May 6.
Tue collapse of the student movement is regarded with different emotions by different people according to their predilections. Some look on the students as a and of half-grown, half-educated youths, whose eruption into the domain of polities is, and must be, in the nature. of an impertinence. Others think that the students represent the only unselfish body of public opinion in China and should be recognized as occupying the same position in regard to the government as His Majesty's Opposition does to the- Government of Britain.
Which of these views is the true one or whether either of them is true, may remain a point on which opinions differ. One thing is certain, the salvation of Chi is not to be accomplished as easily as enthusiastic youth imagines. The regeneration of a nation is a difficult and complex process and is never accomplished without prolonged travail and disturbance. - The masses are painfully conscious that there' is something rotten in the State of Denmark; they can even state with some degree of assurance what that something is. But when they are asked to suggest a remedy for the present deplorable condition of government, they are immediately at the end of their resources.
The truth is that the problem is really a moral rather than a political one. Some years ago a foreign gentleman, travelling on one of our river steamers, had a district magistrate for a fellow passenger. The men became very friendly and the foreigner expressed with great plainness of speech his admiration for the sterling qualities of the Chinese people and his profound surprise that they were ruled by the most corrupt coterie of officials to be found in any civilized state. The magistrate listened with that innate courtesy which distinguished the Chinese gentleman. When: it was his turn to speak he said: What you say is all very true, but it seems to me you forget one important point. You speak of the Chinese people and Chinese officials as though these were two distinct races. Now, no Chinese is born an official. There are no- hereditary official positions in this country. Officials are selected from the ranks of the people and many of them come from the lower ranks. If you could decapitate every official -in, China to-morrow and fill their posts with new men, your new men would be drawn from the same source as the old and they would have the same faults.''
On reflexion the foreign traveller admitted the truth of his Chinese friend's criticism. China had, not so many years ago, officials selected by an autocratic monarchy. Since 1911 she has had officials selected by a representative government. He would be a bold man who would say that the latter class are a better set than the former. One can recollect that when the old legal parliament was meeting in Peking during and before 1917, the Chinese Press poured the vials of its wrath on the heads of the people's representatives. It asserted that they spent their time in tea shops and theatres so that a quorum was often impossible to obtain. Democracy weighed in the balance and found wanting and one can well endorse the pronouncement of the Chinese magistrate quoted above, that,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.