In America, China, and Britain alike there is a recognition—weak and partial though it is—of this great opportunity. The return of the Boxer indemnity, already partially repaid by America, and soon to be repaid by Britain, ear-marked for educational purposes, is an unprecedented and most significant thing in international relationships. Part of the American money has gone to educate Chinese students in English and so prepare them to become students in the American Universities. The rest is to be devoted to the development of a modern library in Pekin University. The British money is not yet apportioned, but Dr. Tsai, the Chancellor of the National University at Pekin, has recently been in London to urge the paramount need of a museum and a properly equipped system of scientific laboratories in China.
I saw Dr. Tsai giving an address to the China Society in the London School of Oriental Studies upon these new developments of Chinese education. It was one of the most reassuring things I have witnessed for some time, that little gathering of Chinese students and of a few interested English friends, in the steep little lecture theatre in Finsbury Circus, to discuss the making-over of the Chinese mind that is now in progress. We are still in the day of comparatively small things; sums like ten million pounds are dwarfed by such figures as four hundred million people; yet they are not too small to be perceptible and significant. A growing number of Chinese are making themselves thoroughly well acquainted with all the West has to teach them; they are not simply learning and accepting, they are criticising. The perennial vigour and originality of the Chinese mind is manifested by a prompt repercussion to British and American ideas.
I have before me as I write, for example, a memorandum on Chinese Politics and Professionalism, by Mr. S. C. Chang, which is one of the ablest criticisms of the Anglo-American panacea of “democracy” that I have ever read. It is one of the most remarkable and admirable things about China that in a time of great political confusion whole provinces, almost without government, go on in an orderly fashion and that arts flourish and reading and teaching spread. The nucleus of the mental organisation of a new China, in close touch and sympathy with the Atlantic peoples, appears. Before a generation has passed it may have gathered sufficient power to undertake the general education of the whole Chinese people. It already inspires a considerable Press.
These new relationships of study and discussion between the English-speaking and Chinese worlds will, I hope, increase, intensify, and develop. At present it is a very extraordinary thing that, while the young Chinese students in Britain and America can be counted by hundreds, there is still no system of sending English and American students, by way of scholarships, to study Chinese life and literature in China.
The Chinese are more conscious than the English-speaking peoples of deficient knowledge, and of the need of new inspiration. Our phase is, comparatively, a phase of self-satisfaction. The Chinese will know what we think, and know long before we have realised how much we have to learn from them, and what a wholesome thing it is for us to get their point of view. For Chinese schools multiply and teaching spreads, and where there are schools and teaching there the future grows.
XXXV
AIR ARMAMENT: THE SUPREMACY OF QUALITY
3.5.24
Bankrupt France and out-of-work England are developing a sort of armament race in air equipment. It has not quite the vigour of the old naval armament race; it is not so expensive, and the chances for financial and industrial loot are less. But it goes on, and at present, on paper at least, France leads handsomely. On paper France is ascendant over Britain in the air, capable of inflicting vast injuries, while sustaining small reprisals, and the matter is one of great concern to many anxious souls. They have visions of London stark and stiff and twisted under poison gas and all the British ports and docks destroyed.
The vagueness of our knowledge does on the whole enhance our terrors. But it is well to remember that our knowledge is vague. It is particularly vague about the things that aeroplanes can carry and drop. Chemists and science students generally find an innocent pleasure in inventing wonderful rays, explosives, and lethal gases for the benefit of the ingenuous newspaper man. They invent them rather than make them. In practice the normal limitations and insufficiencies of this earthly life apply with peculiar force to explosives and lethal gases. Only in the world of scientific romance can they be made out of nothing and instantaneously. In this sordid world of everyday they demand ingredients that are difficult and expensive to produce and limited in amount, and they require apparatus and skill and often considerable courage for their preparation. And in order to produce any serious effect on an enemy they must be delivered in huge consignments upon that enemy, and that requires a large number of aeroplanes of sufficient size to carry bulky material. Mr. Galsworthy was recently writing to the Times in grave alarm about the exposure of Britain to French air attack. He saw all her ports destroyed, no wharf for any food ship, England starved. I doubt if he had ever attempted to figure out how many tons of high explosive—allowing for the inevitable misses—would have to be conveyed from France to Southampton, for example, to smash up that one port alone to any decisive extent.
Before the heavy transport aeroplane can be safely used its mechanics must be insured against attack from fighting aeroplanes in the hands of highly skilled men. And this brings us to the essential objection to any panic creation of air forces. In the air quality is of supreme importance, and quality is rare. Given equal machines a good man can almost always put down a mediocre man; a man of exceptional gifts can keep on putting down ordinary men. The star air fighters in the war were men who had accounted for scores of enemy machines. Given a few exceptional men and the best machines, an air force of a few score units is capable of accounting for hundreds of inferior squadrons. God, we are told, is on the side of the biggest battalions, but this arithmetical preference, if it continues at all at the present time, is certainly restricted only to land fighting. In the air God is now manifestly on the side of intelligence, quickness, and courage. For a mastery of the air over and around one’s country there is needed therefore, before all other things, a War Office capable of finding and using first-class men, aviators, mechanics and inventors. Inventors and innovators most of all. After that, it must have money for the best material. But the money and the bulk of the product is a secondary matter. It is only after the air war is won that the big omnibuses full of bombs can come into play for more than incidental raids.