It is interesting to contrast what the Chinese have sought in the West with what the West has sought in China.  The Chinese in the West seek knowledge, in the hope—­which I fear is usually vain—­that knowledge may prove a gateway to wisdom.  White men have gone to China with three motives:  to fight, to make money, and to convert the Chinese to our religion.  The last of these motives has the merit of being idealistic, and has inspired many heroic lives.  But the soldier, the merchant, and the missionary are alike concerned to stamp our civilization upon the world; they are all three, in a certain sense, pugnacious.  The Chinese have no wish to convert us to Confucianism; they say “religions are many, but reason is one,” and with that they are content to let us go our way.  They are good merchants, but their methods are quite different from those of European merchants in China, who are perpetually seeking concessions, monopolies, railways, and mines, and endeavouring to get their claims supported by gunboats.  The Chinese are not, as a rule, good soldiers, because the causes for which they are asked to fight are not worth fighting for, and they know it.  But that is only a proof of their reasonableness.

I think the tolerance of the Chinese is in excess of anything that Europeans can imagine from their experience at home.  We imagine ourselves tolerant, because we are more so than our ancestors.  But we still practise political and social persecution, and what is more, we are firmly persuaded that our civilization and our way of life are immeasurably better than any other, so that when we come across a nation like the Chinese, we are convinced that the kindest thing we can do to them is to make them like ourselves.  I believe this to be a profound mistake.  It seemed to me that the average Chinaman, even if he is miserably poor, is happier than the average Englishman, and is happier because the nation is built upon a more humane and civilized outlook than our own.  Restlessness and pugnacity not only cause obvious evils, but fill our lives with discontent, incapacitate us for the enjoyment of beauty, and make us almost incapable of the contemplative virtues.  In this respect we have grown rapidly worse during the last hundred years.  I do not deny that the Chinese go too far in the other direction; but for that very reason I think contact between East and West is likely to be fruitful to both parties.  They may learn from us the indispensable minimum of practical efficiency, and we may learn from them something of that contemplative wisdom which has enabled them to persist while all the other nations of antiquity have perished.