NEW CHINA AND OLD.*
AMONG the many great problems pressing for solution upon the world, already in view of the dawn of the twentieth century, none looms through the clearing mist of the near future more pregnant with vast results to mankind than the issue of the evolution, now accomplishing itself less and less slowly, of the immense populations that occupy the varied and fertile lands lying between the Pacific Ocean and the great deserts of Tartary and Tibet. For upon the degree of organised civili- sation, as understood in the West, the three hundred millions of Chinamen may attain within the next twenty years, depend not only the fortunes of the oldest of existing States, but those of all Eastern Asia as well. Nor can the result be regarded with indifference by the West. The isolation of China is no longer safeguarded by the barrier of remote and inaccessible frontiers which sufficed in the past, and the Middle Kingdom must lag less and less behind the nations of the West in the march of nineteenth-century civilisation, at the peril of disintegration and destruction. In that event, another Mogul Empire might tempt the whole world to war ; but the more probable history of the near future is of a very different character. For more than a quarter of a century, the rulers of China have appre- ciated to the full the superiority of the material side of Western civilisation, and have begun to feel the inherent strength of China in relation to that of European countries. A new State, indeed, is in course of evolution which Western diplomacy will have to take into more and more serious consideration, a State that must, should its unity be preserved, by its mere size and weight occupy a prominent place in the political ordering of the world.
The problem, therefore, turns upon the preservation of that unity, in other words, upon the result of the struggle between modern conditions and traditional habits of life and thought, which it is a principal object of the book before us to illustrate in the light of thirty years' experience in Mid- China as a missionary of the Church of England. Archdeacon Moule, like his brother, the well-known Bishop, has devoted his great powers and his whole life to the service of the Chinese people. In those great centres of population, Ningpo, Hang- chow, and Shanghai, and throughout the provinces in which they are situated, he has laboured since 1861. He early obtained a thorough command of colloquial Chinese, and has thus been enabled, not only to bring himself as a Christian teacher and preacher into direct contact with the people, but to gather his experiences at first-hand from officials, gentry, tradesmen, and peasants. It would be no great praise to say that his book is one of the best ever pub- lished on China ; it is better to say simply that its few hundred pages afford a most accurate, lifelike, and sym- pathetic portraiture of the kind of human being who lies under the yellow skin of a Chinaman. To Western readers, the Chinaman is too often a mere strange creature with a pigtail, talking a still stranger jargon, and fed upon puppies and rats. The truth is, the Chinaman at bottom is very much as other men, and the forces that act upon men are just as readily obeyed on the plains watered by the Hoang-ho and the Yang-tze as elsewhere. The important thing is to know what these forces are, and this is just what Archdeacon Moule tells us, after a lucid and earnest fashion of his own, judging the Chinese justly, and explaining their defects without overlanding their virtues.
It would take us too far to demonstrate that the immobility of China is due, not to any idiosyncrasy of the Chinese mind, but to the course of the history not so much of the Empire as of the people of China. We must start from the Confucian system, in its entirety probably of much later date than the philosopher, a system in reality less an ethical code than a plan of government. Its defect is twofold in the first place, the people suffer not only for their own faults, but for those of their governors, including the Son of Heaven himself; secondly, the will of Heaven, which ought to rule the conduct of Emperor and people alike, is interpreted by the Emperor alone. Thus a form of government, democratic in principle in that its end is the good of the people at large, has become in practice an ordinary Oriental despotism, tempered by the right of rebellion, and softened by the entire absence of the military spirit, unnecessary since the consolidation of the • New China and Old : Pers6na, Recollections and Observations of Thirty Years. By the Von. Arthur E. Moule, B. D., 0.2d S. Missionary in Ningpo, Hangchow, and Shanghai, and Archdeacon in Mid-Clime. With Illustrabons. London : Seeley and On.
Empire—the secret of which has not yet been extracted from Chinese annals, if, indeed, it is to be found there—within inaccessible frontiers. For centuries the Chinese, surrounded by semi-barbarian peoples, were justified in regarding their own civilisation with an admiration that ensured both its permanency and its immobility, strengthened by the real ignorance and sham learning of the lettered classes, which still form the most serious hindrance to China's full acceptance of the material, and in a much greater degree of the moral, aspects of Western civilisation. Of the literati, or gentry, as they are usually termed, the education at best endues them with a certain dialectical dexterity which is exercised wholly on subjects as devoid of intellectual interest as of practical importance. The themes selected for the annual examinations, as well as the essays written on them, sufficiently prove this, as do the meaningless and insincere proclamations issued from time to time by those high graduates who become Governors of Provinces; while diplomacy and commerce, where actual facts must be dealt with, afford fairer fields for the display of the Chinese intellect, and here the European finds it no easy task to hold his own.
Neither Confucianism, however, save in the complacent spirit it engenders, nor Taouism nor Buddhism in their purer forms, present any serious obstacle to the evolu- tion of China in the direction of Western civilisation. It is scarcely too much to say that the principle of fang-shui practically alone stands in the way of material advance, and the worship of ancestors, with the ideas bound up therewith, bars the spread of Christianity, both dogmatic and ethical.
Feng-shu,i, is not in itself the stupid superstition it is commonly supposed to be—the religious rites, indeed, of the Chinese that appear most grotesque to us, have or have had a good reason at bottom, not usually very difficult of discovery.
Feng-shui or Wind-Water, is a sort of Pantheism of which the elements or aspects are Form, Number, Invisible fluid (breath, vapour, &c.), and the Energy that produces and maintains the order of Nature. This is by no means an unphilosophical conception ; it is the application of it that has become infected with superstitions of all kinds, resulting in a variety of geomantic processes for avoiding undue prominence of any of the above aspects which might impede the beneficial working of the others. Thus, railways and telegraphs were objected to. mainly because no regard was paid in their construction to. feng-shui principles, and when the Woosung line was opened, a soldier was bribed with a hundred dollars to demonstrate the danger of this neglect by throwing himself before the engine,—which he did, and the line was doomed, being eventually bought up by the Chinese Government and demolished. Nevertheless, as Archdeacon Moule asserts' feng-shui is rather "a spectre to be vigorously laid than a belief to be slowly eradicated." Since adjoining villages have been made responsible for damage to telegraph-posts, these have remained uninjured, and are now regarded as harmless. In fact, the Chinaman is, with a little patience, peculiarly open to the logic of facts.
The worship of ancestors is something more than a super- stition, and something beyond a philosophy. It is based upon the deepest and best of human feelings ; it is an extension of the love children naturally entertain for their parents, to their remoter foregoers,—and such it doubtless was from the beginning. In China it is closely connected with the care of the grave, and the choice of a proper site for the repose of the dead. For, to quote the Archdeacon, the Chinese,-
" Distinguish between an animus and an anima, the first being the breath of heaven and returning thither ; the second being the material or animal element, and returning to earth at death. The common people, modifying the distinction, suppose that the dead are chained to the tomb by the material soul, and that the spiritual nature hovers round the old home ; and therefore, as there must be action and reaction of the two souls on one another, the comfort of the corpse makes the earthly soul complacent ; and flashing complacency to the spiritual soul as well, prosperity to the house of the living is secured by some unseen influence."
A third part of the soul, we may add, inheres in the tablet hung in the ancestral hall and reverenced much as the Lares were in ancient Rome.
Now, it is this worship of ancestors that has been a stumbling-block in the way of missionaries since the days of Ricci. That most able Jesuit, who died in 1610, treated
ancestor-worship as a social rite which converts were to be allowed to practise. But it was condemned as idolatrous by Innocent X. in 1645. The condemnation, however, was in effect reversed; but in 1693 Maigrot reverted to it. Against this the Jesuits appealed, not to the Pope, but to the great Emperor Kangbsi, who adopted their conclusions, and even imprisoned those who rejected them. Finally, nevertheless, the worship of ancestors was pronounced pagan and idolatrous, and is not now sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Arch- deacon Moule asks why it should not be permitted. The answer depends upon the possibility of cleansing the rite from the superstitious practices with which it is at present asso- ciated. Perhaps this may be effected in time; the Arch- deacon seems to us a little over-sanguine in the matter. If, as appears likely, the material advance of China should weaken the principle of feng-shui, which is intimately bound up with ancestor-worship, the objectionable features of the latter may become more susceptible of elimination. It certainly would be a serious calamity to China, and something of a reproach to Christianity, were the spread of the Christian faith to induce a weakening of the filial virtues characteristic of the sons of Han.
The book, which is well illustrated, is full of lively pictures of Chinese life. Archdeacon Mottle knows the people thoroughly, and presents them to us in all moods and under all conditions. His account of a visit to a Mandarin's yamen, and of the dinner there endured, is as amusing as it is realistic ; but the aim of the book is much more to give an adequate view of Chinese life as a whole, and especially from the stand- point of a Christian missionary mainly interested in the success of his work, than to describe the mere external oddities of a race whom it is too often the fashion of Western peoples to abuse when they can, and laugh at when they cannot abuse.
The chapter devoted to presenting the methods and results of missionary labour in China is extremely instructive and interesting, but we can scarcely do more than refer to it. The progress of Christianity is slow but certain. The most recent statistics give the Roman Catholics as 540,000, but the Hong Kong Register claims a million, under the care of 700 Euro- pean Bishops and priests and 560 native priests. Of Protes- tant missionaries, including ladies married and single, there were in 1890, 1,295, but the number of native communicants is only some 37,000, and of adherents about 100,000. These figures, however, are reassuring when contrasted with those of 1877,-13,000 communicants and 40,000 adherents. The truth is, that until the literati (gentry) are got at, none but the slowest progress can be expected. And to get at this • class the missionary must be more than a preacher in the collo- quial language ; he must possess an adequate knowledge of the written language, and he well acquainted with the classics, and the fundamental principles of Buddhism and Taouism. For this learning a basis might be more easily laid in this -country than in China, and it is to be regretted that so few opportunities exist for acquiring it, and that such as do exist are so little used. With it the missionary would be much better equipped for steering a prudent course amid the rocks and shoals of Chinese popular life.
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