On the whole, the case of China is more to the point. By and large, the people of China, more particularly the people of the coastal-plains region, have for long habitually lived under a régime of peace by non-resistance. The peace has been broken transiently from time to time, and local disturbances have not been infrequent; but, taken by and large, the situation has habitually been of the peaceful order, on a ground of non-resisting submission. But this submission has not commonly been of a whole-hearted kind, and it has also commonly been associated with a degree of persistent sabotage; which has clogged and retarded the administration of governmental law and order, and has also been conducive to a large measure of irresponsible official corruption. The habitual scheme of things Chinese in this bearing may fairly be described as a peace of non-resistance tempered with sabotage and assassination. Such was the late Manchu régime, and there is no reason in China for expecting a substantially different outcome from the Japanese invasion that is now under way. The nature of this Japanese incursion should be sufficiently plain. It is an enterprise in statecraft after the order of Macchiavelli, Metternich, and Bismarck. Of course, the conciliatory fables given out by the diplomatic service, and by the other apologists, are to be taken at the normal discount of one-hundred percent. The relatively large current output of such fables may afford a hint as to the magnitude of the designs which the fables are intended to cover.
The Chinese people have had a more extended experience in peace of this order than all others, and their case should accordingly be instructive beyond all others. Not that a European peace by non-resistance need be expected to run very closely on the Chinese lines, but there
should be a reasonable expectation that the large course of things would be somewhat on the same order in both cases. Neither the European traditions and habitual temperament nor the modern state of the industrial arts will permit one to look for anything like a close parallel in detail; but it remains true, when all is said, that the Chinese experience of peace under submission to alien masters affords the most instructive illustration of such a régime, as touches its practicability, its methods, its cultural value, and its effect on the fortunes of the subject peoples and of their masters.
Now, it may be said by way of preliminary generalisation that the life-history of the Chinese people and their culture is altogether the most imposing achievement which the records of mankind have to show; whereas the history of their successive alien establishments of mastery and usufruct is an unbroken sequence of incredibly shameful episodes,—always beginning in unbounded power and vainglory, running by way of misrule, waste and debauchery, to an inglorious finish in abject corruption and imbecility. Always have the gains in civilisation, industry and in the arts, been made by the subject Chinese, and always have their alien masters contributed nothing to the outcome but misrule, waste, corruption and decay. And yet in the long run, with all this handicap and misrule, the Chinese people have held their place and made headway in those things to which men look with affection and esteem when they come to take stock of what things are worth while. It would be a hopeless task to count up how many dynasties of masterful barbarians, here and there, have meanwhile come up and played their ephemeral role of vainglorious nuisance and gone under
in shame and confusion, and dismissed with the invariable verdict of "Good Riddance!"
It may at first sight seem a singular conjuncture of circumstances, but it is doubtless a consequence of the same conjuncture, that the Chinese people have also kept their hold through all history on the Chinese lands. They have lived and multiplied and continued to occupy the land, while their successive alien masters have come and gone. So that today, as the outcome of conquest, and of what would be rated as defeat, the people continue to be Chinese, with an unbroken pedigree as well as an unbroken line of home-bred culture running through all the ages of history. In the biological respect the Chinese plan of non-resistance has proved eminently successful.
And, by the way, much the same, though not in the same degree, is true for the Armenian people; who have continued to hold their hill country through good days and evil, apparently without serious or enduring reduction of their numbers and without visible lapse into barbarism, while the successive disconnected dynasties of their conquering rulers have come and gone, leaving nothing but an ill name. "This fable teaches" that a diligent attention to the growing of crops and children is the sure and appointed way to the maintenance of a people and its culture even under the most adverse conditions, and that eventual death and shameful destruction inexorably wait on any "ruling race." Hitherto the rule has not failed. The rule, indeed, is grounded in the heritable traits of human nature, from which there is no escape.
For its long-term biological success, as well as for the continued integrity of a people's culture, a peace of non-resistance, under good or evil auspices, is more to be desired than imperial dominion. But these things are not
all that modern peoples live for, perhaps it is safe to say that in no case are these chief among the things for which civilised Europeans are willing to live. They urgently need also freedom to live their own life in their own way, or rather to live within the bonds of convention which they have come in for by use and wont, or at least they believe that such freedom is essential to any life that shall be quite worth while. So also they have a felt need of security from arbitrary interference in their pursuit of a livelihood and in the free control of their own pecuniary concerns. And they want a discretionary voice in the management of their joint interests, whether as a nation or in a minor civil group. In short, they want personal, pecuniary and political liberty, free from all direction or inhibition from without. They are also much concerned to maintain favorable economic conditions for themselves and their children. And last, but chiefly rather than least, they commonly are hide-bound patriots inspired with an intractable felt need of national prestige.
It is an assemblage of peoples in such a frame of mind to whom the pacifists are proposing, in effect, a plan for eventual submission to an alien dynasty, under the form of a neutral peace compact to include the warlike Powers. There is little likelihood of such a scheme being found acceptable, with popular sentiment running as it now does in the countries concerned. And yet, if the brittle temper in which any such proposal is rejected by popular opinion in these countries today could be made to yield sufficiently to reflection and deliberate appraisal, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that its acceptance would not be the best way out of a critical situation. The cost of disabling and eliminating the warlike Power whose dominion is