THE QUESTION OF CHINA By Kenneth Scott Latoueette HE overwhelming disaster in Europe has not prevented X Americans from watching with interest the progress of events in China. And it is well that it has not. An ancient people, the influence of whose civilization has been second in extent only to that of the jNIediterranean basin and western Europe, is attempting to adjust itself to modern conditions and has been profoundly affected by the world war. It com- prises more than a fifth of the human race, and dwells in a land blessed by nature with a fabulously fertile soil, a favor- able climate, and immense mineral resources. Its fate loses nothing of significance or importance even when compared with the cataclysm of the great war. In the attempt at readjustment, China is confronted with a bew ildering and almost overwhelming array of problems. Her rulers must conform to modern ideals of efficiency and honesty. Her democratic aspirations must be crystallized into a workable constitution backed by an intelligent public. Her military chieftains must learn to bow before the civil arm of the state. Her provinces must abandon their mutual jealousies and their unwillingness to co-operate with the central authorities. China must see that her government assumes those extensive functions of defense that are part of the duties of a modern state. She must find an increased revenue in a land w^here a false step in le\’ymg taxes may mean widespread misery or disastrous rebellion. Her writ- ten language needs simplifieation both in its charaeters and in its style. She must organize for her millions an educa- tional system complete from the primary grades to the university. Her sehools must be provided with books and 102 THE YALE REVIEW teachers of a “new learning” of which she was scarcely aware twenty years ago. She must build an expensive trans- portation system of railroads, steamboats, and turnpikes. She must reorganize her chaotic currency and banking sys- tem, and standardize her weights and measures. She must introduce new industries and modern methods of manufac- ture and of agriculture. Her system of conducting trade must be adjusted to modern conditions. Her naked hills must be reforested and her flooded lands reclaimed. Her crowded cities must be cleansed of their filth, moral and physical, and be rebuilt on a plan that allows for more space and air and play room. Her myriad diseases must be com- bated on modern lines by a new medical profession. Her women must be freed from their bound feet, and from the heavier bondage of ignorance and blind social conventions. Her abject and widespread poverty must be cured at its sources. Underneath all these problems, however, are a few deter- mining factors that must be reckoned with by all who would seek to understand or to deal with the Chinese situation. If they are faced squarely, fewer mistakes Avill be made and fewer misconceptions will arise. The first of these is the foreign origin of the changes that are taking place. They have not sprung spontaneously from within, but have been forced from without upon an unwilling people. Until the last few hundred years, Chinese civiliza- tion was very largely isolated from other cultural groups. Shut in by mountains and deserts on three sides and by the sea on the fourth, only one contribution from another people. Buddhism, affected it profoundly. China was long accus- tomed to associate intimately only with peoples possessing an inferior culture, and she became proud, complacent, and unreceptive to any ideas but her own. Thus isolated she progressed but slowly, and at times even gave the impression of being decadent. The wonder is not that she progressed slowly, but that she progressed at all. That there THE QUESTION OF CHINA 103 has been growth, that she has endured and has always assimi- lated her conquerors, and that she has left indelible impres- sions even upon a neighboring nation as vigorous as Japan, are striking evidences of the native strength of her people. Our civilization of the Occident antedates that of China by several centuries, and is the product of many diverse groups and ages. This composite ancient culture, ever renewed and enriched by contributions from new peoples, ever expanding, borne by the vigorous nations of western and northern Europe and by the new Japan, has been forced rapidly upon isolated and nearly stationary China. Self- invited, Westerners have come and have insisted that she open her doors to their trade and their ideas. Against her will and her ineffective protests, she has been constrained to enter the current of the world’s life. With the arrival of each new cable line, of each steamship, of each foreign mer- chant, of each missionary and diplomat, the pressure has grown. The Chino- Japanese War, the forced leases to Germany, Russia, France, and England, the failure of the Boxer outbreak, and the Russo-Japanese War have levelled her walls and left her defenseless and bewildered before the flood of new influences. For a less vigorous nation the result would have been disintegration and bondage. Even as it is, China has been shaken to her foundations, and has partially fallen under the tutelage of foreigners. She has frankly recognized the new conditions, however, and has set herself to the task of readjustment. She is resolutely attempting to adopt what is best in the new without aban- doning what is best in the old. She is seeking to take her place not as a dependent and a pupil, but as an equal in the family of nations. The second factor in China’s situation is that other nations have not left her free to work out her readjustment unham- pered and in her own time. In the process, she has partially lost her independence. Through her weakness and her for- mer blindness, she has to a large degree fallen into the hands 104 THE YALE REVIEW of alien powers. Her maritime customs duties are regulated by foreign treaties. They are collected under the direction of a foreign staff, and are pledged to the payment of her foreign debt — a debt which was accumulated partly in her efforts of the Boxer year to rid herself of the foreigner and partly in the attempt to conform her life to his. Her revenue from the salt industry is collected under foreign supervision and is partly pledged to the five-power loan incurred in 1913 for the reorganization of her government. The more important sections of some of her leading cities are virtually foreign soil. The best districts of her commercial metropolis, Shanghai, of Tientsin, the port of entry to her capital, and of Hankow, the most strategic commercial city of the interior, are foreign “concessions.” Even in her capital, the foreign legations are entrenched and guarded like bits of alien territory in the land of an enemy. Foreigners are not subject to her laws or her courts, and yet she is held strictly accountable for all damage that may come to them even through chance disorder. Her railway lines, her chief iron works, her coal mines, and her steamboat traffic, even in her interior waters, are largely controlled by foreigners. Many of her best schools have been established and are maintained by foreigners. Indeed, so widespread are foreign interests that the powers cannot permit China to become involved in an extensive civil war which would endanger foreign lives and property. She cannot, as in the old days, settle the question of imperial succession by prolonged wars between rival claimants. Extensive disorders can only result in intervention. The comparative bloodlessness of the revo- lution of 1911 was due not to any change in Chinese nature, but to fear of the foreigner. jSIoreover, the situation is aggravated by the selfish ambi- tions and mutual jealousies of the powers. So rich is China as a field for commercial and industrial exploitation that each nation is eager to obtain as large a share for itself as possible, particularly in case of intervention or partition. Japan THE QUESTION OF CHINA 105 especially is interested. She feels that her very life depends on keeping China open to her trade. She is overcrowded. Her arable land is limited and is forced to nearly its maximum yield. If Japan is to continue her growth, she must acquire territory to wliich some of her surplus popu- lation can emigrate and still remain under her control; and she must give herself, as England has done, to the production and exportation of manufactures. Failure means the ulti- mate sacrifice of her position as a world power, and even, in this age of force, a possible loss of independence. China and Korea are her natural fields for commercial and territorial expansion. Here in some sections are vacant lands for her farmers. Here are very great supplies of raw materials for her factories and unlimited deposits of iron, with which nature has not liberally blessed Japan. Here is a vast popu- lation, her natural market. Japan feels that she is designed by nature to lead the peoples of the Far East into the new era, and that her own life depends upon the maintenance of that leadership. Korea was weak, and to save it from falling into Russian hands, Japan felt herself forced to annex it. China is weak and has been unable to defend her territory against the earth hunger of European nations. To keep them at bay Japan has already fought two wars, the first of which taxed her resources to the utmost. It is but natural, then, that while Europe is preoccupied at home, Japan should seek to make certain her position in China, even by steps that seem to threaten the open door and Chinese independence. The seizure of Tsing Tao gave Japan the German possessions in Shantung, and these with her holdings in south Manchuria insure her domination of Peking and north China. Her ownership of Formosa makes possible a sphere of influence in Fuhkien, the rich province on the adjoining mainland. Her twenty-one demands on China m 1915, although not fully granted, strengthened her claim. The Russo-Japanese agreement of 1916, formed under the stress of the great war, completed the alliance of 106 THE YALE REVIEW Japan with her former enemy and gave her a freer hand. Disturbances in Manchuria in 1916 strengthened her grip on that contested district. The American note to Peking in June, 1917, gave Japan an opportunity to assert as never before her “special interest” in China. And the latest Chinese revolution may provide Japanese statesmen with a sufficient reason for new and vigorous interference in the domestic affairs of the Middle Kingdom. For China this tutelage is at once salutary, embarrassing, and dangerous. It is salutary because it compels prompti- tude and efficiency. Her national pride demands quick and effective reorganization to throw off the foreign yoke. She must work carefully, for she knows that a false step may mean intervention. It is embarrassing because it hampers her efforts at freedom — when, for instance, the problem of sufficient revenue is so pressing, she is not free to increase her customs duties. It is dangerous because it leaves her a help- less victim in any such situation as the great war, and may possibly lead to a complete loss of independence. The third factor in the situation is China’s immense, unwieldy, and rapidly increasing population. No one knows whether tliree hundred millions or the popular four hundred millions is nearer the exact number, but the Chinese are certainly between a fourth and a fifth of the human race. And when one considers that all use the same written lan- guage and literature and various dialects of the same spoken language; that all possess in the main the same ideals, traditions, and institutions ; and that hereditary strains com- mon to all probably predominate in their lineage, it is evident that they are the largest fairly homogeneous group mankind has ever seen. This very immensity is one of the funda- mental facts to be taken into consideration by whoever has to do with China. Of course, the size of the race makes all attempts at hand- ling it difficult, and retards its adjustment to new conditions. Think of organizing an educational system for forty million THE QUESTION OF CHINA 107 or more children of school age! It is a hard enough task to administer such a system when once it has been organized, but China must provide for it teachers of a learning that she began heartily to accept searcely fifteen years ago. She must find new text-books to replace those which up to fifteen years ago had not undergone any important change for hundreds of years. Her government must organize schools from the primary grade to the university, in a land where education was formerly left almost entirely to private initiative and support. Think of changing the social and political ideals and institutions of such a people! No wonder that the republic has been so unstable, and that offieial corruption continues in spite of the vigorous efforts of many able idealists. One marvels rather that a constitution is possible at all, and that ideals of official integ- rity have made any headway. Even in Japan, a country that seems to have changed so completely in the past fifty years, where the population is only a sixth or an eighth of that of China, where a long coast line and numerous harbors and a highly centralized political organization furnish favor- able conditions for the rapid spread of new ideas, there are whole districts but little changed as yet, and on the mass of the older generation the new culture is merely a veneer. The ingress of new ideas will be accelerated as railway building progresses, as the postal and telegraph systems are extended, and as the public press grows in dignity and influence. The development of a live and increasingly intelligent public opinion has been one of the marvels of the past six years, but public opinion has not yet reached the stage where it can be trusted to act sanely in an emergency; and for China the next few years are to be the crueial period. It is then that there is the gravest danger of shipwreck. If China can only hold together another generation, the situation will cease to be so acute. The rapid increase of this already numerous population also presents a grave economic and political problem. 108 THE YALE REVIEW Strong sentimental and ethical motives unite in reinforcing the natural instincts to propagate one’s kind. Xo crime is greater, so every Chinese is told, than to die without leaving issue to perpetuate the name of his ancestors and to do them honor at the family shrine. Sons, too, are a convenient form of insurance in a land where the state provides no old-age pensions and where for the most of the population hard physical labor forces an early retirement. Accurate census returns have never been obtained, but from the rough gov- ernmental data available it has been estimated that the population of China has nearly doubled since the middle of the eighteenth centurj". This increase has come in spite of the checks of war, dis- ease, and famine. Every generation or two China has been visited by destructive strife. Disease is on every hand. Bubonic plague is endemic. Tuberculosis is fostered by the crowded life of the cities, by damp, dark houses, and by the entire lack of intelligent sanitarj'^ precautions. Smallpox until very recently took its toll unhindered by anything but the remarkable resistance of the race and a crude form of inoculation. The black plague, tj^ihus, dysentery, cholera, and a score of other diseases the presence of many of which is unknown in the West, or at worst is only a memory, commit their ravages unchecked by intelligent opposition. The older Chinese medical profession possessed a copious phar- macopoeia, but its theory and practice were largely based on misinformation and superstition. No dissection of the human body was allowed until 1912; the older anatomical charts must be seen to be appreciated. Stones proclaiming themselves in large characters to be from the sacred T’ai Shan are placed at the ends of streets to frighten away the spirits of disease, while the sewage of the city is carried out in the open pails of the thrifty farmers, or left to find its way to the nearest stream or pond through crude ditches in or under the streets. Water for the use of the larger cities is taken unfiltered from the rivers, from chance springs THE QUESTION OF CHIXA 109 and ponds, and from wells in private courtyards or crowded streets. Only the necessity of boiling water for the univer- sal tea prevents the mortality from being much greater than it is. Along with war and disease has gone famine. In a land where, except along the river and canal systems, the transportation of foodstuffs is expensive, a local drought or flood may mean starvation in one section whUe in neighbor- ing districts ample harvests are being reaped. Even during the last fifty years, there have been famines that have cost a million or more lives each, and the Chinese annals show that this sad record is not exceptional. These restraints of population are being withdrawn. As has been said, the fear of foreign intervention prevents civil strife. No large reduction of population by a foreign war is probable, for China is too poorly organized and financed to engage in an extensive war, and international opinion would not allow a conquest of extermination even if any power wished to carry it on. Western medical science is grappling with China’s death rate and is certain to reduce it in the next few years. Western hospitals, while still pitifully under- manned and inadequate in number, are to be found in all parts of the empire, the outposts of Western science. West- ern missionarj^ societies, local voluntary Red Cross organiza- tions, and independent Chinese and Japanese practitioners are all having a part in the war on disease. Medical schools have been established to train an adequate Chinese staff. Harvard, Yale, and Pennsylvania, for instance, have lent their names to enterprises of their graduates for medical education in China. The Rockefeller F oundation under the name of the “Cliina Medical Board” has, after a most careful survey, taken the initial steps in a scheme of medical education which is framed with the entire nation in mind and which will involve the expenditure of millions of dollars. This medical work is, of course, admirable. Com- mon humanity demands that it be strengthened, and its growth is inevitable. Even on purely selfish grounds, the 110 THE YAEE REVIEW world would be compelled in this day of rapid communication to clean up so huge a centre of infection. Then, too, "with an improvement in the general health of the nation, there will come increased individual energy and initiative. But the lowering of the death rate is not likely to be followed imme- diately by a corresponding decline in the birth rate. Vol- untary birth control will come in time, of course, as it is com- ing in Europe and America, but it will make its effects felt first on only the more wealthy and intelligent classes. In the mass of the nation it will come but slowly, and in the meantime population will largely increase. The relief meas- ures against famine, which are more and more directed towards a permanent protection against the floods that are the causes of much of the trouble, have, also, for this reason contributed largely to an increase in the population. Unless this increase of population is accompanied by a correspondingly enlarged food supply, poverty will mul- tiply, the forces making for civilization will be weakened, unrest will grow, and the government, and all agencies working for the regeneration of China will find their task more and more difficult. Eventually, this food supply will increase. There are extensive unoccupied lands even in the eighteen provinces. Only the richest alluvial plains are completely under cultivation. There are, for instance, in the vicinity of one populous provincial capital, thousands of acres of waste land awaiting intelligent reclamation. In Mongolia and Manchuria, there are large areas that could support a much greater population. It is possible, too, that the artificial barriers to Chinese settlement in other sections of the world will in time be withdrawn, or that some unoccu- pied areas in which the white race cannot thrive will be found adapted to the Chinese. Improved methods of agriculture and new food crops can do much. The growth of railways and better roads will facilitate the transportation of food. At the present time in central and south China, the high- ways are merely narrow tracks. Live pigs are carried THE QUESTION OF CHINA 111 squealing on wheelbarrows whose greaseless axles protest as loudly as their burdens against the clumsiness of man. The days of so costly a method are numbered, for the advent of better highways and of railroads is certain. Moreover, China seems to have a great industrial future before her. She has a hard working, intelligent, frugal population that will eventually make splendid factory labor. Her mineral resources, especially of coal and iron, stagger the imagina- tion. When once she becomes a machinery and factory using nation, she will be able to exchange her products for food. All these changes, however, will take time, and all her problems are clamoring for immediate solution. If she survives the next few decades, reorganization will take place, and readjustments to the new conditions. But it is during these years that the increase of population is likely to make itself most felt. Its acute stage coincides with the crisis in the other phases of Chinese life. A factor, bound up very closely with the last, is the disorder produced by the contact with the industry, com- merce, and finance of the West. China is experiencing a rapid rise in prices, though the scale has been much lower than in many other parts of the world. In the interior unskilled labor can be had for two dollars a month or even less, eggs can be purchased for six or seven cents per dozen, and other prices correspond. But Chinese prices are being forced up towards the level of the rest of the world. On the coast and along the rivers of even the far interior, they have doubled or more than doubled since 1900. The increase has been most marked near the great coast commercial cities, but it is rapidly making its way inland. Wages increase, as elsewhere, more slowly than food prices. The process must prove painful to the great groups of the population whose chronic state already is slow starvation. Moreover, foreign competition is temporarily proving injurious to important branches of Chinese trade. The Chinese tea trade has seri- ously declined in competition with the tea prepared in Ceylon 112 THE YALE REVIEW under improved foreign methods. Foreign cottons have partially displaced the native product in domestic markets, and Chinese cotton manufacturers are finding competition difficult with the cheaper grades of English and Japanese goods. But there are indications that this situation is not to be permanent. The products of modern factories in China are now beginning to displace foreign cottons. The intro- duction of labor-saving machinery, if it proceeds at all rap- idly, will work temporary hardship on the millions now engaged in handicrafts. Eventually, of course, they will be benefited. Already in Shanghai the number of rickshaw coolies has increased since the introduction of street railways. The process of change will probably mean added difficulty for the government and all constructive forces during the next few decades. The lack of individual initiative is another primary factor of the Chinese problem. In a population as large as that of China the individual is sure to be submerged. The very immensity of numbers tends to make him feel helpless even in winning his own living. The most courageous may well despair of influencing the nation as a whole. Action is by groups rather than by individuals. But the trouble goes deeper. From time immemorial the family has been the unit in China. No important step is taken by a single member without consulting the whole. If a boy desires an education or if he wishes to break with any of the customs of the past, the counsel of the entire family must be sought. The well-spring of all morality is held by the Con- fucian school to be reverence for one’s parents. Dissipation is wrong not as in Christian teachings, as an offense against God, a defiling of the temple of the Spirit of God, but because it injures the body transmitted by one’s ancestors. The son’s duty to parents is defined as service for them during their life and sacrifice to them after their death. The state has carried the matter still further by the theory of collective responsi- bility, by which the family is held accountable for the deeds THE QUESTION OF CHINA 113 of its blood relations. An entire family or clan may be pun- ished for the crime of one member, the punishment varying with the degree of relationship. This family action has valuable features. It has served as a check on excessive radicalism. It probably accounts partly for the prevalence of collective action in China, for merchant guilds and trade guilds and secret societies, and for that provincial loyalty which is part of the strength as well as the weakness of China’s political system. It has in it the seeds of national solidarity and patriotism, and could the group consciousness come to include in its scope the nation rather than the province, or city, or clan, it would give to China that unity which she now so sadly lacks. This group action, however, has many obvious weaknesses. It may account for the lack of balance and stability that so many leaders show when once they take the initiative and attempt to stand alone. The reaction, often seen to-day, is an excessive indi- vidualism that is for the time fully as dangerous as the old conservatism. The impracticable plans of reform with which students of contemporary China are all too familiar, plans which are announced and followed with enthusiasm for a time, only to be abandoned shortly amid discouragement, may be due partly to this lack of training in individual liberty and responsibility. It is, of course, a grave defect in a crisis like the present, when fearless, able, well-trained, balanced leadership is indispensable. There was something pathetic about the desperation with which the mass of the nation clung to the late Yuan Shih Kai. They heartily disliked him and distrusted his loyalty to the republic, but by their endur- ance of his rule confessed their distrust of others and the dearth of men of presidential or imperial calibre. As in the case of the problem of population, this is a weakness which will be felt most keenly during the next few years. If China can but tide over these years successfully, a group of younger men trained in the West and by efficient schools in China, schools which now are relatively few, will gradually 8 114 THE YALE REVIEW grow up, disciplined, fearless, and capable of leadership. Their forerunners are already appearing. Still another factor has been the lack of national unity. Provinces have been too jealous of each other and of the central government to hold together. They declare their “independence” at every unfavorable turn of the political wheel. Parties hate one another so heartily that they prefer civil war to the acceptance of defeat. In 1913, 1916, and now again in 1917, internal strife has followed each marked shift of events in Peking. The provinces south of the Yangtze are more radical than those of the North. The great liberal republican party, the Kuo Min Tang, with its stronghold at Canton, dominates the South. The conserva- tive, military Pei-yang party, once led by Yuan Shih Kai, still controls the North, although now it has no formal organization. Each side is so rabid that it prefers to seek aid from even the hated and feared Japanese rather than acknowledge defeat at the hands of the other. The final danger is the threatened disintegration of morals. There is a tendency to reject the older standards of action. Now, there are some features of the Confucianism of the past century whose disappearance would cause no regret. Of its ultra-conservatism, its barren agnosticism, varied at times with a crude superstition and bigotry, China is well rid. But there is much more of good than of evil. Westerners might read with profit the teachings of China’s great sages, and much of her stability has been due to their influence. The newer Chinese student tends to ignore the classics of the past. He is too busy learning English, eeonomics, engineering, and other “Western” subjects to devote his attention to his own literature. He is apt to be a bit con- temptuous of Confucius and Mencius. Old customs are passing and with them the wholesome moral restraints that they so often embodied. Western customs may in some instances more nearly conform to the ideal standards of morality, but the period of transition is likely to be one of THE QUESTION OF CHINA 115 anarchy. The coming in of greater freedom between men and women in social intercourse and the substitution of vol- untary courtship for the old betrothal by parents through the medium of go-betweens has in many cases resulted in license. A weakened control of the parent over the child may be very desirable, but is too frequently accompanied by a les- sened respect of the child for all authority. The laudable desire to break away from the dead hand of the past and to act and think as men of the new age leads to a failure of the old deference to teachers and to legitimate authority of every kind, as the widespread student riots testify. It is the old, old story of the moral disintegration that accompanies rapid changes in culture. A backward civilization copies the vices of an aggressive civilization more readily than it does its virtues. License is frequently mistaken for liberty. This disintegration but makes worse a traditional political corruption. From time immemorial offices have been bought and sold. Ridiculously low salaries have encouraged public officials to feather their nests from public funds. Patriotism was formerly unknown and to the leaders of the old school, particularly of the military group, means little even to-day. Private interest crowds regard for public welfare out of the hearts of all but a few. In time the essential moral vigor of the Chinese people will probably assert itself. Some of the leaders are awake to the dangers of the situation and are earnestly seeking a solution. Missionaries, for the most part splendid representatives of the best of the Occident, are putting to the problem the energies of their minds and of their faith. But the crucial years for China are the next few decades. Will she find herself in time? One must confess that in the light of all these problems, the immediate future is not bright. The need for rapid readjustment is so imperative, the vast population is so slowly moved, and its increase presents such a menace to all stable government, there is so great a lack of competent leadership, factional strife is so acute, and the threatened 116 THE YAEE REVIEW moral disintegration is so grave, that at times the courage and faith even of the stoutest must quail. High-minded, patriotic Chinese, on returning from their student days in America, are sure to feel temporarily overwhelmed by the situation. All is not dark, however. There is another fac- tor, quite as fundamental as any of those already mentioned, that gives a firm basis for the faith of the optimist. It is the people themselves. No one who knows the Chinese inti- mately can doubt their racial vigor, their native ability, or their power to react under hard circumstances. Time after time in their long history, they have been invaded and con- quered in whole or in part only to absorb their conquerors. Hsiung Nu, Chin Tatars, Mongols, and Manchus have in turn overrun the country only to be assimilated and to lose their racial identity. Even the J ews have succumbed : their ancient colony at Honanfu has lost its language and its cus- toms and is not to be distinguished from its Chinese neigh- bors. Europeans resist with difficulty the effect of the first generation of contact, and some have become largely Chinese in their mental outlook. N o race could produce the marvel- lous civilization of the older China, and impress it upon the vigorous Japanese, and then resist the disintegrating ten- dency of centuries of isolation without the endowment of a large store of native ability and mental and moral vigor. Confucius and his long line of spiritual descendants would be of themselves a noteworthy achievement for any people. To-day in our own universities Chinese students are proving, under the handicap of an alien tongue, their ability to com- pete successfully with the best that America can produce. The Chinese, too, are beginning to rise to the emergency. They are developing a national patriotism, a trait said by keen observers of only a decade ago to be totally lacking. The nation-wide resentment roused by the J apanese demands of 1915, the rapid growth in influence, circula- tion, and dignity of a patriotic daily press, the phenomenal and almost pathetic eagerness with which the educated class THE QUESTION OF CHINA 117 has recently listened to the plea for a higher individual and national righteousness from native and foreign representa- tives of the Christian church, all point to a growing love for country, an unflinching self-examination, and a determina- tion to reform. The Chinese race may react too late for its immediate salvation. It may for a time come under the domination of foreigners. It may be split asunder. But all that has happened to China many times before. The conviction grows that again in the future, as so many times in the past, the Chinese race will Anally assert itself and will have a new birth of national and individual freedom and reach new heights of achievement. The Japanese may for a time dominate their huge neigh- bor, as they now seem about to do ; but, speaking from the standpoint of the centuries, they will be thrown off or absorbed as other conquerors have been. The important question is. What w'ould be the effect of years of alien domi- nation? Would China be transformed by her masters, or by her own effort to regain her independence, from a peace- loving, essentially democratic people, willing to co-operate with a league of free nations, into a militaristic, autocratic state that seeks to wreak its vengeance on its enemies by mastering Asia and terrorizing the world? The hope for the immediate future seems to lie in a joint protectorate by a league of the stronger nations. Such a protectorate should be benevolent, not selfish, guaranteeing independence and the open door, and should seek to aid China to get on her feet politically and industrially. Americans should prepare themselves to join intelligently with all the great powers, including Japan, to obtain this end. Any other course seems to mean added danger for China and civilization. JOURNEYS TO GO By William Young Ruddy, and golden-bright, The great Sun comes from its bed. Look! Like the fiery crown. In the window of jewelled glass! — Ever so fair to the sight. With its glittering spikes outspread. On its cushion of crimson down. Above the Priest, at the Mass ! — Or the halo that is shed. In the chapel, as we pass. From the sinless Christ-child’s head! And do but listen ! Oh, hark ! F ar over the hill, and the dale ! — Oh, is it indeed the lark. That warbles so wild, and high? But rather it seems the glee That the shepherd blows on his nail — The wonderful shepherd; he. With the shifting and sliining locks. Who wanders, and leads his flocks. Through the pastures of the sky. O lark ! — for we, too, would be Like thee ! — as glad, and as strong ! Strong, with the strength of flight — F or love doth fetter us so ! Strong, with the strength of flight. And glad, with the gladness of song ! And ever, from some far height.