an old temple—haunted—wolf with green eyes—loneliness—death of missionaries—fear—sanctuaries—“james buchanan”—valiant farmers—autumn tints—famous priest—sacrifice of disciples—tree conserving—camels at my gate—servants—“cook book”—enchanted hills—cricket cages—kindly people—the fall of belshazzar—hope for the future.
and with two servants and the temple coolies to wait upon me i settled down in the san shan an, the temple of the three mountains, the oldest temple in this valley of temples, built long ago in the sung dynasty. they said it was haunted, haunted by the ghost of a big snake, and when the mud from the roof fell as so much dust on the stone floor, and over me, my tables and chairs and bed, my boy stretched out his arms and explained that the snake had done it. the snake, i found, always accounted for dust. when my jam and butter disappeared, and i suspected human agency, he said in his pidgin-english, “i tink—i tink——” and then words failed him, and he broke out into spelling, “i tink it r—a—t.” why he could spell that word and not pronounce it i do not know, but until i left i did not know that the snake that lived in my roof was supernatural. i don't think even i could be afraid of the ghost of a snake. the temple up above, the language 370officer's temple, was haunted by a wolf with green eyes, and that would have been a different matter. i am glad i did not dare the wolf with green eyes. for i was all by myself. the language officer, the good samaritan, went back to peking, and, except at week-ends, when i persuaded a friend or two to dissipate my loneliness, i was the only foreigner in the valley. go back to peking until the work i had set myself to do was done, i determined i would not. it has been a curious and lonely existence away in the hills, in the little temple embosomed in trees, among a people who speak not a word of my language; but it had its charm. i had my camp-bed set up on the little platform looking out over the place of tombs, with the great peking plain beyond, and there, while the weather was warm, i had all my meals, and there, warm or cold, i always slept. when the evening shadows fell i was lonely, i was worse than lonely, all that i had missed in life came crowding before my eyes, all the years seemed empty, wasted, all the future hopeless, and i went to bed and tried to sleep, if only to forget.
and china is not a good place in which to try the lonely life. there are too many tragic histories associated with it, and one is apt to remember them at the wrong times. was i afraid at night? i was, i think, a little, but then i am so often afraid, and so often my fears are false, that i have learned not to pay much attention to them. i knew very well that the legations would not have allowed me, without a word of warning, to take a temple in the hills, had there been any likelihood of danger, but still, when the evening shadows fell, i could not but remember 371once again, sir robert hart's dictum, and that if anything did happen, i was cut off here from all my kind. it was just fear, the fear that one personifies, but another time, if i elect to live by myself among an alien people, i do not think i will improve my mind by reading first any account of the atrocities those people have perpetrated at no very remote period. as the darkness fell i was apt to start and look over my shoulder at any unexplainable sound, to remember these things and to hope they would not happen again, which is first cousin to fearing they would. at pao ting fu, not far from here as distances in china go, during the boxer trouble, the boxers attacked the missionaries, both in the north and the south suburb, just outside the walls of the town. in the north suburb the boxers and their following burned those missionaries to death in their houses, because they would not come out. they dared not. think how they must have feared, those men and women in the prime of their life, when they stayed and faced a cruel death from which there was no escape, rather than chance the mercies of the mob outside. one woman prayed them to save her baby girl, her little, tender margaret, not a year old, her they might kill, and her husband, and her two little boys, but would no one take pity on the baby, the baby that as yet could not speak. but though many of those who heard her prayer and repeated it, pitied, they did not dare help. it is a notable chinese characteristic—obedience to orders—and the lookers-on thought that those in authority having ordered the slaughter of the missionaries it was not their part to interfere. they told afterwards how, as a brute rushed up the 372stairs, the mother, desperate, seized a pistol that lay to her hand and shot him. i am always glad she did that. and others told, how, through the mounting flames, they could see her husband walking up and down, leading his two little boys by the hand, telling them—ah, what could any man say under such terrible circumstances as that.
and in the south suburb the missionary doctor was true almost to the letter of the faith he preached. as the mob surrounded him, he took a revolver, showed them how perfect was his command over the weapon, how he could have dealt death right and left, and then he tossed it aside and submitted to their wicked will, and they took him and cut off his head. but the fate of the women always horrified me most. it was that that seemed most terrible in the dusk of the evening. they took two of the unmarried women, and one was too terrified to walk—having once seen a chinese crowd, filthy, horrible and always filthy and horrible even when they are friendly, one realises what it must be to be in their power, one understands that girl's shrinking terror. her they tied, hands and feet together, and slung her from a pole, exactly as they carry pigs to market. is this too terrible a thing to write down for everyone to read? it almost seems to me it is. if so forgive me. i used to think about it those evenings alone in the san shan an. and one of those women, they say, was always brave, and gave to a little child her last little bit of money as she walked to her death, and the other, who was so terrified at first, recovered herself, and walked courageously as they led her to execution outside the city walls.
when i thought of those women i was ashamed 373 of the fear that made me afraid to look behind me in the dark, made me listen intently for unusual sounds, and hear a thousand unexplainable ones. i, in the broad daylight, went and looked in the two sanctuaries that were at each end of my courtyard, each with an image and altar in it. in both were stored great matting bundles of spanish chestnuts, and in the larger, oh sacrilege! oh bathos! was my larder, and i saw eggs, and meat, and cabbage, and onions, coming out of it, but i do not think anything could have induced me to go into those places after nightfall. i ask myself why—i wonder—but i find no answer. the gods were only images, the dust and dirt of long years was upon them, they were dead, dead, and yet i, the most modern of women was afraid—at night i was afraid, the fear that seems to grow up with us all was upon me. by and by a friend sent me out “james buchanan”—a small black and white k'ang dog, about six inches high, but his importance must by no means be measured by his size. i owe much gratitude to james buchanan for he is a most cheerful and intelligent companion. i intended to part with him when i left the hills, but i made him love me, and then to my surprise, i found i loved him, and he must share my varying fortunes. but what is a wandering woman, like i am, to do with a little dog?
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we went for walks together up and down the hill-sides, and the people got to know us, and laughed and nodded as we passed. the chinese seem fond of animals, and yet you never see a man out for a walk with his dog. a man with a bird-cage in his hand, taking birdie for a walk, is a common 374sight in china, so common that you forget to notice it, but i have never seen a man followed by a dog, though most of the farm-houses appear to have one or two to guard them. here, in the hills, they were just the ordinary, ugly wonks one sees in peking, not nearly such handsome beasts as i saw up in the mountains. the farms in these hills evidently require a good deal of guarding, for i would often hear the crack of a gun. some farmer, so my friend, the language officer, told me, letting the “stealer man,” and anyone else whom it might concern, know that he had fire-arms and was prepared to use them. at first the reports used to startle me, and make me look out into the darkness of the hill-side, darkness deepened here and there by a tiny light, and i used to wonder if anything was wrong. “buchanan” always regarded those reports as entirely out of place, and said so at the top of his small voice. but then he was always challenging wonks, or finding “stealer men,” so i paid no attention to him.
at the first red streak of dawn, for the temple faced the east, i wakened. and all my fears, the dim, mysterious, unexplainable fears born of the night, and the loneliness, and the old temple, were gone, rolled away with the darkness. the crescent moon and the jewelled stars paled before the sun, rising in a glory of purple and gold, a glory that brightened to crimson, the pungent, aromatic fragrance of the pines and firs came to my nostrils, their branches were outlined against the deep blue of the sky, and i realised gradually that another blue day had dawned and the world was not empty, but full of the most wonderful possibilities waiting but to be grasped. oh those dawnings in the san shan an! those dawnings after a night in the open air! never shall i forget them!
and the valley was lovely that autumn weather. day after day, day after day, was the golden sunshine, the clear, deep blue sky, the still, dry, invigorating air—no wonder everyone with a literary turn yearns to write a book in a valley of the western hills. and this valley of the san shan an was the loveliest valley of them all. it, too, is a valley of temples, to what gods they were set up i know not, by whom they were set up i know not, only because of the gods and the temples there are trees, trees in plenty, evergreen firs and pines, green-leaved poplars and ash-trees, maples and spanish chesnuts. at first they were green, these deciduous trees, and then gradually, as autumn touched them tenderly with his fingers, they took on gorgeous tints, gold and brown, and red, and amber, the summer dying gloriously under the cloudless blue sky. they tell me that american woods show just such tints, but i have not been to america, and i have seen nothing to match this autumn in the chinese hills. and i had not thought to see beauty like this in china!
i counted seven temples, and there were probably more. up the hill to the north of my valley, beyond a large temple that i shall always remember for the quaint and picturesque doorway, that i have photographed, was a plateau to be reached by a stiff climb, and here was a ruined shrine where sat calmly looking over the plain, as he had probably looked in life, the marble figure of a very famous priest of the long ago. it is ages since this priest 376lived in the hills, but his memory is fragrant still. he had two disciples. i wonder if the broken marble figures, one beside him and one on the ground outside the shrine, are figures of them. there came a drought upon the land, the crops failed and the people starved, and these two, to propitiate a cruel or neglectful deity, flung themselves into a well in the temple with the beautiful doorway. whether the rain came i know not, but tradition says that the two disciples instead of perishing rose up dragons. personally i feel that must have been an unpleasant surprise for the devotees, but you never know a chinaman's taste, perhaps they liked being dragons. the country people seem to think it was an honour. there was a farmhouse just beyond this shrine, a poor little place, but here on the flat top of the hill there was a little arable land, and the chinese waste no land. far up the hill-sides, in the most inaccessible places, i could see these little patches of cultivated ground. it seemed to me that the labour of reaching them would make the handful of grain they produced too expensive, but labour hardly counts in china. up the paths toiled men and women, intent on getting the last grain out of the land. off the beaten ways walking is pretty nearly impossible so steep are the hill-sides, but of course there are paths, paths everywhere, paved paths, in china there are no untrodden ways, and upon these paths i would meet the peasants and the priests, clad like ordinary peasants in blue cotton, only with shaven heads. my own landlord whom my boy called “monk,” and generally added, “he bad man,” used to come regularly for his rent, and he was so fat that the wicked evidently flourished like a green bay tree. all the priests, i think, let out their temples as long as they can get tenants, and whatever they are—my landlord had beaten a man to death—much must be forgiven them. they have gained merit because, in this treeless china, they have conserved and planted trees. some little profit, i suppose they make out of their trees because, one day in september, i waked to the fact that at my gate, how they had climbed up the toilsome, roughly-paved way i know not, was a train of camels, and they had come to take away the sacks that were stored in the sanctuary under the care of the god. what on earth was done with those spanish chestnuts? they must have been valuable when they were worth a train of camels to take them away.
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as far as i could see there was no worship done in my temple, the coolies, who carefully locked the sanctuary doors at night, were filthy past all description. i tried to put it out of my thoughts that they occupied a k'ang at night in the room that did duty for my kitchen, and i am very sure that they were the poorest of the poor, but at night i would see the youngest and dirtiest of them take a small and evil-smelling lamp inside along with the god, but what he did there i never knew. only the lamp inside, behind the paper of the windows lit up all the lattice-work and made of that sanctuary, that shabby, neglected-looking place, a thing of beauty. but, indeed, the outside of all the buildings was wonderful at night. in the daytime when i looked i saw how beautiful was the lattice-work which made up the entire top half of my walls. at night in the courtyard when only a single candle was lighted 378their beauty was forced upon me, whether i would or not. always i went outside to look at those rooms lighted at night. i walked up and down the courtyard in the dark—“james buchanan” generally hung on to the hem of my gown—i looked at the lighted lattice-work of the windows, and i listened to the servants and the coolies talking, and i wondered what they discussed so endlessly, in voices that sounded quite european.
they were good servants. the cook i know i shall regret all my days, for i never expect to get a better, and the boy was most attentive. any little thing that he could do for me he always did, and the way they uncomplainingly washed up plates never ceased to command my admiration. i had only a camp outfit, the making of books may be weariness unto the flesh, as solomon says it is, but even then it does not make me a rich woman, so i did not wish to spend more than i could help, and yet i wanted to entertain a friend or two occasionally. this entailed washing the plates between the courses, and the servants did it without a murmur. i came to think it was quite the correct thing to wait while the plates and knives for the next course were washed up. my friends, of course, knew all about it, and entered into the spirit of the thing cheerfully, but the servants never gave me away. you would have thought i had a splendid pantry, and my little scraps of white metal spoons were always polished till they looked like the silver they ought to have been. my table linen i made simply out of the ordinary blue cotton one meets all over china, and it looked so nice, so suitable to meals on the look-out place, that i shall always cherish a tenderness for blue cotton. 379indeed, but for the lonely nights when one thought, it was delightful. i only hope my friends enjoyed coming to me, as much as i enjoyed having them. their presence drove away all fears. i never feared the gods in their sanctuaries, i never thought of those who had perished in the boxer trouble or the possibility of the return of such days when they were with me. i thought i had lost the delights of youth, the joy of the land of long ago, but i found the sensation of entertaining friends in the san shan an was like the make-believe parties of one's childhood. sitting on the look-out place, away to the south, we could see a range of low, bald hills. they were enchanted hills. the chinese would not go near them, for all that the caves they held hidden in their folds were full of magnificent jewels. we planned to go over and get them some day before i left the hills, and make ourselves rich for life. but they were guarded by gnomes, and elves, and demons, who by their nefarious spells kept us away, though we did not fear like the chinese, and we are not rich yet, though jewels are there for the taking.
oh, those sunny days in the mountain temple when we read poetry, and told stories, and dreamed of the better things life held for us in the future! they were good days, days in my life to be remembered, if no more good ever comes to me. was it the exhilarating air, or the company, or the temple precincts? all thanks give i to those dead gods who gave me, for a brief space, something that was left out of my life.
there was only one blot. that imaginative document known as “cook's book” was brought to me afterwards. it wasn't a book at all, needless to 380say. it was written on rejected scraps of my typewriting paper, and it generally stated i had eaten more “chiken” than would have sufficed to run a big hotel, and disposed of enough “col” to keep a small railway engine of my own. then the flour, and the butter, and the milk, and the lard, i was supposed to have consumed! i did not at first like to say much, because the servants were so good in that matter of washing plates, and knives, and forks, and whenever i did remonstrate the boy murmured something about “master.” he was a true chinaman, he felt sure i would not grudge anything to make a man comfortable. the woman evidently did not matter. she was never urged as an excuse for a heavy bill. i put it to him that the presence of “master” need not add so greatly to the coal bill, and i put it very gently, till one day he mentioned with pride that “missie other boy was a great friend of his.” and i, remembering tuan's powers in the matter of squeeze, had gone about getting these servants through quite different channels! but once this knowledge was borne in on me, i became hardhearted. i threatened to do the marketing myself.
“i talkee cook,” said the crestfallen boy, and he did “talkee cook,” said, i suppose, missie wasn't quite the fool they had counted her, and presently he came back and returned me fifteen cents! after that i had no mercy, and i regularly questioned every item of my bills.
but they were simple souls, and i couldn't help liking them. it seemed hardly possible they could belong to the same people who had slung a helpless woman from a pole like a pig, bearing her to her death, a woman from whom they had had naught 381but kindness. and yet they were. the selfsame subservience that made them bow themselves to the boxer yoke, was exactly the quality that made them pleasant to me, who was in authority over them. they were just peasants of babylon, making the best of life, deceiving and dissimulating, because deception is the safeguard of the slave, the only safeguard he knows. and they certainly made the best of life. it amused me to watch their pleasures, those that were visible to my eyes. they had a little feast one night, with my stores, i doubt not, and they caught and kept crickets in little three-cornered cages which they made themselves. at first, when i went to the temple, these cages were hung from the eaves outside, but as the weather grew colder they were taken inside, and i could hear a cheery chirping, long after the crickets had gone from the hills outside. it rained and was cold the first week in october, and the servants, like the babies they were, shivered, and suggested, “missie go back peking,” and one day when it rained hard my tiffin was two hours late, and was brought by a boy who looked as if he were on the point of bursting into tears.
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certainly those temples are not built for cold weather. everything is ordered in china, even the weather, and the first frost is due, i believe, on the 1st of november, and yet, on that day, i sat in the warm and pleasant sunshine writing on the platform that looked away to the enchanted hills, reflecting a little sorrowfully that presently i would be gone, and it would be abandoned for the winter.
for after that unexpected rain, which for once was not ordered, the days were lovely, and the nights 382times of delight. the stars hung like diamond drops in the sky, the planets were scintillating crescents, and, when the moon rose, the silver moon, she turned the courtyard and the temple into a dream palace such as never was on sea or land. it was beauty and delight given, oh given with a lavish hand.
and the people i saw in the hills were the kindliest i had yet met in china. i had little enough to do with them, i could not communicate with them, and yet this was borne in on me. whenever we met, dirty brown faces smiled upon me, kindly voices with a burr in them gave me greeting, i was regularly offered the baby of the farm-house at my gates, much to that young gentleman's discomfiture, and whenever there was anything to see, they evidently invited me to stay and share the sight. once a bridal procession passed with much beating of gongs, the bride shut up in the red sedan chair, and all the people about stood looking on, and i stayed too. another time they were killing a pig, an unwieldy, gruesome beast, that made me forswear pork, and i was invited to attend the great event. the poor pig was very sorry for himself, and was squealing loudly, but much as i wished to show i appreciated kindliness, i could not accept that invitation.
and here in the western hills i sat in judgment upon the people i had known of all my life and been amongst for the last ten months. of course, i have no right to sit in judgment but after all, i should be a fool to live among people for some time and yet have no opinion about them. and it seemed to me that i was looking with modern eyes upon the 383survival of one of the great powers of the ancient world, babylon come down to modern times, babylon cumbrously adapting herself to the pressure of the nations who have raced ahead of the civilisation that was hers when they were barbarian hordes.
all along the pacific coast, on the west of america, and the east of australia, they fear the chinaman, and—i used to say his virtues. i put it the wrong way. what the white races fear—and rightly fear—is that the chinaman will come in such hordes, he will lower the standard of living, he will bring such great pressure to bear, he will reduce the people of the land in which he elects to live, the people of the working classes, to his own condition—the hopeless condition of the toiling slaves of babylon. it has been well said that the east, china, is the exact opposite of the west in every thought and feeling. in the west we honour individualism. this is true of almost every nation. a man is taught from his earliest youth to depend to a great degree upon himself, that he alone is responsible for his own actions. even the women of the more advanced nations—it marks their advancement, whatever people may think—are clamouring for a position of their own, to be judged on their merits, not to be one of a class bound by iron custom to go one way and one way only. in the east this is reversed. no man has a right to judge for himself, he is hide-bound by custom, he dare not step out one pace from the beaten path his fathers trod. the filial piety of the chinese has been lauded to the skies. in truth it is a virtue that has become a curse. to his elders the chinaman 384must give implicit, unquestioning obedience. his work, his marriage, the upbringing of his children, the whole ordering of his life is not his business but the business of those in authority over him. if he stepped out and failed, his failure would affect the whole community. whatever he does affects not only himself, but the farthest ramifications of his numerous family. this interdependence makes for a certain excellence, an excellence that was reached by the chinese nation some thousands of years ago, and then—it is stifling.
this patriarchal system, this continual keeping of the eyes upon the past, has done away in the nation with all self-reliance. a man must be not only a genius, but possessed of an extraordinarily strong will-power if he manage to shake off the trammels and go his own way unaided, if he exercise the sturdy self-reliance that sent the nations of the west ahead by leaps and bounds, though the chinese had worked their way to civilisation ages before them. pages might be written on the subservience and ignorance of the women.
“oh but a woman has influence,” say the men who know china most intimately. and of course she has influence, but in china it must often be the worst form of power, the influence of the favourite, favoured slave. the woman's influence is the influence of a degraded, ignorant, and servile class, a class that every man treats openly with a certain contempt, a class that is crippled, mentally and bodily. the chinese, be it counted to them for grace, have always held in high esteem a well-educated man, educated on their archaic lines; but not, i think, till this century, has it ever occurred to 385them that a woman would be better educated. a cruel drag upon the nation must be the appalling ignorance of its women, the intense ignorance of half the population. things are changing, they say, but, of necessity, they change most slowly. knowledge of any kind takes long, long to permeate an inert mass.
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we praise the chinaman for his industry. but, in truth, we praise without due cause. we of the west have long since learned of the dignity of labour and if we do not always live up to our ideals, at least we appreciate them, and judged by this standard the chinaman is found wanting. he does not appreciate the dignity of labour. the long nails on the fingers of the man upon whom fortune has smiled proclaim to all that he has no need to use his hands; his fat, flabby, soft body declares him rich and well-fed, and that there is no need to exert himself. he is a man to be envied by the greater part of the nation. the forceful, strenuous life of the west, the life that has made the nations has no charms for, excites no admiration in his breast. manual labour and strife is for the man who cannot help himself. and, man for man, his manual labour will by no means compare with that accomplished by the man of the west. nominally he works from dawn to dark, really he wastes two-thirds of the time, sometimes in useless, misdirected effort, sometimes in mere idle loitering. he is a slave in all but name. his life is dull, dull and colourless; he can look forward to no recreation when his work is over, therefore he spins it out the livelong day. home life, in the best sense of the term, he has none, he may just as well stay at his 386work, exchanging ideas and arguing with his fellows.
something to hope for, to live for, to work for, seems to me the great desideratum of the majority of the chinese nation, something a little beyond the colourless round of life. the greater part of the nation is poor, so poor that industry is thrust upon it, unless it worked it would of necessity die; the struggle for life absorbs all its energies, gives it no time for thought sufficient to raise it an inch above the dull routine that makes up the daily round, but the country is by no means poor, had it been there would have been no such civilisation so early and so lasting in the world's history, no such fostering of a race that now, in spite of most evil sanitary conditions, raises four generations to the three of the man of the west.
china is a rich land and once she is wiser she will be far richer still, for in her mountains are such store of iron and coal as, once worked, may well revolutionise the industrial world.
now the thought of revolutionising the condition of the industrial world brings me quite naturally to the consideration of missionary effort.
for the last two hundred and fifty years the catholic, and for the last hundred years the protestant churches, have been working in china with a view to proselytising the people. and converts are notoriously harder to make than in any other missionary field. still they are made.
to me, a greek, it does not seem to matter by what name a man calls upon the great power that is over us all—the thing that really matters is the life of the man who calls upon that god. now the missionaries, whether they make converts, or whether they do not, do this, they set up a higher standard of living. they come among these slave people, they educate them, men and women, they care for the sick by thousands, and by their very presence among them they show them, i speak of material things, there is something beyond their own narrow round, and they make them desire these better things. if the western nations are wise they will allow no poor missionaries in china, it is so easy to sink to the level of the people, to become as chinese as the chinese themselves. personally, i think it is a mistake to conform to chinese customs. the missionaries are there to preach the better customs of the west and there must be no lowering of the standard. the chinaman wants to be taught self-reliance, he wants to be taught self-respect, and, last but by no means least, he wants to be taught to amuse himself rationally and healthily. now this in a measure, even this last, is what the missionaries, the majority of them, are teaching him, though, doubtless, they would not put their teaching in exactly those words, might be even surprised to hear it so described. they are helping to break down the great patriarchal system which has been stifling china for so many hundreds of years. they are teaching responsibility, the responsibility of every man and woman for his and her own doings.
and they are pioneers of trade, forerunners of the merchants who must inevitably follow in their footsteps. there are those who will say that they do not influence the more highly educated portion of the community, but they come to those who need 388them most. the rich can afford to send their sons abroad, to pay for medical attendance. it is to those of humble means that the schools and hospitals introduced by foreign charity are an immeasurable advantage, a boon beyond price. for the man who has once come in contact with these foreigners never forgets. he has seen their possessions, humble in their eyes, wonderful in his, and in his heart a desire is implanted—a desire for something a little better than has satisfied his fathers. and slowly this little leaven of discontent, heavenly discontent and dissatisfaction with things as they are, will permeate the whole lump. china is daily coming more in contact with the rest of the world. that world ruthlessly shuts out her proletariat because it will not be pulled down. it is well then that the proletariat should be levelled up. the process is slowly beginning when the missionaries put into the hands of a labourer the gospels, tell him he is of as much value as the president in his palace, make him desire to read, to wash his face to be just a little better than his fellows. the creed he holds is a small matter, but it is a great matter if he be no longer a slave, but a self-respecting man fit to mingle on equal terms with the men of the west. such a man will be more capable, more ready to develop the resources of his own rich land; as a trader he will be of ten times more value to the mercantile world for ever on the look-out for a market. whether the nations then need fear him will be matter for further consideration. it is possible things may be adjusted on a comfortable basis of supply and demand.
it would be unfair to give all credit for changing {3898}china to the missionaries. they are only one factor in a general movement that her own sons, the men of new china, have deeply at heart. the past is going, but the great change will not be anything violent. the boxer tragedy awakened the western world thoroughly to what it had always felt, that an empire like babylon was unsuited to the present day, and they said so with shot and shell, and china is taking the lesson to heart, slowly, slowly, but she is taking it. she will have learned it thoroughly when the need for change, the desire for better things, the power to insist on a higher standard of living shall have come to her lower classes, and then she will not change exactly as the western world would wish, but as she herself thinks best. the chinese have always adapted themselves, and in these modern times they will use the same methods that they have done through the centuries.
there came forth the fingers of a man's hand and wrote upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace, “mene mene tekel uphar-sin.” in that night was belshazzar, the king of the chaldeans, slain, and darius the mede took the kingdom. so the men who made the forbidden city sacred have passed away, the dowager-empress who defied the west has gone to her long home, the emperor is but a tiny child, his empire is confined within the pinkish red walls of the inner city, and the republic, the new young republic with a dictator at its head, reigns in his stead. but the nation is stirring, the slow-moving, patient slaves of babylon. will not a new nation arise that shall be great in its own way even as the nations of the west are great, for surely the spirit of those men 390who built the wondrous courtyards and halls of audience of the forbidden city, who planned the pleasure-grounds at jehol, who stretched the wall over two thousand miles of mountain and valley, who conceived the altar of heaven, the most glorious altar ever dedicated to any deity, must be alive and active as it was a thousand' years ago. and when that spirit animates not the few taskmasters, but the mass of the people, when it reaches the toiling slaves and makes of them men, the nation will be like the palaces and altars they built hundreds of years ago, and the rest of the world may stand aside, and wonder, and, perhaps, fear.
