The foreign Powers generally seemed to court the very "disturbance" apprehended by "leaving the treaty to carry out itself," washing their hands of their own careless work. We have seen what pains were taken to allow the treaty to operate smoothly in its main purpose by elaborating a scheme of trade regulations far more complete than the treaty itself. But as foreign trade had been carried on by the Chinese for centuries, and the merchants of the respective countries were thoroughly at home with each other, commerce was the least likely source of friction. Of the new dynamic element introduced into the treaties, it seems never to have occurred to the negotiators that any regulation was necessary at all. Missionaries were permitted to enter and settle in the interior, where everything was strange, for practical purposes beyond the orbit of their countries' laws, while protected against the jurisdiction of the Government under which they were to live. Men who could withstand the temptation offered by such a state of things are not born every day. Without rule of conduct save their individual judgment, with no previous understanding with the Chinese provincial officials as to relative rights and duties, they were left to find such accommodation to their surroundings as their several idiosyncrasies and the untried conditions of Chinese social life might determine. The missionary in the interior had thus all the qualities of a "foreign body" setting up irritation in the organism,—a state of things, however, which his absolute faith in the sanctity of his mission perhaps prevented him from comprehending.
One trait in the national character was highly favourable to the reception of a foreign religion. The Chinese were of all nations the most tolerant of opinion. They had already accepted and assimilated two foreign religions—Buddhism and Mohammedanism; indeed they had also, two hundred years before, accepted and retained Christianity until it was expelled in convulsions provoked by the foreign missionaries themselves. Its second advent need not have caused convulsions had it come as the others had done, with clean hands, as a religion and nothing else. The tolerance of the Chinese has been referred to materialism and contemptuous apathy, which is by no means an exhaustive account of the matter. They were not, any more than Hindus, naked savages without language or literature: if anything, they were over-civilised. Proud they were, indeed, and conceited, and in its religious aspect they affected to regard Christianity as but a wave breaking on a rock. Their rock was a unique philosophy, scarcely to be called a system, which stands for religion, differing from other philosophic systems in eschewing speculation and attending to the ethics of common life,—the only philosophy that may be said ever to have transfused itself into the blood of a people.
The culture of the Chinese, however, was merely an obstacle to the realisation of the Catholic ideal of saving the heathen, as the grandest natural scenery was regarded merely as a hindrance to medieval travel. "Unhappy infidels, who spend their lives in smoke and their eternity in flames," was Father le Jeune's epigrammatic summary of the whole case in Quebec. So deep-rooted is the tradition of the reprobation of the heathen, that it generally requires many years' experience before a foreign missionary is led by contact with facts to see that Chinese ethics form the natural basis for the Christian superstructure. Some missionaries, indeed, go so far as to use the writings of Confucius as a text-book. Before reaching this ripe stage, however, the foreign missionary has it in his power to do more mischief than he can perhaps ever undo.
There was one treaty stipulation which has not been left to chance for its fulfilment—the additional article inserted in the French Convention of Peking in 1860. An astute missionary, acting as interpreter to Baron Gros, managed to interpolate in the Chinese text a clause of his own which had no place in the French—the ruling version—and was quite unknown to the French Envoy.[17] By that clause full permission was accorded to French missionaries to purchase land and erect buildings thereon throughout the empire; and further, all churches, schools, cemeteries, lands, and buildings which had been owned by persecuted Christians (Chinese) in previous centuries were to be paid for, and the money handed to the French representative in Peking for transmission to the Christians in the localities concerned. This astounding demand, in our eyes at once so truculent and so impracticable, seems to have been to the Chinese neither more nor less oppressive than the rest of the treaty, and they signed without demur, under the usual mental reservation. But it was in germ an official recognition of a French protectorate over Chinese Christians, and of corporate communities of Christians held qualified to be served heirs to those who had been persecuted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a germ which might be cultivated with greater or less success, according to the skill of those who had the care of it. Some effort of imagination is required in order to realise what is implied in this surreptitious article.
We must suppose [wrote Sir Rutherford Alcock] a French army entering London and there dictating the conditions of peace, and among others one that all Church property confiscated by Henry VIII. should forthwith be restored to the Roman Catholic Church by the present holders, however acquired, and without compensation, and that the French Government could be appealed to in order to enforce the rigorous execution of the stipulation.
How the stipulation was enforced is thus described by Prince Kung in his circular of 1871, more fully noticed below:—
During the last few years the restitution of chapels in every province has been insisted upon without any regard for the feeling of the masses, the missionaries obstinately persisting in their claims. They have also pointed out fine handsome houses (belonging to, or occupied by, the gentry or others) as buildings once used as churches, and these they have compelled the people to give up. But what is worst, and what wounds the dignity of the people, is that they often claim as their property yamêns, places of assembly, temples held in high respect by the literates and the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Buildings which were once used as chapels have been in some cases sold years ago by Christians; and, having been sold and resold by one of the people to another, have passed through the hands of several proprietors. There is also a large number of buildings which have been newly repaired at very considerable expense, of which the missionaries have insisted on the restitution, refusing at the same time to pay anything for them. On the other hand, there are some houses which have become dilapidated, and the missionaries put in a claim for the necessary repair. Their conduct excites the indignation of the people whenever they come in contact with each other, and it becomes impossible for them to live quietly together.[18]
Bitter consequences have resulted from the enforced operation of the interpolated clause, for the French Government, as is shown above, took full advantage of the pious fraud. Neither did the Chinese themselves, on discovering the truth, openly resent this example of how the foreign religion "porte les hommes à la vertu." The fraud was more than condoned by missionaries of all nations and sects, whose legal title to residence in the interior of China, distant from all authority, rests solely on the interpolated French clause, the benefit of which accrues to them under the most-favoured-nation privilege. British Protestant missionaries, not altogether satisfied with this tainted title, in a long letter to their Minister, Sir Rutherford Alcock, claimed the right of inland residence on another ground. They adduced the public declaration of Mr Burlingame, that "China invites Protestant missionaries to plant the shining Cross on every hill and in every valley"; to which the answer was simple, that the Chinese Government disavowed the promises of the envoy, and repudiated the implied obligation. The British Government disapproved of the claim under the French treaty, though in rather ambiguous terms, because it rested "on no sound foundation, but on an interpolation of words in the Chinese version alone in the French treaty with China." Since then, however, the pretensions of the French missionaries have been vindicated less by the interpolated clause itself than by the vigorous exercise of all the rights conferred by it, and very much more. The clause thus lent material force to the spiritual ferment, accelerating by many degrees its disintegrating action. It may be alleged, in palliation of the light-heartedness with which the whole subject was treated by the negotiators of the treaties, that they could not have foreseen such a development of their innocent toleration clause; but the circumstance only emphasises the urgent need there was for a clear definition of what was really meant by it.
But if toleration be the note of Chinese polity—concerning not religion alone, but almost every matter affecting government—it may be asked, What is it in the propagation of Christianity that excites the hostility of people and rulers? It is that the missionaries present themselves to Chinese view as the instruments of powerful nations bent on the ruin of the empire. They enter the country with a talisman of extra-territoriality; their persons are sacred; the law of the land cannot lay hands on them. That is the first stage. The second is, that they seek to extra-territorialise their converts also, whose battles they fight in the provincial courts and in the rustic communes, and so make it of material advantage to the people to bear the banner of the Cross. Many missionaries are really zealous in the work of alienating the Chinese from their natural allegiance, and of encouraging them to seek the protection of foreign Powers as against the native authorities. Thus a revolution of the most vital nature is in progress, and is being pushed on with all the energy which Christian, combined with ecclesiastical and political, zeal can throw into the work. Village is set against village, clan against clan, family against family, and a man's foes in China are too often they of his own household.[19]
No doubt the Chinese Government are to blame for having allowed such a state of things to grow up; but it is part and parcel of their drifting attitude towards everything. It is not that their apprehensions are not aroused, but that they lack initiative to avert the danger which they fear. While in theory they do not admit the claim of any foreign Power to protect Chinese subjects, yet in practice the thing goes on, and is acquiesced in. So formidable, indeed, have the foreign missionaries become, that most of the provincial authorities are afraid as well as jealous of them; and peace-loving viceroys give the simple injunction to their prefects and magistrates that on no account must they permit dispute with foreigners or native Christians. This means that the Chinese Christian must be upheld, right or wrong, and the Christian would be very un-Chinese if he did not take advantage of such a privilege to trounce his heathen neighbours.