THE EAST
OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
THE EAST
OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
BY
HENRY CODMAN POTTER, D.D., LL.D.
BISHOP OF NEW YORK
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1902
Copyright, 1900, 1901, 1902, by
THE CENTURY Co.
Copyright, 1901, by The Churchman Co.
Published October, 190S
THE DEVINNE PRES
TO
JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN
FINANCIER, PHILANTHROPIST, FRIEND
TO WHOSE MUNIFICENCE
THESE OPPORTUNITIES FOE OBSERVATION
IN THE EAST WERE OWING, AND WHOSE
CONSTRUCTIVE GENIUS, WHICH UPBUILDS
AND NEVER PULLS DOWN, HAS INDICATED
THE TASKS WHICH AWAIT WESTERN CIV-
ILIZATION IN EASTERN FIELDS
CONTENTS
PAGE
i. CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUN-
DERS 1
n. THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES . . 41
HI. IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 71
iv. IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 103
v. IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 139
vi. INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 169
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN
BLUNDERS
THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND
TO-MORROW
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN
BLUNDERS
THE traveler who has journeyed by
steamboat from Hongkong to Canton
by night wakes in the morning to a scene
which he is not likely to forget. The condi-
tions of life in China are unique in this,
that they are but little limited by space.
We are wont, in our Western world, to talk
of the crowding and herding in great cities ;
and in one aspect of these the East has no-
thing to match them. The foundations
there are so often insecure that buildings
that climb up like ours into the air, with
tens of stories piled, higher and higher,
upon one another, are virtually unknown;
but, on the other hand, we see, packed into
a bullock-cart, huddled in a bamboo hut,
literally heaped upon one another in a mud-
walled hovel, in the streets, or on the road-
side, numbers of people who ordinarily, in
4 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW
our world, whatever their circumstances of
poverty or degradation, would not endure
such crowding for an instant. This char-
acteristic, however, in the Chinese reaches
its climax when one sees their life in boats.
And the startling idiosyncrasies of that life
are revealed with no more comic or tragic
distinctness both, in fact, are there often
strangely and pathetically intermingled-
than among the crowded denizens of a Chi-
nese house-boat.
And nowhere are these to be observed in
more impressive proportions than in the
great sluggish stream on whose banks is the
city of Canton. Crowded as is the popula-
tion of any Chinese city, Canton in this
must surely be preeminent, and in the case
of the great throngs that pack her dark and
narrow streets and their darker and nar-
rower habitations, this teeming flood of life
overflows its bounds and spreads itself in
a vast mass of boats on which tens of thou-
sands of people pass their whole lives, men,
women, and children almost trampling
upon one another, and preserving them-
selves from being crowded into the stream
to drown by an ingenuity which is not easily
intelligible. Indeed, as a matter of fact,
they do not always succeed in doing so.
Life is not accounted of much value in
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 5
China ; and its enormous surplus of popula-
tion, which under the present conditions
the land can but poorly support, is depleted,
whether by drowning or otherwise, without
awakening much concern or causing much
grief.
On the morning when I first saw Canton,
looking from my cabin window I found our
steamer surrounded by an apparently end-
less flotilla of Chinese house-boats, and
stood fascinated by the almost myriad life
with which they teemed. No one who has
not seen it has ever seen anything like it.
The boats are twenty or thirty feet long,
and are shop, kitchen, freight-house, bed-
room, nursery, store-room, all in one, with
sometimes a family of fifteen or twenty
persons to crowd and strive, eat and sleep,
fight for the opportunity to earn their
scanty wage, by day or night, and often to
be born and die in them. The children
swarm like ants, and almost before they
can speak are tied to an oar and made to
pull it. But when they are not tied thus
they are sometimes hustled over the side of
the boat. They sink out of sight, and that
is the end of them.
To this frequent occurrence there is, how-
ever, one exception. Now and then you
will notice a toddling little creature to
6 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
whom is attached a small balloon. If it
tumbles into the water the balloon supports
it ; it is fished out with a long pole, cuffed
and scolded by its irate parent, but saved.
And this is simply and solely because "it"
is a boy ! If it were a girl, the parent would
see in its removal a gracious providential
interposition, and would say, in the Chinese
manner, "It is ordered." If one follows,
now, along that slender thread that binds
the Chinese house-boat boy to his balloon,
he will find, I think, a clue to much of Chi-
nese character and Chinese history. The
people of China are not peculiar in prizing
boys more than girls, for that, alas! is a
characteristic of many Christian nations
and families. They are, however, peculiar
in their reasons for doing so. With us one
wants to perpetuate his name ; to shield, by
the industry or prowess of sons, the widow
and daughters that he may leave behind
him; or to join with his own energy and en-
terprise that of another of his own name
and lineage. But with a Chinese parent the
concern is quite different. He expects, in-
deed, that his son will take care of him in
his old age, and, in fact, filial duty in this
respect is carried to somewhat grotesque
lengths, as is witnessed by a legend current
in China that a married son, with whom
CHINESE TEAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 7
lived his widowed mother, said to his wife
on one occasion : ' ' My income will not sup-
port my mother, you and me, and our child.
It is the will of Heaven, therefore, that we
sacrifice our child to our mother, and we
will bury it alive ' ' ; which on preparing to
do by digging a grave in which they pro-
posed to bury the child alive, they came
upon a pot of gold which it was revealed
was hidden there for their enrichment in
reward for their filial conduct! But, as I
have said, a boy's life is precious to a pa-
rent not merely because of the care which
he is bound to give a parent in his old age,
but because it is the supreme duty of the
son, after his parent is dead, to make the
annual offerings upon which the conditions
of the parent 's life beyond this world must,
according to Chinese theology, depend.
And so the little baby boy toddling about
the crowded house-boat of the meanest
peasant has a balloon fastened to his tiny
person, not as a token of any especial ten-
derness on the part of his parent, but rather
in what might be called a forecasting spirit
of other-world thrift, by means of which the
parent provides for his future interests
after he is dead.
It is in this curious combination of indi-
rection, insensibility, and selfishness that
8 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
one must needs find the clue to a great deal
of Chinese character. No one can come into
contact with this people, see them in their
own homes, or go ever so little below the
surface of their national history, without
recognizing that they are marked off from
other races by certain wholly unique and
quite distinctive traits. No more interest-
ing or timely study than those traits can
invite the Western student.
Timely, I say, because whatever may
have been the situation a little while ago,
in the matter of the relations of China to
the rest of the world, no intelligent ob-
server can be insensible to the fact that not
only have they begun to change, but that in
the near future they are destined to be
changed more and more rapidly. No one
who is at all familiar with the attitude of
the Western world, by which I mean, for
my present purpose, the civilizations of
Europe and America, can be ignorant of
the fact that, to Western ideas, to com-
merce, the arts, international intercourse,
China was regarded fifty years ago as
largely inaccessible. The Great Wall of
China was commonly accepted as no inapt
image of the great life of China. True, we
had books like M. Hue's travels, as we have
had since then Williams 's "Middle King-
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 9
dom"; but as we read them we only re-
ceived a fresh impression, concerning
China and the Chinese, of impenetrability.
Their manners, their traditions, their men-
tal processes, all these seemed to be what,
largely, their public highways still are im-
passable. It is told by an acute and singu-
larly just and impartial observer of these
Orientals 1 that when the coolies in a par-
ticular neighborhood in North China learn
that a foreigner is journeying their way,
they are in the habit of going out into the
highways and digging holes and pitfalls in
the roads which render them impassable.
The unsuspecting stranger plunges incon-
tinently into these, and then the neighbors
appear with profuse protestations of sym-
pathy and surprise, and having, with Ori-
ental deliberation, pulled him and his bul-
lock-cart out of the pit, fill the pit up at
their leisure, and after the whole process
is completed charge him a good round sum
for their services. Not unlike this has been
the experience of students and travelers in
China, who have sought to find their way
through the curious impasse of the Oriental
mind, and who have vainly struggled to dis-
cover the clues which would explain to them
the manifold eccentricities of Chinese do-
1 The author of " Chinese Characteristics."
10 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW
mestic and social life, the principles upon
which its cities and provinces are governed,
its rules of conduct regulated, its more
serious views of human life determined.
There is little doubt that, besides that ele-
ment in all this which is unconscious and
traditionally characteristic, there has been,
with the Chinese people, a good deal of de-
liberate intention. They have not wanted
to understand us, and they do not wish that
we should understand them. Sometimes,
undoubtedly, it is true that what seems ob-
scure in their modes of speech or of reckon-
ing is only seemingly so, and that, at bot-
tom, they are more accurate than we. A
Western traveler in China was, on one
occasion, loud in his indignation at the igno-
rance, the stupidity, or the duplicity which
represented to him that the distance be-
tween two places was not the same from
east to west as from west to east, nor the
same in wet weather that it was in dry. But
it was pointed out to him that distance in
a journey was equitably measured by the
time that it took to make it, and that a jour-
ney from east to west must needs be longer
if it was up-hill rather than down-hill, or if
made in wet weather and over heavy clay
roads rather than in dry weather. Nobody,
it should be said in passing, will ever be
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 11
just to the Chinese mind or to Chinese
modes of expression who does not bear in
mind the difference in Eastern and West-
ern modes of thinking of which this is an
illustration.
But when this is said, it must still be
owned by any one who has had experience
of the children of the Flowery Kingdom
that they are often purposely obscure, and
that they do not always want to understand
us or to be understood by us. Two tem-
peramental peculiarities explain this, which
are too often little accounted of. One is
their enormous contempt for the outside
barbarian, and the other is their imperturb-
able contentment with their own life and
land and all that belongs to them. One en-
counters the Chinese often long before he
has reached their own land. They are
servants in a California household, work-
men on some great Western railway or
mining enterprise, or cabin-' ' boys " on
some Pacific steamship. I wonder whether
those who have met them under these vari-
ous conditions are as sensible of their mild
but unmistakable contempt as I have been.
They may be perfectly civil and readily
obliging, I have always found them so,
but, beneath that mask of stolidity which
one can almost never penetrate, there
12 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
gleams sometimes an elusive hint of a cer-
tain calm scorn with which they listen to
you as you convey to them your wishes, and
with which, with languid and machine-like
accuracy, they fulfil them. "The best ser-
vants in the world," cries some superficial
and unobservant traveler ; and as one hears
him he recalls that characteristic personage
in one of Mr. Thackeray's "Letters to a
Young Man about Town" (a classic for the
instruction of our youth, which one could
wish might be republished with every new
crop of boys), where Mr. Brown is discours-
ing to his nephew on the subject of the way
in which wise women manage their hus-
bands. "Your father, my dear Bob," says
Mr. Brown, "thinks your mother a fool.
Alas, poor man! How meek she is; how
she never disputes with him; and yet with
what a mild contempt for his masculine
stupidity she most accurately measures
and manages him!" But no woman's con-
tempt for her husband ever matched a
Chinaman's contempt for the "white
devil ' ' who is his master. And the misfor-
tune has been that, in our intercourse with
these people, we have not recognized how
natural and, from their point of view, how
reasonable this is. "Young folks think old
folks are fools, but old folks know that
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 13
young folks are fools," is a proverb on
which most of us have been reared; and
yet we forget that to the Chinese the oldest
of the Western nations is very young, and
in fact vulgarly modern.
You say to your Chinese domestic, ' ' Why
did you not put salt in the fish-cakes?"
And he answers you blandly, though
greatly, it is to be feared, to your exas-
peration, "We do not put salt in fish-
cakes." But why should you be angry?
His usages are some thousands of years
older than yours. Indeed, he knows very
well that a few hundred years ago, so far as
you or your ways are concerned, there was
neither ancestral habit, usage, nor custom
to appeal to. And then, under all these con-
ditions, he can keep his temper, and, too
often, you cannot. Chinese imperturba-
bility is surely without its equal. The sto-
lidity of our own native Indians has been
supposed to be preeminent, but any one
who has seen the Chinese in their own land
will recognize, I think, another and, in its
way, a much higher quality than this; for
ordinarily there is no sullenness in it, but
rather a bland and beaming, if often irri-
tating, good nature, which is as fine as it is
exasperating. I was witness of a scene in
an interior city in China which, as an illus-
14 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
tration of this, was not without its elements
of mortification for the foreigner who
watched it. A party of Americans had
gone into a leading shop and had selected
various articles, for which, after having in-
quired their prices, they offered a lump
sum far below that asked for them. It was
courteously but firmly declined, with the in-
formation that the prices in the establish-
ment were fixed, and that the rule was to
make no reductions. I should be glad if I
could forget the scene that followed, in
which the things selected were rudely flung
about, and finally some of them hurled at
the proprietor's head with epithets more
forcible than refined. But, through the
whole odious scene, the shopkeeper was un-
moved, and his placid and serene dignity
undisturbed. One who realized what such
self-command might easily cost could not
but realize also what an element of power it
must needs be in the race and people that
possessed it.
We come also here, I cannot but think,
upon one of those large psychological facts
which go so far to explain the history of the
Chinese empire. Think of it for a moment !
There it has endured, all these thousands of
years, undisturbed amid the tremendous
revolutions that have upheaved other em-
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 15
pires and changed the face of the civilized
globe. One need not be unmindful of what,
in the progress of civilization, has else-
where conie out of national or racial rest-
lessness, to recognize what a tremendous
force of conservatism has been the Chinese
conviction that one empire contained all in
the world that was worth having, and that
the only way to look at the rest of the world
was to look down from the top of the Great
Wall.
But alas for such complacency ! the Great
"Wall is rapidly becoming a crumbling ruin,
and, even in the regard of its own people,
is plainly destined to be, before long, no
more than a venerable historic memorial.
The processes by which this has thus far
come to pass are a part of current history,
and I need not do more here than cursorily
allude to them. The first view of the ordi-
nary traveler leads one, indeed, to suppose
that the changes that are to transform
China are coming to pass very rapidly, and
the stranger entering the port of Shanghai
or Hongkong concludes that the great Asi-
atic empire has already largely lost its
traditional characteristics. Nothing could
be more remote from the facts. The treaty
ports are no more than the homes and ware-
houses of foreigners at least so much of
16 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW
them as at first strikes the eye; and the
traveler has need to make but a short jour-
ney into the interior, no matter where he
may land, to find the teeming millions of
the land untouched in any smallest degree
by the habits, the beliefs, or the ideas of
the outside barbarian.
It is undoubtedly true, however, that
this is not likely to continue ; and thought-
ful observers and older foreign residents
in China merchants, missionaries, and
others were agreed, as far as I encoun-
tered them, in their impression that changes
hereafter would be likely to come much
more rapidly than heretofore. But though
prejudice has begun to yield, it is undoubt-
edly true that it will not yield rapidly, and
that anything like a progressive movement
from within is far more improbable than
among any other people in the world.
When I entered China there were most in-
teresting rumors of the rise and growth of
the young emperor's party, of the interest-
ing personnel of its leading adherents, of
their wide reading of recent English and
American literature dealing with questions
of political, social, and sociological interest,
of the aspirations of the youthful sovereign,
and of the hopeful outlook in China for
something answering to constitutional and
CHINESE TEAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 17
representative government. But in a few
months the whole movement had appar-
ently come to grief; the representatives of
the "Young China" party were in hiding
or fugitives; the dowager empress, it was
said, had put an effectual extinguisher on
the whole business, and our quondam guest,
Li Hung Chang, was "strengthening his
fences" on the old and cleverly corrupt
lines.
It is inevitable that any great social or
political movement in China should be
marked by such reactions. For, first of all,
it must be remembered that of political
unity, in our sense of the word, the empire
of China knows little or nothing. Its vast
and various provinces, extending from the
frigid to the torrid zone, have no binding
quality of custom, language, or religion.
The dynasty that rules is a Tatar dynasty.
But the Manchurian represents, rather, the
greatest traditions of the empire. And this
single illustration is sufficient to indicate
what is true of the larger whole. Those of
us in America who enjoyed the acquain-
tance of Chinese students, merchants, or
others resident in our own land during the
war between China and Japan must re-
member the surprising apathy with which,
when we ventured to refer, sympatheti-
18 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW
cally, to Chinese naval or military disas-
ters, our expressions of sympathy were re-
ceived. We were calmly informed that our
Chinese friends did not come from the
provinces that had been invaded or the
coasts that were threatened; that, in fact,
they knew very little about them, and evi-
dently cared less. The burning resentment
with which an American would hear that
foreign troops were landing upon the coast
of Florida or invading the territory of Cali-
fornia, though none of us might ever have
seen, and did not know a soul inhabiting,
the one or the other, this, apparently, was
a sentiment which to a Chinese was incon-
ceivable. And yet it is difficult to imagine
how any great national movement can come
to pass until a country, whether an empire
or a republic, has what Kossuth called
national solidarity.
A still further difficulty in the way of a
great movement in the direction of social
or political progress in China is the large
absence of any considerable discontent
with existing conditions. The government
of China has not inaptly been called a gov-
ernment by "squeeze." In no community,
common as bribery or corruption is in po-
litical affairs, especially in the East, is
there so much of it as in China. It be-
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 19
gins at the top and extends all the way
down. The emperor squeezes the gover-
nors of provinces ; the provincial governors
squeeze the magistrates; and the magis-
trates squeeze the people. If you have a
case before the local justice, who is ordina-
rily magistrate, chief of police, and tax-col-
lector all in one, you will do well to bring
your little present with you. Often the
magistrate takes a present from both sides.
Sometimes he has the grace to return the
gift of the man against whom he decides;
but if you were to quote to him Solomon's
aphorism to the effect that ' * a gift blindeth
the eyes, ' ' he would blandly assure you that
in his country, on the contrary, it quickens
and clears the vision ; and the curious thing
about the whole business is that, ordinarily,
the suitor agrees with him, and that the
community is, on the whole, entirely satis-
fied with the present condition of things.
Of course such a state of affairs is
not universally prevalent; and, equally of
course, the contrast between Chinese and
European communities in close proximity,
as, for example, at Hongkong, Shanghai,
and elsewhere, must sooner or later impress
the intelligent native, but far less than one
would suppose. The Chinese hates our
cleanliness, our wide streets, our police pro-
20 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
tecting the feeble and restraining personal
violence ; and, like a child in a nursery when
you have put it in order, thinks that you
have only spoiled what to him was fair.
Tell him that, if he will let it, civilization-
Western civilization will drain his towns
and cleanse his dwellings and sanitize his
whole life, where now he cannot move or
breathe without filth and crowding, his an-
swer is Mr. Harold Skimpole's, in "Bleak
House," to the friend who, on visiting his
apartments, exclaimed, "Why, Harold, you
can't swing a cat here," "But I don't want
to swing a cat here. ' ' And that attitude of
mind, for the time being, at any rate, is
an intellectual impasse you can go no
farther.
It cannot be disguised, however, that in
these regards there are in China occasional
tokens of progress, and that they are begin-
ning to multiply. As producing these,
there are various causes, such as the influ-
ence of commercial intercourse, the intro-
duction of Western scientific and mechani-
cal inventions, but first of all, as many
candid observers have frankly acknow-
ledged, the influence of the missionary. I
know how much challenge this statement
may produce, but if the character of the
witnesses and their testimony are consid-
CHINESE TEAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 21
ered, I believe it cannot be impugned.
That there have been mistakes in mission-
ary enterprises in China cannot, however,
be denied, and these might, I think, in many
cases where they are still persisted in, be
wisely recognized and remedied, as they
easily may be. In his interesting and, on
the whole, impartial work on the East, the
present viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, al-
ludes with considerable reserve, but with
sufficient explicitness, to some of these
which have long existed. Generally they
refer to the somewhat careless disregard of
local or national prejudices by which our
modern missions have been widely charac-
terized. I confess I cannot see why such
disregard should be indulged in. At home
and among ourselves we are all agreed that
people cannot always do things that are in
themselves entirely innocent, if they are
liable to be misunderstood; and it might
well be a rule with all our missionary au-
thorities that in the matter, for example, of
the conventionalisms of mission stations,
unmarried women, traveling missionaries,
and the like, the missionary should not vio-
late Chinese social conventions, which, how-
ever contemptible they may seem to us, are
too widely and deeply rooted in heathen
lands to be lightly disregarded.
22 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW
Again, the modern missionary to a peo-
ple whose nobility are its scholars should
be a man of education and of refinement.
The ceremonial of Chinese life is doubtless
often irksome, but a man with not only the
instincts but also the training of a gentle-
manand, unfortunately, the two things
do not always go together will not lightly
disesteem it.
And yet again, the modern missionary,
like his greatest predecessor, the Apostle
Paul, may wisely strive to understand and
respectfully to refer to the religion that he
has come to supplant. If it be true, as
Christian scholars and missionaries have
owned, that "no student of history, no ob-
servant traveler who knows human nature,
can fail to be impressed to the point of deep
awe with the thought of the marvelous re-
straining power which Chinese morality has
exerted upon the race from the earliest
times until now," 1 it would certainly seem
to be worth while for teachers from other
lands, who are invading China with the
proclamation of a still higher standard of
morality, at least respectfully to compare
it with that which they aim to supplant.
"It would be hard," says Dr. Williams, "to
overestimate the influence of Confucius in
1 "Chinese Characteristics," pp. 207, 208.
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 23
his ideal princely scholar, and the power
for good on his race which this conception
has ever since exercised. The immeasur-
able potency, in after ages, of the character
thus portrayed, proves how lofty was his
standard; and the national conscience has
ever since assented to the justice of his por-
trait." It is another Christian scholar of
recognized authority who has said: ''The
teaching of Confucianism on human duty
is wonderful and admirable. It is not per-
fect, indeed. But on the last three of the
four things which Confucius delighted to
teach letters, ethics, devotion of soul, and
truthfulness his utterances are in har-
mony with the law and the gospel. A world
ordered by them would be a beautiful
world. ' '
And yet the most ardent champion of the
Chinese would not care to maintain that, in
any such sense as this writer used the word
' ' beautiful, ' ' the empire of China is a beau-
tiful world. First of all, it is rotten through
and through with political corruption. ' * To
what purpose," said a Chinese official of
himself and his associates, ' ' would you turn
us out of office? If you did so, you could
only replace us by successors who would
steal more than we do." Again, it is
weighted down by a social and moral apa-
24 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
thy which is all the more appalling because
it still worships its old teachers worships
them while it openly and flagrantly disre-
gards their teachings. There can be no
moral debasement for a nation greater than
this.
And now, what of its future f As I began
by saying, the doors that have been so long
closed against other nations are at length
being slowly forced open. England and
Germany and France and Russia and the
United States have all discovered a keen
interest in this ancient people, and a touch-
ing anxiety, each one of them, that the
future of China should not fall into the
hands of any of the others. With an almost
sublime force of inertia China has resisted
successive incursions, and has held fast to
her ancient traditions with unexampled te-
nacity. But now at last they are yielding ;
and a beginning having been made, no
one can now predict how fast the revolu-
tionary forces of Western civilization may
advance. When in Japan I was assured by
one closely connected with a great embassy
at Peking and warmly interested in our
national successes that the efforts prose-
cuted by a group of American capitalists
with remarkable persistency to secure con-
cessions for a great Chinese midland rail-
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 25
way were inevitably doomed to failure. It
was only three weeks later that, on the jetty
at Shanghai, I was informed by an Ameri-
can gentleman who had been largely con-
cerned in conducting the necessary negotia-
tions that the whole business of securing
those concessions was then happily and sat-
isfactorily concluded.
Well, the rest will sooner or later follow,
not speedily, it may be, but nevertheless in-
evitably. When the late Mr. Brigham'
Young gave in his adhesion to the construc-
tion of a branch of the Union Pacific Rail-
way from Ogden to Salt Lake City, a
shrewd observer is reported to have said,
''That means the death of Mormonism,"
and he was right. Mormonism, it may be
urged, still survives, but only as an extinct
memorial of a strange delusion and a very
clever leader. And little by little, as mod-
ern ideas, fashions, freedoms, push their
way into the heart of China, the vast organ-
ism will begin to take on a new life ; and as
the blood of other peoples flows through its
traffic, its arts, its literature, its pleasures,
its laws and customs, China will begin to
take on not only new manners, but new
morals and new ideals.
Will they be better or worse? Would
that one could be quite sure about that!
26 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW
But alas ! there cannot be racial tranf usions
without the consequences that forever at-
tach to such processes. A clever writer,
whose work it was my fortune to encounter
for the first time in the Chinese seas, pub-
lished, not long ago, the story of a poet who,
when lying mortally ill, was by a clever
suggestion all but miraculously revived by
the transfusion of a considerable amount
of blood drawn from the arm of a coster-
monger. He recovers rapidly, and returns
speedily to rude health. But, to his dismay,
he discovers not only that he has lost his
taste for claret and developed an inordinate
thirst for beer, but that his poetry has taken
on a redundancy of most atrocious slang,
without the employment of which he finds
it impossible to write a line.
The illustration may seem extravagant,
but it certainly has a message for Western
nations that are to-day dealing with an
effete civilization. We may give China
railways and manufactories, and a thou-
sand cheap and clever inventions which are,
it sometimes seems, the dominant note of
our Western civilization. We may make
them discontented with their own simpler
customs and their more frugal and infre-
quent personal indulgences. More than
this, we may not only sell to them the
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 27
weapons of war and armed ships and the
rest, but we may which is quite another
thing teach them how to use them. The
question still remains, and it is, as I shall
endeavor to show, quite a different question
in China from what it is, for example, in
India, what will they do with this new
knowledge and these new powers? Multi-
ply the open doors into China, and you must
needs multiply the doors that open out of
China; and has the American nation ever
realized that the time may easily come when
the question whether the Chinese will come
here, or go or stay, may be taken altogether
out of our keeping, and that by the Chinese
themselves? I do not underestimate our
numbers, our wealth, our prowess; but in
the long run, in warfare, Napoleon's pro-
fane maxim as to Providence and the
strongest battalions has in it a grim ele-
ment of truth. Nobody appears to be quite
clear how many people there are in China;
but it seems generally to be agreed that
there are at least some four hundred mil-
lions, and these four hundred millions have
one very considerable element of superi-
ority as fighters over Western peoples
they are profoundly indifferent to pain or
death. It may be well for us to realize
that, after we have civilized them by grid-
28 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
ironing their land with railways and filling
their homes with "Yankee notions," we
may have to reckon with a Chinese dragon
of proportions rather more formidable than
those that are rampant at the doors of Chi-
nese temples.
But surely there is a nobler view, whe-
ther of our opportunities or of their risks,
than this. However much China may
want open ports and machinery and im-
proved sanitary conditions in streets and
houses, she wants some other things in-
finitely more. One of these is the awaken-
ing of her human sympathies. In the ab-
sence or paralysis of these the testimony
of those who know her best would seem to
show that she has no match. It is enough
to be seized with a contagious disease in
China to be practically abandoned. The
sick person is placed in a solitary room with
a jug of water; the door is shut and fas-
tened, and the only attention he gets is
twice a day, when some one peers in
through a narrow opening and prods the
patient with a pole to see whether he is not
yet dead. The author of "Chinese Char-
acteristics," who has drawn for us, I be-
lieve, much the most vivid and accurate
portrait of the Chinese people, relates how
it is customary for one afflicted with any
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 29
natural or acquired blemish or defect to be
reminded of the fact. 1 One of the mildest
forms of this practice is that in which the
peculiarity is employed as a description
in such a way as to attract public atten-
tion. "Great elder brother with the pock-
marks," says an attendant in a dispensary
to a patient, "from what village do you
come?" It will not be singular if the man
whose eyes are afflicted with strabismus
hears an observation to the effect that
"when the eyes look asquint the heart is
askew," or if the man who has no hair is
reminded that "out of ten bald men nine
are deceitful, and the other would be also
if he were not a fool." In this instance
there is not only that indifference which is
careless how it gives pain, but that insensi-
bility which is unable to perceive how in-
consistent is such unfeeling speech with
even the most elemental principles of good
manners. And marching with such charac-
teristics is the national indifference to the
sufferings of children, especially if they be
girls, and to women, invariably if they be
daughters-in-law. With an enormous cere-
monial in all their social intercourse, the
neglect or impatience of which on the part
of foreigners fills the Chinese with an im-
1 " Chinese Characteristics," p. 197.
30 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
mense contempt, there is ordinarily the
most profound indifference concerning the
griefs and misfortunes that touch anybody
else than their own family.
And, along with this characteristic, in
such marked contrast with the ruling ideas
in Christian lands, there is among the Chi-
nese one supreme want which, whether in
art, in literature, or in human conduct, is
equally conspicuous. They are a people
with their eyes in the back of their heads.
Their ideals, so far as they have any, are
all behind them. They know nothing of
a divine discontent. Complacency, abso-
lute, invariable, all-pervading, is the su-
preme note of Chinese life and character.
That a thing was is reason sufficient to the
ordinary Chinese mind that it should con-
tinue to be ; and that anybody who has not
been hired to do so should concern himself
with even a curiosity, much more an en-
deavor, that it should be better, is to the
Chinese mind only an excellent joke. M.
Hue, in his masterly work on China and the
Chinese, relates that in 1857, at the period
of the death of the Emperor Jao Kuang, he
was " traveling on the road from Peking,
and one day, ' ' he says, ' * when we had been
taking tea at an inn in company with some
Chinese citizens, we tried to get up a little
CHINESE TKAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 31
political discussion. We spoke of the re-
cent death of the emperor, an important
event which, of course, must have interested
everybody. We expressed our anxiety on
the subject of the succession to the imperial
throne, the heir to which was not yet pub-
licly announced. 'Who knows,' said we,
'which of these sons of the emperor will
have been appointed to succeed him? If
it should be the elder, will he pursue
the same system of government? If the
younger, he is still very young, and it is
said that there are contrary influences two
opposing parties at court. To which will
he lean?' We put forward, in short, all
kinds of hypotheses, in order to stimulate
these good citizens to make some observa-
tion. But to all our suggestions and in-
quiries they replied by shaking their heads,
puffing out whiffs of smoke, and taking
great gulps of tea. This apathy was becom-
ing almost provoking, when one of them,
getting up from his seat, came and laid his
two hands on our shoulders in a manner
quite paternal, and said, smiling rather
ironically: 'Listen to me, my friend. Why
should you trouble your head and fatigue
your heart with all these vain surmises?
The mandarins have to attend to affairs of
state ; they are paid for it. Let them earn
32 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW
their money, then. But don't let us trouble
ourselves about what does not concern us.
We should be great fools to want to do po-
litical business for nothing.' 'That is very
conformable to reason, ' said the rest of the
company; and they then pointed out to us
that our tea was getting cold and that our
pipes were out."
I submit that here M. Hue has not suffi-
ciently stated, if he sufficiently recognized,
another element in the reserve of his Chi-
nese auditors, which courtesy may have re-
strained them from expressing. What busi-
ness was it of his I Who were these imper-
tinent strangers and foreigners, the Chinese
doubtless said to themselves, who pushed
their way into a country that neither invited
nor welcomed them, and insisted on dis-
cussing its domestic affairs in a promis-
cuous company in an inn? And if, as has
since happened, the inquisitive foreigners
became more and more numerous; if they
not only challenged Chinese customs, but
persisted in introducing their own; if they
ran railways through Chinese graveyards,
thus outraging the most sacred traditions
and beliefs of the people among whom they
ruthlessly forced their way, is it any won-
der that among that slow-moving, slow-
thinking, but intensely conservative and
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 33
exclusive people there has grown up a re-
sentment of foreign ways, and a hostility to
all foreign persons, which has at length
found its expression in acts of violence and
bloodshed at which the whole civilized
world to-day stands aghast?
That a religious hatred is also a large
element in this hostility there can be no
smallest doubt; nor, I think it must be
owned, need there be any wonder. Not
long ago, at the two-hundredth anniver-
sary of the Venerable Society for the Prop-
agation of the Gospel in Foreign . Parts,
in London, Lord Salisbury delivered an
address which was much criticized at the
moment for its somewhat cautionary if not
fault-finding tone. I confess I wondered
when I read it that he had not put his cau-
tions a good deal more strongly. Briefly,
the situation is this. Missionaries from
Christian countries go into heathen lands,
and, while resident or going about in them,
demand the protection of the consuls, min-
isters, and ambassadors of their own coun-
try, to which they are undoubtedly entitled
as long as they are going to and fro on their
lawful errands. But suppose this interven-
tion is invoked when they are violating the
traditions and doubtless often uncon-
sciouslyputting contempt on very tender
3
34 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOBEOW
and sacred usages or beliefs ; and suppose,
still further, that this intervention is in-
voked and even demanded not only for
themselves, but for their converts. These
converts, it must be remembered, are Chi-
nese subjects, amenable to Chinese law;
and yet a recent correspondent 1 from China
tells us that "the Roman Catholic Chris-
tians were often oppressed by non-Chris-
tian members of their community, and as
a result the church appointed two of her
priests to attend to no other duties except
the investigation of evidence in case of liti-
gation, and the conduct of such cases as
they thought unjust before the official. The
fact that they had official rank, and the
other very important fact that they were
foreigners, added to their power, and they
were thus able to meet the official not only
on his own ground, but with the additional
power of understanding foreign law. The
Christians were therefore enabled to obtain
justice.'*
Now, that is a very innocent-looking
paragraph, but if one looks a little closer he
will see how much it really means. In con-
nection with certain missions, it seems,
there is a privileged class. They are not
amenable to the ordinary jurisdiction of the
1 Mr. I. T. Headland, in "Harper's Weekly."
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 35
ordinary civil authority. They have suc-
ceeded in having created for themselves a
sort of extraordinary civil authority for
their own people, consisting of a foreign
priesthood, foreign, at any rate, in their
commission and allegiance, whether hap-
pening to be Chinese or French in their
race and lineage is of small consequence.
These persons are described as having
"official rank," that is, Chinese official
rank; some of them are reported to be in
authority practically equivalent to that of
a viceroy ; and they can take a criminal out
of the ordinary processes of the civil law,
as applied to natives who are not Chris-
tians, and deal with him at their own dis-
cretion.
Let us for a moment turn such a situa-
tion "the other end foremost." Let us
suppose it to be the Buddhists of India who
are sending missionaries to America; it is
said that they have set about doing so.
They ingratiate themselves with the civil
authorities, and get certain of their number
appointed police magistrates. There is a
considerable conversion of native Ameri-
cans to the religion of Buddha, and these,
when they fail to pay their taxes or other-
wise to obey the law, are tried by Buddhist
magistrates, who take care that they are
36 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW
always very gently dealt with. I do not say
that there may not have been in China
wrong and injustice toward Christian con-
verts. But I do say that if such methods
of protecting Buddhist converts were to
obtain among us it would provoke an upris-
ing, which we for our part would maintain
to be abundantly justified by the conditions
which had provoked it.
It is not necessary for me, I hope, to add
that there is undoubtedly a great deal of
missionary work in China which is not
open, on account of the adroitness or usur-
pations of its methods, to any criticism
whatsoever. But even such work, because
it is the work of foreigners, must reckon
with that inveterate hostility to foreigners
of which no one who has not seen it close
at hand can have any adequate conception.
That the Chinese should hate Americans,
who, having shut the American door inex-
orably in their faces, have now turned
around to force open the Chinese doors,
ought not to be to us a matter of surprise.
That that hatred extends, and for reasons
that they do not disguise, to all foreigners,
no one who reads the following extract
from the " North China Daily News,"
which I encountered in Shanghai in No-
vember last, can doubt.
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 37
(Translated from a leading native paper.)
THE INSATIABLE GREED OF WESTERN NATIONS.
LET CHINA BEWARE !
FOREIGNERS have for many years united them-
selves, and have been laying their plans with
regard to China. Originally they availed them-
selves of the plea of the mutual advantages aris-
ing out of commerce to induce China to open
treaty ports at which they could trade. Next,
under pretexts of various losses, in order to en-
rich themselves, they compelled China to pay
certain indemnities. To-day they are mooting
the questions of railways and mines, and using
them as a pretext to get our country from us.
Their purpose is, trusting in their strength, to
partition out and divide among themselves our
country. Like chess-players, who place their
pieces preparatory to attacking and vanquish-
ing the enemy, they have arranged their forces;
like fishermen, who first of all silently throw
the net into the water and then gather out the
fish, they are preparing to catch China. They
believe they have, and perhaps do possess, the
ability to divide China like a watermelon. They
have already seized and they hold the most im-
portant positions, with a view to this end. First
by insinuating that mutual gain would result
therefrom, they have arranged treaties with us,
which was obviously the beginning of our calam-
ities.
38 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW
In the present dispute between Russia and
England, ruin for China lurks. In reality it is
only a quarrel about the partition of China. In-
deed, the surrounding circumstances are con-
verging to this partition. Foreigners are ever
scheming for this. Their discussions tend to the
same results. The signs of this impending ca-
lamity, moreover, are all too apparent within
our own borders. But the opportunity to parti-
tion and snatch from us our country will be
made by outsiders. If, then, China is to regain
her original power, she must arouse herself and
mend her ways. If she exerts herself to her full
ability, she will then be able to foil the strate-
gies of her enemies ; if she will but exert herself
to any extent, she can ward off, for a time at
least, the actual partition. Then the violence
with which foreigners insult us, although it ap-
pears to be all-powerful, will turn out not to be
so, and our distress will really be no distress at
all. But alas! there is a fatal tranquillity that
arises from a condition of coma, a darkness aris-
ing out of a state of crass ignorance, so that,
though dangers like falling mountains threaten
us, many seem unable to observe the impending
ruin. True, there are earnest scholars of the
empire, but they only smite the breast and weep
tears of blood more bitterly, indeed, than in the
days of the Tribulation of Ki. Let our reader
then clearly understand that the attitude of all
foreigners toward China is guided by one prin-
ciple; they unite their energies and combine
their forces in order to gratify their one ambi-
CHINESE TRAITS AND WESTERN BLUNDERS 39
tion, which is to partition and rob us of our
country.
Such has been the cry with which, of late,
China, north and south, has rung. We have
seen and are seeing some of the bloody
fruits of this inflamed national hatred.
May a large wisdom and a temper other
than that of mere revenge deal with the
Chinese question as the essential equities
involved in it demand. We are told that
the destiny of China is to be partitioned up
among the great powers. There could not
be a more stupid or shameless policy. A
nation, like a man, has a right to be until
she has demonstrated unmistakably her in-
competence to administer her own affairs
with equal justice to all. It cannot be
maintained that China has so far descended
the path of national decay and disintegra-
tion. She is stained with a long record of
dishonored and discredited officials, cor-
rupt, mercenary, and unscrupulous. Alas !
is the record of other people unstained in
this regard? She has been guilty of the
gravest crimes against international rights
and comities. Let her be punished for
them as she deserves. But let not the mad
acts of ignorant and inflamed revolution-
ists be made the pretext for pulling down
40 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
a venerable and historic civilization, whose
younger and worthier sons are just now
turning toward the light. Hands off, gen-
tlemen, kings, emperors, and presidents,
until a people, stirred at length by the
vision of nobler ideals, shall show us what
they can do for their own regeneration.
II
THE PROBLEM OF THE
PHILIPPINES
II
THE PROBLEM OF THE
PHILIPPINES
IN Le Sage's "Bachelor of Salamanca"
th^re is recounted a series of stirring
incidents which issue in the arrival of the
hero, Don Cherubin de la Ronda, in Mexico,
in which, for a time, he leads a vagrant life,
and in which, for a still longer time, he
holds an official position of considera-
ble importance. The book is interesting,
though characteristically coarse reading,
and as throwing a very helpful side-light
upon not only usages, but standards, cere-
monious, commercial, or moral, of the Span-
ish rule in Mexico, it is of enduring value.
For nothing can be plainer to one read-
ing the volume than that, to use a modern
vulgarism, the Spaniards were not in Mex-
ico, or in any other colony, "for their
health." The ordinary term of office of a
governor was five years, and, however poor
a man came to the colony, he was expected
to leave it a man of independent fortune.
43
44 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW
When Don Cherubin de la Ronda's friend
and patron, the Count de Gelves, retires
from the viceroyalty of New Spain, the
former relates that "finally we set out from
Mexico, and it may be said that on the day
of our departure we presented a spectacle
to the Americans which gave ample scope
for their curses. The wags, at seeing two
hundred mules loaded with bales, mostly of
silver, made themselves a little merry at
our expense, and we repaired with^ their
money to Vera Cruz" which goes af good
way to explain the long-suffering patience
of the natives under Spanish rule.
And no estimate of the Philippine, any
more than of the original Mexican situa-
tion, or of the people with whom chiefly
the former is concerned, can be even mod-
erately intelligent which leaves this feature
out. Spain found the islands as the fruit
of that fine spirit of adventure which will
forever preserve her name illustrious.
Columbus was not a greater hero nor a
more daring explorer in his way than was
Magellan in his. But neither Magellan nor
the men who followed him, as indeed such
an incident in their history unmistakably
reveals, rose above the spirit of their times.
That the aims of the Spanish-American
and Spanish-Pacific ventures were not
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 45
those of colonization so much as of mere
conquest is plain enough. True, the church
went in the ships with the soldiers, and the
priest and his paraphernalia were often
landed first of all. But, without impugning
the spirit or the purposes of the reverend
clergy of that day, it is enough to say that,
having startled the simple savages among
whom they landed with their unfamiliar
ceremonies, they seem to have done little
or nothing to teach or to protect them.
When Manila was occupied by the Span-
iards the historian tells us that they first of
all established a system of taxes to be im-
posed upon the natives, and later built hos-
pitals for their own soldiers, penitentiaries
for the punishment of the recalcitrant, and
war-ships to enforce their decrees. Of
schools and the development of industries
we hear nothing, nor, indeed, do the Span-
iards seem to have contemplated the latter
as practicable among the untutored sav-
ages. And yet, later experience has dem-
onstrated that in handicrafts, the mechanic
arts, and kindred industrial pursuits the
native Filipino has exhibited unusual apti-
tude. The factory-hand of to-day, in such
cotton-mills as I visited, is usually a lad or
a girl under seventeen or eighteen years of
age. Yet I was assured by their Scotch
46 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW
overseer that they learned their somewhat
delicate and intricate tasks, which involved
the manipulation of machinery easily dis-
arranged or misdirected, in about half the
time that a European boy or girl would
acquire the same knowledge.
But of development along lines that, to
our American thinking, are those which
alone are legitimate in the work of coloniza-
tion, it is plain that the Spanish conquerors
had no conception, or, if they had, regarded
it with not the slightest interest. The pages
of Philippine history, from the year (1521)
when Magellan landed on the north coast of
Mindanao, in the southern Philippines,
down to our own time, have, indeed, little
else to record than successive struggles for
a group of islands which the most cursory
inspection proved to be rich in natural re-
sources, and for the possession of which,
before a great while, Chinese, Dutch, and
English in turn vigorously and more or less
successfully contended. It would be in-
teresting to speculate upon what would
have been the history of the islands if the
British fleet which, under Admiral Cornish,
on September 22, 1762, arrived before Ma-
nila had maintained the hold which the land
forces under General Draper, a little later,
established there, and which was only re-
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 47
laxed when, after the ratification of the
treaty of Paris in February, 1763, Manila
was evacuated.
It is undoubtedly probable that, had Brit-
ish control of the islands been maintained,
their history would have been more pros-
perous and peaceful than it subsequently
proved to be. Whatever we may deny to
her, England has the genius of coloniza-
tion. And yet, if, in 1762, she had retained
possession of the Philippines, it is by no
means certain that she would have ruled
them more easily than did Spain. Britain's
more signal triumph as a colonizer has been
in India, and in India she has the difficult
task of dealing with different tribes, rulers,
and tongues. But the local divergences in
these respects can in no degree be compared
with what Spain found in the Philippines,
nor can the original conditions be consid-
ered at all similar. India had a civilization,
however we may disesteem much that dis-
tinguished it. It had a religion which, how-
ever much of it was clouded by supersti-
tion, was still the parent and propagator of
great ideas. But the civilization of the na-
tive tribes of the Philippines was utterly
unworthy of any such name, and their re-
ligious ideas were at once pagan and pue-
rile. Mr. Foreman, to whose admirable
48 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
work 1 I shall have occasion more than once
to refer, relates that in the year 1881 he
had occasion to visit a village in Upper
Pampanga which the Spanish authorities
had established as a kind of model for the
elevation and instruction of the Negritos.
They were housed in bamboo and palm-leaf
huts of excellent sanitary construction, and
supplied with food and clothing for a year,
with instruction in tilling the soil and other
industries. But at the end of a year or two
they had fled to the mountains, and no per-
suasion could bring them back to anything
that separated them from the low animal-
ism and the nomadic habits which were
their ancestral inheritance. Now, this, it
must be borne in mind, was after Spain had
been in possession of the Philippines for
more than three hundred years.
It is quite true, of course, that this has
not been the history of Spanish colonization
in all the islands or in connection with all
the tribes. I shall never forget the pro-
found impression which was made upon me
when I entered the harbor of Manila. The
spectacle of solid and stately structures,
forts, arsenals, municipal halls, churches,
viceregal palaces, and the rest, was worthy
of any port of Spain, distinctly recalling,
l " The Philippine Islands," by John Foreman, F.R.O.S.
THE PEOBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 49
indeed, impressions which I had received
when entering the harbors of Cartagena,
Malaga, and Barcelona. And when one
goes to and fro in Luzon, and to a greater
or less degree in others of the Philippine
Islands, he sees manifold material evi-
dences of commercial, municipal, civic, and
ecclesiastical activity. The question at
once arises, Why has it accomplished so
little, and why, on the whole, is the type of
civilization which one finds in the Philip-
pines so low and in some instances so ex-
ceptionally debased? These are questions
which the nation which has assumed the
burden of governing these islands has need
to ask and to press until it shall have an
answer. In that answer, if it is soluble at
all, we shall find the solution of the Philip-
pine problem.
It is partially answered as soon as we
have intelligently recognized the elements
that went to make up the Spanish civiliza-
tion. Whatever Spain might have hoped to
do or to be to the Philippines, she could
not have expected to create among them a
social order or to introduce and establish
moral standards that were higher than her
own. Those that she did introduce were
translated to the people whose soil she in-
vaded and whose tribes she undertook to
60 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW
rule by four powerful agencies : the army,
the civil ruler, the church, and commerce.
In speaking of them I shall content myself
mainly with the testimony of her own wit-
nesses.
And, first, the army. Substantially the
first knowledge that the Filipino had of the
Spaniard was as a soldier. The men who
came in ships and who first landed on his
shores came as the servants of those who
sailed in them as the conquering hosts of
Spain, and when, as at Cebu, these con-
querors first landed, they disclosed the pur-
pose for which they had come by seizing
and sacking the first town that they entered.
The natives were declared Spanish sub-
jects, their king was dethroned, and the
grandson of the Spanish leader, the daring
Legaspi, was despatched to take possession
of Luzon. The Spanish historian has ob-
scured this latter transaction by chronicles
that are curiously contradictory, but he may
believe who can that the native rulers of
Luzon surrendered their territory, their in-
dependence, and their tribute to invading
foreigners who used no other weapons than
persuasive speech. From the beginning,
though the records were written by Spanish
hands, the pages of Philippine history are
stained with blood, chiefly the blood of in-
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 51
nocent and guileless savages, entrapped,
terrified, robbed, and ravished by civilized
and nominally Christian soldiers. It is not
altogether surprising that their descen-
dants do not welcome the advent of the
Christian soldier to-day.
Naturally enough, conquest was followed,
for a time at any rate, by a rule that was
largely military. As the colony was di-
vided and subdivided into provinces and
military districts, the chief authority was
usually a military officer who gladly re-
signed his rank for an office which, while
it ordinarily had attached to it a stipend
of but three hundred dollars, afforded in-
definite opportunities for personal emolu-
ment. In his ' ' Noticias de Filipinos, ' ' Don
Eusebio Mazorca, in an unedited manu-
script, 1 dated 1840, in the archives of the
Bauan Convent, Province of Batangas,
states that "there are candidates up to the
grade of Brigadier who relinquish a $3000
salary to pursue their hopes and projects
in [provincial] Governorship," and of the
qualifications for these positions T. Comin,
in 1810, wrote: "In order to be a Chief of
a Province in these Islands, no training or
knowledge or special services are neces-
sary. . . . It is quite a common thing
1 Foreman's " The Philippine Islands," p. 230.
52 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW
to see a barber or a Governor's lackey, a
sailor or a deserter, suddenly transformed
into an Alcalde, Administrator, and Cap-
tain of the forces of a populous province
without any counsellor but his rude un-
derstanding, or any guide but his passions
'sin otro consejero que su rudo entendi-
miento, ni mas guia que sus pasiones.' m
Comin was subsequently Spanish consul-
general at Lisbon.
With absolute power, with a native in-
capacity even to conceive of an equitable
exercise of authority, ignorant, self-willed,
and wholly irresponsible, it can easily be
imagined that this military rule did little to
win or elevate the people whom it pre-
tended to govern. Our own American
theory, still widely prevalent more shame
on us! in certain parts of our own land,
that "a negro has no rights that a white
man is bound to respect/' was apparently
the highest view of his duty that the ordi-
nary Spanish military officer was capable
of conceiving. To amuse and indulge him-
self at whatever cost to the community over
whom he was placed, and then to wring
from the conquered province the last peseta
that could be squeezed from the peasant
whom he terrorized, this was the founda-
1 Foreman's " The Philippine Islands," p. 231.
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 53
tion for civil rule in the Philippines which
was laid by that military rule which pre-
ceded it.
It is not greatly surprising, therefore,
that when the civil ruler took over the tasks
of the military governor the situation was
not greatly improved. He was the creation
of the Spanish government at Madrid, and
that conception of the object of his appoint-
ment which I have indicated at the begin-
ning of these pages was undoubtedly a
leading, if not the principal, motive. The
appointments to places of trust and respon-
sibility, such as were those of military gov-
ernors, alcaldes, or other prominent magis-
trates, were in the gift of the Spanish
cabinet, and when a cabinet officer went out,
his favorites went out with him. The sys-
tem, in a word, was our own, save as the lat-
ter is feebly and intermittently qualified by
civil-service regulations ; and the uses which
a government officer made of his place, if
more glaring and unblushing, especially,
for example, in cities, than those which we
are familiar with at home, were of substan-
tially the same character. The authority
that I have already quoted, Don Eusebio
Mazorca, 1 describing the official processes
in this connection, says: "The Governor
1 Foreman's " The Philippine Islands," p. 242.
54 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW
receives payment of the tribute in rice
paddy, which he credits to the native at two
reals in silver per caban. Then he pays this
sum into the Eoyal Treasury in money, and
sells the rice paddy for private account at
the current rate of six, eight, or more reals
in silver per caban, and this simple opera-
tion brings him 200 to 300 per cent, profit. ' '
One is not surprised to hear that officials on
retiring from office took with them, when
they returned to Spain, large sums, three or
four times exceeding their total official
emoluments.
Under such a system of civic corruption
at the top, it inevitably followed that the
rottenness reached all the way down. One
is irresistibly reminded of our police sys-
tems in cities, with their political ' ' bosses, ' '
by an experience of the author I have al-
ready quoted. In 1885 he bought a small
estate which had been leased to a tenant
whom the purchaser found at the moment
in the Manila jail for a violent assault.
Three months later the man was at large,
and he was soon after appointed governor
of his own village.
It is not to be supposed, however, that
such a state of things existed without the
mechanisms and processes of the law by
which it ought to have been restrained or
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 55
corrected. The difficulty was that the
courts and the usual legal processes and
personages were as corruptible as the
higher officials. "I knew," says Foreman, 1
"a man in Negros Island a planter who
was charged with homicide. The judge of
his Province acquitted him, but fearing that
he might be again arrested on the same
charge, he came up to Manila with me to
procure a ratification of the sentence in the
Supreme Court. The expenses of the legal
proceedings were so enormous, that at
length he was compelled to fully mortgage
his plantation. Weeks passed, and he had
spent all his money without getting justice,
so I lent his notary 40Z. to assist in bringing
the case to an end. The planter returned to
Negros apparently satisfied that he should
be no further troubled, but later on, the
newly appointed judge in that island, whilst
prospecting for fees by turning up old
cases, unfortunately came across this, and
my planter acquaintance was sentenced to
eight years' imprisonment." The narrator
of this incident naively informs us that
' ' the family lawyer, proceeding on the same
lines, had still a hope of finding defects in
the sentence to reverse it in favour of his
client." How could it be otherwise when,
i "The Philippine Islands," p. 268.
56 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
a little earlier, we are informed that if a
case had been tried and judgment given
under the civil code a way was often found
to convert it into a criminal case ; and when
apparently settled under the criminal code,
a flaw could be discovered under the Laws
of the Indies, or the Siete Partidas, or the
Koman law, or the Novisima Recopilacion,
or the Antiguos fueros, decrees, royal or-
ders, Ordenanzas de buen Gobierno, or
some others by which the case could be re-
opened? Such a state of things throws an
interesting side-light upon the charming
innocence of those American commission-
ers who, in the recent treaty of Paris, vir-
tually reenacted the above Philippine sys-
tem of civil and ecclesiastical law. One is
tempted to say that the prayer from the
bench, "May God have mercy on your
soul ! ' ' might not only fitly follow a criminal
trial, but precede a civil one.
Any description of the Philippine situa-
tion would, however, be gravely incomplete
which omitted that other element in it which
was neither military nor civil, but ecclesi-
astical. We ought not to fail to recognize,
in reviewing it, those earlier motives of
missionary zeal which found undoubtedly a
welcome sphere in all the splendid range of
Spanish conquests. The heathen peoples to
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 67
whom the conquerors came were in pagan
darkness, and a Christian and Catholic
monarch owned the obligation to impart to
them the religion which was identified with
the history of his people and the founda-
tions of his throne. That the methods
which were employed to this end were not
always or often those which to-day would
receive the unqualified sanction of the de-
scendants of those who invoked them is only
to say that the ideas of Christian expansion,
whether Latin, Greek, or of the Reformed
communions, were not those which intelli-
gent people of any Christian fellowship
would to-day approve. A religion of exter-
nalism and a propaganda of force went
hand in hand ; and that their fruits were not
manifest in regenerated characters or in a
pure and righteous social order was simply
because no seed was sown which could have
produced such fruits. But the gravest as-
pects of the ecclesiastical history of the
Philippines appear when we turn to look,
in the pages of their own historians, for the
influence, whether of institutions or of in-
dividuals, in bringing to pagan tribes no-
bler ideals and a doctrine or practice re-
sembling even in some remote degrees those
of the brotherhood of Jesus Christ. For
this it ought distinctly to be said that at
68 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW
first the church was only indirectly respon-
sible. The civil and military authorities
soon discovered that in the Philippine Isl-
anders they had a people extremely sen-
sible to external impressions, ignorant,
credulous, and superstitious. From the
awe with which they witnessed rites and
ceremonies unfamiliar, but dramatically
impressive, they passed readily and swiftly
to awe and fear of those who performed
them, and the civil ruler found himself in-
voking ecclesiastical terrors because often
no others proved to be so effective. Out
of this it not unnaturally grew that the ec-
clesiastic came, in time, to unite both sacred
and secular functions, the church has too
readily in every age assumed them both,
and the prelate and the priest became,
sooner or later, the magistrate and the
judge. In such capacities the village pas-
tor took on ultimately the character of a
government agent, and, as such, it was
within his discretion arbitrarily to grant or
to refuse his official signature to documents
which without it had no value. Or he
could, as a guardian of the public safety,
denounce to the authorities as a dangerous
person one whose presence in the district
was inconvenient to himself, and presently,
by order of the governor of the province,
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 59
the obnoxious person disappeared es-
corted to prison or banished to a distant
island.
That these things and others like them
were largely due to the malign influence of
the so-called religious orders Heaven save
the mark! has repeatedly and very re-
cently been denied with a coarseness and
vulgarity of vituperation to which I need
not here further refer than to say that to
minds capable of forming a dispassionate
opinion upon any subject it was sufficient
evidence of their truth. Other evidence,
however, there is in the history of the Phil-
ippines, abundant, continuous, and of indis-
putable authority, most of all to those who
have ventured to challenge it. The Jesuits
were expelled from the Philippine Islands
in the year 1768 by virtue of an apostolic
brief of Pope Clement XIV. 1 It is quite
true that they were permitted to return in
1852, but only on condition that they should
confine their labors to strictly educational
and missionary work. And these were un-
doubtedly the least obnoxious of the orders,
the others the Austin Friars, Recoletos,
Dominicans, and Franciscans being iden-
tified with incidents in the social and do-
royal decree setting forth the execution of this
brief was printed in Madrid in 1770 (Foreman).
60 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
mestic life of the Philippine people, the cor-
ruption of their households, and the adroit
sequestration and appropriation of their
property, which will continue to make any
attempt by the government of the United
States to avoid or evade the question of
the friars an utterly vain and futile one.
On the relations of these orders to one an-
other an amusing side-light is thrown by an
incident in the history of the Dominicans,
by whom, in 1778, the province of Panga-
sinan was spiritually administered, while
that of Zambales was allotted to the Reco-
letos. The Dominicans therefore proposed
to the Recoletos to cede Zambales to them,
* ' because it was repugnant to them to have
to pass through Recoletos territory in going
from Manila to their own province." The
1 ( Recopilacion de las Leyes de Indies"
shows that it at length became necessary to
forbid these amiable brethren to have any
part in civil government. 1
I have thus rehearsed the influences
which had so much to do with creating the
situation which existed when the fleet of
Admiral Dewey found its way into Manila
Bay, because only so can one get an intelli-
gent view of a problem which has in it un-
usual elements of delicacy and difficulty.
J Ley 46, tit. 14 (Foreman).
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 61
Those who accept unreservedly a policy of
colonial expansion, concerning which I have
myself seen nothing in our recent history
to change opinions formed long ago, are
fond of pointing to the achievements of
Anglo-Saxon colonization in other lands,
and of asking why we may not match them.
If there were no other answer to that ques-
tion it might be found in that quite excep-
tional unlikeness in the Philippine situation
to situations, such as that in India, where
the colonizing power has had to deal with a
people that, whatever its tribal differences,
is largely homogeneous. But an especial
difficulty in the Philippine situation, which
includes tribal differences running all the
way, as in the case of the Negritos, from the
extreme of barbarism to conditions, as with
many of the Tagalos, of semi-civilization,
is that you have those most perplexing com-
plications which arise out of the superim-
position upon the native tribes of a civiliza-
tion partly Japanese, 1 partly Chinese, and
overpoweringly Spanish, whose influence,
whatever it may have been for good, must
be owned by an impartial student to have
1 It is not generally known, perhaps, that so late as 1896
the Katipunan, a secret patriotic society of the Filipinos
(persistently misrepresented as a masonic order), sent a
deputation to Japan to present a petition to the Mikado
praying him to annex the Philippines.
62 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
been never such as to create in the native
mind a faith in the government as the
friend of liberty and equity, or an affection
or respect for rulers as the dispensers of
justice or the exemplars of blameless living
or honest dealing. In a word, there has
been nothing in the past history of the Fili-
pino to educate him to value or to imitate
liigh ideals of official authority or civic,
social, or domestic self-restraint.
It is not surprising that these peoples
should have been impatient under a condi-
tion of things in which law and religion
and their official representatives stood for
so little that boded anything but evil to
them. The revolutionary movement repre-
sented by Aguinaldo and those associated
with him was therefore to have been antici-
pated, and had had, indeed, its repeated
forerunners. The practical question was,
and is, What did it amount to, what was its
worth? There is no question in connection
with the Philippine problem more impor-
tant than this, nor any concerning which
the effort to create an erroneous impression
has been more strenuous or more persistent.
The comparisons between our own strug-
gle for independence and that of the young
guerrilla warrior have been frequent and
eloquent. Their only defect is that the
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 63
facts which warranted any such comparison
were so largely wanting. I say nothing
here of the just doubts which any one ac-
quainted with the history of the Filipino
leader must needs entertain, whether as
to the integrity of his record or the honesty
of his purpose. I maintain that it is simply,
an intolerable impertinence to compare
him or those who are about him with the
men who were the leaders in our struggle
for freedom and who laid the foundations
of the republic. The warrant for a struggle
for freedom must be found in something
more than the mere passion to be free from
an irksome yoke, or else any desire to break
out of wonted restraints and the chafing
limitations of hated social order becomes
straightway a sacred aspiration with which
we are bound to sympathize, and in which
we are bound to cooperate. I venture to
speak with some warmth on this subject,
because my knowledge, through correspon-
dence and personal interviews with those
who have stood, not only in the Philippine
Islands, but in America, Japan, and China,
as the representatives and spokesmen of
the revolutionary movement there, has ex-
tended over nearly three years and has in-
cluded a considerable variety of individ-
uals; and I am constrained to say that
64 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
it has only deepened my conviction that,
whatever elements of equity there may be
in the Philippine struggle for freedom, the
leaders have not yet appeared who could
be seriously considered as competent to lead
or organize it.
Under these circumstances the duty of
the government of the United States does
not seem to be obscure. Through the blun-
der of the naval commander who, after
his splendid achievement in destroying a
Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila, failed
to see that his task there was at an end,
we have assumed another and a much more
difficult one. We have had no training for
its discharge; we have a very inferior
mechanism for its accomplishment ; and we
are cursed with political traditions which
make it doubly difficult to perform it suc-
cessfully. But at this writing there is no
honorable way out. To throw up our task
now would be a cruelty to those whom we
abandon, and a confession of our impotence
which would disgrace us before the world.
The element of time in the whole melan-
choly business is that which has trans-
formed essentially its aspect. We must go
on now, whether or no we find the task more
expensive in men and means, and less
profitable commercially, than originally we
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 65
expected. Noblesse oblige. A great nation
cannot abandon a weaker people which it
has, before all men, adopted as its ward
without confessing that, great as it claims
to be, it has nothing to impart, nothing to
sacrifice, in order to give freedom and good
government to those who have not forfeited
all claim to such gifts because they have
looked for them in the wrong direction.
I would not minimize the difficulties or
the costliness of the task. I have elsewhere
than in these pages l recognized our consid-
erable inadequacy for it. But that inade-
quacy consists rather in our instruments
than in the absence of those informing prin-
ciples which must forever determine the
value of any instruments, and which are.
forever at the foundation of all good gov-
ernment. The greatest glory, as a history
of administration, of our Civil War was
that after we had blundered, and had bred
swindling contractors and shoddy manufac-
turers and smuggling, and incompetent
generals, then, like some great creature
breasting the waves, we shook ourselves
free from them, and rose above them, and
did the tasks, and fed and moved the
armies, and fought our battles, better and
1 See an address before the Church Congress,
6 October, 1899.
66 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW
better. And, best of all, we searched for
and found the men, and lifted them from
their obscurity, Lincoln, Stanton, Grant,
and their peers and successors, who did
the thinking and planned the marching,
and fed and moved the armies that won
through to victory. I am not one of those
who believe that the people of the United
States have lost the capacity to repeat such
achievements. There are many who will
never cease to regret our original blunder
in the Philippine Islands. But they are not
so despairing of their country as to believe
that she is so far gone from original right-
eousness that she has in her no virtue left
with which to educate those distant islands
for freedom; and meanwhile it is just as
well to remember that her rulers have never
intimated that this government has any
other purpose in regard to them.
But we shall gravely blunder if we mini-
mize or evade any one of the difficult tasks
which are before us. There are influences
that will tempt the leaders of political par-
ties to do this, which it would be the crud-
est folly to ignore. If we are ever to win
the confidence and mold the characters of
these island peoples we must recognize the
injustices from which too long they have
suffered, and set about to right them. We
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 67
must not with one hand proffer them free-
dom freedom of thought, freedom of
speech, freedom of worship and take it
back with the other. And we must there-
fore courageously face such questions as,
for example, What has the government of
the United States to say to a pronuncia-
mento like this!
"You must reject and condemn the ma-
sonic sect, so frequently rejected and con-
demned by the supreme pontiffs.
"You must also reject and condemn lib-
erty of worship, liberty of the press, liberty
of thought, and the other liberties of perdi-
tion, condemned and rejected by the pon-
tiff.
"You must also reject and condemn lib-
eralism and also modern progress and civ-
ilization, as being false progress and false
civilization.
"You must utterly abominate civil mar-
riage and regard it as pure concubinage.
"You must also condemn and reject the
interference of the civil authorities in any
ecclesiastical affairs, so much in vogue
nowadays. ' '
I take these instructions from a lately
published pamphlet in Manila. This pam-
phlet was issued without duly expressed
church authority, until the organ of the
68 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
Roman Catholic Church in Manila, a Span-
ish newspaper called the "Liberastus,"
admitted the fact that the Jesuits had pub-
lished it. 1
There is not the slightest occasion to in-
voke theological or ecclesiastical rancors in
connection with questions raised by such a
publication as this. But it should also be
said that there is as little for being deterred
by any fulminations of that sort of thunder,
now happily reduced to the dimensions and
substance of the sheet-tin rattled for a simi-
lar purpose behind the scenic stage, from
considering calmly and dispassionately
what it bodes to the rights and liberties of
those whom it seeks to terrorize, or to the
free institutions which it will be our sacred
duty as well as our privilege to plant among
them. Our tasks, at the best, in the Philip-
pines are not easy ones. It will be neces-
sary, at the outset, to have it definitely un-
derstood that they are not to be obstructed
by influences and societies of whose enor-
mous power for mischief and corruptness
the history of the Philippine Islands is the
melancholy and tragic record.
As to what American rule has already
achieved in our new possessions, I am glad
to affirm here what correspondence extend-
1 New York "Evening Post," May 16, 1900.
THE PROBLEM OF THE PHILIPPINES 69
ing over two years, the testimony of respon-
sible and impartial witnesses of all classes,
and personal observation have led me to be-
lieve in regard to our army and our civil
servants in the Philippine Islands. That
there have been no unworthy or ill-con-
ducted individuals among them would be
to demand that the standard of conduct, for
example, in Manila should be higher than
it is in Washington or Boston. I do not be-
lieve that it is, but I do believe that it is
quite as high. The soldiers do not love
their work in the Philippines, I should not,
if I had to do it, but they do it, as I more
than once saw, so as to earn the evident con-
fidence of the communities among which
they are stationed, and to give proof to
these of the spirit and purpose of our pres-
ence in the Philippines. Time alone can
demonstrate how far we may be able to per-
suade a fickle, restless, impulsive, unreason-
ing people, embittered by many wrongs
received at the hands of those we have ex-
pelled, or ought to expel, to trust us, to
learn from us, and under our patient tute-
lage to grow into the stature of competent
citizens in a self-governing state.
m
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN
Ill
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN
MY traveling companion in Japan was a
gentleman of various culture and of
artistic tastes. These latter found in Japa-
nese architecture and decorative drawing
certain resemblances to American art and
the recent work of well-known American
artists which, to my cruder intelligence and
more imperfect culture, were not discerni-
ble, and which led him to active investiga-
tions for the confirmation of his theories.
They took us, one morning, into a curio-
dealer's establishment, and soon immersed
my friend in a huge pile of portfolios, the
contents of which I was soon constrained
to confess were to me neither interesting
nor even intelligible. Under these circum-
stances, taking advantage of my compan-
ion's absorption in a hideous drawing of
a Japanese interior, which to my ignorant
scrutiny violated every law of perspective
and every principle of the harmony of col-
73
74 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
ors, I quietly slipped out of the shop, and
after a few steps found myself in one of
the greater highways through which to-day
throbs the various life of the capital of
modern Japan. There was local color
enough there, though a good deal of it was
not Japanese ; and presently I found myself
before a shop-window not unlike such a one
as might be found in our own New York
Third or Eighth Avenue the window of a
place primarily for the sale of newspapers
and periodicals, but incidentally for almost
anything and everything else. Here, con-
spicuously displayed among other prints
and pictures, was suspended a huge broad-
side, such as comes sometimes with the
London "Graphic" or "Illustrated News,"
representing the assembled sovereigns and
rulers of the world. Their grouping had in
it a large suggestion, and furnished to the
student of political history a very useful
lesson. In the center of this august group
was seated the Emperor of Japan, and
gathered about him in respectful attitudes
were kings and queens and presidents,
among whom was our own chief magistrate,
placed in what apparently, according to
Japanese art, was a position of appropriate
obscurity on the extreme left of the em-
peror, while standing behind the imperial
IMPEESSIONS OF JAPAN 75
chair in which the Mikado was seated (this
struck me, I confess, as curiously contra-
vening the Japanese traditions of good
manners) was the late venerable and ven-
erated Queen of Great Britain and Ireland
and Empress of India, whose years and un-
exampled reign, if not her sex, would seem
to have entitled her to one of the chairs in
which, as I observed, the young German
Emperor and our own President were rep-
resented as lounging.
But the chief value of the picture lay in
the help which it gave to the traveler in
recovering his political perspective. If a
modern publisher should make a lithograph
of the rulers of the world for American
consumption, I presume he would put our
own President in the center, just as in the
Transvaal a Boer publisher getting out any-
thing of the sort would have put Oom Paul
there. The thing, in other words, for the
traveler to learn from such an incident is
that Japan only like the rest of the world,
after all, in that takes itself quite seri-
ously. We Americans, on the contrary, do
not, as a rule, take Japan at all seriously.
The thing that irritated me in my country-
men, and quite as often in other foreigners,
wherever I met them in Japan, and often,
too, in what I read in the books about Ja-
76 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKEOW
pan, was that so many people thought it
necessary to take everything that they saw
or heard there as a part of a huge opera
bouffe. It was my good fortune when in
Tokio, through the courtesy of Colonel
Buck, our most able and capable minister
plenipotentiary to Japan, to have the rare
privilege of witnessing the opening of the
Japanese Parliament by the emperor in
propria persona. My companion and I
were, with the exception of the diplomatic
corps, the only foreigners present; and I
confess I thought the occasion one of most
impressive dignity and interest, albeit 'the
costumes both of the nobles and of the mem-
bers of the House of Commons were Euro-
pean instead of those of the charming out-
lines and coloring usually worn by persons
of distinction in Japan. Speaking, how-
ever, of the occasion to a member of a for-
eign legation, a little later, his only obser-
vation was, "Did you ever see such a droll
collection of old hats I " I could not refrain
from replying that, if the hats were old, the
ideas inside of them, as their wearers
swarmed in to their places, were both new
and already fermenting; and I should be
tempted to say that the man or nation that
does not take Japan seridusly is on the way
to a considerable surprise.
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 77
And yet the elements of lightness and
gaiety, along with self-complacency, if not
large conceit, of which I have spoken, are
undoubtedly distinctive of Japanese char-
acter. As to the former, that note of vi-
vacity, cheerfulness, and even playfulness
which the foreigner so often remarks, its
tokens perpetually recur. The conditions
of life in Japan, for the great majority of
its forty millions of people, are inevitably
narrow and hard. It has not been, until
lately, a nation of various resources or of
commercial productiveness. The great ma-
jority of its people must subsist directly
upon the soil, and from this they get little
more than the simplest food and the scanti-
est raiment. And yet the stranger in going
to and fro among them is struck with their
smiling faces and the merry laughter that
he so often hears, amid surroundings and in
connection' with tasks and burdens which,
it would seem, would press all joy out of
life. Added to this, there is a disposition
to adorn the simplest things and to enrich
the homeliest duties with a certain quaint
prettiness which gives to them an almost
attractive aspect. It is said that the art
of making and pouring out tea, in the life
of a young Japanese girl, is encompassed
with so much variety and even intricacy
78 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW
of ceremony that it takes two years prop-
erly to acquire and practise it.
Such a fact is somehow symbolic of much
more. The humblest tasks have in the
doing of them a rhythmic usage, and the
relation of this to certain kinds of work
most remote, one would say, to anything
like artistic form was shown in a very curi-
ous way by a controversy which was going
on in certain Japanese newspapers while I
was in Japan. A correspondent had written
to one of them to complain of the condition
of the railway between Yokohama and To-
kio, and was answered by some one who
wrote in demurrer of his criticisms, evi-
dently under official inspiration. Mean-
time, however, a foreigner had taken a
hand in the discussion, and touched, as it
would seem, the nerve of the whole busi-
ness. He had observed, he said, the Japa-
nese track-layers at work, and had watched
their methods when they were repairing the
road-bed of the railway in question. The
roughness of the road, with the consequent
jumping or jolting (5f the railway-carriages,
was owing, as he pointed out, to the ine-
qualities of the road-bed, and to the loosen-
ing of the ties or timbers which rested upon
it. This, he explained, could be remedied
only by redistributing the earth upon which
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 79
the ties rested, and, above all, by careful
and intelligent repacking of the soil and
stones beneath and around the ties; and
then he added that when Japanese work-
men undertook this task they worked in
groups of three or four, all of whom used
their picks in unison and struck their blows
in obedience to the sound of some rhythmic
measure. But such a method, as he showed
plainly enough, was wholly unsuited to such
an end. The loosening, gathering, dislodg-
ing, replacing, and repacking of stones and
soil under a railway-tie could not be done
otherwise than as it was done by the indi-
vidual workman using his tool and direct-
ing his work quite independently of any
other tool or hand, just as from moment to
moment the situation revealed itself and the
exigency demanded. There must be the
intelligent observation first, and then the
independent action of the independent and
individual mind and hand. Undoubtedly
one saw in the Japanese method, in this
particular case, the survival, and the appli-
cation under conditions to which they were
utterly inappropriate, of those older meth-
ods of labor in which the laborer worked
as a machine, chained together with other
laborers in a group or gang, in which no
man thought for himself, but in which each
80 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW
man repeated mechanically the movement
and gesture of his neighbor, softening it, as
so often one hears among Oriental peoples,
with some monotonous but rhythmical
chant, which was droned or sung as uncon-
sciously as all the rest. At such a point the
mind inevitably reached out to recognize
the difference between such work, with all
its inevitable defects and limitations, and
that other freer labor where the worker
wrought by himself, thought for himself,
and aimed the blow, not as any fixed and
formally recurring rhythm demanded, but
as the free judgment and the free hand en-
joined and directed.
Yet one could not but see, now and then,
how effective in its way was the older
usage ; and behind it there shone often the
tokens of an exceptional power. If I were
asked to say, of all that I saw in Japan,
what that is that lives most vividly in my
memory, I should probably shock my artis-
tic reader by saying that it was the loading
of a steamship at Nagasaki with coal. The
huge vessel, the Empress of Japan, was one
morning, soon after its arrival at Nagasaki,
suddenly festooned I can use no other
word from stem to stern on each side with
a series of hanging platforms, the broadest
nearest the base and diminishing as they
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 81
rose, strung together by ropes, and ascend-
ing from the sampans, or huge boats in
which the coal had been brought alongside
the steamer, until the highest and narrow-
est platform was just below the particular
port-hole through which it was received
into the ship. There were, in each case, all
along the sides of the ship, some four or five
of these platforms, one above another, on
each of which stood a young girl. On board
the sampans men were busy filling a long
line of baskets holding, I should think, each
about two buckets of coal, and these were
passed up from the sampans in a continu-
ous and unbroken line until they reached
their destination, each young girl, as she
stood on her particular platform, passing,
or rather almost throwing, these huge bas-
ketfuls of coal to the girl above her, and
she again to her mate above her, and so on
to the end. The rapidity, skill, and, above
all, the rhythmic precision with which, for
hours, this really tremendous task was per-
formed was an achievement which might
well fill an American athlete with envy and
dismay. As I moved to and fro on the deck
above them, watching this unique scene, I
took out my watch to time these girls, and
again and again I counted sixty-nine bas-
ketsthey never fell below sixty passed
82 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOEKOW
on board in this way in a single minute.
Think of it for a moment. The task I
ought rather to call it an art, so neatly, sim-
ply, and gracefully was it done was this :
the young girl stooped to her companion
below her, seized from her uplifted hands
a huge basket of coal, and then, shooting
her lithe arms upward, tossed it laughingly
to the girl above her in the ever-ascending
chain. And all the while there was heard,
as one passed along from one to another of
these chains of living elevators, a clear,
rhythmical sound, which I supposed at first
to have been produced by some bystander
striking the metal string of something like
a mandolin, but which I discovered, after
a little, was a series of notes produced by
the lips of these young coal-heavers them-
selvesdistinct, precise, melodious, and
stimulating. And at this task these girls
continued, uninterruptedly and blithely,
from ten o'clock in the morning until four
o'clock in the afternoon, putting on board
in that time, I was told, more than one thou-
sand tons of coal. I am quite free to say
that I do not believe that there is another
body of work-folk in the world who could
have performed the same task in the same
time and with the same* ease.
And what does it mean? For that is the
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 83
point of this incident, and of all that thus
far I have said. It means that in one aspect
of them, at any rate, the Japanese are not
what most of us have been wont to account
them a feeble folk. Again and again, dur-
ing my visit to Japan, I encountered certain
of my own countrymen and others who have
been for a shorter or longer time resident
among them, from whom I heard more or
less amusing illustrations of the blunders
which Japan has made in what many ac-
count its overhasty adoption of Western
ways. I was told, for instance, that so in-
flamed was Japan with a sense of its suc-
cesses as a sea-power that, after its late war
with China, and after it had received from
the latter the war indemnity due to it, it
had promptly proceeded to invest the whole
sum in the building or buying of new ships,
leaving no provision whatever for the costly
maintenance of these ships, each of which,
if as large as our own Olympia (and many
of them are), could be kept in commission
and ready for active service only at an ex-
pense of about a thousand dollars a day.
Now, undoubtedly, this was very poor
financiering unless the government was
satisfied that in some other way than by
economizing the Chinese indemnity fund
it could provide for manning and running
84 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
these ships. But surely the hypothesis is at
least admissible that they might be able to
do so. It is undoubtedly true that in con-
nection with its transformation during the
last quarter of a century Japan has been
spending too much money; but I appre-
hend that already her own shrewd finan-
ciers have found this out, and that measures
will be devised to meet the emergency.
Meantime the significant thing is that,
whatever this new empire arising out of
the old has done, she has done well. There
may have been too much slavish imitation
of Western methods at first, and the effort
too rapidly to adjust these to an Oriental
people may, in some instances, have re-
sulted in grotesque failure. But the. Japa-
nese are a people quick to learn, and no
national or local vanity has prevented them
from recognizing and correcting their own
blunders. On the other hand, their suc-
cesses have been too marked and note-
worthy to be belittled or ignored. Again
and again while in the national capital
I saw regiments of soldiers marching
through the streets, turned out in all re-
spects with remarkable excellence, and car-
rying themselves after a fashion, and re-
flecting a precision and efficiency of drill,
worthy of any army in any land. If in the
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 85
future history of the far East there is fight-
ing to be done, I venture to predict that the
army as well as the navy of Japan will give
a good account of itself.
And what are the chances? It has been
said that Japan has been made drunk with
its successes in China, and that if, as is
likely, it should seek to force another issue
with China, that huge empire, roused at
last, and with its four hundred millions of
people to draw from, would wipe it out.
But is it likely ? So far from its being so,
there are, I apprehend, other possibilities
of a far more portentous character of
which as yet foreign statesmen have taken
but little account. In a letter l written not
long ago from Tokio I find these words :
We who live in Japan and have many opportu-
nities of ascertaining the views held by publi-
cists about the Chinese problem believe that we
are in a position to speak with some confidence.
"What we see before everything is that the states-
men of the country do not credit the possibility
of the Middle Kingdom's [China's] complete
disintegration. They think that its territorial
dimensions may be reduced, but they think also
that there must always remain a solid residuum,
guaranteed from disruption by the homoge-
neity of the race, by its vast resources, and by
1 In the Hongkong " Telegraph," December 17, 1899.
86 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW
its long history of autonomy. Japan under-
stands that it is a matter of life and death to her
nascent industries to prevent any large encroach-
ments upon Chinese dominions by powers which
employ protective tariffs to close their markets.
She does not want the irreducible minimum of
the Chinese empire for her commercial vis-a-vis.
Then comes the question, To what lengths is she
prepared to go, and what methods does she think
feasible, for the conservation of the Middle King-
dom ? Here also there is a notable consensus of
opinion among her leading politicians. They
think that what China needs before everything
else at present is a strong army and a strong
navy, the weapons for self-defense. She already
possesses materials for an army; they require
only to be molded into shape. Japan is best
fitted to undertake that task.
The letter then goes on to deal with the
question of a navy for China, and con-
cludes :
These are the practical questions that press
for immediate settlement, according to the view
of Japanese publicists. The questions of finance
and general reform would be national corollaries
which Japan does not seem to consider incapable
of solution.
This is a significant utterance, and its
significance is increased by the fact that it
IMPRESSIONS OP JAPAN 87
appears in a Chinese, not a Japanese, jour-
nal, and that its suggestions are preceded
by the statement:
The Chinese commissioners Lin and Ching
have now left Tokio. Ostensibly their journey
to Japan had a purely commercial object; they
were instructed to make a careful investigation
of the trading and manufacturing methods that
Japan is following with success. But in reality
their main purpose was to ascertain the possi-
bilities of an alliance between the two Oriental
empires.
A very little reflection will enable one to
see the enormous possibilities that lurk in
language such as this. Just now the West-
ern world is saying to itself: "At last the
huge Chinese empire is on the eve of disin-
tegration. The great wall is broken down.
The haughty seclusion has been invaded.
There is the carcass, and there already the
Western eagles are gathered together-
Russia, England, Germany, France, with
our own national bird hovering near at
hand. It will not be a great while before
the attending physicians, to change the
figure, will diagnose the disease as requir-
ing vivisection, and will divide the remains
between them." It does not seem to have
occurred to anybody that China herself may
88 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
wish to have a voice in the matter, or if it
does, we are just now being told that she is
an empire made up of such heterogeneous
and mutually indifferent principalities that
there is no remotest prospect of binding
them together in any common effort for
preserving the national autonomy. But
those who say so in America, at any rate
forget their own very recent history, and
how our States, east and west, though di-
vided by a distance of three thousand miles,
were bound together, despite their diverse
interests and. traditions, in one splendid
and heroic struggle for the life of the Re-
public. And if it should be asked, "What
evidence is there that there exists anywhere
in China to-day any such national sentiment
as our own Civil War disclosed?" I think
that question is sufficiently answered by the
following extract which I take from a lead-
ing Chinese journal published within the
last few months:
Foreigners have for many years united them-
selves, and have been laying their plans with
regard to China. Originally they availed them-
selves of the plea of the mutual advantages aris-
ing out of commerce to induce China to open
treaty ports at which they could trade. Next,
under pretext of certain losses, in order to en-
rich themselves, they compelled China to pay
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 89
certain indemnities. To-day they are mooting
the questions of railways and mines, and using
them as a pretext to get our country from us.
. . . In the present dispute between Russia
and England ruin for China lurks. In reality,
it is only a quarrel about the partition of China.
Indeed, the surrounding circumstances are con-
verging to this partition. Foreigners are ever
scheming for this. The signs of this impend-
ing calamity are all too apparent within our
own borders. ... If, then, China is to re-
gain her original power, she must arouse herself
and amend her ways.
Does it need to be pointed out that be-
tween language such as this, translated
from a native Chinese journal, and the
visit of Chinese envoys to the capital of
Japan, with the account of which I have
prefaced it, there is likely to be a close con-
nection? It would seem from it, at least,
that that large apathy with which we have
been wont to credit China is no longer a
characteristic of the situation. It would
seem as if this vast empire were at last
awakening and arousing herself nay,
more: that for the first time in her history
she is recognizing her deficiencies, and
reaching out for help and guidance from
a powerful neighbor in correcting them.
Supposing, now, that she gets from Japan
90 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW
that help and guidance, we may be sure that
Japan will be clever enough to make her
pay for it. Indeed, the article which I have
just been quoting goes on, at the close, to
say:
In regard to Japan, the Japanese secretly de-
manded Amoy, and, further, they have secretly
laid plans to usurp authority over the whole
province of Fu-kien. Is not this proof enough
that Japan also seeks to have her "sphere of in-
fluence" in China?
This indicates clearly enough that China
recognizes the thirst for empire which
burns in the breast of her neighbor. But it
does not lessen the significance of words in
which, in this same article, referring to
Japan, this Chinese correspondent says:
It must be remembered that Japan is a coun-
try whose inhabitants are our brothers. We and
they are companions who ride in the same car-
riage.
Precisely ; and when once the Chinese peo-
ple as a whole grasp this fact, and when
they consent, as they have now so lately
indicated their readiness to consent, to
learn the arts of war on sea and land from
their clever and resourceful and most am-
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 91
bitious neighbor, then let the West, in our
homely but expressive phrase, clear the
track for the inevitable changes that are
destined to come to pass.
It is this view of Japan that I confess
to-day most of all interests me, and that I
think must interest any student of history,
ancient or modern. There is something
fascinating in this picture of an ancient
people, nobody knows quite how old or,
with certainty, whence derived, awakening
at last out of the slumber of its antiquated
puerilities and superstitions, rousing itself
from the paralysis of its ignorance and in-
sularity, reaching forth to our Western life,
its art, its letters, its science, its mechanical
ingenuities, seizing their significance in its
relations to the upbuilding of our Western
civilizations with a marvelous rapidity, and
then transferring them, with a rapidity
scarcely less marvelous, to its own soil and
its own life.
"Alas," cries the artistic traveler, "how
horrid to have all this Japanese charm and
color despoiled by the introduction of our
hideous American modernisms, noisy, fe-
verish, and mechanical!" I think the ap-
prehension is unnecessary. On the after-
noon of the day on which occurred that
opening of the Japanese Parliament to
92 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
which I have already referred, I spent an
hour with a Japanese statesman of great
distinction, to whom I ventured to convey
my sense of the dignity of the function of
the morning, adding, however, the expres-
sion of my hope that the prevalence of
European costumes, uniforms, evening
dress-suits, and the like, which distin-
guished it, was not an indication of a fash-
ion which was to prevail in Japan, where
the national dress of both sexes is so much
more graceful and beautiful than our own.
"Oh, no," he laughingly replied, "I don't
think it will. The emperor, as you saw,
wore the dress of a European general ; but
you may be sure that as soon as he got back
to the imperial palace he took it off as
promptly as possible."
And in this there is a suggestion of what
will continue to come to pass in Japan. At
first it was natural enough that a people
impressed with the value of those Western
forces in which it had been so long and so
conspicuously deficient should, in the effort
to appropriate them, appropriate much that
was accidental rather than essential, and in
many instances for the moment mistake the
relative value of the two. But all this will
right itself in time indeed, has already
begun to do so. ' ' Our men will be likely to
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 93
adopt your dress, for it is a better working-
dress than their own ; but our women no. ' '
And in this there was much discernment;
for the dress of men among the Japanese
has too much flowing drapery to make it a
good working-dress, while, on the other
hand, the dress of women, especially of el-
derly women, has in it so much of what
might be called the large charity of reserve
but here I perceive that I am entering
upon a domain in which my abundant igno-
rance would make me an easy prey to femi-
nine criticism, and I forbear.
I wish, however, that in this connection I
might give the substance of a conversation
which I had with the distinguished states-
man whom I have just quoted. The two
foremost men in Japan to-day, for intel-
lectual force and high qualities of leader-
ship, are the Marquis Ito and Count Okumo.
The former was kind enough to intimate
his desire to see me and to make an appoint-
ment to that end, of which, however, my en-
gagements prevented me from availing
myself. With the latter I had for a good
part of an afternoon a conversation which
was altogether unreserved, in which I was
permitted to ask all sorts of questions, and
throughout which I was impressed with the
rare penetration, grasp, philosophic' can-
94 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
dor, and statesmanlike sense of proportion
of an unusually elevated and courageous
thinker. Happy would it be for Japan if
her policies could be directed by so firm
and competent a hand.
Count Okumo was full of hope for the
future of his people; was not insensible to
the dangers of the hasty superimposition
upon an Asiatic people of Occidental forms
of government; and described in a very
interesting way the tentative experiments
which were in progress for the purpose of
training the people in some of those earlier
departures from pure paternalism which
are involved in the erection of something
like an elective system in connection with
municipal rule.
Did he not apprehend, I asked, that
among a people for so many generations
wonted to the feudal system, with its tribe
or clan and its tribal ruler, there would be
danger of the reassertion of the power and
influence of the feudal lord as against the
freedom and purity of our elective system I
Yes, he answered, he recognized that
danger, though he recognized also, laugh-
ingly, that it lurked in other systems where
the feudal lord or chief was sometimes de-
scribed as a ''boss"; but he believed that a
higher and wider education was the remedy
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 95
for that, and that the secret of the correc-
tion of political as of other evils lay, first of
all, in the intelligent recognition of them.
And in this connection it was interesting to
have pointed out to me by our able minister
to Japan the schools for girls and young
women which the count had founded and
maintained at his own expense. There
could be no better witness to his large faith
in the nobler future of his own people. At
the foundation of all national greatness lies
a competent motherhood, and it is a note of
the highest promise that so wise a leader
should have recognized that fact and set
about providing for it.
That, in connection with the progress of
Japan in these directions, there has been of
late an impatience of her earlier teachers
along these and other lines of Western
progress, has excited considerable com-
ment, and a not unnatural irritation in the
United States. A little while ago Japan
could not have too much or too many of us.
"But now," as an aggrieved American
manufacturer said to me, "we no sooner
build their factories for them and teach
them how to run them than they dismiss
our superintendents and pack them home
again. ' ' And why should they not ! They
are building factories and maintaining
96 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW
them for their own profit, not ours; and I
apprehend that American unpopularity in
Japan is due, at any rate partly, to our
over-eagerness to seize opportunities which
the people themselves have discerned or
created, and of which they themselves not
unnaturally desire to reap the benefits.
Personally, I cannot say that I encountered
any evidence that foreigners are not as well
treated and as cordially welcomed in Japan
as they are, say, in Germany or France.
The best that the world has is now, so far
as they have awakened to the value of it,
within their reach ; and if the process of as-
similation is as rapid as the process of
appropriation, no one may undertake to
predict the measure of their future achieve-
ment. They have great and largely unde-
veloped national resources, exceptional en-
ergy, a curiously quick prehensile quality
in all mental processes, and a boundless
ambition.
And yet all these will not make a great
nation, and that other thing which does they
are confessedly without. I say i ' confessed-
ly," because in a leading journal of Japan I
found the following remarkable words:
We have recently ventured to call attention
in these columns to the demoralizing effect of
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 97
the present transition of this country from old
to new. We do not pretend to have done any-
thing like justice to a question so complicated
and so difficult to deal with ; but we believe that
no sober-minded student of contemporary life
and thought in this country, be he a Japanese or
a foreigner, will dispute the fact that our people
are now passing through an extremely critical
period of their moral development. Nor will any
such person be disposed to deny that the symp-
toms of the moral malady as revealed in various
walks of life are sufficiently grave to demand
serious reflection on the part of the leaders of
thought and action among us. Now the question
is, What is the remedy, or is there any ? Before,
however, proceeding to talk of the remedy, it
would be well to see if the patient is at all con-
scious of the gravity of his situation, for in the
case of all moral diseases the awakening of the
patient to the danger to which he is exposed is
the essential condition for the efficacy of any
remedy that may be applied to his complaint.
From various indications noticed in public life
as well as in private intercourse, we are led to
conclude that the national consciousness is be-
ginning to feel that something is wrong with the
country in matters of conduct and belief. There
have never been wanting men who have warned
their countrymen against the moral danger to
which they were exposed. Leaders of thought
and reform like Mr. Fukuzawa, Mr. Sugiura,
and some others have been calling the attention
of the people to this very subject during the past
7
98 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
fifteen years or more. But the warnings of these
moralists have hitherto failed to produce any
marked impression upon the nation ; it is neces-
sary that the evils of the times should make a
certain progress in order that their real signifi-
cance may be brought home to the generality
of the people. Sufficient progress now seems
to have been made in this undesirable direction,
for, as already stated, there are unmistakable
indications that the thinking portion of the peo-
ple is slowly awakening to the reality of the
situation.
As to the question of the remedy, a large num-
ber of our readers will, we presume, answer that
nothing but religion will save the Japanese from
utter moral degeneration. Or, to put it in a con-
crete form, they will say that the only hope for
us lies in our conversion to Christianity. We
certainly recognize in Christianity a form of re-
ligion inculcating a lofty standard of morality,
powerful as a motive power. We recognize in it
a factor which has played an important part in
the development of European civilization.
But, admitting all these things, we cannot be-
lieve that it will ever succeed in getting a firm
hold upon the minds of the educated class. Men
of this class have for centuries lived and died
under a system of morality which inculcates vir-
tue for virtue's sake and entirely dispenses with
supernatural sanctions of any sort. The result
of acquaintance with the sciences brought by the
new civilization has certainly not tended to turn
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 99
the educated Japanese from their traditional
attitude of mind on religious matters.
If there is little hope for the adoption of
Christianity by the educated sections of the peo-
ple, is there better hope in that quarter for Bud-
dhism? We should say decidedly not. Bud-
dhism in its pure form has never been able to
make much headway in Japan. As we pointed
out in these columns some two years ago, it has
only been able to obtain a footing here by adapt-
ing itself to and humoring the original beliefs
of the people. It has certainly done much good
to Japan ; and utterly degenerate and hopelessly
ignorant as are the majority of its priests, it
is the professed religion of the bulk of the peo-
ple and will die hard. But the days of its vigor
are long since past ; there is nothing to encourage
the hope that it will yet revive, at all events in
such a form as to touch the imagination and in-
fluence the life of the educated class.
As to Shinto, we may dismiss it altogether out
of our consideration. It can hardly be called a
religion, and as a system of morality it is hope-
lessly encumbered with a mass of legendary lore
which will hardly bear the light of scientific
criticism.
The reader will doubtless ask, "If you reject
the help of all religions, what is your remedy
for the complaint you speak of?" To be frank,
we have to confess that we cannot think of any
specific cure for the present case, unless some
teacher of extraordinary gifts makes his appear-
100 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
ance among us to preach moral truths with a
force and authority which belong to true genius.
If there has been a serious moral relapse
among us, it has been the result of the shock
occasioned by our contact with a new civilization.
In the general confusion that has attended our
effort in breaking loose from the old order of
things, it was natural that we should have fallen
into the error of carrying Vandalism into the
domain of moral life. The evil results of that
error have now reached a point at which the na-
tional consciousness cannot help awakening to
the gravity of the situation.
It will be impossible, I think, for any
thoughtful person, whatever may be his
creed or want of creed, to read these words
without a sense of their profound pathos.
This ancient people, waking with a new
life, becomes conscious that neither arms
nor battle-ships nor machinery, neither
railways, factories, nor constitutional gov-
ernment, make a great state ; because none
of them, nor all of them put together, pro-
duce that essential righteousness which is
the essential strength of nations as of men.
Misconceiving what that is for which the
supernatural stands in the Christian re-
ligion, the writer whom I have quoted fails
to recognize that the supreme power of that
religion lies in the fact that it furnishes
IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 101
precisely that for which, unknowingly, he
asks a "teacher of extraordinary gifts . . .
to preach moral truths with a force and
authority which belong to true genius"
to do this, and infinitely more than this,
by the spell of a divine Personality that
touches and conquers the heart of man to-
day even as it did when that spell first
broke upon the moral consciousness of men
two thousand years ago. For that, though
as yet it but imperfectly discerns it, the new
Japan is waiting. May the day be not long
distant when from the lamps that Christian
hands have lighted, and still more from the
lives that Christian men and women have
lived there, it shall see and own its coming
Teacher, Saviour, King!
IV
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA
IV
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA
IF one were asked to express in a single
phrase that which exists in the Western
mind as its distinctive conception of the
land and the people included within the
geographical boundaries of what we are
wont to describe as India, it would oftenest
be done, I imagine, by calling it the land of
mystery. Western peoples are ordinarily,
it may be presumed, as ignorant of China
or Japan as they are of India ; and travelers
have probably been as often obliged to cor-
rect their earlier impressions of either of
these countries in the light of a fuller
knowledge. But no other people have in
them so much that has been inscrutable, and
that continues to be so, as those various
tribes and states that extend from the Rus-
sian frontier to the Indian Ocean.
And the interesting thing is that this ele-
ment of mystery does not disappear with
closer observation or more intimate ac-
105
106 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW
quaintance. It would be a small thing to
say that my Bengali servant was inscruta-
ble to me after several weeks of his con-
stant companionship by day and by night,
in travel, rest-houses, dak-bungalows, and
inns, on shipboard, and in those frequent
and quite unreserved conferences which
are indispensable in travel between a for-
eigner and one who is guide, valet, and
interpreter all in one. Any traveler would
say, doubtless, that to understand the occult
mental processes and cryptographic speech
of any foreign servant is easily beyond the
cleverness of the most experienced mind-
reader. But this inability to comprehend,
and still more to forecast, the mental pro-
cesses of these Orientals is, I have found,
unreservedly admitted even by those who
have known them for a generation. Indeed,
the dramatic element of British rule in In-
dia largely consists in that absence of
certainty as to the character, motives, or
possible conduct of those over whom they
are set which I have often heard admitted
on the part of their rulers.
It is this that must needs lend to the land
and to its people an exceptional and peren-
nial interest. As in the costumes and cus-
toms of other Eastern nations there is
forever wanting that note of almost star-
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 107
tling picturesqueness which salutes the
stranger in India, so it is with all that
costume and custom stand for. Prodi-
gal wealth, Oriental splendor, subtlety in
speech and action, inexhaustible craft, un-
wearied furtiveness, swift and secret re-
venges, hot passion and its reckless blow,
far-seeing purposes and their marvelous
adroitness of scheme and instrument, the
tragedies of racial or tribal ambitions, the
carelessness of life in warfare, the unspeak-
able perfidies of intrigue in the lives of
kings and courts, the surface gentleness
and obsequiousness, and the hard glitter
of undying hatreds that gleam beneath
them these are some of the elements that
long ago made up life in that strange land,
and that are a long way from having van-
ished out of it to-day.
Under these circumstances, the presence
of British rule in India, and the story of its
achievements, is of its kind one of the most
wonderful things in human history. It does
not in the smallest degree matter that what
has come to pass was not always a thing of
forecast or the fruit of a set purpose in the
beginning ; the marvelous thing is that, with
no hesitating or unequal steps, it has come
to pass. And, indeed, this is, in its way, one
of the most impressive and significant f ea-
108 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
tures of the whole Anglo-Indian historic
evolution. The " Honorable East India
Company" came into existence somewhere
about the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
tury. It was when Elizabeth was queen,
and when that great renaissance that
stirred England coincidently with her
emancipation from Latin ecclesiastical tra-
ditions and the benumbing influence of
Latin standards of morals and conduct was
throbbing through the veins of a great peo-
ple and kindling all the avenues of her life,
domestic, social, civic, and commercial, with
the glow of a new and nobler life. "The
Governor and Company of Merchants of
London trading to the East Indies, ' ' as the
corporation was styled, began in a modest
way by sending out to the East a few ships
to purchase silks, spices, and other Indian
products. As the trade grew, an ambassa-
dor was sent by King James to Jahangir
to conduct such negotiations with the In-
dian ruler as should best protect and foster
the nascent commerce. That was the begin-
ning. What a splendid galaxy of sailors,
soldiers, rulers, statesmen, merchants it has
been that, step by step, has built up the
great empire of to-day ! In tracing its his-
tory it is instructive, and especially for
Americans, who have but lately embarked
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 109
upon a similar enterprise, to see that that
history was clouded by features as little
honorable as they were equitable. The
earlier Indian governor had no salary, and
the art of the ' ' grand squeeze, ' ' as the Chi-
nese describe it, was remorselessly applied,
too often, by one who was the depositary of
a largely irresponsible power. The Honor-
able East India Company was for more
than two hundred years a corporation
whose British servants obtained and held
their places largely by pure favoritism, and
whose methods, it must be owned, were
often eminently characteristic of officials
holding place quite independent of their
merits. Under these circumstances, the
only wonder is that the "Honorable Com-
pany ' ' was able so successfully to hold what
from time to time it acquired, and to push
its enterprises and its acquisitions to such
large and enduring successes. The expla-
nation must be found in the fact that, cor-
rupt and unscrupulous as the earlier meth-
ods of the East India Company may often
have been, on the whole they were on a
higher plane than those of the native
princes whom they supplanted.
Of the rule of these, it must be owned,
the story was ordinarily a tragic and cruel
one. The first British settlers in India
110 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
found the land rent and divided by inter-
nal dissensions, and its ruling powers in a
state of constant warfare upon one another.
In these wars the native princes learned,
after a time, to seek the aid of those small
bodies of the East India Company's troops,
both European and native, which the com-
pany had found it necessary to organize
for the protection of its own settlements.
When, however, such aid was given, it had
to be paid for in one way or another; and
thus the grants of land were made on which,
afterward, were built Bombay, Calcutta,
etc. As the student of Indian history will
remember, these were not always securely
held, and caste prejudice, racial prejudice,
and the conquering propensities of tribal
leaders led occasionally to attacks upon
the English settlements, such as the sack-
ing of Calcutta by Siraj-ud-Daula, Nawab
of Bengal, with all the consequent horrors
of the prison called the Black Hole, into
which one hundred and forty-six Euro-
peans were driven at night, and out of
which only twenty-three persons were taken
alive the next morning. But during the fol-
lowing year (1757) Clive won the battle
of Plassey, the English were supreme in
Bengal, and India began to see the begin-
ning of the end.
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 111
Of the end, did I say? But who will be
bold enough even to-day to prophesy the
end? I shall speak later of the reasons
which would seem to make it impossible,
with any considerable degree of certainty,
to forecast that end ; but in the meantime I
wish to refer to some of the conspicuous
features of British rule in India which
make it, as I conceive, the greatest object-
lesson in colonial government in the history
of the world.
And in order to appreciate the situation,
both as it existed originally and as it exists
to-day, it must be remembered that India is
not in any sense a homogeneous country.
The Indian empire contains 1,560,000
square miles and a population of two hun-
dred and eighty-seven millions, and these
extend from the eighth to the thirty-seventh
degree of north latitude, and from 67 east
to 99 east longitude.
It follows, of course, that there are great
diversities of climate, soil, custom, and lan-
guage, as there are also of native rule and
religion. Even to-day the languages of the
north and south are wholly different, and
when I asked my Bengali servant, who was
a native of central India and had traveled
with me there, to accompany me to the
southern provinces, he very properly urged
112 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
that he could be of little or no use to me, be-
cause he could not speak the languages of
those provinces. More than this, as the
modern student will see if he looks at a map
of India and traces the ancient sovereign-
ties for which its provincial names once
stood, these various sections of the Indian
peninsula were divided from one another
by a score of petty sovereignties whose mu-
tual hatreds were at once deep and malig-
nant. Indeed, the way in which these sur-
vive to-day in India, where, superimposed
upon them all, is the strong hand of British
rule, is at once tragic and pathetic. The
traveler in India is early arrested, in his
scrutiny of the natives, by the curious mark
painted down, or across, their foreheads a
round red disk, a yellow bar with displayed
ends, three white stripes, and the like, in
an endless variety of combinations. These
are very commonly mistaken by the for-
eigner as designations of caste, but they
are nothing of the sort. They are tribal
designations, and they still assert them-
selves, though the tribal ruler prince,
nawab, raja, whatever he may have been
has long ago been dethroned, or is to-day
as, if he exists at all, he so often is no
more than the stuffed and bedizened simu-
lacrum of a tribal ruler. Such signs are a
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 113
dramatic witness to the intensity of that
tribal bond with which, in the future his-
tory of India as in the past, the conquer-
ing power must reckon.
It was with this vast and heterogeneous,
not homogeneous, people that the Anglo-
Saxon had to deal when the East India
Company began to trade with the Indian
peninsula, and among whom it has won its
most splendid successes. I do not speak of
other colonial settlements in India, French,
Dutch, or Spanish, because they have
largely disappeared, and because the sur-
vival of that other power which has super-
seded them has been eminently a survival
of the fittest. One of these days, the time
has not come for it yet, some dispassion-
ate student will write a comparative history
of colonization, and will point out the ele-
ments that have contributed, where coloni-
zation has succeeded, to its success. It is
quite certain that "originally, in the case of
India and the East India Company, they
did not in any considerable degree exist,
any more than, in the case of the French
colonies, they exist in Algeria to-day. The
first aim of a great commercial corporation
was, naturally enough, commercial gain;
and while Warren Hastings was undoubt-
edly not the monster that Burke painted
114 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
him, yet so long as the East India Company
had large and undefined and exclusive
rights in India, it is not surprising that
they should have abused them. The Brit-
ish Parliament did wisely when it annulled
the East India Company's charter of 1600,
and later followed the lead of Pitt, in 1784,
in passing his India bill, and, later still, in
taking those successive steps that trans-
ferred the custody of India to the crown.
It is difficult for one who visits India for
the first time to realize that this was done
so lately as 1858. That was the year follow-
ing the Mutiny; and the bloody history of
the Mutiny prepares the modern student to
understand something of the Indian mind
and temper. As Sir W. Hunter, than whom
no higher authority in Indian history ex-
ists, has put it:
During seven hundred years the warring races
of Central Asia and Afghanistan filled up their
measure of bloodshed and pillage to the full.
Sometimes they returned with their spoil to their
mountains, leaving only desolation behind ; some-
times they killed off or drove out the former in-
habitants and settled down in India as lords of
the soil ; sometimes they founded imperial dynas-
ties, destined to be crushed each in its turn by
a new host sweeping into India through the
Afghan passes. The precise meaning of inva-
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 115
sion in India during the last [eighteenth] cen-
tury may be gathered from the following facts:
It signified not merely a host of twenty to a hun-
dred thousand barbarians on the march, paying
for nothing and eating up every town and cot-
tage and farm-yard; burning and slaughtering
on the slightest provocation, and often in mere
sport. It usually also meant a grand final sack
and massacre at the capital of the invaded
country.
And besides these wars from without were
the intestine conflicts in which Hindu
fought with Hindu, Mohammedan with Mo-
hammedan, and each with the other. The
readers of Macaulay will remember his de-
scription of the unspeakable brutalities of
the Mahrattas. The story of the bloody
ravages of Pindarees, of the Sultan Mo-
hammed Shah of Gulbarga, and of the
Hindu Maharaja of Vijayanager (the first-
named of whom swore an oath on the Koran
that he would not sheathe the sword until
he had put to death a hundred thousand
infidels), is told by Meadows Taylor in his
''Indian History" with a ghastly detail
that no one who has read it can recall with-
out a shudder.
It was amid such a condition of interne-
cine warfare and unrest as this that the first
English settlers in India found themselves.
116 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW '
I may not attempt to trace here the succes-
sive steps by which British rule has built up
in that land the present structure of order,
peace, and security. But however men may
differ about the wisdom or originality of
those successive steps, there can be no
question as to that which is their founda-
tion-stone. I was exceptionally fortunate,
while in India, in coming into more than
ordinarily close contact with educated na-
tives, both Hindu and Mohammedan, who
spoke to me often with marked unreserve of
the rule under which they lived, and of the
rulers who administered it. I suppose no-
body who reads these pages will expect me
to say that they spoke always with enthusi-
asm of the one, or with affection of the
other. They did nothing of the sort; and
indeed I have observed that in our own be-
loved land and under our own honored rul-
ers it cannot be said to be an invariable
experience that we refer to the law or to the
administrator of the law in terms of either
admiration or approval. In other words,
criticism and fault-finding, whether con-
cerning the rule or the ruler, would appear
to be considered as a primary function of
the modern citizen. Well, it is not greatly
different in India, Why should it be? It
is a land of newspapers, of free speech, and
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 117
of much public and published fault-finding
of officials and their decisions, great and
small. We should say that among ourselves
this is wholesome and normal, and far more
to be desired than smothered discontent or
a concealed smoldering hostility. I do not
see why it should not be so in India, espe-
cially when one takes into consideration an
additional element in the situation there
which is, in fact, of all the most important.
As I have said, I conversed with great
unreserve with many natives concerning
British rule in India, and influential men
among them expressed themselves to me
with great freedom. They had grievances
to rehearse and officials and their acts to
criticize, but this one thing, from first to
last, always and everywhere, was plain
that they recognized that with the mainte-
nance and permanence of British rule in
India marched the safety of life and prop-
erty, freedom to go about unmolested on
one's honest errands, the peace and good
order, in one word, of the social fabric.
They would like to see the old dynasties,
sovereignties, greater or lesser principali-
ties and powers with which in other days
their race or family had been identified, re-
stored? Yes, perhaps, if it could 'be done
without too great a cost. But the cost?
118 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
To face that it was plain enough they had
no stomach. Under the present conditions
the humblest Indian servant knows this one
fact, which of all others is of paramount
consequence to him: he is no longer the
creature of another man's whim; his life,
his property, his right to go to and fro,
his family ties, his task or employment-
all these things are within his own control.
That he knows. And he knows that British
rule in India has given this to him and se-
cured it to him. He knows that underneath
all the dealing of this alien race with him
and his there lies the broad stone of justice ;
that no man, stranger or home-born, may
wrong him with impunity; and that, how-
ever weak he may be, he need be the favor-
ite of no prince, the fawning tool of no ca-
pricious rule, in order to secure for himself
and those dear to him their rights and his
own.
Now, then, carry this consideration from
the lowest to the highest in the Indian
social scale. With a consummate tact and
wisdom which cannot be too highly praised,
the present ruling power in India, instead
of sweeping into oblivion with its strong
hand the various powers which it had su-
perseded, has dealt with each one of them,
great and small, in accordance with this
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 119
large law of equity. If a state or a ruler
had in them anything to conserve, the im-
perial authority has conserved it. If a ma-
haraja showed himself amenable to reason,
and willing to hold such power as was
intrusted to him from a power above him
which was strong enough to maintain his
just right, some modus Vivendi was speed-
ily devised by which the status quo ante
was maintained. Around the person of the
Viceroy of India, by gradual but sure pro-
gressions, the great Indian princes have
been drawn in a Council of State for the
consideration of common interests and the
maintenance of common rights. Doubtless
there are sometimes restlessness, impa-
tience of the dry Western rule, resentment,
and smoldering enmity. But suppose that
the powers which once ruled India could
recover their old sovereignties, there is not
one of them that does not know that the
next step would be to fly at one another's
throats. It does not seem to have occurred
to people who are fond of prophesying that
British rule cannot hope to maintain itself
in India, because it is an alien rule, and who
sagely remind us that when once the man
is found from among themselves who can
unite the various Indian states and nation-
alities of the elder time, this united India
120 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW
will be strong enough to sweep the Saxon
out of his country, root and branch it does
not, I say, seem to have occurred to these
clever seers that the present rule in India
has built up a strong and wide-spread con-
stituency to whom such a prospect is only
and wholly distasteful. For when some
such great revolutionary movement had ac-
complished its purpose and the last Briton
had been either butchered or expelled from
India, then there would arise the question
which to-day the educated and, above all,
the wealthy native would ask himself, in
the spirit of a modern Frenchman, "Et
apres?" A great Indian merchant with
whom I became acquainted, and who felt, I
suppose, that he might express himself to
an American with such freedom as he might
not otherwise indulge in, referred with
some feeling to the fact that, except undef
limited and special conditions, the people of
India were not trusted with arms, nor al-
lowed to govern themselves. "But, then,"
he said, with that quick mental turn which
is so curious a characteristic of the Oriental
mind, ' ' if we were permitted to govern our-
selves, it would take a great deal of money
and time and involve a great many risks,
while, now, British imperialism does it all
for us and leaves us free to go about our
IMPRESSIONS OP INDIA 121
business with, perhaps, a greater sense of
security than we should otherwise have."
As a matter of fact, there was no "per-
haps ' ' in his mind whatever. He was a rich
man, and he knew there was no slightest
question of surmise that if British rule
were to vanish out of India, security for him
and his would speedily vanish with it.
An observer of romantic tendencies
might easily deplore this, and ask, "Is the
old heroic, if often barbaric, spirit of India
a vanished quantity?" I may not under-
take to answer that question. One thing is
certain: British rule in India has taught
its people to value peace, the safety of life
and property, and the privilege of going
quietly and securely about one's business.
I am not sure that we who call ourselves of
the superior races are indifferent to these
things.
But that rule has taught the people of
India a great deal more. I suppose that to
a certain class of minds the temper that
prompts one to fly at his neighbor's throat
and to resent an injury with a blow will
always be regarded as the * * heroic ' ' spirit ;
but there is another view of heroism which
it is to be hoped will continue to have its
disciples, and which holds that self-re-
straint and courageous endurance, self-
122 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORKOW
reliance and a noble patience under inju-
ries, that temperance, frugality, industry,
and discontent only with ignorance, evil,
and injustice, may also have in them some
element of heroism. At any rate, that is
the lesson which British imperialism has
been teaching India, and which India most
needed to learn.
Let me here anticipate the traveled critic
who has seen the short, brusque, and some-
times violent ways of the British soldier or
the British cad with a native servant or
coolie or inferior of whatever class. No-
body who has been in India needs to be told
that, with the relations existing there, such
things are inevitable, but nobody who
knows anything about the facts needs any
more to be told that such acts are limited
by an authority and punished with an im-
partiality which in the case of the govern-
ment of a conquered people by the con-
quering nation is absolutely unique. There
is, in this connection, if any one desires it,
an opportunity for comparison in the case
of the treatment by the Boers of the blacks
in South Africa which has in it a whole vol-
ume of meaning. Such wanton cruelty,
such habitual brutality, as are notoriously
characteristic of the Boers' treatment of
their native servants have no more place in
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 123
India than the practices of the thugs or
dakoits; and the humblest native in India
knows that, in the case of whatever injustice
he may experience from those above him,
he has a court or civil magistrate where his
appeal will have a swift and impartial hear-
inga court in part, at least, of persons of
his own race, and an attorney, if he chooses,
of his own speech and lineage.
Indeed, the system of civil jurisprudence
as, with unexampled wisdom and equity, it
has been built up in India, is one of the
most marvelous features in all its modern
history. Both the Hindu and Mohammedan
governments, it must be remembered, were
pure despotisms. An Indian ruler looked
upon his kingdom as his private property,
from which he was at liberty to exact what
he could and spend it as he pleased. He
could, personally, deprive his subjects of
liberty, property, or life itself, as he saw fit.
One illustration of this will suffice :
The Governor Ahmadabad, about the year
1646, invited the principal directors of the Eng-
lish and Dutch trading companies to an enter-
tainment, of which, as usual, displays of danc-
ing-girls were among the chief features. One
party having danced themselves out, another
was sent for, but for some reason they refused
124 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
to come. They were then forcibly dragged into
the presence of the governor. He listened to
their excuse, laughed at it, and immediately com-
manded his guards to strike off their heads.
They begged their lives, but in vain, and the exe-
cutions were immediately proceeded with in the
presence of the guests. Horrified by the spec-
tacle, the strangers could not conceal their emo-
tions, whereupon the governor burst out laugh-
ing, and asked them what it was that had
disturbed them. 1
In contrast to this sort of despotism, the
same writer tells us that to-day in India
the meanest coolie is entitled to all the solemn
formalities of a judicial trial; and the punish-
ment of death, by whomsoever administered and
on whomsoever inflicted, without the express
decree of the law, is a murder for which the
highest officer of the government is as much ac-
countable as a sweeper would be for the assas-
sination of the governor-general in durbar. 2
In other words, human life is to-day more
secure in India than in Kentucky.
But when you have secured justice, you
have not necessarily secured progress. In-
ertia may paralyze endeavor, and an exag-
1 "The Indian Empire: A Handbook," etc., p. 38.
8 Ibid.
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 125
gerated conservatism successfully resist the
aspirations of national development. And
here the problem in India was the more dif-
ficult because the racial traditions and ten-
dencies of the people were all on one side.
Therefore the quiet determination, the
steady and undaunted perseverance, which
have overcome these racial characteristics,
which have awakened a wholesome ambi-
tion, developed local enthusiasms, educated
and wisely directed particular energies and
activities, are something which challenges
the warmest admiration. One of the most
picturesque spots in India is Darjeeling,
that superb elevation from which one gets
the incomparable vision of the Himalayas,
with the matchless peak of Everest in the
far distance. But quite as wonderful in its
way is the journey thither, over a railway
that climbs a height of six thousand feet
from the plains below, surmounting engi-
neering difficulties, all the way, which are
a wonder to the traveler and a perpetual
study to the civil engineer. And as one
traces these successive conquests, he sees
in them no inapt symbol of what the ruling
power in India has been doing all over the
land: building its highways, widening and
deepening its watercourses, fertilizing its
deserts, draining its swamps; the builder
126 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW
everywhere of schools and colleges, hospi-
tals and infirmaries; inspiring its agricul-
ture, grading and replanting its forests,
founding and developing manufactories;
and over all shedding the light of a pure
and undefiled religion in the midst of a
people darkened and besotted by centuries
of ignorance and superstition. In the cow-
temple or the monkey-temple at Benares
one may see what the religion of the Hindu
can do to touch with the spell of a higher
hope an immortal nature, and in the Church
of England schools at Agra, as I saw them,
one may see what Christianity does do.
And in all this organized effort and per-
sistent endeavor the finest element is not the
machinery, admirable as so often that is,
but the man. My journeyings through the
East brought me in many ways and in
widely diverse places in the Straits Set-
tlements, in Benares, and in Arabia, as well
as in India itself in contact with the Brit-
ish official, than whom there is no finer
specimen of public servant in all the world.
It was my privilege, too, to make the per-
sonal acquaintance of a large number of
such officials from the highest to the lowest;
and from one extreme to the other, wher-
ever I encountered them, they were dis-
tinguished by three invariable character-
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 127
istics which are of foremost value, I venture
to think, in making a competent public
servant.
1. The first of these that impressed me
was the sense of responsibility. The
American traveler who has had any ex-
tended opportunities for observing public
servants, in whatever capacity and of what-
ever nationality other than his own, must,
I think, have been sensible of this. Our
own national note just here is too often that
of flippancy, illustrating itself now by the
levity, now by the audacity, with which a
diplomatic representative will treat a duty
or an occasion which certainly was worthy
of something more than either. A fine
specimen of American independence and
contempt for effete rulers has been cited in
the anecdote of the ambassador who is said
to have replied to an Oriental potentate
who sent for him to say that he understood
that a newspaper in the United States had
spoken disrespectfully of the Sultan: "A
newspaper in the United States speak dis-
respectfully of your Majesty? Why, sir,
there are twenty thousand newspapers in
the United States that give your Majesty
h 1 every morning. ' ' But that such a style
of diplomatic intercourse could be seriously
regarded as anything else than insolent and
128 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
vulgar, no intelligent person will care seri-
ously to urge. It was, however, character-
istic of its kind, and it was a dramatic illus-
tration of an incapacity to appreciate the
representative responsibility of a public
servant. Of the absence of this incapacity,
public service in India is an impressive
example. Wherever one encountered that
service it was marked by simple dignity, by
a careful regard for the accuracy of an
official statement, by a painstaking en-
deavor that the demand for official action
or intervention should rest upon the sure
basis of justice, equity, and right legal pre-
scription, and, what was often best of all,
by a scrupulous, considerate, and patient
courtesy, which perpetually reminded one
that the individual had learned to sink him-
self, his own swaggering self -consciousness,
ease, sensitiveness, or preferences, in what
was due from him as the servant of a great
state and the representative of a great peo-
ple. It was this one note that, wherever one
came in contact with a government official
of whatever rank or class, lent to what he
did an explicit character of distinction.
2. And higher and finer even than this
was what, for want of any other term to de-
scribe it, I may call the note of sympathy.
The distance between an Eastern and a
IMPEESSIONS OF INDIA 129
Western mind must be measured, somebody
has said, not by miles, but by centuries.
With all our best endeavors, I presume we
shall never be quite able, with our nurture
and ancestry, to attain the Asiatic's point
of view. But to strive to get nearer to it, to
be considerate and patient in view of our
remoteness from it, and, best of all, forever
to recognize the common humanity which
underlies all racial distinctions, and in the
brotherhood of which alone we can hope
to build the kingdom of the future, this is
the endeavor which India's great rulers,
Hastings, Wellesley, Cornwallis, the Law-
rences, Lord Dalhousie, and their greater
and lesser compeers, have splendidly and
consistently illustrated. Not long before I
visited northeastern India, its mountain
region had been desolated by unparalleled
storms which had caused not only enormous
destruction, but, in some instances, appal-
ling loss of life. In connection with one of
these, there had been some remarkable ex-
hibitions of heroism in the rescue of per-
sons in peril; and the commissioner of a
certain district decided that these deserved
some formal and official recognition, and
arranged for the presentation of gold med-
als to certain civil and military officers,
policemen and others, who had so distin-
130 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
guished themselves. Among these the case
of two natives, coolies, was brought to his
notice, who had at the repeated risk of
their own lives and with rare gallantry
saved the lives of some English women and
children. The commissioner, after due in-
vestigation, decided that these two men
were eminently deserving of the gold medal
of honor, and that it should be conferred
upon them. But the presentations were to
be made by a high official of the general
government in a public hall, in a town near
to the scenes of disaster, and before a great
throng of the foremost people of the prov-
ince, and beyond the breech-cloth the
coolies had no clothes. In this dilemma the
commissioner himself, and at his own ex-
pense, had them suitably habited, and they
appeared side by side with men of high
rank, and received the decoration which
they had so justly won. "And now they
wear it," said a near kinswoman of the
commissioner, "and wear usually almost
nothing else. They are desperately poor,
and rarely earn more than four annas
[eight cents] a day." "But they will not
keep the gold medals long," I said; "their
poverty will, I imagine, soon induce them
to part with them. " " Never, ' 'was the swift
answer, given with flashing eye. "They
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 131
will never forget how they won them and
who gave them to them." And I believe
her. The government of India and its offi-
cial representative meant, henceforth, to
these men that which had made the hum-
blest and least dowered lives in all the land
sharers in glory and honor and civic im-
mortality with the highest. How wise the
tact, how sure the insight, how resistless
the spell of that human sympathy that could
here first discern its opportunity and then
use it with such rare felicity!
3. But public servants may have the
sense of official responsibility and the grace
of personal sympathy, and yet be without
that chief qualification for the public ser-
vice which consists in trained capacity.
And here has been the preeminent quality
of Indian public service of whatever kind.
The history of the Honorable East India
Company's service was of another kind.
Then a "pull" was the chief requisite to
admission. But the time came when Eng-
land learned what every other country
that has undertaken to aolminister foreign
dependencies will have to learn that
without a competent and competently
trained civil service colonial possessions
are simply a school for every dishonesty
and a screen for every injustice. No man
132 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
is appointed to any place whatever in India
without a certain preliminary training, and,
when that is concluded, the application of
certain definite and searching tests to verify
the results which such training is supposed
to produce. The only objection to which
this system is open, if I have read aright
the arguments in our own country and es-
pecially upon the floor of Congress, is that
it is liable to produce an official class or
caste, which will hold the public offices as
a sort of hereditary possession, passed on
from one set of office-holders to another,
to the exclusion of that rare and gifted body
of men who are the tools of our congress-
men and senators in primary meetings,
political conventions, and State legisla-
tures, and whose services can be properly
rewarded only by their appointment, on the
nomination of these political lights, to po-
sitions for which they have never been
trained and for which, oftener than other-
wise, they have not the remotest qualifica-
tion. Well, it would be interesting if some
one would take the trouble to compare even
with the best specimens of our own public
servants an Indian public servant of the
second or even the third generation, men
whose fathers, like Lord Roberts 's, were
public servants there themselves, and who,
IMPEESSIONS OF INDIA 133
in grave emergencies and in the long-con-
tinued discharge of the gravest responsi-
bilities, have illustrated characteristics that
are so utterly remote in their high qualities
of excellence from our own patent Con-
gress-made article as to be to such a crea-
ture altogether unintelligible.
It would be unjust to conclude this chap-
ter without recognizing dangers in the fu-
ture of India, which are inseparable from
the social situation in that part of the Brit-
ish empire, and which will need for their
solution a large wisdom and, it may be, a
still larger courage. One of these, it must
be obvious, is likely to follow from that ra-
cial transfusion which almost literally to-
day is coming to pass in India. Through
licit or illicit unions of the ruling race with
the natives there is now in India a consider-
able population of mixed blood, of which I
observed little was said, but concerning
which one would think there must needs be
on the part of reflecting persons consider-
able thought. This element, which is de-
scribed by the general term "Eurasian,"
represents a community which has parted
company with Asiatic traditions, and which
in manners, dress, and ambitions is appar-
ently altogether identified with those for-
eigners whose racial inheritance in part it
134 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
shares. From this class comes in large
numbers that element which is represented
in India in civil posts of minor responsi-
bility, in the preservation of the public
peace, in the administration of railways,
etc. They are usually found to be fairly
efficient and trustworthy, and they are not
unnaturally ambitious of official place and
social position so far as either of these is
within their reach. Naturally, their only
hope or expectation in these directions is
from their European connections, as, ob-
viously, their intermarriages or more ir-
regular domestic relations with Europeans
have inevitably cut them off from the na-
tive races and castes of whatever desig-
nation.
At present this element in India is a dis-
tinctly subordinate and inconsiderable one ;
but the causes which have already made it
so evident a factor in the problem of the
future seem likely to make it increasingly
so. If I were a statesman concerned with
the future of India, I should watch it closely
and not without considerable apprehension.
As it exists at present it does not impress
one as greatly efficient or formidable in any
direction. But it is not difficult to conceive
that a time may come when native races in
India, awakening from their lethargy, may
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 135
address themselves to the acquisition of a
modern civilization, and agencies and in-
struments of revolt or aggression which,
they now despise ; and when aware, as they
already are, that there is no real fellowship
between the Eurasian and European ele-
ments in India, they may make such terms
with the former as, appealing to their cu-
pidity or their ambition, may make them
formidable allies in some large and united
effort for ridding the land of its foreign
rulers. History furnishes just here paral-
lels which I need not recall ; and in the mat-
ter, preeminently, of revolutions which are
both social and political, history repeats
itself. To-day the Eurasian in India be-
lieves that his interests are \dentical with
those of its rulers. But the time may easily
come when, weary of waiting for a recog-
nition which as yet has never come, and
which is likely to continue to hold him at
arm's-length, and itself aloof from him,
the man of mixed blood may turn to the
people of that other blood which he has not
been allowed to forget still flows in his
veins, and confederated with which he may
one day prove himself a potential factor
in the empire-building of the future.
There is still one other element in the
problem of India which one cannot over-
136 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW
look if lie would I mean the religious ele-
ment. The traveler who has followed his
guide into the temples of Burma, India, and
Ceylon must surely have brought away
with him impressions which time can never
efface. Some of them are pathetic, others,
as at the Burning Ghats at Benares, are
profoundly tragic, but all of them, to any
sensitive mind, are intensely repulsive. It
seems inconceivable, at first, that any sane
human being can find in rites that are so
puerile, so tawdry, and so inane, anything
that expresses in any worthy way any re-
ligious idea. It is in vain that one is re-
minded that in many of these heathen
temples there is much that recalls similar
rites and instrumentalities in forms of
Christianity that affect a very venerable
authority for what they do. One can only
say, so much the worse for such forms. But
the thing that is of chief consequence in the
whole dreary business is its profound hold
upon the faith and affections of millions of
people, and the meager impression which as
yet a higher civilization, which is itself the
product of a purer form of faith, has made
upon it.
It is at this point that our popular im-
pression of the influence, e.g., of Christian
institutions and especially of Christian
IMPRESSIONS OF INDIA 137
missions is, I am disposed to think, erro-
neous. Said a member of the Oxford Mis-
sion in Calcutta, with a fine courage for
which one could not sufficiently honor him,
"We had been here three years before we
made one convert"; but he added, "When
one remembers what his departure from his
old fellowships cost him, one need not won-
der." Nor, indeed, can any one who under-
stands what an absolute expulsion from all
earlier ties, fellowships, and recognitions
on the part of kindred or friends such
a step involves. But, on the other hand,
one who understands what has been going
on all the time since England entered
India will recognize that slowly but surely
old traditions have been weakening and old
lines of separation disappearing, so that,
step by step, the dawn of a better and a
brighter day is drawing near. I should be
violating personal confidences if I should
furnish the evidence of this which came to
me in private conversation with Brahmans
of high rank and official station; but I vio-
late no confidence in saying that, among the
most thoughtful and clear-sighted of these,
it is coming to be more and more clearly
perceived that the task is a hopeless one
which claims to be able to hold the minds
and faith of a people who read and think
138 THE EAST .OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
to the outworn shibboleths of a corrupt and
sensuous paganism. And meanwhile the
work which Christian missionaries of many
names but of one noble aim are doing in all
these lands, in schools, in homes, in hospi-
tals, in nurseries, in colleges, and in the
hearts and lives of shame-bowed and sor-
row-burdened men and women, is above all
praise, as it is above all price. Much of the
best of this work is our own. And herein
and hereby is the divinest transfusion of
all the transfusion of the divinest Life of
all into theirs who still walk in darkness
and the shadow of death. May God, who
has inspired it, crown it with complete
success !
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN
ISLANDS
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN
ISLANDS
DURING a recent voyage across the Pa-
cific, our evenings in the steamer's
fine saloon were often beguiled by the
music of various races and tongues. A
modern ship's company has as little homo-
geneity in nationality as in interests; and
to a traveler of philosophic temperament
few things are more interesting than to note
the ways in which this fact at first betrays
itself, only to melt away before a great
while, if there be the opportunity of a long
voyage, into a kindly and neighborly tem-
per which enforced proximity makes both
sensible and mutually agreeable. Our
transatlantic racers, it is true, offer little
or no chance for anything of this sort. The
voyage is scarcely begun before it is ended,
and the conventions of social reserve, and
sometimes the memory of rather painful
experiences, conspire to beget in the trav-
141
142 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEKOW
eler a habit of repression, if not of exclu-
siveness. But in a long Pacific voyage it is
different People who are destined to be
two or three weeks together in the same
ship and at the same table sooner or later
conclude to make the best of the situation,
and one and all bring out their store of
amusements or accomplishments for the
common benefit.
It is to this that we owed, on an evening
that will always be memorable, the privi-
lege of listening to some Hawaiian songs
accompanied by a running commentary
both descriptive and historical, to which I
am bound to say I am indebted, in its larger
suggestions, for the outlines of this chapter.
The singer and performer for he was
both was an American gentleman whose
name, if I were at liberty to record it here,
would be familiar to many American ears ;
and he brought to his task a rare and most
individual charm. He was born in Hono-
lulu, of an ancestry identified with the ear-
liest missionary history of the Sandwich
Islands, and he united in himself the fine
insight of his New England forefathers
and the sunny vivacity of Oahu. The in-
strument which he used was a primitive
guitar consisting of a wooden bowl with
metal strings across its open face ; the notes
IMPEESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 143
were produced by a manipulation analo-
gous to that of a banjo ; and along with this
he undertook to give a brief history of the
evolution of Hawaiian music. Some of us
had heard it or thought we had while in
the islands, and had been much struck with
both its plaintiveness and its tunefulness.
It was a rude shock to learn that, in its
primitive and unadulterated form, Ha-
waiian music had neither characteristic;
and that for the obvious reason that it
consisted in thumping the bottom of the
wooden bowl and twanging a single string.
The performer then illustrated how these
elementary modes of expressing musical
ideas had been influenced by the incom-
ing of civilization; how the Hawaiians
had caught the airs of the missionary
hymns and modified them by their own in-
terpretation of them; and finally how, as
the element of civilized life became more
pervasive and potential, the music of the
native and the manipulation of his instru-
ments took up into themselves everything
and it was apparently not much that was
intelligible to the native mind, even to the
last negro or music-hall melody.
The whole was a parable of really large
suggestiveness. For one could not but see
in it how what had come to pass in connec-
144 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
tion with something that, after all, was a
very small part of a people 's life, was that
which had taken place in other and far
graver aspects of that life. There was, in
other words, first the primitive simplicity
and barbarism of that life, with all its
charm and all its dreaminess ; and then, step
by step, there came to be, out of the mere
babel of primal instincts and acts, like pri-
mal noises, something increasingly com-
plex, increasingly pathetic, and sometimes,
alas! increasingly tragic.
For one cannot read the story of the abo-
riginal days of these beautiful islands with-
out being sensible first of all of their charm.
In their merely natural aspect this, in its
almost dramatic contrasts, has a unique fas-
cination. As the Hawaiian Islands rise out
of the sea to the vision of one who sees them
for the first time from the deck of a ship,
their aspect is both rugged and august.
The mountain-ranges are distinguished by
great strength of outline and boldness of
proportion ; and, as seen against the sky, as
we saw them, with the moon rising behind
them, have in them something indescriba-
bly mysterious and noble. But as they are
more nearly approached, they are seen to
be clothed almost to their summits with a
rich verdure, and this has a singularly gra-
cious quality of softness and depth.
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 145
This feature in the landscape seems
somehow typical of the people. Their his-
tory reveals them as distinguished by char-
acteristics of great savagery and cruelty;
but their ordinary aspect, and their un-
spoiled manner toward strangers, where it
still survives, is one of an individual and
most unusual charm. No one who has seen
them will find himself tempted to compare
them to any other people or race. Wher-
ever they derived the traits of form and
feature that distinguish them, and their
racial origin is hidden in considerable ob-
scurity, they do not resemble the races or
people from whom they are supposed to be
sprung. The race found by the first ex-
plorer, Juan de Gatan, commander of the
Spanish exploring expeditions sent out
when the ships of Spain dominated the
waters of the Pacific, was Polynesian; but
it has not been claimed that any other Poly-
nesians closely resembled them. It is un-
doubtedly the case that, during their long
occupancy of the beautiful islands in which
they found their home, they underwent
those changes which, as Buckle in his ' l His-
tory of Civilization" has shown, are as in-
evitable as the effect of climatic and kin-
dred influences. In a latitude in which the
range of the thermometer, all the year
round, is ordinarily between 75 and 85
146 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
F., it is not probable that great robustness
or aggressive vigor would be developed;
and it has not been. On the other hand, in
a region singularly favorable to the develop-
ment of almost every variety of tropical and
semi-tropical fruits and flowers, without the
arid and desolating influence of long
droughts, it was equally to be expected that
this rare beauty and affluence in every nat-
ural environment should find its reflec-
tion in the singular softness, grace, and
beauty of the people. The mountains make
them strong and stalwart, their height,
grace, and symmetry of physical develop-
ment are especially noteworthy, and their
plains, fertile, flowery, and ever verdant,
make them soft and indolent and self-
indulgent. No stranger can see them for
the first time, disfigured as they now too
often are by the hideous costumes of our
modern civilization, without being dazzled
sometimes by a beauty of form and feature
and of expression which, to an artist's eye,
when they are seen in their own lovely set-
ting, is a perpetual delight. * * Here, ' ' such
a one would be tempted to say, "is some-
thing like the original Garden of Eden, as
it might have been."
Yet the earlier and tribal history of the
people was neither beautiful nor engaging.
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 147
In the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, a foun-
dation which owes its existence to the wise
munificence of a Hawaiian princess who
was, at the time of her death, the wife of an
American merchant in Honolulu, we may
see not alone the emblems and implements
of domestic life, but those others which in
the history of the most primitive peoples
are the symbols of its religion. Along with
these one may read, too, if his curiosity
leads him in such a direction, the story of
that strange admixture of grotesque be-
liefs, rites, and priestly terrorism which
repeats a story that, alas ! in the history of
the world's religions, is as old as the race.
Two elements go, ordinarily, to make up
these religions, and they were not wanting
in the Hawaiian Islands. One of them has
been superstition, a blind terror begot-
ten by persistent misinterpretation of the
forces of nature, with its invariable accom-
paniment of a belief in the power of evil
spirits in earth and air and sky; and the
other the cleverness of unscrupulous men
who, as priests or religious teachers, per-
petuated among the people a blind fear,
which by the adroit manipulation of charms
and amulets, and, above all, by the mysteri-
ous influence of the taboo, they maintained
and deepened. We are accustomed to as-
148 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
sociate that word " taboo" with the idea of
prohibition; but, as a matter of fact, it
stood for a whole code of religious rites,
ceremonies, and privileges, as well as re-
strictions, which covered every man's life,
reached out to and controlled the disposi-
tion of his goods, appropriated to so-called
religious uses, if it saw fit, the products of
his fields and fishing-grounds, and, in its
extreme form, when it became a part of the
worship of the people, sent the king for
days and nights to the temple in a continu-
ous act of worship, while the altars reared
under the trees reeked with the blood of
human sacrifices. It was characteristic of
a note of singular brutality in the religion
of these island peoples that, in a silence
which, if it could, muzzled the mouth of
every man, woman, and child, beast and
fowl, the priest killed a hog, and then put
to death a man. The hog was then roasted
and eaten, and the people returned thanks
after the feast by putting to death another
man!
Such conceptions and usages prepare one
to find among a people whose they are a
morality of the very lowest type ; and of the
unnamable vices of a race with singularly
engaging traits of disposition I may not
speak here. They are a tragic commentary
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 149
upon the theory that heathen peoples, so far
as their religion is concerned, may wisely
be left to themselves, and that efforts to
better them lead them only to exchange
one set of vices for another; and are, inci-
dentally, a no less interesting commentary
upon the relative value of religious cere-
monial, and of those great informing and
inspiring principles which touch the
springs of conduct rather than direct the
rules and instruments of worship. A
stranger who had landed in one of the Ha-
waiian Islands when they were as yet un-
trodden by the white man might easily have
formed a conception of them as an ex-
tremely devout people. They never built
a canoe or used a new fishing-rod without
offering a prayer and making a sacrifice
to their patron god. Much more, if a house
were to be built or a boat to be launched,
was the priest invoked and the sacrifice
offered. But in pathetic contrast with such
usages was the fact that those two most
august facts of life, as we view it, marriage
and death, were unattended with any reli-
gious ceremonial whatever. And in this
striking departure from the custom of other
pagan peoples we have a very impressive
demonstration of the essential animalism of
the people.
150 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW
In the most picturesque of the many
interesting collections assembled in the
Bishop Museum at Honolulu are specimens
of the superb plumed spears and robes
worn by the chieftains and sovereigns of
the Hawaiian tribes. One of them is a mag-
nificent canary-colored vestment made of
feathers of inimitable richness and deli-
cacy, and behind these are seen the vari-
ous insignia which denoted the rank and
achievements of these hereditary chief-
tains, one of whom became in time their
king. For here, as so often elsewhere, the
political evolution seems to have been from
an association of heads of tribes who be-
came in time vassals to one who was
stronger and cleverer than the rest. The
Hawaiian chiefs found their master, after
long periods of warfare with one another,
in that powerful ruler of the island of Ha-
waii who, having first conquered the whole
of his own island, pushed his victories over
the other islands, and demonstrated in
many ways the qualities of a really great
sovereign. His statue has wisely been
placed in front of the Government Building
in Honolulu, and no one who looks at it will
refuse to own that its original was justly
called * ' Kamehameha the Great. ' ' To this
man, wise, strong, and courageous, his peo-
IMPRESSIONS OP THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 151
pie owe a lasting debt ; and under his hand
there came to them, for the first time, the
enjoyment of those individual rights which
under a feudal government are unknown.
How welcome they must have been, we can
realize only when we contrast the original
condition of such a primitive people with
our own. The artist, the poet, the senti-
mental traveler, are fond of reminding us
how much of the world 's earlier beauty and
simplicity civilization in its advance has
spoiled. Yes, it may be so, from a super-
ficial point of view; but how would our
artistic or sentimental friends have enjoyed
a condition of things in which, when their
own feudal chief went abroad, they and
their families were obliged to be prostrate
on the ground face downward, and where
it was death for a common man to remain
standing at the mention of the king 's name,
or when his sovereign's old coat was car-
ried by? Civilization, when it enables a
man to call not only his soul, but, when the
tax-gatherer is done with it, his property
his own, has ill-educated us to appreciate
the condition of a people among whom two
thirds of all that they produced was the
property of the chiefs, big and little, who
ruled over them. We may be reverting to
such a type as this in our great cities, with
152 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
their greater imposts, but happily we have
not gotten there yet.
This leads me naturally to the next and,
to many minds, more interesting period in
Hawaiian history when its peaceful seclu-
sion was at length invaded by alien influ-
ences which, in a comparatively short time,
have largely changed its aspect and pros-
pects. The first intrusion, as we have seen,
was Spanish, but it was speedily followed
by the visit of Captain Cook in 1778, and
later by that of Vancouver. Cook ac-
counted himself the discoverer of the Ha-
waiian Islands, and as a compliment to an
English peer who was at that time First
Lord of the Admiralty, gave them the
name by which school-boys have oftenest
known them, the Sandwich Islands.
The sentimental moralist who has
reached this point in the history of newly
discovered territory has, as I have inti-
mated, a tempting opportunity for raising
the question how far civilization has really
elevated the character of the savage. In
the case of the Hawaiian Islands there is
a great deal that lends itself to such a dis-
cussion in the painful history of civilized
commercial invasion, and the most repul-
sive features of this are to be found in con-
nection with both the naval and commercial
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 153
marine of the nations that, from their re-
discovery by Cook, sought a foothold in
these gems of the Pacific. I need not re-
hearse that history here. It has, alas! its
familiar counterpart all around the world;
but it has also this honorable sequence, that
there was speedily awakened in many
American hearts the purpose to give to the
Hawaiian Islands that strong foundation of
Christian morality which can alone make
either a community or a nation enduringly
great.
I may not trace here the history of Chris-
tian missions in the Sandwich Islands, but
I may at least say, as one wholly outside of
the communions by which originally they
were initiated and conducted, that no one
can visit these islands without recognizing
the noble work which Christian missiona-
ries have done there. By a curious confu-
sion, a habit of jesting allusion to the "sons
of missionaries" in the Hawaiian Islands
has, in many minds, been associated with
the missionaries themselves, and perhaps
it may be worth while for an outsider to
say how much in his judgment it amounts
to. I suppose that in Honolulu, as else-
where, the sons of missionaries have turned
to secular callings, and I presume they have
conducted themselves with shrewdness and
154 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
success. It is difficult to see why they
should not have done so ; and if a mission-
ary 's residence in the Hawaiian Islands
gave his son a business advantage there, it
would seem natural enough that he should
have embraced it. I have heard in other
foreign fields bitter words about the mis-
sionaries, and in one instance took the
trouble to follow these complaints and
sneers to their source. It was said that
missionaries took advantage of opportuni-
ties to push their way into business agen-
cies, and so to crowd out men whose liveli-
hood these agencies were. On inquiry I
found that the whole basis for these whole-
sale charges was that one missionary in a
foreign land who had lost his voice there
had turned to a secular task which was
offered to him, and which it was found that
he could do better than the man who stood
next to him in competition for it ; and that
was all there was to it. Under such circum-
stances, the whole superstructure of mis-
representation crumbled to the ill-smelling
fragments of business jealousy. In the
same way I found, on inquiry in Honolulu,
that a good deal of the bitterness against
missionaries had to do with their coura-
geous witness against the glaring immorali-
ties of their own race. They have been
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 155
contemptuously described as, there and
elsewhere, living in luxury and indolence,
and their homes as illustrating what, to the
natives among whom they labored, was a
prodigal expenditure. Well, yes, when one
is living among a community whose ward-
robe consists of a bit of cotton cloth, and
their daily menu a bowl of rice or taro, a
rocking-chair and a pair of cotton sheets
may seem bloated self-indulgence; but the
question whether a civilized human being is
called, in order to do missionary work, to
accept barbarian standards of decency or
modest comfort would still remain to be
answered.
A much more interesting and more im-
portant question, whether in the Hawaiian
Islands or anywhere else, is the question,
What was the influence of these Christian
missionaries and those who came after them
upon the manners, habits, beliefs, and
ideals of the people to whom they came?
At the base of the state, it forever needs
to be remembered there is the family; and
the first thing that Christian households,
largely drawn from New England ances-
tries, spoke to was, so far as it existed at
all, the Hawaiian conception of the family.
We were shown in the streets of Honolulu
a wooden house which had been made in
156 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
New England and shipped piecemeal to its
destination. It was as delightful a bit of
incongruity as could be imagined, with its
two stories, white clapboards, green blinds,
narrow windows, low ceilings, and the rest.
One perspired at the thought of the suffer-
ings of those who had summered in that
hot second story, and wondered at the per-
sistence of provincial type that could have
done so stupid a thing. But also one could
not but straightway remember how much
else that was fine and high had persisted
along with it, how much patient courage
and steadfast self-sacrifice had gone to the
acquirement of the heathen speech, had
wrought with the pagan mothers and chil-
dren, and day by day had held up before
that wild and lawless savagery the pure
and strenuous examples of gentleness and
godliness and unswerving devotion to duty.
That that large expenditure of labor and
money has produced in the Hawaiian Isl-
ands enduring results, no one who knows
them will pretend to question.
But along with them there were coming
to pass political changes of equal and last-
ing import. I have spoken of Kamehameha
I, whose statue stands in front of the Gov-
ernment Building in Honolulu, and whose
noble presence proclaims him every inch a
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 157
king. It is not easy to imagine what would
have been the fate of civilization in the Ha-
waiian Islands if this sovereign and his
vassals had antagonized it. But the king,
if not the feudal chiefs, had the rare dis-
cernment to see how much of order, secu-
rity, and prosperity the white man could
give to his people, and to welcome changes
from an arbitrary paternalism, which ri-
pened under his successors into something
like a constitutional form of government
with definite land tenures, the dethrone-
ment of the heathen priests, and, under
Kamehameha III, in 1833, the proclamation
of a bill of rights, and the creation, a few
years later, of an executive ministry, a ju-
diciary department, and the promulgation
of a constitution. In other words, a race of
savages gradually organized itself into a
state ; and, in the whole process of organi-
zation, it is but just to say that our own in-
stitutions and our own progress and devel-
opment under them exercised a paramount
influence.
But, alas! you cannot make a state by a
constitution, and our own times have had no
more dramatic illustration of this than the
Hawaiian Islands. That able ruler, Kame-
hameha I, who had the wisdom to discern
that the foreign peoples who had found
158 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW
their way to his shores were the product of
institutions which he and his might wisely
borrow, was followed by successors, male
and female, who had neither his prudence,
his principles, nor his genius for statesman-
ship. There were five Hawaiian rulers in
the Kamehameha succession, but when, in
1874, Kamehameha V, the last of that dy-
nasty, died, the situation became gravely
complicated. There was, as I have indi-
cated, a legislative body, and this, after
much delay, proceeded to the election of
David Kalakaua, who received the suf-
frages of a considerable number of his own
countrymen, but especially of the Ameri-
can residents. Opposed to him, however,
was Queen Emma, of late years so familiar
a figure in Hawaiian history, the widow of
Kamehameha IV. Queen Emma was the
representative of the anti- American senti-
ment in the island, and besides the consid-
erable British sympathy which ranged
itself on her side, she had a large following
of various nationalities and of not very
fragrant record. In a word, the lines were
drawn and the battle set in array for that
long struggle, the latest issue of which re-
sulted so recently in the annexation to our
own Republic of what was not long before
the kingdom of Hawaii.
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 169
I may not trace the history of that strug-
gle here, but I may perhaps be permitted to
state the conclusions which I think almost
any dispassionate student of history must
inevitably reach in regard to it.
In the first place, it is important that the
materials out of which this new state had
inevitably to be made must be clearly recog-
nized. There were, to begin with, the na-
tive populations. Their characteristics
have already been in some measure indi-
cated, and these, it is to be remembered,
have not at any time revealed any consid-
erable substantiveness of character. The
native Hawaiian was kindly, but cruel;
graceful, but essentially savage ; and super-
stitious to an almost incredible degree. It
has been charged that when the people re-
ceived Christianity they gave a cordial
welcome to both its teachers and its teach-
ings; but I apprehend that there can be
little doubt that both pagan beliefs and
superstitious practices still survive in what
are reckoned as Christian households. An
intelligent observer to whom I am much
indebted, Captain Lucien Young, U. S. N., 1
says: "The idols have been destroyed or
hid away, but in secret haunts, concealed
from the public gaze, the natives practise
The Real Hawaii,'' p. 73, passim.
160 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
their incantations and believe in the mys-
teries of their time-honored religion."
When it is remembered that many of these
are most intimately associated with their
usages as to alleviating pain or healing or
warding off disease, it can readily be seen
how difficult it has been to uproot them.
The physician attached to a Christian mis-
sion or civilized community in those islands,
when called to the bedside of a native pa-
tient, has had to battle not only with the
disease, but with the persistent faith, if not
of the patient, then of his whole household
and all his neighbors, in a science of medi-
cine which consisted in propitiating some
offended deity by the sacrifice of a pig, and
sometimes (as late as 1820) by the sacrifice
of a child. Nor does this seem surprising
when one comes to understand the charac-
ters of the gods, who, as conceived by their
worshipers, were certainly embodiments of
cruelty and bestiality. No description of
the rites of worship which the first visitors
to these islands found there could be ad-
mitted to the pages of a decent publication ;
yet long after the earlier rule of savage
chieftains had been superseded by consti-
tutional forms of government, some of these
survived in the royal household; and a
queen who professed to have unreservedly
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 161
accepted the Christian religion kept about
her the kahunas, or priests and heathen
doctors, as her closest friends and advisers.
With this background of unredeemed
heathenism to build upon, it was not more
natural that it should reappear under new
forms of civic order than that these, in turn,
should be made the opportunity for every
unscrupulous adventurer who had the auda-
city to ingratiate himself with this simple
people or to lend his cleverness to the tur-
bulent or revolutionary tendencies which
from time to time appeared among them.
The American residents and others who, in
1875, elected Kalakaua as king, chose, I
suppose, the best available man ; but he was
not even a pure Hawaiian, being reputed to
be the illegitimate son of a negro cobbler
who came to the Sandwich Islands, no one
seems to know on what errand, from our
own Boston! This certainly was pretty
poor stuff out of which to have made a king,
and it throws an interesting light, inciden-
tally, upon the sometime struggles of our
Anglican brethren to maintain in the isl-
ands an " ancient dynasty"! But I refer
to it now because it helps to explain what,
in the subsequent history of the govern-
ment, came to be such a curious and con-
stantly recurring characteristic of the suc-
11
162 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW
cessive cabinets, administrations, and the
like. Kalakaua's chief counselor and
mentor was an ex-Mormon missionary of
such unsavory character that his own com-
munity had expelled him one who, after
having swindled his Mormon associates
and apostatized from them, fled to Honolulu
and devoted himself to inflaming the na-
tives against the whites. This man stands
foremost in a long series of disreputable
men, Americans, Englishmen, and of what-
ever other vagrant race that drifted into
the islands, who in any political crisis came
to the surface, always as fomenters of dis-
cord, friends of unbridled license, and
leaders of every vicious element in the
community. In reaching a conclusion as to
what was our duty as a nation to these peo-
ple, it is impossible to leave out of sight
such obvious considerations as those facts
which I have rehearsed suggest. I am not
a disciple of a policy of imperialism, but I
confess, in view of the situation as it existed
in the Hawaiian Islands when they voted
to seek annexation to the United States, I
am unable to see what else we could have
done than to grant their request.
For their position in the Pacific indicated
that if they are not strong enough to rule
themselves, they belong rightfully under
that protection which we, of all other peo-
ples, can best give them. Whatever earlier
civilization, Spanish, English, or French,
found them, seized them, or sought to en-
rich itself from them, we alone earliest
recognized a duty to them, and sought, by
bringing to bear upon them the highest and
most transforming influences, to discharge
it. We alone strove to build up among them
a civilization which had for its foundation
some other motive than the passion of con-
quest or the love of gain. We alone gave
them schools and teachers, and the good
physician with the Christian home. We
alone enriched them with those who, what-
ever may be said of their descendants, lived
pure and noble lives, and did among them
good and lasting work. After these, it is
true, have come the trader, the land-specu-
lator, the sugar-planter, and the rest; and
possibly it may be as well that the authority
of the United States should stay in the Ha-
waiian Islands to regulate them, as well as
to protect its own international rights.
International rights, I say, for as to the
growing importance of these there can be
no smallest doubt. One need not be dazzled
or blinded by the glamour of imperial ex-
pansion in order to recognize that no re-
public such as ours can draw a line round
164 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOEROW
its domestic territory and ignore its duties
and its opportunities with reference to the
rest of the world. We must trade with
other countries than our own; and if we
have anything good that they have not, we
must needs wish, and, even though there
should be pecuniary profit in it, may rightly
wish, to impart it to them. But we cannot
do this unless we can get at them, and we
cannot get at them without the physical re-
sources and conveniences which shall ena-
ble us to do so. Now, the Hawaiian Isl-
ands stand preeminently for one of these
conveniences. No traffic with the great
East can be maintained, except at almost
ruinous cost, without some foothold between
its coasts and ours for a Pacific coaling-
station, and no greater opportunity for the
enlargement of certain departments of agri-
culture and trade than the Hawaiian Isl-
ands afford could easily be discovered.
If we do our duty toward them, we shall
find our interest in doing it, and to that duty
and to those toward whom we are to dis-
charge it there is no great world-power that
is so near as we. Geographical, commer-
cial, and moral considerations here seem all
to point one way.
But, alas ! it would seem as if the people
toward whom we are to discharge such duty
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 165
would soon cease to be. There is one mys-
terious effect of civilization upon weaker
races concerning which the historian and
the psychologist have yet to give us more
light. The United States, since its people
first went to the Sandwich Islands, has car-
ried on no exterminating war. With shame
and confusion it must be owned that it has
taught them many vices, or rather perhaps
it would be more true to say it has cor-
rupted them with the taint of forms of those
vices which were distinctly its own. But,
on the other hand, it has given them the
arts, and learning, and civic order, and the
examples of industry and thrift. But it
cannot be said that they have prized the
learning highly or widely profited by it.
For no reason which can be directly trace-
able to us, it must be owned that they are a
decaying race, and their more recent statis-
tics reveal this with dramatic significance.
According to Captain Young, 1 whom I have
already quoted, the eight islands composing
the Hawaiian group have a total population
of 107,000, of which, however, only 35,000
are Hawaiians. There are 10,000 people
of mixed descent, in part Hawaiian; the
rest are Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese,
and other Europeans, of which last, with
i " The New Hawaii," p. 327.
166 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW
Americans, there are 14,000. In other
words, nearly two thirds of the people of
these islands are other than Hawaiian.
That this proportion is likely to be in-
creased along the same line seems probable,
and the time seems likely to come when the
native Hawaiian, like the native North
American Indian, will have disappeared.
Who they are who will ultimately be
dominant in his place it is not easy to fore-
cast. At any moment the United States
may close its Hawaiian doors to those races
which, of the Eastern world, are nearest to
the islands, and which are now represented
there by a large proportion of the popula-
tion some twenty-four thousand Japanese
and fifteen thousand Chinese, who to-day,
in fact, taken together, make an element
larger than that represented by the Ha-
waiians themselves or any other peoples.
Both these races have brought to the Ha-
waiian Islands forces and qualities which,
originally, were foreign to the native peo-
ple. As the eye ranges the distant hill-
sides which flank the rear of Honolulu, it
is arrested by the shining patches of
ordered verdure which, terrace upon ter-
race, climb up along their slopes; and the
inquirer is told, in every instance, that these
IMPRESSIONS OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS 167
are the farms and market-gardens of the
Japanese, who have in so many like places
taught the soil to yield its increase where
it never did before. Such qualities, in any
people, are sources of power and wealth;
and when it is remembered that behind the
Japanese have come the Chinese, whose
thrift in the Eastern world is a proverb
like that of the French or Germans in the
Western, it is plain that their influence
upon the future of the Hawaiian Islands
must be deep and lasting. Already, in the
case of the Chinese, has their capacity for
agricultural work revealed itself in the vast
sugar-plantations which American and
other capital has acquired and is adminis-
tering with characteristic skill and profit;
and already there are tokens of the wealth
which, aided by this foreign labor, these
can extract from a rich soil and from singu-
larly favorable climatic conditions.
So the problem is set: the mixture of
races, energies, industries, and of the
higher moral qualities which these various
strains, ancestries, and activities stand for.
There are other theaters in which the same
drama is being played out under much
broader and, it may be, more complex con-
ditions, but not in which a more interesting
168 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
or indeed dramatic experiment is being
made. It will be for the government and
the people of the American Republic to
demonstrate that they are equal to a task in
itself so delicate, and in its consequences
so grave and important.
VI
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS
RELIGIONS
VI
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS
EELIGIONS
ONE advantage in being a citizen of the
United States, which has not perhaps
occurred to all of us, is that the American
traveler is likely to see the great East in its
most impressive perspective. Unlike Euro-
pean travelers, he does not ordinarily ap-
proach it through the Suez Canal, but
across the Pacific. And the happy result
which this will secure to him will be this:
that he sees, first Japan, then China, and
last India. An artist would tell him that
he has thus secured the crescendo of color-
Japan, with its charm of prettiness and de-
tail ; China, more massive but more somber ;
and then India, with its wealth of color and
outline, which culminate at last in Ceylon.
A very considerable part of this impres-
sion will be derived from Indian architec-
ture; and in all respects the most splendid
effects in architecture are those achieved in
171
172 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW
the temples, with their mass of decoration,
and their infinite richness of detail and
color wrought out in gold and lacquer
enamel.
Inevitably, the mind reaches back of the
structures and fabrics, the temples and the
palaces, to the people. What are they like ;
what do they believe ; what of their future ?
What does religion, with them, stand for,
and how far do we of the West understand
them or their beliefs, and do justice to
either? These are questions which, espe-
cially as they relate to Christian missions,
must needs interest us. Indeed, what more
fascinating vista could there be than that
which opens before him who, to-day, turns
his feet, on whatever errand, to those lands
and races which, of late, in such wonderful
ways, are having all their doors flung open
to the world! Whatever else was true of
the men who, as missionaries, first set on
foot that mighty invasion of the heathen
world which from such small beginnings
has grown to such noble and stately propor-
tions, this certainly was not true, that they
had then advanced to such a recognition of
the presence of God even in heathendom as
led them, first of all, to seek for sympathetic
contact with it. We cannot read the story
of what they said and of how they wrought
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 173
without recognizing, in all early missionary
enterprises, in modern times, a very im-
perfect apprehension of the fact that God
has not left himself anywhere without wit-
ness among men, and that their little sys-
tems who dwell or have dwelt in pagan
lands, whether of philosophy or religion,
while but broken lights that were destined
to have only their brief day-in that most
like so many of our own! were, after all,
yet broken lights of God; dim glimmers of
the fuller splendors of a coming day. It
is in this, on the other hand, that I think
our noblest progress has been made. The
comparative study of religions has brought
to light, for every student who has pursued
it with thoroughness and candor, at least
two clear convictions one that God has
had, in all human history, many ways of re-
vealing himself; and the other that there
is, after all, no wholly right method of mis-
sionary endeavor other than that which St.
Paul pursued on Mars Hill when, as he
passed by, he saw an altar to the unknown
God. Not ridicule, nor denunciation, nor
contempt, was his method; but recognition
recognition of the deep want of man and
of the often honest though often blunder-
ing methods of men who sought to find an
answer to it!
174 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
Need I tell those to whom I am writ-
ing that this must needs become the method,
not only in the domain of religion, but in
all other undertakings in connection with
which we of Anglo-Saxon lineage are turn-
ing our faces toward those new lands and
peoples that beckon us to-day? It must
begin in the domain of religion, because re-
ligion lies at the foundation of all national
life and personal conduct, and it must begin
there by being just and speaking the truth.
I can best make my meaning clear, at this
point, by an illustration; and in choosing
it I think you will agree with me that I am
selecting an institution which lies at the
basis not only of religion but of all social
order. It was my privilege, little more than
a year ago, to spend some months in India,
and, while there, it was almost instinctive
to seek such light as was available upon the
family life of a people that, whatever we
may say of their defects, have disclosed in
a long and memorable history some of the
most noteworthy traits that mark a great
race and a really high civilization. For,
the family life is, after all, the key to all the
rest. In studying the history of another
Eastern people, not so numerous as that of
India, but marked from their earliest ex-
istence with strong and fine traits I mean
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 175
the Hebrew-it is impossible not to recog-
nize how powerfully and how enduringly
the principles which determined the organi-
zation of the family and the laws that gov-
erned it have influenced and determined
the whole progress of its growth and
achievement. It was the glory of our Puri-
tan ancestry that, in an age that had largely
lost them, it set about restoring some of
those more dominant notes of the Hebraic
household which made the families of Israel
such mighty forces in the world; and no
man who cares to understand those forces
that lie among the foundations will be in-
different to those facts which reveal the
law of the home and, e.g., the place of wo-
man in it anywhere.
Well, what have we usually been told on
these points as to the situation among these
various peoples who may be largely de-
scribed as inhabiting the peninsula of
India? It must be owned, I think, that
whatever the sources of our information,
the popular impressions of Western peoples
have ordinarily been that, so far as the do-
mestic life of India is concerned, it has been
one of uniform cruelty, lust, and degrada-
tion. The custom of child marriage; the
hideous usage of burning widows, known
as "suttee"; the studied maintenance of
176 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOREOW
conditions in which women lived in rigid
seclusion, in profound ignorance, and
under a masculine rule at once without
shame and without pity; these are tradi-
tions in which I presume you were brought
up, as I was. It is enough to say of them,
one and all, that our popular impressions
of them are an often grotesque distortion
or exaggeration of the facts. I was so for-
tunate, more than once, as to make the
acquaintance of native East Indians of dis-
tinguished rank and varied culture. More
than once they introduced me to their fami-
lies and presented me to their wives and
daughters. In all such cases they were, I
beg to say, persons who retained their an-
cient religion, Buddhist, Mohammedan, or
Parsee, as the case might be, and who had
no keener enthusiasm than that which cher-
ished their national, racial, and religious
traditions. They answered questions about
their homes and children, and the laws that
governed them, and they gave me chapter
and verse in their sacred writings for what
they told me in regard to them. Now, then,
let us look at some of these testimonies as
indicating not what may have been, and
doubtless was, a degraded practice, here
and there for if we were judged by these
our own record in the courts of the civilized
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 177
world would not be an unsullied one-but
the law or rule of life set for many millions
of people in its authoritative documents.
The extracts which I shall quote are taken
from the laws of Manu Manu being the
semi-divine lawgiver of the East, whose
works, constituting the Veda in its broader
sense, fall into three general divisions of
Sacred Ceremonial and Domestic. From
these last I take those laws which define
the place of woman in the economy of East
Indian life:
MANU.
"Where women are honored, there the Devas
(gods) are pleased; where they are dishonored,
no sacred rite yields rewards. Ill, 56.
Where female relations live in grief, the
family soon wholly perishes; but that family
where they are not unhappy ever prospers.
Ill, 57.
In like manner, care must be taken of barren
women, of those who have no sons, of those whose
family is extinct, of wives and widows faithful
to their lords, and of women afflicted with dis-
eases. VIII, 29.
In order to protect women and Brahmins, he
who kills in the cause of right, commits no sin.
VIII, 349.
One's daughter is the highest object of ten-
12
178 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MOEEOW
derness; hence if one is offended by her, he
must bear it without resentment. IV, 185.
A maternal aunt, the wife of a maternal uncle,
a mother-in-law, and a paternal aunt, must be
honored like the wife of one's spiritual teacher;
they are equal to the wife of one's spiritual
teacher. II, 131.
(In India the wife of a spiritual teacher is
regarded as a living goddess.)
Toward the sister of one's father and of one's
mother and toward one's elder sister, one must
behave as toward one's mother; but the mother
is more venerable than they. II, 133.
But the teacher is ten times more venerable
than the sub-teacher, the father a hundred times
more than the teacher, but the mother a thousand
times more than the father. II, 145.
I apprehend that if that last rule or precept
of Mann's were propounded in some Amer-
ican homes we should find it rather strong
meat for some "heads of families"!
But it is said that there are customs and
usages in India, such as child-marriage,
which are monstrous and altogether inde-
fensible. Most surely they are, if they ex-
ist as they are popularly represented to
exist. But suppose that we obey the excel-
lent maxim which enjoins, "audi alteram
partem," and hear what a witness of their
own has declared, placing himself on record
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 179
the other day in Carnegie Hall in New
York in these words : l
It is said that the greatest curse is the child-
marriage in India, and that it is sanctioned by
religion ; but this is not true. Religion distinctly
forbids it, and in many parts of India so-called
child-marriage is nothing but a betrothal. The
betrothal ceremony takes place some years before
the real marriage ceremony ; sufficient cause may
prolong the period of betrothal for even three
or four years. In Northern India the real mar-
riage does not take place until the parties are
of proper age; it is attended with music, feast-
ing, and the presentation of gifts. A betrothed
wife stays in her father's house until the time of
her real marriage. In Southern India, customs
are not the same; many abuses have crept in,
and child-wives are often given to their hus-
bands at too tender an age. The Hindoo law
does not prevent the remarriage of the betrothed
wife after the death of her betrothed husband ;
but it says that under such circumstances the
parents of the betrothed wife commit a sin, as
of giving false witness before the court of
justice.
In this connection, the following remarks
are abridged from " The Women of India,"
published by the Madras Christian Litera-
ture Society:
i " Woman's Place in Hindoo Religion," a lecture
by Swami Abhedananda.
180 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
It is not surprising that people should cling
with tenacity to customs supposed to be sanc-
tioned by ancient religious authority, and it has
been said that in India every custom, whether
unintelligible, or positively indefensible, be-
comes a religious question. Dewan Bahadur R.
Ragunath Row has probably said all that can be
said on this subject, in the two editions of his
pamphlet, "The Hindoo Law of Marriage," pub-
lished first in 1882, and in his reply to a review
of that pamphlet by two learned Madhva pun-
dits, as well as in more recent papers; and his
countrymen must read and judge for themselves.
Happy will it be for Hindoos if they can
conclusively prove that their religious books do
not require them to break the laws of health and
reason and morality. If they do require it, so
much the worse for the laws, and all one can say
is that such laws cannot be inspired ; at any rate,
they can have no binding inspiration and au-
thority for those who now admit these evils.
A book of laws, however sacred it may be held,
ceases to be of abiding authority if those laws
are out of harmony with intellectual, social, and
moral progress. Is it not irrational to suppose
that the Laws of Manu a code compiled, accord-
ing to the latest computation, 1400 years ago
with its minute and childish formalities, its fan-
ciful, unequal, and retaliatory penalties, such as
mark the 'earliest forms of criminal legislation,
its uniform leniency shown to a certain class
of the community, and its entire subordination of
women, should be fitted to regulate society in
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 181
the nineteenth century? Though there is much
that is majestic, benevolent, and beautiful about
the code, are there many among those who have
become accustomed to more humane and juster
laws who would like to live under it in the pres-
ent day ?
The conservative Hindoo, however, clings to
antiquity, and, in the matter of child-marriage,
those who protest against it have antiquity on
their side. Kama married Sita; Krishna mar-
ried Rukmini ; Arjuna married Draupadi ; Nala
married Damayanti, not as children, but as
grown up women. And as for the Hindoo re-
ligious books themselves, a careful study of them
seems to show that infant marriages "form no
part of a religious institution in India." The
very mantras that the Smritis prescribe to be
chanted during the marriage ceremonies clearly
indicate that the bride should be a woman, and
not an infant.
The second religious basis of child-marriage
is the doctrine of the Shraddha, or the ceremo-
nies that follow the funeral rites. Orthodox
Hindoos believe that if they do not leave sons
behind them, who will offer food for their souls
after death, they cannot reach heaven; if they
can secure this, they may rest satisfied. But in-
telligent men do not believe that balls of rice
and flour can have any effect on departed spirits ;
that any ceremonies or sacred places can acceler-
ate the progress of disembodied relatives to hea-
ven.
According to the Hindoo law, it is better for
182 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
a girl of a high caste to remain unmarried for
life than to marry one who is not of noble birth,
or from a family of the same caste, or one who is
unqualified or illiterate.
Well, I am not clear that while there is
no law among us of the nature of this last
precept, we have not a similar tradition
which, to many minds, has quite the force
of law!
But again; at this point I hear some one
ask : ' ' This is all very well ; but what have
you to say about the hideous practice of
1 suttee,' or the self-burning of widows?"
Believe me, it is not of the smallest conse-
quence what I have to say on such a subject,
but rather what they who are accused of
such a custom have to say. And here,
again, I summon the accomplished gentle-
man and scholar who has already testified,
Swami Abhedananda. In the address from
which I have just quoted, and which I have
yet to hear challenged, he says :
Self-burning of widows was not sanctioned by
the Hindoo religion, but was due to other causes,
the fact being that when the Mohammedans con-
quered India they treated the widows of the
soldiers so brutally that the women preferred
death, and voluntarily sought it. It is often
said that the "Christian government" has sup-
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 183
pressed "suttee"; but the truth is that the in-
itiative in this direction was taken by that noble
Hindoo, Rammohun Roy, who was, however,
obliged to secure the aid of the British Govern-
ment in enforcing his ideas, because India was
a subject nation. The educated classes among
the Hindoos had strongly protested against the
priests who supported this custom (which pre-
vailed only in certain parts of India), and ef-
forts had been made to suppress the evil by
force; but as it could not be done without offi-
cial help, appeal was made to the Viceroy,
Lord Bentinck, and a law against "suttee" was
passed. Thus the evil was practically sup-
pressed by the Hindoos themselves, aided by the
British Government.
And if I am met at this point by the ob-
jection that this is the mere assertion of a
partizan Oriental, whose statements must
needs be taken with large allowance, let me
quote one of the most eminent English au-
thorities in the same connection, Sir M.
Monier Williams. Says this learned Ori-
entalist and devout Christian scholar: "It
was principally his (Raja Rammohun
Roy's) vehement denunciation of this prac-
tice, and the agitation against it set on foot
by him, which ultimately led to the abolition
of 'sati' throughout British India in
1829. J>1
1 " Brahmanism and Hindooism," p. 482.
184 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
I need not pursue these illustrations fur-
ther. It is enough to say that every one
who cares to do so in a painstaking and can-
did spirit will be continually surprised to
find how wide-spread in Christian lands, and
in minds that we are wont to call intelligent
and sufficiently educated, has been the mis-
apprehension which has prevailed as to
customs and beliefs among peoples of alien
race and faith.
Do we ask, now, how this misapprehen-
sion has come about? I answer that it has
had a threefold cause: in ignorance; in a
not altogether unamiable passion for exag-
geration; and most of all, I am persuaded,
in a constitutional incapacity on the part of
the Western to understand the processes of
the Eastern mind.
Ignorance, pure and simple, has been a
potent factor in our misapprehensions
about Oriental foreigners. Those who have
lived longest among them will tell you of
that secretive, if not furtive, habit of mind
and of speech which so widely prevails in
the East ; by which we, with our all but hope-
less Western literalism, are so easily mis-
led, and which offers, I may add, so strong
a temptation to one with an often merely
playful impulse to amuse himself at the
expense of another's credulity. There is a
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 185
legend lingering still, I think, at the capital
of the Republic, that a British traveler, on
asking a native whose was the ghastly statue
of Washington which will be remembered as
sitting very inadequately clad in the neigh-
borhood of the Patent Office, was told that it
was a statue of ' ' Sitting Bull, ' ' and that the
stranger promptly entered the fact in his
note-book. It would be interesting to know
how much of our knowledge, e.g., of China,
for the last two hundred years, was derived
in the same way, and of the same accuracy.
The Abbe Hue's "Travels" have been con-
sidered a mine of authentic information;
and yet, nothing is more evident to one who
reads them than the extreme difficulty
which this accomplished scholar found,
anywhere, in obtaining trustworthy infor-
mation. Suspicion and distrust of the for-
eigner are instincts to which even we our-
selves are liable; but we cannot possibly
measure their force in minds whose every
tradition has trained them to abhor all
foreigners, and who have seen in the curi-
osity of the alien only a menace or a sneer.
And then, next to ignorance in the West-
ern observer of Eastern peoples, has been
the inevitable tendency to exaggeration.
The huge inductions from small groups of
facts; the hasty generalizations upon the
186 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
basis of a chance incident; the desire for
dramatic effect in literature or in mission-
ary addresses; the cheerful willingness to
believe the worst and not the best of one
whom we call indeed our brother or our
sister, but whom by no possibility we could
be induced to treat as such ; the knowledge
that if one comes back from a foreign land
without a traveler's tale, painted in strong
colors and of tragic proportions, he is not
quite fulfilling the expectations of the home
public; all this, together with the further
fact that books and discourses about for-
eigners are not criticized, as they should
be, by foreigners, has made it easy for the
modern peripatetic philosopher to create a
monster in literary portraiture, and then
persuade us to accept it as a photograph!
And then, finally, there has been a great
deal that has been brought to the West from
the East which is the product of that abso-
lute incapacity, on the part of the Western,
to understand Eastern mental processes.
The East thinks pictorially; the West liter-
ally and logically. The East abhors a strict
construction of language; the West lusts
after it with a strange and stupid opacity
as to all the traditions of the language
which it interprets. The East continually
employs indirections, without a thought of
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 187
deliberate untruthfulness. The West for-
ever construes them as if they could have
no other motive than to deceive. Under
such circumstances the wonder is, not that
the West and the East have so often misun-
derstood each other, but rather that they
have understood each other at all. "How
far is it to the next town?" you ask the inn-
keeper, from whom you have hired your
conveyance in China; and he tells you that
it is fifteen miles. You hire your carriage
at so much a mile, and then, when, having
made your visit to the neighboring town,
you return to your starting-point, you find
that the innkeeper has charged for a jour-
ney of fifteen miles going, and twenty-five
miles returning ! And then you call him a
liar, a thief, and a swindler, until he calls
your attention to the fact that your journey
going was down Mil all the way, and took
two hours, and, returning, up hill all the
way, and took four, and that he is justly
entitled to be paid for the time of horses
and servants and the extra wear and tear to
both of a heavy grade all the way home. In
a word, all the equity is on his side, and
you have simply misunderstood him ! It is
a homely parable, but it is pertinent, in our
dealings with Oriental peoples from the be-
ginning to the end.
188 THE EAST OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
And yet, when it has all been said, the
glorious fact still remains that our Western
civilization, literature, and most of all re-
ligion, have something to give to the peo-
ples that have them not, of incomparable
value and potency. One cannot but feel
sometimes as if what Dr. Horace Bushnell
called the "out-populating power" of the
Christian stock were one of its divinest
notes. Said a distinguished Chinese pro-
fessor in the Imperial University of Pekin
to an eminent American missionary: 1
"Why should we not send missionaries to
your country?" The missionary replied:
"By all means; send them, and make the
experiment." "But would your people
receive them?" he asked. "Certainly,"
was the answer; "and their message would
be heard and weighed." Do you suppose
this accomplished Chinese scholar set about
such a work? No. He was proud of his
race and his religion ; but he did not believe
in the latter ardently enough to make the
smallest effort to propagate it. He was a
Confucianist, and believed in some over-
ruling power which he called "Strength"
or "Tien"; and he had some notion of a
life to come, as evidenced by his worship
a Dr. W. A. P. Martin, President of the Imperial Tuner-
wen College, Pekin. See "The World's Parliament of
Religions," Vol. II, p 1139.
INDIA: ITS PEOPLE AND ITS RELIGIONS 189
of his ancestors : but between him and that
passion for souls, on fire with love for whom
a Divine Redeemer died, such as sent Mills
and his heroic companions forth to die for
God, there was a great gulf, to pagan mind
and heart immeasurable and impossible.
And so, we of this twentieth century and
this Christian Republic see our calling. In
all those new and largely untrodden realms
whose portals are opening to us to-day,
there is much to deplore, but much, let us
not forget it, to respect. Some of us here
can recall the smile of mingled mirth and
derision with which, a few years ago, it was
announced that the Mohammedans were
preparing to send missionaries and estab-
lish a Mohammedan mission in the city of
New York. We were so superior in our
Occidental virtue that the whole thing
seemed a huge joke. And yet, thus far,
Christianity has utterly failed to control
the vice of drunkenness. The great cities
of this land are dominated, not by their
churches or their universities, but by their
saloons; and Christian lands, wherever
they are to be found, are dotted, 1 as a Chris-
tian scholar has said, "with poorhouses,
asylums, jails, penitentiaries, reformato-
ries, built to deal with evils, nine-tenths of
i Dr E R. Sunderland, " The World's Parliament
of Religions," Vol. I, p. 630.
190 THE EAST OP TO-DAY AND TO-MOKROW
which are said to be caused directly or in-
directly by the drink habit, which Christen-
dom fails to control and is powerless to up-
root." But Mohammedanism in Oriental
lands does control it. Said Isaac Taylor,
after declaring that "Mohammedanism
stands in fierce opposition to gambling and
makes a gambler's testimony invalid in
law," "Islam is the most powerful total
abstinence association in the world."
And so, I repeat, we may see our calling.
Goethe declared long ago that he who knows
but one language knows none I commend
the maxim to those zealous gentlemen who
are kicking the classics out of our colleges
and substituting for them courses of botany
and civil engineering and Max Miiller ap-
plied the same maxim to religion. Heirs of
a great faith, it belongs to us to learn from it
so much at least of the law of the brother-
hood of humanity as shall enable us to treat
other faiths, other philosophies, other man-
ners than our own with courteous consid-
eration; and then, charged with great
treasures, beckoned forward by great ex-
amples, humbled and instructed by past
blunders and failures, to turn to the new
and larger tasks that are before us with a
high hope and a great patience 1
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