But on what grounds can we think that the natures of clay and wood desire this application of compasses and square, of arc and line?  Nevertheless, every age extols Po Lo for his skill in managing horses, and potters and carpenters for their skill with clay and wood.  Those who govern the Empire make the same mistake.

Although Taoism, of which Lao-Tze was the founder and Chuang-Tze the chief apostle, was displaced by Confucianism, yet the spirit of this fable has penetrated deeply into Chinese life, making it more urbane and tolerant, more contemplative and observant, than the fiercer life of the West.  The Chinese watch foreigners as we watch animals in the Zoo, to see whether they “drink water and fling up their heels over the champaign,” and generally to derive amusement from their curious habits.  Unlike the Y.M.C.A., they have no wish to alter the habits of the foreigners, any more than we wish to put the monkeys at the Zoo into trousers and stiff shirts.  And their attitude towards each other is, as a rule, equally tolerant.  When they became a Republic, instead of cutting off the Emperor’s head, as other nations do, they left him his title, his palace, and four million dollars a year (about L600,000), and he remains to this moment with his officials, his eunuchs and his etiquette, but without one shred of power or influence.  In talking with a Chinese, you feel that he is trying to understand you, not to alter you or interfere with you.  The result of his attempt may be a caricature or a panegyric, but in either case it will be full of delicate perception and subtle humour.  A friend in Peking showed me a number of pictures, among which I specially remember various birds:  a hawk swooping on a sparrow, an eagle clasping a big bough of a tree in his claws, water-fowl standing on one leg disconsolate in the snow.  All these pictures showed that kind of sympathetic understanding which one feels also in their dealings with human beings—­something which I can perhaps best describe as the antithesis of Nietzsche.  This quality, unfortunately, is useless in warfare, and foreign nations are doing their best to stamp it out.  But it is an infinitely valuable quality, of which our Western world has far too little.  Together with their exquisite sense of beauty, it makes the Chinese nation quite extraordinarily lovable.  The injury that we are doing to China is wanton and cruel, the destruction of something delicate and lovely for the sake of the gross pleasures of barbarous millionaires.  One of the poems translated from the Chinese by Mr. Waley[39] is called Business Men, and it expresses, perhaps more accurately than I could do, the respects in which the Chinese are our superiors:—­

    Business men boast of their skill and cunning
    But in philosophy they are like little children. 
    Bragging to each other of successful depredations
    They neglect to consider the ultimate fate of the body. 
    What should they know of the Master of Dark Truth
    Who saw the wide world in a jade cup,
    By illumined conception got clear of heaven and earth: 
    On the chariot of Mutation entered the Gate of Immutability?