But, it will be said, you have been comparing Western practice with Chinese theory; if you had compared Western theory with Chinese practice, the balance would have come out quite differently.  There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this.  Possession, which is one of the three things that Lao-Tze wishes us to forego, is certainly dear to the heart of the average Chinaman.  As a race, they are tenacious of money—­not perhaps more so than the French, but certainly more than the English or the Americans.  Their politics are corrupt, and their powerful men make money in disgraceful ways.  All this it is impossible to deny.

Nevertheless, as regards the other two evils, self-assertion and domination, I notice a definite superiority to ourselves in Chinese practice.  There is much less desire than among the white races to tyrannize over other people.  The weakness of China internationally is quite as much due to this virtue as to the vices of corruption and so on which are usually assigned as the sole reason.  If any nation in the world could ever be “too proud to fight,” that nation would be China.  The natural Chinese attitude is one of tolerance and friendliness, showing courtesy and expecting it in return.  If the Chinese chose, they could be the most powerful nation in the world.  But they only desire freedom, not domination.  It is not improbable that other nations may compel them to fight for their freedom, and if so, they may lose their virtues and acquire a taste for empire.  But at present, though they have been an imperial race for 2,000 years, their love of empire is extraordinarily slight.

Although there have been many wars in China, the natural outlook of the Chinese is very pacifistic.  I do not know of any other country where a poet would have chosen, as Po-Chui did in one of the poems translated by Mr. Waley, called by him The Old Man with the Broken Arm, to make a hero of a recruit who maimed himself to escape military service.  Their pacifism is rooted in their contemplative outlook, and in the fact that they do not desire to change whatever they see.  They take a pleasure—­as their pictures show—­in observing characteristic manifestations of different kinds of life, and they have no wish to reduce everything to a preconceived pattern.  They have not the ideal of progress which dominates the Western nations, and affords a rationalization of our active impulses.  Progress is, of course, a very modern ideal even with us; it is part of what we owe to science and industrialism.  The cultivated conservative Chinese of the present day talk exactly as their earliest sages write.  If one points out to them that this shows how little progress there has been, they will say:  “Why seek progress when you already enjoy what is excellent?” At first, this point of view seems to a European unduly indolent; but gradually doubts as to one’s own wisdom grow up, and one begins to think that much of what we call progress is only restless change, bringing us no nearer to any desirable goal.