“Yes,” assented the doctor, “of course a long purse doesn’t hurt there, as everywhere else. But, in the main, our judges are beyond the coarse temptation of money bribes. We’ve advanced a good deal from the time of Sir Francis Bacon, that ‘brightest, wisest, meanest of mankind,’ who not only accepted presents from suitors in cases brought before him, but had the nerve to write a pamphlet justifying the practice and claiming that it didn’t affect his judgment.”
“What do you think of the present revolution in China, doctor?” asked Dick. “Will it bring the people more into sympathy with our way of looking at things?”
He shook his head skeptically.
“No,” he answered, “to be frank I don’t. Between us and the Chinese there is a great gulf fixed, and I don’t believe it will ever be bridged. The Caucasian and Mongolian races are wholly out of sympathy. We look at everything from opposite sides of the shield. We can no more mix than oil and water.
“The white races made a mistake,” he went on and the boys detected in his voice a strain of sombre foreboding, “when they drew China out of its shell and forced it to come in contact with the modern world. It was a hermit nation and wanted to remain so. All it asked was to be let alone. It was a sleeping giant. Why did we wake him up unless we wanted to tempt fate and court destruction?
“Not only that, but the giant had forgotten how to fight. We’re teaching him how just as fast as we can, and even sending European officers to train and lead his armies. The giant’s club was rotten and wormeaten. In its place, we’re giving him Gatling guns and rifled artillery, the finest in the world. We have forgotten that Mongol armies have already overrun the world and that they may do it again. We’re like the fisherman in the ‘Arabian Nights’ who found a bottle on the shore and learned that it held a powerful genii. As long as he kept the bottle corked he was safe. But he was foolish enough to take out the cork, and the genii, escaping, became as big as a mountain, and couldn’t be squeezed back into the bottle. We’ve pulled the cork that held the Chinese genii and we’ll never get him back again. Think of four hundred million people, a third of the population of the world, conscious of their strength, equipped with modern arms, trained in the latest tactics, able to live on practically nothing, moving over Europe like a swarm of devastating locusts! When some Chinese Napoleon—and he may be already born—finds such an army at his back—God help Europe!”
He spoke with feeling, and a silence fell upon them as they looked over the great city, and thought of the thousands of miles and countless millions of inhabitants that lay beyond. Did they hear in imagination the gathering of shadowy hosts, the tread of marching armies, and the distant thunder of artillery? Or did they dimly sense with that mysterious clairvoyance sometimes vouchsafed to men that in a few days they themselves would be at death grip with that invisible “yellow peril” and barely win out with their lives?
Dick shivered, though the night was warm.
“Come along, fellows,” he said, as the captain and doctor walked away. “Let’s go to bed.”