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 forever 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.

[Footnote:  The growth of the Chinese press is remarkable.  Although no complete statistics are available there is reason to believe that the number of peri-odicals in China now approximates 10,000, the daily vernacular newspapers in Peking alone exceeding 60.  Although no newspaper in China prints more than 20,000 copies a day, the reading public is growing at a phenomenal rate, it being estimated that at least 50 million people read the daily publications, or hear what they say,—­a fact which is deemed so politically important that all political parties and groups have their chains of organs throughout the country.]

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