money and power as the proper ends for nations as for individuals.  The helplessness of the artist in a hard-headed business community has long been a commonplace of novelists and moralizers, and has made collectors feel virtuous when they bought up the pictures of painters who had died in penury.  China may be regarded as an artist nation, with the virtues and vices to be expected of the artist:  virtues chiefly useful to others, and vices chiefly harmful to oneself.  Can Chinese virtues be preserved?  Or must China, in order to survive, acquire, instead, the vices which make for success and cause misery to others only?  And if China does copy the model set by all foreign nations with which she has dealings, what will become of all of us?

China has an ancient civilization which is now undergoing a very rapid process of change.  The traditional civilization of China had developed in almost complete independence of Europe, and had merits and demerits quite different from those of the West.  It would be futile to attempt to strike a balance; whether our present culture is better or worse, on the whole, than that which seventeenth-century missionaries found in the Celestial Empire is a question as to which no prudent person would venture to pronounce.  But it is easy to point to certain respects in which we are better than old China, and to other respects in which we are worse.  If intercourse between Western nations and China is to be fruitful, we must cease to regard ourselves as missionaries of a superior civilization, or, worse still, as men who have a right to exploit, oppress, and swindle the Chinese because they are an “inferior” race.  I do not see any reason to believe that the Chinese are inferior to ourselves; and I think most Europeans, who have any intimate knowledge of China, would take the same view.

In comparing an alien culture with one’s own, one is forced to ask oneself questions more fundamental than any that usually arise in regard to home affairs.  One is forced to ask:  What are the things that I ultimately value?  What would make me judge one sort of society more desirable than another sort?  What sort of ends should I most wish to see realized in the world?  Different people will answer these questions differently, and I do not know of any argument by which I could persuade a man who gave an answer different from my own.  I must therefore be content merely to state the answer which appeals to me, in the hope that the reader may feel likewise.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are:  knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.  When I speak of knowledge, I do not mean all knowledge; there is much in the way of dry lists of facts that is merely useful, and still more that has no appreciable value of any kind.  But the understanding of Nature, incomplete as it is, which is to be derived from science,