THE CATASTROPHE IN CHINA.
THE fearfully graphic letter published in our columns last week, and written by Mr. Balfour, concerning the famine which began two years and a half ago in the thickly-populated provinces of Northern China, gives us a sort of foretaste of the kind of physical phenomena which might well attend the last days of man on the planet which he inhabits, and in which he is im- prisoned by far more unconquerable fetters than any which tie the poor Chinese to the provinces of Shansi and Chihli. Mr. Balfour states that the process of drying-up which has long been going on in the table-lands of Central Asia has lately been ex- tending itself to the great provinces watered by the innu- merable affluents of the Peiho and the Hoangho. The country thus attacked by famine is of the magnitude of thirteen Switzerlands, and some of it is so literally deprived of food, that the people, after subsisting long on the bark of trees, and thereby, no doubt, doing all that in them lay to hasten the strides of the great drought,—for all experience proves that to denude a country of trees has the effect of robbing it of the rain that is needful for the growth of trees,—have been reduced first to feeding, like some of the Hindoos in the late Indian famine, on the thatch of their own huts, and on the stringy fibre of the potato-stalk, and last of all, to consuming a species of red slatestone, which splits into small fragments when chewed, and which yields when swallowed, — as it can be by practice,—possibly something of the nature of food, and certainly something which appeases in a degree the gnawing pains of hunger. In the meantime, so fearful is the famine, that husbands gladly sell their wives for six dollars a
head to save them from it, and children for even two dollars, while those who have no opportunity of doing this, not unfrequently kill their children and poison themselves by arsenic or by drown-
ing, in their despair. Corpses, says Mr. Balfour, lay rotting by the wayside, and there was none to bury them. It is hardly possible to conceive a more ghastly picture of society, not simply dissolved into its elements, but with hardly even its elements left. What can family life mean when the father or the husband thinks it his first and most imperative duty to sell or slaughter his daughter or his wife, to save her from the agonies of famine? What remains of the moral training of man in a society in which the shadow of death in its most fearful form overwhelms every glimpse of hope, and in which duty, if it has a meaning at all, appears to consist in the sacrifice of every affection, however sacred, for the bare hope of keeping body and soul together ? Lessing has termed history the "divine education of the human race," but how are we to find anything divine in this fearful trampling- out of all the seeds of moral and spiritual life under the crushing march of a malignant fate? If any beneficent influence were ' evolved' by the accumulation of such horrors, the problem to our faith would be comparatively easy. But when nothing is ' evolved' except the silence of rotting corpses and despairing suicides, where indeed the calamity is too vast in its scale to put man on his mettle, and the only result is that he is paralysed in the presence of the great wave of desolation, and lies down to let it sweep over him,—here, surely, faith in that Providence which has appointed man his place on the earth, and fitted him for that placef must stand bewildered, and can scarcely even cry out sincerely that it believes, while it implores help for its un- belief? Where there is room for a deliverer, the gratitude for help given, compensates, or perhaps even more than compen- sates; the horror engendered by the evil destiny with which that deliverer does battle. But where there is none, where provinces lie down to bear the agony of destruction without even a hope of help or a thought of gratitude, no explanation of the purpose of Providence seems at first sight possible. Of course, it is always easy to say that our complete ignorance of the meaning of such calamities does not prevent them from having a beneficent meaning to eyes that can penetrate far beyond our own. But then there is no denying that our faith could never have grown up at all in the presence of this grand march of misery and desolation, and that in all probability, therefore, that faith depends on.* long train of circumstances which, though favourable to it, were yet as intrinsicallyccmtingent on the one side, as these horrors, which would have been destructive of it, were contingent on the other. Can we say without an inward shake to our own faith ?— Had we been tried by so searching a fire as this, our trust in the beneficence of God would never have survived it ; but as we have not been so tried, but only seen others exposed to a test which our religion could never have outlived, we can go on in our belief, and indulge the deepest thankfulness that that belief has never been taken from us by experience of the same awful kind?' We hardly think any sincere person could say this. But many, we believe, might say—what is very different—that though, if they had lived through • such a rush of apparent evil into the world, under the same conditions as the Chinese, nothing is more certain than that they should have come out of it as believers in an evil rather than in a good ruler of the destiny of man, yet with the faith which their inherited teaching has given them, they might well have passed through such a moral tornado of horrors, and yet never for a moment have been even tempted to renounce it. Yet even so, the difficulty is only transferred from one point to another. How is it that such trials are inflicted at all on those not yet prepared to be educated by them ? Why are the untaught put through a lesson of which they could not possibly catch the meaning, while the well-taught, who might profit by it, are spared it ? Why do these whirlwinds of terror and desolation sweep down the races which have never learned to believe in the goodness behind the tempest, and yet spare those who might profit by that trust? If such calamities could mean nothing but the trampling of a malignant fate to the Chinese, and might mean much more to the races of Europe or America, how is it that they sweep away peoples to whom they come but as a cataract of destruction, and leave comparatively un- touched, or touched by a far lighter hand, those in whom they might foster the highest and most tranquil submission to a mysterious, but yet perfectly loving Will ?
We suspect the answer to be twofold ;—first, the same causes or combination of causes which inspire a portion of mankind with faith in God's providence, store up for them also at the same time immense resources of intellectual, moral, and spiritual strength, which enable them often to evade the shock of these physical calamities, and often greatly to diminish or alleviate it when they do come, and to reduce them to dimensions not too vast for the purpose of eliciting human courage, fortitude, and invention. Next, though
the frightful woes of physical calamity which have struck the inhabitants of Asia, and probably even of Africa, from time to time, have often been almost or quite destitute of any visible educating power for those who have been overwhelmed by them, and though these calamities have often merely seemed to thin away certain races, so as to give greater predominance to other races, not so terribly exposed to those frightful scourges, yet the fear of a malignant deity which such horrors have very naturally left behind them, and the strong desire to propitiate it, have always been of that relatively superficial kind which depends on the deep sense of human impotence, and which at once vanishes before any vigorous growth of spiritual life in man. Nothing is more certain than that the earliest history of mankind is a history of suffering,—that the ages, for instance, when only stone implements were known must have been ages of prolonged privation and keen suffering,—that many races,—like the Egypt- ian for centuries back,—have lived a life of dull and monotonous oppression, lightened by very faint gleams of hope or joy,— that, in short, the early history of the race,—an-early history which for very large divisions of the human race isnot yet ended, —is a history of grinding trouble, in which almost all that the race seems to learn is to suffer, without as yet learning the great art of suffering gladly on behalf of others, • or so as to pluck joy out of suffering. The natural theology which insists on the vast preponderance of happiness over suffering, does not really face the story of the early history of the world as it is now known to us, nor even that of the contemporary history of the great stationary races. What it thinks of mainly is the life of those races in which the sense of spiritual streng th- of the power to cope with or embrace suffering—has at length been elicited after the long dull history of human passiveness and numbness. The ages in which man struggled for life with animals far fiercer and not much less cunning than himself, and with natural agencies which were all but too potent for-him, were certainly not ages in which the goodness of Gochcould. have been proved by the vast preponderance of human happiness over human suffering. Such calamities as are•now devastating• China are but specimens, as Mr. Balfour reminds us, of cyclical calamitiestto which other portions of the earth's surface have been subject periodically since first there was life upon the globe ; and assuredly to those-who cannot see in the long ground-swell of suffering of race after race compelled to save itself from destruction by the most painful migrations, a steady preparation for the culture of a higher order of moral power and vitality, the history of mankind must be desolate indeed. But in truth, the dull sufferings of savage, barbarous, and stationary races,—and probably even the mere animal sufferings which preceded the appearance of man. on this globe,—have all been necessary to store adequately the human nature which we now know with its present resources,—a nature that is strengthened and stimulated by suffering, instead of numbed by it, which finds in voluntary suffering for others the key-stone of a great faith, which finds, indeed, the secret of a new and trium- phant power in the very heart of wretchedness and misery.
And from this point of view such calamities as have recently descended on India, and now on China, cannot be regarded as even the pure misfortunes which, in any other age, (when they would only have been endured, and so added a new tempering in the fire of sheer endurance to the natures which passed through them), they must have been. So far as they are now rendered the occasions of a new sympathy between races of very different mould and very different faiths,—so far as they bring the religion which treats the highest kind of suffering as divine, to bear on the stolid fortitude of hereditary apathy,—they are not mere repetitions of the old horrors of physical calamity, but opportunities for a new and marvellous upward spring in the spiritual history of the race. No one can deny that within the last century, whatever the weaknesses and faults and sentimentalities of European feeling may have been, there has been an abrupt and marvellous growth in the sympathy between different nations and different races. The excitement of English feeling against the cruelties of Warren Hastings in India, the fervid enthusiasm of France against the Bastille and all that the Bastille typi- fied, the general growth of European horror of the slave- trade, the rising of the English conscience against the cruelties of the old British criminal law, the sympathy of all Europe with Greece and with Poland, the movement which ended in the abolition of slavery in all British dominions, the self-reproach with which the iniquities of our Irish administration were regarded, the passionate sympathy with Hungary and Italy, the growing distrust of the selfishness of the English policy in Turkey, the rapid growth of European sympathy with the oppressed Slays of Eastern Europe, the intense interest in African travel, and in the suppression of the internal slave-trade in Africa, the eager desire to alleviate the horrors of Indian and now of Chinese famines,—are all signs of the rising of a great wave of feeling, which is confined to no one country and to no one continent., and which seems to us to make it certain that the repetition of the old physical horrors of the earliest ages will be alleviated, this time, by the cementing of new sympathies between the East and the West, and the spread of the religion which is founded on God's own willingness to suffer, to the races which hare hitherto attributed their suffering to beings not divine, but malignant. Yet if this is to be so, we must regard not only Indian, but Chinese, and all other forms of anguish, as divine opportunities for the practical proof of our eagerness to aid.in lessening these most frightful of all the physical calamities which can overwhelm man,—calamities whose horror can only bs diminished in one way, by making them the signals for a new era:of religious sympathy and compassion, the starting-points of anew and moreeffectual attack on the exclusive principles of race, caste, and hereditary suspicion.
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