But Mr. Forman sees working that Shuttle of Service of which I am speaking. He sees, as any thinking man sees, as Roosevelt saw, as Bryan saw, and as Taft saw, that the greatest single influence for good in the Orient is the missionary. Mr. Forman was incensed at this careless phrase on the Pacific liners, and he investigated the work of our missionaries when he was in the Orient, and he came to the decision that they are worth more to America, even from that selfish standpoint, than all the ambassadors that we have sent over, because they are, in their crossing and recrossing, weaving a Fabric of Friendship between the Orient and the Occident; between the nations of the East and those of the West; between the white peoples and the brown peoples; in spite of the diplomatic differences and yellow newspapers in the United States and Japan.
Mr. Forman says about his conclusions:
"I concluded that any one of the large missions in those Oriental countries accomplished, so far as concerns American standing and prestige, more than all our diplomatic representation there put together. I do not believe it to be an exaggeration to say that for the Orient the missionaries are perhaps the only useful form of what is called diplomatic representation."
And again in the same article he says:
"One good missionary in the right place, it seemed to me, can accomplish more than quite a number of ambassadors."
And again he wonderfully sums up that mission of love in a paragraph which I think ought to be passed on:
"But when a missionary establishes a clinic or a hospital, healing sores and diseases that their own medicine men have abandoned as hopeless; when he educates boys and girls that otherwise would have remained in darkness; when, with a whole-souled enthusiasm, he gives them counsel, aid and service and he asks nothing in return then the stolid and passive Chinese or Korean is genuinely impressed. Then America really becomes in his mind the synonym for kindness and service, and from mouth to mouth goes abroad the fame of the land that is aiming to do him good, without any menacing background of exploitation."
I talked with one bright-faced, twinkling-eyed, red-blooded, big-framed missionary who was crossing with his family of a wife and four children. He had spent fifteen years in the Orient as a missionary, and then because of illness he had been compelled to go to America. There he had taken a church and had preached for five years. His health came back, and as he told me, "The lure of the East got me and I had to come back. I never was so happy in my life as I am on this trip and the whole family feels the same way. We are going back to our people!" And the way he pronounced those italicised words made me know that he, too, was weaving a thread in the Fabric of Friendship.
We met a woman who was traveling back to China with her three darling little tots. I made love to all three of them, and it wasn't long before I asked one where her Daddy was. I assumed, of course, that they had been home on a furlough and that Daddy was back there in China waiting anxiously for them to return to him. I pictured that meeting, for I have seen many such during war days, both on this side and in France.
"My Daddy is dead," the child said simply with a quiver of her little lips.