all, in the case of outrages upon missionaries, where
his fault is connivance rather than ignorance, and
VII MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IN CHINA 91
when, as was the case the other clay after the ghastly-
massacre in Fo-kicn, he inquires with unblushing
effrontery from the representatives of our outraged
civilisation : " How many heads do you want ? "
the answer should be : "Your own to begin with."
The interests of the Mandarin class are so closely
bound up together, they recognise so fully even in their
wrong-doings the solidarity which exists between
them, that the condign punishment of a single leading
Mandarin will strike terror into the breasts of all his
colleagues. The execution of a dozen common
malefactors can only increase the Chinaman's con-
tempt for European life which in his estimation even
the Governments of Europe must hold very cheap
when they are seen to accept such paltry repara-
tion. Under the pressure of an ultimatum backed
up by a powerful fleet, the central Government
has pronounced upon Liu-Ping-Chang, the real
author of the Szu-chuan outrages, what appears
to be an unprecedentedly severe sentence of dis-
grace. But it must be remembered that he had
already been suspended from his duties at Cheng-tu
more than a year before, and a high official had
been dispatched from Peking to take over from
him the seals of the vice-recjal Yamen. Yet at
the beginning of June he was still the virtual ruler
of the province, and in all the scenes of violence
enacted there at that time his hand was clearly
traced and seen to be still all-powerful. Our repre-
sentative in Peking will doubtless see to it that
92 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
the recent Imperial decree shall not turn out to
have been like former measures, mere stage thunder.
In any case, however, the downfall of Liu- Ping-
Chang, whose crimes at any rate stopped short of
bloodguiltiness, cannot produce any lasting effect
unless such fiendish atrocities as those perpetrated
in Fo-Kien are also more amply avenged than
they so far appear to have been. No commission
of inquiry conducted by Chinese officials, whether
in the presence or in the absence of European
Consuls, will ever reveal the connection which
exists between the immediate culprits and their
aiders and abettors in high places, nor is any
commission of inquiry necessary to establish a
connection which Chinese law itself deduces from
the principle of hierarchical responsibility. The
Powers have only to insist that the law shall be
enforced with the utmost rigour where missionaries
have suffered in the same way as it is enforced
where Chinamen have suffered, i.e., Chinamen
who possess sufficient influence and money to set
the law in motion. If the central Government
cannot or will not enforce its laws in such cases,
then we must take the task into our own hands.
We used at one time occasionally to do so, and
people in Canton have not yet entirely forgotten
that a very high official there was once placed
on board of a British man-of-war and deported
to Calcutta, where he was allowed the leisure of
a lifetime for repentance. Punishment in China
VII MISSIONARY OUTRAGES IN CHINA 93
should be retributive if possible, but it must above
all be deterrent. There is an underground con-
nection between every viceregal Yamcn in China,
and an example made of one of them will be
felt at every provincial seat of government.
CHAPTER VIII
THE FINANCIAL TOSITION OF CHINA
If China has shown greater imperviousness than
any other Eastern State to the influences of Western
civilisation, there is one point at least on which
her obstinacy has until recently stood her in good
stead. While other Eastern Powers, scarcely more
amenable than China to the wholesome influences
of the West, have eagerly welcomed the facilities
for reckless extravagance opened up by contact
with the modern money market, China has hitherto
shown in this direction a very laudable self-restraint.
The few small loans which she had from time to
time contracted abroad before the Japanese war
were always punctually discharged, and the total
outstanding amount is barely half a million sterling,
which but for the outbreak of hostilities would have
been paid off before now. Nor had she until then
any internal debt. Under the pressure of a disastrous
war she was driven to raise two loans abroad, one,
a silver loan of ^1,635,000 at 7 per cent., in
CH. VIII THE FINANCIAL POSITION OF CHINA 95
December, 1 894, and one, a gold loan of ^3,000,000,
in February of this year. Besides these two loans,
contracted by the central Government on the
security of the Imperial Maritime Customs under
Sir Robert Hart's administration, the provincial
authorities obtained considerable advances from
local banks and from smaller foreign syndicates on
the same security. The total indebtedness repre-
sented by these advances has not yet been de-
finitely ascertained, but it may be safely put down at
between two and three millions sterling. In addition
thereto, and, at least in part, on the same security,
internal loans have been floated, which can only be
roughly estimated, but which probably do not fall far
short of ;j^5,ooo,ooo. Altogether, including the small
outstandinof balance of former foreio;n loans, the in-
debtedness of China at the close of the war, might
be estimated approximately at ;^ 12,000,000 to
;^ 1 3,000,000. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki she
undertook to pay Japan a war indemnity of
200,000,000 Kuping taels, and for the retrocession
of the Leao-tong Peninsula the compensation which
she has to pay, has been fixed at another 30,000,000
taels, or in sterling altogether about ^40,000,000.
The total liabilities arising out of the expenditure
and penalties of war therefore amount to over
;^50,ooo,ooo. How will China be able to meet
them ?
For a countrv of three or four hundred million
96 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
inhabitants and almost inexhaustible natural re-
sources such a burden ought not to be excessive.
But in this, as in every other respect, the same
standard cannot be applied to China as to other
countries. No trustworthy returns of revenue are
published, and such information as is accessible to
foreigners with reference to the receipts of the
Imperial Treasury in Peking is not only fragmentary
and of doubtful intrinsic value, but it is further
complicated by the latitude which the provincial
treasuries enjoy in the collection and expenditure
of revenue. The normal revenue which reaches
the Peking Treasury has of recent years been
variously estimated at between ^15,000,000 and
^25,000,000. The discrepancy between these
estimates is, however, in a great measure due to
the different results shown by conversion at varying
rates of Chinese currency into sterling, and at the
present rate of exchange for silver it naturally
represents a much lower figure than it did a few
years ago. So long as the Chinese revenue had
no heavy gold payments to meet abroad, it was
not materially affected by the depreciation of
silver, but with a gold debt of ;^5o,ooo,ooo in
sight its situation in this respect is entirely changed.
Herr von Brandt, formerly German Minister in
Peking, and one of the best of living authorities,
adopts the figure of 100,000,000 taels — ^i5,ooo,ooO'
— as representing the annual revenue of the central
THE FIXAN'CIAL POSITION OF CHINA
97
Government, and he subdivides it into the followingf
items : —
Taels.
Land tax ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 35,000,000
Maritime Customs, including inland duty on foreign
opium ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 23,000,000
Inland transit dues ... ... ... ... ... ... 12,000,000
Native Customs and native grown opium duty... ... 10,000,000
Salt monoply ... ... ... ... ... ... 10,000,000
Sale of titles and brevet ranks ... ... ... ... 5,000,000
Rice tribute ... 3,000,000
Licenses, &c. ... ... ... ... ... ... 2,000,000
Total ... ... ... ... Taels 100,000,000
This would appear an first sight to represent an
exceedingly low rate of taxation per head of
population, but, with the single exception of the
Maritime Customs, these figures, even if accurate
in themselves, convey no idea of the amounts
actually levied from the taxpayer. In view of
the colossal scale upon which the official classes
conduct their operations of public plunder, it may
safely be assumed that for every tael actually paid
into the Treasury in Peking at least four or five
more are extorted from the public, and melt awav
in the course of transmission throuo^h the nimble
fingers of a predatory hierarchy. It is strikingly
characteristic of Chinese methods that, always
with the exception of the Maritime Customs
revenue, the revenue annually paid into the
Peking Treasury never seems to vary. The
alternations of good and bad years, to which
China with her periodical famines and inundations
H
98 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
is more subject than perhaps any other country,
are never reflected in the returns of pubHc revenue.
In theory, no doubt, the explanation sounds plausible
enough, that the various provinces and districts
are assessed at a fixed annual sum, in accordance
with immemorial custom. But the same custom
also prescribes, at least in theory, that remissions
of taxation shall be allowed, especially in con-
nection with the land-tax, whenever unforeseen
visitations fall upon the tax-payer. As there are
few countries where such visitations are of so
frequent occurrence as in China, remissions of taxa-
tion, if they really took place, ought to produce
corresponding fluctuations in the aggregate receipts
of the Imperial Treasury. One can hardly help
inferring that as there is no trace of any such
fluctuations, the remissions themselves are only
" make see," like so many other things in China,
and that, while an immutable tradition has fixed
the amount with which the central Government
has to be satisfied, the rest is merely a matter of
private bargain between the provincial and the
Peking Mandarins. In fact, one notable exception
serves to prove that this is the rule. After the
wholesale impoverishment of the country by the
fearful ravages of the Taeping rebellion, the
assessment of the land-tax had to be reduced,
and the effect of this reduction was at once visible
in the diminished returns of public revenue which
have never since been brought up to their earlier
VIII THE FINANCIAL POSITION OF CHINA 99
level. In the present condition of things, and so
long as there Is no prospect of any real reform in
its administration, the existing revenue probably
represents all that it can be expected to yield,
as well as all that the country can be expected
to pay. Perhaps, for a few years at least, some
shrinkage rather than any increase ought to be
expected ; for whilst the war was going on the
local authorities not infrequently levied the taxes
in advance, or lavished profuse promises of future
relief in return for immediate contributions, and
some of these promises might have to be at least
partially redeemed.
Fortunately for her, there Is one revenue upon
which China can rely, because, except as to owner-
ship, it Is Chinese only in name — to wit, the
Maritime Customs revenue, levied by foreigners
In her employ upon her foreign trade. This re-
venue represents about three-and-a-half millions
sterling at the present rate of exchange, and it
should therefore be sufficient to meet the Interest
of the debt of ^50,000,000 contracted in con-
nection with the recent war. It has formed the
security for the loans which China has already
raised, including the Franco-Russian loan, and
forms, indeed, the only security upon which under
existing conditions she can possibly expect to
borrow in foreign markets. Whether she has im-
proved Its value in the eyes of European financiers
by granting practically a first lien upon it to two
II 2
loo THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION CHAP.
such masterful creditors as France and Russia, may
perhaps be doubted ; but it may be safely conceded
that, if France and Russia are not in a position
to reserve to themselves in future the exclusive
right of financing China, she will obtain assistance
from other quarters, and on more or less onerous
terms be able to meet out of the Maritime Customs
revenue the liabilities with which the war has
saddled her.
But does that dispose of the financial difficulties
of her position ? or does it not rather simply dis-
place them ? This revenue, which she has hence-
forth to surrender for the service of a foreign debt,
represents not only close upon a quarter of the
total revenue hitherto available for purposes of
general expenditure, but the most certain and
tangible of her revenues. She has spent it to
very little purpose in the past. Part of it has
gone to feed the Palace in Peking, a still larger
portion has been squandered on the creation of
armies and fleets which proved a mere snare and
delusion ; but, one way or another, it has gone to
keep up the appearances of Empire, and to supply
such stage properties as she has hitherto con-
descended to borrow from Western civilisation.
Even if no real reforms are to be looked for, if
the same game of " make see " is to be played in
the future as in the past, money will still be
required for it. The reorganisation of the army
and navy occupies a foremost place in the public
VIII THE FINAN'CIAL POSITION OF CHINA loi
programme, and prospectively no doubt in the
private pecuniary calculations of every Mandarin,
"conservative," or "progressive"; and, even it
it once more produces only sham armies and sham
A STATION MASTER ON CHINA'S ONLY RAILWAY.
fleets, they will have to be paid for. Railways and
other public works, if they are to be built at all,
are to be built, according to the views still pre-
valent in Peking, by the Chinese themselves, either
out of revenue or with the proceeds of further
I02 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
loans, the service of which will have to be met out
of revenue — i.e., they are to be built with a maxi-
vmni of extravagance, roguery, and incompetence.
If it were conceivable that under the present
system of government even a relatively higher
standard of honesty could be introduced into the
public administration, the Treasury receipts might
at once show an increase which would easily meet
the new demands to be made upon it without
increasing the burden of taxation. But, as has
been already, I think, sufficiently indicated, such
a contingency is as inconceivable as that the
Emperor or his great satraps like Li Hung Chang
should sacrifice to the necessities of the State any
portion of the vast hoards of wealth which they are
known to have accumulated by the sweat of the
toiling millions whom they rule. The only altern-
ative which they might be compelled to contemplate
would be the surrender of some other branch of the
public revenue into the hands of a foreign adminis-
tration similar to that of the Maritime Customs.
But it must be remembered that the administration
of the Maritime Customs, as we know it to-day,
has grown up in spite of the Chinese Government
rather than with its active co-operation. When
Mr. Lay was first appointed more than thirty-five
years ago, to direct and assist the local authorities at
Shanghai in the collection of the Maritime Customs
of that port, the Chinese authorities never dreamt
of the importance which an institution so modest in
VIII THE FINANCIAL POSITION OF CHINA 103
its origin was destined ultimately to acquire. The
dominant influence of England in Peking after the
war of i860 induced them to acquiesce in the
gradual extension of a service which annually
broueht into their coffers a more and more substan-
tial revenue. But even the brilliant success
achieved by Sir Robert Hart and the undoubted
loyalty both of the Inspector-General and of his
able staff to the best interests of China have never
overcome the jealousy and aversion of the ruling
classes for an organisation which they feel them-
selves powerless either to criticise or to upset. To
the present day, although — or perhaps rather
because — they know that every penny collected by
the Maritime Customs administration is faithfully
paid into the Chinese Treasury, they leave no stone
unturned to drive the import trade under native
control away from the ports where there is a Euro-
pean Customs administration to those under native
administration, with the result, for instance, that in
the Canton province the four ports where the
customs are collected by Sir Robert Hart's employees
yield a revenue of three million taels, while the forty
ports where they are collected by native officials
produce, or at least pay in, less than half a million
taels. While every other branch of the public
revenue remains absolutely stationary, that of the
Maritime Customs has doubled ; yet, with such an
object lesson in the value of integrity and order
constantly before its eyes, the Chinese Government
I04 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
remains obstinately blind to the substantial advan-
tages which would necessarily accrue from an
extension of the same principles of administration
to other departments.
Time and again it has been urged in its own
interests, and as a mere measure of financial policy,
to intrust Sir Robert Hart's administration with
the collection of the whole customs revenue, native
as well as foreign, and to place in the hands of
European officials the management of the salt
monopoly, which would be a source of immense
revenue if honestly and wisely administered, but is
to-day mainly an instrument of petty tyranny and
gross peculation. It is still in this direction rather
than in a more ambitious attempt to promote a
sweeping scheme of general reforms that foreign
pressure might at present be most usefully applied.
Even if the Emperor and the central Government
had any desire to introduce wholesale reforms into
the existing system of administration, they could
not supply the machinery for carrying their purpose
into effect, nor command the material force neces-
sary to overcome the resistance which they would
meet with at every point from the vested interests
of a powerful bureaucracy leagued together in
defence of time-honoured abuses. Any foreign
Power prepared to enforce such an undertaking
upon the rulers of China would have to furnish
both the machinery and the motive power to drive
it. It would practically have to take into its hands.
VIII THE FIXANXIAL POSITION OF CHINA 105
to a far greater extent, for instance, than we have
done in Egypt, the real government of the country,
and, apart from the danger of international jealousy,
such a responsibility is not one to be lightly
incurred.
No country probably could be more easily ruled
by foreigners than China, for there is no people
more docile to its rulers than the Chinese. It is
little more than 200 years since the wearing of the
pigtail was imposed upon them as a badge of their
servitude to a new dynasty of alien conquerors, and
to-day there is not a Chinaman who recollects the
origin of, or does not glory in, his distinctive head-
dress. His conservatism lies in the spirit of
unquestioning obedience which he yields to his
rulers rather than in the form in which it is exacted
from him. But more powerful than the accidents
of foreign conquest has hitherto been the unchange-
able influence of the oroverninof classes through
whom the conquerors have ruled, and to whom
they have in turn succumbed.
In Egypt our veiled protectorate has been on the
whole fairly successful, because we have found
amongst the governing classes at least a certain
number of statesmen and officials willing to accept
the guidance of a handful of English administrators
and to recognise the ascendancy of England with-
out any direct assertion on her part of political
sovereignty. In China European influence, and
the influence of the present governing classes, are
io6 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
absolutely and hopelessly incompatible. The former
mig-ht sweep the latter away immediately upon the
assumption of direct sovereignty, and probably
none would regret the old order of things or refuse
to yield the same obedience to the new. But the
two could never be blended. Without the constant
application of physical force it is impossible to con-
ceive European or English officials working with
or through Chinese Mandarins to any effectual or
permanent purpose. A foreign administration like
that of the Imperial Maritime Customs can be
created and maintained, but only on condition that
it remains what it has been from the beginning, an
impermvi in imperio. Other branches of the
financial administration will have to be dealt with
in the same way if the Chinese Empire is to be pre-
served, not for its own sake, but for the sake of
European peace ; and, for the same reason, the con-
trol under which they will have to be placed must
be such as not to operate to the exclusive political
advantage of any single Power or group of Powers.
The central Government must be induced to place
the collection and management of other portions of
its revenue in the hands of European officials, im-
partially selected from different nationalities, who
will develop them in the same loyal and single-
minded way in which they have already developed
that of the Maritime Customs, and will thus enable
it to meet out of its own intrinsically ample re-
sources the growing expenditure of the future. This
VIII THE FIXANXIAL POSITION OF CHINA 107
much the collective pressure of Europe ought to
achieve, and the authority of Peking over the pro-
vinces, weakened though it has doubtless been by
recent events, would still prove adequate for such a
limited purpose, if properly exerted under close and
constant supervision. Had France and Russia been
in a position to carry out in all its logical consequences
the policy of exclusivism upon which they originally
entered, by shutting out all other countries from
participation in further Chinese loans as they did in
the first, they would probably not have been dis-
posed to co-operate in any measure calculated, even
indirectly, to restrict the financial tutelage which
they aimed at establishing over China ; but as cir-
cumstances" have compelled them to leave the field
open for the capitalists of other countries, they can
hardly refuse to join with those Powers who merely
wish to insure, for the benefit of all the creditors of
China, the stability of her financial position.
CHAPTER IX
FROM CHINA TO JAPAN
There can be few stronger contrasts than that
which presents Itself to the traveller who crosses
the few hundred miles of sea separating China
from Japan. It is like passing from night into
day, from an atmosphere laden with the oppressive
odour of decay into one charged with the ozone
of exuberant vitality. On the western shores of the
Yellbw Sea he has left behind him a countless
agglomeration of human beings which no homo-
geneity of race, language, or religion has availed
to weld together into a nation, a cumbersome and
corrupt bureaucracy which barely contrives to keep
the ponderous machinery of government moving in
the well-worn ruts of time-honoured abuses, and a
central authority, loose and shiftless at the best, and
now distracted to the verge of utter helplessness
and imbecility. On Its eastern shores he lands
amongst a people whose national vigour has been
strung to the highest point of tension by a stren-
uously centralised administration, which itself re-
CHAP. IX FROM CHINA TO JAPAN 109
sponds in complete sympathy of intellect and heart
to the touch of enlio^htened and resolute rulers.
Alone amongst all Asiatic nations, Japan seems to
have realised in its fullest sense the modern
conception of patriotism, such as we understand it
in the West. In China the eyes of even the best
among the living generation are hypnotised by
constant contemplation of the dead past. In Japan
all eyes are straining towards the future. On the
one hand, the chaos of misrule, corruption, and
ignorance ; on the other, a rigid discipline based on
an individual sense of duty and an innate love of
order. In China an almost universal trend down-
wards into the common slough of despond ; in
Japan a combined effort to level upwards. In both
countries the low^er classes are patient and indus-
trious ; but whilst in China what remains to them of
the fruits of their industry after they have been
squeezed by their rulers is too often squandered in
opium smoking and in an insensate mania for
gambling, thrift is the rule in Japan. In both
countries they are easily governed, but in China
there is the dull, unreasoning resignation of the
overworked beast of burden, in Japan, the ready
acquiescence of a bright and light-hearted people
instinct with the joyousness of life.
No ordeal tries the mettle of a nation like war.
In China, save for here and there a few brutal
assaults upon some unoffending Japanese during the
exodus which followed the outbreak of hostilities, the
no THE FAR EASTPZRN QUESTION CHAP.
dull indifference of the masses was rivalled only by
the callousness of their rulers. The army, with a
splendid physique, great powers of endurance, and a
strange indifference to death, except apparently on
the field of battle, showed itself to be a mere herd of
helpless coolies, and its officers proved themselves
if anything more worthless even than the rank and
file. The military Mandarins, despised by the
civilian literati, have no pride in their profession,
and treat their men with the same heartless con-
tempt which is meted out to themselves. In fact
they are never with their men, and least of all when
any fighting has to be done. A European en-
gineer on the Tientsin Shan-Hai-Kwang Railway,
over which thousands of troops were conveyed
during the war, assured me that he had never once
seen in charge of them an officer of higher rank than
a captain — and a Chinese captain is only a coolie
promoted from the ranks. The canon of proprie-
ties forbids an officer going near his men — except
in order to gamble with them and reduce their
pay-sheet by his winnings. The distance which
must be preserved on parade and in battle
order between the troops and the officers in com-
mand of them is laid down in the Chinese text-
books with edifying precision. It varies, according
to the rank of the military Mandarins, from 1,200 to
3,000 paces. It may be imagined what sort of
control an officer sitting at such a safe distance in
his palanquin, or, if by chance riding on horseback,
IX
FROM CHINA TO JAPAN
supported in his saddle according to the rules of
etiquette by a posse of servants on foot is likely to
have over his men. A Chinese camp is very
Chinese indeed. To begin with, everything that
should be left undone is done to make it as con-
spicuous as possible to the enemy. Just as every
A CHINESE BRAVE.
Chinese soldier wears on his dark-coloured coat,
both back and front, a large white circular patch
embroidered with the name of his company and
regiment which stands out at a thousand yards like
the bull's eye of a target, so every Chinese camp is
marked out against the skyline by a gaudy array
112 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
of flags and pennants with the standard of the
commander flaunting above the rest on a lofty
scaffolding right in the centre. The camp itself
consists of a collection of quadrangular pens enclosed
by mud walls, in which the men are huddled
together in batches of five hundred or a thousand,
whilst the regimental or headquarter staffs live in
comparative luxury in neighbouring villages, and
devote their chief energy to defrauding the troops of
the largest possible proportion of their rations and
pay. What wonder that under such conditions the
Chinese army has been a terror not to the enemies
whom it was sent to fight, but to the unhappy
peasantry of the district where it was quartered ! Of
discipline there could not be a vestige, though now
and again a Mandarin might attempt to repress the
savage lawlessness of his men by some condign act
of severity equally savage and lawless. On one
occasion, for instance, a vendor of bread and cakes
whose shop had been ransacked by marauders
wearied the General by his lamentations into telling
him that, if he could produce one of the offenders,
justice should be done him. He forthwith
denounced one of the soldiers present, and the
General gave orders for the delinquent to be then
and there ripped open. If the result showed that
he had deserved punishment, well and good. If
not, the plaintiff would be subjected to the same
penalty for having traduced him. The operation
was performed ; from the bleeding entrails of the
IX FROM CHINA TO JAPAN 113
poor wretch material evidence of his guilt was
produced. Chinese justice had been done !
Japan is a nation of hero worshippers, undis-
criminating, perhaps, at times in the objects of its
worship, but always accessible to the highest forms
of emotion. The enthusiasm of the army for the
first time called out for active service was equalled
only by the enthusiasm of the people for the army.
To the impression made by the Japanese army In
the field upon a trained observer, Surgeon-Colonel
W. Taylor, who acted as British military attache
during the war, has recently rendered an impartial
testimony in the course of a lecture delivered to his
brother officers at Aldershot. " It was," he said, " In
no sense an exaggeration to say that the progress
made by Japan In recent years, and more especially In
the organisation of her army and navy, was unknown
to western nations up to the date when the late war
with China broke out. That she possessed a military
service of a certain strength and made up of different
branches considered necessary parts of a modern
army was doubtless known to the Intelligence
Departments of the European nations, but not one
of these had the slightest idea of the high state of
efficiency to which the military organisation had
been brought or of the splendid discipline, hardihood,
and bravery of the soldiers of which the Japanese
army was composed. Nor was it appreciated that
Japan had physicians and surgeons of the highest
standing, many of whom had taken first-class
I
114 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
honours in American and European schools, and
some of whom were pioneers in bacteriological and
other branches of scientific research. Recognising
that trained soldiers were worth looking after and
caring for, that it was necessary to keep them in
health, and that humanity demanded the relief or, at
any rate, the alleviation of all suffering, she organised
her Army Medical Department. The effect of that
organisation was such that there was no nation in
the world — not even Germany — to whom Japan
could not teach many lessons, so perfect and com-
plete was her system of medical service."
In the eyes of the Japanese themselves the warlike
achievements of a national campaign conducted on
the most approved principles of modern science
represented but the natural evolution of those feudal
virtues which fired the imagination of their ancestors,
and had ever formed the favourite themes of their
poets. There was not a hamlet in the most secluded
country side which did not thrill to every episode of
the war and deck itself out in all the bravery of
bunting and triumphal arches to welcome back its
own small contingent of battle-stained warriors.
Even the bearers and coolies, the humblest of non-
combatant camp-followers, had their share in the
joyful home-coming. In China I had seen the
wretched soldiers, dismissed with a mere pittance
from the colours, begging and bullying their way
home to their distant provinces. In Japan, I saw
the whole population of a small village in the hills
IX FROM CHINA TO JAPAN 115
of Hakona turn out to struggle for the gratuitous
honour of taking in a batch of invalided soldiers,
who had been sent up from the hospitals of Tokyo
to recruit their strength in the more bracing air of
the mountains. The one explosion of savage
revenge provoked at Port Arthur by the atrocities
which the Chinese had committed upon their
prisoners should be remembered mainly as the
solitary exception to the rule of rigid discipline
maintained throughout the rest of the campaign,
and against it may well be set off the friendly rela-
tions universally established between the conquerors
and the peasantry of the Chinese districts which
they occupied, and the security enjoyed throughout
Japan by the Chinamen who elected to remain on
there during the war. The appeals made by so
many Chinamen in the neighbourhood of Wei-Hai-
Wei and in other districts which the Japanese have
to evacuate, begging to be naturalised as Japanese
subjects, are an eloquent tribute to the justice and
generosity of Japanese administration even in a
conquered country.
Of the statesmanship which presides over the
destinies of the two countries, the relative value is
clearly and indelibly set forth in the pages of their
respective history during the last thirty years.
Personal acquaintance with its chief exponents on
either side merely brings out the contrast in sharper
relief. I had met Li Hung Chang in Tien-tsin,
and a few weeks later it was my privilege to meet
I 2
ii6 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
the Japanese Prime Minister, Count I to, in Tokyo.
Comparisons are proverbially odious, and in this
case it might scarcely be a compliment to Count
Ito even to institute a comparison. I need merely
say that Count Ito not only talked with me in my
own language, slowly and somewhat laboriously,
yet with correctness and lucidity, but displayed, in
the course of a long conversation, a profound
acquaintance with the ideas and methods of
European civilisation, together with an independent
and sometimes critical but always friendly and
thoughtful judgment concerning the limits wathin
which their assimilation was desirable or possible
from the point of view of his own country's
material needs and ethical idiosyncrasies.
But even in those features which must appeal to
the casual traveller, the contrast is no whit less
startling. Of the Chinese capital I have already
attempted to draw what can at best be a faint and
very imperfect picture. But the stately isolation
and antiquity of Peking spread a certain glamour
over the remnants of a once mighty civilisation even
in the last stage of decomposition. To realise fully
the abomination of a Chinese town, one must pass
straight out of the cleanliness and symmetry of the
foreign settlements in Shanghai, into the filth and
stench and chaos of the native city. They are
divided only by a broad thoroughfare and a deep
archway under the ruinous walls of the Chinese
city. On the one side, under a peculiar but
IX FROM CHINA TO JAPAN 117
eminently practical form of municipal self-govern-
ment, has risen within the last four decades a busy,
thriving, well-drained, well-ordered, well-lighted city,
with an excellent supply of water, with spacious
promenades, with handsome well-kept streets, with
commodious houses and fine public buildings, with
immense warehouses and business premises, and
along the whole-river side, a succession of magnifi-
cent quays and commodious docks, fitted in fact
with all the modern appliances, which have enabled
it to become one of the greatest shipping centres of
the world, and the greatest emporium of trade in
the Far East. On the other side, under the blight
of Mandarin misrule, the ancient native city is slow-
ly rotting away in the decrepitude and sloth of its
palsied old age. The more enterprising of its
inhabitants are gradually migrating into the
European settlements where as law-abiding citizens
they enjoy in peace and security the abundant
fruits of their natural intelligence and industry.
But upon the rest, and especially upon the ruling
classes, the object-lesson which lies at their very
doors, in even the material advantages of Western
civilisation, is absolutely and hopelessly wasted.
The European municipalities, anxious to mitigate
the dangers which must always arise from the
proximity of such a hot-bed of infection, tried to
induce the authorities of the native city to have
at least a supply of wholesome water laid on from
the European waterworks. Very easy terms were
ii8 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
offered, and strenuous official pressure was applied,
but in vain. The precincts of the Chinese city
were not to be contaminated by clean water filtered .
in European cisterns.
Outside the cities, and generally in the rural dis-
tricts of China, one breathes a healthier and freer
atmosphere. The peasantry are friendly, and the
further they are removed from the demoralising
influence of the big Mandarins, the more the con-
tentment of undisturbed industry is reflected in their
peaceful homesteads, the more also one realises that
whatever there is left of prosperity in China has
survived in spite of its rulers. Roads, canals, public
works of every kind, except under the pressure of
some alarming cataclysm, are left to shift for them-
selves, and what remains of them simply serves to
emphasise the contrast between the past and the
present. It is a cruel sight to see the miserable
waste of human toil and animal suffering entailed
by the neglect of the most ordinary duties of the
State. Long files of camels and of mules can pick
their way with relative ease, even under heavy bur-
dens, over the well-worn tracks which, except at
certain seasons, afford much better going than what
are by an excessive euphemism still termed the Im-
perial roads. But with the conservatism peculiar to
China, wheel traffic, which dates back to the time
when there were real roads, is still maintained long
after the roads have ceased to exist. Four, six, and
even eight horses or mules are harnessed to the
IX FROM CHINA TO JAPAN 119
cumbersome overloaded waggons, and by dint of
blows and curses from their drivers, contrive some-
how to drag them along over boulders and through
ruts, which in any other country would be looked
upon as simply insurmountable. Presently there
comes a steep declivity, and to supply the place of a
brake, one or two of the unfortunate animals are
detached from the team, and secured by long ropes
from their collar-piece to the rear of the waggon.
Then, as the ponderous vehicle stumbles down the
hill-side, a couple of drivers, facing the wretched
beasts, belabour them on the head with the heavy
thongs and still heavier handles of their whips until
forced back upon their hind-quarters they slither
down the incline, panting and quivering in every
nerve, but counteracting by their struggles the
downward momentum of the cart. Perhaps it is
only fair to add that the men who have at the same
time to act as drags upon the wheels do not fare
very much better than the four-footed brakes in the
rear, except that they know what they are about,
and do not require to be mercilessly beaten. This
is however only one of many incidents which
illustrate the brutalising effect upon the people of
a callous and pitiless ruling class. Not only the
moral, but the physical sensitiveness to pain be-
comes blunted, and the most exquisite refinements
of torture merely arouse among the spectators feel-
ings of curiosity and of amusement, rather than of
disgust. The same kind of atrophy seems to have
I20 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
impaired even the artistic sensibility of the people,
and with few exceptions the best work that is pro-
duced in China to-day is only a feeble imitation,
when it is not a mere caricature, of the masterpieces of
earlier times. Many of the most beautiful processes
of workmanship have been altogether lost, and
the spirit which informed them in the days of Kien
Lung or of Kiang Hshi is extinct. There is a general
impression that China has merely stood still whilst
other nations have progressed. But she has in
reality proved no exception to the rule that nations
must move either forwards or backwards. She was
undoubtedly the first to invent most things, from
gunpowder to the Wagnerian leit motiv, of which the
principle is clearly discernible amidst the distressing-
cacophony to Western ears of her interminable
lyrical dramas, and she had reached a relatively
high standard of civilisation at a time when our
ancestors in Northern Europe were little better
than savages. But she has been able to perfect
nothing ; and though it is difficult to specify the
date when she reached the zenith of her prosperity,
there are ample indications that within the last one
or two centuries she has been from every point of
view steadily and even rapidly declining. What we
see to-day is not merely stagnation, but decay.
In Japan, on the other hand, the past is only the
picturesque background which throws into relief the
achievements of the present and the promise of the
future. It is needless for me to expatiate upon the
IX FROM CHINA TO JAPAN I2r
natural beauties of the fair Island Empire of the
Far East, or upon the quaintly fascinating manners
of its people. For they are nowadays familiar to
every one, either from personal knowledge and from
the many excellent works produced by more com-
petent authorities than I can claim to be. But in
order thoroughly to appreciate either the country
or the town life of Japan, there can be no better
preparation than a visit to China and to the Chinese
capital. Tokyo may not rival Kyoto, the former
capital of the Mikados, in historical interest or
natural beauty ; but it combines, even more strik-
ingly, most of the graceful features of Japanese
national life with all the appliances of modern
civilisation. In its broad and well-kept streets,
over which stretches an intricate network of tele-
phone and telegraph wire, the native jinriksha still
holds its own with the electric tramway and the
omnibus. The tall chimneys of gigantic factories,
where the nascent industry of the Far East is
already competing successfully with the old manu-
facturing centres of the West, overshadow but do
not crush the tiny workshops where the skilled
artisan puts into his patient labour the individuality
of an artist's soul. The merry twinkle of thousands
of Japanese lanterns has not been subdued by the
more searching brilliancy of the great arc lights
which constellate the sky above. The fierce spirit
of olden times has departed from the Japanese forms
of worship ; but the stately shrines of Shiba and
122 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Asakusa have not lost their hold upon the romantic
imagination of a poetic people, and the beautiful
parks and gardens which surround them, thrown
open to all comers, are the favourite resorts of
holiday-makers as well as of devotees. Not the
least interesting of the many curious and novel
features which Japan presents is the rapid assimi-
lation, by a people upon whom dogmatic Christianity
at least appears to take no hold, of a civilisation
which historical experience has hitherto led us to
consider well-nigh incompatible with any other form
of religion than Christianity.
The kindly welcome everywhere extended to the
foreigner by the highest and the lowest may pos-
sibly spring rather from the inborn courtesy of the
Japanese than from any special friendliness towards
Europeans. But the charm of polished and kindly
manners, no less than the exquisite Dutch-like
cleanliness which seems to form part and parcel
of the Japanese nature, materially enhances the
pleasure of travel in a singularly beautiful country,
which combines, perhaps more than any other, the
interest of strange and unfamiliar surroundings with
the requirements of physical comfort. Railways
running north and south from Tokyo bisect
in its entire length the great central island. The
Biwa-Canal, which, tunnelled for a couple of miles
through the heart of a mountain chain, has brought
the rich agricultural district watered by the Biwa
Lake into direct water communication with Kyoto,
IX FROM CHINA TO JAPAN 123
is a feat of native engineering, conceived and exe-
cuted solely by Japanese, that may well deserve
comparison with the Periyar Canal in Southern
India, a somewhat similar work on a yet larger
scale, which ranks as one of the proudest achieve-
ments of Anglo-Indian engineering science. Har-
bours and lighthouses, the regulation of rivers,
the construction of roads and bridges, the growth
of thriving industrial cities such as Osaka, of busy
shipping centres such as Yokohama and Hiogo, the
rapid development of a large mercantile marine, all
bear witness wherever one turns to the ardour and
intelligence with which Japan has equipped herself
to take her part and to hold her own in the more
peaceful competitions as well as in the armed
struggles of the modern world. Nothing perhaps
is more significant in this respect than the marvel-
lous exhibition of native industries held this year at
Kyoto. In spite of the tremendous strain to which
the whole life of the nation was subjected, not only
by the war with China, but by apprehensions of
still graver struggles, the Japanese could yet spare
out of the superabundance of their energy enough
time and thought and enterprise to achieve a no
less signal if more pacific triumph in the field of
industry.
CHAPTER X
THE JAPANESE INDUSTRIES AT THE KYOTO EXHIBITION
On the principle that a Jack-of-all-trades can be
master of none, it is often assumed that so versatile
a people as the Japanese must necessarily be super-
ficial. As a matter of fact thoroughness rather than
the superficiality generally imputed to them, seems
to be one of their chief characteristics. The history
of the recent campaign must have satisfied even
the most sceptical critics on this point, as far at
least as their military organisation and adminis-
tration are concerned, though it may be contended
that the fighting mettle of their troops was never
subjected to any very severe test. The industrial
exhibition held this year at Kyoto must have con-
vinced any impartial visitor that they can equally
excel in the arts of peace.
Everything that the Japanese do bears the
impress of careful thought, and one cannot help
believing that in selecting for the site of the most
important industrial exhibition hitherto held in
Japan the ancient capital where the Mikados were
CHAP. X JAPANESE INDUSTRIES 125
enthroned before the days of the great national
awakening in an atmosphere of exclusiveness
scarcely less forbidding than that which still sur-
rounds the Son of Heaven in Peking, they aimed at
one of those subtle contrasts in which their artistic
nature delights. Like the ancient Greeks and the
Italians of the Renaissance, they have an innate
sense of the beautiful, and, owing to the absence of
all apparent effort, one is apt to overlook the intel-
lectual discipline under which their sesthetic instinct
has been trained and matured. No one, for Instance,
who has visited the marvellous temples of Nikko
can fall to have been struck with the impressiveness
of the frame In which they have been set. On the
terraced slopes of a mountain valley the royal tombs
of Yemitsu and Yeyasu stand out in the opalescent
glory of their delicate workmanship against an
austere and majestic grove of lofty cryptomerlas,
giant kings of the forest that lived for centuries
before and will for centuries outlive the monarchs
who lie buried at their feet. We know now from
those who have studied the art literature of Japan
that this contrast, both natural and symbolical, was
deliberately planned and purposed in all its details.
The Japanese cedars rival even those of California
in height and girth, and their imperishable grandeur
and sombre foliage were marked out not only to serve
as a foil to the exquisite daintiness and many-coloured
brilliancy of these dainty shrines, whose lace-like
tracery and carvings and lacquered panels and
126 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
burnished columns and incrustations of solid gold
seem amidst such surroundings to be almost as
diaphanous and evanescent in their beauty as the
wings of a butterfly or the hues of a rainbow, but
also to remind the worshipper that man's life, how-
ever bright, is only a transient sunbeam which lights
up but once for every one one single little spot on
the mysteriously revolving sphere of countless ages.
Equally suggestive, though of another order of
ideas, is the contrast between the Japan of yester-
day which lingers still untouched in the older
quarters of Kyoto, the City of many Temples, and
the Japan of to-day and of to-morrow which does
the honours of a thoroughly modern exhibition held
in celebration of the eleven hundredth anniversary
of the foundation of the city. Within sound of
the big bell of Chion-in, which has boomed forth
to so many generations of Buddhist worshippers its
deep-mouthed call to prayer, within sight of the
mediaeval castle where even after the Shogunate had
capitulated to Western pressure, the Mikados less
than thirty years ago still schemed and plotted to
keep the "barbarians" out of the "land of the
gods," Japan has given living testimony to the
reality of the new spirit henceforward associated in
her history with the year-name of Meiji. The
gates of Japan remained closed for more than a
quarter of a century longer than those of China
against every form of European intercourse, but
when they were at last thrown open, although as in
X JAPANESE INDUSTRIES 127
China at first only under compulsion, they were thrown
almost at once wide open without any of the mental
reservations which have helped China to maintain in
spite of treaties the inflexible rigidity of her moral
isolation. Only twenty-seven years have elapsed
since the one hundred and twenty-third sovereign
of a dynasty which has reigned for nearly twenty-
seven centuries in unbroken succession over the
Island Empire of the Far East realised that the
time had arrived to apply to his country the moral
of the ancient Japanese proverb that " when men
become too old, they must be led by the young."
The Kyoto Exhibition contains an epitome of all
that Japan has learned during these twenty-seven
years from the ripe experience of the West, not
learned merely by rote and slavishly copied, but
inwardly digested and moulded to her own needs
and informed with her own spirit.
The exhibition buildings in themselves cannot
claim any more originality or beauty than is usually
to be found in such temporary structures, but from
the outside they are not unsightly and inside they
are well-lighted, well-ventilated, of course kept
scrupulously clean, and conveniently arranged and
distributed. The contents show the whole rano-e of
Japanese industry ; and within the short space of a
quarter of a century, the range of Japanese Industry
has so swiftly and steadily broadened out in every
direction that it may be said to fall very little short
now of the whole range of the world's industry,
128 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
whilst in all those branches which are indigenous to
the soil of Japan, it has lost little, if anything, of
its artistic originality and traditional pre-eminence.
A very brief inspection suffices to dispel one of the
many myths prevalent abroad with regard to
modern Japan, viz., that she has sacrificed her
aesthetic idealism to the practical advantages of a
thriving wholesale business in second-rate " art
manufactures." Undoubtedly in the seaports chiefly
frequented by the omnivorous globe-trotter as well
as in many European shops, plenty of Japanese
rubbish, not to speak of still baser imitations manu-
factured in Europe, can be found to-day which
twenty years ago no Japanese workshop would have
produced or existed to produce. The Japanese are
far too good traders to refuse to supply any demand
which arises in the foreign market, and they are not
to be blamed if the demand includes much which is
"cheap and vulgar." But that is not, after all, a
phenomenon peculiar to Japan, nor has it impaired
the ability of the Japanese to supply the demand
which still exists and grows both at home and
abroad for the highest and most perfect forms of
their national art industries. Only an expert could
fittingly describe all the exquisite exhibits at Kyoto
which testify to the splendid vitality of Japanese
art. The crackled ware of Satsuma, which not long
ago seemed doomed to extinction, has once more
resumed its place in the front rank of Japanese
ceramic art, while the egg-shell porcelains of Mino,
X JAPANESE INDUSTRIES 129
the rich colouring of the Kutani ware, and the
potteries of Kyoto itself, show that for variety of
conception and for brilliancy as well as softness ot
tone the best specimens of the present day can well
stand comparison with those of the past. Nor
have the modern metal-workers and carvers in
ivory lost their cunning, though perhaps to this
more than to any other branch of Japanese art may
be applied nowadays the somewhat severe judgment
that " it is o^reat in small things and small in ereat
things." The genius which inspired the great
bronze Buddha of Kamakura, that immortal monu-
ment of " the peace which passeth all under-
standing," belongs to far off centuries, and its secret
had been lost long before there was any question of
contact with Europe. On the other hand the
Japanese lacquerers who so soon outstripped their
Chinese teachers have scarcely ever turned out
finer specimens, especially of the matchless gold
lacquer, than at the present day, and the art of
cloisonnt^ enamelling may be said to have been only
now brought to perfection, the modern work of both
the Kyoto and the Tokyo schools, each so distinct
and so beautiful of its kind, combining with the
accuracy and sobriety of design of the older models
a. hitherto unknown delicacy of colouring and
perfection of finish. The oil and water-colour
paintings of the Europeanised school are merely
the creditable productions of young Japanese artists
who have studied chiefly in Paris, but there is
K
I30 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
plenty of g-ood work in the old Japanese style to
show that the influence of the Qrreat artisan-artists
did not disappear altogether with Kyosai, although
it is apparently the fashion to look upon his death
in 18S9 as the end of Japanese painting. Still less
can one deny to the modern Japanese embroideries,
and to the hand-paintings on silk and on velvet, a
wealth of imagination and a tastefulness of execution
at least equal to the best work of the past. In fact,
if I may be allowed as a layman to express a
personal opinion, which however is also that of not
a few more competent judges, it would seem that,
generally speaking, the native industries more es-
pecially influenced by the aesthetic temperament of
the people have altogether gained far more by the
adoption of improved modern processes than they
have lost by the relative vulgarisation which must
in some measure accompany a largely increased
production.
But even if one were prepared to acquiesce in
the verdict of the most despondent laudator tem-
poris acii, and to regard as inevitable the extinction
of all those forms of art which we are in the habit
of associating with Old Japan, neither the actual
nor the prospective achievements of Modern Japan
in the wider fields of the world's industries would
be thereby materially affected. These form after
all perhaps the most important, though not the
most attractive side of the Kyoto Exhibition, for
in them we have the material evidence of the extra-
X JAPANESE INDUSTRIES 131
ordinary energy and quickness of apprehension and
adaptability of a singularly gifted race. If George
Eliot's definition of genius as an infinite capacity
for taking pains cannot be altogether accepted as
satisfactory, there is no people to whose genius it
would seem so applicable as the Japanese. At first
they no doubt applied themselves merely to copy the
products of European industry, and, as with all
beginners, their first attempts were often clumsy
and imperfect, but with unswerving tenacity of
purpose they kept on plodding away until they had
in most cases remedied their defects, and in some
improved even upon their models. Within twenty-
five years they have learned to produce thousands
of articles, from European boots and hats to grand
pianos and steam-boilers, of the very existence of
which they scarcely dreamed a quarter of a century
ago ; and not only do they produce them now in
ever-increasing quantities and of an excellent
quality, but, owing to a variety of circumstances,
some accidental but others permanent, they can
actually produce them cheaper than in the older
industrial centres of the West. Too much con-
fidence, I was told, should not be placed in the
indications of prices attached to the exhibits, as
some of the Japanese manufacturers were apt to
appraise their wares below the real current rates
with a view to influence the jury for the dis-
tribution of aw^ards, whilst taking care at the same
time to label them as " Sold " in order to avoid
K 2
132 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
the risk of having to part with them at a loss.
But it is only fair to say that in the few cases
where I was able to put this statement to the test,
I had no difficulty in obtaining the same articles at
the prices affixed to the exhibition samples.
One of the sections which naturally claims the
chief attention of an English visitor is that of
textiles, for it includes those manufactured pro-
ducts which already compete only too success-
fully with those of Lancashire and India, viz.,
cotton yarns of every grade, and piece goods of
every variety. Here, too, can perhaps be seen in
its simplest and most striking form the ability of
the Japanese not only to turn out the cheapest
work possible where it is of a purely mechanical
order, but to invest it whenever there is the
slightest scope for their artistic feeling, as in the
patterns of the commonest cotton fabrics, with a
charm of grace and originality peculiarly their own.
The silk manufactures, and especially the finer
classes of flowered silks and brocades, of course
display these artistic qualities in a still higher
decree. The woollen industries are still in their
infancy in Japan, but there is enough to show how
rapidly the supply is following on a demand which
has only sprung up of quite recent years. The
Australians have already their eye on Japan as a
great future market for their wools, and considering
the relative proximity of the two countries, our
Australasian colonies may well look forward to sup-
X JAPANESE INDUSTRIES 133
plying a raw material which Japan herself can hardly
be said to produce.
To give a list of the exhibits in the galleries
devoted to the miscellaneous industries of Euro-
pean origin, but now already acclimatised in Japan,
would be merely to give a list of almost every
article which can be purchased in Oxford Street or
Cheapside at the hosiers' and haberdashers', at the
trunk-makers' and watch-makers', at the shoe-
makers' and hatters', at the cutlers' and perfumers',
at the jewellers' and goldsmiths', at the grocers' and
the ironmongers', at the stationers' and saddlers',
at the umbrella-makers' and the toy shops, and so
on ad injinitiim. If for intrinsic quality and
fashionable finish they cannot yet be said to stand
comparison with the best articles of the same
category in first-class London shops, it would be
just as great a mistake to imagine that they are
mere "shoddy" imitations. In fact the relative
inferiority of quality is in most cases trifling com-
pared with the relative inferiority of price. Where
the greatest delicacy of workmanship is most
essential, the Japanese lightness of touch and
precision of eye produce almost perfect results,
as in the manufacture of scientific instruments,
mathematical, optical, photographic, and specially
those for purposes of surgery and dentistry. I
chanced to meet in front of one of the cases
devoted to this class of exhibits a young German
surgeon, the assistant of a well-known specialist,
134 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
who was lost in admiration over the finish of the
work, and in astonishment over its cheapness. He
pointed more particularly to some minute scales
for weighing infinitesimal quantities, which, he
assured me, could scarcely be matched in Europe,
and certainly not for less than twice the price.
Not less conspicuous is the ability displayed in
adapting agricultural and other mechanical imple-
ments to the special needs of the Japanese cultivator
and artisan.
Strangest of all, perhaps, in this strange revelation
of industrial life, but yesterday still unborn, and now
already ripening into the full vigour of maturity, is
the roar of steam engines and electro-motors in the
spacious gallery set apart for machinery, — machinery
not of foreign importation but of Japanese make,
derived indeed from foreign models, but applied to
the purposes of Japanese manufacture, weaving
looms and printing presses, spinning frames and
driving gear, &c. This part of the Exhibition
represents no doubt rather a suggestion of the
future than the actual achievements of the present,
for Japan will probably for many years to come
have to draw from abroad the greater part of her
supply of machinery which figures in the import
lists of 1894 for no less than half a million sterling.
But considering the enormously rapid strides which
she is making, there is really no future which can
be looked upon in respect of the development of
her industries as indefinitely remote.
X JAPANESE INDUSTRIES 135
By no means the least instructive spectacle which
the Kyoto Exhibition presents is the attitude of the
native visitors of all classes and conditions whom it
has attracted from all parts of the country. The
Japanese are undoubtedly a pleasure-loving race,
but only on the principle that " all work and no play
makes Jack a dull boy," and even when on pleasure
bent they have essentially a frugal mind, and if
circumstances anyhow permit, still an eye for
business. The passenger rates at which the
Government contrives to work its railways, and to
work them at a large profit, are to our Western
notions at all times ridiculously low, scarcely one
farthing a mile third class, and for visitors to the
Exhibition return tickets have been issued at the
price of a single fare ; so that the Tokyo artisan, for
instance, can travel to Kyoto and back, a distance of
some 650 miles, for less than eight shillings ; and as
another shilling a day amply covers his expenses for
food and lodging, the excursion is well within the
reach of even his slender purse. As an illustration
of what Japanese prices are, a dish of hot, fresh, and
fragrant tea, including a teapot and a cup of coarse
but tasteful faience, can be purchased at any railway
station in Japan for the sum of three farthings ! In
these circumstances the Japanese who dearly loves
an outing and enjoys travelling for travelling's sake,
is not likely to grudge himself such a satisfactory
combination of the useful and the pleasurable. For
it is quite evident that he has not come to Kyoto
136 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
solely out of curiosity or in the search of mere
amusement, but to learn. He may stroll uncon-
cernedly through the galleries with which he has no
special concern, and laugh and joke with his
neiofhbours over the new-fanorled exhibits of
European fashion, but when he has reached the
section in which he is personally interested, his
manner at once changes, he studies everything with
close attention, he makes copious inquiries, and in
nine cases out of ten he pulls out a note-book and
jots down the results of his observations, slowly
perhaps and laboriously, but with visibly conscien-
tious thoroughness. He seems to look upon this
great temple of modern industry in which he finds
a special shrine set apart for his own particular
handicraft, much in the same light as he looks upon
the temples of his gods which, with their shaded
groves and tea-gardens and the popular fairs
regularly held in their vicinity, offer the threefold
attraction of religious devotions easily performed,
an enjoyable pic-nic, and useful purchases on the
way home.
Certainly, as one leaves behind him the Exhi-
bition grounds and their picturesque and animated
groups of men and women and children, now intent
upon merry-making, as half an hour ago inside the
building they were intent upon learning, and, stroll-
ing away over the silent pine-clad hills of Maruyama,
one looks down on the one hand over the exotic ex-
panse of the great city which for eleven centuries
X JAPANESE INDUSTRIES 137
lived its own life there untouched by the breath of
our Western civilisation, and on the other over the
corrugated iron and glass roofs of the intensely
up-to-date buildings in which are stored the
marvellous results of a brief five and twenty years'
contact with the modern world of thought and
action, there must come over the least impression-
able mind an overwhelming yearning to know what
the future has in store for a nation so old and at the
same time so young, which has entered as it were
upon its majority in a new phase of life by displaying
in the same year equally signal proofs of its aptitude
for the arts of peace as for those of war, and which
seems alone at the present day capable of preserving,
in conjunction with the newly acquired proficiency of
an essentially mechanical age, its ancient inheritance
of artistic originality and refinement.
CHAPTER XI
JAPAN AND ENGLAND
While in China the war has laid bare the
immeasurable rottenness hitherto half concealed
under the venerable cloak of an ancient civilisation,
in Japan it has triumphantly vindicated the reality
of a new civilisation against the scepticism with
which a social evolution of unprecedented rapidity
had been generally regarded. Until last year the
attitude of the Western world towards Japan was
mainly one either of thinly-veiled derision or of
good-natured condescension. We called her " une
traduction mat fait e^' or, If we were impartial enough
to admit that the translation was not altogether ill-
done, we would seldom allow that it was anything
more than a translation. It was a favourite common-
place that the Japanese were plagiarists, shallow,
superficial ; that they had sacrificed the picturesque
individuality of their national life in order to ape
the manners and customs of their betters ; that they
masqueraded in the borrowed feathers of political
institutions which became them no better than the
CHAP. XI JAPAN AND ENGLAND 139
European clothes they had adopted in preference to
the graceful kimono of their ancestors ; and that
commercial greed had even degraded their sense of
artistic beauty in the vulgar attempt to compete with
European industries. They were losing their charm
as a delicate objet de vertu to be toyed with by
aesthetic dilettanti, and they had yet to show the
qualities which would stand the rough usage of a
work-a-day world. Another view was that they
were meddlesome upstarts whose restlessness w^ould
some day make mischief abroad unless internal
troubles kept them busy at home — a contingency
which might properly be expected from so rash an
experiment as that into which their new-fangled
constitution had launched them. A third view,
naturally favoured by those who, trading with or in
the Far East, were the first to feel the daily pinch of
Japanese competition, was that they were engaged
in a criminal conspiracy against the commercial
supremacy of the Western world, and that if it w^as
a mistake to underrate and deride them, it was folly
not to recognise in their conairrencc ddoyale a grave
public danger. There were, of course, many shrewd
observers able to discount the exaggerations of all
such views, who realised more fully the meaning
and bearinofs of a o-reat national transformation, with
which, however desirable or undesirable from
different standpoints, the world would have to
reckon. But on the whole, there was little know-
ledge of the real facts concerning Japan, and where
I40 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION CHAP.
there was knowledge there was little sympathy. In
England especially the doctrine that the Japanese
were superficial, aggressive, and generally objection-
able was as firmly rooted in many quarters as the
belief in the " latent power of China, our natural
ally."
It is easy to be wise after the event, and to-day
when one passes across from China to Japan, it is
impossible to entertain any other feeling but one of
profound amazement that so much doubt should have
existed amongst well-informed people, and even
amongst those who were acquainted with both
countries, as to the issue of a struggle between them ;
and still more that the sympathies of Europeans,
and especially of Englishmen, should have been, if
not universally, at least at the outset very largely,
enlisted on the Chinese side. The explanation of
this strange phenomenon can only to a slight extent
be found in some of the incidents which preceded
and accompanied the outbreak of hostilities. The
sinking of the Kowshing, a British ship sailing under
the British flag, by the Japanese fleet at a time when
no state of war was officially known to exist, seemed
at the moment to be a wanton outrage upon the
flag of a friendly nation. It is now known that
Chinese men-of-war had already worthily opened
hostilities by firing a few runaway shots at the
Japanese ships, and that though the Kowskmg still
flew the British ensign when she was sunk, she had
ceased to be a British vessel within any reasonable
XI JAPAN AND ENGLAND 141
meaning of the word, since the Chinese Mandarins
on board had taken complete charge of her, and her
own officers, overpowered by numbers, could act
only under duress. Nor can there be any doubt
that the Chinese authorities in charterincr a British
o
ship for the transport of their troops instead of using
one of their own had from the first reckoned upon
the immunity of a neutral flag in the event of her
being overtaken by the outbreak of hostilities before
the completion of her errand. At any rate the
opinion given by the Law Officers of the Crown
that no case lies against the Japanese Government
finally disposes of the question. But the version
current at the time undoubtedly went far to confirm
the prejudice raised against Japan by the apologists
of China who, for her benefit, propounded afresh
the old fable of the wolf and the lamb.
It would be a work of supererogation now to set
forth the case for Japanese intervention in Korea, and
it is with the results rather than with the causes of the
war that I am concerned. Nor need one attempt
to dispute the fact that Japan had been steadily
preparing herself for a struggle with China, and
regarding it as inevitable was not disposed to
indefinitely postpone it. But whatever the precise
circumstances which precipitate hostilities, a nation
cannot properly be charged with provoking a war of
wanton aggression when the enemy against whom
it is waged has himself been for years past com-
passing schemes of unmistakable hostility. The
143 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Japanese were far too well informed of all that was
going on in China not to be aware that as far back
as 1882 the Celestial Empire had determined to
seize the earliest opportunity of arresting the pro-
gress of Japan and of definitely restoring, by force
of arms, the supremacy which in theory it had
always claimed over her. In a memorial presented
in that year to the throne by Li Hung Chang, to
which, unfortunately, publicity was not given so
opportunely as by Prince Bismarck to Count
Benedetti's proposals, it is expressly stated that such
must be the cardinal object of China's policy.
"Your Majesty," he says, "has graciously ordered
me to undertake the responsibility of preparing the
plan for the invasion of Japan," and if the Viceroy
deprecated the immediate recourse to arms then
contemplated at Peking, it was only because he had
formed a more correct appreciation than his col-
leagues of the relative fighting strength of the two
countries. " My humble opinion is, let us not lose
sight of our plan of invading Japan, but let us not
commit the mistake of doing this in a hurried
manner. . . In one of the ancient maxims it is said,
' Nothing is so dangerous as to expose one's scheme
before it is ripe.' On this account I have in a former
memorial recommended to your Majesty that we
should be extremely cautious and take care to con-
ceal our object, whilst neglecting nothing to raise
our strength in the meantime." Finally, after dis-
cussing what might furnish "the best case for
XI JAPAN AND ENGLAND 143
bringing about a rupture with Japan and coming to
extremities," he repeats '•' that it is above all neces-
sary to strengthen our country's defences and to
organise a powerful navy, and the aggressive steps
against Japan should not be undertaken too hastily."
It may be argued that too much weight should not
be laid upon Memorials to the Throne, which are as
common as blackberries in China, and that in this
particular case Li Hung Chang really veiled under
the polite form of a plea for caution and delay his
disapproval of the schemes entertained by the
hotspurs of Peking. But it is difficult to recon-
cile this indulgent theory with the attitude
which China persisted in maintaining towards
Japan, and more especially with the policy consist-
ently pursued by her Resident in Korea. Indeed
the whole purpose of Li Hung Chang's armaments
was to enable him some day to chastise the Japan-
ese "upstarts," for whom, with the incorrigible pride
of his race, he even now cannot conceal his con-
tempt. That his own preparations for war were a
trifle less successful than those of the Japanese does
not alter the spirit or the intention in which they
were conceived. No one in China questioned the
invincibility of his ironclads and armies, and all that
can be charitably said on his behalf is that he him-
self probably never realised how entirely the con-
tagion of greed and ignorance, starting from his
own Yamen, had unfitted them for anything but the
spectacular displays over which he was so fond of
144 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
presiding. In these circumstances Japanese states-
men can no more be blamed for having taken up
in 1894, under conditions which they beUeved
favourable to their country, the challenge thrown
down to them in Korea by the high-handed pro-
ceedings of the Chinese, than was Bismarck in 1870
for seizing the opportunity furnished to Germany
by the overbearing action of the French in con-
nection with the Hohenzollern candidature to the
Spanish throne. Had the influence of England at
Peking been exercised to its fullest extent either by
the late Government when the Korean complica-
tions assumed a more immediately threatening
shape last year, or by its predecessors during the
long incubation of China's hostile designs against
Japan, the latter might have been saved the
necessity of vindicating by force of arms her right
to work out her national development free from
Chinese obstruction, for that was really the question
fought out on the battlefields of Korea and Man-
churia. Up to the very outbreak of war Japan
might have been satisfied with some substantial
concession implying a practical confirmation of the
equality of Japan already formally recognised by
China, especially if such a concession had been
made under the pressure and therefore, by implica-
tion, under the guarantee of England. But the fatal
delusion that China was not only our natural ally,
but an ally whose alliance was worth cultivating,
had led us for years past to remain conveniently
XI JAPAN AND ENGLAND 145
blind to the general trend of Chinese policy
towards Japan, and Lord Rosebery's Government
in this respect merely followed at the crucial
moment in the footsteps of its predecessors.
What, however, weighed perhaps most strongly
against Japan with European, and especially
British, public opinion was the bitterness enter-
tained towards her amongst the foreign communi-
ties of the Far East. It would not be fair to ascribe
this bitterness solely to the jealousy engendered by
trade competition, or to a lurking belief that a shift-
less country like China affords a more promising field
for the undisturbed enterprise of Europeans than an
active and go-ahead country like Japan. It must be
admitted that there is one very important point in
which Japan does not bear favourable comparison
with China. In both countries the native commercial
classes are strenuous and intelligent, but whereas in
China their relative probity, ability, and trustworthi-
ness stand out conspicuous against the vices of the
ruling classes, they comprise in Japan some of the
least estimable elements in the country. Until the
new era of Japanese history they were looked down
upon by the old feudal aristocracy with a contempt
far more aggressive than that displayed by the
Chinese Mandarins towards the corresponding
classes in the Celestial Empire. Under these con-
ditions the Japanese merchant or trader, being a
kind of social pariah, was not restrained by the same
sense of self-respect which governs other classes
L
146 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
of the community, and he acquired, too often
justly, the reputation of being a thoroughly un-
scrupulous rogue. When Japan was thrown open
to foreign intercourse, the European merchants
naturally sought to guard themselves against the
bad faith of the native traders by measures which,
however necessary at the time, could not fail to
prove more and more galling to a hyper-sensitive
people in proportion as the attitude of Japanese
society itself towards the mercantile classes under-
went a more complete transformation. Trade and
commerce have long since ceased to be tabooed,
and many of the highest and ablest and most
honourable men in Japan are to-day directly or
indirectly associated with important banking, indus-
trial, and trading enterprises. There are now not
a few Japanese firms which, for absolute integrity
and rectitude, can bear comparison with any of
the European firms established in Japan. Never-
theless, the standard of mercantile morality, al-
though it has been undeniably raised, is by no means
as satisfactory as it should be. Only this summer,
for instance, a guild of Japanese merchants com-
bined to defeat the ends of Japanese justice by
compelling an English firm, under threats of a
general boycott, to partially waive recovery of a
judgment pronounced in its favour by a Japanese
Court of law in a really outrageous case of breach
of contract. Nor did a single Japanese paper
venture to point out that the action of this guild
XI JAPAN AND ENGLAND 147
was not only an offence against commercial
morality but an affront to the Japanese tri-
bunals. Such incidents naturally breed ill-
feeling and distrust, and, though the remedy does
not lie in reprisals and recriminations, it is not
surprising that the European communities in Japan
often allow their judgment to be overborne by
prejudice. It is all the more to the credit of the
late Government that, in the face of violent local
opposition and of ignorance and indifference at
home, they Avere the first to recognise by a generous
revision of our treaties the right of Japan, in spite
of many shortcomings, to be treated no longer either
as a child or as an outcast amongst the civilised na-
tions of the world. Freely granted before the warlike
achievements of Japan had strengthened her claim,
this concession was a statesmanlike act, of which
the satisfactory effects upon the relations of the two
countries were only temporarily weakened by certain
unpleasant incidents connected with the earlier
stages of the war, and by the unabated virulence of
the anti-Japanese feeling in a large section of the
English Press of the Far East. They were sub-
sequently confirmed and reinforced by our refusal
to join with France, Russia, and Germany in their
imperious intervention on behalf of China,
Industrial and commercial antagonism is no
doubt destined to affect more and more closely
in the future the policy of nations, but so long as
it is restricted within the limits of lawful com-
L 2
148 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
petition it can hardly prove an insuperable obstacle
to the maintenance of friendly and even intimate
relations based upon a community of political
interests, Now, the existence of such a community
of political interests between the Island Empires of
the West and of the East is obtaining every day
fuller recognition in Japan as well as in England. Im-
pressionable and passionate as the Japanese from time
to time show themselves to be, a remarkable shrewd-
ness and solidity of judgment underlies their excita-
bility. If the enthusiasm with which an unbroken
record of military triumphs during the recent war
fired the patriotism of an imaginative people did credit
to their hearts, the sober moderation with which they
wore their laurels did at least equal credit to their
heads. Many another nation, better accustomed
to the intoxicating effects of victory, would have had
its head turned by the sincere flattery of profound
astonishment with which Japan's successful debut on
the stage of modern warfare was almost everywhere
received. Except for a few ebullitions of youthful
vanity in a yet immature press, Japan preserved
a coolness and sobriety of judgment which, if it did
not entirely preserve her from committing political
mistakes, enabled her to rectify them without any
irreparable loss of dignity, Japanese statesmen
would probably now be the first to admit that they
would have acted more wisely in not insisting on a
cession of continental territory from China, and with
greater experience they might well have foreseen
XI JAPAN AND ENGLAND 149
the resistance which such a demand would provoke
in other quarters, especially from Russia. They
might, perhaps, even have realised more fully the
constant strain to which the retention of an outlying
and distant position on the mainland would have
subjected Japan. But admitting that they erred in
this matter, one is no less bound to admire the
suppleness and fortitude with which they accepted
the consequences of their error. Confronted by the
ultimatum of the three Powers, the Japanese Govern-
ment referred the issue to its military and naval
advisers, and when the latter, without allowing
themselves to be dazzled by their recent achieve-
ments, declined to undertake the responsibility of
forcibly resisting such a combination as was now
arrayed against them, it bowed to the inevitable
and, without the slightest sign of unseemly vexation,
relinquished, in obedience to foi'ce majeure, one of
the chief prizes for which the blood and treasure of
the country had been freely poured forth. In the
same spirit the nation resigned itself to the decision
of its Government, and, high as party feeling runs,
even the most hot-headed poHticians have hitherto
shown little disposition to make capital out of a
misadventure which was felt to involve no disgrace.
Seldom has a youthful people given surer proof of
the self-restraint founded upon an unerring con-
sciousness both of its strength and of the limitations
of its strength.
With the same objectivity of judgment the
150 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Japanese, who had not unnaturally resented our
action during the earlier stages of the war, especi-
ally in warning their fleets off the treaty ports of
China, promptly and fully recognised and appreciated
the friendly attitude of England in the final crisis,
and, unpalatable no doubt in itself as was the
advice she tendered them, they were not slow to
realise that the conciliatory spirit in which she
counselled acceptance of the conditions imposed
by the three Powers materially facilitated a dignified
withdrawal from a position which had become
untenable. But it was not only the contrast be-
tween the actual attitude of Eneland and that of
the three Powers at this particular juncture which
brought home to the Japanese the existence of a
real community of political interests between
England and Japan. It was still more the light
thrown by their intervention in favour of China
upon the future policy of the three Powers in the
Far East, and especially of Russia. Their action
was practically a notice served upon Japan that
even though the Sick Man of the Far East were
lying on his death-bed she was to have no share in
his future inheritance. This notice she was obliged
to accept, and, under present conditions, she must
for some time to come acquiesce in its consequences.
From the moment, therefore, that she finds herself
excluded from all further participation in the spoils
of the Sick Man, her interests are transferred from
the side of those who aim more or less openly at
XI JAPAN AND ENGLAND 151
the dismemberment of the Chinese Empire to
that which makes for the maintenance of the status
q2io. Instead of ranking amongst the disruptive
forces, she is driven to co-operate with the forces
of conservation in the Far East, chief amongst
which is EnQ;land.
No nation can be expected absolutely to renounce
all dreams of future aggrandisement, and the day
may come when the ways of England and Japan
in the Far East will have to part. But the dread
of remote continofencies must not be allowed to
overshadow the possibilities of present usefulness.
For some time to come it looks at least probable
that England and Japan may have to travel along
parallel paths. The experience of the last year
has taught us the value of Japan, and it has taught
Japan the value of moderation and prudence, with-
out which she cannot hope to retain the permanent
goodwill of England. This lesson has been con-
veyed to her, not only by the final outcome of the
war, but also by the difficulties, many of them of
her own creation, which now confront her in Korea.
Her excessive optimism, and, it must be added, her
own tactlessness in attempting to ride roughshod
over the rights and interests of others, have led her
into an impasse from which she may yet find it hard
to withdraw unscathed. In spite of all the en-
deavours of Count Inouye, one of the ablest of
her statesmen, she has to confess to-day that all
her efforts to introduce order, tranquillity, and good
152 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
government in Korea have been defeated, partly by
the incorriorible inertia and ill-will of the Koreans
themselves, and partly no doubt, by outside in-
fluences. Count Inouye has publicly explained
the peculiar difficulties with which he has had to
contend, nor in doing so has he spared his own
countrymen in Korea. He does not admit that
these difficulties are altogether insurmountable, but
on his own statement it may be doubted whether
Japan is in a position to surmount them. Even if
she were ripe to undertake a more arduous task
than that which has severely taxed our own powers
in Egypt, she has to reckon with the Russians, who
make no secret of their determination not to allow
Korea to be converted into a Japanese Egypt.
One can readily understand that in these circum-
stances Japan would gladly welcome an opportunity
of retiring honourably from such a dangerous and
thankless field, if she could do so without merely
surrendering it to another Power, whose presence
there would be a permanent menace to her own
security and independence. It should not be be-
yond the powers of Japanese statesmanship to pro-
duce some scheme which would at least temporarily
relieve her from responsibilities to which she is not
equal and from apprehensions which she cannot
afford to disregard. If, as seems probable, none of
the Powers are anxious to push matters to extrem-
ities, an international arrangement placing under a
collective guarantee the neutrality of Korea and the
XI JAPAN AND ENGLAND 153
independence formally secured to her by the Treaty
of Shimonoseki would remove the Korean question
out of the forefront of dangerous controversy in the
Far East. In working towards this consummation,
Japan would be entitled to rely upon the strenuous
co-operation of British diplomacy. At any rate, in
this as in other questions, the interests of England
and of Japan should be arrayed on the same side,
and it is upon such an association of interests rather
than upon written engagements that must be found-
ed the pacific and, in the true sense of the word,
conservative alliances which can alone find favour
with British public opinion.
CHAPTER XII
OUR COMMERCIAL INTERESTS
Great as are the political changes of which the
Treaty of Shimonoseki must be deemed rather the
forerunner than the final consecration, and vital as
must be their bearing upon the future development
of our trade relations with the Far East, there has
been hitherto generally a tendency to measure the
importance of that instrument, in relation to the
commercial interests of the British Empire, chiefly
by the clauses which extend the area open to
foreign trade in China. The benefits secured by
the Treaty in this respect have certainly fallen
short of the expectations raised by the demands
first formulated on behalf of the Japanese Govern-
ment, and there has been some disposition even
to suspect Japan of having merely put forward
those demands as a bait for European, and
especially for British, sympathy and support, with-
out any serious intention of enforcing them when
once China should have accepted the heavier
sacrifices of territory and treasure imposed upon
CHAP. XII OUR COMMERCIAL INTERESTS 155
her by her conquerors. To those acquainted with
Oriental methods of bargaining it must seem quite
unnecessary to seek for any such MachiavelHan
explanation of the concessions to which Japan
ultimately consented. A Chinaman especially,
even when prepared from the very outset to accept
practically the terms offered to him, will always
expect some trifling point to be conceded to him
which shall "save his face." It is, of course,
to be regretted that those stipulations to which
we attached most value were precisely those which
were ultimately expunged from the Treaty. The
removal of the Woosung bar at the mouth of the
Yang-tsze-kiang would have been an immense boon
for the trade and shipping of Shanghai, in which
we are so pre-eminently interested. The opening
of the West river, in Kwang-tung, had long been
urged as a matter of vital importance for our colony
of Hong-kong. The opening of Siang-tan and
of the Siang river and Tung-ting lake would have
been beneficial not only commercially, but also
politically, as it would have given access to the
province of Hu-nan, hitherto a close preserve of
Chinese fanaticism. ; and in the same way the
moral effect of compelling the capital of the
Celestial Empire to throw open its gates to
foreign trade would have been of the greatest
possible value. But, after all, if Japan could not
carry every point of her original programme, she
can hardly be blamed for having insisted only on
156 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
those from which she anticipated the most chrect
benefit for herseh"", and what she has actually
achieved is by no means inconsiderable or value-
less to others than herself The free navio^ation of
the Yang-tsze is extended from I-chang to Chung-
king, and with the opening of Chung-king itself to
foreign trade it will enable our influence, com-
mercial and otherwise, to make itself felt in the
upper portion of the great valley in which British
in*;erests are already so largely concerned. The
opening of Su-chau and Hang-chau, and the free
navigation of the Woosung river and canal con-
necting these two cities, are of no less importance
to British interests in the lower basin of the
Yang-tsze. At Shanghai itself there is indeed
some disposition not to look upon these last
provisions of the Japanese Treaty as an un-
mitigated boon. It is clearly of the utmost
importance that the industrial development of
China, which, as I shall presently endeavour to
show, must now be looked upon as imminent,
should be centred, as far as possible, in places
where British trade has already taken firm and
deep root, and therefore, as far as the lower valley
of the Yang-tsze is concerned, at Shanghai, the
greatest British emporium in the whole country.
It is argued that the opening of Su-chau and Hang-
chau, though it may not immediately threaten the
supremacy of Shanghai, can hardly fail to affect
it unfavourably. Although these two great cities.
XII OUR COMMERCIAL INTERESTS 157
whose beauty, wealth, and splendour were formerly
a favourite theme of Chinese poets, have not yet
recovered from the ruinous effects of the Taiping
rebellion, they are now once more busy and
populous centres of native industry, and, situated
as they are in the heart of the cotton and silk
districts of China, they will, it is feared, attract
away from Shanghai no small share of the native
and foreign capital which is waiting impatiently to
be invested in cotton mills and silk filatures.
Though these apprehensions may not be alto-
gether groundless, they should be considerably
lessened by the perusal of an interesting passage
which Mr. Beauclerk has specially devoted to this
question in the last annual report of the British
Legation at Peking on the foreign trade of China.
He is clearly of opinion that Shanghai has no
serious cause to dread the industrial competition
of Su-chau and Hang-chau, while the exceptional
banking facilities offered at Shanghai will continue
to attract native merchants to that city, which is
bound to remain, as in the past, the chief terminus
of the import trade as far as the foreign importer
is concerned. The whole volume of its trade can,
moreover, only increase w^ith the growing prosperity
of Su-chau and Hang-chau, and, as regards the
free navigation of the waterways connecting them
with Shanghai, one may reasonably hope that the
universal preponderance of our shipping will secure
for us a proportionate share of the local carrying
158 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
trade now opened up to foreign enterprise. In fact,
it will doubtless be found in this case, as in all
other cases hitherto, that every extension of the
area of foreign trade, and everything v/hich stimu-
lates commercial and industrial progress, tends to
the benefit of British trade generally.
But there are other clauses in the Treaty of Shi-
monoseki calculated to have much wider and further-
reaching consequences for British trade and industry.
Under Article VI. it is stipulated that Japanese
subjects shall be free to engage in all kinds of manu-
facturing industries in all the open cities, towns,
and ports of China, and shall be at liberty to import
into China all kinds of machinery, paying only the
stipulated import duties thereon. Further, all articles
manufactured by Japanese subjects in China shall, in
respect of inland transit and internal taxes, duties,
charges, and exactions of all kinds, and also in re-
spect of warehousing and storage facilities in the
interior of China, stand upon the same footing and
enjoy the same privileges and exemptions as mer-
chandise imported by Japanese subjects into China.
Finally, Japanese subjects purchasing goods or pro-
duce in the interior of China, or transporting imported
merchandise into the interior of China, shall have the
right temporarily to rent or hire warehouses for the
storage of the articles so purchased or transported
without the payment of any taxes or exactions what-
ever. The benefit of these provisions accrues to
ourselves under Article LIV. of the Treaty of Tien-
XII OUR COMMERCIAL INTERESTS 159
tsin of June 26, 1858, subsequently confirmed by
the convention signed at Peking on October 24,
i860, and to all other Powers who similarly enjoy
the most-favoured-nation treatment. The riofhts
secured to foreigners under the Japanese treaty are
not in all respects novel — that of importing ma-
chinery, for instance, having already been asserted
by us in principle ; but they have now acquired a
practical value which they have hitherto lacked, even
where they already existed on paper. For the Japan-
ese will enforce them with their wonted energy, and it
will behove other Powers, and especially Great Britain,
to do the same, under penalty of being left behind
in the race. The Treaty of Shimonoseki opens up
a vast field for industrial enterprise, under foreign
impulse and direction, of which it is almost impos-
sible to exaggerate the future importance. We can
only measure it, to some extent, by what has already
happened in Japan.
The point upon which, in this connection, most
stress is usually laid in Europe is the damage done
to certain branches of European industry by the
extraordinarily rapid growth of Japanese industry,
and the results already achieved by the latter are
undoubtedly calculated to strike the imagination at
first sight with astonishment and alarm. The most
conspicuous of these results are those connected
with the cotton industry. In 1885 Japan imported
only $800,000 worth of raw cotton. In 1894 she
imported $19,500,000 worth, or more than four-and-
i6o THE P^A.R EASTERN QUESTION chap.
twenty times as much. At the beginning of 1 885 there
were 19 spinning mills, with about 50,000 spindles, in
Japan, and at the end of 1893 there were 46, with
about 600,000 spindles. The result was, of course,
inevitable. The lower-grade yarns formerly im-
ported from abroad have practically disappeared
from the Japanese market, the importation of middle
grades is rapidly declining, and only the higher
grades, which Japan has not yet set herself to pro-
duce, still maintain their footing. The importation
of cotton yarns reached its high-water mark in 1888,
when the growing supply from the native mills had
not yet overtaken the growing demand arising out
of a general increase of national prosperity and ac-
tivity. In that year cotton yarns were imported
from Great Britain and India, in about equal pro-
portions, to the total amount of 62,860,000 lbs. Six
years later, in 1894, the importation from the same
countries amounted only to 21,241,000 lbs., or barely
one-third of the former figure. If the pinch has not
yet been more severely felt in England, it is due to
the fact that the loss has so far fallen much more
heavily on Bombay than upon Lancashire, for, while
the imports from the latter have been reduced 40
per cent, those from the former have suffered to the
extent of 90 per cent. Nor is this all. Not only at
the present rate of progress is the time within sight
when Japan will cease altogether to import goods
of this category, but last year for the first time
she actually appeared as an exporter, and for the
XII OUR COMMERCIAL INTERESTS i6i
respectable figure of 4,500,000 lbs., sent chiefly to
China. How entirely the diminution of imports of
cotton goods is due to the successful competition of
native indu.stry appears from the fact that, wherever
that competition has not yet assumed such consider-
able proportions, the imports, as for instance of cotton
piece goods, have continued during the same period
steadily to increase — viz., from 85,500,000 in 1888
to close upon $7,000,000 in 1894.
The depreciation of silver, to which I shall have
to refer later on, has, of course, contributed very
largely to foster the growth of Japanese industry,
but it does not alone suffice to account for it. Still
less can it be ascribed to the artificial influence of
excessive State protection benefiting the producers at
the expense of the consumers. Everything that the
State could do to encourage legitimately the growth
of native industry has been done, but though Europ-
ean firms occasionally complain that the Customs
authorities favour the native as against the foreign
importer, the existing treaty tariffs have at any
rate hitherto been an insuperable obstacle to any
prohibitive form of protection. Under the revised
treaties Japan undoubtedly hopes to be in a position
to favour nascent industries at home by raising the
import duties on certain classes of foreign goods, but
as she has done so well with the moderate tariffs
hitherto in force, one may hope that she will not
abuse the liberty which she is recovering to
indulge in exaggerated protectionism. For if the
i62 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Japanese as a nation have every reason to be
proud of the rapid strides made by native
industries, those investors who are personally
interested in them have every reason to be equally
satisfied with the handsome returns they yield.
While 93 spinning companies in Lancashire were
working at a loss, the cotton mills of Japan were
paying in 1894 dividends of 16 to 20 per cent.,
and even more. These are results which may well
provoke jealousy and apprehension among European
manufacturers and importers of cotton goods, and,
though not in the same degree, similar results may
already be noted in connexion with many other
branches of industry. Ready-made clothing, boots
and shoes, hats and caps, umbrellas, paper of every
quality, beer, matches, are all represented by
annually diminishing figures in the import column
of Japanese trade returns, while the corresponding
figures in the export column are rising every year.
Silk manufactures exported from Japan have in-
creased in value from $54,547 in 1885 to $8,400,000
in 1894. The annexation of Formosa maybe ex-
pected to give an immense impetus to the sugar
industry by securing to Japan a field of almost
unlimited capacity for the production of raw
sugar. Japanese coal, the exports of which
have risen in value from under $2,000,000 in
1885 to over $6,500,000 in 1894, is rapidly driv-
ing English coal, except for special purposes,
out of every market east of Singapore, and has
XII OUR COMMERCIAL INTERESTS 163
already penetrated as far west as Colombo and
Calcutta.
That is one side of the picture, and the one
upon which people in Europe generally prefer to
dwell. But there is another side to it which de-
serves at least equal attention. The opening up
of Japan, the growth of her native industries, the
development of her commercial activity have intro-
duced to us a competitor whose energy and enter-
prise seriously threaten certain branches of our
own trade and industry, but what effect have
they had upon our trade and industry taken as
a whole ? This is surely the material question
to which that of the profit or loss of individual
branches must remain subordinate. Ten years
ago the entire foreign trade of Japan amounted
to barely $65,500,000, in 1894 it exceeded
$230,000,000 — i.e,, it has increased nearly three-
and-a-half-fold in the space of ten years, and
of this increase by far the largest proportion
accrues to foreign imports. They have risen from
$28,000,000 to $117,000,000, or nearly four-and-
a-half- fold within one decade. During the same
period British shipping entered and cleared from
the ports of Japan has increased from under i^
million tons to close upon 3 million tons. Of
the whole foreign trade of Japan the British Empire
takes to-day more than 40 per cent., or, in other
words, the trade between Japan and the British
Empire alone is to-day nearly half as much again
M 2
i64 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
as was the entire trade between Japan and all
foreign countries ten years ago. The balance of
trade, moreover, continues to be entirely In favour
of the British Empire, and especially of the United
Kingdom. The total value of Imports and exports
from and to the British Empire In 1894 was
^9,846,134, whereof the Imports into Japan repre-
sented ^6,779,864, and the exports from Japan
only ^3,066,570, while of these amounts the United
Kingdom Itself only imported ^626,019, but
exported ^4,614,517. Nor must It be forgotten
that calculations made in sterling, though they
alone can properly represent the value of the trade
from the point of view of the British producer, do
not give an adequate Idea of the Increasing demand
for British produce from the point of view of the
Japanese consumer, who, owing to the depreciation
of silver, has to pay to-day nearly nine dollars of
his own currency for every £1 worth of British
goods for which ten years ago he had to pay only
five dollars. Thus If we take for purposes of
comparison the year 1888, which the pessimists
who croak over the impending doom of British
trade In the Far East generally have In mind —
the last year during which foreign trade already
deriving immense benefit from the general develop-
ment of the country was still relatively free from
the pressure of Japanese Industrial competition — we
find that Japan took less than $20,000,000 worth
of goods imported from the United Kingdom,
XII OUR COMMERCIAL INTERESTS 165
whereas in 1894 the amount required to meet her
demands had risen in her own currency to over
$40,000,000.
To appreciate thoroughly the meaning of these
figures, it may not be inexpedient to compare them
with those of the foreign trade of China, which
has not been affected by any such remarkable
development of native enterprise as has been
witnessed in Japan. The total value of the foreign
trade of China has only increased from $230,000,000
to $435,000,000 within the same decade during
which that of Japan has increased from $64,000,000
to $230,000,000 — i.e., in China it has not quite
doubled, whereas in Japan it has been increased
nearly three-and-a-half-fold. The foreign trade of
Japan, with just over forty million inhabitants,
stands already to-day where the foreign trade of
China, with nearly ten times the population, stood
in 1885, and, at the present rate of progress in
both countries, another decade may see them
almost on a level. Even more significant in its
bearing upon European industries is the relative
growth of imports into China and Japan. In 1885
the imports into China amounted to $132,000,000,
and in 1894 to $243,000,000, an increase of about
80 per cent. In 1885 the imports into Japan
amounted to$28, 000,000 and in 1894 to $1 17,000,000,
an increase of over 300 per cent. Surely if statistics
can teach any lesson, we may learn from what we
have already witnessed in Japan not to look forward
i66 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap, xii
with dismay, but rather with confidence and satis-
faction, both to the further development of Japan
and to the impending development of China under
conditions even more favourable to ourselves, if
only we show ourselves determined to secure for
British enterprise the fair play which alone it
requires in order to reap its legitimate share of the
harvest wherever fresh fields are thrown open to
human activity.
CHAPTER XIII
THE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA
It has been rightly said that no question can be
of vital importance to the British Empire that is
not of vital importance to the British working man.
In fact, in a certain sense, this is not only true, but
a truism. Truism, or not, however, there is scarcely
a question which, judged by that test, can be
pronounced of more vital importance than the Far
Eastern Question. I showed in the preceding
chapter that, though the growth of Japanese industry
had pressed heavily upon certain classes of British
manufactures, the general development of the
country had within ten years more than trebled the
whole volume of foreign trade with Japan and more
than quadrupled the foreign imports. On the
other hand, in China, where the stimulus of national
activity has hitherto been lacking, the volume of
foreign trade has not quite doubled within the same
period, and it is the exports rather than the imports
which show the larger proportion of increase. At
the present day the demand of Japan's 40 million
i68 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
inhabitants for foreign goods is equal to very nearly
half the consumption of China with her 300 to 400
million inhabitants, and, with regard to goods
imported direct from the United Kingdom, Japan is
already very nearly as good a customer as China.
Should China ever be opened up only to the extent
to which Japan is already opened up, the foreign
trade of China, on the basis of the present trade
of Japan and of the relative population of the two
countries, might be estimated at ^200,000,000
per annum.
And why should not that estimate be realised ?
China is endowed far beyond Japan with the natural
resources which favour the growth of national
wealth and the development of native industries.
She grows her own cotton whilst Japan has to
import it ; she grows silk of a better quality and
might increase its production to almost any extent ;
the same may be said of her teas ; she is beginning
to export wool in spite of the well-nigh prohibitive
cost of transport over impossible roads from the
frontiers of Mongolia to the coast ; the cultivation
of sugar and tobacco is capable of enormous
development and improvement ; in fact, there is
hardly any valuable crop which cannot be success-
fully grown in one or other region of her vast and
fertile soil, nor is there apparently a single mineral
or precious metal which does not lie buried under
its surface, gold, silver, and iron, and immense
coalfields of a quality unrivalled perhaps out of
XIII THE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 169
Great Britain. The trading classes of China
compare by no means unfavourably, both for in-
tegrity and, within certain limits, for enterprise,
with those of Japan. The people of China are as
hard-working and industrious as the people of
Japan, and make in almost every respect equally
good workmen, given equally favourable conditions.
The manager of one of the largest cotton mills at
Shanghai told me that in resfard to mechanical skill
the native hands, whether men, women, or children,
can stand comparison with the English hands in
any Lancashire mill ; they are more quickly trained
and far more easily managed ; they have not so
much muscular strength, and cannot perhaps do so
much work in the same time, but they make up for
it by their readiness to work longer hours. A
similar statement was made to me in a Chinese
filature. As for the actual supply of human labour,
it may be looked upon in China as practically
inexhaustible. No sicrht can be more instructive
in this respect than one which may be witnessed
every day, not in a remote city where labour is a
drug in the market, but in the busiest centre of
activity in the whole country — viz., at Shanghai.
Some of the local traffic on its waterways is carried
on by stern-wheelers, where the motive power is
supplied by human labour, steam pressure being
replaced by the measured tramp of coolies, who
tread the wheel in relays of thirty-six at a time.
Labour is, of course, as cheap as it is plentiful, and
I70 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
is likely to remain cheap for a much longer period
in China than in Japan, where the general standard
of living is already beginning to rise, and where
there are already indications of those labour
troubles with which Western countries have long
been disastrously familiar. In China, as in Japan,
the normal cheapness of labour has of late been
further accentuated in relation to European labour
by the depreciation of silver.
One does not require to believe in bimetallism in
order to recognise the enormous advantages which
the manufacturers in a silver country enjoy in
competing with gold countries. The cost of the
necessaries of life, as far as the masses are con-
cerned, has remained absolutely unaffected by the
fall in the value of silver, and the workman is
therefore quite content to receive the same wages
as he did formerly, for their purchasing power, as
far as he is concerned, is still the same. But while
the wages bill of the employer in China or Japan
has remained actually the same, it stands, in relation
to that of his Western competitor, at only half the
figure to which it formerly amounted, now that the
value of the silver dollar has fallen from one-fifth to
nearly one-tenth of the £ — i.e., from 45-. to little
more than 2s. gold. Thus, where, for example, for
the production of similar goods to the value of, say,
^100, the cost of labour was, and still is, ^20 in
England and $50 in China or Japan, the real cost in
China or Japan is no longer, as it was formerly,
XIII THE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 171
^10 in sterling currency as against ;^20 in England,
but only about ^5. And the same applies to any
raw material required for the purposes of manufac-
ture which both the gold and the silver country
equally produce. The silver price of Cardiff coal,
notwithstanding the fall of its gold price, has in-
creased from $10 to $15-16 silver per ton, while,
with the excellent plant laid down in Japan to work
the native mines and the construction of railways
to convey their output to the chief industrial centres,
the price of Japanese coal has fallen to $3 silver
per ton, or for the purposes of competition with gold
countries to little more than 6s. gold per ton. The
depreciation of silver might, in fact, be said to
operate as a system of protection in favour of the
industries of silver countries as against those of
gold countries.
If China possesses in as high a degree as Japan,
and in some respects even in a higher degree, the
combination of natural resources, favourable oppor-
tunities, and working qualities required for the
development of powerful industries and sound
commercial activity, how is it that she has hitherto
lagged so far behind in the race ? There is, I
think, but one answer to this question. Misgovern-
ment has in almost every direction hampered the
spirit of individual initiative in China where it has
been stimulated in Japan. The ignorance and
arrogance of the official classes have scouted the
assistance of foreign capital and foreign brains for
172 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
the guidance and education of native enterprise, and
their rigid exclusivcness has closed against foreign
enterprise every door which they were not compelled
to leave open under the specific provisions of treaties
wrung out of them by sheer physical force. Their
greed has multiplied the exactions under which the
inland trade has been left to struggle at their mercy.
They have obstinately refused to equip the country,
or allow it to be equipped, with even the most
elementary appliances required by the conditions of
modern trade. Superstition has served as a con-
venient pretext for forbidding the construction of
railways and for keeping locked up in the bowels
of the earth the mineral treasures with which the
country abounds, lest the navvy's or miner's pick-
axe should disturb the mysterious spirits of earth
and water which lurk beneath the soil. The few
industrial or commercial undertakings in which
some of the shrewder or hungrier mandarins have
embarked are conducted in the narrowest spirit of
selfish monopoly. In fact, official China has looked
upon foreign trade as nothing but a vehicle for
foreign influence, and, true to her traditions of
hatred and contempt for the outside barbarians, she
has steadily opposed the force of inert resistance to
everything which might conduce to its expansion,
and Europe, taking her at her own valuation, has
hitherto allowed her "latent resources" to sleep
undisturbed in the custody of her " latent power."
Events, however, have moved rapidly within the
XIII THE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 173
last eighteen months. The Japanese war has
shattered the venerable imposture which so long
overawed the civilised world, and the sixth article of
the Treaty of Shimonoseki contains practically a
new charter for foreign industrial and commercial
enterprise in China. Not only does it assert and
confirm the right of foreigners to engage in all
kinds of manufacturing industries in the open cities,
towns, and ports of China, but it secures for all
goods thus manufactured the same privileged treat-
ment in respect to inland transit as for goods im-
ported from abroad. Of scarcely less importance
is the provision under which foreigners purchasing
goods in the interior or transporting merchandise
into the interior will in future have the right to
temporarily rent or hire warehouses for storage
without liability to any taxes or impositions. In-
dustrial undertakings would probably in any case
have remained, for the present, confined to the
open ports and towns to which the Treaty of
Shimonoseki limits them, but the whole of China is
now thrown open for the exchange and transport of
commodities under conditions which the Japanese,
at any rate, may be trusted not to allow Chinese
officialdom to defeat or evade. Nor is it to Japan
alone that the pressure of war has rendered China
more yielding. We have seen how France and
Russia have already worked, for their own purposes,
upon her helplessness. Great Britain has perhaps
been more slow to realise the opportunities of the
174 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
situation, but in one respect, at least, she promptly
recognised the necessity of not letting herself be
distanced by others. For various reasons we had
refrained from enforcing our right to import
machinery into China. As soon, however, as the
Treaty of Shimonoscki had conferred that right
upon the Japanese, who would certainly not be slow
to render it operative, the British Legation at
Peking demanded the immediate issue of instruc-
tions to the Chinese Customs authorities for the
removal of all the obstacles which they had hitherto
placed in the way of the importation of British
machinery, and three months ago, for the first time,
British machinery was admitted without let or
hindrance at Shanghai. Already on the banks ot
the river large native-owned cotton-mills and silk
filatures are working successfully, despite the
cramping influence of their mandarin proprietors,
and their tall chimneys seem already to indicate the
future site of the great industrial metropolis ot
the Far East, which, combining the advantages of
Manchester and Liverpool with the production at
its very gates of all the raw materials required for
its manufactures, can hardly fail some day to rival,
and perhaps outstrip, its Western prototypes. Nor
can that day be far distant. All that is wanted to
energise Chinese labour are foreign capital and
foreign organisation, and, now that the barrier of
Chinese ofificial obstructionism is being broken
down, foreign capital and foreign organisation will
XIII THE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 175
pour in. Of these, if we are true to ourselves
and to our traditions, we shall contribute our
legitimate share and reap a proportionate harvest.
One large cotton mill already in course of
erection represents the first fruits of British
local enterprise, and its success, which seems
to be assured beyond all possibility of doubt,
is expected to usher in an unprecedented era ot
industrial activity. Even in a country like
China activity is contagious, unless directly
paralysed by official obstruction. But, in presence
of the pressure which the Powers will probably no
longer shrink from applying both at the seat of the
central Government and at the provincial centres,
that obstruction must gradually relax, as indeed the
whole forces of Chinese resistance have already in
the last few months shown signs of weakening.
Rumours are afloat that the Chinese Government
has actually decided to commence the construction
of a regular system of railways, and, whether those
rumours in their present shape are founded or un-
founded, China will undoubtedly have either to
build railways herself or to see others build them for
her and in spite of her. With the growth of native
industries, with adequate means of communication,
and with treaty protection against the exactions of
inland transport, foreign trade must expand, if not
with the same rapidity as in Japan, with even greater
prospects of continuity and intensity. If nature
has made Japan rich, she has created China even
176 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
richer ; and, if the average value of foreign im-
ports consumed to-day by every Japanese amounts
to nearly $3 a head, an average consumption of less
than 80.60 per head in China can only represent a
fractional part of the potential purchasing power of
a country endowed with almost inexhaustible natural
wealth. China is to-day with regard to the possibilities
of foreign trade and industry still almost a virgin soil
of which we have only scratched the outlying fringe
and surface. Even so it yields us an annual trade
harvest of a gross value of close upon ^30,000,000.
What it may yield when we have obtained security
and facility of access to the whole area and have
applied to it modern methods of improvement and
development, it goes " beyond the dreams of
avarice " to conceive.
It is, at any rate, a field worth struggling for, and,
if we are not only to maintain, but to consolidate
and extend, the position which we already hold, we
shall not do it without a struggle. The days are
past when our industrial supremacy went un-
challenged and the whole trade and commerce of
the world seemed to gravitate towards us as by
some immutable law of nature. We have keen
competitors in our own European neighbours.
Another and no less keen competitor has sprung
up in the Far East. But out of this very competi-
tion arises a compensating increase in the whole
volume of trade, and, so long as our individual spirit
of enterprise does not slacken nor the national vigour
XIII THE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE OF CHINA 177
relax which is required to back it up, we have
no cause for despondency. No nation is better
equipped than ourselves for conquering a fair
share of the profusion of material advantag^es
which must accrue to the trade of the world from
the industrial and commercial development of the
Chinese Empire — an Empire whose population con-
stitutes nearly one-fifth of the estimated total of the
human race. Our language is paramount as the
only medium of intercourse between the peoples of
the Far East and of the West. We were the first
to break down the barriers of Chinese intolerance.
We have in our hands more than 60 per cent, of the
carrying trade by water. There is not a single
commercial centre where our commerce has not
struck older and deeper and firmer roots than that
of any other country. We are, in fact, the people
in possession. What we have to do is not only to
see that we are neither forcibly ejected nor squeezed
out by more subtle means, but also to guard care-
fully our prospective interests in an estate of
growing and perhaps immeasurable value. Those in-
terests are collectively those of the w^hole community
in an Empire built up as ours has been on industry
and commerce, and individually those of every work-
ing man for the produce of whose labour our foreign
markets must be maintained and extended. In no
part of the world is commercial power so directly
conditioned upon political power as in the Far East,
N
178 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap, xiii
and nowhere, therefore, should the rulers of the
British Empire be able to rely more implicitly upon
the support of the British democracy for the main-
tenance of our political power and with it of our
commercial power.
CHAPTER XIV
WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY
If, In the critical phase upon which it has now
entered, the Far Eastern Question must put to
the test all the highest qualities of British
statesmanship, no British Administration could
fortunately be placed in a better position to deal
with it vigorously and successfully than that to
which an overwhelming Parliamentary majority
fresh from the polls seems to assure a relatively
long and undisturbed tenure of office. During the
life of the present Parliament it will be within
the power of Lord Salisbury and his colleagues to
determine whether the course of events in the Far
East shall be so shaped as effectually to safeguard
our Imperial interests, actual and prospective,
political as well as commercial, or whether those
interests shall be allowed to drift, as has too often
been the case in the past, at the mercy of un-
expected accidents. Our position in the Far East
must be sustained, as it has largely been created,
by individual enterprise, but nothing would tend
N 2
iSo THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
to restore more fully the public confidence upon
which individual enterprise is conditioned than
some definite proof that her Majesty's Government
are acting in pursuance of a clear, comprehensive,
and well- considered policy which they are prepared
to carry through with unflinching determination.
What should be the lines of that policy it would
be presumptuous to indicate, as it must largely
affect and be largely affected by our relations in
other parts of the world with those Powers whose
more or less friendly rivalry we have to face in the
Far East. But it may not be inexpedient to draw
attention to a few points which impress themselves
most strongly on the mind of an impartial observer
on the spot. The idea that the alliance of China
in her present condition is worth having, or that it
can be secured by conciliatory methods of in-
dulgence and forbearance has been, it may be
hoped, finally exploded by the events of the last
twelvemonth. Whether the maintenance of the
Chinese Empire itself continues to be in the future,
as in the past, a matter of British interest is a
question to which China must be left to furnish the
answer by her own acts. If her helplessness is
such that she may at any moment lapse into a
mere puppet in the hands of Powers who will
use her for purposes detrimental to our own
interests, if she takes no steps to arrest the process
of internal decay which must ultimately produce
total and immediate collapse on the first pressure
XIV WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY i8i
from outside, we can hardly be expected to show
much concern for the merely nominal independence
and integrity of an empire which has survived
itself. But a Power so essentially conservative
and so profoundly interested in the preservation
of peace as England cannot wish to hasten a
dissolution fraught with so many possibilities of
international conflict. If, therefore, there is any
remnant of vital energy in China, we should not
forego a last opportunity of helping her to extend
her precarious lease of life. Not a few of the more
influential among the Peking officials recognise in
a more or less crude fashion that for the re-
organisation of her army and navy, for the con-
solidation of her financial credit, and for the
development of some of her resources, China must
have recourse to European assistance. They
realise that, had she retained Captain Lang's
services and extended their sphere as he sug-
gested, her ironclads might not have been reduced
to vainly seeking refuge in harbour from a Japanese
fleet inferior in everything but skill, courage, and
discipline. If the experience of the war has really
taught her that much, it is obviously inexpedient
that the task of creating a new navy for her should
be allowed to devolve upon any other Power than
ourselves, and not less so that any English officer
should be allowed to undertake it without ample
guarantees for the full and unrestricted exercise
of executive and administrative authority without
iS2 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
which the most elementary conditions of efficiency
and discipline cannot possibly be secured. The
arrangement under which a certain number of
Chinese are to be trained in Russian military
schools and attached to the Russian Army seems
to indicate that Russia is quite prepared to under-
take the task of reorganising the land forces of
China as far as it may suit her own purposes. But
unless the Peking Government has both the will
and the power to centralise the administration of
the army, the arrangements which it may enter
into will presumably only affect the troops of the
home provinces adjoining the capital, and the
viceroys of the outlying provinces will continue, as
in the past, to carry out their own particular views,
like Chang Chih Tung at Nanking, who has enlisted
military instructors from Germany on his own
account, and in the vast majority of cases they will
most probably do nothing at all. In dealing with
the finances of China, I have already shown that
to insure the elasticity of revenue required to
meet the charges of the war China will probably
be compelled to transfer the collection of some
other of her revenues to a reliable European ad-
ministration, such as that which already exists
under Sir Robert Hart for the Imperial Maritime
Customs. In the formation of any new adminis-
tration on that model, or in any extension of Sir
Robert Hart's administration, the preponderating
interests of British trade and shipping, which
XIV WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY 183
actually contribute 15 per cent, of the total revenue
of China, entitle us to the fullest participation.
Franco-Russian loans, past or future, cannot be
allowed to serve as an excuse for excluding British
influence from the administration of revenue
created, sustained, and developed mainly by British
enterprise. Indeed, should the next Chinese loan
be raised, as now seems probable, in London and
Berlin upon the security of the Imperial Maritime
Customs, it will behove us rather to increase than
to relax our control over those revenues in view of
the prior lien already granted upon them to Russia
and France. Second mortgagees are in the nature of
things more closely interested than first mortgagees
in maintaining and developing to the utmost the
security successively pledged to both classes of
creditors. No less important is it that in regard
to the construction of railways, the opening of
mines, industrial enterprises, and all other measures
calculated to develop the immense natural resources
of China, England shall strenuously resist any
attempt to defeat the treaty provisions under
which she enjoys the most-favoured-nation treat-
ment. Apart from the legitimate profits which
British capital and British industry may properly
expect to derive from participation in such under-
takings, the exclusive control by other Powers of
the railways and coalfields of China would be
fraught in the future with very serious conse-
quences, military as well as commercial.
i84 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
That we are fully justified in henceforth treating
China without fear or fav^our she has herself been at
pains to prove. Whether she ultimately ratifies it
or not, in attempting to sign away to France by the
Tongking Convention of June last territories which
she had solemnly covenanted a little more than a
year ago never to transfer to a third Power without
our consent, she deliberately turned her back upon
the policy of very one-sided friendship which we
had hitherto pursued towards her. If the action of
French diplomacy in this matter was unfriendly,
that of the Chinese Government constituted a flag-
rant violation of our treaty rights for which we are
entitled to exact the most substantial compensation.
The British Government intends, it is stated, to
resume immediate possession of some at least of the
Burmese dependencies which were given in trust to
China by the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1894,
and it would be clearly justified in declaring that
Convention to be altogether annulled by the Chinese
violation of its fundamental conditions. But, besides
this, there are many questions connected with the
regulation of our boundaries in the upper valley of
the Irawadi, with the adequate defence of our posi-
tions on the mainland opposite Hong-kong, with the
opening of the West river in Kwang-tung and of
other districts important to British trade, which are
awaiting settlement between ourselves and the
Chinese, and we shall neither abate their hostility
nor reconquer the wholesome respect which they
XIV WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY 185
had apparently ceased to entertain for us by toler-
ating the passive resistance which is the Alpha and
Omega of her statesmanship. China hates all
foreio^n Powers, but there are some whom she fears
and others whom she despises. It is not by per-
manently taking rank amongst the latter in her
estimation that we can hope either to guard our own
interests or to exercise upon China for her own
good the material pressure which can alone induce
her to deploy whatever recuperative powers she
may still possess. One can only note with satis-
faction that in this respect the situation already
shows some improvement in Peking, and that
during the last months of his official sojourn in
China, Sir Nicholas O'Conor has found several
opportunities of teaching the Chinese that England
is not yet to be treated as a qiiantite n^gligeable.
Nor should China be allowed to forget that, if
others have a claim upon her "gratitude" for
their intervention in her favour after the close
of the war, we have an equally good claim
upon her "gratitude" for the intervention which
localised hostilities during the progress of the war.
If Shanghai and Canton and the other central
and southern ports of China remained unmolested
by the Japanese fleet, it was due solely to the
friendly but firm representations which we made
at Tokio.
But it is not China alone that we have to deal
with. France and Russia bulk laro-e in the back-
i86 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
ground. The policy of the latter may not be in-
spired by any deliberate animosity toward Great
Britain, except inasmuch as our influence is exer-
cised, in her opinion, to shut her off from that access
to the open sea which she has hitherto vainly
sought, from the shores of the Mediterranean to
those of the Pacific. Directly, or indirectly, we
have, so far, blocked the road against her in the
Levant and in India, and, headed off in both direc-
tions, she has thrown herself with her full weight
upon the Far East. With regard to the precise
nature of the secret agreement which accompanied
the Franco-Russian loan we are still in the dark, but
there is every reason to believe that such an agree-
ment exists, and that, in spite of skilfully-worded
ddvientis, it contains provisions under which Russia
will have the right to use Port Arthur as a naval
and coaling station for her fleets, and not only to
run her Trans-Siberian railway through Manchuria,
but also to connect it ultimately with an ice-free
port to be subsequently determined, and which may or
may not turn out to be Port Arthur, either on the
Gulf of Chi-li or on that of Leao-tong. For the
moment, and possibly as a pledge for the ulterior
fulfilment of some such engagements, Russia seems
to be making herself at home in the Bay of
San-Kau, an equally convenient and important
strategical position to the south of the Gulf of
Chi-li at the extreme point of the Shan-Tung
peninsula. As far as China is concerned, Man-
XIV WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY 187
churia, of course, lies entirely at the niercy of
the Russians, and when the Leao-ton^ peninsula
has been restored to her, she will be nothing
more than a tenant holdinof on sufferance from
the Power which has been chiefly instrumental in
ousting the Japanese. Whether in so vast a field
room might not be found to satisfy Russia's natural
ambition to possess a port open all the year round
to her fleets without either precipitating the dis-
membermient of the Chinese Empire and the general
scramble which must ensue, or entirely displacing
the balance of power to the detriment of others, is a
question which cannot be answered until Russia has
frankly disclosed the limit of her demands. Much
must depend in this respect, from our point of view,
upon the extent to w^hich she has determined to
identify her policy in the Far East with that of
France. For it is, unfortunately, difficult to believe
that the main object of French policy there, as else-
where, is not -one of settled hostility to England.
On no other hypothesis is it possible to explain the
abrupt refusal of the French jNIinister in China to
grant the Tsungli-Yamen time even to consider the
British protest against the proposed cession of part
of the Kiang-hung province to France before sign-
ing the Convention of June 20. Nor have the
organs of French colonial expansion and others of a
more responsible character hesitated to describe the
Tongking Convention with China as only an instal-
ment of the policy which is designed to carry the
i88 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
French tricolour up the valley of the Mekong into
Yun-nan and Szu-chuan, and ultimately drive in a
French wedge between British Burma and the
valley of the Yang-tsze-kiang, the natural strong-
hold of British influence in China. The French
advance from the south would thus meet the
Russian advance from the north, and between the
two England would be finally squeezed out.
Such a policy is one in which Great Britain could
never acquiesce without abdicating her position in
the Far East. For if there is one region in China
with which the trade and commerce of our Empire
is more closely bound up than with any other, it is
the basin watered by the great river which, de-
scendinsf from the borders of our Burmese dominion,
flows into the Yellow Sea close to Shanghai, the
greatest emporium of British commerce in the Far
East. Nothing probably would be better calculated
to arrest any plans which may exist elsewhere for
hastening on the dismemberment of China, or even
to restore a little backbone to China herself, than
for us to make it clearly understood that we could
under no circumstances allow the valley of the
Yang-tsze to pass under the control of another
Power.
It is much to be regretted that, while Russia
has neglected no opportunity of consolidating her
relations with the Mongolian and Manchurian pro-
vinces which march with her Siberian frontier, we
have hitherto done little to bring the Chinese
XIV WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY 189
provinces of Yun-nan and Szu-chuan into closer
contact with our Burmese possessions. It is only
within the last few months that a junction has
been finally established between our Burmese
telegraph system at Bhamo and the Chinese
station at Tal-i-fu. Russia on the other hand,
by a convention concluded in August, 1892, has
already secured a twofold junction between the
Chinese lines from Tien-tsin and her stations in
the Amur province, the one between Ninguta
and Vladivostok, and the other between Tsitsihar
and Blagovestchensk, besides the construction of
a line from Peking to Kiakhta, via Kalgan, Urga,
and Maimatchin. Another junction still further
west is imminent, as a Chinese line already
reaches Su-chau in Kan-su, whence it is to be
carried across Dzungaria towards Semipalatinsk,
That the Russians will insist, with or without
the consent of China, upon carrying their Trans-
Siberian railway along the most convenient line
of country for themselves, and establishing a
terminus on the open sea free from the re-
strictions which nature imposes upon Vladivostok,
is obvious, and there are already indications that
as soon as the great northern Trans-Asiatic line
is completed they will turn their attention to
the extension eastwards of their southern line,
which might easily be prolonged from its pre-
sent terminus at Tashkent to Kuldja, and thence
across the heart of Mongolia to Peking, or from
I90 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
Kuldja northwards towards the upper valley of
the Yenisei.
Meanwhile, what has Encrland done ? She has
wasted years in discussing the relative merits of
different routes for approaching South- West China
from Burma, and after finally recognising the
insuperable difficulties of the line originally favoured
by the Indian Government from Bhamo to Tal-i-fu,
she has adopted, not the line which every con-
sideration, technical as well as political, appeared
to recommend for a great Indo-Chinese trunk line
from Moulmein up the Salween valley across Kiang-
kheng to Szumao, but a small branch line from
Mandalay through Theebaw to the Kunlon ferry
on the Salween, and thence on to the Chinese
frontier at Mungting, and another running also
from Mandalay up the valley of the Irawadi to
Mogaung, whence connection by road would have
to be established with Tal-i-fu and Yun-nan-fu.
Both these lines will doubtless prove useful, but
they must be looked upon rather as makeshifts
than as the adequate solution of a question which
has for years past been repeatedly urged upon
the attention of successive Governments, Can one
doubt, for instance, that if the construction of the
Moulmein- Kiang-kheng-Szumao railway had been
taken in hand ten years ago, there would never
have been room for the difficulties which have
recently arisen between ourselves and the French
with regard to the Upper Mekong Valley? To-day
XIV WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY 191
the French contest our rights to part of the
territory through which thatHne would have passed ;
they have wrested another part froni the Chinese ;
they are establishing a consulate at Szumao, where
we are still unrepresented ; they have acquired for
the development of the mineral resources Yun-nan
and for the construction of railways facilities which
cannot fail to pave the way for the political
absorption of those regions ; and two influential
French missions are already on their way out to
study on the spot the new line of country marked
out for French expansion.
The same fatal procrastination has been displayed
with regard to another question which has been
even more constantly and urgently impressed upon
the British Government — -viz., the appointment of
commercial Attaches in the Far East. While every
public and private report has drawn attention for
years past to the dangers which threaten British
trade and industry from the increasing fierceness of
European competition as well as from the growth of
native industries, the British Government has taken
no steps to procure even an adequate investigation
of the question. The ordinary agencies at its com-
mand are admittedly insufficient. Consular officers
may take the keenest and most intelligent interest
in all matters which affect British trade and industry
in their own districts, but their knowledge and ex-
perience are in the nature of things limited ; and
the diplomatic staff of the Legations, which both in
192 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
China and Japan are undermanned, has neither the
time nor the special qualifications required to deal
in an exhaustive and comprehensive fashion with
the materials at its disposal, still less to undertake
independent inquiries, which in many cases could
only be satisfactorily conducted on the spot. It is
surely not too much to ask that in countries where
our present'trade amounts to some 40 millions ster-
ling per annum there should be some special officer
appointed to watch over interests of such magnitude.
Our relations with the Far East are primarily and
essentially commercial, and their political import-
ance is merely the result of their commercial im-
portance. It is nothing less than a public scandal
that our political officers should be denied the assist-
ance of officials properly qualified to give them
responsible advice on the very matters which ought
to inform and govern their policy, and this at a time
when every other Government is straining its polit-
ical influence to the utmost for the furtherance of its
commercial interests. It is not necessary or desir-
able that diplomatists should act as touts and agents
for every commercial traveller clamouring for orders
and contracts, but it is indispensable that they should
have at their disposal for the legitimate protection
and promotion of trade and commerce technical
advice of the highest order.
Scarcely less unfortunate has been the absence of
such technical advice in military and naval matters.
Had the British Legations in China and Japan been
XIV WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY 193-.
kept regularly informed by experts of the real con-
dition of the armaments of both countries, we might
have been spared the surprise and embarrassment
produced by the unexpected collapse of China's re-
sistance. With the establishments which we possess
at Hong-kong and Singapore it should not be diffi-
cult to organise an efficient intelligence department
on the spot, even if financial considerations preclude
the appointment of military and naval Attaches from
home. It may be hoped also that in future the
British fleet in Chinese waters will be kept up to
such a standard of strength that its superiority
over any other fleet shall not turn mainly, as
was the case during the most critical period of
1895, upon the somewhat speculative question of
the qualitative superiority of one particular English
battleship over the quantitative superiority of the
Russian battleships.
If we are to hold our own in the Far East it is
upon ourselves alone that we must rely. There are,
indeed, Powers for whose co-operation we might
legitimately hope against any violent attempt in
other quarters to monopolise an excessive share of
the vast field which is opening up for human enter-
prise. The United States, for instance, have larger
and more direct interests in the Far East than any-
where else outside of the American continent, and
one can hardly imagine any circumstances in which
those interests would conflict with our own. There,
if anywhere, might be laid the foundations of that
o
194 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap.
close understanding between the two great branches
of the Anglo-Saxon race which it must be the object
of every far-seeing statesman on both sides of the
Atlantic to promote and extend. Nor in the long
run should the interests of Germany, in spite of fierce
commercial rivalry, prove antagonistic to our own.
What she chiefly wants is what British influence has
everywhere and always been exerted to secure — viz.,
open markets and free play for commercial and in-
dustrial activity. Even if Germany contemplates
the acquisition of a coaling station off the Chinese
coast which would serve as a point d'appui for her fleet
in the event of a sudden declaration of war overtaking
it in Far Eastern waters, this is not a desire which
can be denounced as on the face of it unreasonable,
so long as in its fulfilment she shows a proper regard
for British interests and treaty rights. Nor is there
the slightest reason why we should bear her a per-
manent grudge for having elected to join hands with
Russia and France in their intervention in favour of
China whilst we preferred to hold aloof. There can
be no doubt as to the sincerity of the desire which
she so earnestly expressed at the time to see Eng-
land adopt the same course. There was nothing of
hostility to her in our refusal to do so, nor of hostility
to us in her abiding by her own decision. In fact,
inasmuch as Germany undoubtedly exercised a mod-
erating influence on her somewhat reluctant part-
ners, we at least can have no cause to regret her
determination.
XIV WANTED, AN IMPERIAL POLICY 195
There are many circumstances which, as I have
already explained, should draw England and Japan
much closer together than in the past ; but, though
the interests of both countries would seem to pre-
scribe a common course of action, they cannot be
looked upon as wholly identical. There are some,
indeed, who think that Japan may not be proof
against the temptation of coming to a direct under-
standing with Russia for a division of the spoils of
China. It is certainly remarkable that within a few
months after Japan had been warned that her
presence in the Leao-tong peninsula was an intoler-
able menace to the safety of the Chinese Empire,
and before she has actually evacuated it, the most
responsible organ on foreign affairs in France should
openly invite Japan " as a natural co-heiress of the
Chinese Empire" to come to terms with Russia "as
to the division of the Sick Man's inheritance, which
may be already looked upon as well-nigh open."
Whether Japanese statesmen will listen to such
cynical proposals must ultimately depend in a great
measure upon the reliance which they may feel able
to place upon the friendship of England.
Meanwhile, the policy which France and Russia
have been lately carrying through with a high hand
at Peking is calculated to create legitimate appre-
hension in this country, for it has so far indicated
only too clearly a disposition to ignore our traditional
rights and position. But in so extensive a field it
should not be impossible for every Power to find
196 THE FAR EASTERN QUESTION chap, xiv
adequate scope for its own activity without placing
undue restrictions on that of its neighbours. Un-
fortunately, in the present mood of French politicians,
the governing principle of French policy all over the
world seems to be rather to deal a real or imaginary
blow at British interests than merely to promote
those of France, and such a temper is hard to deal
with. There is, however, no sufficient reason at
present to believe that Russia is definitely pledged
to any such policy. England and Russia are, after
all, the two great Asiatic empires of the world, and
if they have been able to amicably settle their
differences in Central Asia they should be equally
able to settle their differences in Eastern Asia by
the exercise of similar frankness and forbearance.
"Live and let live" is the only principle upon
which the scramble for Africa could possibly have
been conducted without plunging Europe into
sanguinary struggles ; and whether the scramble for
the Far East be near at hand or whether it may yet
be averted, the same principle can alone secure a
pacific solution of the Far Eastern question. Great
Britain must, at any rate, be prepared for all events.
She cannot trust for the defence of rights so well
defined and of interests so vital as hers to the mere
contingency of doubtful alliances and understandings.
Still less can she surrender them without shaking to
its very foundations the whole structure of political
power and commercial enterprise upon which her
world Empire has been built up.
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