is these that have held the whole together. In this way the conviction will come to us that the significance of the Revolution in China lies not in the immense number of people involved, not in the magnitude nor richness of the territory, not in the uniqueness nor swiftness of its outward accomplishment, but in the coming into this great complex world of men and things in which we live of a new factor, the greatest, the most bewildering of any that have yet entered in. That factor is the Chinese people setting their feet in the paths that the eternal laws of moral development have laid down for human destiny.

1. First then among the more apparent moral and spiritual elements of the Chinese Revolution must be mentioned enlightenment, coming primarily through western education. Diplomacy and trade would claim but a small share in this contribution. The part that western education has played fostered first and foremost by Christian missions, and since 1905 an objective to which both government and people have given themselves unstintedly, will be adequately treated in other addresses of this conference. It needs to be given a logical and strong emphasis here because, just as the conscience and personality of an individual can receive no large or true development aside from increasing intelligence, no more the ethical and national ideals of a people. Yet fascinating as is the theme, I yield it the more readily remembering that enlightenment as the equipment of the young Turk party seems not to have fulfilled the promise of their brilliant constitutional movement, and Japan, with an average of school attendance that outdoes some states of our own loved America, felt constrained by the ethical wabbliness of its modern society last February to call a meeting of the leaders of its three great religions to see if the moral foundations might not be made more secure. Still it is not without significance that the overturning in China is often spoken of as a students' revolution.

Aside from the part that modern education has played in thus enlightening the Chinese people there ought to be mentioned right here the tremendous influence of the periodicals and books of the Christian Literature Society and in a lesser

measure the various tract societies. Put with these the hundreds of Chinese newspapers, good and bad, and it becomes less difficult to understand how new ideas permeated the whole country. Kang Yy Wei, who after the imprisonment of his master, the former emperor, Kuang Hsu, from Japan directed the fortunes of the so-called "Reform" party, had newspapers in nearly every treaty port and although harried by the officials, found haven in the foreign concessions or in Hongkong and continued his propaganda, almost as revolutionary as that of the republicans themselves, up to the commencement of the struggle.

The revolutionaries had the keenest appreciation of the moral value of publicity. From the first they took not only the people but foreign powers into their confidence. A first move of their provisional government was to appoint one of their cleverest, best informed men, Wu Ting Fang, former minister at Washington, as their minister of foreign affairs. To him and another of their best leaders, Wen Tsung Iao, they gave the task of keeping the outside world informed as to the inwardness from the revolutionary view point of each event or complication. In the most critical hour of the struggle when, with the utmost good will for Yuan Shi Kai and his cause, the powers hesitated to let him receive any financial backing, these men checkmated every move that Peking made by the sympathy for their cause in the world at large, and by showing the courts and cabinets abroad just what grip they had on the south and the Yantse valley with all the commerical interest of foreigners involved. A little of it may have been what Americans call "bluff,” but the game was not played in the dark, so far as they were concerned, and the forces of light with their concomitants of sympathy and trust seemed predestined to win.

2. After enlightenment as a moral element in the Chinese Revolution must be mentioned a new stirring and vigor of moral conscience.

It is rather startling to find that of the ten shortcomings for which Dr. Sun Yat Sen specifically arraigned the Ta Ching dynasty eight are distinct charges of moral failure. Even the other two the second,-"they have opposed our

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