China is a rich land and once she is wiser she will be far richer still, for in her mountains are such store of iron and coal as, once worked, may well revolutionise the industrial world.
Now the thought of revolutionising the condition of the industrial world brings me quite naturally to the consideration of missionary effort.
For the last two hundred and fifty years the Catholic, and for the last hundred years the Protestant Churches, have been working in China with a view to proselytising the people. And converts are notoriously harder to make than in any other missionary field. Still they are made.
To me, a Greek, it does not seem to matter by what name a man calls upon the Great Power that is over us all—the thing that really matters is the life of the man who calls upon that God. Now the missionaries, whether they make converts, or whether they do not, do this, they set up a higher standard of living. They come among these slave people, they educate them, men and women, they care for the sick by thousands, and by their very presence among them they show them, I speak of material things, there is something beyond their own narrow round, and they make them desire these better things. If the Western nations are wise they will allow no poor missionaries in China, it is so easy to sink to the level of the people, to become as Chinese as the Chinese themselves. Personally, I think it is a mistake to conform to Chinese customs. The missionaries are there to preach the better customs of the West and there must be no lowering of the standard. The Chinaman wants to be taught self-reliance, he wants to be taught self-respect, and, last but by no means least, he wants to be taught to amuse himself rationally and healthily. Now this in a measure, even this last, is what the missionaries, the majority of them, are teaching him, though, doubtless, they would not put their teaching in exactly those words, might be even surprised to hear it so described. They are helping to break down the great patriarchal system which has been stifling China for so many hundreds of years. They are teaching responsibility, the responsibility of every man and woman for his and her own doings.
And they are pioneers of trade, forerunners of the merchants who must inevitably follow in their footsteps. There are those who will say that they do not influence the more highly educated portion of the community, but they come to those who need them most. The rich can afford to send their sons abroad, to pay for medical attendance. It is to those of humble means that the schools and hospitals introduced by foreign charity are an immeasurable advantage, a boon beyond price. For the man who has once come in contact with these foreigners never forgets. He has seen their possessions, humble in their eyes, wonderful in his, and in his heart a desire is implanted—a desire for something a little better than has satisfied his fathers. And slowly this little leaven of discontent, heavenly discontent and dissatisfaction with things as they are, will permeate the whole lump. China is daily coming more in contact with the rest of the world. That world ruthlessly shuts out her proletariat because it will not be pulled down. It is well then that the proletariat should be levelled up. The process is slowly beginning when the missionaries put into the hands of a labourer the Gospels, tell him he is of as much value as the President in his palace, make him desire to read, to wash his face to be just a little better than his fellows. The creed he holds is a small matter, but it is a great matter if he be no longer a slave, but a self-respecting man fit to mingle on equal terms with the men of the West. Such a man will be more capable, more ready to develop the resources of his own rich land; as a trader he will be of ten times more value to the mercantile world for ever on the look-out for a market. Whether the nations then need fear him will be matter for further consideration. It is possible things may be adjusted on a comfortable basis of supply and demand.
It would be unfair to give all credit for changing {3898}China to the missionaries. They are only one factor in a general movement that her own sons, the men of new China, have deeply at heart. The past is going, but the great change will not be anything violent. The Boxer tragedy awakened the Western world thoroughly to what it had always felt, that an Empire like Babylon was unsuited to the present day, and they said so with shot and shell, and China is taking the lesson to heart, slowly, slowly, but she is taking it. She will have learned it thoroughly when the need for change, the desire for better things, the power to insist on a higher standard of living shall have come to her lower classes, and then she will not change exactly as the Western world would wish, but as she herself thinks best. The Chinese have always adapted themselves, and in these modern times they will use the same methods that they have done through the centuries.
There came forth the fingers of a man's hand and wrote upon the plaster of the wall of the King's Palace, “MENE MENE TEKEL UPHAR-SIN.” In that night was Belshazzar, the King of the Chaldeans, slain, and Darius the Mede took the kingdom. So the men who made the Forbidden City sacred have passed away, the Dowager-Empress who defied the West has gone to her long home, the Emperor is but a tiny child, his Empire is confined within the pinkish red walls of the Inner City, and the Republic, the new young Republic with a Dictator at its head, reigns in his stead. But the nation is stirring, the slow-moving, patient slaves of Babylon. Will not a new nation arise that shall be great in its own way even as the nations of the West are great, for surely the spirit of those men who built the wondrous courtyards and halls of audience of the Forbidden City, who planned the pleasure-grounds at Jehol, who stretched the wall over two thousand miles of mountain and valley, who conceived the Altar of Heaven, the most glorious altar ever dedicated to any Deity, must be alive and active as it was a thousand' years ago. And when that spirit animates not the few taskmasters, but the mass of the people, when it reaches the toiling slaves and makes of them men, the nation will be like the palaces and altars they built hundreds of years ago, and the rest of the world may stand aside, and wonder, and, perhaps, fear.