I find it hard to account for the persistence of these delusions amongst any but vocational idealists. That the missionaries and school-teachers who are largely responsible for Young China's political activities and aspirations should still hope to gather rare and refreshing fruit from the tree of their own planting is natural enough. It is in the nature of the rhapsodist to place his hopes for to-mor' ove the experience of a thousand yesterdays, and to attach more importance to the form of a government than to the character of the men who claim to administer it. But the prevalence of this kind of plausible optimism in a business community which, with regard to its own affairs, can never afford to ignore the experience of yesterday, is chiefly due, I think, to the fact that blind faith in "Democracy," as a cure for "li human ills. has become a fashionable shibboleth all the world over. and this by reason of intellectual laziness: also, because the catchwords of our latter-day demagogues, their appeal and the secret of their success, are based on sentiment rather than on sense and on hysteria rather than on history, At: Shanghai, in particular, the teachings of history have carried even less weight than elsewhere, because the eloquence and fervour with which Young China proclesmed its discovery of Utopia, to the thumping of innumerable tubs, created a clamour and 2 series of moving pictures sufficient to disturb most minds and to prevent them from inquiring whether this Utopia was the sort of place in which the Chinese people, as a whole, might find themselves at home. And yet, for those who amidst the tumult and the shouting found time to reflect, who remembered the millions of patient. politically unconscious toilers that make the
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