12th March, England it is commonly said that all roads lead to London. In China it can only be said of all roads that they lead to the next place; and what is true of China geographically is true in many another sense as well, The fact is that in spite of its oneness of language, of custom, and of religion, China does not strike the careful observer as an organic unity, but at the best as am organism only of the lowest type. It is a law that all well differentiated organisms have an easily observable centrality but centrality is the one mark that is wonderfully absent in things Chinese.
In every western city there is one spot, or in big cities many spots, which are centres of life. hey may be the brand space in front of some great cathedral where the irregular and crowded houses are as Ruskin says struck back into sudden obedience and lovely order; or the centre of converging streets where Bank or Bourse or Exchange make a nerve-centre giving and receiving the most distant influences; or the Public Gardens or Park or Square where grave citizens stroll and exchange greetings when the business of the day is done, This thing may be observed in its simplest form in our villages, in which the cottages generally group themselves in some relation to a centre, village green, where the rade forefathers of the hamlet practised archery once, and their not degenerate sons today play cricket. But in China there is no such natural centre of town or village life, A village is several rows, not a group, of cottages, where every man suns himself on his own doorstep a city is simply a Inrger number of such squalid streets enclosed by a wall; never converging to a public centre, never grouped around some noble building, the pride and glory of the place.
It is the same with regard to the country asa whole; all roads do not lead to Peking nor to any other centre. The frequent removals of the capital emphasise this, Let anyone think what Paris is to France or London in its different way to England, and then think what Peking is to China. The heart of the people does not turn to it, they do not think of it, and long for it, and wish to go to it; they are not proud of it: it is the great examining centre, and the great central office government, but it is not the centre of national life, To the ordinary mind the Chinese language will seem an instance of the same remarkable lack of unity. A little child who had just learned to count was counting for her own amusement to see how far she could go; after counting into the giddy hundreds with every variety of emphasis to make it interesting she stopped and enquired of us when she should get to the end? We assured her to her dismay that there was no end, that she might go on like that for ever and ever. She looked raeful, but presently her face cleared Any way," said the little maid, "there's an end to it this end;" and she cheerfully counted backwards to one, and rested there as at a safe terminus. Now the Chinese language has this peculiarity that there is no end to it in either direction, It is generally acknowledged that there is no finis to it; you may hope to finish learning another language but not the Chinese; it is not however so generally remembered that there is no beginning; it seems without form and void, Tf one has to swim across the Pacific it matters little where one is dropped; and. in Chinese you may begin anywhere, and give up when you are tired. he radicals are a ladder over the ship's side into the deep sea, Other languages are as manifestly growths as trees are, of which the varying history can be read in the dead wood. Ihe Chinese language has of course been subject to sunil but they are not so plainly seer larity of sound is no guide to si of form and vice versd; avd no new expression may be moulded with safety on the form of an already-existing one all is ready-made, in square-cut, solid blocks, so to speak, an arbitrary structure instead of root and stem and branch and delicate st fibre indicative of gradual growth. Indeed, the apparently arbitrary form might almost account forthe absurd Chinese theory that their written language is an invention of one man. In the days when we wrestled with rxrw, our woe was insulted by the rhapsodies of a Greek scholar over the divine simplicity and order of the Greek tongue we lived to see some reason in this, but we are sure the most confirmed sinologue will not have the effrontery to make any such claim for Chinese.
'A great name has often acted as a unifying power, and "Children of Israel," "Seed of Abraham," or "Followers Mohammed " are expressions that mean something. The Chinese call themselves Sons of Han, but it is 2 mere expression, and no man's heart is.fired with a feeling of brotherhood thereby. 'Their greatest name is of coarse Confucius; and it would not have been surprising if the grave of their sage had been a centre of national enthusiasm why is not Chiifu to the Chinese' what Mecca is to the Mohammedan? We do not blame them that they leave the ashes of their great 'I'eacher under a simple mound of earth in the open; but it would be interesting to know how many Chinese are drawa by reverence for that great name to visit that tomb, and to compare the number with the number of those who visit, say, the equally unpretending grave of Shakes-peace, We remember a discussion we bad in a European university with a Chinese whose English was perfect and voluble he argued against Christianity in China on the ground that it was a disintegrate ing power. He regarded the Confucian jon or system as the great bond of union in the Chinese people; the influence of which being weakened China would fall to pieces, It might however be shown that nothing which is not highly organised itself can act as a centre of organic life: the heart and brain of man are the most highly specialised parts of him. But can anyone profess to regard the Chinese Classics as an organic whole? Ihe Jewish sacred books considered as a national literature simply, extending over many hundreds of years, most markedly exhibit an "increasing purpose they are instinct with life, and give as it were a well-defined pulse beat in every part alike. They form an organic whole, having.a central iden round which all else clusters, to which all else is subordinate, They were capable therefore of becoming the centre of a people's life, and a uniting or unifying power. Do the classics show anything to correspond While admitting the general wholesomeness and very occasional sublimity of their teaching, we must admit that they consist of annals, treatises, ana, apophthegms and odes which may be taken almost in any order and display no culminating central idea, The way in which they are taught throughout the Empire accords with this; the teachers do not present a general scheme of analysis of the subject; they begin explaining at the first verse and work steadily through one sentence after another until they come out at the other side, then they begin another book. he very posty of treating the system thus shows its lack of trae centrality and hence its inadequacy as a centre of a people's life.
In the Christian church it was early found necessary to formulate a Creed it was possible to condense the central ideas of a system into a formula of few words; and though the Creeds have had their dividing influence as well, separa-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.