CHAPTER XII.
THE SCOURGES OF CHINA.
It is the present war between China and Japan that has brought Korea to our general notice; has caused us to ask and learn something of where and what Korea is. It is this war that will largely open up Korea, directly or indirectly, to Occidental travellers, to Occidental adventurers, and to Occidental enterprise.
Whatever the ultimate effect of the war upon Japan the effect will be far greater upon Korea, greater even than it will be upon China. China is a huge place, and will, I think, change but slowly, no matter how great her defeat may be, no matter how many and how sweeping the concessions she may perforce yield to Japan. Korea is small and weak, and may, if force enough is brought to bear upon her, change swiftly.
Korea has been now almost lost sight of in the present struggle; because it has ceased to be the theatre of the strife. But the war concerns Korea no whit less than it concerns China and Japan. This war is an essential part of Korea’s history—the most recent scene in Korea’s dramatic life.
With the war in the details of its action we are all very familiar, at this moment. But I doubt if we are quite au courant of the causes of the war; and we have yet much to learn of the two interesting peoples who are waging the war.
There are several reasons why China fell a fighting of Japan—China had to, for Japan forced the war—China hates Japan—China, an important part of China, was unnerved by a fearful plague and easily excited into indulging in the dissipation of war. It was easy and comparatively safe for Japan to make China fight, because China had for years so neglected the art of war (if so holy a name may be attached to so often so unholy a thing), that she was ill prepared to cope with any foe that was more than a foe of straw; was ill prepared but did not know it. The Chinese for long have not regarded warfare as the manliest of occupations. Scholars, not soldiers, are their beau ideals, and the scum of their populace fills the ranks of their standing army. Their officers know little of military tactics, and are wont to direct, from behind the curtains of palanquins, the actions of their troops.
Japan has fallen a fighting of China because she hates China; because she dearly loves a bit of glory, and saw a splendid chance to gain it; and because she too felt the need of a national stimulant: the course of her true politics had not been flowing over smoothly, and she had been badly unnerved by earthquake.
China is the home of the wild white roses, of supreme philosophy, and of deadly pestilence. The recent plague in Hong Kong and Canton was merely an outbreak of an inevitably recurrent pest which is the sure result of the conditions of Chinese life. We are railing loudly just now against Chinese dirt. I feel that Chinese dirt is very much less than Chinese poverty. And it is a significant fact that the dirt and the poverty are usually found together. The houses and grounds of the rich Chinese that I have known in Singapore, in Penang, in Shanghai, and in Hong Kong, have been models of order and neatness, if not (according to European standards) of beauty.
The poorer quarters of the Chinese cities are undeniably filthy. But it is the filth bred of overcrowding and of dire penury, and of the inability of the government to cope with such enormous masses of humanity, rather than of natural uncleanliness. It is an almost infallible rule that only lazy people are dirty; sloth and filth are old bedfellows. The Chinese are the most industrious, thrifty nation on our globe; and I am convinced that the national dirt, the dirt of the poorer classes, is their misfortune and not their fault.
But there the dirt is, and, like a thousand maggot-breeding filth-heaps, it is constantly creating horrid germs of deadly disease.
It is very much to our national shame that the Chinese quarters of Hong Kong are almost as filthy as the poorer parts of Canton. We are absolute in Hong Kong; but we have done disgracefully little for the sanitation of the native quarters in the island we have conquered.
And yet Hong Kong ought to be the healthiest city in the world, the freest from pestilence. I know of no other city so admirably situated for conditions of health. Aside from the beauty of the place, and regarding it only as adaptable to healthy modes of human life and residence, it is ideal. And our flag waves over Hong Kong. And yet but yesterday a plague was raging there; only to think of which must make the gorge of Christendom rise.
While the plague raged, no doubt everything was done that terror and wisdom could devise. But the evil is deep-rooted, and it will not be uprooted in an hour.
Except for their unavoidable proximity to the possibility of dire disease (in which the Chinese are born, live, and die), the European inhabitants of Hong Kong are in every way to be envied.
Alas! almost the latest duty of the doyen of that Queen’s house was the sending of a disinfecting party through the plague-stricken districts of Hong Kong—a party including British soldiers, some of whom were attacked by the seemingly invincible plague, and died a death almost Chinese in its horror.
The conditions of well-to-do Chinese life are very pleasant in Hong Kong.
But in the Hong Kong of the poor there is nothing much but a tragic struggle for human existence, and misery, misery almost unalleviated, and yet not quite unalleviated. The poorest, hardest pressed of the Chinese have—more than most peoples—the love of home, the joy in work, the affection for kith and kin that go far to alleviate any lot, however hard. And they have other blessings—the poverty-cursed Chinese—they have their festivals and their temples. The cobbler, who sits by the wayside and works for a few sen, smokes now and again his tiny pipe of opium; he burns his incense sticks and his red, paper prayers in the joss-house, and once in every four years he contributes some mite of work, of treasure, or of interest to the Söul festival.
Plagues fall upon China almost with a grim regularity; they crush into terrible graves countless thousands. But China goes on, and the Chinese go on; and, ignorant as they may often be of the laws of sanitation, they remain for ever steadfast to themselves and to their country, and to what they conceive to be for the best advantage of both. What nation does more?
We have made many conquests in the East. But we have not been altogether victorious over Asiatic disease. We have carried our flag in triumph into the Chinaman’s Mecca—into Pekin. And we have knocked open the doors of the emperor’s palace, knocked them open with the butts of our rifles. We have made Shamien our own. We have made it bloom like a fair English garden, and at the very gate of Canton; where it lies a mute but eloquent reproach to the filth of the Chinese city. We have gained the probably most beautifully situated city in the world—the city of Hong Kong—and there we have built for our soldiers an almost ideal barrack. But we have been powerless—we are powerless to-day against the relentless outbreak of a Chinese plague. And Shamien—that proud spot of our, perhaps, supremest Chinese triumph—reeks with the poisonous stench that comes from Canton.
Alas! alas! We have paid a high price for our occupancy of Asia. We have often sacrificed to her our children.
The history of China is spotted with plagues. And the sanitary condition of many of the Chinese cities and the density of their populations are such that we can scarcely hope for China a future much freer from such plagues than her past has been.
Go into the native market in Hong Kong; see the burning sun pour down upon the half putrid fish and a hundred unwholesome looking native foods; see the dense, sweating, seething human mass that is packed in among the stalls, and you will wonder that Hong Kong is ever free from pestilence. But the European residents of Hong Kong are not, as a rule, over familiar with the details of the native quarter. They live on the Peak, or on the outskirts of the beautiful public gardens, where no smells reach them coarser than the indescribable perfume of the wisteria.
Nothing could be lovelier, happier than Hong Kong the European. It is a place of charming bungalows, of superb verdure, a place of green hills and of fanning breezes, a place of shady streets and sweetly fragrant nooks.
Nothing could be more picturesque, nothing could be sadder than most of Hong Kong the Chinese. It is a crowded place of deepest poverty. When I have said that, I have said it all.
As I have said, the Chinese are not, I believe, greatly responsible for either the gravity or the frequency of their epidemics. Poverty, extreme poverty, commits most of the crimes against the Chinese health. People who are too poor to buy soap cannot wash themselves, and much less their clothes. People who can afford none of the necessities of health cannot be blamed for falling ill. And the Chinese government, which is at the fountain head the most paternal of all governments (but corrupt in many of its branches), is unable to cope with the unavoidable poverty of China’s overplus of humanity in those parts of the empire in which the population is densest and most congested. It is a common mistake to suppose that there are more people in China than China could support if those people were equally scattered over her vast territory. But in the great centres of Chinese life the people are overcrowded to starvation and to pestilence.
Yes; things seem to be going rather badly in Asia just now—Mahommedan and Hindoo strife, mysterious and ominous mango smearing, native regimental insubordination, and buried treasure that refuses to be dug up, are rife in India and Burmah. Siam is slowly, but I fear surely, disappearing within the insatiable maw of France. China has been smitten down by a dire plague. Japan has been torn with earthquake: and now a black war cloud has broken over the Far East, drenching with its deadly rain of bullets Korea, China, and Japan.
For centuries Korea has given China and Japan an excuse to exchange discourtesies, and to vent a spleen, which for many hundreds of years has sometimes slept, but never slept soundly, and much less died.
The Koreans have never of recent years been skilful in averting calamity from themselves or from their country. The Japanese are as brave as they are venturesome. The knight errant spirit that characterized old feudal Japan has by no means died out of Japan the new, probably never will die out of Japan. It is “bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.” The land which was for so many decades the theatre of that dignified but horrible butchery called Hari-Kari, is not the land of cowards. Hari-Kari, or self-disembowelment, was looked upon in old Japan as a ceremonial of more than religious importance. And, even now, numbers of the Japanese deplore the abolition of Hari-Kari. It follows that the Japanese are neither afraid to die, nor reluctant to fight against fearful odds. But it is China who is fighting against fearful odds now. And yet I venture to think that in the long run Japan will lose more, gain less than her adversary. The Chinese are slow to anger. They are slower to forgive. They are not fond of withdrawing from any position they have taken. They are not prone to look at things through the eyes of others. They are not easy to convince. The Chinese in things military are shockingly behind the times, and the Japanese are splendidly up-to-date. But there are qualities that are, in the long run, more apt to win an Oriental war than being up-to-date.
China may cry, “Peccavi,” but she won’t mean it. Unless, indeed, she be permanently crippled she will bide her time, watch her opportunity, and fight again and to better purpose. Japan is China’s natural foe. China has forgiven us, I verily believe, for forcing ourselves into Pekin and for wresting from her Hong Kong. But she will never forgive Japan. And why should she? Shame to any nation that forgives a Port Arthur!
In half a day the Japanese can steam from their own coast to Korea: but also any Power in possession of Korea can steam from there to Japan as quickly. Korea is certainly more necessary to Japan than to China. But geographical propinquity does not necessarily constitute territorial right; and so far as we can judge the merits and demerits of so perplexed, so involved, so almost prehistoric, so Oriental a question, China has more right to Korea than Japan has. But international right is fast becoming (if it has not already become) a matter of national might, and concerning Korea the question of the moment is not, as it was a few months ago, “Who will fight the better, China or Japan?” but “How far shall we let them fight?”
Russia has her eye upon Korea. Even the United States may crave to stick a finger, a modest little finger, in this political pie.
What right have we to interfere in the quarrels of Eastern Powers? What right have we? It is too late for us to think of that now. We have kinsfolk in all those Oriental places, and shall have in the generations to come. It is our supreme duty to protect them, even though to do that ‘great right we do a little wrong.’ Russia securely, strongly lodged in Korea would not be an altogether desirable sight for British eyes.
And Korea, where does she come in in the present quarrel? Alas, she bids fair to go out, unless indeed Europe should be sentimentally chivalrous and forbid the disnationalization of one of the few remaining unchanged countries of the old Eastern world, and decree that Korea should remain yet a little longer a steadfast landmark upon the ever shifting sands of history.
What rights have the Koreans in the matter? Alas, it is also too late to ask that question. Their rights seem very apt to be torn into shreds between the dragons of China and Japan, or else to be (as most Eastern rights are) crushed into dust beneath the heavy but righteous foot of advancing civilization.