It is announced that the policy of the United States is ex-allis, "to seck a solution which may bring about permanent safety and peace to China." By safe'y is presumably meant safety to foreigners in China, However the several Powers may differ in other poi doubt they are at one here, and th rideed a cmsummation devoutly to be wished, But if, in seeking a solution, i is ex-posted that riy one meisuro or plan, may e found by which permanent results of safety can quickly be assured, I submit there is an obstacle not easily to be surmounted. This obstacle is one of moral character, and it does not consist so much in the moral character of the Chinese alan", as in the difference between the moral character of the East and that of the West. In the present crisis there is accentuated the collision between Europe and America in their Nineteenth Century " and China in her "Dark Ages." We cannot deal effectively with China because ws are on the same moral plane. In_the days of the Crusades Europe could deal with Asin a more nearly equal moral footing; and when in the 16th and 17th centuries the Poles stood as the bulwark of Europe against the Asiatic hordes, they were able to punish the Asiatic with a punishment the Asiatic understood, exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
In her Nineteenth Century of Christian teaching, Westera Europe, at least, has arrived at a stage of moral' advance wh to be cruel hurts herself more than it hurts her enemy, when it is no longer possible for her to. be barbarous. Yet the lex talions is the only law that carries a sanction sufficiently strong to affect the Chinese mind, To borrow the homoopathio dogma, similin similibus curantur, but in this case at least the "like" would have to be administered in far from homeeopathie doses.
It is unnecessary to argue that immediate results, if obtainable at all, are attainable only through fear. The vast bulk of the Chinese population will not for many a long day tolerate the foreigner for love, either of him, or of toleration in the abstract. The word fear is broad enough to cover every motive not a motive of love, but applies specifically to fear of punishment. In other words, immediate results of safety are to be secured only by so severely punishing the Chinese government and people that, for fear of a repetition of the punishment, they will forego a repetition of the crime.
But how are we equipped for admiuistering such punishment? It is as if a humane judge of the England of this day were sent backward to sit upon the bench of the England of 200 years ago, when there were more than a hundred capital crimes upon the statute books. Would that judge succeed in reducing crime in his circuit? In these advanced days we read the criminal history and the penal codes of even one hundred years azo with a shudder, and wonder how our fathers could have been so cruel. We lose sight of the fact that cruelty is relative, and that what we now uphold as necessary deterrent punishment may in less than a hundred years hence be shuldered at in turn as unnecessary inhumanity.
Whether we believe in vidence or in the immutable laws of ey tion, we must believe that the ci of a'given people in a given period is the highest of which that people in that period is calle, That which has survived needs no other proof of its necessity. It is not true that whatever is is best, for it may not survive till to-morrow, but it is not to denied that whatever rus was het, for otherwise both God and His law are denied.
If we follow the same reasoning for China, and recognise, as we must, that penalties are useless unless they be severe enough to de'er at least the average man from crime, then the punish: nen's pre: valent in Chima, barbarous as they may seem to us, must be considered necessary for their deterrent force, and in that view it is fortunate that the heats of the rulers are so mercifully hardened.
In the Southern States of the United States we have been brought face t" face with a similar situation in the collision between Nineteenth Century white morals and prehistoric Negro morals. Not_ to mention more serious matters, it is noticeable that the waite man rarely commits of the lesser crimes, whereas the Negro thieves continually and apparently with no sort of compunction, There are, of course, several agencies making for progress, moral and other, but we -are concerned now only with the agency of penal sanction, The white man his posed through the period of hanging for theft, amt th: helped to bri when no sanction, however sli needed to deter bite from that, is no longer tempted to do. Li un the mry, after bia colon the control of slavery, where he had no personal responsibility, was left under the control of insufficient. penal sanction. The Negeo thief finds no hardship in a comfortable well-fed jail. His body is there better cared for than it has ever been before, and his mind and heart are not touched. When he comes out, his associates may laugh at him for having been found out, but they will not contemn him for having been guilty, The white man who has embezzled ten thousand dollars is punished as severely with two yests in the penitentiary as the Negro who has stolen a pig with five years in the chain gang. Judges, recognising this philosophic truth, give sentences for longer terms in like cases to Negroes than to Whites. These judges sometimes suffer the odium of the charge of partiality and prejudice; but in fact they are acting only according to the highest law.
fo return to China, something of a compromise in ourselves between the civilised beings we now are, and the barbarous beings we once were, is necessary if we propose to deal effectively with the Chinese. It isos well to realise at the outset that no deterrent measure carried out solely on the moral line of modern Europe and America will deter the Chinese for one moment. Christian sentiment need not be horrified by this proposition. The judge who sternly hanged the thief two centuries ago was a better Christian in the see offic mankind than the judge who weakly commutes the murder.s's sentence in this day.
'The Japanese officer in London was speaking by the book when he said that his people were given free rein they eyuld teach the Chinese an effective lessor), "The Japanese are not so far advance' into the new era that they cannet relapse into the old with ample zest, and, given free rein, they could and would wreck a signal vengeance after the native method and with no civilised qualms. The Russtan soldiery, having now been. sufficiently scratched into Tartarism, might p answer the same purpose. As for us, of Western Europe and America, it would react too severely upon ourselves if we relapsed to the Asiatic level even for this single occasion.
The inevitalte conclusion from the history of the past few decades in China, and cum the application of the principles derived from the history of nil tine, is that if we remain on our own proper level in treating with the Chinese in the present crisis, se shall have no guarantee whatever that ifthe wind isnor"-nor-east next year the scenes of this year will not be repeated. Tt is warve than "useless to rely on diplomacy, except between nations equally controlled by equal moral ssnetions. The Chinese sucalled statesmen have been praised as great diplomats. It isan insult to the name of diplomacy. To be an unscrupulous Li not to be great diplomat, The success ful di plomat gives little to receive much. He succeeds, to be sure, by making the lift lo he gives appear to be more than the mu ch be receives, but what he does give gives with both hands. His promise is the promise of his people and all that he promises he can depend ujoa his people to fulfil, Not so the so-called diplomat of China, He promises all that is demanded of him, ard will use the defence of duress for failure to perform.
He remises without his people, gt hat' whether they fulfil or not depends not upon his remise, but upon the way the wind lows.
Diploniacy as such is of no value here. If we would have immediate results every man in power who is responsible for present or past suffering of innocent foreign ers should be hunted down though he fled to the uttermost parts of the empire, and the conquering arm should go to every contre of recent barbarity, and all the guilty, high and low, should be dealt. with in such manner as that the Chinese mind should roughly be jarred awake to the inexpediency—to put it on the first and lowest plane—of rebelling against foreign intrusion. If we cannot do this thorough ly ourselves, we might leave it to the Russians, who would not agree not to burn Peking, or to the Japanese who are ready at a word to cut a broad swath of destruction through the Isind.
But if, on the other hand, it is impossible to leave our own moral plane even so far as to be cruel by proxy, then let us once for all acknowledge that it is just by so much impossible for uy to ensure immunity from barbarous outbreaks for a long time to come.
Not that: this leaves the future without, hope, but the hope must be long deferred. and meantime we must expect heart sick ness. The Chinese character must wor, out its own redemption though foreign fluences may aid not a little to haste'. Ay. vance by guidance and example ang a little pressure now and then.
Ultimately and through Pie own processes of evoltition, China 1 re tome to realise that she cannot 7 she cannot Tse unto herself, that having passed "22 £0", to reali but meantime it will" toraahe beyond the ability to Geal with China on the Chinese moral plane, if We © sine into China, we come with our eye'. open and must accept all the risks Inve! sed in our coming.
Epoar Pierce ALLEN.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.