The chief trouble, in the opinion of the writer, has been the simplicity of the problem and not its complexity.  By eliminating the glamour which surrounded the Throne, and by kicking away all the pomp and circumstance which formed the age-old ritual of government, the glaring simplicity and barrenness of Chinese life—­when contrasted with the complex West—­has been made evident.  Bathed in the hard light of modern realities, the poetic China which Haroun al-Raschid painted in his Aladdin, and which still lives in the beautiful art of the country, has vanished for ever and its place has been taken by a China of prose.  To those who have always pictured Asia in terms of poetry this has no doubt been a very terrible thing—­a thing synonymous with political death.  And yet in point of fact the elementary things remain much as they have always been before, and if they appear to have acquired new meaning it is simply because they have been moved into the foreground and are no longer masked by a gaudy superstructure.

For if you eliminate questions of money and suppose for a moment that the national balance-sheet is entirely in order, China is the old China although she is stirred by new ideas.  Here you have by far the greatest agricultural community in the world, living just as it has always lived in the simplest possible manner, and remitting to the cities (of which there are not ten with half-a-million inhabitants) the increment which the harvests yield.  These cities have made much municipal progress and developed an independence which is confessedly new.  Printing presses have spread a noisy assertiveness, as well as a very critical and litigious spirit, which tends to resent and oppose authority.[27] Trade, although constantly proclaimed to be in a bad way, is steadily growing as new wants are created and fashions change.  An immense amount of new building has been done, particularly in those regions which the Revolution of 1911 most devastated.  The archaic fiscal system, having been tumbled into open ruin, has been partially replaced by European conceptions which are still only half-understood, but which are not really opposed.  The country, although boasting a population which is only some fifty millions less than the population of the nineteen countries of Europe, has an army and a police-force so small as to allow one to say that China is virtually disarmed since there are only 900,000 men with weapons in their hands.  Casting about to discover what really tinges the outlook, that must simply be held to be the long delay the world has made in extending the same treatment to China as is now granted to the meanest community of Latin America.  It has been almost entirely this, coupled with the ever-present threat of Japanese chauvinism, which has given China the appearance of a land that is hopelessly water-logged, although the National Debt is relatively the smallest in the world and the people the most industrious and law-abiding who have ever lived.  In such circumstances that ideas of collapse should have spread so far is simply due to a faulty estimate of basic considerations.