and put within her reach the material and instruments which would enable her to carry such ideas into practice—­this apart from religious teaching.  More particularly is this the case in respect to popular education, perhaps, by means of which the transformation of Old China into New China will be a less long and difficult process.  The people may not want the missionary—­I do not for a moment say that they do—­but they need to know the secret of his power and the power of his kind, and they must study his language, his science, his machinery, his steamboats, his army, his Dreadnaughts.  They realize that the foreigner is useful not for what he can do, but for what he can teach—­therefore they tolerate the missionary.  This is virtually the national policy of China towards foreigners, a policy gaining the acceptance of the people with remarkable quickness.

After having set aside all considerations of national prejudice and patriotism, it is interesting to ask whether it is actually a fact that the Chinese, as a race, are inferior to the peoples of the West?  Much has been said on the subject.  I give my opinion flatly that the Chinese is not inferior, and the longer I live with him the more numerous become the lessons which he teaches me.

“The question, when we examine it closely, has really very little to do with political strength or military efficiency, or (pace Mr. Benjamin Kidd) relative standards of living, or even the usual material accompaniments of what we call an advanced civilization; it is a question for the trained anthropologist and the craniologist rather than for the casual observer of men and manners.  The Japanese people are now much more highly civilized—­according to western notions—­than they were half a century ago, but it would be ludicrously erroneous to say that they are now a higher race, from the evolutionary point of view, than they were then.  Evolution does not work quite so rapidly as that even in these days of ‘hustle.’  The Japanese have advanced, not because their brains have suddenly become larger, or their moral and intellectual capabilities have all at once made a leap forward, but because their intercourse with Western nations, after centuries of isolated seclusion, showed them that certain characteristic features of European civilization would be of great use in strengthening and enriching their own country, developing its resources, and giving it the power to resist aggression.  If the Japanese were as members of the homo sapiens inferior to us fifty years ago, they are inferior to us now.  If they are our equals to-day—­and the burden of proof certainly now rests on him who wishes to show that they are not—­our knowledge of the origin and history of Eastern peoples, scanty though it is, should certainly tend to assure us that the Chinese are our equals, too.  There is no valid reason for supposing that the Chinese people are ethnically inferior to the Japanese.  They have preserved their isolated seclusion longer than the Japanese, because until very recently it was less urgently necessary for them to come out of it.  They have taken a longer time to appreciate the value of Western science and certain features of Western civilization, because new ideas take longer to permeate a very large country than a small one, and because China was rich within her own borders of all the necessaries of life."[AU]