Jan, 28.
In an article which Dr. Wu Lien-teh was asked to write for the Chinese Recorder," and of which we reproduce the main portions to-day, he puts some very straight questions. We do not know whether Dr. Wu is himself a Christian. But he is intimately acquainted with foreigners both at Home, where he had a brilliant career at Cambridge, and in China; and, if he will permit us to say so, is as much liked by those foreigners who know him personally as his abilities are respect ed by them. No one, therefore, seems better qualified to put the questions he raises, and certainly no exception could be taken to his manner of putting them. Whether the missionary body ought to plead guilty, we should not venture to say, partly because we have no knowledge on the point, partly because we have still less time for answering the letters which any li opinions on our part would pro-yoke. The gist of the matter is (though Dr. Wu does not express it so bluntly) that foreigners consider themselves superior to Chinese and show that they do in their every-day bearing. That the masses of the Chinese equally consider themselves superior to the foreigner is beside the point, Dr. Wu is thinking mainly of the increasing number of Chinese who go to Europe or America to study, who make friends there and are received on terms of equality and return to China to find themselves relegated to an inferior position and the back door.
Leaving out religion as being too delicate a matter for what is, here, a discussion of purely social relations, can either East or West traly claim- any substantial superiority of civilization over the other? That the West does claim it, is shown by its abundant proselytizing, in education, hygiene, commerce and industry: and the East appears to admit the truth of the claim by sending its sons to Western lands to imbibe wisdom at the fountain head. But uneasy suspicions are becoming prevalent that the advancement of the West is largely restricted to material things. We are cleverer
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.