Not an uncommon argument in support of the truths of Christianity is to call attention to the purity of the lives of the missionaries. I find a note of a conversation on this subject in my Journals. “Venerable sir,” answered the learned and respectable Kung, “the goodness of a dumpling does not depend upon the pucker at the top of it. You can no more judge a man’s merits by his outward seeming than you can mete out the sea in a bushel measure. It is true that to all appearance your missionaries lead very pure lives; but to all appearance so do our people. Look at Mr. Li and Mr. Pao, who live in my street. Nothing can be more respectable than their outward demeanour, yet we know perfectly well that Mr. Li sleeps in flowers and closes his eyes in willows” (a metaphorical expression for leading a dissolute life), “while as for Mr. Pao, the less said about him the better. What guarantee have I that these men, whose excellence you extol, are not like my neighbours Li and Pao? Since I must doubt even that which passes before my eyes, how can I believe that which comes to me only by hearsay? The proverb says, ‘If your front teeth are knocked out, swallow them.’ Nobody publishes his own misfortune or his own disgrace.”
The Chinaman knew his own country well. Virtue without the supremest power of science and education is not enough to carry conviction to the man of letters.
At any rate, the history of the great Jesuit movement proves my point that the spirit of religious intolerance is not a fault which can fairly be laid to the charge of “The Hundred Names,” as the οἱ πολλοί of China call themselves, and that where it has shown itself it has been engendered and fostered by the fears of the officials. It is the same with trade. The rulers and not the ruled are the authors of all difficulties. The Chinaman is a born trader. Buying, selling, and barter are the very joy of his life, and so long as he can get the better of a bargain what cares he with whom he deals? Foreigner or fellow-countryman, it is all one to him.
The third source to which hatred of foreigners is ascribed is opium. That has been dealt with so recently by a Royal Commission that there is nothing new to be said upon the subject. All I can say, speaking from personal observation, is that I have known some hundreds of Chinese of all classes who were opium smokers. None of them abused the drug. They regarded it as a most valuable prophylactic against fever and ague, and would have been very loth to do without it. Some were literary men and officials doing hard brainwork; others, like a travelling pedlar whom I met on one of my Mongolian excursions, were doing equally hard bodily work. The abuse of opium has, so far as I can judge, been grossly exaggerated. It cannot be denied that there are to be seen in the opium dens of great cities a few poor wretches who have reduced themselves to a state of abject degradation by their intemperance; but their percentage must be small indeed compared to that of the victims of alcohol who are the disgrace of our own towns, and at any rate, as has been cunningly observed, they do not go home and beat their wives. To deprive the Chinaman of the finest qualities of Indian opium would be to condemn him to the use of the miserable substitute which he grows in his own fields. It would be like forbidding the importation of champagne and Château Lafitte into England, and driving our epicures and invalids to the necessity of falling back upon cheap and nasty stimulants. If the opium trade were to be abolished to-morrow it is my firm conviction that it would spring up again immediately, but under altered conditions and in native hands. If it be thought that I am wrong in what I say as to the use of opium, read what Dr. Morrison says in his delightful book, An Australian in China. There you have the independent testimony of a competent physician who has travelled over the whole of China from east to west, and who has dealt exhaustively with the question. No one has had better opportunities of judging. No opinion is worthy of more respect.
My conclusion then is that neither the religion of the missionaries, nor the trade of the merchants, nor even the much-abused drug, can honestly be counted as the cause of the anti-foreign movement in China, though one and all have been used as levers to envenom it. Foreign intercourse in any shape is the bugbear of the mandarin, as being the one standing danger threatening abolition of himself and his privileges, of which the two most dearly prized are robbery and cruelty.
Let us be just, however, even to the mandarin. It often happens that the missionaries are surrounded by natives of bad character, who hang on to them for protection. Especially is this the case with certain Roman Catholics, who have always endeavoured to “extra-territorialise” their converts, that is, to exact for them the same privileges of immunity from Chinese jurisdiction as are granted to the subjects of their own country. It is easy to see how this may give just cause of offence to the officials, and how readily a cunning malefactor will run to his priest to shelter his back from the bamboo rod, swearing that the charge brought against him is a mere pretext, his profession of the Christian faith, in which he is protected by treaty, being the real offence. Full of righteous indignation and confidence in the truth of his convert, who, being a Christian, must necessarily be believed before his heathen accuser, the priest rushes off to the magistrate’s office to plead the cause of his protégé. The magistrate finds the man guilty and punishes him; the priest is stout in his defence; a diplomatic correspondence ensues, and on both sides the vials of wrath are poured out. How can a priest who interferes, and the mandarin who is interfered with, love one another? Some instances there have been where the priests have gone a step farther, and have actually urged their disciples to own no allegiance to their native authorities, but to obey only themselves as representatives of the Sovereign Pontiff of Rome.
The missionaries, on the other hand, of the China Inland Mission put forth no such pretensions, and excite no such animosities.
The jealousies of the different sects of Christianity among themselves throw as great difficulties in the way of conversion to-day as they did in Ka̔ng Hsi’s time. A highly-educated Chinese gentleman, who had been making inquiries into the doctrines of Christianity, once appealed to me on the subject. “How is it,” he asked, “that if I go to one teacher and talk to him of what I have learnt from another he answers me, ‘No, that is not right; that is the doctrine preached by So-and-So; if you follow him you will go to hell’?” But that one missionary should speak of the Church of another Christian as a “Scarlet Woman” appeared to him to be altogether lacking in decorum. It must be a puzzle—yet not worse than the various schools of Buddhism.
It used to be a cardinal article of faith among Europeans in China during the fifties, that if once we could throw Peking open to foreign diplomacy all would be well. That was to be the sovereign cure for all the ills of which we had to complain. We should be in touch with the Emperor and his court, and we could not fail to convert the most recalcitrant of mandarins to the adoption of our Western civilisation: perhaps even China might become a Christian country. We have now been at Peking for forty years, during which time successive ministers of all countries have preached, flattered, scolded, and threatened over the sweetmeats and tea of the Tsung-Li Yamên, and what is the result to-day?
What really was wanted was not to get into Peking ourselves, but to get the Emperor with his court and Government out of it. This is no new theory of mine. So confident have I always been that Peking is the worst capital on all grounds for China, that thirty years ago, writing in Macmillan’s Magazine of the Tientsing massacre in 1870, I said, “This time we hope that the past will be a lesson for the future, and that such conditions will be imposed as will secure our countrymen, be they laymen or missionaries, from outrage, and will prevent China from remaining the one bar to the progress and civilisation of the world. It is not within the province of a magazine article to suggest what those conditions should be; but we cannot help hinting that if the treaty powers were to treat China as Peter the Great did Russia, and transplant the capital and court from Peking back to Nanking, whence it was removed by the Emperor Tai Tsung, who reigned under the style of Yung Lo at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the headquarters of obstructiveness and mandarinism would be destroyed, the power of the viceroys would be brought under the control of the central Government, and a new era might be inaugurated which should be as conducive to the welfare and happiness of the Chinese people as to the safety and profits of the European trader. Above all, the representatives of European powers, instead of being boxed up in Peking like rats in a trap, would in the not improbable event of their having from time to time certain demands and requisitions to make of the Chinese Government, be backed up by the presence of their men of war on the spot. It is wonderful how distance weakens a threat, and how wholesomely the sight of power acts upon the Oriental mind.”