undeveloped resources of their country, especially its coal and iron.  They have before them the example of Japan, which, by developing a brutal militarism, a cast-iron discipline, and a new reactionary religion, has succeeded in holding at bay the fierce lusts of “civilized” industrialists.  Yet they neither copy Japan nor submit tamely to foreign domination.  They think not in decades, but in centuries.  They have been conquered before, first by the Tartars and then by the Manchus; but in both cases they absorbed their conquerors.  Chinese civilization persisted, unchanged; and after a few generations the invaders became more Chinese than their subjects.

Manchuria is a rather empty country, with abundant room for colonization.  The Japanese assert that they need colonies for their surplus population, yet the Chinese immigrants into Manchuria exceed the Japanese a hundredfold.  Whatever may be the temporary political status of Manchuria, it will remain a part of Chinese civilization, and can be recovered whenever Japan happens to be in difficulties.  The Chinese derive such strength from their four hundred millions, the toughness of their national customs, their power of passive resistance, and their unrivalled national cohesiveness—­in spite of the civil wars, which merely ruffle the surface—­that they can afford to despise military methods, and to wait till the feverish energy of their oppressors shall have exhausted itself in internecine combats.

China is much less a political entity than a civilization—­the only one that has survived from ancient times.  Since the days of Confucius, the Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman Empires have perished; but China has persisted through a continuous evolution.  There have been foreign influences—­first Buddhism, and now Western science.  But Buddhism did not turn the Chinese into Indians, and Western science will not turn them into Europeans.  I have met men in China who knew as much of Western learning as any professor among ourselves; yet they had not been thrown off their balance, or lost touch with their own people.  What is bad in the West—­its brutality, its restlessness, its readiness to oppress the weak, its preoccupation with purely material aims—­they see to be bad, and do not wish to adopt.  What is good, especially its science, they do wish to adopt.

The old indigenous culture of China has become rather dead; its art and literature are not what they were, and Confucius does not satisfy the spiritual needs of a modern man, even if he is Chinese.  The Chinese who have had a European or American education realize that a new element, is needed to vitalize native traditions, and they look to our civilization to supply it.  But they do not wish to construct a civilization just like ours; and it is precisely in this that the best hope lies.  If they are not goaded into militarism, they may produce a genuinely new civilization, better than any that we in the West have been able to create.