Lady Florence Mary Cecil

“ There will be a terrible moment when, with all the insolence of youth, the young man refuses to believe in God or in a devil, and rushes into every wild anarchical and socialistic scheme to satisfy his craving for action.
It is a terrible moment, and one which one sees rapidly developing in Japan and among the Westernised Chinese; but beyond that terrible period there dawns a brighter day when China will reassert its natural sentiment and will accept Christianity as the only reasonable religion that is consonant with modern science and a belief in the spiritual world. ”

“ The truth is that it is neither a question of cost nor of efficiency which makes the Chinese architecture despised; it is part of the great movement which expresses itself in stone and brick—a movement which is tending to bring the Eastern countries into misery—a movement which is planting in the East all that is commonplace, all that is hideous in the West, and that is destroying all that is beautiful in the East both in thought and colour and form. ”

“ The condition of the country is such that anywhere a rising may occur, and the fire once alight may be hard to extinguish; the result of the conflagration must be that the powers must enter to secure the safety of their nationals.
Altogether poor China is in a dangerous position in regard to her foreign relations; all round her echoes the cry, "You must reform or disappear." Every railway that is made, every loan that is floated, every trade that is opened up, bring to China increased responsibilities in her foreign relations. ”

“ Hitherto our civilisation has grown richer; every race it has conquered has added beauty to its traditions and nobility to its ideals. We may look forward with hope, if not with confidence, to its future. But if this momentous change in the history of the world is to be well directed, it can only be done by men of sincere Christian faith; and if the civilisation is to augment these benefits to mankind, it can only be by being more fully endued with the Christian ethics on which its whole greatness depends. ”

“ I am certain that those people who are proud of the culture of their kitchen gardens would be surprised and ashamed if they could compare them with those of a Chinaman. One passes garden after garden with rows of plants placed at even distances and every plant exactly the right distance in those rows, with never a weed to be seen all over the whole plot. Again in handicraft there is the same industry; you buy Chinese embroidery for a song in such a place as Changsha. ”

“ Thus it was the combination of these facts, with the threatening attitude of Western powers, which made all the prophecies of men who knew the East untrue. No one understood the vital power of the movement in Japan. If, thirty years ago, some one had written a book to prove that Japan would one day defeat Russia, people would have laughed at the suggestion, and the authority of people who had lived in the East all their lives would have been quoted to prove that an Eastern race could never fully accept Western civilisation. ”

“ When we were chatting over the revolutionaries and talking about a certain doctor dodging in and out of China at the risk of his life, I said that I wondered that there was any difficulty at all for a man who was bred in the country wandering where he liked, and I was assured that such was the organisation of the Chinese Government that they could lay hands even in the remotest village on anybody if they required him, and that the only way a revolutionary could hope to escape arrest was by a most perfect and complete disguise. ”

“ No man of any feeling or any conscience could pass indifferently by a single individual eating the berries of a deadly plant, unconscious that they were poison. What shall be said, then, if we allow, not only one individual but a fourth of the population of the world, to eat of a deadly poison which must deprive them of all happiness and of life, which must condemn them by millions to the misery of the very blackest darkness, where the only motives known are selfishness, lust, pride, and cruelty, for this is what certainly will happen to China if she accepts the materialism of the West. ”

“ Nowhere is the transitional period through which China is passing more obvious than in the cities of China; many towns are still completely Chinese, but as you approach the ports you find more and more Western development. The contrast between towns is extremely marked. Shanghai or Tientsin are Western towns and centres of civilisation; the difference between them and such towns as Hangchow or Ichang is very great. The true Chinese city is not without its beauty—in fact, in many ways it is a beautiful and wonderful place. But to appreciate it eyes only are wanted, and a nose is a misfortune. ”

“ Statesmen seriously say that three or four months' extra study will enable the educated Chinaman to learn all that is necessary of Western civilisation, and then those who have acquired this knowledge can return to China and teach their fellow-countrymen; and it is impossible to convince the Chinese that the uniting together of two different webs of thought is a matter of extreme difficulty, and, it may be added, of extreme risk. The pleasing dream that you can arbitrarily select the good points of West and East and weave them into one is the very reverse of the truth. ”

“ Still for good or for evil the system was there, and long before our own new departure in education, the Chinese were quite accustomed to the idea that the boy who had sufficient ability might climb the ladder of learning, from class to class, from school to school, till at last he took the coveted Hanlin Degree. So high a value did the Chinese place on education, that it was possible, and it did indeed happen, that boys of the very humblest parentage climbed that ladder till they reached the most exalted positions. ”

“ If it should happen that the Western world should neglect the Chinaman when it has the opportunity of teaching and directing him, longing as he is to learn about Western civilisation, the punishment of the West will be that she will, in years to come, be influenced for evil by the power of the great Celestial Empire. If, on the other hand, the East should turn towards Christianity, and, taught by Christianity, should learn to live a higher life, the example of her faith and of her morality will in years to come react beneficially on the Western world. ”

“ But fashion, issuing her capricious orders, has no office, no clerks, no printed forms that have to be filled up to secure obedience, yet her subjects yield such willing service that they seek for information from every quarter as to the nature of her commands, and when they know them, they count neither money nor comfort to be of importance compared with obedience to their mistress. The world, while it wonders at its own submission, enlarges or reduces its clothes, alters its head-gear, and further, will even change its manners, its speech, and its thoughts. ”

“ As the pupil goes through the mission school he learns within its walls to shake himself free from the haunting fear of demons which besets every Chinaman; he has slowly realised that God is holy, good and loving, and has either accepted Christianity or stands on the threshold of the formal acceptance; he has reached the end of the curriculum of the school or college and his brilliancy demands a higher education. Attracted by the reputation of Tokio, he goes to its University, and there he finds himself in an atmosphere where all the destructive thought of Europe grows rankly ”

“ Yes, Shanghai on a spring afternoon is a most interesting place; and yet as you turn your eyes to the river and catch sight of the dark grey warship, you realise that beneath all this peace and busy commerce lies the fear of the grim realities of war. China may assimilate the adjuncts of Western life, but she will never welcome the Western. The racial gulf that divides them is far too deep. ”

“ But I fear the system of slavery continues very commonly all over China, and such a philanthropic effort as the Shanghai Slave Refuge can touch but a very small proportion of them. Probably when the little slaves are destined to be wives to their mistresses' sons they are treated less cruelly, and though employed as household drudges, do not live actively unhappy lives.
Without stating that women as a whole are miserable, I think it would be no exaggeration to say that they are infinitely less happy than their Western sisters. Many of the national customs militate against their happiness. ”

“ The desire for radical change is never so much to be dreaded as when it attacks the home life of a nation. That quiet life so often hidden away because of its very sacredness by the Eastern races is like everything else in China disturbed by the introduction of Western civilisation, and in no other part of human life will its two different sides be more apparent. ”

“ The materialist will certainly retort, "So he has taught you to err." Confucianism must fall before Western materialism. I do not speak of Buddhism, for that is falling so quickly that its influence may be said to be almost gone. China will be left stripped of religion, robbed of her old ideas, and not clothed with new ones, wandering into all the misery and humiliation that vice and sin can bring upon mankind, till the curse of her millions in misery will go out against the harsh unfeeling West, who could leave her thus blind and helpless without a guide. ”

“ To the University would accrue the great gain of having a supply of properly prepared pupils coming into it from the mission schools, one of the causes of disappointment of ill-considered University schemes being that there is no proper provision for a supply of pupils. In the West there are numerous secondary schools, and any University can easily find a sufficient number of pupils properly grounded in knowledge. In the East to erect a University without feeding schools is like building a house in the Chinese fashion roof first. ”

“ Can one wonder that the Chinese are liable to misunderstand the West, and were it not for the saintly life of many missionaries, the high character and strict justice of our Consuls—yes, and the admirable discipline and management of such great undertakings as that of Butterfield and Swire—the evil would be incurable; but though there are many specimens of the bad, there are also not a few men who by their lives have testified before the Chinese to the greatness of our social and moral traditions and to the religion by which they are inspired. ”

“ Considering that the land is Chinese soil, one cannot but wonder that any one who had dealings with the Chinese should allow so ill-mannered a notice to be put up. No Chinese gentleman would object for a moment if the notice had been to the effect that unclean persons and beggars should be excluded from the gardens; but to exclude the cultured Chinese merchant who is every whit as clean as his Western neighbour, or to exclude the respectable people of the middle class whose orderly behaviour is beyond suspicion, is as unreasonable as it is regrettable. ”

“ It is most regrettable when liberty is exchanged for tyranny, when the acceptance of one opinion involves the persecution of another, when Christians not only differ but persecute and thwart each other's efforts. This may be an evil in our own land, an evil which we hope will soon pass away, but in China that evil does not exist except between the Roman and the non-Roman bodies. ”

“ As to the spiritual ideals in Chinese architecture, who can doubt them when they look at some of the pagodas that the reverence of Buddhism has produced. These pagodas tell in every line of a nation that would reach up above mere utilitarianism to higher thoughts. The uselessness of the pagoda which so often annoys the practical Englishman is one of its chief merits. It stands there in all its beauty pleading with mankind for a love of beauty for its own sake and a belief in a beautiful spirit world. The whole of Buddhist thought is intimately connected with the love of beauty. ”

“ CHAPTER XIX MOVEMENT IN KOREA AND MANCHURIA
One of the movements which will affect Christianity all over the East has had its origin in Korea. Just as the suffering and miserable heart of the individual man is that which Christianity finds most suitable for its home, so it is with a nation. It is at the moment of national adversity and humiliation that religious movements most readily rise. Korea had looked upon herself as the equal of Japan. From Korea came much of the civilisation which adorned Japan before the great Western movement. ”

“ A candidate who always disregards justice is universally condemned; but a candidate who wilfully offends powerful people, who is not prepared to give and take, to sacrifice a conviction here, to push forward a little beyond the line of justice there, is equally unable to gain the suffrages of the voters; and in China the judge stands in the same position as the candidate does in England. ”