What has Mr. Bland to tell us of all the welter of loan-mongering, rococo constitution-tinkering, Confucianism, and genuine if at times misdirected philanthropy, which is now seething in the Chinese melting-pot?

In the first place, he has to say that the main obstacle to all real progress in China is one that cannot be removed by any change in the form of government, whether the ruling spirit be a full-fledged Republican of the Sun Yat-Sen type, aided by a number of “imitation foreigners,” as they are termed by their countrymen, or a savage, albeit statesmanlike “Old Buddha,” who, at the close of a life stained by all manner of blood-guiltiness, at last turned her weary face towards Western reform as the only hope of saving her country and her dynasty.  The main disease is not political, and is incapable of being cured by the most approved constitutional formulae.  It is economic.  Polygamy, aided by excessive philo-progenitiveness, the result of ancestor-worship, has produced a highly congested population.  Vast masses of people are living in normal times on the verge of starvation.  Hence come famines and savage revolts of the hungry.  “Amidst all the specifics of political leaders,” Mr. Bland says, “there has been as yet hardly a voice raised against marriages of minors or polygamy, and reckless over-breeding, which are the basic causes of China’s chronic unrest.”

The same difficulty, though perhaps in a less acute form, exists in India.  Not only cannot it be remedied by mere philanthropy, but it is absolutely certain—­cruel and paradoxical though it may appear to say so—­that philanthropy enhances the evil.  In the days of Akhbar or Shah Jehan, cholera, famine, and internal strife kept down the population.  Only the fittest survived.  Now, internal strife is forbidden, and philanthropy steps in and says that no single life shall be sacrificed if science and Western energy or skill can save it.  Hence the growth of a highly congested population, vast numbers of whom are living on a bare margin of subsistence.  I need hardly say that I am not condemning philanthropy.  On the contrary, I hold strongly that an anti-philanthropic basis of government is not merely degrading and inhuman, but also fortunately nowadays impracticable.  None the less, the fact that one of the greatest difficulties of governing the teeming masses in the East is caused by good and humane government should be recognised.  It is too often ignored.

A partial remedy to the state of things now existing in China would be to encourage emigration; but a resort to this expedient is impossible, for Europeans and Americans alike, being scared by the prospect of competing with Chinese cheap labour, which is the only real Yellow Peril,[67] as also by the demoralisation consequent on a large influx of Chinamen into their dominions, close their ports to the emigrants.  That Young China should feel this as a gross injustice can be no matter for surprise.  The Chinaman may, with