As far as Americans have any sympathy at all with European schemes for conquest in China, they naturally look with more favour on England and Germany than on France and Russia. The reason is apparent. England establishes honest and beneficent government wherever she goes and makes its advantages freely accessible to the citizens of other nations, so that an American is not only as safe but as unrestricted in all his legitimate activities as he would be in his own land. Germany, too, while not so hospitable as England, is nevertheless a Teutonic, Protestant power under whose ascendancy in Shantung our missionaries find ample freedom. But France and Russia are more narrowly and jealously national in their aims. Their possessions are openly regarded as assets to be managed for their own interests rather than for those of the na- tives or of the world. The colonial attitude of the former towards all Protestant missionary work is dictated by the Roman Catholic Church and is therefore hostile to Protestants, while the Russian Greek Church tolerates no other form of religion that it can repress. A recent traveller reports that Russia has put every possible obstruction in the way of reopening the mission stations that were abandoned during the Boxer outbreak. She has already put Manchuria under the Greek archimandrite of Peking, and has sought to limit all Christian teaching to the members of the Orthodox Greek Church. It is significant that Russia is strenuously opposing, under a variety of pretexts, the ``open door'' which Secretary Hay obtained from China in Manchuria, while there is ground for suspecting that Russian influence in Constantinople is preventing, or at least delaying as long as possible, that legal recognition of American rights in Turkey which the Sultan has already granted to several other nations. As for Russian ascendancy in Manchuria, everybody knows that it is inimical to the interests of other countries and that there will be little freedom of trade if Russia can prevent it.
XVI
GROWING IRRITATION OF THE CHINESE—THE REFORM PARTY
THE effect of the operation of these commercial and political forces upon a conservative and exclusive people was of course to exasperate to a high degree. A proud people were wounded in their most sensitive place by the ruthless and arrogant way in which foreigners broke down their cherished wall of separation from the rest of the world and trampled upon their highly-prized customs and institutions.
It must be admitted that the history of the dealings of the Christian powers with China is not altogether pleasant reading. The provocation was indeed great, but the retaliation was heavy. And all the time foreign nations refused to grant to the Chinese the privileges which they forced them to grant to others. We sometimes imagine that the Golden Rule is peculiar to Christianity. It is indeed in its highest form, but its spirit was recognized by Confucius five centuries before Christ. His expression of it was negative, but it gave the Chinese some idea of the principle. They were not, therefore, pleasantly impressed when they found the alleged Christian nations violating that principle. Even Christian America has not been an exception. We have Chinese exclusion laws, but we will not allow China to exclude Americans. We sail our gunboats up her rivers, but we would not allow China to sail gunboats into ours. If a Chinese commits a crime in America, he is amenable to American law as interpreted by an American court. But if an American commits a crime in China, he can be tried only by his consul; not a Chinese court in the Empire has jurisdiction over him, and the people naturally infer from this that we have no confidence in their sense of justice or in their administration of it.
This law of extra-territoriality is one of the chief sources of irritation against foreigners, for it not only implies contempt, but it makes foreigners a privileged class. Said Minister Wen Hsiang in 1868:—``Take away your extra-territorial clause, and merchant and missionary may settle anywhere and everywhere. But retain it, and we must do our best to confine you and our trouble to the treaty ports.'' But unfortunately this is a cause of resentment that Western nations cannot prudently remove in the near future. While we can understand the resentment of the Chinese magistrates as they see their methods discredited by the foreigner, it would not do to subject Europeans and Americans to Chinese legal procedure. The language of Mr. Wade, the British Minister, to Minister Wen Hsiang in June, 1, is still applicable:—
``Experience has shown that, in many cases, the latter (law of China) will condemn a prisoner to death, where the law of England would be satisfied by a penalty far less severe, if indeed, it were possible to punish the man at all. It is to be deplored that misunderstandings should arise from a difference in our codes; but I see no remedy for this until China shall see fit to revise the process of investigation now common in her courts. So long as evidence is wrung from witnesses by torture, it is scarcely possible for the authorities of a foreign power to associate themselves with those of China in the trial of a criminal case; and unless the authorities of both nationalities are present, there will always be a suspicion of unfairness on one side or the other. This difficulty surmounted, there would be none in the way of providing a code of laws to affect mixed cases; none, certainly, on the part of England; none, in my belief, either, on the part of any other Power.''[58]
[58] Correspondence Respecting the Circular of the Chinese Government of February 9, 1871, Relating to Missionaries. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty, 1872.
Meantime, as the Hon. Frederick F. Low, United States Minister at Peking, wrote to the State Department at Wash- ington, March 20, 1871:—``The dictates of humanity will not permit the renunciation of the right for all foreigners that they shall be governed and punished by their own laws.''
But the Chinese do not see the question in that light. Their methods of legal procedure are sanctioned in their eyes by immemorial custom and they fail to understand why forms that, in their judgment, are good enough for Chinese are not also good enough for despised foreigners. When we take into consideration the further fact that the typical white man, the world over, acts as if he were a lord of creation, and treats Asiatics with more or less condescension as if they were his inferiors, we can understand the very natural resentment of the Chinese, who have just as much pride of race as we have, and who indeed consider themselves the most highly civilized people in the world. The fact that foreign nations are able to thrash them does not convince them that those nations are superior, any more than a gentleman's physical defeat by a pugilist would satisfy him that the pugilist is a better man. It is not without significance that the white man is generally designated in China as ``the foreign devil.''