CHINA .A_ND CHANGE.
OBSERVERS of foreign affairs have plenty of reason, if they do not forget the experiences of the past few years or ignore history, to agree with the proposition of a writer in the Times of Tuesday that the acceptance of the word " Republic " in China will not work any fundamental change. The Chinese character of to-day is the result of thousands of years of a progression so slow that it has often seemed to be a mere marking of time. The Chinese is like a frog embedded in rock. He is wonderfully preserved, and time has passed by him, wearing away the covering which holds him, but leaving on him no marks of the process of attrition. Anyone who believes that this lineal descendant of the ages, at the uttering of a single word, or at the removal of a particular dynasty, can suddenly change into a hew being must believe that magic is part of the machinery of human affairs. He must believe that the world will fall asunder and piece itself together again at the tap of a wand, with a "Hey, presto !" as the motive and explanation of everything. It would be an amusing if pre- carious world if such things were possible, but history does not stage-manage itself in this way. We have lately watched Persia summon a Alejliss, but remain as incapable as before of managing her affairs. We have watched the Young Turks revive the Constitution of 1876, and commit the oldest kind of Turkish political sins in the newest kind of constitutional ways. The point hardly needs demonstration. Yet so persistent is the indulgence of sentiment or superstition that there are thousands of persons in this country who cannot refrain from thinking that some- how the mumbling of a political incantation will create in the twinkling of an eye anywhere in the world a perfect aptitude for strange and scarcely apprehended political forms.
The writer in the Times, in an agreeable philosophical vein, points out how little was accomplished even by the French Revolution. "A little flurried, a little confused, a little less certain, a little ashamed of all the pother perhaps, the French nation returned to the same customs and traditions which it had previously possessed." The French Revolution, in spite of all the assumptions to the contrary, was not a social revolution. As Burke said of the changes then accomplished, " Their benefits were super- ficial; their errors were fundamental." The French Revolution, with its assertion of the rights of man, gave to all the world a model of a written constitution which need never be obeyed. That, if you like, is an impressive change, but it is an external change, a formal change, a question of theory which may not affect laggard practice. Peru has a perfect constitution, and it also has within its borders the Putumayo horrors. Mexico has a perfect constitution, and it also possesses the cruelly enslaved debtors of Yucatan. Great political movements, like the epidemic of revolutions in 1848, sweep over the face of the civilized world and leave the labourer in the fields, the clerk in the office, and the salesman in the shop wondering not less intently than before these cataclysms began how he shall amuse himself on the following Sunday, or what shall be the colour of his next suit of clothes. We think of a picture Zola draws in "Le Dehticle," of the tide of war streaming past a labourer who has not the dimmest conception of what issue is being decided in the great agony around him. The dead are buried, the wounded die, and the labourer remains very much what he was before. French history is full of illustrations of the steady, scarcely mutable elements which lie beneath the contorted surface of history. What was the snot prepared for the entry of Louis XVIII. into Paris—the snot which was to captivate the fancy and agile intellect of the Parisians "Rien n'est change ; ii n'y a qu'un Francais de plus." And could anything that was elaborately spiritu,e1 conceivably have been more true ?
The writer in the Times says that in China the real Sovereign power was never lodged in any particular dynasty, but in Con- fucianism. When the dynasty failed in its paternal service it was removed and replaced by another. It was never autocratic. Confucianism alone was autocratic. We must say that the writer leaves out of account the occasion when the conqueror elected that the Chinese people should be his subjects, and when the Chinese people cannot in any reason- able sense be said to have chosen their Sovereign. The Chinese did not, for example, want the Ming dynasty to be replaced by the Manchus. No doubt they removed the Manchu dynasty, like others, in due course, when it became too oppressive and too inconvenient. But in order to see the balance adjust itself over a number of years one would have to be independent of time or be able to watch our mundane affairs from another planet. For the Chinese who lived only while regal oppression was in the course of working itself up to the point of provoking retribution no such consolation was possible. But the writer says that oppression, in the sense in which we Europeans understand the word when it is used of monarchs, was never visited on the Chinese. No Chinese Emperor ever had the power, like autocrats in European history, to impose his whims upon the people, as though they were legislative acts popularly desired. The personal power of the Emperor did not permeate the land, it was great when it was symbolic— when the Emperor offered sacrifices for the whole people. For the rest, it obeyed the principle of Confucius, that a ruler, without going beyond his own family, completes the lessons of the State. Confucius says: "There is filial piety : therewith the Sovereign should be served. There is fraternal submission : therewith elders and superiors should be served. There is kindness : therewith the multitude should be served."
We come then to the old conclusion that the more a thing changes the more it is the same thing. We may use European terms to describe the changes in the East, but let us remember that words cannot be transplanted into exotic conditions and retain their value and vigour. The misapplication of our native phraseology is as fertile a source of error in political philosophy as the use of anthropomorphic terms in theology. In the latter case the terms are at best metaphors or illustrations. When pressed as though they had the strictest form of applicability they are the origin of all heresy. So it is with the employment of Western political terms in the affairs of the East. "The patriarchal family itself," says the writer in the Times, "is self-contained and self-ruling. The Tillage commune is equally self-contained and self-governing. Districts are ruled by delegates chosen from the villages and towns, and they, too, are self-governing.
. All this will remain in spite of the change from the Manchu dynasty to a so-called Republic." In fine, the revolution is not a social transformation; it is a change of directors, and the new ones will assume the paternal functions of the Imperial house. The new dynasty will be called a Republic.
Is there, then, no change of importance ? The correspondent thinks that there is one—the adaptation of the Chinese patriarchal system to Western commerce and manufacture. The new trade will be different from Western trade, for the simple reason that the Chinese is not a European. His mastery of life and means, within the limits of his traditions, is notable for its subtlety and minuteness. To take an illustra- tion, he has so many grades and names to express slight differences of colour that there are no European equivalents for them. Similarly, Europe is unable to match his subtle economical and utilitarian character. How this character will work out in trade no man can foresee with certainty. Of course it will be said that we shall not hold our own against such cheap and detailed competition. That, we venture to say, is a mere bogey. Let the millions of China raise their standard of comfort, as they must if they trade successfully. Their prosperity will also be ours, for we shall minister to their comfort, unless indeed we have lost the art of trading altogether,
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