intellectual and material progress;"—and the sixth,— “they suppress liberty of speech"-are at no great remove from the moral realm. The avariciousness of the imperial clan was so great that even in their hour of supreme distress when Yuan Shi Kai had exhausted every resource to obtain money absolutely necessary to prevent the government from falling into anarchy with an unpaid soldiery, it did not occur to any of them to offer help from their immense accumulation of treasure. Yuan had to go personally and beg a paltry 6,000,000 taels, enough at best to tide things over less than a month. Yet when the comptroller of the household made his report after the death of Tze Hsi, the old dowager empress, the privy treasure was 12,000,000 taels gold, and 990,000,000 taels silver. It is said also that the princes had deposits in foreign banks amounting to $65,000,000. However that may be, it is certain that Duke Tasi Tao, brother of the regent, whom he had placed over the war office, grew fabulously rich through his sales of commissions in less than three years. So extreme did the evil become that the revolutionaries were able before the struggle to put their generals in command of the most important divisions and brigades of the army. The fact that, when the crisis came and some of the princes were still for fighting it out, forty-six generals of the northern army sent a telegram demanding the abdication of the throne and the setting up of a republican form of government, shows that many of those generals still held their commissions, as well as suggests a suspicion that Yuan had come to the place where he could play on the winning side. From top to bottom official life in China was unthinkably corrupt. Sir Robert Hart, than whom no westerner better knew the inside of officialdom, said that if the revenues of China were honestly collected and honestly administered they would go six times as far as they did. Personally I feel very certain that the splendid sweep of the anti-opium movement through the length and breadth of the land had very much to do with this quickening of the moral conscience against the 267 years of misrule which the Manchus had given China. That great reform, already THE JOURNAL OF RACE DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 4, NO. 1, 1913 four-fifths made good, and accomplishing more in its five years of agitation than we in America have with a hundred years of our toying with the liquor evil, surprised not only the western world; it surprised the Chinese people themselves. It revealed reserves of moral power of which they had not been conscious. It was hardly a fair indictment of the Manchus made by Ma Soo, secretary to Dr. Sun when president of the provisional government, to say at a great republican rally regarding the new compact with Great Britain, signed May 8, 1911, "The opportunity (to free China) came, but they (the Manchus) would not take it. They sold their people for an increased revenue of 350 taels per chest of opium;" for from the beginning the throne had shown earnestness and sincerity in this great reform. It was rather the scorn and unfaith of Great Britain that the revolutionaries should have pointed to. "Heaven hears through the ears of the people" was a quotation from their most ancient philosopher, Shun, that the Chinese often had thrust at them during those months and years of waking moral consciousness. They were but living up to their highest and noblest traditions when, with the plain evidences of hopeless misrule on everyhand and blind and stubborn opposition to all sound progress clearly manifest, they came to realize that "heaven had withdrawn its favor" from their rulers, and accordingly prepared their vials of wrath. Mr. Yung Wing, so intimately connected with Chinese student life in America since its inception in 1872, in a letter to a friend shortly before his death in Hartford, Connecticut, April 12, 1912, wrote, "The late political revolution in its sweep over eighteen provinces has accomplished two wonderful historical facts of the century, one the downfall of the Manchu dynasty, the other the rising up of the Chung Hua Republic; neither of which can be possible without our full recognition of God in human history. The laws which govern the rise and fall of principalities and empires have been foreordained by the Deity himself; and when a dynasty like the Manchu was swept away like chaff before the whirlwind, we may be sure that the dynasty has violated some of the fundamental principles of the moral universe. Upon investigation we will find that the Manchu Dynasty since its supremacy over the Chinese Empire for nearly three centuries have not observed justice to the people, nor righteousness, nor equality, nor truth. If the Manchus had been scrupulous in maintaining the cardinal virtues in their administrative system as taught by Confucius and the sages of old, they would never have been allowed to abdicate." From words like these it is easy to see how such a roused moral consciousness as we have been noting rises clearly into the spiritual realm. From what has been said it must not be concluded that the revolution was a great white crusade. There were plenty of rascals who simply went on following their own fortunes with the new turn of the tide, and there was a great deal of blind and foolish enthusiasm that the country had found the panacea for all its woes and weaknesses; but despite this we must not fail to note that the great moral motive firing the energies of most of the leaders and the best spirits was fundamentally sound and high, much more so than the commercial, land hungry diplomacy of the representatives of the powers encamped in Peking. 3. A third moral and spiritual element for us to note was a new, almost intoxicating selfconsciousness among the Chinese people. This is in marked contrast with the inchoate spirit of old China. That led us to regard the nation as a mere congeries of land grubbing people. Just as the new Chinaman has come to a higher and clearer sense of personality than he has before known, so the whole country in its livest stratum of society showed that it had come to a higher plane of national consciousness. The very fact that the revolution aimed simply at getting rid of the dynasty and not at setting up some great hero or deliverer on the throne is witness of this. China aimed to set herself in the chair of sovereignty, and that so large and able and representative a proportion of the people could and did respond to the ideal has startled the world. A new sense of unity then is one of the first things that rivet our attention in this element of self-consciousness. Of course plenty of provincial jealousies and section differences were brought into play but the fact that eventually they were successfully subordinated to the common ideal is the outstanding fact. Among the first pronouncements of the new government was one that a foremost aim should be the consolidation of the five races of which the inhabitants of this tremendous land with some reason have regarded themselves composed, making of the Hans, the Manchus, the Mongolians, the Mohammedans, and the Tibetans one great homogeneous nation. They proclaimed the fact to the world in the stripes of their new flag. Even the vanquished Manchus were included without resentment in the new democratic ideal. In the early weeks of the revolution, the break-up of the country into small provincial republics seemed like a contradiction of this spirit of unity. That view was due less to local ambitions, than to the misunderstandings by the outsiders of the real program of the revolutionaries which was not to sweep the country with fire and sword, but only to seize those positions of government and armed force which it was necessary for them to hold until such times as the success of the movement made the consolidation of the whole swift and sure. It is interesting to note that this new spirit of unity has none of the old exclusiveness or anti-foreign feeling in it. Indeed that element, heretofore thought undeniably characteristic of the Chinese is maintained to be wholly an accretion of Manchu misrule. Dr. Sun says in a recent article called "My Reminiscences:" "People in Europe think that the Chinese wish to keep themselves apart from foreign nations, and that the Chinese ports could be opened only at the point of the bayonet. That is all wrong. History furnishes us with many proofs that, before the arrival of the Manchus, the Chinese were in close relations with the neighboring countries, and that they showed no dislike toward foreign traders and missionaries. Foreign merchants were allowed to travel freely through the Empire. During the Ming dynasty there was no anti-foreign spirit." The Republican Advocate one of the journals of the new day says in its first issue: "The spirit which China has shown in her great struggle for political liberty has been appreciated by the West, and the friendly attitude of the western nations towards China has been equally appreciated. Our mission therefore is clear. Our policy is not antagonism but coöperation. China desires to be a free independent nation not in the old sense of isolation and exclusion, but in the more rational sense of unobstructed individual development on the basis of coöperation and reciprocity; and if we succeed in attaining this objective we shall have realized our cherished ambition." The world is still wondering that so soon after the cataclysm of 1900, so great and portentous a struggle as this revolution could be carried through by the same people with hardly any hurt of foreign life or property. If with the queue and the kowtow the Chinese can shake off the Manchu bred dislike of the foreigner, and forget the foreigner's abominable ill treatment of more than a century, he is showing us moral stamina of no mean order. Another element in this new self consciousness of the nation has been its rousing spirit of patriotism. That peculiar attachment of the heart for one's native land as superlatively his own unexpectedly flowered forth in wide profusion. "Give us mountains and rivers" was a slogan constantly used against the hated Manchus and their corrupting grip on the whole inmost life of the land. The patience, persistence, and undaunted faith of the revolutionaries baffled in seventeen unsuccessful attempts to launch their program, but for fifteen years holding steadily and cannily to their course, and motived as the event has proved with much less of self-interest than similar upturnings in the world's history reveal, have shown a quality of patriotism in the Chinese of which the West little dreamed. Dr. Sun tells of a nameless Chinese laundryman who one evening after the great revolutionist had been addressing his fellow countrymen in Philadelphia, "called at my hotel, and thrusting a linen bag upon me went away without a word. It contained his entire savings for twenty years." As I |