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

VI

Among Chinese institutions there is none that provokes the European mind to more hostile and contemptuous comment than our system of government. The inadequate salaries of our officials and the consequent temptation, to which they frequently succumb, to extort money by illegitimate means, is productive of much annoyance to foreigners; nor have I anything to say in defense of a practice so manifestly undesirable. At the same time, I cannot but note that corruption of this kind is a far less serious evil in China than it is, when it prevails, among yourselves. With you the function of government is so important and so ubiquitous that you can hardly realize the condition of a people that is able almost wholly to dispense with it. Yet such is our case. The simple and natural character of our civilization, the peaceable nature of our people (when they are not maddened by the aggression of foreigners), above all, the institution of the family, itself a little state—a political, social, and economic unit—these and other facts have rendered us independent of government control to an extent which to Europeans may seem incredible. Neither the acts nor the omissions of the authorities at Peking have any real or permanent effect on the life of our masses, except so far as they register the movements of popular sentiment and demand. Otherwise, as you foreigners know to your cost, they remain a dead-letter. The Government may make conventions and treaties, but it cannot put them into effect, except in so far as they are endorsed by public opinion. The passive resistance of so vast a people, rooted in a tradition so immemorial, will defeat in the future, as it has done in the past, the attempts of the Western Powers to impose their will on the nation through the agency of the Government. No force will ever suffice to stir that huge inertia. The whirlwind of war for a moment may ruffle the surface of the sea, may fleck with foam its superficial currents; it will never shake or trouble the clear unfathomable deep which is the still and brooding soul of China.

If our people are ever to be moved, their reason and their heart must be convinced; and this lesson, which you in Europe are so slow to learn, was embodied centuries ago in the practice and theory of our State. Government with us is based on the consent of the people to a degree which you of the West can hardly understand, much less imitate. What you have striven so vainly to achieve by an increasingly elaborate machinery happens among us by the mere force of facts. Our fundamental institutions are no arbitrary inventions of power; they are the form which the people have given to their life. No Government created and no Government would think of modifying them. And if from time to time it becomes desirable to add to them such further regulations as the course of events may seem to suggest, these, too, are introduced only in response to a real demand, and after proof made of their efficacy and popularity. Law, in a word, is not, with us, a rule imposed from above; it is the formula of the national life; and its embodiment in practice precedes its inscription in a code. Hence it is that in China government is neither arbitrary nor indispensable. Destroy our authorities, central and provincial, and our life will proceed very much as before. The law we obey is the law of our own nature, as it has been evolved by centuries of experience, and to this we continue our allegiance, even though the external sanction be withdrawn. Come what may, the family remains, with all that it involves, the attitude of mind remains, the spirit of order, industry, and thrift. These it is that make up China; and the Governments we have passively received are Governments only so long as they understand that it is not theirs to govern, but merely to express in outward show, to formulate and define, an order which in essentials they must accept as they accept the motions of the heavens. China does not change. The tumults of which you make so much, and of which you are yourselves the cause, are no signs of the break-up of our civilization. You hear the breakers roaring on the shore; but far away beyond your ken, unsailed by ship of yours, stretch to the blue horizon the silent spaces of the sea.

How different is the conception and fact of government in the West! Here there are no fundamental laws, but an infinity of arbitrary rules. Nothing roots except what has been planted; nothing is planted but what must be planted again. During the past hundred years you have dismantled your whole society. Property and marriage, religion, morality, distinctions of rank and class, all that is most important and most profound in human relationships, has been torn from the roots and floats like wreckage down the stream of time. Hence the activity of your Governments, for it is only by their aid that your society holds together at all. Government with you is thus important to an extent and degree happily inconceivable in the East. This in itself appears to me an evil; but it is one that I see to be inevitable. All the more am I surprised at what I cannot but regard as the extraordinary inefficiency of the machinery on which you rely to accomplish so vast a work. It is, I am aware, hard, perhaps impossible, to discover or devise any sure and certain method of selecting competent men; but surely it is strange to make no attempt to ascertain or secure any degree of moral or intellectual capacity in those to whom you entrust such important functions ! Our own plan in China of selecting our rulers by competitive examination is regarded by you with a contempt not altogether undeserved. Yet you adopt it yourselves in the choice of your subordinate officials; and it has at least the merit of embodying the rational idea that the highest places in the Government should be open to all, rich or poor, who have given proof of ability and talent, and that they should be open to no others. Compared to the method of election it appears to me to be reason itself. For what does election mean? You say that it means representation of the people; but do you not know in your hearts that it means, and can mean, nothing of the kind? What is really represented is Interests. And in what are Interests interested? Your reply, I suspect, will be, In public abuses! Landlords, brewers, railway directors—is it not these that really rule you? And must it not be so while your society is constituted as it is? There is, I am aware, a party which hopes to bring to bear against these the brute and overwhelming force of the Mass. But such a remedy, even if it were practicable, does not commend itself to my judgment; for the Mass in your society is itself an Interest. The machinery which you have provided appears to aim at bringing together in a cockpit egotistic forces bent upon private goods, in order that they may arrive, by dint of sheer fighting, at a result which shall represent the good of the whole. It is perhaps the inveterate respect, in« herent in every Chinaman, for the authority of morality and reason, that prevents me from regarding such a procedure with the enthusiasm or even the toleration which it seems commonly to arouse among yourselves. When problems of such vast importance have devolved upon, and must be assumed by, a Government, I cannot but think that some better means might have been devised for interesting in their solution the best talent of the nation. And I am confirmed in this view by the reflection that I have met in your universities and elsewhere men who have profoundly studied the questions your Legislature is expected to determine, whose intelligence is clear, whose judgment unbiassed, whose enthusiasm disinterested and pure, but who can never hope for a chance of putting their wisdom to practical effect, because their temperament,, their training, and their habit of life, have unfitted them for the ordeal of popular election. To be a member of Parliament is, it would seem, a profession in itself, and the qualities, intellectual and moral, which open the door to a public career appear to be distinct from, and even incompatible with, those which contribute to public utility.