Ad Astra * Index: Letters from a Chinese Official, New York, 1903

IV

In attempting to lay before you a characteristic scene of Chinese life I selected for the purpose a community of peasants. I did so because it is there that I find the typical product of our civilization. Cities, it is true, we have, and cities as monstrous, perhaps, as yours; but they are mere excrescences on a body politic whose essential constitution is agricultural. With you all this is reversed; and for that reason you have no country life deserving the name. On the one hand waste of common and moor, on the other villas and parks, laborers poorly clad, wretchedly housed, and miserably paid, dreary villages, decaying farms, squalor, brutality, and vice— 'such is the picture you give, yourselves, of your agricultural districts. Whatever in England is not urban is parasitic or moribund. If, then, I am to give an impression that shall be candid and just of the best results of your civilization.

I must turn from the country to the life of your great cities. And in doing so I will not seek to win an easy victory by dwelling unduly on those more obvious points which you no less than I admit and deplore. Your swarming slums, your liquor-saloons, your poor-houses, your prisons— these, it is true, are melancholy facts. But the evils of which they are symptoms you are setting yourselves to cure, and your eiforts, I do not doubt, may be attended with a large measure of success. It is rather the goal to which you seem to be moving when you have done the best you can that I would choose to consider in this place. Your typical product, your average man, the man you call respectable, him it is that I wish to characterize, for he it is that is the natural and inevitable outcome of your civilization. What manner of man, then, is he? It is with some hesitation that I set myself to answer this question. I am a stranger among you; I have enjoyed your hospitality; and I am loath to seem to repay you with discourtesy. But if there be any service I can do you, I know none greater than to bring home to you, if I could, without undue offence, certain important truths (so they seem to me) to which you appear to be singularly blind. Your feet, I believe, are set on the wrong path; I would fain warn you; and useless though the warning may be, it is offered in the spirit of friendship, and in that spirit, I hope, it will be received.

When I review my impressions of the average English citizen, impressions based on many years' study, what kind of man do I see? I see one divorced from Nature, but unreclaimed by Art; instructed, but not educated; assimilative, but incapable of thought. Trained in the tenets of a religion in which he does not really believe —for he sees it flatly contradicted in every relation of life—he dimly feels that it is prudent to conceal under a mask of piety the atheism he is hardly intelligent enough to avow. His religion is conventional; and, what <s more important, his morals are as conventional as his creed. Charity, chastity, self-abnegation, contempt of the world and its prizes—these are the words on which he has been fed from his childhood upward. And words they have remained, for neither has he anywhere seen them practised by others, nor has it ever occurred to him to practise them himself. Their influence, while it is strong enough to make him a chronic hypocrite, is not so strong as to show him the hypocrite he is. Deprived on the one hand of the support of a true ethical standard, embodied in the life of the society of which he is a member, he is duped, on the other, by lip-worship of an impotent ideal. Abandoned thus to his instinct, he is content to do as others do, and, ignoring the things of the spirit, to devote himself to material ends. He becomes a mere tool; and of such your society is composed. By your works you may be known. Your triumphs in the mechanical arts are the obverse of your failure in all that calls for spiritual insight. Machinery of every kind you can make and use to perfection; but you cannot build a house, or write a poem, or paint a picture; still less can you worship or aspire. Look at your streets! Row upon row of little boxes, one like another, lacking in all that is essential, loaded with all that is superfluous—this is what passes among you for architecture. Your literature is the daily press, with its stream of solemn fatuity, of anecdotes, puzzles, puns, and police-court scandal. Your pictures are stories in paint, transcripts of all that is banal, clumsily botched by amateurs as devoid of tradition as of genius. Your outer sense as well as your inner is dead; you are blind and deaf. Ratiocination has taken the place of perception; and your whole life is an infinite syllogism from premises you have not examined to conclusions you have not anticipated or willed. Everywhere means, nowhere an end! Society a huge engine, and that engine itself out of gear! Such is the picture your civilization presents to my imagination. I will not say that it is so that it appears to every intelligent Chinaman; for the Chinese, unlike you, are constitutionally averse to drawing up an indictment against a nation. If I have been led into that error, it is under strong provocation; and already I feel that I owe you an apology. Yet what I have said I cannot withdraw; and I shall not regret that I have spoken if I may hope that my words have suggested to some among my readers a new sense in the cry, "China for the Chinese!"