Mr. J. O. P. Bland on a New Conception of Chinese Greatness —Our Transition from Ancient to Modern—The Sanctuary of the French Settlement Few of our readers need to be introduced to Mr. J. O. P, Bland, a one time secretary of the Shanghai Municipal! Council, and the author of the most interesting books on China yet written. In the last issue of the ''National Review" Mr. Bland records his impressions of a recent visit to "Shanghai with wonderful skill.
To return to the East after an absence of years is to recover something of the freshness and keenness of first impressions, enhanced by an improved sense of proportion and relative values. After long residence in China, one comes, I think, to take for granted many beautiful and soul-satisfying things. Familiarity, and the cares that infest the day, combine to dim one's sense of the philosophic dignity inherent in all the East's conception of life and death and in its time-defying institutions. The thorns that spring up conceal from us the splendid proportions, the enduring strength of that which, say what we will, is by far the noblest monument of human wisdom that has come down to us from the wreck-strewn past. Amidst the clamour of the money-changers and the nostrum-vendors of the Treaty Ports, where East and West alike forget the things that matter in their eager pursuit of gain, one often loses sight of the profound significance of China's moral civilization, Amidst the froth and foam of the breakers, we forget, the deep unruitled spaces of the sea. And because of our restlessness and the haunting memory of our Western birth-right, we often depreciate, when we live amongst them, the thoughts and ways of these old-world children of the East.
New Hour on Cuina's LA.
But when one has left China behind for some years and dwelt in the market-places of the West's triumphant civilization, when one has seen that civilization reduced to a welter of scientific slaughter and red ruin, we begin to perceive, far more clearly than before, the value of that system of moral philosophy which is the very breath of life to the Chinese, and which has preserved this ancient race, if not from attack, at least from disruption. One is, then, perforce compelled to face the question whether, as the world stands to-day, it is not an impertinence and a waste of time for us to continue to urge the Chinese to forsake the teachings of their Sages and to believe in the moral superiority of a system which ends in Armageddon. When one returns to China and finds this patient people, a quarter of the earth's inhabitants, pursuing its steadfast way, along the lines; prescribed by centuries of experience and immemorial tradition, and achieving, in spite of new perplexities and perils, a degree of stability which Europe may well envy, one comes to regard the East's non-militant type of civilization in a new light and its results in clearer perspective.
There can be, I think, no escape from the conclusion that, in the broad conception of life. and in the social and political systems which arise out of conce}). tion, " East is East_and West is West, and never the twain shall mest." Between the creative ideas of these two worlds there lies a gulf of elemental difference, which neither Time nor any tide in the fafiairs of men can bridge. Considering Asia.and its philosophy as a whole, disregarding its intellectual half-breeds (those brilliant dragon-flies of a brief day, that dart erratically across the depths of national life), we may confidently ascribe this difference to the permanent hold which the patriarchal family system of morals and politics has acquired over the race-mind of the East, and to the peculiar virtues and defects pro-{duced in the masses by that system. But let the fundamental causes of that difference be what they may, deep buried in the past, its general result has been to produce in the Asiatic mind a deep reverence for the absolute and the Universal, which revolts _instinetively from the materialism of the West. Hx Oniente luc.
Inpivipuat versus Community.
Ht is not for nothing that from the East has come every religion which has elevated. and comforted the hearts of men, for the East has always held firmly to the belief that the means of existence are less important than its ends. The masses of the people in China and Japan are unconsciously nearer to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount than many of the Christian communities in Europe and America which subscribe to send missionaries to the East. San anyone deny that the forceful individualism upon which are based the social progress and material prosperity of Europe and America jis morally inferior to the family system of Asia, in which the interests of the individual are sacrificed to those of the community?
It is the birthright and the instinct of the Anglo-Saxon to respect an active self-helping race and to despise the passive non-li rom the Asiatic point of is not only a text but an absolute truth that the meek shall inherit the earth, Your Chinese educated in Missions may wear a
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.