Sas SS SSS SS SS ae ee See ES IERS ——— em se ss See Seance: AY PP nf ‘ ey he ee : PE SpSH t9) iy ANS tl yal ay ee seg, ty ek Wy » anes Ahoy , it We i Le vey iY! i] lett a | A NEW WORLD \BY” KENNETH MACLEN NAN SECRETARY OF THE CONFERENCE OF MISSIONARY SOCIETIES GENERAL SECRETARY OF THE UNITED COUNCIL FOR MISSIONARY EDUCATION, LONDON MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA NEW YORK 1925 CoPyYRIGHT, 1925, BY MISSIONARY EDUCATION MovEMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA Printed in the United States of America TO MY WIFE THIS BOOK 1S: DEDICATED Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from — Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/costofnewworld0Omacl PUBLISHER’S NOTE WHEN the World Missionary Conference met in Edinburgh in 1910, Kenneth Maclennan was practis- ing law in that city. He was a leader in the Laymen’s Missionary Movement among the Scottish churches and following the Conference was called from his business career to the service of the interdenominational agen- cies of the British missionary societies. He was active in developing the work of the United Council for Mis- sionary Education and he has remained as its General Secretary along with his other duties. During the World War Mr. Maclennan occupied a highly respon- sible post in the British Ministry of Munitions and was asked to continue in government service for some time after the War. He soon returned to his work in connection with the world enterprise of the Church, however, and has since become the Secretary of the Conference of Missionary Societies in Great Britain and Ireland with headquarters in London. American readers of The Cost of a New World will readily understand that the book has some inci- dental references applying primarily to Great Britain and the British Empire. It has not seemed desirable on that account to make any essential modification of the text in the American edition. The book as a whole presents a world situation that men of good-will in every land must face together and it 1s an advantage to have for common study throughout the English- speaking nations such a broad treatment of the prob- lems as Mr. Maclennan has given. Vv ARS i > Went Wael i \ nik Ne oe PREFACE THE object of this book is to face the problems sug- gested by the strange and perplexing fact that there could take place almost simultaneously a World Mis- sionary Conference and a World War. These events were the climax of two streams in the history of the modern world. One was the expansion of Christian- ity, and the other an ever-increasing material develop- ment practically untouched by ‘spiritual influences. The problems of the world today are just those of the pre-war world. The only difference is that they have to be faced and solved against a new background. It seems of urgent importance therefore that, in the light of pre-war history, fresh consideration should be given to the world movements of today in order to discover what are the vital forces in deadly grips in these move- ments, what are the real issues, and what is the rele- vancy of Jesus Christ to them all. This volume accordingly offers a brief survey of the material forces at work in the pre-war world, discusses some current world movements, e.g., the growth of national and racial consciousness, the seething mind of youth, the industrialization of the Orient, the open- ing of Africa and the out-reach everywhere after edu- cation, and seeks to understand the real conflict in all these movements and the relevancy of Christianity to them. : The problems of our time throw upon the new generation an exceptionally heavy burden. The book is primarily written for them, and the author will be Vil Vill PREFACE content if the volume in any way helps them in facing their overwhelming task. The writer is alone responsible for the opinions expressed, but he desires to acknowledge invaluable help unsparingly given by various members of the United Council for Missionary Education, and a num- ber of other friends too numerous to mention. If exception may be made, he would like to express thanks for help and constructive criticism on the parts of the book dealing with Africa and the Far East re- ceived from Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey of Prince of Wales College, Achimota, Gold Coast, Rev. T. Kagawa of Tokyo, Miss Margaret Burton of New York, Miss Agatha Harrison of the Y.W.C.A. (who, until she left China in February, 1924, was a member of the Child Labor Commission appointed by the Shanghai Municipal Council), Dr. Henry T. Hodgkin, Secretary of the National Christian Council of China, and Dr. Harold Balme, President of Shantung University. One more acknowledgment must be made. I offer to my colleague, Miss A. E. Cautley, Editorial Secre- tary of the United Council for Missionary Education, my deep gratitude for the untiring assistance she has given on the book and for seeing it through the press. KENNETH MACLENNAN Lonnon, 30th September, 1925. CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE PrRE-WAR WoRLD ; ; X Introductory: Leadership passing to new generation —Roots of present distress in pre-war world— Limited expansion of Christianity—Four move- ments contributing to making of modern world. I. Expansion of Europe—Early colonial empire—Growth of British colonies—Later European colonial em- pires—Sense of Christian responsibility lacking. II. Rise of modern democracy—Rousseau—French Rev- olution—New watchwords and reactions—Antag- onisms between Church and democracy—Is there a necessary fundamental quarrel ? III. Industrial Revolution—Features—Rise of modern capitalism—Mushroom industrial towns—Imper- sonal relations of employer and employed—In- dustrial war—Development greatly accelerated— Relation to religion. IV. Evangelical Revival—John Wesley—William Carey —Geographical conception of expansion of Chris- tianity—A World Missionary Conference and a World War—Christian stream isolated in world’s life—New conception required. gt tek Wet Uma dodall New FAcTors IN THE WoORLD’s LIFE ) it A Introductory I. Growth of nationality—Formerly confined to Europe —Now world-wide—Nationalism and Christianity. II. Internationalism—The Hague—Peace Conference— League of Nations—Threatened by narrow nation- alism. ix PAGE 15 37 x CONTENTS III. Race problem—European expansion and domina- tion—Motive self-interest—Emergence of Japan— Race consciousness—Accelerated by World War —Types of race relationships—Variety of conse- quent problems—Various attitudes to problem— Christian conception of race. IV. Seething mind of youth— Universal — Common features—Potential power—Christianity and youth. OS atk OW Sy EE THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE ORIENT. . , Introductory I. Beginning of modern trade between East and West— East India Company — China — Japan — Swift growth—Shipping—Railways. II. Accelerated by natural resources—Textiles—Coal— Iron, etc-—Rapidity of recent development. III. Consequent social changes—Modern factory system —Exploitation—Child labor—Shanghai cotton mills —Working mothers and child mortality—Reactions of industry in West and Fast. IV. Legislation—Treaty of Versailles—India Factory Act —Japan National Factory Law—China—Right of combination—Strikes—Fight against exploitation. V. Christianity and economic development—Problem facing missionaries. CHAR TER ELNV: THE OPENING OF AFRICA . A ! i! f le Introductory I. Early Portuguese adventurers—English—Dutch— French—Road to the interior of Africa closed by unhealthy coastal belt. II. Rise of West African slave-trade with America— Britain’s dominant share—Abolition—East African Arab slave-trade—Lessons. ITI. Recent rapid opening of Africa—Unhealthy climate conquered—Uplands of the interior—Partition— Swift changes—New life—Directed by white men. PAGE 63 87 LV. V. Vi. VII. VIII. THE ik CONTENTS Africa an annex of Europe—Main problems—Lack of data for solving. Land—Early tribal system—White settlement—Pro- tectorates — Reserves — Land ownership— Attitude toward native cultivation of soil. Labor—Sparse population—Unequal to potential de- velopment—Labor supply—Policy in East Africa —Labor Color Bar in South African Union. Taxes—Hut tax—What native gets in return. Duty of Government—Principle of Trusteeship— Black and white cooperation. COTTER Uy WorRLD AT SCHOOL . } ri ite : M Introductory: World learning to read—Education biggest factor in human progress—A spiritual en- terprise—Not a matter of organization or system. Cultural penetration of Western education—China— Mission schools—Rise of national system—Prob- lems of dual system—China’s distrust of Western penetration—Anti-Christian feeling—Future of Mission schools. Education and national aspirations—India—National aspirations call for educated people—Education top-heavy—Unbalanced university education—Edu- cation of women—Primary education—Small in scope and wrong in type. Christianity and national secular systems of educa- tion—Japan—Strong national system—Secular— Christian schools—Place and function. . Education and primitive peoples—Africa—Type required—Its past failure—Inadequacy—-New Govy- ernment policy—Education for life concern of Governments and Missions. Education wider than schoolsk—Women and educa- tion—Oriental and African students in Western colleges—Education and national policy—World leadership being made in the schools—Pulling to- gether—The new spirit. 3 PAGE 1I2 Xil CONTENTS CHAPTER VI Tue BreAK-uP oF PAN-ISLAM . : j ‘ é Introductory: Parable of Great Mosque of Damascus —Age-long unity of Islam. I. Breakdown of unity—Social and political causes— Penetration of the West—Great War—Cinema— Motor cars—Railways—Literature—Education of women. II. Unity of spiritual and temporal power in person of Caliph—Sultan for long Sultan-Caliph—Deposed by Turkish Republic. III. Reactions—Pan-Islam broken—Caliphate abolished. IV. Problem of Islam to maintain unity through Caliphate—Opportunity of Christianity. CHAPTER RV IT Tue ReaL CONFLICT , : : ; : ‘ a uf Il. Att, LY. Introductory: The deeper meaning of things. World Missionary Conference and World War each a climax of history—The war a clash of rivalries —Expansion of Christianity isolated—Opposing influences—Conflict for mastery between material and spiritual. Conflict seen in national and international move- ments—In industry—In race relations—In the new Africa—In education—In divided democracy. Solidarity of human society—Reactions of human activities world-wide. Spiritual and material both stronger than ever before —Both in strong opposition—Is there a better way ?—Necessity for giving full weight to spiritual and moral values in all life—True unity of spirit- ual and material. 153 CONTENTS CHARTER Vall THE LEADER IN THE CONFLICT . : ‘ Introductory: Is there a religion that can control the material side of life?—Inadequacy of great non-Christian religions—Christianity’s claim— Rests on Jesus. Jesus a Teacher and a Life—New view of God— New attitude to men—Was His teaching a phase in history of religion?—Was He a mere dreamer ? . The faith of Jesus in God and man—Man’s response —The revolution in the mind of man. . Apparent first result failure—The Cross—Turned to a creative force—The early Church—The way of the Cross. Can corporate groups act in a Christian way— Wanted, directed spiritual outlook. Highest corporate life must rest on individual life— The hindering sins of today—The bearing of teaching of Jesus on these. . An example of today’s problems—Public opinion— The influence of the press—Drifting with public opinion—Helping to make it—Its power. VII. No neutrality in conflict between material and spiritual—Our individual influence—Our national influence—Fight means the Cross—Christ the Leader and the Victor—Adventure for Him. APPENDIX Summary of Recommendations of the Commission appointed by the Municipal Council of Shanghai to inquire into the conditions of child labor in Shanghai and the vicinity. INDEX e ’ a e 4 a e e X1ll PAGE 172 186 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD CHAPTER I THE PRE-WAR WORLD THE leadership of mankind is soon to pass to a genera- tion of men and women who know only the world of the War days and after. When Armageddon broke out their careless, happy laughter filled every school playground; now grown to manhood and womanhood they are faced with a troubled world in desperate need. To them it seems that the problems of the time are of an entirely new order created by the War. But in reality the problems are just of the kind which de- manded solution before the War. ‘The difference is that they have to be solved against an entirely new background. The only background of the new genera- tion is the world that has emerged from the War. ‘To them the old world of 1914 is unknown, or is at most only a confused memory of tender years; to all those who come after it will not be even that. Indeed, man so quickly adjusts himself to new en- vironment that to many older folk the pre-war world seems but a dim memory of the distant past. The shattering effects of the War are such a grim reality, and the acute needs left in its train are so urgent, that the mind of many of the older generation also is filled only with the post-war world. The War dramatically changed the face of the I5 16 THE: COST (ORVA NEW WORKED world. The outlook of men everywhere has shifted and their energies have taken a new bent. The whole social fabric is in solution. Statesmen are busy with world reconstruction, commerce and industry are fac- ing new and perplexing problems, cruel economic dis- tress on a world scale is baffling mankind, and the ex- pansion of the nations of the West has created acute inter-racial and international problems. It is hardly to be expected that the Church can pass through the fires of such a time without feeling the challenge of the changed world. The roots of the present world-wide distress, how- ever, do not lie in the War but in the kind of world in which such a catastrophe was possible, and some un- derstanding of that world seems necessary to a right appreciation of the situation confronting those who today would build the city of God. It will be useful, therefore, to look afresh at the expansion of Chris- tianity in the days before 1914. For one reason or another that movement took lim- ited direction. The grip of religion on the mind of men was unequal to the task of making the Christian spirit effective in human society. This may partly be due to the fact that the modern expansion of Chris- tianity was greatly stimulated by geographical dis- coveries. As the big blank spaces on the old maps were filled up, the Christian impulse was stirred to send the gospel to the newly discovered regions. The missionary in turn became explorer and discoverer ; geography and missions became closely bound up. The trail of the explorer became “a new pathway for Christianity.” For long years the small missionary THE PRE-WAR WORLD 17 forces of the Church were sadly inadequate even to a mere geographical occupation of the world, and it was only natural that geographical occupation should be emphasized as the goal of the missionary enterprise. “The whole wide world” was the bugle-call of missions. In more recent years it became increasingly evident that the establishment of the Kingdom of God in the world demanded a fresh estimate of the Christian forces and a new kind of missionary occupation. Great streams of human activity had burst forth in Christendom and reached out into the remotest cor- ners of the earth as allies or enemies of the mission- ary cause, while the impact of western ideas on Africa and the hoary Orient offered great new regions of men- tal and material development for Christian occupation. The missionary passion largely ignored the heathen heart at home, and the Church is even now waking up but slowly to the fact that all these streams of out- going life from the homeland profoundly affect its task in the mission field, and that for good or evil the na- tion is really a missionary society. History always has its lessons for posterity, and if we of the present generation would face the new prob- lems aright we ought to study carefully the experience of the past that we may ever build the better. The modern expansion of Christianity is only part of the dramatic evolution of the last hundred and fifty years. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the beginning of several movements from which issued those great streams of new life which have given us the modern world. Four of these movements were peculiarly destined to turn the current of history into 18 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD fresh channels—the expansion of Europe, the birth of modern democracy in the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Evangelical Revival. All of these gave new direction to the trek of the spirit of man. I The early expansion of modern European civiliza- tion over the extra-European world was due in the first instance to the enterprise of Spain and Portugal, and later to that of Holland, France, and Great Brit- ain. Portugal by and by fell under the sway of Spain, and the defeat, soon thereafter, of the Great Armada brought the supremacy of Spain to an end. She ceased to count in the expansion of Europe, and her great dominion is now a thing of the past. From the days of the Armada the rivalry was between the new sea-rovers, English, French, and Dutch. Early leader- ship fell to the Dutch, then finally to Britain, after a long and fierce struggle with France. Through the activities of its well-known trading Company to the East Indies, Holland acquired in that early struggle important colonies in the Malay Archi-° pelago, South Africa, and Ceylon, while in North America the Dutch founded New York and established colonies along the Hudson River, and in South Amer- ica they founded Dutch Guiana. Indeed, but for the stronger lure of the Indies, Holland might have occu- pied Australia and New Zealand, both of which her intrepid explorers brought to the notice of Europe. THE PRE-WAR WORLD 19 The colonial empire of Holland has had some vicissi- tudes and is now represented by Dutch Guiana, and the small islands of Curacao, Bonaire, etc. in the West In- dies, and by extensive territories in the East Indies where she has accepted responsibility for the govern- ment of fifty million Asiatics, Queen Elizabeth was only four years dead when the first English colony was founded in Virginia. Soon thereafter the men of the Mayflower, the forerunners of the American Commonwealth, landed at New Plymouth on 11th November, 1620, a date which marked “the dawn of a new day for freedom in all the world.” But not till a hundred and thirty years later were the foundations laid of that wonderful ex- pansion of the Empire through which the restless en- ergy of the British people brought them great new re- sponsibilities in all parts of the world, responsibilities which were only gradually perceived and are not even now fully realized. For long France and Britain were keen rivals in colonial expansion, but the Seven Years’ War dramat- ically ended that rivalry in India and North America. An obscure English clerk in the service of the East India Company, later to become Lord Clive, had been dreaming for some years of a British India. Clive had gradually destroyed French influence in Southern India; in 1757 his victory at Plassey made the East India Company the real masters of Bengal in the north, and led to British dominion over the whole of India. The beginning of British dominion in Canada is more romantic. The mind likes to dwell on the epic 20 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD story of Wolfe’s conquest of Quebec. The imagina- tion is stirred by the tale of how he read to his staff, during the midnight sail up the St. Lawrence, Gray’s “ Elegy ” (the authorship of which he would have pre- ferred to the honor of taking Quebec), by the death next day of the opposing generals on the Heights of Abraham, and by the simple memorial obelisk with the names “ Wolfe” and “ Montcalm” on either side. The capture of Quebec by Wolfe in 1759 made Britain mistress of Canada. These events in India and North America marked the end of the first colonial empire of France and left Britain alone to carry on European expansion. The creation of the French later colonial system and the rise of those of Italy, Russia, Germany, and the United States belong to more recent years. From the middle of the eighteenth century till far on in the nineteenth the expansion of Europe was practically the expansion of England. That enterprise proceeded haphazard. An incidental temporary alliance between Napoleon and Holland led to Britain’s capture (1806) of Cape Col- ony, and its subsequent purchase; the necessity for a dumping-ground for convicts led to the first settlement in Australia; quarrels between British traders and set- tlers and the Maori led to the annexation of New Zealand in 1839; while the accidental march of events rather than any deliberate intention added to the Em- pire great territories in Equatorial Africa. “ England had, almost by a series of accidents, be- come ae center of an Empire.” * Expansion devel- oped in many ways and does not seem to have been 1 Ramsay Muir, The Expansion of Europe, p. 40. THE PRE-WAR WORLD 21 directed by any definite policy: it was carried on by restless adventurous spirits, almost without guidance from home. But British ideals were in the main its guide. The later development of the other European co- lonial empires, though very important, must be passed Over in a single paragraph. The colonial expansion of Holland has been briefly referred to above (p. 18). Before the middle of the nineteenth century France laid the foundations of her new huge colonial system in North Africa, and added later French Congo, Cochin-China, New Caledonia, and Madagascar. Por- tugal mapped out large African territories in Mozam- bique and Angola; Russia by steadfast penetration ex- tended her rule over Central Asia and Siberia. Italy sought for expansion in North Africa and Somaliland; and, in the partition of Africa, Germany acquired an outlet in Togo, Cameroons, Tanganyika, and German South-West Africa. Within the last fifty years the new competition for world control has resulted in the extension of European domination to all the politically unoccupied parts of the earth’s surface and intrusion on many of the helpless older civilizations. At the be- ginning of the present century the United States of America entered on colonial responsibility in the Philip- pines and other islands of the Pacific, and in the West Indies. Such a development of influence over other peoples was bound to raise in the course of years the question “whether the spirit in which this world-supremacy of Europe was to be wielded should be the spirit of trus- teeship on behalf of civilization; or whether it was to 22 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD be the old, brutal, and sterile spirit of mere domination for its own sake.” * The sense of Christian responsibility was singularly defective in the empire-builders of the modern world. Even England had scant regard either for religion or humanity. The expansion of Christianity was by no means concurrent with the expansion of Europe. “Along the African coast the man stealer, not the missionary, was the representative for generations of British interest in the native.’* Slavery was not merely a thing of private enterprise; the slave-trade between Africa and North America was actually one of the prizes of the Marlborough victories guaranteed to England by international treaty.* The conception of England as a mother of nations had not then been born; exploitation went on merrily. The rigid view that our colonies existed for our benefit split the Em- pire and gave rise to the American Commonwealth. ““Tt was not the Stamp Act nor the repeal of the Stamp Act,” says one historian, “that brought this about: it was that baleful spirit of commerce that wished to gov- ern great nations on the maxims of the counter.”’ The Kast India Company was able for many years with all the power of the British Government behind it to exclude Christian missionaries from its territories. With the passing years humanitarian practise grew, and Christian ideals developed, but there was always a conflict, in which the spirit of evil was too often in the ascendant. Commercial penetration and develop- 1 Ramsay Muir, The Expansion of Europe, p. 143. 2 History of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, Vol. I, p. 24. 8 The Treaty of Utrecht, 1713. THE PRE-WAR WORLD 23 ment of natural resources, telegraph lines, roads and harbors do not always mean progress in the ideal of trusteeship. They have been and may still be the chan- nels of exploitation; they always create new problems. The old tribal customs whereby primitive society was bound together are invariably weakened—if they do not break down—when they come into contact with European civilization, and primitive peoples have to be helped to adjust the old social order to the new. The problem is not fully solved anywhere, but a sign © of the times is the increasing acceptance of the doc- trine of trusteeship evidenced by the appointment by the Colonial Secretary of a Committee on East Africa to consider among other things “ the provision of ser- vices directed to their [the natives’] moral and ma- terial improvement; ’’ and the setting up by the Crown Colony Governments in Africa of a strong Advisory Committee on native education in British Tropical African Dependencies. Even righteous rule is no longer enough. ‘ Re- ligion,’ wrote Professor Seeley, “is the great state- building principle, . . . since the Church (so at least I hold) is the soul of the State; and if you find a state which is not also in some sense a Church, you find a state which is not long for this world.” I] All visitors to Geneva visit Rousseau’s Isle, where, while Wolfe was taking Quebec and Clive was winning India, a young Frenchman was maturing a new phi- losophy of “ the sovereignty of the general will,” which 24 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD set agoing another great stream of life in the modern world. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the prophet of the French Revolution, issued his Contrat Social to a star- tled world in 1762. It was instantly recognized as revolutionary, was condemned by the University of Paris and burned by the common hangman a year later as “reckless, scandalous, impious and calculated to destroy the Christian religion and all government.” To many the French Revolution seems only a series of bloody and dramatic events; it was in reality a perma- nent European upheaval. It was “a conquest in the spheres of thought, society, and politics, effected by a people over the old systems of authority, class privi- lege, and absolute rule.’’* Great new political ideas suddenly burst on the mind of a world in which gov- erning policies centered round the fortunes of royal houses and the strife between dynasties, and in which the efforts of statesmen were concentrated on alliances designed to maintain a balance of power. The thunderclap of 1789 sounded the doom of the old systems of government in Europe. In France, from the brilliant pens of Voltaire and Rousseau, there poured forth with extraordinary charm and lucidity new conceptions of society, which were flashed from end to end of Europe. The Contrat Social was a veri- table gospel of “the sovereignty of the general will,” and the great new words Liperty, Equatity, FRa- TERNITY, became the watchword of the new movement. Events were soon to show that, in the words of Lord Acton, ‘Ideas are the cause and not the result of 1J. Holland Rose, The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era, 1789- 161 5.°Dsi1. THE PRE-WAR WORLD 25 public events.” For a time it seemed as if the Revolu- tion only succeeded in setting up a “ reign of terror ”’ in France, and in threatening the fabric of govern- ment everywhere. Practically all Europe was hostile, and there was little expectation that chaotic France could maintain herself in face of a continent arrayed against her. But “the heir to the Revolution” was already on the horizon; the little Corsican corporal was dreaming of a European States-General.- The ka- leidoscopic change of the vision from States-General to masterful Empire only made a new highway for the revolutionary doctrines. The rise of the Napoleonic despotism in no way checked the Revolution; it car- ried its seeds to every country in Europe. The whole continent was rotten-ripe for change, and the decay everywhere of the old order had prepared the way for a devastating upheaval. The real strength of the new movement was that it was an upheaval of the mind of man, an intellectual ferment which bequeathed its fer- vent doctrines to posterity. The new ideas were too strong for any despotism to destroy. The smashing up of the old monarchies by Napoleon was just such a clearing of the ground of effete litter as gave room to the new ideas to germinate everywhere. After the reactions of the terrible early years, the Revolution hibernated for a period, but lived on. The questions it raised would not sleep; after half a century it broke out afresh everywhere, and Europe was again shaken to its foundation. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the general will is still loudly proclaimed in national and international affairs. In England, after some hesitation, the forces of 26 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD Church and State were arrayed with the powers of Central Europe against revolutionary France, as again and again the movement burst through all control and issued in red riot and massacre. It is hardly strange that Christian men in England regarded the situation with horror as they viewed what, at close range, seemed appalling moral dissolution and the ruin of stable so- ciety through fanaticism riding on uncontrolled and reckless despotism. Everywhere antagonism sprang up between the Church and the Revolution. The incident illustrates a situation which has arisen again and again in his- tory. The Church has too often been opposed to new movements of thought and to anything that seemed to affect the social fabric, from considerations relating to transient and superficial events, and not by any process of reason, or because of the positive vitality of its life or a fresh application of the principles of Jesus. This attitude often leads to an evil reaction—the dechris- tianization of many new movements which are really in the interest of progress, and in which the powerful influence of religion has for a time at least been lost with disastrous results. “Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic Church?” asks Hilaire Belloc.*. A survey of the history of the last hundred years undoubtedly raises the question of what has been and what is the relation of religion to the democratic movement in the modern world. Is this great stream of modern de- mocracy in Christian and non-Christian lands an enemy 1 The French Revolution, p. 217. THE PRE-WAR WORLD 27 to the expansion of Christianity, or may it be its hand- maid? Must it flow on outside that great central stream we would fain see become a River of Life to a thirsty world? Ii When the expansion of England was taking on new dimensions in the middle of the eighteenth century and Rousseau was flashing forth with such brilliance his new doctrine of human society, a hard-headed Scots boy, meditating deeply over a boiling kettle, conceived the idea of harnessing steam to the service of man. James Watt’s steam engine (1769) marked the begin- ning of still another great stream in the life of the modern world. The steam engine is one of the many new inventions and improved processes which have characterized the unparalleled development of indus- try and commerce during the last hundred and fifty years. That development covered the whole range of industry, first in textiles, then in iron and steel, and, combined with the development of steam power, the introduction of machine tools, the railway, the steam- boat and the electric telegraph, brought about that gen- eral and rapid expansion which is well termed “the industrial revolution ’—for it was nothing less than a revolution, if not in dramatic swiftness, certainly in. far-reaching consequences. The industrial revolution has served to meet the rapidly increasing material needs of growing popula- tions, has made available the underground mineral wealth of the world, and has given cheap and quick 28 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD transport. It has stimulated research and created a demand for knowledge, it has made accessible in cheap form the literature of all the ages, has been the hand- maid of science and art, and has vastly promoted human comfort. In estimating the influence of this stream of life on the spirit of man these things must be borne in mind; but supremely, the industrial revolu- tion gave to the world a new social and economic order. The outstanding feature of this new social and eco- nomic order is the rise of the modern capitalist sys- tem. Money has undoubtedly become one of the great- est forces in the world. It has played a dominating part in the history of mankind during the last century and a half; it has created a new end for collective human energy—the making of profit. It certainly ex- ercises political influence: a cynic has described mod- ern governments as “ bank clerks.”’ Another notable feature of the industrial revolution was the mushroom growth of the great industrial towns, until now over three fourths of the people of Great Britain are housed in urban areas. This crowd- ing of population has created bad housing conditions. In Scotland nearly half of the population are living in one- or two-roomed houses, or to put the facts in an- other form, about forty-five per cent of the population of Scotland are living more than two toa room. These housing conditions are reflected in health: high infant mortality and urbanization go together ; in typical cases in Lancashire towns one child in every four dies be- fore the age of five. Such high mortality implies morbidity in those who survive, and while there has been a marked improvement in public health in recent THE PRE-WAR WORLD 29 years, the rate of improvement is handicapped by hous- ing conditions. The improvement has been the greatest among the middle and upper classes; the period which made England wealthy did not provide corresponding improvement in the conditions of the masses of her people. A third result of the industrial revolution is that on almost the entire industrial plane it has introduced impersonal relations between employer and worker, creating a sense of unrelated, or even hostile, interest. It also makes for separation of class from class, so that today every great city presents sharp divisions of classes and districts, by a process of imitation down- wards, through “ black-coat’’ and artisan, artisan and laborer, and laborer and “ casual.”’ Industrialism has given to the world war between capital and labor. Employers and employed have formed opposing camps, and so we have Employers’ Associations and Trade Unions. ‘The latter were at first illegal, then tolerated, then free, and are now very powerful, though less so than just before the War. The last century witnessed a long fight for wages, for hours, for conditions of work, for liberty to combine, and for a share in the control of industry. The Fac- tory Acts are a record of struggle to minimize the growing evils of industrial life. Antagonism grew with the years of struggle. The roots of much of it lie in past history, but the full effects of social wrongs live on for decades: ‘‘the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” To- day the antagonism and bitterness are perhaps accentu- ated by a growing demand for a higher standard of 30 THE: GOST OR VA NEW WORLD life in face of stringent economic conditions. Roughly, we are at pre-war standards for the worker, and some leaders of industry doubt whether even that can be maintained. This clouded outlook is further darkened by the specter of unemployment which stalks through the land like a moral pestilence. Then industry still takes too big a toll of human life. On an average, five railway workers in England are killed each week and about fifty-one are injured daily, while in coal mines one hundred men a month are killed by normal accident and there is one non-fatal accident im each year for every six workers. In our day the pace of industry has been greatly accelerated. Applied science has harnessed.the forces of nature to the needs of man. Wireless, high-speed oil engines, the motor car, the aero-bus, all quicken the rate of progress. Wrong influences work more havoc by reason of the greater pace, and the possibilities of social and moral disaster are more numerous. The foregoing is only a very rough outline of some of the main features of our industrial system, a growth of the last hundred and fifty years, huge, complex, rendering unique service to mankind, controlled by capital, carried on with ruthless competition, the one end being economic gain, with employers and employed ranged in hostile camps. The great bulk of both these groups are most excellent men and women, carrying heavy burdens and faced with the solution of prob- lems from which we might well shrink. In so far as there is evil in the industrial system both are its vic- tims, and in both groups the best men are worrying tremendously to find a way out. They are in dead THE PRE-WAR WORLD 31 earnest seeking to do the right thing for the common good, and choice of action is often terribly perplexing. - It is more difficult to speak of this great stream of industrial life in relation to the religious life of the country. Our life during the last century has been spiritually defective in that people in and outside in- dustry are more concerned with things than with ideas or people; the mind of the average young man today, not even excepting undergraduates, is probably more occupied with “ mo-bikes”’ than with literature, sci- ence, or sociology. The lack of a sense of the spiritual in industry is shown by the fact that the business world never looks to the Church for a sure word. The typical captain of industry says he has no use for religion, that the Sermon on the Mount is impracti- cable, that Christianity and business won’t square. This doctrine, if accepted, would strike at the very foundation of religion, for if God has no concern with one section of human life, how can we claim all life, or any life, for Him? With all their present evils, in- dustry and commerce are necessary to any modern so- cial system, they are spreading in all non-Christian lands and they form the greatest stream of the world’s life. It would be calamitous if, in the expansion of the Kingdom of God, the Church must regard them as making no contribution to the City of God. It would be a heavy handicap if the Church had to carry on her task of world expansion with the influence of trade and commerce in both Christian and non-Chris- tian lands flung into the other scale. She cannot be unconcerned as to whether the influence of industrial relations at home and abroad is for her or against her. 32 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD IV The question of what was the influence of religion in all this movement of history asserts itself at every turn. After the Reformation period there was a drab backwater in religion in Europe. There were inter- mittent springs of new life, but these were inadequate to set new tides flowing. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, however, “there appeared a move- ment headed by a mighty leader, who brought forth water from the rocks to make a barren land live again.”* Born in 1703, John Wesley began, at the age of thirty-five, those wonderful journeys on his gray mare from end to end of England, and his preaching tours in Scotland and America, which ush- ered in the dawn of a better day. With fresh insight into the heart of the gospel, he sounded the note of world evangelization and made ruthless war on all nar- rower conceptions. ‘The new doctrine—‘‘ The world is my parish ’’—heralded the new age of Christianity. The great geographical discoveries that were to give new meaning to “the world” had not yet taken place, but in the Evangelical Revival led by John Wesley lay the seeds of the modern missionary enterprise which, however, did not take general organized form for half a century—a notable exception being the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, formed in 1701 for the maintenance of clergymen in the colonial settlements of England and for the propagation of the Gospel in those parts. 1H. W. V. Temperley, Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VI, chap. ii, p. 76. THE PRE-WAR WORLD 33 In 1786 in a Conference of Baptist ministers, Wil- liam Carey, an obscure cobbler-preacher stirred by the story of Captain Cook’s travels, proposed considera- tion of their responsibility to the heathen, and was told by the chairman to sit down as “a miserable enthusi- ast.” But the ideal had been born and six years later the Baptist Missionary Society was formed after Carey’s immortal sermon. The heroic leader had next to face the hostility of the then all-powerful East In- dia Company which endeavored to exclude him from its territory, to reside in which he had to follow a secu- lar calling. As, however, he “ preached for the glory of God,” and only worked on an indigo plantation to pay expenses, he was compelled to remove from the territory of the Company to Serampore where, under the protection of the King of Denmark, Carey carried on his great work. Carey’s doctrine—“ Expect great things from God and attempt great things for God ’’— had rooted. Society after Society was formed in Great Britain, on the continent of Europe and in America, to apply that doctrine in the system of foreign mission work. Within little more than half a century the once all-powerful Company became a thing of the dust and a byword among the nations, while in the India of today missionary institutions are among the most prized in the land; of Protestant missionaries alone there are over five thousand at work, and the total Christian community numbers nearly five million. Carey had planted a living idea. “Tt was principally through the activity of mission- aries,’* as Ramsay Muir points out, that the new 1 The Expansion of Europe, pp. 115-10. 34. THE COST OF A NEW WORLD humanitarian spirit, which fought and won the battle for the abolition of slavery throughout the Empire, was cultivated and expressed. From among the men of the Evangelical Revival came the leaders of the humanitarian movement. These were soon in deadly grips with slavery and other evils. Only after a long fight were they able in 1806 to put an end to the slave- trade, and it was not till 1833 that slavery in the Brit- ish colonies was declared illegal. During the hundred years before the founding of modern missions the number of slaves imported into British colonies ex- ceeded two million.* The enormous size of the trade will be realized when it is recalled that for every slave landed five more were estimated to have perished. Or- ganized religion may too often have been silent, but outstanding men in the churches have again and again made vocal the wrongs of our fellow-men in various parts of the world until the very words “ Exeter Hall” were at once a glory and a term of contempt. But the fact was overlooked that the Evangelical Revival was only one phase of our intellectual upheaval, and only part of the new mentality was captured for Jesus Christ. Although the expansion of Christianity was so pro- foundly affected by the expansion of empire, by the intellectual upheavals at home, and by the development of a world’s trade and commerce, the problem of whether these forces could be brought into the service of Christ in one common stream of Godward life was discerned by few. The Church went her way in un- conscious isolation, handicapped in her efforts to preach the Evangel to all the world by the effect of 1 The total population of England in 1801 was only 8,900,000. THE PRE-WAR WORLD 35 the impact of these other streams of life flowing from the homeland to every non-Christian land. It is a startling fact that over a century after Carey it was possible within four years of each other to have a World Missionary Conference* and a World War. May the reason for that strange spectacle lie in the fact that in these hundred years the expansion of Christianity was isolated even in the mind and thought of the Church, and was hardly present at all in the mind and thought of the world? The triumphs of the first hundred years of missions far exceeded all expectations; they are veritable new Acts of the Apos- tles, but the handicaps to the work. cannot be ignored. For, however faithfully the Church occupies every square inch of the earth’s surface, it will not truly have occupied until its message has claimed territory more important than can be expressed in geographical terms. Every region of human action and every move- ment of human life in non-Christian lands must be claimed for Christ if the gospel is to be effectively preached, and it is almost idle for the missionary to undertake that task if the impact in these lands of the corresponding regions of life in the homeland is not Godward. The missionary message of England is the whole impact of English life on those that sit in dark- ness, for with the missionary message of the Church goes the missionary or non-missionary message of na- tional life. The two combined constitute our message to the non-Christian world, and the Church will not be able to make her message fully effective until the 1 The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh, 1910, attended by 1,200 delegates from all parts of the world. 36 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD current of national life and influence flows in one great central stream infused with Christian principles. “There is an imperative spiritual demand that national life and influence as a whole be Christianized, so that the entire impact, commercial and political, now of the West upon the East, and now of the stronger races upon the weaker, may confirm, and not impair, the message of the missionary enterprise.” * Books FOR REFERENCE AND FURTHER READING Expansion of Europe, The. Ramsay Murr. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston. 1923. $3.50. French Revolution, The. WitarrE Bettoc. Henry Holt and Co., New York. 1911. 50 cents. (Home University Library Series. ) Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England, The. A. ToynseE. Longmans, Green and Co., New York. 1908. $1.00. Journal of John Wesley. FE. P. Dutton and Co., New York. Four volumes, Everyman edition. 80 cents and $1.00. Nineteenth Century, The. C. E. Trevetyan. Macmillan Co., London. (Published only in England, but may be ordered through The Macmillan Co., New York. Price about $1.25.) Shori History of the English People. J. R. GREEN. American Book Co., New York. $2.60. William Carey: Missionary Pioneer and Statesman. F. DEa- VILLE WALKER. Student Christian Movement, England. 5s. 1 Message from the World Missionary Conference to the Church. CEASE TERRE UL NEW FACTORS IN THE WORLD’S LIFE SEVERAL new factors in the world’s life lent signifi- cance to the weighty words addressed to the Church by the World Missionary Conference, 1910, urging that national life and influence as a whole be Chris- tianized. The last half of the nineteenth century had seen the strong growth of nationalism in Europe; its closing years had witnessed the rise of a new interna- tional ideal; early 1n the new century the race problem had taken shape and become acute, while, in the years after the War, all these movements received a new im- petus from a rising tide of youth, so universal that in all lands men talk of it as “the Youth Movement.” In this small volume we can look only very briefly at each of these. I The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, and the French Revolution, pro- duced far-reaching and enduring effects in the growth of the spirit of nationality. Europe saw Greek and Italian nationality established; but reactions always fol- lowed every step forward. Successive attempts in Po- land, Hungary, Bohemia, and elsewhere to effect na- tional independence were for the time being abortive. The national instinct, however, always reasserted it- self. Revolution broke out in various countries— France, Spain, Portugal—where the people felt that of 38 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD the national spirit was not being adequately expressed in popular self-government. It was through an ap- peal to national pride that Bismarck, on the wave of victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, effected the unity of Germany. The nationalist movement was till the beginning of the present century almost entirely confined to Eu- rope, and at any rate was found only among men of the white race. The rise of the United States was due to an attempt to govern arbitrarily, and not to any sense of nationalism. The Canadian rebellion of 1837-8 was due more to political grievances than to any growth of nationalist ideas; Lord Durham’s rem- edy—proved by subsequent events—was to substitute responsible self-government for “a system of rigid control.” The Indian mutiny of 1857 was not so much a national movement as an entirely unexpected out- break led by a section of the Indian army worked up by an appeal to unredressed grievances and religious susceptibilities. The nationalist movement in India was to emerge much later. The repeated treks north- ward of the Boer farmers in South Africa, resulting in the formation of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State, is practically the only modern ex- ample outside Europe, before the present century, of the assertion of nationality. With the new century, however, the situation swiftly changed, and the rise of nationalism in extra-European lands has created many perplexities and delicate problems for the mis- sionaries from the West and the native Christian com- munities alike. The nineteenth century was barely closed when an NEW FACTORS IN WORLD’S LIFE 39 event took place which precipitated a new national spirit in non-Christian lands. For long, Japan had steadily resisted all outside influence: the early Jesuit mission was repelled, foreign trade was forbidden, and the island empire of the Far East was a closed land. The doors were practically forced about the middle of the nineteenth century and British and American com- merce gradually penetrated the country; but not until 1883 was all Japan thrown open. In the next twenty years the development of the country was phenomenal, and Japan looked covetously across to Asia for new territories for her people. Meanwhile Russia had steadily crept eastward to the Pacific coast and it was inevitable that sooner or later the two empires should clash. On the battlefield of Moukden (1905) little Japan emerged triumphant over the might of the old Russia. The effect was volcanic and electric. It stirred the sense of nationality in land after land. Na- tionalism was no longer a European idea, it was world- wide, and a new factor was brought into the world situation. This new phase was accelerated by the World War, and the fresh impetus given to nationality in Europe has had its repercussions in India, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Arabia, North Africa, and else- where. There have been no great shiftings of the scene of history that have not also been charged with meaning for the Christian Church, and the modern nationalist movement in non-Christian lands affects its task, im- poses fresh responsibilities, and offers new opportuni- ties. Old faiths are crumbling away by mere contact with the facts of the modern world; Christianity 1s 4o THE COST OF A NEW WORLD rejected as the vanguard of western penetration; and today more lands than one are threatened with the fate of a people that have no God. The catastrophe may mean that in a land like China a nation may be bereft of religion in a single generation. Nationalism charged with Christianity is one of the noblest things on God’s earth; without the spirit of Christ it may shrink into the most selfish system the world has wit- nessed. One task of the Church in the world today is everywhere to make the national spirit Christian. IT While nationalism was penetrating the Orient the Old World was groping after a unifying international- ism. The Hague—the old, quaint capital of Holland, so full of interest to the lover of art and the student of history—has in the years since the World War been rather eclipsed by Geneva as the Mecca of interna- tionalism. But twenty-five years before the birth of the League of Nations men everywhere were feeling that the social fabric was hardly adequate to sustain the burden of a world-wide civilization based on the ideal of the unity of mankind. For years national jealousies, acute political crises, and fierce commercial rivalries made a forward step difficult, but in 18g9, due to the untiring efforts of friends of goodwill, the first International Peace Conference met at the Hague. This was followed by a second Conference in 1907, and from these historic meetings emerged the first permanent Court of International Arbitration. The Hague had in the old days witnessed more than one NEW FACTORS IN WORLD'S LIFE 41 gathering of representatives of many nations to make iriternational agreements, but all of them were designed to promote military alliances or to secure some advan- tage to one or other of the signatories. Now for the first time in history an agreement had been come to by the leading governments of the world recognizing the place of judicial processes in settling international dis- putes. The Hague Conventions were only the small beginnings of the rule of law among the nations. In this conception, however, lies the true antidote to selfish nationality. It opened a great door wide to the Church and cast upon her the large task of helping forward the true international spirit in every land. The ultimate sanction for the rule of law in interna- tional relations lies in the law of God; His is the only bar at which principles of right and duty for men and states can ultimately be tested. But the great hopes born at the Hague were doomed to eclipse: in 1914 there came a disconcerting reaction. Paradoxically, during the World War there was a cry everywhere for internationalism. Peace was to usher in something like competition among the nations to set up a state of things in which right would be forever on the throne. Man’s instincts are truest and his impulses most right when in the big crises of life he is called to rise to superhuman effort and sacrifice. But the white heat of the new sentiment cooled with the lengthening strife, and within a few weeks of the Armistice the pendulum swung violently the other way and the nations were functioning far below their best intentions, The new internationalism had for the time missed its opportunity, and narrow nationalism ran 42 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD riot. Eager to secure firmly long threatened national rights, to realize cherished hopes of independence, or to maintain and strengthen national interests, men in every land were unconsciously carried into mutual an- tagonisms which hardened as the months went by. The new underlying assumption was that nationality had to be strengthened and fenced in in every possible way; the nations were soon feverishly harnessing everything to its service, and erecting fresh barriers against their neighbors. To many men in Christian as well as non-Christian lands, nationality and interna- tionality are still to a large extent incompatible ideals, and this great region of human life and thought has to be permeated with the spirit of Jesus. The highest ap- peal for an international spirit lies in the Christian conception of God the Father of all mankind seeking to make the kingdoms of this world the Kingdom of His Christ. it In these days much attention is being given to an- other world phenomenon—the race problem—which had also emerged on the horizon before the Edinburgh Conference of 1910. For five hundred years European civilization has been steadily expanding to the ends of the earth, be- ginning with the days when Columbus discovered America and Vasco da Gama rounding the Cape of Good Hope reached India. The dividing seas became the easy highway of increasing western domination, until at the beginning of this century practically the NEW FACTORS IN WORLD’S LIFE 43 whole world of color, bowing to superior force, ac- knowledged white leadership—passively at least—and did homage to white prestige. While various motives can be found for this aggres- sive expansion of European influence on the colored races there can be no doubt that the primary motive was search for wealth. The glittering prize was “the gold of the Indies.” This inevitably brought the na- tions of Europe into collision not only with the various colored peoples of the world, but also with each other. For the mastery of North America and India many of the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fought. There was more bad feeling among whites in those days than between whites and colored peoples, and when white held white in contempt, it is hardly to be expected that either would be over-scrupu- lous in their dealings with weaker people of other color. The rise of humanitarianism led in more recent years to the removal of some of the worst abuses. It swept away slavery, made an end of the East India Com- pany, and gradually enthroned law. A higher and nobler conception of human relationships has grown up and the nations have accepted the principle of trus- teeship for backward peoples, although, on balance, the motive of self-interest still plays a large part in the relationship of white peoples with those of Asia and Africa. This long policy of the pursuit of self-interest and unchallenged domination inevitably left a deep mark on the mind of the white man. It gave him a sense of superiority, of conquering energy and daring, of masterful enterprise, knowledge and capacity, and it is 44. THE COST OF A NEW WORLD hardly surprising that he should as a rule despise what Kipling rather unhappily calls “lesser breeds,’ and should consider himself a man apart. In the case of Britons these views were exaggerated by a conscious- ness of sea power, unrivaled commerce and wide em- pire, and of a unique genius for political institutions and government administration, Thus it was at the end of the nineteenth century— but already the hour of challenge was at hand. After the decisive defeat on the plains of Manchuria of white Russia by yellow Japan the white man was no longer considered invincible, and the World War put an end to his prestige. He lost face throughout the world in statesmanship, in arms, and in religion. ‘Today all races are self-conscious and challenge any suggestion of inherent inferiority. And arising out of this fierce clash of wills we have the modern race problem. Its salient facts can only be stated in this book very briefly.* In North America there are three race problems. The first of these is concerned with the assimilation into American citizenship of European immigrants of different stock. The second problem arises from the presence in the United States of over ten million Ne- eroes—freed slaves and their descendants—a child race, but (in theory at least) equal citizens of a great state with the most advanced whites. The cherished belief that the African belongs unchangeably to a child 1 Readers are referred to several excellent books on this subject which have recently been issued: Race and Race Relations, by Robert E. Speer; Christianity and the Race Problem, by J. H. Old- ham; The Clash of Color, by Basil Mathews. See book list at end of this chapter. NEW PACTORS IN WORLD'S LIPE 45 race is, however, being steadily challenged and slowly destroyed. There is no more thrilling page in history than the story of how in the lifetime of middle-aged men of today, five million American Negroes (now doubled in number) stranded and embarrassed by a newly won freedom, have steadily grown in sturdy self-respect, economic independence and responsible citizenship. Separated by less than sixty years from the status of slavery, one in every fourteen owns his home, and illiteracy is rapidly disappearing, seventy- eight per cent of the colored people now being able to read and write. This upward tendency is regarded with mingled hope and fear; it is even resented, and there are millions of whites today who would forcibly hinder it in the interest of white domination. These collisions of the “ will to rise” and the ‘ will to re- press’ constitute a grave race problem. America has not only her race problem of the south, but also of the west. Japan cannot carry her own population, and her lithe and active sons cross the Pacific to America, who seeks to avoid within her own gates deadly economic competition on unequal terms. If Japan were weak and helpless, there would be no problem; but the great new fact is that the emergence of Japan—one of the tinted peoples—as a first-class power, puts her in a position to press for equal rights. America is undoubtedly entitled to control the charac- ter of her own population, but in so doing she has created for herself a specially acute race problem by discriminating on grounds of color against the citizens of another strong state. A significant fact to be noted is that the sympathies of Canada are instinctively with 46 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD their American cousins in the attitude of the latter to the people of Japan. In the African continent a medley of races is in- volved in the color problem. Within the South Afri- can Union, Boer, Briton, and African (black and “colored’’) are involved, all living on different eco- nomic and social planes; and, with what might be called impish irony; the fates have added immigration from India and China to this tangle of race. In Kenya “ Codlin”’ and “ Short” in the shape of Briton and Indian are holding out rival friendly hands to the puzzled native. In other parts of Africa the problem is that of the adjustment of right relations between a few whites and large masses of blacks in what must— climatically—be a black man’s country. The race ele- | ment in the problem is easily stirred by questions cir- cling round government, education, taxation, land, and labor, and these problems are not made easier by the weakening or break-up of the tribal system and the introduction of liquor. We shall return to Africa in a later chapter.* Australia is sixty times the size of England, but she has a population a million and three quarters less than that of Greater London. This huge country with its sparse population of whites is faced with the dread of being flooded, through Chinese immigration, with another race having a lower economic level of life. The land is capable of a development far beyond the possibilities of its small population, and the masses of China covet entry to the vacant territory. The races stand over against each other hostile and watchful. 1 See Chap. IV. NEW FACTORS IN WORLD’S LIFE 47 In Hindustan the Indian challenges the political ascendancy of the white race. Probably the rise of nationalism all the world over has considerably affected the Indian, but the challenge is bound up with racial considerations. He sees that the problems of Ireland, Poland, and Czecho-Slovakia are regarded as matters for the Irish, the Poles, and the Czechs, that the prob- lems of Japan are primarily for the Japanese, of Egypt for the Egyptians, and of China for the Chinese. This gives him a sense of race inferiority. He is dissatis- fied that he is in a different position; he does not want things done for him, however well; he wishes to do things for himself, to have the destinies of his own life subject ultimately only to his own will. His political ‘revolt is undoubtedly helped by a strong reaction against western civilization and a fresh appreciation of the intellectual and spiritual heritage of India. These few general examples illustrate the attitude of the colored races toward the white. The revolt of the colored races is not merely against political domination or even economic exploitation. There has been an ac- cess of self-consciousness, an understanding on the part of all races of the riches of their own inheritance, and there is a fierce desire to protect the old cultures against the destructive and disintegrating forces of the materialism of the West. The colored races are conscious of overwhelming numerical supremacy. There are six hundred and fifty-five million Mongolians alone, three hundred and nineteen millions of Indians, one hundred and ninety million Negroes in Africa and America, and one hun- dred and fifty million more of non-white races else- 48 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD where. These huge populations create in the countries where they are most crowded an impelling need for expansion, and a growing demand for free access to all lands on equal terms. This in turn creates an openly expressed hostility, on the part of sections of the white race, to this surging tide of color. That hostility ex- tends to all progress of colored races, social, political, and economic. It rests on two things. First, there is the legitimate desire to prevent depression of European and American standards of life to the levels of Asia or primitive Africa. Competition on different eco- nomic levels will force the white man down to the level on which he can compete with colored men, and that would be an unmitigated evil. The rapid indus- trialization of the Orient, with which we shall deal in the next chapter, and the development of the natural resources of Africa, make this a very real problem. In the second place there is the fear of unrestricted im- migration with its threat to white civilization and cul- ture. It is acute in North America, Australia, and East and South Africa, where respectively Japanese, Chinese and Indians, each with their own peculiar so- cial development so different from that of the white, seek an outlet for surplus population and offer illimi- table cheap labor. Perhaps bulking more in the mind of the average man is the supposed threat to racial purity through intermarriage. The problem of intermixture without marriage the white man has made for himself. There are in South Africa alone five hundred and forty-five thousand * “ colored”’ people (i.e., the descendants of 1 Official Year Book of the Union of South Africa, 1923, p. 133. NEW FACTORS IN WORLD’S LIFE = 49 African mothers and fathers of other races), which means that one non-European in every ten is “ col- ored.” ‘The thorny path that problem creates for man- kind is one the white man should share, if only as an act of restitution for his part in the making of the problem. The question of intermarriage is much more difficult, but it is really a much smaller problem than intermixture, for general intermarriage at different stages of social development is hardly probable and the fear of it need not fence off the races. Marriage is a social institution, the very basis of human society ; its perfect conception is Christian marriage where the man and woman marry as one in Christ. Short of that conception racial intermarriage, in view of all the difficulties, is likely to be a tragedy. Many difficulties and disabilities will have to be faced. Race operates like caste: the children will be outside the pale in white and colored society; relatives on both sides have to be reckoned with; in many cases it will involve acute pov- erty, for economically the couple will be outcast; and it will always mean for one, if not for both, a com- plete readjustment to new conditions of life. The dif- ficulties are not really biological but are external to the two people concerned: at vottom they are due to the views and prejudices arising from different cultures, and social customs. But intermarriage is a hard road and only rare spirits should try it. These paragraphs are all too brief and bald a sum- mary of some of the more important facts concern- ing the race problem. How is the problem being met? There is a school of white men, ably represented by so THE COST OF A NEW WORLD Lothrop Stoddard,* who argue that the rest of man- kind is inherently inferior physically, mentally, and morally to the people of northern Europe, and must, for the preservation of the nordic race, be kept in per- petual subjection. It might be said in answer that the nordic race is a myth: the Finns are Asiatic, the Scots are Celts and so forth. A study of race migration would suggest that ‘race ” itself is a myth. Stoddard does not seem to allow enough for the fact that stabil- ity in civilization rests on character alone. History contains no record of any people being able to keep another in perpetual subjection; “the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong.” The nordic peo- ples are not supremely gifted. They are rich in sol- diers, seamen, adventurers, traders—in short, conquer- ors—but they have not the monopoly of prophets, poets, artists and statesmen. The founders of all the great religions were Asiatics. The nordic race has distinc- tive gifts, but so have the other races. Then there are schools of Negro thought which hold the opposite doctrine. The first is represented by men like DuBois, author of Souls of Black Folk and Dark- water, a man of great capacity into whose soul the iron has entered and who preaches the impossibility of cooperation between white and black. The conclusive answer to DuBois seems to be that in spite of all the difficulties in the way of cooperation, isolation is im- possible. Men simply cannot live apart in our modern world. ‘Then there is the Negro leader, Marcus Gar- vey, who preaches unrelenting warfare on the white race. His cherished vision is of a day that will see 1See The Rising Tide of Color, Lothrop Stoddard. NEW FACTORS IN WORLD’S LIFE 51 war break out between the East and the West, when the Negroes’ chance will come. ‘“ War,’ says Garvey, “is the only way by which man can obtain salvation.” Garvey and men like him are doubtless extremists, but they cannot be dismissed as mere froth; in a crisis they might work incalculable ruin to thousands of their deluded followers. Over against these extreme views there is the Chris- tian conception of man, and the Christian way of human progress: “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” His design is that all men everywhere should come “‘ unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” who is redeeming men ‘‘out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation,” and is making them “kings and priests ”’ unto God. If that is true, there is a plane on which all races and civilizations are assimilated into some- thing higher, disaster is averted, and the difficulties enumerated just become the rough places on the road. If the rough places are to be made smooth, the Church has a great task. She must seek to win a re- spect for all races, recognizing differences of gift and function, and stirring her members to an honest at- tempt to rid the mind of prejudice. The full expansion of Christianity to all the world is bound up in a con- tinuous effort to uplift every race, to give men the best we have got, to secure equality of justice for all, to insure maximum opportunity to all men—not the same opportunity but equal opportunity. In the fam- ily the children are all differently gifted physically, mentally, and temperamentally ; the parents love all and 52 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD help all—not in the same way, but in the measure of the need of each, with greater solicitude for the greater need. The Church must not shirk the still more diff- cult task of making men willing to throw responsi- bility on men of other color, according to gifts and capacities. The gospel assumes the equality of all men before God, and declares that they have equal access to God and that any man may become a temple of His Spirit. Missions are helped or handicapped in so far as the influence of people within the Church is or is not thrown on the side of right solutions of race problems. There is in these days no more vital touchstone of liv- ing faith. Men have got to see that there is only one primary conflict in the world—not white against black, or brown, or yellow, not East against West; but right against wrong, the true against the false, and Christ against anti-Christ in whatever garb it clothes itself. IV _In a graphic paragraph a well-known Christian pub- licist paints in a few sentences a picture of the seeth- ing mind of youth—another of the great world fer- ments of the present time: Sit in the snug quiet of an undergraduate’s room at midnight in Oxford, or listen to the talk of youth over a Lyons’ tea-table in Leadenhall Street. Ask what is in the mind of the hot-headed youth of Delhi or the undergraduates of the flaming renaissance movement that radiates from the University of Peking through NEW FACTORS IN WORLD’S LIFE 53 China and is transforming the leadership of the most numerous people in the world. Ask what the young Negroes, whose older brothers have come back furious from the war to demand equal rights with the whites, are saying. Look at the daughter and mother in an English home gazing at each other physically across three feet of dining table, but intellectually and spirit- ually across the deepest and widest chasm that has ever separated two generations. Read Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages, J. E. Buckrose’s The Privet Hedge, and all the hundred other novels of today that reveal the heart of the new youth. Over all these ranges of life, and in every continent of the world today, you will find the seething mind of youth facing the new problems of the new world in a new way.* This rising tide of youth is one of the signs of the times. It is marked by intellectual alertness, by social passion, by a refusal to bow to tradition or authority, or time-worn convention or custom. It does not hold gray hairs in reverence; it frankly scorns middle age. “Too old at forty”’ is one of the convictions of youth today. The youth movement is universal. That most ven- erable of all institutions, the British House of Com- mons, has seen in recent years newly-elected members still in the vigor of middle age introduced to “ Mr. Speaker’ by their own sons. Even solemn Church Congresses have been almost hectored by ardent youth which has accused the Church of having come under middle-aged control. The students of a well-known theological college have defined their own Church as 1 Basil Mathews, Zion’s Herald, October 18, 1923. 54 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD “the negation of youth erected into a system.” ‘This is not merely an amusing parody; it reflects an under- lying rebel spirit. These young people in the shops and offices, work- shops and factories, colleges and universities of Great Britain, tell us emphatically that they are sick of the dismal failure of these post-war days. Youth is always the age of criticism; it is cynical about political par- ties and programs, cynical about the sincerity of states- men, more than doubtful about the value of the Church, and intolerant of sect and creed. But the youth who are caught up in the new movement, while critical and cynical, are terribly in earnest. That is the paradoxi- cal character of the youth movement in our time. Young people across the Atlantic are sharing the thought of their British cousins. In the colleges of. North America there has been almost open revolt against the leadership of the older generation, because of doubt by the young as to whether the old had any sure word for them about the problems created by the War. The youth of America are asking ‘‘ What is wrong with the world, and why?” They think that “all the world, including the United States and Can- ada, regardless of what it may say it believes or pro- fesses to follow, in its actual life and living conditions is today essentially pagan.’’* And what is true of Great Britain and America has its counterpart on the continent, in the older countries of the Orient, in the Near East, and among the youth of the Negro race. In Germany there is a strange, somewhat Bohemian, 1 Christian Students and World Problems (Report of Indianapolis Convention, 1924), p. 2. NEW FACTORS IN WORLD'S LIFE 55 movement among young people. The pre-war Ger- many demanded subordination from its youth; indi- vidualism had almost disappeared in the efficient na- tional machine; the state religion was the handmaid of the doctrine of rigid obedience. But even then there were rebels who refused to submit their own spirits to a national system, and one of these founded a new movement of young men and women who felt that their search into the why and wherefore must not be controlled by teachers or parents. They called themselves the Wandervdgel from their habit of wan- dering in the open country. After various ups and downs the astute German drill-sergeant was able to give the movement a semi-military formation. It be- came the “ Young Guard,” and in 1914 was engulfed in the War. The organization reemerged after 1918 and its spirit has already captured a large part of the youth of German gymnasia and universities and has rooted firmly among working men and women. Its outlook is very broad. At a meeting of leaders in 1919 the movement was pledged to “ seek the elimina- tion of all distinctions of race and class which divide common humanity.” It relies on the birth of charac- ter through fearless thought and through fresh con- tact with nature to realize this objective. The move- ment is preaching a new manner of life, with simpler requirements, temperate habits, with a mixture of puri- tanism and a real appreciation of all good life. Here is a picture of one of the wandering groups: From the distance, around the bend of the wood where the road dipped down to the river, came the 56 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD music of a number of instruments, soft but of marked rhythm. I was sure that I had never heard anything like it before. My companion said, ‘ Wait, and you will see” Ina few minutes a troupe of some thirty or forty young men and women passed us at a rapid stride, walking in loose lines with arms interlaced or holding hands. Guitars were hung from the shoulders of strapping young fellows by colored ribbons whose ends fluttered in the wind. The band was in curious costume; of the girls some were in peasant dresses of printed cottons, their hair coiled around their heads in braids, following a fashion which has spread all over Germany as a deliberate defiance of imported styles; others wore even simpler and more colorful garments and ribbons around their hair. The youths wore tunics or shirts open at the throat... . With eyes shining they passed by, absorbed in song or earnest talk. “ Wandervogel?”’ Y asked my companion. I had heard years before the war of the organization of these “migratory birds” that had taken thousands of young people out of the crowded cities on holidays and cre- ated a cult of outdoor life and lore such as Germany had not known for generations. “ Better than that,” he replied, “they are of the new democratic youth movement (freideutsche Jugendbe- wegung) which has broken all ties with merely pro- tective societies organized for the young by the old.” * And the youth movement in Germany has its coun- terpart in almost all the other countries of Europe. Nor are youth movements confined to the white youth of the world. They are perhaps strongest of all in the Orient. 1 Youth and Renaissance Movements, p. 68. NEW FACTORS IN WORLD'S LIFE 57 It is difficult for a westerner to estimate the change represented by the youth movement in China or, as it is sometimes called, the “ New Thought ”’ movement. Several millenniums of the culture represented by the old scholars, to whom a single quotation from Con- fucius was sufficient authority for any maxim or any custom, have been swept aside by the new learning. So complete is this national revolution that in spite of the present turmoil, continual civil war, and of the absolute breakdown of government, modern education on national lines and the New Thought movement are progressing everywhere. The youth in the Chinese colleges and schools will accept nothing that is not critically examined and found to rest on a scientific basis. They want democratic government and a re- formed social order, and are increasingly opposed to the growth of western influence, which they feel to be merely the continuation of the old aggression. Para- doxically, foreign literature is more and more eagerly read, and the Peking Society for Lecturers on New Learning is bringing to China a small procession of British and American publicists, who are warmly wel- comed., “ Nothing is too new to be discussed in China today, and nothing too radical for experiment.” * The young everywhere are demanding the control of their own lives. A flourishing Chinese Women’s Rights League is seeking equal political rights, equal- ity of rights of inheritance, and equal opportunity in education, a marriage law effecting equality between men and women, a law fixing an age of consent, the abolition of licensed prostitution, the slave-trade, and 1 Timothy Lew in China Today Through Chinese Eyes, p. 38. 58 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD foot-binding, “equal pay for equal work,” and “ pro- tection of motherhood ”—and all this in a land where till within the present century the generation of today has been chained to the generations of all the past centuries. The youth of India are the torch-bearers of the na- tionalist movement. The student world has led in the new aspirations and demands, and everyone now recognizes that the soul of Young India is behind nationalism. An acute observer tells us that it is hardly possible to magnify the seriousness of the dis- content among the students of India. Nationalism absorbs the mind of youth, and one very real danger in India is that the young men of India may take an exclusively national view of all public questions in their concentration on the demand for freedom to fash- ion their own destiny. It may be doubted whether western forms of government can be easily adapted to oriental institutions; some new system has to be devised whereby when the western hand comes off the tiller, Indian pilots can guide the ship of state along lines suited to the genius of her peoples. However baffling are the problems of that transition, they must be faced with sympathy and courage, and in that ef- fort it is with the youth of India that Britain will have to reckon. Great common features run through all this national ferment of youth in every land. Everywhere it is a revolt against ‘‘ The God of Things as They Are.” It is permeated by an essential unity. Youth is the only “International”? today, everywhere rebel, everywhere united by some subtle alchemy. Statesmen, church- NEW FACTORS IN WORLD’S LIFE 59 men, capitalists, and socialists have all failed to effect a real “‘ International” ; the young everywhere are tak- ing a world view. In many lands the youth movement is unorganized or is confined to small groups, but its power does not lie in numbers or organization. It has been well said that “if five per cent of the people knew what they wanted they could change the face of the country.” The great power of the youth movement lies in its new living thought, its social passion, its open mind. And yet with this open-mindedness there does not come everywhere an easy access for Christianity. Large numbers of men and women in the youth movement name the Name of Jesus Christ; in the colleges and high schools of the world their number exceeds a quar- ter of a million. But in the old lands youth has re- volted from narrow pietism—it abhors statecraft and churchcraft; it does not see that Christianity stands for the good against the evil everywhere, that it is the supreme fermenting force in the world. In the non- Christian lands Christianity is too often merely re- garded as foreign propaganda; while in China there is an anti-Christian Students’ Movement, bitterly hostile to and actively opposing the spread of Christianity, in which it professes to see only western imperialism, mili- tarism, and capitalism in a new form. Only a movement with the fervor of a religion can capture youth, and yet youth everywhere is challenging religion. Why do we have thousands of eager Italian boys in black shirts following a flag for hours in dust and heat? Why are there six hundred thousand mem- bers of the Komsomol, or Communist Youth Move- Lee Na ni ee TVV ohh rir «. . 7 i ft Fay 60 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD ment? Why are there thirty German Youth Move- ments, all impelled by a desire to escape from the tram- mels of the past? Why the China Renaissance Youth Movement? Why the Japanese Senanden? Why have communist students captured the student world in the Universities of Athens, Sofia, and Prague and other continental towns so that Christian students are driven to inquire, “How can we get from our members as much loyalty and certainty about Christianity as the young communists have about communism?” Youth, in all these movements, asserts that the task before man ‘‘is to strive for a new spirit, the vanquishment of right by love, of authority by an inner freedom, con- straint by a cosmic restraint.” * It does not, however, hear the sure word “ Love is of God”’; it has not yet entered into the liberty wherewith Christ has made men free, nor learned the love of Christ which constrain- eth, nor has it seen in Him the great leader of the youth of the world. All these volcanic national and racial upheavals, all the fierce stirring of the mind of youth, may appear superficially to be merely uncontrolled forces resulting only in a mischievous clash of wills, issuing in wild anarchy. In reality, stripped of all excrescences, they are a healthy upheaval of the human spirit breaking through the stifling crust of “things as they are” for a breath of fresh air. In the desire to be free men hit out blindly at everything which appears to stand for the old cramping order of things. But all upward movements of the spirit of men are born of the Spirit 1 Youth and Renaissance Movements, p. 77. NEW FACTORS IN WORLD’S LIFE 61 of God. Our task is to interpret them, to find what is of God in them, to help them to purge themselves of all that is dross, and to relate them to the coming of His Kingdom. The issues raised by all these movements touch the expansion of Christianity very closely. Heralds of the Cross everywhere have to preserve a right attitude to nationalism in State and Church. Nothing would be a greater barrier to religion than that Jesus Christ should be regarded as a western national. In an ef- fective international standard lies the only hope in some lands for adequate personal and religious liberty, de- cent government, and a fair chance for the young Church to carry the gospel and give Christian educa- tion to her own people. Race antipathies in the mem- bership of a Church paralyze its life and negative its message; in a Christian nation they very easily handi- cap the foreign missionary and impair his mission. What an ally the youth of the world might be in mak- ing that message effective! Here are great regions of human life lying athwart the Church in her task of world-wide expansion, which demand new and en- larged ideals of the enterprise. Books FoR REFERENCE AND FURTHER READING Christianity and the Race Problem. J. H. OtpHam. George H. Doran Co., New York. 1924. $2.25. Clash of Color, The. Bastz MatHews. Missionary Education Movement, New York. 1924. Cloth, $1.25; paper, 75 cents. Covenant of the League of Nations. World Peace Foundation. V. 3, Special number, July, 1920. 5 cents. Menace of Colour, The. J. W. Grecory. J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia. 1925. $4.50. 62 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD Quest of Nations, The. T. R. W. Lunt. United Council for Missionary Education, London. 75 cents. Race and Race Relations. Ropert E. Speer. Fleming H. Revell Co., New York. 1924. $3.50. Race Problem and the Teaching of Jesus Christ, The. J. S. Hoy- LAND. Religious Tract Society, England. 3s. 6d. Rising Tide of Color, The. LotHrop Stopparp. Charles Scrib- ner’s Sons, New York. 1920. $3.00. CHAPTER IIT THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE ORIENT In Chapter I we saw how the failure of Christianity to permeate to any large extent the great movements of human activity and thought which broke out in the middle of the eighteenth century, made possible one hundred and fifty years later a World Missionary Con- ference and a World War within four years of each other. In Chapter II we looked at some of the new world-wide movements which must needs be Christian- ized if they are to help and not hinder the message of the missionary enterprise. We aim in these next four chapters at dealing with a few of the present-day move- . ments in the non-Christian world which present fresh regions of material and mental development for occu- pation by the Church of Christ. The present chapter deals with the industrialization of the Orient. This and similar movements are making the world with which the new generation will have to deal, and are creating the conditions under which the expansion of Christianity has to be carried on. Before the World War fastened a new set of prob- lems on a distressed world, the Far East had already its full share of upheaval. On the surface the “un- changing East’’ was much the same as for centuries past, but, in the last few decades, in India, China, and Japan three ancient civilizations have been swept into the great current of world-wide commerce and indus- try. These countries contain about one half of the total population of the globe, and while as yet only a 63 64 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD tithe of that huge mass of humanity has come under these new influences, the beginnings of a swift indus- trial revolution on western lines have undoubtedly set in. Commercial and industrial influences are far- reaching, and in so far as these ancient lands are be- coming commercialized and industrialized, they are leaving much of the old life behind them. ‘The people of the Orient are taking their place in the life of the world at a thousand points, and are now making their contribution to the great common stream of life from which issueS the uplift or degradation of the whole human race. I In the case of India there was from time immemo- rial a certain amount of trading contact with the West. The gold of the Indies was the lure of many a mer- chant-adventurer, and long before the British conquest of India through the victories of Clive and Warren Hastings, a considerable trade had sprung up with Europe. Since Queen Elizabeth’s time the East India Company had been silently prospering. Its charter was again and again extended; it was an entrenched monopoly, made huge profits, and developed a large trade. But not until the Company was finally abol- ished did the spirit of modern commerce and industry vitally touch India. China had for ages presented closed doors to foreign adventurers. When Abraham emigrated from Chaldea to Canaan, the Chinese people had already begun to develop a language, a government, a religion, arts and INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 65 sciences, which have seldom been touched by any breath from the outside world during four thousand years. Canton was the first door to open, and became the trading port in China for the East India Company. The trade with Canton was not unattended with diffi- culties. The European “ factories’ * were confined to a very tiny territory, and when the Company offended, the Chinese suspension of trade by the latter was the effective method of disciplining the “ foreign devils,” who were invariably glad to renew trade relations by payment of an indemnity. Europeans were not al- lowed to touch at any other ports until after the first Opium War of 1841-2. Under the treaty made at the end of that war, five ports, Shanghai, Ningpo, Fuchow, Amoy, and Canton, were opened to European trade and the modern commercialization of China really began. After a period of slight contact with the West, in medizval times, Japan was for long a closed land. Its opening to modern trade and commerce dates from _ the day in 1863 when Commodore Perry of the Amer- ican Navy sailed into the Bay of Yedo with a squadron of four ships. The closed door was practically forced open, and in the course of the next few years commer- cial treaties were made with the various European countries. While, as mentioned, India had a limited trade with the West for centuries, world commerce in India, China, and Japan alike, is quite a recent development. The swift growth of these new commercial contacts is almost dramatic. Already the merchandise of the 1 The Company’s warehouses were called “ factories.” 66 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD Orient is carried over the Seven Seas by a great fleet of richly laden ocean-going steamers. In 1922, the tonnage of ships engaged in foreign trade entering and leaving the ports of India, China, and Japan was ap- proximately equal to the tonnage engaged in foreign trade entering and leaving the ports of the United States. It will hardly be surprising that with such an enor- mous shipping trade the East has taken to shipbuild- ing, in which Japan has already made big strides. Her output is exceeded only by Great Britain and the United States. Though she is but a recent entrant into shipbuilding competition, she is already producing one fifteenth of the whole world’s output. India’s pro- duction is negligible, but China has now begun ship- building, for which she has unequalled facilities. Within the lifetime of the present generation the Clyde, the Tyne, and Belfast may find deadly rivals in the Yangtse valley, Hong-Kong, and Kobe. The long coast lines of India, China, and Japan, and their numerous excellent ports, have made easy the rapid development of sea traffic. But the increase in internal communication has been equally notable. The first railway was built in India seventy years ago; now there are as many miles of track lines operating as in Great Britain. China’s first railway was laid down only as late as 1876, but there were at the end of 1921 about nine thousand miles open in China and Man- churia, and a much larger mileage projected. The railways in China are few compared with the huge country to be served, and the recent disturbed condi- tions of the land have made railway development dif- INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 67 ficult, but with settled conditions railway construction is sure to proceed rapidly. The growth of railways in Japan reads like a fairy tale. Forty-five years ago there were little more than as many miles of railway. In 1922 the mileage was equal to more than one third of the railways in Great Britain. II The rapid commercial development of China ‘and Japan has been accelerated by the great natural re- sources of these countries. Japan is especially rich in coal, iron, silver, copper, and petroleum, while raw silk is produced in abundance. China is essentially an agricultural country; in addition to the huge crops of grain required to feed her own millions, large quanti- ties of silk, cotton, and tea are produced for export. But for China many women could not walk in silk at- tire; she furnishes over one fourth of the world’s sup- ply of raw silk. China is also rich in minerals. Coal is abundant, and some of the iron and copper fields are among the richest in the world. The country claims to have known long before the rest of mankind the art of smelting iron. With a very extensive coast line, an abundance of excellent deepwater ports, and two great river systems stretching into the heart of the country and navigable for hundreds of miles, China is well equipped for development of her great resources. It should always be borne in mind, however, that China is still an agricultural country, and that in Japan there are nearly four times as many people engaged in farm- ing as in other industries. India, like China, depends 68 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD for her life on agriculture, more than two thirds of her people being supported by tilling the soil, rearing stock, and forestry. One tenth of all the land tilled is under cotton; large crops of jute are raised; and of course India and Ceylon supply most of our breakfast and afternoon tea. But there is also substantial min- eral wealth in India, especially coal, gold, mica, lead, copper, and manganese, as well as petroleum. The industrial development of the Orient has been influenced in two directions by these natural resources. The growth of cotton, jute, and silk has led to textile industries, while mineral resources have led to coal mining, the smelting of iron and other ore, and the development of iron and steel and allied industries. For those who revel in statistics some figures may be given, | India grows cotton and jute in enormous quantities and the country is suitable for textile development. In Calcutta and district there are seventy-six jute mills, employing over 276,000 workers, while nearly three hundred cotton mills employing over 300,000 workers are found in Bombay, Madras, and other towns. China likewise grows cotton and also silk, and there too great mills have been erected. At the beginning of the pres- ent century there were two modern cotton mills in China; in 1922* there were over seventy with more than 2,500,000 spindles, one hundred hosiery, under- wear, and towel mills, one hundred and twenty modern corn mills, and various other factories employing to- gether over half a million men, women, and children. These form the nucleus of a great army of Chinese 1 Statesman’s Year Book. INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 69 workers who some day are going to meet all the needs of the four hundred million potential customers within their own frontiers. Cotton is imported into Japan from India and China, spun into yarn on over 4,000,000 spindles, and woven into cotton cloth on 45,000 looms. The Japanese also spin a large part of the silk they produce. All this India, China, and Japan do not only for themselves but in an increasing degree for the great markets of the world. In addition to exporting raw jute, India sells to England and other countries nearly $135,000,000 worth of jute products each year. China cannot be said to have entered on world industrial com- petition. She does not as yet manufacture all the cot- ton goods she needs for her own people, and she has to buy from Japan and England, but every year sees an increasing Chinese output and a narrower margin of requirement from the outside world. Soon China will not only clothe her own people but she will sell cotton to other countries. Japan’s population is small compared with India’s and China’s teeming millions, and already her great markets are overseas. Japan ex- ports annually to China (including Hong-Kong), Straits Settlements, and India, goods to the value of over $250,000,000, so that her trade is already a factor in setting a standard of competition throughout the Far East. This huge textile development is effecting a subtle social change. India and China, like other Eastern lands, still use the hand loom, but in the modern world the god of cheapness must eventually consign the hand loom to the scrap-heap—it has no chance in com- 70 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD petition with the most up-to-date textile machinery, and the social structure it represents will perish with it. A large part of the cotton thread produced in the big factories on the Yangtse is still sent to the interior, where it is woven into cloth on hand looms. But modern machinery is unfortunately a remorseless ag- eressor, before which arts and crafts have to bow everywhere. In attempting to win back India to home- spun, Gandhi was surely emulating the monarch who ordered back the tides of the sea. If great textile industries have invaded the East, of as great importance has been the development of its mineral wealth. Coal and iron are the twin pillars of modern industry, and so long as coal is the main source of power, so long will factories group themselves near the coal supplies. Accordingly, the big industrial re- gions of the world are found near the coal and iron fields in Great Britain, Belgium, the Ruhr, and Penn- sylvania. India, China, and Japan have abundant sup- plies of coal, and extensive iron ore is found in all three countries. The furnaces of Tatanagar, Han- kow, and Osaka are names as familiar in the iron and steel world as Pittsburg, Middlesborough, and the Ruhr. The output of pig iron in China in 1922 was equal to one fifth of the output in Great Britain for the same year. Similarly, silver, copper, tin, lead, wolfram, and antimony are all found in large quanti- ties in one or other of the countries of the Orient, and are being mined and manufactured in increasing quan- tities. Many large Eastern banking businesses have grown up even in disordered China, where modern banking is INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 71 only an institution of the present century, and foreign banks are strong and numerous. There are regular ocean steamer services from the great ports of the Orient to all parts of the world. The telegraph and the telephone link up their cities, and they are in con- stant cable and wireless communication with lands overseas. The rapidity of all these developments can hardly be overstated. The growth is, to a certain extent, re- flected in the figures of traffic passing through the Suez Canal, that great arterial road between West and East. The Suez Canal Company * had successive rec- ord years in 1922, 1923, and 1924. In the latter year over 25,000,000 tons of shipping passed through the canal as against the best pre-war year (1912), the fig- ure for which was about 20,000,000 tons. India has in half a century increased her trade tenfold. The im- portant consideration is not so much the present extent of industrialism in India as its rapid growth in recent years.” Between 1902 and 1920 the number of fac- tory workers increased fourfold, of miners above ground threefold, while workers in mines below ground increased by more than one half. In Japan 14,000 new factories were built during the World War; these have come to stay. In 1911 China imported 3,000,000 barrels of flour, but ten years later she exported the same quantity and imported none. Japan fifty years ago was a peaceful agricultural country and as late as 1883 there were only 125 modern factories. In tg21 1 British Chamber of Commerce Journal, Shanghai, March, 1925. 2See articles on ‘“Industrialism in India,’ in the National Christian Council Review, June-September, 1925. 72 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD there were 71,000, employing over 1,750,000 men, women, and children.* III All this development has meant the growth of a large mining, industrial, and transport population in the new industrial centers and at the ports, with con- sequent overcrowding and bad conditions judged even by eastern standards. At the same time its influence permeates to the agricultural community and to the old trading guilds which go back for at least ten cen- turies. The old and the new life go on side by side, but business, formerly a family affair, is more and more becoming a matter of individual units, and old customs and equities are displaced. Competition and the law of supply and demand are now in the saddle, and age-long guild customs are no longer adequate to regulate trading and stabilize business, There are various factors in this rapid industrial development of the Orient which must be considered. Primarily there is the introduction of western capital and the tendency of human nature to exploit natural wealth everywhere. Then unlimited cheap labor and cheap fuel coupled with western efficiency of plant and organization, give a great advantage to Oriental indus- tries in competition with the West. Further, the East has an immense home market with potential customers numbering about half of the human race, among whom there is a steadily growing demand for modern goods stimulated by the new and rapid means of transport 1 Résumé Statistique de L’Empire du Japon, 1924. INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 73 and communication, multiplied points of contact, the spread of modern education, and the growth of the newspaper press. In all this industrial development the worst features of the growth of the factory system in the West are being reproduced. The old “cry of the children” goes up day by day, and in lands where human life is cheap, men and women are the easy and helpless victims of industrial injustice. In some of the Shanghai cotton mills children of from seven to twelve years of age work twelve hours a day on a night and day shift. Babies are brought to the mills with their mothers, and live in the dust and heat; tiny children do odd jobs at the age of six and regular work at eight for long shifts of twelve hours, one procession coming out of the mill half asleep as the other goes in. In a re- view of 880 cases dealt with in the Industrial Hospital at Shanghai it is stated that “the youngest child in- jured was five years old.”’* One employer has de- clared that “if we stop employing children in mills we would have to close down .. . children’s hands are peculiarly fitted for the work.’ * A half-holiday on Saturday and one rest day a week are almost un- known to the industrial mites of the Orient and their heritage of joy and play is denied to them. They lead an almost prison-like life. The conditions under which their mothers work ensure that many more “sleep the sleep that knows no waking” long before they are old enough to toddle to the mill. The exploitation of child labor in the cotton mills 1 Paper by H. W. Decker, in China Medical Journal, March, 1924. 2 Sherwood Eddy, The New World of Labor, p. 26. 74. THE COST OF A NEW WORLD of Shanghai has acquired considerable notoriety. It has been the subject of severe criticism for some years, and in June, 1923, mainly under the pressure of Chinese Christians, missionaries, and others specially interested in religious and social questions, the Munici-. pal Council appointed a Commission to inquire into the matter. That Commission made its report about a year later. In view of the interest created in the matter a summary of its recommendations is printed as an Appendix.* In 19217 there were about fifty cotton mills in or on the borders of the Shanghai Foreign Settlement— now there are several more—employing not hundreds but thousands of children down, it would seem, to the age of about eight or nine years. “ Many of the for- eign-owned mills of Shanghai, which have produced substantial dividends for their shareholders during the past ten years, are still employing child labor for long hours per day or night, and the very mild measures of reform which have been recommended by the spe- cial Industrial Commission after two years’ negotia- tions have so far failed to secure ratification by the rate-payers of the International Shanghai Settlement. Such facts as these afford ready ammunition for the communistic propagandist or anti-foreign agitator, as he inveighs against the exploitation of human life by so-called ‘ callous capitalists.’ The foreign-owned mills form but a small percentage of the total, and condi- tions within them, as competent observers have pointed out, are far superior to those to be found in most Chi- 1 Page 183. 2 North China Daily News, 5th November, 1921. INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 75 nese industrial enterprises; but it is impossible to gloss over the fact that they are employing labor under condi- tions that would not be tolerated for a moment in this country.” * The factory system in India affects child life in an- other way. Bombay, the Manchester of India, has about 150 cotton mills with some 200,000 operatives ; the city is in fact a “ cottonopolis.” Two out of every three babies born there die within one year, as against one out of fourteen in England, but the figures of the mill population are even worse. Three fourths of all the babies born in Bombay are born in a one-roomed house, and of these more than eight in every ten die within a year of their birth. The other side of the picture is that the cotton mills of Bombay, largely owned by wealthy Parsees, make notoriously large profits on the capital invested in the mills. In 1923 there were over 2,000,000 factory workers in Japan.” Of that number more than half were women. A reliable writer on Japan states that the factories have now to recruit 300,000 new girls from the country districts every year, of whom over one third return home within the year, one sixth because of serious illness, tuberculosis heading the list. Mr. Suzuki, the labor leader of Japan, stated ten years ago that over one hundred and thirty thousand women were employed in the mines of that country. “Most of them are between sixteen and twenty years of age, and they work in the pits along with the men. ‘Twenty per cent of all the laborers in the coal mines 1 Harold Balme, What is Happening in China (1925), pp. 17-18. 2 Résumé Statistique de L’Empire du Japon, 1924. 76 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD today are women. They are usually employed to carry baskets filled in the pits. They work in the bowels of the earth, naked like the men, wearing only a little breech clout.” * Another great Japanese leader, T. Kagawa, has stated to the writer that while there has been some improvement in the last ten years, the con- ditions are not materially changed, and that accidents are very numerous. The industrial condition of the women workers of the Orient denies life to their children, forms a degra- dation of womanhood, and is a sinister element in the body social; tomorrow it will mark the beginning of a struggle in the East for sex economic independence. Following the example of Japan, educated young Chinese women are now beginning to take posts as clerks in banks, assistants in business houses, and operators in telephone offices. All this is leading to the breakdown of the restrictions which in former days hemmed in the life of the women of China, and it is not without significance that in Korea today a newspaper is published under the title The New W oman. Labor and life are both cheap in the Far East. Of one Chinese cotton spinning company it has been written : ” The profits of the factory again surpassed $500,000. . . . For the past two years it has been running day and night with scarcely any intermission. The num- ber of hands employed is 2,500. . . . [The statement 1 Quoted in Creative Forces in Japan, Galen M. Fisher, p. 60. 2 Quoted from the Maritime Customs Trade Report for 1920 by Sherwood Eddy in his New World of Labor. INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 77 then gives a wages table.] It will be seen that the Company is in an exceptionally favorable position. With the raw material at their doors, an abundant and absurdly cheap labor supply to draw on, and no vexa- tious factory laws to observe, it is not surprising that their annual profits should have exceeded their total capital on at least three occasions. This unashamed statement may be allowed to speak for itself. Itneeds no comment or elaboration. Cheap labor is a nightmare to civilization. No man 1s good enough to have an abundance of “absurdly cheap labor ’ at his disposal and “ no vexatious factory laws to observe.” It invariably ends in abuse. Figures and vivid pictures are dangerous, but when China enters on world-wide competition, industry in the West will have to face some grave and perplexing questions. A consideration of China’s labor supply, her raw material, and her potential home market may well give the West pause. Competition between white and colored labor, on a different economic level, is inevitable. So surely as metal is attracted by a mag- net will capital follow the cheapest material and the least costly labor and freedom from restriction. The increase of an efficient community of workers in the Orient will far outrun any improvement in social con- ditions. Hours, wages, and conditions, but not effi- ciency, will for long lag behind the standards aimed at in the West. The first impulse is to repress the in- dustrial status and opportunity of the native worker, but that impulse is impotent in the self-governing states of the Orient. So far as can be seen this is a 78 THE COST! OF A NEW WORLD problem labor has hardly awakened to. In the present economic distress it is clear that the working classes in one European country are seriously affected by worse working conditions in another. But such conse- quences are trifling to those which will be felt when the full strain of Oriental competition for world markets sets in. Difficult and delicate problems of mutual re- lations and interest will have to be settled before the workers of the world can unite. The far-reaching reactions of industry ought to be much better understood by Christian folk. A lady* speaking to a huge missionary convention in America began her address thus: Several of us in this room are wearing hair nets... . Comparatively few of the women who still use these realize that the great center of the hair-net industry is in the city of Chefoo, China. And probably even a smaller number of those who have discarded nets for bobbed locks are aware that they have thereby con- tributed to the unemployment of hundreds of women in that far-away city of north China. Yet, only a short time ago a letter from a friend in Chefoo con- tained this sentence: “I don’t know what will happen to us if you women in America don’t stop cutting your hair. We are all losing our jobs. There were 18,000 women and girls in the hair-net factories here two years and a half ago, and now there are only a few over 2000.” The converse picture followed: It is a far cry from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Tokyo, Japan. But when a few months ago the girls 1 Miss Margaret Burton at Washington, January, 1925. INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT = 79 in a silk mill there petitioned for higher wages, their employer said that to grant their request would mean the failure of his business. When pressed for an ex- planation he gave competition with the silk mills of Tokyo as the reason for his answer. The close association between industry and arma- ments has had its reaction in the East, where the gift of modern armaments cannot be reckoned as a gain to the welfare of the people. Japan’s field army of twenty-one divisions and her $200,000,000-a-year navy, make a heavy toll on industry, while no one would contend that the Indian army budget of $400,- 000,000 can be anything but an intolerable burden on her resources. Modern industry and social custom and political action in West and East are interdependent and react one on the other, and anything we can do to help to bring a Christian way of life into industry in this country will help to make things better in the East, while any betterment in the East will react here. IV An attempt was made in the Treaty of Versailles to lay down a minimum labor charter for all the world. Part XIII of the Treaty deals with labor. It lays down the principle that universal peace can only be established if it is based on social justice. It states that conditions of labor exist involving such injustice, hardship, and privation to large numbers of people as to produce unrest so great that the peace and harmony of the world are imperilled and an improvement of 80 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD these conditions is urgently required. The Treaty created a permanent international labor organization for the promotion of better labor conditions through- out the world. It lays down certain methods and prin- ciples which seemed to the signatories to be of special and urgent importance, and already the organization has done much useful work. But these methods and principles have hardly as yet touched the industrial systems of the Far East. In India the workers’ modest charter is contained in the Factory Act of 1921, which fixes a maximum eleven-hour day or sixty-hour week and disallows em- ployment of children between the ages of twelve and fifteen for more than six hours a day. In India, how- ever, western standards are lamentably few, and inquiry and statement of facts are not welcomed. It is the same in Japan. When the Rev. T. Kagawa investi- gated the coal mines of Kyusiu in 1918 his discoveries were so damaging both to the mine owners and to the government inspectors that he was forbidden to pub- lish part of his report.* Some factories in Japan, but only a fraction of the total, have excellent provision for workers, compara- tively good wages, an eight-hour day, insurance against unemployment and a pension fund, but in Tokyo, for instance, only three hundred factories out of five thou- sand are said to have anything like welfare work. A Japanese National Factory Law was passed in 1911 and came into force in 1916. It provided inter aha that: 1 Creative Forces in Japan, Galen M. Fisher, p. 68. INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 81 (1) Children under twelve years of age cannot be employed except that, with the permission of the ad- ministrative authorities, children as young as ten may be employed on light work. (2) The employment of children under fifteen and women for more than twelve hours a day is prohibited. (3). The employment of children under fourteen and women between the hours of Io p.m. and 4 a.m. is prohibited. But the first and third provisions were not to be put into operation for fifteen years in order to allow the factories time to adjust themselves! * China has so far only paper labor legislation and it is difficult to see how in the midst of the pre- vailing disorder any protection of the worker can be enforced. Article 427 of the Peace Treaty secures to employees the right of association for all lawful purposes. India, China, and Japan are all signatories, and although the International Labor Conference has given much atten- tion to the Orient, especially to China, the workers of the Far East have not yet been able to make good this right to combine. Industrial unrest seems to be the only possible road to betterment. In Japan the labor movement took rise within the last thirty years, in the midst of the boom following the victory of Japan over China. It was subject to constant police restriction, but several strikes occurred with varying success till in 1918, arising out of the war-time anti-profiteering rice riots in Kobe, the labor movement took on a new lease 1 Creative Forces in Japan, Galen M. Fisher, pp. 83 and 84. 82 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD of life. In that year there were over eight hundred strikes, involving one hundred and twenty-five thou- sand workers. Two events in the Far East greatly strengthened the position of the young Trade Unions. The strike of 1921 at the great Kobe shipyards in Japan showed that the spirit of the old feudal régime was gone; the worker had discovered his unsuspected powers, and meant to put up a fight for social justice. The great leader of the movement was the well-known Kagawa who, while he fights for the workers, remains pastor of a little church in a slum. The Kobe strike failed, the workers made no terms, their leader was sent to prison, but the sympathies of Japan were with the strikers who had measured swords with their employers and had created an organization which stood the test of defeat. In 1922 the Chinese seamen took a stand (in the words of the President of their Union) against ‘‘ deprivation of their rights, rough treatment, fourteen-hours work a day, and an existence bordering on semi-starvation.”’ It looked a forlorn hope by a group of “ silly sailor folk” unaccustomed to organization. Within a fort- night the number on strike reached thirty thousand, and the intervention of the British in Hong-Kong in proclaiming the Seamen’s Union to be an unlawful so- ciety only resulted in sympathetic strikes of twenty thousand coolies and others. In a month one hundred and sixty-six steamers had been held up, and at the end of three months the industrial life of Hong-Kong was completely paralyzed. Then shipowners and Gov- ernment capitulated. The Seamen’s Union was de- clared lawful, the strikers obtained their demands, and INDUSTRIALGIZATION (OBR ORIENT | 183 an immediate impetus was given to labor organizations among Chinese workers. Trade Unionism in India is as yet in its infancy and is being organized under many difficulties. India is perhaps the poorest country on earth. The average income of the Indian worker is about seventy shillings a year; thousands live in perpetual debt and are glad to get one meal a day. The industrial community is small—one in forty. The Indian is a village dweller. Only crushing poverty drives him to the jute factory or the cotton mill, and as soon as he can, he returns to his village. The industrial countries in the West have developed permanent industrial populations; but in India the village is still the home, and there is a con- stant ebb and flow between the industrial towns and the rural areas. With brilliant exceptions labor in India is not throwing up a strong leadership from its own ranks, and is therefore subject to exploitation at the hands of self-appointed leaders. If industrial un- rest, of which there is much in India, is not to end in mere sporadic anarchy, it is surely better that there should be adequate organization to guide the ignorant helpless mass of Indian workers and to formulate their demands and press for social justice. Just as industrialism created in the West the condi- tions set forth in Chapter I, so in the East the old sordid story is being reenacted and the old bitter strug- gle staged again, but with this difference—that while in the West the best Christian consciousness of the community sympathizes with the demand for adequate factory legislation and better conditions for working people, there is no similar public opinion or similar 84. THE COST OF A NEW WORLD | standard of the value of personality to which appeal can be made in the East, and as yet, except in Japan, there is hardly any active industrial machinery through which betterment can be enforced. Human greed and callousness are at the root of much of the evil. The world has not yet witnessed rapid economic development without exploitation. Unfortunately the case of the Chinese cotton com- pany * is not an isolated one. The same sordid story is true of the jute mills of Calcutta. Dividends ex- ceeding the total amount of capital of a company are by no means unknown. Some of the firms concerned have good English and Scottish names, and unfortu- nately the consumer, in whatever land he lives, is the unconscious employer of sweated labor. In such a situation industrial strife when it breaks out becomes acute and often takes the form of fierce rioting and race conflict. Think of the openings for Bolshevik agents ever ready to exploit discontent, wherever found! A sense of injustice is soon turned into bitter enmity, generally against the West, and the only hope of the worker in such a situation is wise leadership basing demands on justice, opposed to violence, and with a right view of the sacredness of personality and of the value of service and sacrifice. Where are these ideals to be found outside Christianity ? V Opinions may differ as to the relation of the Chris- tian Church to economic development, but no mission- 1See p. 76. INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ORIENT 85 ary doubts that a right understanding of the facts will help him in his missionary task or that a better impact from the West would lighten his task. He works in lands where the old social order is crumbling away— sometimes imperceptibly but always steadily. The age- long sanctions of family and communal life are begin- ning to break down, there is social strain from new quarters, the old ethics get damaged and destroyed, new evils grow. He sees only too acutely that mere ma- terial development—buying, selling, and manufacturing —will not create a better social order or lead men to God. Much less will such conditions as we have sur- veyed bring this to pass. He is painfully aware that the non-Christian religions are not adequate to the new social needs and have nothing to say to them. He does not wait to ask whether Christ can meet them, whether he should leave social conditions alone, or whether Christian leaders should be trained up to deal with them. In the everyday work of every mission these questions are answered. The missionary does not stop at social amelioration, famine and earthquake relief, and medical help. He cannot arrest his teach- ing or his preaching of Christ the moment it faces human greed and heartlessness, or indifference in deal- ing with evil. He does not only attack slavery, opium, drink, and other evils, where he is sure of acting up to the home community consciousness. His standards are those of Jesus. | That view of life is costly. It calls us to bear the world’s pain. The forces that maim life and crush the spirit of man should shock like bloodshed and vio- lent death. Conscience has to be aroused, example 86 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD set, pioneer efforts encouraged, facts made known, and Japanese, Chinese, and Indian Christians alike helped to understand, and to meet, and to solve in the spirit of Jesus, the big problems facing them. Books FOR REFERENCE AND FURTHER READING China in the Family of Nations. Henry Hopexin. George H. Doran Co., New York. 1923. $2.00. Christ and Labour. C. F. ANDREWs, George H. Doran Co., New York. 1924. $1.75. Creative Forces in Japan. GALEN M. FisHer. Missionary Edu- cation Movement, New York. 1923. Cloth, 75 cents; paper, 50 cents. International Labour Office Reports. International Labour Of- fice, 26 Buckingham Gate, S. W. 1. England. Moral and Material Progress of India. Government Official Re- port, 2s. 6d. England. New World of Labour, The. SwuErRwoop Eppy. George H. Doran Co., New York. 1923. $1.50. Social Problems and the East. FRANK LeNwoop. Edinburgh House Press, London. 2s. 6d. Statesman’s Year Book, The Macmillan Co., New York. 1924. $7.50. Women Workers and the Orient. Marcaret E. Burton. Cen- tral Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, West Medford, Mass. Cloth, 50 cents; paper, 35 cents. ee CHAP PE ReLV THE OPENING OF AFRICA I WITHIN a year of the impetus given to maritime ad- venture by the discovery of America, the Pope divided between Spain and Portugal all the unknown shores on either side of the Atlantic. The uncharted seas and the unexplored coast of Africa were the prize of the Portuguese, and the gift carried the obligation to plant the Cross on the newly-won soil. The ships of Por- tugal carried a mixed group of friars, traders, and sol- diers with equally mixed results, and such domination as was acquired was exercised with scant regard for the African. But the days of Portugal’s glory were numbered. Other nations were destined to secure mas- tery of the seas and the Portuguese soon dropped out of the race for supremacy. These new conquerors, the English, Dutch, and French, brought as few good gifts to the African as did the Portuguese. The continent was regarded only as a clumsy barrier to be circumnavigated in order to reach the riches of India, and occupation was limited to the few ports necessary for the convenience of the trading fleets to the East. For long, there had been commercial intercourse between India and East Africa where trading stations had been planted by the Arabs; but the west and south coasts were, and remained for centuries, an almost unknown region to the outside world, To these early venturers the great riches of Africa were not unknown, but the richer lure of the East 87 88 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD could not be dispelled by any stories of African gold and ivory, and the few who attempted to penetrate the secrets of the continent, though easily overcoming the feeble opposition of the African, were baffled and over- come by the deadly malaria of the low coastal plains. Invasion from without has been the pathway of civilization in all times, but the burning sands of the great Sahara on the north and the fever-swept coastal plains of the tropics made Africa immune from in- vading armies; while its mighty rivers which should have been the highways of exploration and civilization discharged into the seas through malaria-infested sudd and swamps and mud shoals which formed almost im- passable barriers to any who wouldenter. Thus Africa was the last great continent to yield up its secrets. I] Europe first took note of the resources of tropical Africa when the demand for slave labor in the new lands across the Atlantic opened up a profitable traffic in human flesh and blood. England was the chief of sinners in promoting the African slave-trade to Amer- ica. Her colonies there were partly carried on at the expense of the poor African, and in the hundred years preceding 1786 the number of slaves imported into British colonies exceeded two million. British inter- ests in Africa were mainly centered in the slave-trade. Indeed the African slave-trade, as has been mentioned, was a coveted prize secured to Great Britain by inter- national treaty.’ 1 Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, see p. 22. THE OPENING OF AFRICA 89 The wretched trade needs no fresh description. The bloodshed in Africa and death through the horrors of the “middle passage’’ accounted for a far larger number of Africans than ever reached the slave fields of the new world. In two and a half centuries eight million negroes were, “at the lowest computation,” * carried across the seas, and it is estimated that about forty million more perished through the bloody traffic. Bristol, Liverpool, and other British towns laid the foundation of their greatness largely on the slave- trade with America, There were African slaves in domestic service in England as late as 1772—little more than one hundred and fifty years ago—when Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s famous judgment de- clared that “as soon as any slave sets his foot on English ground he becomes free.” Britain abolished the slave-trade in 1806 and in 1833 slavery itself was declared illegal throughout the British dominions. It was not until 1885, however, that the European pow- ers, by the Treaty of Berlin, united in declaring that the slave-trade was illegal. The slave-trade was by no means confined to West Africa. Extensive slave raiding had for centuries been carried on in East Africa by the Arabs, but by the end of the nineteenth century, following on the heroic efforts of Livingstone, the Arab trade was finally extinguished. Two of Livingstone’s country- men, Frederick and John Moir, who fought the Arabs and successfully threw trade routes across the tracks of the slaver, had no small share in dealing the death- blow to the traffic. 1 Norman Leys, Kenya, p. 25. go THE COST OF A NEW WORLD | African memory may not vividly recall the slave- trade and it is looked on by Europeans as a hideous dream of the far past having little relation to the problems of Africa today; but two and a half cen- turies of inter-tribal slave raiding, with its terror, savagery. arson, and murder, carried on to meet the demands of the European trader have left permanent marks on Africa. Ruthless war became the business of life; rum, gin, and firearms the prizes; tribal tradi- tion and customs were destroyed; society, even so far into the interior as the great lakes, took on a ruthless, warlike character, and a century and a quarter has not effaced the effect of these things on African life. The slave raiders contributed largely to the tribal dis- integration which white men found going on in the Africa of fifty years ago. Problems of an urgent character have been created by the white man for him- self and now poetic justice demands his help in their solution. It is easy to blame slave traders and to pass judg- ment on slave owners, but the lessons of the terrible traffic are entirely lost unless an effort is made to get behind the brutal facts and understand the mentality to which such a traffic was possible and defensible. The real evils of any policy lie in the principles on which it is based, and the reasons which impelled men to carry on the slave-trade should, rightly understood, be compass and chart in many difficult issues of our time concerning primitive peoples. The traffic was shared by English, French, Portu- guese, Dutch, and Danes. Slave labor was in request for sugar, rice, cotton, and tobacco plantations in North THE OPENING OF AFRICA 91 America, the West Indies, and Brazil, and the cotton- gin which gave an immense impetus to the American cotton trade created a corresponding new demand for slaves. “A business destined in the course of time to be prohibited by law seemed in the eighteenth century to be so important for the development of our manu- factures, shipping, and plantations as to receive not only national regulation and protection but also a na- tional subsidy.” * Much of the opposition to the abolition of slavery was due to those sordid and selfish motives which are opposed to every step in human freedom—even the “happiness of the slaves” was urged against aboli- tion. But there were in men’s minds very real fears of grave consequences. It does not lessen the reality of such fears that they are common to all ages and all times of change. Fear, which is the want of faith, has to be reckoned with in every generation; it is really the enemy of all progress. The prosperity of the industries of many territories in the new world was bound up with a plentiful supply of slave labor, and at the whisper of abolition the cry was raised, “the country’s colonial trade is in danger.” Rivalry of other nations was feared, and the question was asked, “(How can we hold our own with the French and Dutch?’”’ Ruin was feared at home, and the as- sertion was made, “ Liverpool will become a vast Poor Law Union.” ‘These were all very real fears and were so strong that the primary interest of the poor Afri- can could for long get no hearing. The African, conscious of suffering a great wrong, had not yet any 1K, A, Benians, Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VI, p. 187. 92 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD conception of either political or economic freedom. His was a dumb appeal for relief from his sufferings. The wrong could only be righted by the wrongdoer. The motives governing the exploitation of the slave days throw light on the problems of today, for all questions concerning Africa touch very closely this matter of motive, and these slave days are recalled only for the sake of the lessons they teach. In the last resort, human relationships resolve themselves into an attitude of mind. Til The opening up of the vast heart of Africa belongs to comparatively recent years. What the methods and motives of commerce could not effect in the sixteenth century, the spirit of exploration, scientific research, and humanitarianism accomplished in the nineteenth. Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Thomson, Speke, Grant, and others opened up the great interior of the continent and revealed it as a land of broad fertile uplands, huge lakes, and great rivers. Its potential wealth captured the imagination of Europe, the race for possession began, and “ before the meeting of the Conference at Berlin [December, 1884 to February, 1885] the foundations of the German Empire in Af- rica were already laid; the outlines of the vast French empire in the north had begun to appear; and the curi- ous domination of Leopold of Belgium in the Congo Valley had begun to take shape.’ * Great Britain was, of course, well in the race, and occupation proceeded 1 Ramsay Muir, The Expansion of Europe, p. 170. THE OPENING OF AFRICA 93 so vigorously that at the beginning of the twentieth century the flag of one or other of the European coun- tries flew from Cape Town to Cairo, and from Sene- gal to Zanzibar. ‘The sole exceptions of Abyssinia and Liberia only accentuated the completeness of the Euro- pean partition of Africa. The partition and subsequent opening-up of the continent were closely linked with the rapid industrial development of Europe. That development demanded new sources of supply of those raw materials which are produced in tropical countries—cotton, oil, rubber. River, road, and railway transport made the inner tableland accessible to all the contacts of the modern world, and the swift transition has almost no parallel in history. The African has in half a lifetime taken a flying leap from age-long primitive tribal life into a world in which he has to adjust himself to two thou- sand years of western progress. “ The horn of the motor lorry, the whistle of the steam engine, the buzz of the steam saw, the rattle of the crushing mills sound where his fathers only heard the roar of the lion and the chatter of parrots and monkeys.” * The new life is directed by the white man. There are great crops on the white man’s vast plantations— cotton, coffee, sisal, tobacco, rubber; strange new occu- pations—mining, planting, railroad building, construc- tion of motor highways; irksome new impositions on the African that he does not understand—taxes, forced labor, limitation of movement, and relegation to re- serves. His social system is undergoing a vast up- heaval, and the African mind is bewildered. 1 Basil Mathews, The Clash of Color, p. 65. 94 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD In all social life in Africa the village has been the normal unit; the villager had many common rights and lived a sort of communal life. The land belonged to the village or the tribe; private ownership was vir- tually unknown in primitive society and when chiefs parted with the land or expropriated it, the elementary rights of the peoples were really taken away. Author- ity in primitive Africa rested on tribal law, and the fountain of justice lay in the opinion of the tribe or the village. Men and women had well-defined duties and responsibilities. The fear of spirits has for ages dominated life; and the African mind is in perpetual servitude to unknown forces which pervade the whole material world. Natural phenomena and facts of sci- ence terrify him and the evil in life far outweighs the good. Two thousand years behind western civiliza- tion, Africans in tropical Africa are given ten years instead of ten centuries to adapt themselves to twen- tieth century conditions. IV The immense silent pressure of changing circum- stances on the African can hardly be realized. The new contacts and the interdependence of higher and lower civilizations have raised far-reaching issues both for white and black. These issues lie in the conception of the future position of the African in his own land. For good or ill Africa has become an annex of Europe. The fortunes of its people are controlled by and de- pend on the policy of European governments—British, French, Portuguese, and Belgian. The future of a THE OPENING OF AFRICA 95 Africa depends on how that control will be exercised. Four big problems loom on the horizon—land, labor, taxation, and education. Each of these appears in varying forms in different parts of Africa. Their presentation would require more than one volume on each. They may, however, be summed up as the ad- justment of life to new conditions, and opposing points of view may be conveniently and quite briefly illus- trated from events in East Africa, which has recently engaged a large share of public attention and where all four problems are urgent. The valuable and informative Report of the East Africa Commission presented to Parliament in April, 1925 * only emphasizes the extremely imperfect nature of our information regarding the problems of the Af- rican continent. With regard to land, labor, and edu- cation, we are still at the stage of groping inquiry. In the debate on the Report, in the House of Lords,’ this was recognized by Lord Balfour who, on behalf of the Government, announced the appointment of a Com- mittee of Civil Research for the careful and scientific study of such questions. Any discussion of the prob- lems is liable to be misunderstood as an attack on the white man in Africa. Nothing is further from the writer’s mind. The white man in Africa is just like the white man everywhere—no better and no worse— but it is his misfortune to be faced with problems of an extraordinarily difficult character; where there is fault, it lies in the system. These social and industrial problems are more or less common to the whole of tropical Africa; they 1 Cmd. 2387. 2 30th June, 1925. 96 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD do not concern the African only; they affect the wel- fare of all the people of the continent, European, Af- rican, and Asiatic. Governments in Africa are respon- sible for the well-being of all the population of what- ever race or color. Their task is to secure the coopera- tion of all concerned, but mutual understanding and confidence are beset with pitfalls, and Government ad- ministration is a task of infinite perplexity. Another real difficulty is the gap between average colonial opin- ion and opinion in the home country based on what is believed to be the native point of view. It requires unquenchable faith to keep men’s faces Godward in such a situation. Africa demands supermen if there are to be no serious mistakes and no abuses. V Let us first look at the problem of land. Chartered companies, trading corporations, and individuals have from time to time acquired large areas of land in different parts of the continent and they all hold some kind of legal title. It is now too late to look closely into the adequacy of the consideration given to the native for his land. In the days of the early settler there was room for all, and the acquisition of land by the newcomers did not appreciably lessen the huge areas on which the natives roamed with their flocks, nor affect the plots on which they cultivated their maize and mealies, and for long the African had no sense of land hunger. But as more white settlers pressed up country from the south or entered the interior from the coast, it was necessary to define the areas available THE OPENING OF AFRICA 97 for him, and Government took steps to protect the na- tive rights in their own lands and to control alienation. By means of “ protectorates’’? over new areas or the setting aside of “reserves”’ in existing colonies native rights were defined. But European encroachment is a persistent thing, and in Kenya Colony, for example, it has brought about a. crisis. The important part of Kenya is the high land of the southwestern section which has about the same area as England and Wales, with a population equal to about half that of Lancashire, of whom only nine thousand are Europeans. The plateaux of these High- lands, five thousand to six thousand feet above sea level, are arable in character, and the climate makes the territory suitable for white settlement. Great areas of this land not in actual native occupation have been rapidly alienated by the Government to white settlers. This policy began in 1900, and within twenty-five years 11,859 square miles* of the best cultivable land in the colony have passed to less than two thousand Euro- peans.* The natives, some two million in number, are squeezed out from admittedly the best lands on to re- serves, the area of which, leaving out desert and in- accessible mountain, is estimated at from five thousand to six thousand square miles including good, bad, and indifferent land. Even at that, the Kenya Africans have no legal right in their own land. They have right of occupancy against other Africans but no rights of ownership or even of occupancy as against the Crown. 1 Report of East Africa Commission, p. 148. 2The Census of 1921 gives the number of Europeans occupied in some form of agriculture as 1,893. 98 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD “The Government acquired the absolute ownership of the whole by merely behaving as its owner.” In Southern Nyasaland a curious situation exists. The Report of the East Africa Commission draws at- tention to the practise, on private estates there, of imposing rent on native residents, and mentions a decision of the High Court of British Central Africa in 1903 to the effect that the terms of the estate own- ers’ Certificate of Claim preserved the customary free- hold rights of resident natives. The Commission states : * We are bound to say that there seems to be grave doubt whether the demands for rent at present made by many of the estate owners on the resident natives are sound in law, and whether the Government is jus- tified in enforcing them. . . . We cannot but regard it as anomalous that in Southern Nyasaland the ma- chinery of Government is being used to impose on native residents claims by landowners to rights which are, prima facie, not included in their titles, while such claims are not enforced in Northern Nyasaland, and are excluded in Northern Rhodesia. By the “ Uganda Agreement” of 1900 made be- tween Sir Harry Johnston and the King and people of Buganda, half of the country became Crown land and the other half was put at the disposal of the Lukiko (Native Council). From the first, native freehold title was recognized. ‘‘ Today approximately one in every hundred of the population of the Kingdom of Buganda is a landlord possessing freehold title to his 1 Report of East Africa Commission, p. 110. THE OPENING OF AFRICA 99 land.”’* Freeholds vary from a few acres to fifty square miles, and the Lukiko has forbidden sales or bequests to non-natives. The staple crop of Uganda is cotton, and the crop for 1925 is estimated at over 175,000 bales valued at over $20,000,000. ‘“ The bulk of the cotton is produced by peasant cultivators on small patches through the use of the hoe,” a system the extension of which is urged by the Manchester cotton trade. The policy of encouragement of native cultivation is undoubtedly the best for all parts of Africa. Sir Fred- erick Lugard says that “as a cultivator of his own land, the African will work harder and produce more than he will as a hired laborer, and the progress made will be more rapid and permanent, and the output cheaper, while labor difficulties do not arise”’;” while the Governor of Nyasaland has stated as “ his consid- ered opinion that the prosperity of the Protectorate depends on the development of its tropical agricultural resources . . . principally by the natives themselves with European instructors.” ° In West Africa a far-seeing administration has pur- sued the policy of allowing the land to remain in the hands of the African, with the happiest results, and no white trader can dispossess the West African of his land. ‘ The grant of large blocks of land to conces- sionaires, unless uninhabited, is altogether opposed to the principle of trusteeship.”’* In Nigeria and the Gold Coast great native industries in the cultivation 1 Report of East Africa Commission, Cmd. 2387, p. 25. 2Lugard, The Dual Mandate, p. 507. 3 Report of East Africa Commission, p. 109. 4Lugard, The Dual Mandate, p. 208. 100..=60)/-§ THE COST OF ‘A NEW WORLD of cocoa and palm-oil have been created. In 1891 the cocoa crop on the Gold Coast was three quarters of a hundredweight, in 1924 1t amounted to 218,000 tons, worth on an average at least $175 a ton, while Nigeria exported in 1922 over $75,000,000 worth of kernels and oil. In these territories the African works and develops his own soil, but in Kenya the link is snapped between the African farmer and his land. His relation to the soil is reduced almost to that of a serf to the white settler. He can only supply his needs by work always controlled by and for the Euro- pean. The question is what is to be the position of the African in Africa, and the problem shifts at once from the land to the man who lives upon it. The land policy in Uganda, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and other territories offers one answer: the policy in Kenya offers another. VI It is apparent that the problem of labor is bound up closely with that of land. The European popula- tion, outside the South African Union, is trivial com- pared with the number of Africans, but the native population even in areas of greatest density is com- paratively small, and in many large territories very sparse. It is almost nowhere equal to the potential development of the country’s resources. In Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Nyasaland, and Northern Rho- desia combined the population is only thirteen million, while in the whole of the South African Union the natives, at the Census of 1921, numbered less than five THE OPENING OF AFRICA IOI and a half million. It is clear that the policy of en- couraging native production must inevitably raise grave questions bearing on labor supply for both public and private employers. The problem is well illustrated by the labor troubles in Kenya Colony. As already mentioned, a large part of Kenya con- sists of high plateaux suitable for white settlement, nearly twelve thousand square miles of which have been alienated by the Government to Europeans. This area requires black labor for its development. Short- age of labor, always a problem, was made more acute by the demands of the war, post-war settlement of ex-soldiers, and the breaking-up of the large estates by those who had acquired them. The Kenya Gov- ernment came to the rescue and issued a circular * ex- pressing the hope that “by an insistent advocacy of (its) wishes an increasing supply of labor will re- sult.” * District officers were told that the need could not be brought too frequently before native authori- ties, and native chiefs were informed: that it was part of their duty to advise and encourage all unemployed young men to go out to work on the plantations. Fur- ther, district officers were to keep a record of chiefs who proved helpful and of those who did not, and were to report to the Government. The whole thing savored of compulsion and, as a consequence of urgent representation from various quarters, the Colonial Secretary (Mr. Churchill) issued a despatch ° laying down two important principles: 1 October, 1919, Cmd. 873. 2 An article in The International Review of Missions, October, 1921, gives fuller information. 3 September, 1921, Cmd. 1509. 1o2\) THE, COS? OR AgNE WY WORD (1) Beyond taking steps to place at the disposal of natives any information which they may possess as to where labor is required, and at the disposal of employ- ers information as to the sources of labor available for voluntary recruitment, the Government officials will in future take no part in recruiting labor for private em- ployment. (2) In regard to compulsory paid work for Govern- ment this is to be avoided except when absolutely nec- essary for essential services. .. . This view is taken strongly in the Report of the East Africa Commission,» which lays down that “under no circumstances could the British Adminis- tration tolerate in any form the principle of compul- sory native labor for private profit, be the employer native or non-native.” In South Africa a big problem concerning labor arises out of the industrial development of the native. There is in the South African Union a large white artisan class which is almost absent from other parts of Africa. In the Union one never sees a native en- gine-driver or skilled mechanic, rarely even a native chauffeur. The highest skilled work is reserved for the white, the natives being allowed to engage in cer- tain less skilled operations only. But in various other parts of Africa natives are becoming the skilled crafts- men of the country, and work that is done in South Africa only by white men is done efficiently in other places by skilled Africans. To preserve the monopoly of the white craftsmen in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, a policy of uP o187, THE OPENING OF AFRICA 103 industrial segregation was adopted some years ago. Certain recent regulations for the limiting of Asiatic and native skilled labor were declared by the Courts to be ultra vires, whereupon the Union Government promoted a Color Bar Bill, tightening the restrictions in the three northern provinces, and foreshadowing their extension to the Cape Province. The avowed purpose is gradually to institute an industrial segrega- tion policy throughout the Union. This would be con- trary to the traditions of the Cape and to the pledges given at the time of the Union. The Bill for the time being is dead. It passed the House of Assembly, where the Government com- manded a majority, but in the Senate the South Afri- can party, led by General Smuts, defeated the measure (7th July, 1925) by seventeen to thirteen votes.* It can be reintroduced in a new Session, and if again rejected by the Senate, the Government can Je the Bill through in a joint sitting of both Houses, and that is evidently their intention. The question is not one of segregation of natives into reserves, but a limitation of the function of na- tives in areas where mixed populations live: it de- mands a lower type of labor from the African and denies to him the full exercise of any skill he may acquire. The result within our time will be that skilled labor in South Africa will be forcibly repressed while it will be highly developed and general in other parts of Africa. Here you have white workers deliberately aiming at keeping the African at a lower level of in- dustrial and social development than elsewhere. That 1The Times, ist August, 1925. 04); THE ‘COST OR AGNEW UW ORED is flinging down a glove that will some day be picked up, for skilled colored labor in Africa will not appeal in vain to colored and skilled labor in the Orient, and we may one day witness a colossal industrial world- wide struggle on color grounds alone. That raises the question whether labor is going to have a truly inter- national mind. ‘This is one of the biggest questions of our time. The mere mention of the South African Color Bar Bill conjures up a ghastly problem. The Minister of Mines stated in the debate on the Bill in the Cape Parliament that the terms of legislation “‘ must be such as would prevent the possibility of the recurrence of regulations against the Asiatics and natives being de- clared ultra vires by the Courts.” * This is self-interest and racialism run wild: for those, whether workers or capitalists, who seek material advantage over others, have failed to find for themselves that ethical standard which alone can guarantee progress. Such an attitude can ultimately only maintain itself by an act of war. Quite apart from the economic futility and stupidity of such a policy, we find in the example cited white work- ers failing to interpret truly the. value of individual life. Christianity above all religions in the world has placed the greatest emphasis on human personality, but we are utterly failing to grasp that principle if there is to be differentiation against labor merely on the ground of color. East and West Africa represent two land policies for Africa: the circular of the Kenya Government and 1 Mr. Byers, Minister of Mines in Union Parliament, 6th May, 1925. The Times report. THE OPENING OF AFRICA 105 the Despatch of the Colonial Office set forth two dif- ferent attitudes towards labor. The Color Bar in South Africa represents a third view. These conflict- ing ideals are in grips today. The fundamental issue is the same. It is the old one of slavery days: what is to be the place and function of the African? Is the native to be subordinated to the interests of the white man, and is the white man to exploit the native labor? Or is the European to foster for the Africans ‘“ com- plete freedom in the disposal of their labor, the fur- therance of their economic development, and a definite progressive policy of training them in responsible self- government? ”’ Vil A third great problem for Africa is taxation. Again the case of Kenya is taken for the purpose of illustra- tion, although it should be repeated that it is not any worse than that of many other colonies. The revenue from taxation in Kenya is derived almost equally from (1) hut and poll tax, (2) customs duties, and (3) miscellaneous sources. While the native is taxed in- directly through customs duties, etc., he is mainly conscious of a direct heavy hut tax. “A popular theory is that the native taxation should be increased, the argument being that the more money the native is forced to earn for the State, the longer he will have to work,” * The hut and poll tax which in 1913-147 yielded about $857,000 amounted in 1922 to over $1,- 250,000, equivalent to one third of the total revenue 1 The Times correspondent, 9th March, 1925. 2 Quoted from official returns by Norman Leys in Kenya, p. 336. 106 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD from taxation. What the native gets in return is hard to tell. The comparatively small amount of the pro- ceeds of native taxation spent in the area in which the money is raised has a special bearing on education, which will be dealt with in the next chapter. For example, the estimated expenditure in Kenya for 1924 on the education of an African population of almost two and a half millions was only $185,000 * as against $120,000 on the education of a total European com- munity of about ten thousand. In Nyanza Province only $250,000 of a hut and poll tax amounting in 1921-22 to about $1,450,000 (£294,000) was spent for all purposes within the province. Mr. F. C. Linfield, in a supplementary Memorandum to the Report of the East Africa Commission,’ says: “ The Chief Native Commission of Kenya, in a paper submitted to us, estimated that in 1923 the maximum amount that could be considered to have been spent on services provided exclusively for the benefit of the native popu- lation was slightly over one quarter of the taxes paid by them.” Mr. Linfield adds: As a concrete example we were informed that in the last ten years the Kitui Akamba have paid over a mil- lion dollars (£207,749) in direct taxes alone, and “that you may travel through the length and breadth of Kitui Reserve, and you will fail to find in it any enterprise, building, or structure of any sort which Government has provided at the cost of more than a few sovereigns for the direct benefit of the natives. The place was little better than a wilderness when I 1 Thomas Jesse Jones, Education in East Africa, p. 118. 2 Report of East Africa Commission, p. 187. THE OPENING OF AFRICA 107 first knew it twenty-five years ago, and it remains a wilderness today as far as our efforts are concerned. If we left that district tomorrow, the only permanent evidence of our occupation would be the buildings we have erected for the use of our tax-collecting staff.” It is therefore hardly surprising that the Commission “ feel that both trade and non-native enterprise should in the future pay a larger direct contribution towards the revenue of the Colony.” * It has to be borne in mind that in addition to the hut tax the natives make a substantial contribution to customs and excise, a contribution which in 1922 amounted to nearly $2,- 000,000 (£387,530) for the whole of the Colony.’ This practise of spending only a small part of the native revenue on native welfare is found all over Africa, and in country and municipal locations alike; e.g., “ Out of 217 towns reporting to the Secretary for Native Affairs in South Africa, for the year 1916-17, no fewer than 191 derived more from the native rev- enue than they expended on native services. Sixty- four towns which received revenue from natives vary- ing from $10 to $4,000 frankly returned ‘nil’ as the amount of their expenditure on native services.” * VITl The duty of Government is so to govern as to se- cure the well-being and development of the people. Economic considerations cannot be the sole guide in 1 Report, p. 175. 2 Statesman’s Year Book. 3C. T. Loram in The International Review of Missions, October, 1921. 108 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD government. The human factor is the ultimate one, and there must be a feeling of disappointment that even in such a valuable document as the Report of the East Africa Commission the African throughout 1s dealt with almost entirely as a labor unit. Our re- sponsibility in Africa is “a charge upon the conscience and the intelligence of the British people.’’* Great Britain is committed to the principle of trusteeship for the economic, moral, and social progress of the Afri- can. The principle was first laid down by Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which stated with reference to what are now known as man- dated territories: To those colonies and territories which as a conse- quence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the prin- ciple that the well-being and development of such peo- ples form a sacred trust of civilization and that securi- ties for the performance of this trust should be em- bodied in this Covenant. The British Government White Paper? says: “ There can be no room for doubt that it is the mission of Great Britain to work continuously for the training and education of Africans towards a higher intellectual, moral, and economic level.” The White Paper goes on to lay down that “in Kenya Colony the principle of trusteeship for the natives, no less than in the man- 1 The Times, 22nd May, 1925. 2 Indians in Kenya, 1923, Cmd. 1922. THE OPENING OF AFRICA 109 dated territory of Tanganyika, is unassailable.” This is the inevitable corollary of Article 22 of the Cov- enant, as such a principle cannot possibly be applied to mandated territory without a demand arising in course of time for its application to the case of other peoples not yet able to stand by themselves. The prin- ciple is being brought into effect in the case of man- dated territories by the splendid work of the Perma- nent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, but no similar body is charged with the duty of seeing that it is carried out in non-mandated areas. While the Treaty of Berlin delimited spheres of influence and “ prescribed the rules of the game of Empire building,” the principle of trusteeship had not then been born, and no provision was made then or at Versailles for working out in all colonies the principles upon which backward peoples should be governed. The protag- onists of the old and the new ideals stand over against each other, and the victory for trusteeship is not yet. The problems of Africa have been created by Euro- pean penetration, coupled with the growing conscious- ness of common ideals and interest on the part of the African. These problems are the concern of both black and white, and on the cooperation of these two groups depends the ultimate solution; but the heaviest burden falls on the white man. His shortcomings can be read by him who runs, but the real complexity of his problem, and his real contribution to the advance- ment of the country, are not always so conspicuously in the public mind. The situation demands an un- biassed study of the facts: only thus can we truly understand the responsibility of empire. 110 | VAR COST) ORGAN EM iW ORES All these problems have a special significance for the Church’ in its outreach to help Africa.’ +" Weare bound as a Christian nation to bring national policies to the test of conformity with Christian conceptions of life. Fundamental among these is the conception of the supreme value of human personality and the worth of each individual in the sight of God. We cannot without the surrender of our deepest convictions recon- cile ourselves to any policy in regard to the natives of Africa which contravenes this truth.” * Books FOR REFERENCE AND FURTHER READING Africa in the Making. H. D. Hooper, Edinburgh House Press, London. 2s. Africa: Slave or Free? J. H. Harris. E. P. Dutton and Co.,, New York. $3.00. ~~ Black and White in South-East Africa. Maurice S. Evans. Longmans, Green and Co., New York. $2.25. Darkwater. W. E. B. DuBots. Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York. 1920. $2.00, Dual Mandate, The. F. Lucarp, Blackwood, London. 42s. East Africa—Report of East Africa Commission. Cmd. 2387. H. M. Stationery Office. 3s. 6d. Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa—White Paper is- sued by Colonial Office. Cmd. 2374. H. M. Stationery Of- fice. 2d. History of Native Policy in South Africa from 1830 to Present Day. E. N. Brooxes. Cape Town, 30 Karrom Street. 15s. Kenya. Norman Leys. Hogarth Press, England. 15s. Souls of Black Folk, The. W. E. B. DuBors. A. C. McClurg Co., Chicago. $1.20. Up from Slavery. Booker T. Wasuincton. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston. 1917. 60 cents. 1 Memorandum to Secretary of State—Labor in Africa and the Principle of Trusteeship—approved by thirty-one Societies in the Conference of British Missionary Societies, December, 1920. CHAPTER) V PireowWORLD AT SCHOOL Aut the world is learning to read and is taking a dizzy leap into the mystic world of letters. The babies of the Orient, of Africa, and of the isles of the sea are all alike crawling up the lower rungs of the educational ladder, while their older brothers and sisters with quickened desire are already clumsily stumbling on the threshold of the magic realm of books. The signifi- cance of the new movement lies in the sudden curve of increase after static centuries. When an Arabian Government gives a grant for education, men may cease to wonder at the swift spread of the educational fever. Education is one of the biggest factors in human progress; the right kind of education always uplifts men and women. Types of education must vary with stages of civilization, and the question of what is the right type for different countries is far too wide for discussion here: indeed, the data is not available for its answer. But it may be asserted that the end of education is to make those who seek it useful mem- bers of the community. ‘“‘ We now see,’ says Dr. Anson Phelps-Stokes,* “that education involves not only formal instruction but the development of all the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual powers of youth in the interest of service.” Man is a spiritual being and his education is a spirit- ual enterprise. His highest development is through 1 Education in East Africa, p. xvi. III 112 THE COST OF A NEW WORLD spiritual conceptions of human life. Such conceptions are lacking in many elements in Western society, and a pertinent question is whether the West has any real, contribution to make to the education of non-Christian lands. The material facts of life have colored our own educational systems, and have often hindered true de- velopment, while much that the West has considered educational is inconsistent with moral and spiritual growth. A primary question, therefore, is—what is education? and it is a matter for satisfaction that so many able educators are seeking to find an adequate answer, Education, whatever it may be, is not a matter of organization and system. ‘These, as we shall see, are not what matter most in the education of a people, for education is the sum of all the forces and influences which play on life. But in any consideration of the expansion of Christianity one has to consider the ef- fect of modern educational systems in non-Christian lands, and the complex social and political problems they create. I The introduction of a western system of education into the Orient tends to anti-foreign feeling as the con- sciousness grows that it is a powerful instrument of cultural penetration. This is illustrated by what is happening in China as these pages go to press. China had a rich language and literature when the rude speech of the ancient Britons had not yet been reduced to writing. For thousands of years learning Dae WORLD ALT SCHOOL 113 has been revered, the scholar being at the apex of the social order; and yet in the modern world China as a whole is an illiterate land. The result of the Chino-Japanese War in 1894-5 opened China’s eyes to the futility of the old learning against modern scientific knowledge, and the lesson was driven home by the enforced acceptance of the terms imposed by the Western Powers after the Boxer Rising in 1900. Five years later the old system of education was abandoned by royal edict, and a ministry of edu- cation set up. Modern education in China received a further impetus from the Revolution of 1911. While in 1910 only one Chinese out of four hundred received any education, nine years later one in eighty was at school. For long, Christian missions had carried on schools, and till the end of the nineteenth century they had a preponderating share of all modern education in China. Missionary education in China is marked by three stages. The first was the early years of mission schools, when China’s ancient system of education still held full sway. Then, as the attitude of the Chinese to western knowledge changed, these schools began to be appreciated in a new way on account of the excel- lent modern education they gave. But a third stage came when alongside the mission a national system ot modern education inevitably grew up. The national system dates from the Edict of 1905, and the number of scholars in national schools was soon many times the number in all Christian schools, While the total number of pupils in all grades receiving Christian edu- cation in 1922 was only three hundred and forty-three 114) THE COST: OR PAU NEW OW OREN thousand, the pupils in Government schools and col- leges numbered over four and a quarter million. The Chinese are by nature scholars, and the new educational trail they are blazing will soon reach the most remote corners of the land. The stolid Chinese youth is becoming a real boy under the influence of the modern school; the playground has come to stay; and, best of all, the doors of the schools are thrown wide open to girls. Many of the business and upper class families seek to provide education for their girls, and female education even among the poorer people is increasingly common. It is not unusual to find mill girls and factory hands who are able to read a letter. An educated Christian boy desiring to marry a literate Christian girl would have little difficulty in finding one. Female education is, however, a new thing and only touches the young. Very few women over thirty have had a modern education. The vitality of the new educational movement is shown by the fact that amidst the chaos of recent years education continued to function. A miracle has been worked in the midst of disorder, in face of lack of funds and oppression of military autocrats. Chinese educators were determined to build up a strong Chinese educational system suited to the coun- try’s needs. By and by they became conscious that there was growing up in their country a dual system of education, the one national and non-religious under the direction of their own Government, the other con- trolled by nationals of other lands, acknowledging no allegiance to China, and with clear religious propa- gandist objectives. The Chinese wanted a national sys- THE WORLD AT: SCHOOL II5 tem that would develop national consciousness—not a mental hotch-potch partly British, partly American, and partly Japanese. Up till 1924 there were few signs of actual hostility towards the Christian schools. Then they met with sharp opposition as the main instrument of the cultural penetration of the West, which is re- garded as having a political purpose as well as being hated for its own sake, and this opposition has rapidly grown into a violent anti-Christian sentiment. This new development puts Christian schools in a very different position from that which they occupied a few years ago, and unfortunately the new atmosphere of distrust and suspicion has added to this delicate situation. China is seething with anti-foreign and anti-Christian feeling, and in the matter of education she is especially suspicious of foreign aims. One of China’s most brilliant young leaders, Mr. T. Z. Koo, says: A tendency which has emerged very clearly during the last two or three years is to emphasize national and racial consciousness through education; the lead- ers want to create in our students interest and study of current political, economic, social and industrial plans alongside their education. ‘They are, therefore, beginning to question and attack missionary education, which takes a young Chinese man at his most forma- tive period and puts him through a system of educa- tion which they consider alien, and which, therefore, denationalizes him.* This distrust found expression at the annual meeting in 1924 of the National Association for the Advance- 1 International Review of Missions, April, 1925, p. 161. 110.) “THE COST) OR RAGNE Wi WORD ment of Education, at which most of the larger Chinese colleges and universities were represented, about one thousand educationists being present from all parts of the country. The meeting was by no means merely a demonstration against the West. Much constructive work was done, looking towards a compulsory system of national education affording facilities for all stu- dents up to the highest university standard. The out- look of those present was intensely national. While the excellent work of mission schools was fully recog- nized and the conviction was expressed that the Chinese could not yet dispense with their help, there was clearly a strong feeling that these schools should be brought under the control of a national board of education. Resolutions were passed urging action in the direction of restricting educational activities conducted in China by foreigners, prohibiting foreigners from establishing any more educational institutions, and providing that foreign schools should be turned over to the Chinese within a reasonable period. Whatever action the Gov- ernment may take—and it is improbable that it will take any action for some time—the proposals are a clear hint to Christian missions to consider the situa- tion and adjust their policy to it. If their schools con- tinue to be regarded as instruments of a foreign cul- ture, and not purely Chinese, their day is over. It is becoming increasingly evident that if Christian schools and colleges are to find a permanent place in the educational system of China, it will only be because their educational contribution is so superlatively good that it cannot well be dispensed with, and because at the same time they are offering something which is THE WORLD AT SCHOOL 117 unique in nature, namely the building up of a strong moral and religious character, and the development of public-spirited citizenship. If this goal is to be reached by the Christian forces at present available, it will prob- ably demand the closing down of a large number of relatively inefficient schools, and the concentration upon such as can be adequately manned and equipped. However, it matters not so much whether there be few or many schools, or even how good they are, as how rapidly they divest themselves of their foreign character. They must become, in the words of the Report on Education in China,’ “more efficient, more Christian, and more Chinese.’ ‘The Christian school “can furnish in the new life of China a force that can come from no other source. It can determine the char- acter of the part China will play in the drama of inter- national life ’ and the place it will take in the expansion of Christianity in the Orient. i In India we have an example of the bearing of edu- cation on national aspirations. That country has a national system of education which had its origin in the Dispatch issued by Lord Macaulay in 1854. While it was not Macaulay’s design, the Minute marked the interpenetration of two great cultures. Alexander Duff had already founded a college for giving to In- dians an English education steeped in the Christian religion. Duff’s success ‘‘ marked out educational mis- sionary work as the most powerful method of approach © 1 Christian Education in China, 1922, p. 15. 118, THE COST oORVADNE We WORLD to Hinduism in its higher places.’ * It was inevitable that by and by Indians so educated should turn again to the riches of their own heritage in Indian history, religion, and literature, and.that later the two cultures should come into sharp collision. It was perhaps still more inevitable that a study of western history, and an acquaintance with the writings of Burke, Mill, Carlyle, and Herbert Spencer should give rise to a growing desire for self-government. India’s national aspirations make the question of an adequate educational system of paramount importance. The country wants responsible self-government, and without widespread education of the right kind it can- not realize that aim. Education in India is top-heavy in character and too limited in scope. Its outstanding feature is the com- paratively large number receiving university education —sixty-six thousand students in fourteen universities (one quarter of the total being in Christian institu- tions), while about ninety-three per cent of the total population are unable to read or write. The doorway to university education is a knowledge of English, and as only one in every two hundred of the whole popu- lation knows English, it is from a very small section of the community that sixty thousand young men crowd into the universities. There are two special evils in India’s university system. In the first place the system is foreign, based on western curricula. A dis- tinguished Indian Christian? speaking out of his own 1C,. F. Andrews, The Renaissance in India, p. 35. 2 Shoran Singha in Christian Education in Africa and the East, p. 69. THE WORLD AT SCHOOL 119 experience says: “‘ We were out of touch with the mas- ter-minds of our own country . . . there was no room left to study and appreciate India’s past literature and culture.” Secondly, as one result of making English the medium of university education there is far too little higher education for women. There is only one English-speaking Indian woman to every fifteen men who have an English education, and only one thousand women are found in college out of all India’s millions. But no country can be rightly equipped for self-gov- ernment without adequately educated women leaders, and the intellectual gulf between the men and women in India is a peril in this time of social and political change. The facts make a strong appeal to British Christian women to increase the splendid help in the matter of higher education which they are now afford- ing to their sisters in India. The demand for women’s education has come, and western women leaders may direct into right channels the new intellectual forces of womanhood in that wonderful land. The West hardly realizes that national conscious- ness is not a matter merely of politics; it runs through society, colors art and literature, and is as real in the Church as in the State. The Government education is secular, but the large majority of Christian mission schools are within the national system. Such an ar- rangement creates acute problems and much discussion has raged round the question of compulsory attendance at religious instruction in State-aided schools. With the growth of national consciousness among the stu- dent body the cry came for liberty of choice, and the discussion has resulted in two gains. It has emanci- 20°) DHE COST ORAL WilW ORT pated the missionary mind from false ideas of control in Christian education, while the Indian has discovered the real value of Christian teaching. The fears created by the conscience clause in operation in Ceylon and some parts of India which provided for exemption of the student, if desired, from religious instruction in State-aided schools, have been found groundless. The clause has created asubtle psychological change. From the student mind the red rag of compulsion has dis- appeared, and the missionary teacher has found that, given leave to choose, the pupil is easily attracted by the right teaching of Christianity. An ignorant people can never be really free. While the middle and upper classes in India are educated in as great a proportion as those of western lands, the great masses of the people are still largely illiterate, only about seven per cent being able to read and write. Fewer scholars are enrolled in all India than in the little country of Japan. Even such primary education as is given is defective. Of the children at school no fewer than ninety per cent are in the lowest primary classes. Those who never reach a higher standard very soon lapse into illiteracy. The weakness of elementary education in India is a real peril to the social and political development of the country. It makes for social and intellectual feudalism to have in any land at one end of the educational scale a comparatively large number of university men and at the other the over- whelming masses of the people absolutely illiterate. But mere literacy would not carry Indian aspira- tions very far. Education has got to be conceived afresh in order that it may fit India for freedom. The THE WORLD AT SCHOOL I2I difficulties are many—grinding poverty, constant toil, and social and religious differences. There is no such public opinion as prevails in China and Japan in favor of general education. The Provincial Governments find the task utterly unwieldy, and the danger is that “ statesmanship and Christian love alike are to be de- clared bankrupt.” In such a situation there is indeed a challenge to the missionary forces in India and to the forces behind them in the homeland, to give to India, through Christian education, that full free spirit of Truth on which alone freedom can be built. Ill The position of education in Japan raises the large issue of the relation of Christianity to a national secu- lar system of education. One of the most literate countries in the world today is the far eastern long-closed land of Japan where sixty years ago modern education was entirely unknown. In 1864 a young Japanese, Joseph Neesima, stole away from his country at the peril of his life, reached Bos- ton, Mass., was befriended and given the best educa- tion New England could afford. He set aside tempt- ing opportunities of political preferment and made a great resolve that he would found a Christian College in his own land. Within ten years he gave Japan her first college: the ‘ Doshisha’’ (One Purpose). The rapid progress of the Sunrise Kingdom is due largely to that passion for education exemplified in Neesima. Education has been pursued with such energy that Japan has now a great national school system, educa- 122) ‘THE COST OFA NEW -WORED tion being compulsory, and it has as large a propor- tion of children in the elementary schools as England and Wales and quite as high a standard. Japan has twelve thousand busy technical schools teeming with more than a million eager young men and women, and five universities (the oldest dating only from 1877.) with a staff of over one thousand, and nearly ten thou- sand students—about the same number as are now attending the four great Scottish universities. The story of education in Japan contains more than one example of a lad walking three hundred miles to enter high school, and, in face of extreme poverty and diffi- culty, fighting his way through. It is said that five or even ten times as many men as can be admitted take the stiff entrance examination to the high schools, and after a hard day’s work thousands of apprentices and artisans are found in the evening schools. The Japanese scholar is a real seeker after truth. He breaks loose easily from old authority and faces all modern thought, but he retains a veneration for the great past of his nation and is intensely national- istic and patriotic. His old world lives on, making a background against which the new intellectual life is lived. Education is the most important instrument in the social development of any land; but the system of edu- cation in Japan is secular, while education is fundamen- tally a spiritual enterprise. To exclude religion from it is to omit the greatest factor in setting worthy tradi- tions and creating motives, ideals, and standards for a people. Japan’s splendid educational development con- stitutes a challenge to Christianity to inject into the THE WORLD AT SCHOOL La? thought currents which flow from the schools the spirit and principles of Jesus Christ. The Christian contribution to the educational fer- ment in Japan is, however, very feeble if regard is had to numbers alone. “ The total enrollment of the Christian schools is only fifty thousand, over against a total of eleven million in the Government schools.’ The few Christian schools are, however, more impor- tant than the number of pupils would indicate, and none who are concerned with the real welfare of Japan can overlook them. They have a great contribution to make. But they must never be the medium of a foreign culture; they must ever become more Japanese. The task of the Christian school is to lead the way in the conception of education, and to supply highly trained, thoroughly Christian teachers. If Christian- ity is the hope of the world, its influence in shaping educational development is supremely important and the opportunity of the Christian teacher unrivaled. IV Education is a prime factor in the development of primitive peoples. It is a sign for good that African education bulks large in Christian statesmanship in these days.” “The main purpose of education is to 1 Galen Fisher, Creative Forces in Japan, p. 157. 2Two invaluable contributions to the understanding of the problem of African education have been made by the Commission sent to West Africa in 1921 and to East Africa in 1923 by the Phelps-Stokes foundation under the leadership of Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones, and readers are earnestly commended to the study of the reports issued by these commissions. 124) DHE COST OR WA WINN VV Ory fit a man for life, and therefore in a civilized com-: munity to fit him for his place as a member of that community.” * But few regard the African as a pos- sible member of “a civilized community ”’; he is simply not thought of in that way. So far as education of the African in Africa has gone, it is fortunate that it has been almost exclusively in the hands of mission- aries. True education demands a passionate faith in the possibilities of those sought to be educated and a great insight into their needs; and the missionaries, more than any other class, understand the African mind, appreciate what is best in African customs, tra- ditions and folk-lore, and realize the problems arising from the aggressive permeation of European civiliza- tion. If the necessity of education for the African is recognized at all, the only safe course is to make such an effort to’ train him as will make this education a force for good and not a peril. If the African is to occupy his right place in his own land, education has to be adapted to his need, and the right kind of educa- tion can only be undertaken if the unchanging funda- mental problems of Africa are not obscured. Modern thought is much at the mercy of the newsmonger, and the last “incident” or some hectic but transient situa- tion makes better “ copy”’ than the great drab problem of what is to be the place of the black man in his own land and among the nations. i x ee oo Fat is a Aan, ae bees b ee LiiiibiN iii 1 1012 Uill73 CBlT Hy as FIV st “V ony Se Aa) bi i bay aos STs to SSE See — tS SS SSS