John Stuart Thomson

“ The trees and lakes of the city and suburbs are conspicuous, because all Chinese buildings, except pagodas, are not over two stories in height, and do not dwarf the lovely landscape.
There is one dead foreign city in China, Cathay’s “Deserted Village”, immortal Port Arthur. Where are now the streets of palatial Renaissance palaces which eight years ago nestled under Golden Hill and lined the bund of the Eastern Port? Where are the massed battalions of Alexeieff’s troops, white-capped, white-tunicated and high-booted, which used to dress ranks on the broad parade ground behind Golden Hill? ”

“ China is the home of that nonsputtering, cold vegetable tallow that makes the only perfect lantern candles. The silver shops rival those of Hongkong, Nanking and Soochow, but beware of the German and Japanese machine-made imitation. The artist only can put his soul and a luck message for you into what he makes slowly by hand; anything else is not an objet d’art. There are very fine bronze statues in Shanghai, and the pottery stores are a delight. ”

“ The Oriental has seized on Billiken, with the exaggerated mosquito-bite on his bald head, his elongated cranium, his wolf’s ears, comedian’s smile like DeWolf Hopper’s or Coquelin’s, his elephant’s feet, Buddha’s barrel-stomach, and monkey’s arms, as the god of western wealth, humor, or what-not. The idiot idol, warming his enormous feet, is installed before many a footlight of burning tapers and punk-sticks in the shrines of eclecticism in both Taoist and Buddhist China. ”

“ Great cycles have opened beyond the seas; let America and Britain be great with them, and part of that greatness consists in helping China to be great. One leading Chinese minister and polished orator in our own language, who, I believe, will some day be president of China, for he has the youth, ability and ambition, told me with tears in his enthusiastic eyes, as he declaimed on the great subject, that if America will stand by China in this matter of honor, China will engrave gratitude forever on the core of her heart. ”

“ We are not Boxer murderers if we cry China for the Chinese, and it is not fair to put a stone around China’s neck with indemnities just because you are ahead of us in possessing fleets. We love the American and British peoples, and their glorious books on Liberty, even if we do not love some of your unregulated trusts any more than you and your Supreme Court’s decisions do! We are willing to pay a fair rate of interest. Not a hair of a foreigner is to be touched. ”

“ Men of all nations, Manchus and Chinese, eunuchs, women, human parrots, dictographs secretly placed, waste-paper baskets, keys to private codes, the kitchen cabinet, keyhole sentinels, tapped telephone wires, field-glasses masked behind curtains, letter sweaters and those adders in the bosom, society detectives, have all had their part in the old Peking game of intrigue. ”

“ The blue-gowned Oriental servants noiselessly pass refreshments. Not a Chinese house is in view, though half a million Chinese live hidden in the foothills. On the hundred peaks of Hongkong Island, the lights of a hundred palaces and villas of the merchant princes shine out. Down the winding cement paths, chairs bearing lanterns and carrying guests are borne with their rhythmic swing.
Every lady and every man present has come from far, and knows much of life and geography. ”

“ A pulley, a rope, an endless chain, have been unknown, and hearts and feet have strained up the thirteen stories of the pagodas with the coping stone and upcurled eaves. The day of labor-saving devices dawns for a China whose population is going to decrease within reason, not with the intent to starve labor, but so that labor may devote itself to better-paying work. Government officials only can supervise this condition in China or in America, government’s work being to govern the big as well as the small, as we are just discovering in the West. ”

“ Life is in a whirl at Shanghai. The river bund is crowded, and so is the long, winding Bubbling Well Road. The concessions are splendidly managed from a foreign point of view, and vie with each other in public spirit. The Chinese, however, feel greater warmth for Hongkong, which gives them representation on the council. In Shanghai there are mixed courts, consular courts, an American Superior Court, and Chinese courts. The Chinese are planning for the day when they will try all Chinese offenders. There is an imposing cathedral, and a modern Venetian style railway station. ”

“ Surely there is room for all in twenty-one republics, which are to be bound as one commonwealth. The Chinese are intense in feeling and clannish in spirit, and they often turn vehemently on one another; their Tong wars in New York and San Francisco for instance. Thus Yuan might hate Kang, and Kang have none of Yuan, whereas, according to Macaulay, “both should serve the state”. It is this repression of individual resentment and ambition which has made England and America so governable, and it is something China will learn as the years of stress surge about the ship of state. ”

“ The agitation and the battles had taught the sweet themes of deathless liberty and a new Chinese nationalism to thousands who had been supine, provincial, or anarchistic in their despair. It was recalled that Tau Sze Tung, the reformer and son of a Hupeh governor, who was beheaded in 1898, said on his way to the place of execution: “Martyrdom must always precede revolution; shall I not be the first martyr?” Liberty is never defeated, for each time she falls she makes her conqueror concede something, for she only falls to her knees and rises again. ”

“ Everywhere is desolation; choked tunnels and saps underground, filled war galleries above ground, broken gun carriages, burst Krupp and Armstrong guns piled up in titanic wreckage. Heroic Kondrachenko and gallant Stoessel on one side, and Grant-like Nogi on the other, sowed the hundred valleys and hillsides hereabout with rusting bayonets, belt buckles, medals of glory and skulls of death. Thousands and thousands of men, known not by their names but by their number tag, like prisoners, dropped before the ruthless and fame-obliterating fire of range-fixed guns operating behind searchlights. ”

“ The reformers who dare the most, however, look upon Yuan by his past, as a temporizer, opportunist and dictator largely under foreign influence; too much Occidentalized, and out of touch with the spirit of “China for the Chinese”, and the “Sia Hwei” (reform associations) . They look upon him as, in the past, a Manchuized Chinese who fears to work for himself as a republican, but must have an employer like a Manchu emperor or some other head; great as a Richelieu is great, but not as a Washington is great. They say that while he is thorough of mind, he is not yet vehemently sincere in heart. ”

“ If Germany wants to do a noble work, let her use her army to influence parliamentary and sociological reforms in tyrannical Russia, where men are blighted by the curses of opinion-paralyzing detectivism and oligarchism. If a consistent, persistent policy is maintained there need no more be an Anglo-German feud on the Atlantic than an American-Japanese feud on the Pacific. ”

“ A personal fame, heroism of faith, a love, a depth, a beauty, in none of which our Western life can offer an equal joy or strength. The Oriental, never having dropped the extinguished lamp of memory from his hand, is able to follow the path of history with intensity, satisfaction and certainty, while we of the West, having no similar assurance, wander the fields of the earth, unsatisfied still, where our individual name may be carved with permanence. What hate pursues us? What fate awaits us? It is the saddest sign in our psychological organization. ”

“ With the cry of lèse majesté, Japan, Germany and Russia seem to be successful in stamping out much of the independent criticism of the taxed, or those to whom equal opportunity has been denied. There seems to be only one hope for real liberty in Japan and elsewhere, the rise again, as in Bunyan’s, Milton’s and Franklin’s time, of the independent pamphlet and book, whose one motto shall be, “No taxation without real representation.” ”

“ It is the most spectacular abatement of a gigantic nuisance that the world has known. Among the heroes of the reform was Lin Ping Chang, a grandson of the famous Commissioner Lin who destroyed the chests of opium at Canton and brought on the war with Britain in 1840. Heredity obtains in China! It would have taken England and America possibly fifty years to bring about an equal reform in personal habits, but the Chinese have for 3,500 years been the most obedient people to government in the world, “Filial Piety” being the eminent principle of the religious, social and political life. ”

“ Shanghai shares with Hankau the title of head of the railway system; that is to say one is the New York and the other the Chicago of the land. There is no computing what the future trade will be at Shanghai. The climate is not much improved on the damp sea-level misery which one experiences at Hongkong, Canton, and Amoy, but there are brave hearts in Shanghai, and the noblest of women who will endure any physical torture so long as they know that they are doing their duty in not deserting the advanced firing line of civilization and philanthropy. ”

“ Then the Chinese would know that the foreigner is sincere in his legal measures. Thoughtless or drunken action, like that of the German, often leads to missionary and other riots before the resentment of the indignant natives cools. One brutal fool of this kind, violens in vino, can place at jeopardy the lives of thousands of foreigners and the peace of the nations. We must scrupulously show China that we are sincere. ”

“ Nanking and Peking, but would like to have one, if foreigners will permit her! Why should America delay? “China has been forever and will be forever.” Soon she will be strong enough not to care, but what America does now she will forever appreciate, and America will sit nearest to her heart’s gratitude. Think of it! A republic of 400,000,000 people trading and communing with us across the narrowing Pacific, and beneath the smiling rays of the same warm sun which we both face: an altruistic brotherhood of East and West, working for the uplift of the whole world. ”

“ Peking stands at the end of the great seacoast plain as you go up from Tientsin by railway or by boat. Beyond rise the Hsi Shan (Western Mountains) and the Mongolian plateau and mountains. It is the most expansive city in the republic, because it is more built up than spacious Nanking; a court, a legation, a trading, an art, an educational, a health center in autumn, a military, but not a manufacturing center as yet, though it will be. It is more Mongolian and Manchu, perhaps, than pure Han Chinese. ”

“ I am an ardent admirer of Henry George, whose ideas are practicable on the virgin soil of China, as compared with their impracticability in Europe or the United States, where the money is controlled by the capitalists. I have the full consent of the new republican government to start a propaganda immediately, whereby the railroads, mines, and similar industries, will be controlled by the government. The single tax system, and as far as possible, free trade, will be adopted. ”

“ Too great praise can not be given the British for their taste in occupying a Chinese palace as legation headquarters at Peking. Many missions, every foreign business house, nearly every foreign college, the government itself in its new buildings, even the kindred Japanese, and nearly every foreign legation, are all housed in an ugly adaptation of a Renaissance building with verandas. The fashion came from Singapore and Hongkong, but Hongkong gets some picturesqueness out of the style because that colonial city has a mountain to terrace it on. ”

“ Hankau belonged to the world as much as to China. The Manchu must yet answer for this arson, for arson and murder are unjustifiable world crimes. Arson makes it harder and costlier for an American, a Briton, a German, a Frenchman, to live, as the wave of cost rolls on, as much as it makes it harder for the Chinese to live. In these days of world conservation, no nation should be allowed to put the firebrand to property because men are fighting or arguing over an idea. ”

“ In the midst of peace and life we are yet in the midst of war and death. Yet the Dead City of the Far East, in dying, won something for progress; it checked the Russianization of China and the obliteration of China’s best son, Japan; it prevented the clash of Britain and Russia, and the eventual clash of America and Russia perhaps in the Philippines and Manchuria. ”

“ What of the imperial family and the livelihood of the bannermen? Recently the ministers of foreign nations, the commercial associations at the ports, the different conferences, the various troops and the provincial viceroys and governors have sent telegrams, all stating that the will of the people is bent on a republic, and that it would be well-nigh impossible to make stand against it. Should the enemy arrive at the walls of the capital, the disasters resulting would be unimaginable. How much better for the throne, of its own grace, to proclaim the republic at an early date. ”