26th September.
Ir is related of an English lady in India who lived in one of the Native States, the ruler of which had been bought off with a pension, that she cane to be upon what she supposed were "intimate terms" with the wife of the Rajah, upon whom she frequently called, Upon one of these occasions she was surprised in the midst of something which she was saying to the lady, by her suddenly calling to a servant in imperious tones: "Take this woman out and hang her!" As the servants did not obey, the speaker apologised with dignity: "I forgot for the moment that Tam no longer Queen, That is what I always used to do when I heard things that I did not like." The English visitor departed with more correct notions" of the real relations between Englishwomen and Indian ladies of rank. We have very little doubt that if it were possible to get to the "true inwardness" of the Chinese mind, we also should learn many things which would surprise us all very much. China is peppered with Foreign Consuls. From the Chinese point of view these are the men who are always bringing complaints on behalf of their numerous nationals, whom no one ever invited to China. The Consul spends most of his time in bear-baiting Paotais and other inoffensive Chinese official personages—''Take him out and hang him"! Then there is the omnipresent Missionary, whose mere presence is an insult, representing a Holy Man who was confessedly born outside of China, whose precept (never yet obeyed anywhere or at any time) have for the most part no parallel in the sayings of the Confucian sages, and yet whose claims are exclusive and imperative. The missionary—let him too be taken out and hanged. here are the professional Educators who insist upon relegating the study of the Chinese Classics to a subordinate place; who introduce a bewildering range of new branches of so-called learning wholly unrelated to anything of which Confucian Wise Men have ever heard; who exact implicit faith in the doctrine that the earth is a globe and not a square, that it turns on an axis and goes around the sun (when any one can see the contrary for himself) who ignores all the Chinese " Five Elements" and yet pretends that there are between fifty and a hundred others; and that invisible varieties of ch'é are everywhere present, though the Book of Changes says nothing about them, and the wisest men of the great Chou, Han, and T'ang Dynasties never heard of them. As for all such reckless pretenders—let them be taken out and hanged Then too there are the Merchants, who want to abolish likin taxes of every sort, to open ever more and more Treaty Ports on seas or rivers, or lakes; who demand unimpeded steam naviganon ofall inland waters, unrestricted right of residence, and wider opportunities to drain away in yet larger streams the silver of China which is its true life-blood. Can there be any possible disposition of him better than to take him out and hang him There is also the increasingly pestilential Promoter of Railways, Mines, and the like, who disturbs the féngshui, insults the burial places of the dead, outrages the Earth Dragon, cuts off the heads of people on the surface of the ground and mangles their bodies with his engine wheels, while he buries them alive below the surface under unknown conditions. The rustic, the townsman, the bully, the scholar, the officials, the Empress Dowager, yea, even the monkeys on the banks of the upper Yangtze are atone in the irresistible conviction that the only reply to the demands of the promoter is to take him out and hang him! And then finally there are the Foreign Ministers!!! These men are the embodiment of the anarchistic and corrosive results of foreign contact with the ancient civilisation of China, Ib is the} who have demolished in the north our maritime defences, hampered the arming of our troops, exasperated our scholars by withdrawing their rights of civil service examination, It is they who have riveted upon our neck a chain of indemnities nine and thirty years in length, the payment of which will impoverish the country as a whole and ruin the people in detail. As one should seize a serpent by the head, these men ought to be got hold of and hung up in the face of high Heaven! This was the line of thought adopted two years and a half ago by the rulers of China, and there is very little evidence that it is not the line of thought of those very same rulers to-day, as well as of many others who did not then have the opportui to express themselves. 'T'his is quite different from affirming or implying that it is a view taken by all rulers in China, which is far from being the case, What is here insisted upon is that the causes which then produced the desire to take them out and hang them are all in unimpeded operation to-day, with others added, and that towards mitigating this feeling, after macy and the "settle-tactically nothing whatever has been done.
Is is of course unwise to be too sure of what from the nature of the case can never be known, but there is too good reason to fear that if there could be taken a safely secret plébis-cite of all the people in China who care enough about the matter to cast a vote, the result would be an overwhelming majority in favour of the proposition to take as soon as possible all the classes of foreigners mentioned and to hang them every one.
A statement like this will, of course, appear wholly incredible to those thoroughly "well-informed" and thoroughly self-complacent individuals who form the " public opinion" in Great Britain and the United States, but who in reality know nothing whatever about China as it is. - It is not a gratifyfying reflection that more than a full year after the final " settlement" of affairs between China and "the Powers" there is no sign and no definite promise anywhere of those subjective reforms which alone will render the previous official programme incapable of repetition. Let it be distinctly understood that no one predicts a repetition of the Boxer attempt immediately or at any time in the future. What is affirmed is that there is at the present time in China a minority who would be willing and glad to attempt such a retition, and a majority who would delighted to have it accomplished, but who would never dare to try ib. As an incidental confirmation of this position it is worthy of notice that for several months a carefully nursed, rapidly expanded, and deadly efficient Boxer propaganda has been in actual operation under our very eyes in the largest and most populous province of the Empire, with no genuine effort whatever to stop it on the part of the inert Maochu Governor-General, whose removal is apparently accomplished only by strong pressure. he conditions already witnessed in Szechuan (whatever may be true of the future) are such as all of us had hoped and some of us had expected never again to behold. Together with other significant indications they seem clearly to show that as yet practically nothing has been done toward the real "settlement" of the great, the pressing, the international question of the relation of the Chinese Empire and the Chinese people to the Powers of the World. What is to be done is altogether a matter still in future tenses, and we repeat with such emphasis as we'may, that it cannot be begun too soon.
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Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.