BOOKS.

CHINA. IN TRANSITION.*

IF there be in the eyes of the enthusiast of the peace- propaganda any advantage for humanity in wars and rumours of war, it must surely be in their educative influence. How• many Englishmen, though by their franchise partners in the- greatest Empire the world has ever seen, had before the Boer- War any, even rudimentary, knowledge of South Africa an& its problems ? How many before the Russo-Japanese War had been awake to the renaissance of Japan, or bad even heard? of Corea or Manchuria P How many, till the native unrest. had awakened their alarms, bad taken the trouble to under- stand the conditions of the British Baj in India P As for China, until the Boxer rebellion, or rather until the- present revolutionary movement, it was to most of them a. region as remote and vague as Cathay to their ancestors. of the Middle Ages, its inhabitants a teeming, laborious,. slightly ridiculous race, characterized by their conservative exclusiveness, their pigtails and long finger-nails, their testa- tor dog-flesh and opium, and their tendency by emigra- tion to upset the white-labour market. The European-drilled: troops at Wuchang, the city of "military splendour," revolt against the Manchu rule, the local revolt grows into a national revolution, and at once the sealed book is opened, an& to the world, now no longer indifferent, the old immemoria China stands revealed, just at the moment when it is- crumbling into ruin, to make way for a new China of which the nature and final constitution are still " on the knees• of the gods." The portentous nature of the revelation must: be realized by even the most insular intelligence. An ancient. civilization, which in its essential characteristics existed before " the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," is passing away before our eyes, to give place to- -what no man knows. Even those of us who know nothing of the immemorial culture of the Chinese, and are unmoved! by the spectacle of its passing, may well be impressed by the• fact that a nation numbering, it is supposed, between three- and four hundred million souls has been rudely awakened from its secular dream of peace to the realization that, if it is to• survive, it must be armed. "Hitherto," says Dr. Geil, com- menting on the mushroom growth of barracks in every Chinese city he visited, "China has been a literary nation: she wants only ten years to complete her conversion, and will then be a military one." " The whole empire," be says else- where, "seems to be arming, not in extraordinary haste, but with thoroughness, with doggedness, and with resources wherewith no one European nation can compare "—a fact portentous indeed when we couple it with the news that last Eighteen Capitals of China. By WiEiasu Edgar (40i1,-Litt.D0 ar.o. Legdoss

Constable and Co. [21s. not.] -

Tuesday universal military service became a fundamental law -of the new republic.

"The past dies fast in China" is the refrain that runs rthrough all Dr. Geil's narrative ; and the narrative itself is a most striking illustration of how rapid is the 'change. The author's ,object is to give " an instantaneous view of the new China as she is poised between the past and future "; but the poise has been overact, and though the :title-page of the book bears the date 1911, the China it 'describes is already in large measure dead and gone. This 'does not lessen the value of the work ; rather it heightens the (impression its author intends to convey ;' and for those who wish to understand the epoch-making course of events in 'China, the. vivid sketches given in this book of the country as it was " poised" on the edge of revolution will prove in the 'highest degree illuminating. We say " sketches "; for Dr. 'Geil's account does not pretend to be complete or all-inclusive. 'The scope of the book is, indeed, somewhat difficult to define: it is neither a guide book, a book of travel, a history, a geography book, nor a diary, though it is something of each. 'The author, already well known for his books on the Yangtze and the Great Wall, has visited the eighteen capitals of China and has jotted -down his impressions of men and things, illustrating them with admirable photographs and, what is more important, with copious extracts from local annals and from 'those Chinese classics which are everywhere being rapidly and rrithlessly "scrapped." For the result the author modestly disclaims any literary merit—too modestly, we think, for the book has that quality of literary excellence which is to be 'expected when a keen and sympathetic observer describes what he has seen and heard in the language that is natural to him.

Of the names of the eighteen capitals of China many have 'become more or less familiar to newspaper readers in recent ...months—Wuchang, with its vast annexes beyond the great

Hanyang with its ironworks and arsenal, Halal= with its busy trade and foreign concessions, being the first to spring into lurid prominence. Not the least of Dr. Geil's services is that he has been at pains, not only to bring the -cities themselves before our eyes, but to give their very names a living significance. Journalists and their readers are :bewildered by unfamiliar forms hard to memorize ; it is diffi- .onit for instance, not to confuse Wu-chau and Wu-ehang, or to distinguish between Hu-nan and Ho-nan, Shens-si and Shamed. The difficulty is lessened when we have the names— often picturesque and beautiful, sometimes rich in historical significance—interpreted for us. The popular name of Nan- :king, for instance—"the Southern Capital"—enshrines its ,Iistorical and actual importance in opposition to Peking, "the Northern Capital" ; while its official name of Kiang-ning, " the River's Peace," is eloquent of its position on the Yangtze Kiang, the river par excellence of China. Or what could be more poetical and expressive than the name of Tun-nan, the province " south of the clouds," which to the .north-east rises like an immense staircase to the "cloudy mountains "P It is in the city of Yunnan (Yannon Fu) that Dr. Geil :incidentally notes the most remarkable signs of the coming .change, in its barracks, its ball of assembly, its new educa- tional institutions. Already it is connected by railway with '.French Indo-China, and the author foresees the time, not far ,distant, when it will be similarly connected with Assam and Turma, bringing into contact the civilizations of India and

• China. These innovations are wonderful and fateful ; but they still have the air of exotics, and we confess that we are more fascinated by fading vision of old China given us in these pages than by these glimpses of familiar and not always beautiful forms in unfamiliar surroundings. Splendid, for :instance, is the impression of Soo-chow, "the Amsterdam- :Venice of the East," with its beautiful water-gates and its Grand Canal from which the waterways radiate all over the , Yangtze basin and across country to the Hwang-ho; and deeply interesting the picture of Nanchang, "the Splendour • of the South," still a stronghold of the ancient tradition and the seat of the Taoist " pope " (a mild-Mannered man, to ,judge by his portrait), whose charms and formula, we are tempted to think, would not so long have enjoyed popular '.favor r had they not possessed some efficacy, doubtless through ache power of faith, in curing human ills.

• The above examples may serve as some indication of what are, in our opinion, the conspicuous merits of Dr. Gen book. With the wider deductions which he draws from his observa- tions we confess that we are not always impressed. Dr. Geil is a patriotic American and an ardent Evangelical Christian— both excellent qualities, but apt to cloud the judgment when too straitly combined. His vision of China in the future is of a great Christian republic, and he even dreams of a union of this republic with the United States and the British Empire in a great league for preserving the peace of the world; a vision which might cause a certain uneasiness to other nations were it ever likely to be realized. The evidence Dr. Geil gives of the changed attitude of the people towards Christianity is very remarkable; in Taiyuan Fu, for instance, which in 1900 was the scene of a hideous massacre of missionaries and native Christians, there is now a modern university, forty of whose students are taking a post-graduate course at Berlin. A wholesale Chris- tianization of the population is always a possibility in present circumstances; but what sort of national Christianity would result P Even now it is clear, to those who can read between the lines of Dr. Geil's evidence, that many—not all—conver- sions are due to the belief that the prophylactic and healing spells of the missionaries are more powerful than those of the native hierophants, and that the revulsion of feeling in their favour is the outcome of the discovery that, so far from being "devils," or in league with "devils," they are positively obnoxious to them. Thus it has been discovered in Nanking that the presence of missionaries increases the value of house-property, since ghosts cannot abide them, and houses which they have inhabited cease to be haunted.

"It is a fine idea," says Dr. Geil (p. 202), "that Christianity is a prophylactic against ghosts. At present the approved method against them is to send for a sorcerer or call in Taoist priests or Buddhist monks to chant and drum. It may become more popular to hire a Christian as tenant !" This is all to the good. So is the abolition of foot-binding, and, generally, the growth of a higher idea of the position of woman ; but we confess that we read with unaffected dismay

that Chinese girls are not only giving up cosmetics, but that they are ceasing to wear bright colours, going abroad for preference in " foreign " black, and even, horribile dicfu, gar- nishing these dismal robes with foreign pearl buttons.

We cannot do better than close our review of this interest- ing volume by quoting, as the best example of the translations of Chinese literary fragments given by the author, that of the " sonnet " composed by the Emperor Chien Lung as he walked by the Pearl Grotto beneath the temple of the Goddess of Mercy, high on the western amphitheatre of hills above the plain on which lies the " most wondrous of Chinese cities,"Peking. This poem," which reverential hands carved into the rock," is thus rendered into English verse by Dr. Geil's unnamed companion :—

" Why have I scaled this misty height? Why Sought this mountain den P I tread as on enchanted ground, Unlike the'home of men.

Weird voices in the trees I hear, Weird visions see in air ;

The whispering pines are living harps,

And fairy bands are there.

Beneath my feet my realm I see, As in a map unrolled, Above my head a canopy Bedecked with clouds of goldl"