Francis E. Clark

“ Dynasties may come and dynasties may go, but corruption and ignorance, greed and superstitions, reverence for a dead and outgrown Past go on forever. The individual Chinaman must be transformed before the nation can be transformed. A mere change of dynasty, a mere division of the nation between stronger, greedy nations will not usher in China’s Golden Day. ”

“ But, when one is upon the spot, though this outcome seems most desirable, it does not seem to be a solution of the real problem of the regeneration of China. It is not certain that, if the Powers carve up China among themselves, the real China, the people of China, would be materially improved. The nation would be still the same stolid, superstitious, ignorant mass of unprogressive humanity that it is to-day. The lives of the common people would still be ruled by the Dead Hand of the Past. They would still worship their ancestors and waste their substance on incense and mock-money. ”

“ The dead hand of Confucius rules the Empire more powerfully than any other, but all the long line of teachers and sages who have followed have added the weight of their skeleton fingers.
It is not right in China to aspire to surpass your father, still less to be the equal of your grandfather, still less to approach the virtue of your great-great-grandfather. ”

“ These graves are the most sacred objects in all China. Ancestor worship is the sum and substance of her religion. Before these graves are burned millions of dollars’ worth of mock-money—strips of paper cut to imitate cash, or tissue paper made up into the semblance of blocks of gold and silver bullion. ”

“ Social reforms, which extended even to the unbinding of women’s feet, were to be inaugurated, and a hundred millions of women, whose cramped and crushed feet compel them to hobble as helpless cripples through life, would forever have blessed the memory of Kuang Hsu, could he have had his way. The whole community would have been thrown open to friendly foreign nations and a Christian code of laws in harmony with Christendom, if foreign Powers would guarantee the integrity of China. One of the most remarkable reforms was to be in the whole system of education. ”

“ The Confucian classics for centuries have kept their iron grasp on educated China. To be an educated man in the “Middle Kingdom,” for two thousand years, has simply meant to be possessed of a prodigious memory, and to be able to write a useless essay on some remote and academic theme derived from Confucius. All this, in the mind of the Emperor and his advisers, was to he changed in a year. Western sciences, Western languages, Western history were to be taught. Even the temples might be used for schools of Western learning. ”

“ I have dwelt upon this exaggerated reverence given to the dead, because it is characteristic of the people, and because it accounts, when its root principle is understood, for the pitiable state of weakness and decay to which China has been reduced, and, indirectly, for the revolution and massacres which have recently horrified the world. ”

“ The young Emperor, whom we all believed to be a mere puppet, bred in the harem, and studiously kept in ignorance, the passive instrument of his strong-minded aunt, suddenly showed himself an intelligent man, fit to be a ruler, conscious of the humiliation his country experienced at the hands of Japan, and anxious to render such a humiliation impossible again by the adoption of reforms of all kinds. ”

“ In making a mile with his heavy burden on his back, the perspiring coolie must often travel two miles, because the road-makers have made the highway a series of zigzags, the better to bewilder the spirits of the dead. ”

“ Said one of America’s most successful and sagacious Ministers Plenipotentiary to me, when speaking of another Asiatic nation: “The most potent force for the uplift of this country is not trade or commerce or diplomacy, but Christian missions. The missionaries are doing more for this land than all other foreigners combined.” This is eminently true of China. I see little hope for China in any other direction. This force transforms character rather than changes dynasties, and, without a transformed character, China can never be regenerated. ”

“ It is also well known in China that a spirit cannot climb a hill. So, oftentimes, the road goes out of its way to surmount a hill, and every over-loaded, two-footed and four-footed beast of burden that follows that road must also go out of its way to climb that hill, and drag its burden up and down the steep incline. ”

“ In a day, almost, this society attained threatening proportions. The Boxers themselves are, for the most part, a poor, deluded lot of country louts who believe that by some gymnastics and incantations and by a species of hypnotism, they can render themselves invulnerable to foreign bullets and all foreign weapons. Their significance does not consist in their valor or even in their numbers, but in the fact that they are symptomatic of the ignorance and superstition of the ruling forces of the nation to-day. ”

“ All the reactionaries, all the mandarins, whose official heads were endangered by the new reforms, most of the scholars who had been brought up on the old system, who could see no good in Western learning; all the priests who feared for their livelihood and their temples; and many of the common people, whose superstitious hatred of foreigners had been skillfully worked upon, and who at least feared for their precious queues, were upon her side, and she was allowed to work her wicked will upon the handful of defenseless reformers. ”

“ The recent revolution, with all its heartrending accompaniments of murder, siege and suffering, such as the world has not known since it was shocked by the Indian Mutiny, more than a generation ago, are all the result of the irrepressible conflict between the Past and the Present, the Dead and the Living. ”

“ Not only is he obliged to pay a considerable portion of his poor pittance for incense to propitiate the spirits, and for mock-money to pay the way of his dead forbears on the other side of the Styx, but fear of the spirits and a desire to humor them makes every day’s toil immeasurably harder than it otherwise need be.
There is scarcely a straight road of any length in any Chinese city, because it is thought that the spirits cannot turn a corner, but will go straight on in a given direction when they get started. ”

“ In China, though gunpowder has been known for centuries, soldiers still practice for a military degree with bows and arrows, and perfect themselves in the use of the spear and broadsword. Though China has had the mariner’s compass for numberless years, her junks still crawl along the shore, and she has no steamship lines that launch out into the deep and cross the seas. ”

“ The last three years have been momentous ones in the history of the Celestial Empire. The Dead and the Living have been in mortal combat, and, strange to say, the Dead have won, at least a temporary victory. Ancient conservatism, represented by the astute and utterly unprincipled Empress Dowager, and modern progress, represented by a well meaning though apparently weak young Emperor, first fought a battle royal, and the Empress won ”

“ Nothing is studied but the learning of the Ancients. The examination halls, with their ten thousand cells, witness only the writing of useless essays or impotent poems on some classic theme. Proficiency in the study of neither science, law, medicine, language, theology nor art is tested within their gloomy enclosures, but simply the ability to compose a stilted sentence in ancient style. ”

“ I am no prophet, but I confess that I see light in but one quarter of the heavens. China may be speedily divided between the great nations of the world, because of the rottenness and incapacity of her own government ”

“ But the trouble with all these inventions in China was that they, too, were ruled by the Dead Hand. It was proper for a wise man to make them, but it was entirely improper for a wiser man to improve upon them. They must always remain in the primitive state in which they left the original discoverer’s hand. ”

“ There are also a multitude of Sunday schools, Christian Endeavor societies, schools for the training of Bible women, orphanages, and institutions for the blind and the deaf and dumb, all under auspices of Christian men and women. The aggregate of this work is immense. The story can never be told in print, nor the good accomplished computed in figures. There is no such force at work to-day for the regeneration of China as the army of missionaries sent out from America and Great Britain. ”

“ Every country store in China, whatever else it lacks, is altogether likely to have a supply of mock-money for sale. A moderate estimate by reliable statisticians makes the amount of good money paid for this mock-money to be burned at graves each year at least four hundred millions of dollars, while other expenses of ancestor worship would probably double this estimate. ”

“ But when she handed over the reins of government to the Emperor, Kuang Hsu, a few years a6o, China’s rebellion had been put down, Kashgar had been recovered from Russia, and the nation was at peace with all the Powers.” Had the Empress Dowager only been as good as she was great, as enlightened as she is strong, the history of China in the twentieth century would be very different from what it is now likely to be. But she is as bad as she is powerful, as unscrupulous as she is shrewd, and the poor Reformers had short shrift when she really decided to put them down. ”

“ They are silent when they are questioned, and bold when tortured. Whoever smells the poison will die immediately; you must be very cautious in drinking the water. Those who have seen this notice must make it known; it will avert the calamity of the people. ”

“ The common people use Buddhist forms at funerals and often offer Buddhist prayers, and many intelligent men are fond of discussing Buddhism. When it talks of a holy life, of the unseen, of removing the passions, etc., it is a good thing. ”

“ He read translations of foreign books, gathered round him a band of young reformers, and issued decree after decree, not one of them as we have shown before, impracticable, all of them promising, if carried out, to be of real advantage to the Empire. ”

“ This act of filial piety may have been justified by his unusual wealth, but it is often emulated by the poor, who subject themselves and their posterity to grinding poverty for the sake of honoring the manes of their ancestors. ”