"The real cause of unrest," it has been recently said,[426] "is not Indian at all, but Asiatic. The unrest is the most visible symptom of that resentment of prolonged European domination which is affecting the whole continent of Asia. For 300 years the tide of European dominion has flowed eastward, but the ebb has now set in. Liao-yang and Mukden, the driving back of the legions of the Tsar, gave it a stimulus far more potent than if Bengal had been administratively divided into forty pieces. It would probably have arisen even if Japan had still remained in chain-armour, and had never emerged from the control of her Tycoons and her Samurai. It became inevitable from the day that steam and quick transit broke down the barriers of India's isolation, and her yielding people began to cross the seas. It is part of a great world-movement, the end of which no man can foresee. No concessions, however sweeping, will conjure it. We have to reckon with its continued—and most natural—increase and growth, and to shape our course accordingly."
This is not very pleasant reading for English—or indeed for European—ears, but if the facts are as stated there is nothing to be gained by ignoring them.
Setting patriotism and racial prejudices aside, there are other reasons why British rule could never become really popular in Weihaiwei or in any part of China. With every wish to rule the people according to their own customs and their traditional systems of morality, it is not always possible to do so without a surrender of much that a European considers essential to good order and a proper administration of justice. The different views of East and West on a matter so fundamental as the rights and duties of individuals as compared with the rights and duties of the family or clan are alone sufficient to give rise to a popular belief that the foreign courts do not always dispense justice. Then the Chinese believe that our courts are much too severe on many offences that they consider venial, and not severe enough on offences such as burglary, piracy and armed robbery. They also detest our insistence, in certain circumstances, of the post-mortem examination of human bodies. Again, they totally fail to understand why men who have been charged with a crime and whose guilt in the eyes of the "plain man" is a certainty should sometimes get off scot-free on account of some technicality or legal quibble. If Englishmen are sometimes driven to think that "the law is an ass," we may be sure that the Chinese are, at times, even more strongly inclined to the same opinion.
If one were to ask a native of Weihaiwei what were the characteristics of British rule that he most appreciated one would perhaps expect him to emphasise the comparative freedom from petty extortion and tyranny, the obvious endeavour (not always successful) to dispense even-handed justice, the facilities for trade, the improvement of means of communication. It was not an answer of this kind, however, that I received from an intelligent and plain-spoken resident to whom I put this very question. "What is it we like best in our British rulers? I will tell you," he said. "Our native roads are narrow pathways, and very often there is no room for two persons to pass unless one yields the road to the other. When our last rulers—the Japanese—met our small-footed women hobbling along such a path they never stepped aside to let the women pass, but compelled them to clamber along the stony hillside or to stand in a ditch. An Englishman, on the contrary, whether mounted or on foot, always leaves the road to the woman. He will walk deliberately into a deep snowdrift rather than let a Chinese woman step off the dry pathway. We have come to understand that the men of your honourable country all act in the same way, and this is what we like about Englishmen."
TWO BRITISH RULERS ON THE MARCH, WITH MULE-LITTER AND HORSE (see p. [434]).
A ROADSIDE SCENE (see p. [196]).
It may seem strange that a native should draw attention to a trivial matter of this kind rather than to some of the admirable features—as we regard them—of British administration, yet there is very little just cause for surprise. A year or two ago the correspondent of a great newspaper indulgently referred to Weihaiwei under British rule as affording a conspicuous example of the ability of individual Englishmen to control—without fuss or display of force—large masses of Orientals. Let it be granted that the English people, or rather some Englishmen, are endowed with the twin-instincts to rule with justice and integrity and to serve with industry and loyalty—for it is only the union of these two instincts or qualities in one personality that distinguishes the good administrator: but to regard Weihaiwei as an example of the English power of successfully ruling hordes of alien subjects shows a misapprehension of the facts. Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen have carried out such splendid administrative work in other parts of the world that there is no need to give them credit for work which they have not done. What makes the people of Weihaiwei law-abiding, peaceful, industrious, punctual in the payment of taxes, honest in their dealings one with another is not some mysterious ruling faculty on the part of the three or four foreign administrators who are placed over them, but something that has existed in China from a time when the ancestors of those administrators were painted savages and England was not even a name: it is filial piety, it is reverence for law and respect for those in authority, it is the cult of ancestors,—it is, in short, Confucianism. "The same readiness with which we serve our father," says one of the Chinese classics, "we should employ in serving our Ruler, and the reverence must be the same for both. To honour those who are in a high position and to respect those who are in authority is our first duty." Again, we are told that "Confucius said, the Ruler is served with observance of hsiao [filial piety] and elders are served with such submission as is due from a younger brother to his elder brothers, which shows that the people should make no distinction."[427]