an essay on the civilizations of india, china & japan_lowes dickenson

7/30/2019 An Essay on the Civilizations of India, China & Japan_Lowes Dickenson

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AN ESSAY ON THEIVILISATIONS of INDIACHINA ftf JAPAN

G. LOWES DICKINSON


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AN ESSAYON THE CIVILISATIONS OFINDIA, CHINA, AND JAPANA REPORT MADE TO THE TRUSTEESOF THE ALBERT KAHN TRAVELLINGFELLOWSHIPS


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AN ESSAY ON THECIVILISATIONS of INDIACHINA V JAPAN

G. LOWES DICKINSON

MCMXIVLONDON AND TORONTOJ. M. DENT 6f SONS LTD.


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This Essay is a Report of the author'stravels as a Fellow of the Albert Kahn TravellingFellowships and is published by direction ofthe Albert Kahn Trustees.


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TO THE TRUSTEES OF THE ALBERTKAHN TRAVELLING FELLOWSHIPSGENTLEMEN,

I have the honour to present the followingreport of my travels during the years 1912to 1913.

Instead of describing my journey in detailI have thought it will be more interesting tooffer some reflections on the general spirit andcharacter of the civilisations of India, China,and Japan, and the apparent and probableeffects upon these civilisations of contact withthe West. Any conclusions one may arriveat on a subject so comprehensive are, of course,of the most tentative and hazardous kind, andwhat I set down here is rather the startingpoint than the end of an inquiry. I shall not,however, waste time and space in constantlyqualifying and apologising for my statements;

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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTbut say here, once for all, that everything putforward is provisional, and that any dog-matism of form is merely a concession to therequirements of brevity.

G. LOWES DICKINSON.KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

November 1913.


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AN ESSAY ON THECIVILISATIONS OF INDIACHINA AND JAPAN

PART I. INDIATHE first thing I have to note is that the Eastis not a unity, as implied in the familiarantithesis of East and West. Between India,on the one hand, and China or Japan, on theother, there is as great a difference as betweenIndia and any western country. The contrastthat has struck me is that between India andthe rest of the world. There I do feel aprofound gulf. A Chinese, after all, is notso unlike an Englishman, and a Japanesenot so unlike a Frenchman. But a Bengaleeis strangely unlike anybody outside India.While, however, the East is not a unity, themodern West is. Throughout Europe andAmerica there is the same civilisation, intel-lectual and economic; so that, to a philo-

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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTsophic observer, national boundaries therealready begin to appear obsolete and irrelevant.On the other hand, this modern West is a veryrecent creation. And if one goes back inhistory one can find more analogy betweenEast and West than now appears. FeudalEurope, for example, was in many respectssimilar to feudal Japan; and a mediaevalChristian mystic hardly distinguishable froma contemporary Indian saint. If, therefore,we contrast East and West we shall find ourcontrast breaking down at every point, unlesswe confine the term East to India (which isabsurd), and mean by the West (as of course,in fact, we do) the West of the last centuryonly. And the contrast between that Westand the West of the Middle Ages is perhaps asgreat as the contrast between the modern Westand India. I think it best, therefore, not toattempt to characterise the East as a whole;but to deal separately with India, China, andJapan, and their reactions to the West, as theyhave shown themselves to me. I shall en-deavour to characterise each of these civilisa-tions, first, as they were before contact withthe West; and afterwards to consider theeffect upon them of that contact.


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INDIATo summarise, I will say, first, that I con-

ceive the dominant note of India to be religion;of China, humanity; of Japan, chivalry.These terms, of course, to begin with, are merelabels. I shall proceed to develop my meaningin each case.

In discussing the religion of a people one ismet with the perhaps insuperable difficultyof estimating what, to the mass of the people,their religious observances really mean. Ithink it is clear that to the peasants of mostcountries of Italy, say, or of China or ofJapan religion is no more than a ritualwhich they would be uncomfortable if they didnot perform ; a kind of lightning conductor forthe emotions and desires that are concernedwith the ordinary business of life, with gettingone's living, with birth, marriage, child-bear-ing, and death. And, of course, in India x re-ligion is, at least, this. The people pray forchildren, pray for healing, pray for rain, prayfor everything they want. But is not religionto Indians something more than this ? Obser-vers who try to know the people believe that itis, and I am inclined to think that they are

1 In speaking of Indian religion I have in viewthroughout Hinduism, not Mahometanism.


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTright ; that even the Indian peasant does reallybelieve that the true life is a spiritual life; thathe respects the saint more than any other man ;and that he regards the material world as' unreal," and all its cares as illusion. Hecannot, of course, and does not, put this con-viction into practice, or Indian society wouldcome to an end. But he admires and evenworships those who do put it into practice.I have seen on the faces of poor Indians, atreligious functions, an expression I have seennowhere else, unless, perhaps, in Russianchurches. At Muttra, for instance, I re-member the ecstatic look on the faces of thecrowd as the priests waved their torches beforethe image of the god ; and similarly, at Kandy ,the look of those who came to worship therelics books even! at the Temple of theTooth. This is " idolatry," of course. Butwhat does idolatry imply? Roman Catholicschoose to think that while Christians worshipthe god symbolised by the image, Chinese orIndians worship the image itself. But this issheer prejudice. And, unless I am very muchmistaken, an idol is far more of a symbol andless of an object of worship to an Indianpeasant than it is to most Roman Catholics.


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INDIAKali is a hideous idol, fed by the blood ofgoats. But I am inclined to believe what Ihave been told, that to an Indian she sym-bolises the divine mother; and that it is her,not the idol, that they are worshipping.

I have said thus much on a very difficultsubject, because I am taking the view thatreligion is the dominant factor in Indiansociety; and I wished to deal beforehandwith the objection likely to be taken that veryfew Indians are religious in any true or im-portant sense of the term. Very few, I agree,do or could carry through their religion to itslogical consequences; but most have it; andmost admire those who carry it out. Thisreligion, however, is radically different fromthe religion of the Western nations. In thefirst place, India has never put Man in thecentre of the universe. In India, and whereverIndian influence has penetrated, it is, on theone hand, the tremendous forces of nature,and what lies behind them, that is the objectof worship and of speculation; and, on theother hand, Mind and Spirit ; not the mind orspirit of the individual person, but the uni-versal Mind, or Spirit, which is in him, but towhich he can only have access by philosophic


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTmeditation and ascetic discipline. Indianreligion is thus very " inhuman " comparedto Christianity; and very much more inharmony with the spirit of western sciencethan with that of western religion. And thisfact is exemplified not only by the religious andphilosophic literature of India, but by its art.Hindu sculpture and architecture I haveexamined it from north to south, and fromeast to west is disquieting and terrible to awestern mind. It expresses the inexhaustiblefertility, the ruthlessness, the irrationality ofnature; never her beauty, her harmony, heradaptability to human needs. Man, in theIndian vision, is a plaything and slave ofnatural forces; only by ceasing to be mandoes he gain freedom and deliverance.And this brings me to the second point inwhich Indian religion contrasts with that ofthe West. To an Indian saint or philosopherthe whole world of matter is unreal, and thewhole of human history illusory. There is nomeaning in time or the processes of time; stillless is there any goodness in it. In some way,unexplained and inexplicable, the terribleillusion we call life dominates mankind. Tobe delivered from the illusion from life, that


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INDIAis, and activity in time is the object of alleffort and all religion. In this sense the Indianreligion is pessimistic. There is, of course, animportant distinction between Buddhism andthe Brahminism it supplanted for a time andthen succumbed to. Gautama Buddha, itwould seem, was a thorough-going sceptic andrationalist; he believed neither in God nor inthe soul; and the object of his teaching wasto deliver men from life to annihilation byinstructing them how to eliminate desire.Brahminism, on the other hand, wishes todeliver them from false life to true life. Thetrue life is life eternal; and we may haveaccess to it by discipline and meditation. Butfrom my immediate point of view this dis-tinction is not important. What is importantis that, in either form, precisely that is deniedwhich the West most emphatically affirms: thereality and importance of the material world,and of the historic process in time. The Westis often called materialistic as compared withthe East. But this antithesis, so far as it istrue, does not depend on any metaphysicalview held or denied as to the nature of matter.The West does not profess to know what matteris, and its hypotheses about it are always


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTchanging. The real point of distinction is,that the West believes that all effort ought tocentre upon the process of living in time ; thatthat process has reality and significance; andthat the business of religion is not to deliverus from effort by convincing us of its futility,but to sanctify and justify it. No modernwestern man would regard as an admirabletype at all still less as the highest type aman who withdraws from the world to meditateand come into direct contact with the Uni-versal. But an Indian who is uncontaminatedby western culture still regards that as the trueideal of conduct; and views all activities inthe world as lower and inferior, though, forundeveloped men, they are necessary andpardonable.With this view of religion the history and

institutions of Hinduism harmonise. TheVedas, it is true, reflect an attitude to lifesimilar to that of the Western Aryans; butthis essentially active, positive, optimisticview gradually clouds over. The cause,perhaps, is the influence of climate, of aNature too strong for man. No impressionremains more vivid with me of my visit toIndia than that of the dominance of nature,


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INDIAand the impotence and insignificance of man.But whatever the cause, there is no doubtabout the fact. Indian society became im-pregnated with the sense of the nothingnessof life in time. To escape, not to dominate,became the note of their religion. And lifebeing insignificant, history, of course, was sotoo. It is not an accident, it is a consequenceof their attitude to life, that there are no Hinduhistorians. Contrast the Mahometans, con-trast the Chinese, contrast the western nations.How can you write the history of a nightmare ?You don't do that. You try to wake up.

It is true that Christianity, too, has, as oneof its elements, this idea of the illusorinessof the world. But Christianity contains otherelements, incompatible with this; as, indeed,it was its practical wisdom and its philosophicinsufficiency that it combined the most irre-concilable notions. And further, the westernnations have never really been Christian.Their true religion has only become apparentas Christianity has declined. That religionnot yet expressed in forms, but implicit in alltheir conduct is that the time-process is alsothe real process; that everything materialmatters very much indeed; and that spiritu-


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTalism must either recognise the claims ofmatter or retire from the conflict. This lifeand its purposes are significant, and important,and what a man ought to attend to; that isthe real postulate of the modern West; andthat is what all Indian religion and philosophyhas denied. But on this point China andJapan are at one with the West. And that iswhy I said that the real antithesis is notbetween East and West, but between Indiaand the rest of the world.

This, then, of general attitude towardslife, carrying with it a whole psychology,and reflecting itself in religion and in art, is thefirst point that distinguishes the civilisationof India, as I think, from every other. Thesecond point is one of social institutions. Indiais the home of caste. Caste may be defined asthe hereditary determination of a man's placein society. No hard and fast line can be drawnbetween it and class; for wherever there areclasses the position of the father plays somepart, and usually the chief part, in determin-ing the position of the son. Moreover, almostall societies China is the great exceptionhave passed through an age of caste; Egypt,of course, par excellence, Japan, Europe in the

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INDIAMiddle Ages. But in India caste has developedinto a rigour and a multiplicity unknown inany other country. Castes and sub-castes areinnumerable, and new ones are always spring-ing up. India has never been democratic,either in theory or in practice; never had theideal of equal opportunity; always had thatof hierarchy ; and at the head of that hierarchyalways the priest. Nothing, of course, couldbe more radically antagonistic to the wholecurrent of theory and practice in the modernWest. But this antagonism does not exist atall in the case of China, and only in a verymodified degree in the case of Japan. Here,too, the position of India is unique. It is theantithetic pole to the West.What I have said so far applies to Indiabefore contact with the West, and verygenerally and widely applies still. But aprocess of modification has been proceedingsince the British conquest. And I willgo on now to say what I have to say onthis subject.

Here, again, India differs radically fromChina and Japan. China, though she hasbeen bullied and robbed, has not been con-quered and administered by the western


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTpowers. That may come. But, at anyrate, up to now China has been an inde-pendent country. And Japan has not onlysaved her independence, she has energeticallyreacted against the West, and shown that shecan give as well as take blows. But India,never a nation, never a unity, split up byracial, religious, caste distinctions, fell, andwas bound to fall, an easy prey to a westernpower. That that power should be Englandis one of the ironies of history; for of all thewestern nations the English are the leastcapable of appreciating the qualities of Indiancivilisation, and the most capable of appre-ciating its defects. To an Englishman, prac-tical efficiency, honesty, and truth are the chiefand indispensable goods. To an Indian, as, ina less degree, to other Orientals, all these thingsare indifferent. On the other hand, an Eng-lishman has no conception even of the mean-ing of a philosophic or religious problem. Thenotion that the material world could be a mereillusion is one that could never appeal to himas even intelligible (Berkeley, it must be re-membered, was an Irishman, and Hume aScotchman). His religion, when he has one,is a transfigured morality, not a mysticism.

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INDIAHe is practical, through and through, inspiritual as well as in material things. Be-tween him and the Indian the gulf is im-passable.Add to this that whereas all the other con-

querors of India had migrated to the country,settled down and lived there, and becomeassimilated to Indian conditions, the Englishare, of all races, the least assimilable. Theycarried to India all their own habits and waysof life; squatted, as it were, in armed camps;spent as in exile twenty or twenty-five years;and returned home, sending out new men totake their place, equally imbued with Eng-lish ideals and habits, equally unassimilable.Facility of communication has only emphasisedand strengthened this attitude. The English-man sends his children home to be educated;commonly his wife will spend at least half hertime at home; he himself returns every fewyears; his centre is not India, but England.It would, I think, be unreasonable and absurdto blame the Englishman for this; he is,indeed, often praised for it by foreigners. Asa very intelligent and enlightened official re-marked to me, an Englishman cannot be ex-pected to lose his own soul and his soul is


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTthe traditions and habits of his race for thesake of other people's politics. Still, there isthe fact, and it is one of cardinal importancein the relations between the two races. Itmaintains the distinction between the govern-ing and the governed people; and it does soby creating an almost impassable social gulf.For this gulf, however, it must in fairness beadded, the Indians are not less responsible thanthe English. Their family and caste systemhampers all social intercourse. If a man can-not eat with you, or introduce his wife to you,it is difficult for you to associate with himat all. Add to this that, whereas to mostEnglishmen sport and games are the main sub-jects, outside their work, of interest and con-versation, to most Indians they are completelyindifferent. Indians want to talk philosophyand religion; Englishmen want to talk poloand golf. There is no need, then, to supposeany kind of original sin or deliberate unkind-ness or wickedness on either side to accountfor the social chasm. Cases, it is true, stilloccur where individual Englishmen gener-ally, I think, in the army are insolent toindividual Indians, but these are becomingrarer, and are steadily discountenanced by


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INDIAGovernment. They are not the root of thedifficulty. The difficulty lies deeper; and Isee no way of removing it, short of removingthe English from India.

If the English had been able and content togovern Indians by the sword, without affectingtheir ideas and institutions, this social gulfneed not perhaps have created a political diffi-culty. Indian civilisation would have pro-ceeded unchanged, and Indians would havebeen indifferent as to who it was that raisedthe taxes, so long as they were not intolerablyoppressive. But, in fact, it would have beenimpossible to govern India without modify-ing it; and in any case that was a policydeliberately rejected by the English. Theydetermined to educate the Indians in Englishideas; and they started this process at amoment peculiarly favourable to its success.For the old Indian education was in decadence,and Indians knew and cared little about theirown philosophy. Under the new influences ageneration grew up sceptical and rationalistic,nourished on Mill and Spencer, cut off fromits own roots and artificially grafted on to thewestern tree. This, however, is only whathappens and is bound to happen wherever


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTEast meets West. The paradox in India isthat the English have deliberately instructedtheir Indian subjects in their own politicalideas; in a system of thought, therefore,which radically condemns the kind of govern-ment they maintain in India. Self-govern-ment, no taxation without representation,these and the like are the watchwords ofEnglish political philosophy; while Englishhistory supplies striking examples of therefusal of a people to submit to an arbitraryand autocratic government. In this philo-sophy and this history Indians are carefullyeducated. And further, they have beforethem the famous proclamation of 1858, thatin the government of India no distinctionshall be made on the ground of colour, race,or religion. It was genuinely believed by thestatesmen who inaugurated this regime thatunder the new system of education the Indianswould quickly become willing and able toadminister their own country on Englishlines, under the aegis of English protection.And, in fact, as is well known, in the civiladministration of India less than a thousandEnglishmen take part; all subordinate postsare held by Indians; while in the judiciary the


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INDIAhighest positions are open to natives of thecountry. Both in the central and provincialgovernments there are legislative and execu-tive councils on a representative basis; andLord Morley's recent reform has largely in-creased the power and prestige of these bodies.In the history of India, indeed, the criticalpoint seems to have been reached at whichany further extension of the principle of self-government would really transfer the controlof the country from the English to the natives.And this, of course, would mean a real revolu-tion, analogous to the change of water intosteam or into ice when a certain point isreached in the heating or cooling process.Whether that next step shall be taken or notis the problem before which the governmentof India is hesitating.There are two points here involved; first,

the efficiency of a government controlledwholly or in part by Indians; secondly, itsloyalty to the English political system.When I was in India the Commission onthe Indian Civil Service was sitting, and I hadthe opportunity of attending their meetingsin Madras, and of talking with many of themembers. I also discussed the questions

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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTinvolved with various civilians. One thingcame out clearly. Most of the English wit-nesses believed that Indians could not beadmitted to the highest and most responsibleposts without serious detriment to the effi-ciency of the service. They believed thatas a general rule, Indians have not the nerveand judgment necessary in a critical situation.They believed, also, that Indians cannot betrusted to be impartial. For the majority ofthose who would hold office would be, as theynow are, Brahmins ; and Brahmins will favourBrahmins at the expense of other castes.They believed, therefore, that the transfer ofthe highest administrative posts to Indianswould be very unpopular with the great massof the people, for whom they genuinely believethemselves to be trustees. I am not in aposition to estimate the truth of this view;but I believe it to be widely held among theEnglish officials, and among the most intelli-gent and enlightened of them. On the otherhand, the bulk of the Indian witnesses main-tained that Indians trained in English ideasand methods would be as competent and fairas Englishmen. I must add, however, that Ihave met Indian officials who take the other

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INDIAview, and who hold that the time is not ripefor filling the highest posts with Indians.The question of loyalty is even more diffi-

cult than that of efficiency, as, from an Englishpoint of view, it is more serious. There can,I think, be no doubt that very strong currentsof disaffection are running among the edu-cated class in India. This, it will be remem-bered, found violent expression a few yearsago, at the time of the partition of Bengal. Ithas been driven underground since; but Ibelieve that it is still strong, and that thecauses which produce it are deep-seated andpermanent. The first and chief of these isthe growth of an Indian self-consciousness, afeeling of nationality, which itself is due tothe British occupation. In English, Indianshave for the first time a common languagespoken by all educated people. Also, verylargely under the stimulus of English andEuropean scholars, they have recovered theheritage of their own philosophic and re-ligious traditions; and they are reactingviolently against the modes of thought whichdominated an early generation. This move-ment " back to the Vedas " one might callit is not primarily political. But it almost

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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTinevitably takes a political cast. For it im-plies a reaction against all the ideas and idealsof the western world, the representatives ofwhich in India are the English. The AryaSomaj, for instance, is primarily a society foreducating Indians in their own religion, andfor reforming by Indians, on Indian lines, whatseems to be defective in their civilisation. Butthe association is generally regarded by theEnglish as seditious; and I should think itquite probable that it really is so, indirectly ifnot directly; just as the Celtic movement inIreland, though not political in its aim, carrieswith it political antagonism to the English, asa necessary adjunct to its aesthetic and re-ligious antagonism. In short, in so far asIndians develop a self-consciousness which isfundamentally Indian in character, they mustnecessarily object more and more to controlby a western race.This antagonism of mental attitude is in-tensified and exasperated by the social gulfto which I have referred. Large numbers ofIndians are educated in English universities.They find that in England an impalpablebarrier separates them from their fellow-students; a barrier which is not deliberately

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INDIAcreated on either side, but results from differ-ent instincts, habits, and desires. Briefly,Indians seldom play games! On the otherhand, socially they are treated in England asequals, and there is little consciousness oneither side of a colour bar as such. They areisolated, but not irritated. When, however,they return to India, well instructed in demo-cratic conceptions, social and political, theyfind a great difference; a difference which,one is told, manifests itself on the boat as soonas Suez is passed. The English in Englanddo not feel that they are a governing race,and Indians a governed. They may be in-different to Indians, they may be bored bythem, but they have no sense of a superiorityto be maintained. It is otherwise in India.There the English are a small camp of con-querors planted down among millions of con-quered. Nothing can alter this fundamentalfact. It is expressed everywhere and ineverything. Unfortunately, it is sometimesexpressed in frank and brutal insolence on thepart of individual Englishmen. And Indians,being immensely sensitive, suspect insolenceeven where none is intended. Further, theyhave no adequate outlet for their ambition.

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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTIn the Civil Service they cannot rise to thehighest posts; the Bar is overcrowded; theyhave little aptitude and no training for busi-ness; and they visit on the English their dis-content at conditions for which the Englishare hardly directly responsible. Add thatthey are torn between two civilisations, out oftouch with their own and excluded from ours.Indian society bores them, English society isnot open to them ; and in India it would onlybore them if it were; for the English in Indiaare of all the English the least intellectual andthe least interested in ideas. Indians edu-cated in England form, therefore, a naturalcentre for all seditious movements. The goodand the bad elements of their character andtheir position alike make for this; theirIndian patriotism, their personal vanity, theirthwarted ambition, their idealism. They are,I think, of all gifted men and they are oftenvery gifted the most unhappy. And theirunhappiness makes them bitter and unjust.

In speaking thus far of the contact betweenEast and West in India I have confined myselfto what is peculiar to India, owing to the factthat it has been conquered, and is adminis-tered, by a western race. But apart from28


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INDIAthis fact, and the peculiar problems it creates,there is the larger and, from the point of viewof general history, more important question ofthe general reaction between the civilisationof the East and that of the West. On thispoint, too, I must say a few words. Indianculture, I have suggested, is more remote fromwestern than that of any other eastern country.And in India, as in China, the great masses ofthe people are, of course, untouched in theirtraditional ideas and way of life by any con-tact with the West. The effects, so far, of theBritish conquest on the peasants of India areeconomic rather than intellectual or spiritual;and on the economic question I do not proposeto touch. On the other hand, the educatedclasses in India have been subjected for severalgenerations to the full stream of western ideas;and its effects have been radical and profound.Born into a system of caste, they have beeneducated in the ideas of equal opportunityand no privilege. Born into an atmosphereof all-pervading religion, they have been edu-cated in rationalism and free thought. Borninto an atmosphere of faith, they have beeneducated in an atmosphere of science. Theearlier generations accepted the new gospel


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTwhole-heartedly, repudiated with contemptthe ideas, the customs, and (as was complained)the morals of their race; cut themselves off,in a word, from the whole Indian tradition.Then came a reaction against the West; andwestern-educated Indians now, I think, aregenerally sceptical both of the civilisation ofthe East and of that of the West. They may,indeed, sometimes defend their own funda-mental institutions, such as caste and theposition of women; they may praise the re-ligious attitude of India ; but I doubt whetherthis is often more than a kind of irritationagainst the shams of western civilisation, ofwhich they are very fully conscious. The truthis that their experience of the West has openedthe eyes of educated Indians to the weaknessesof their own system, though without convert-ing them to the system of the West. And Icannot but believe that the process of dis-integration must and will proceed to theend.To speak first of what is most important,

the general attitude towards life, the problemin India is essentially the same as it is every-where in the modern world. How, if atall, can religion be reconciled with positive


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INDIAknowledge? The problem, indeed, is acuterin India than anywhere else, for India is morereligious than any other country. On theother hand, it might be easier of solution thanin western countries, for Indian religion hasnever been a system of dogmas, and is not en-tangled in questionable history. In India, itseems to me, you get the problem in its purestform, namely, not " did such-and-such eventshappen? " which is a purely historical ques-tion; nor " does the individual soul survivedeath? " which is perhaps unascertainable;but " is there a method of discovering truthabout the world as a whole, and man's rela-tion to it, other than the method of observationand induction? " Indian philosophy and re-ligion have always affirmed that there is; thatby meditation and discipline an internal per-ception is opened which is a perception oftruth. Philosophically and a priori this posi-tion can neither be affirmed nor denied. Itis entirely a matter of experience. Indiansaffirm that the experience occurs, and I haveno doubt they affirm truly. They affirm alsothat it is not a hallucination or a merely sub-jective state, which may be questioned butcannot be refuted. To this fundamental


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTpoint everything else is subordinate. Thepersistence of Indian religion will not dependon how much, or whether anything, in theVedas is taken as gospel; it will depend on thecontinuous appearance and acceptance of the" saint " in the Indian sense of that termthe man, that is, who perceives what he affirmsto be spiritual truth. Hitherto the line ofthe saints has not been cut off. One of themost remarkable of them, Sri Ramakrishna,died late in the nineteenth century; and anyone who reads his conversations l will realisehow little he depended on oral or written tra-dition, and how much on direct personalexperience.On the other hand, I cannot doubt that atraining in positive science and its methodsmust make men more incapable either ofhaving or desiring to have this experience, orof accepting it as evidential in others. Re-ligion in some sense may be compatible withscience ; but only, I think, if religion be inter-preted as a passionate contemplation of theworld as made known by science, a sense ofits complexity, its grandeur, and its immense,

1 Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Madras, publishedby the Ramakrishna Mission, 1912.


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INDIAoverwhelming transcendence of man. Thisattitude may have analogies to that of Indianreligion, but it is so far radically distinct thatno Indian saint, and for that matter noWestern saint, ever had anything but con-tempt for the knowledge gained by the sensesand the intellect. Sainthood, in a word, isantagonistic to science, as science is antagon-istic to sainthood. And the development inIndia of scientific knowledge and methodmust end by interrupting and destroying theold Indian religion in so far as that rests on aclaim to attain truth by meditation divorcedfrom observation.There is then, I believe, in India as in

Europe, a real, not merely seeming, antagon-ism between traditional religion and modernways of thinking. The educated class isaware of this, and is making efforts analogousto those made in Europe to overcome it.These may take the form of an abstractionfrom all religions of their more rationalelements and an emphasis of these as theessence of religion. This is the position ofthe Brahmo Somaj, which, in fact, is a puretheism, emphasising, however, the personalrelation of the soul to God. To this sect, or


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTrather these sects, for the society is split intoseveral, all religions equally contain the truth,though all are tainted with error, and theymake no special claim for the Hindu traditionor the Hindu sacred books. I should say,indeed, from what I saw, that their spirit ismuch more Christian than Hindu, thoughthey do not give to Christ a higher positionthan to other great prophets. But for thevery reason, perhaps, of its detachment fromHindu tradition, the Brahmo Somaj seems tobe losing, not gaining, ground. It has fewadherents outside Bengal, and my impressionis that it exercises a small and declininginfluence. The Arya Somaj, on the otherhand, bases itself on the Vedas, and is intenselynational. It claims that its reformed faith isreally the original faith of the Vedas, a claimwhich I should suppose would not for a mo-ment be sustained by an impartial scholar.Its adherents have been very numerous andvery active, especially in North-West India,and it has a college at Hardwar somewhatsimilar to Jesuit institutions, where boys aretrained exclusively till they reach manhood inthe tenets and spirit of the society, with a viewto a future apostolate. The first generation


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INDIAof these students is now being sent out, andit will be interesting to learn what effect theywill have on the world and the world on them.I got the impression, however, that the AryaSomaj, too, is declining with the disappear-ance of the first generation of its apostles.And, indeed, the attempt to graft a beliefwhich shall be in harmony with modern ideasand modern social movements on the text ofthe Vedas is, I believe, as much foredoomedto failure as similar attempts in Europe toreconcile modern positive knowledge with theOld and the New Testament. Whatever maybe the future of these particular sects, theyare symptomatic of a crisis of thought whichis world-wide, and arises wherever the spiritof modern science comes into contact with thatof traditional religion. Meantime, however,the great mass of the Indian people, beinguneducated even in reading and writing, con-tinue unchanged in their old religious routineand religious sentiments. So that it is stilltrue, as I suggested on an earlier page, thatIndia is the most religious country in theworld, unless Russia may be put on a levelwith her.Turning now from religion to social institu-


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTtions, there can be little doubt, I think, thatcaste, the most peculiar feature of Indian life, isbeing gradually undermined, partly by educa-tion, still more, perhaps, by railways and thegradual spread of industrialism. An examplemay show what I mean better than a pageof generalisations. I was travelling in SouthIndia with a Brahmin in the carriage. Whatwas he to do? He had to eat, and therewas the carriage full of unclean foreigners.What he did do was to go into a corner of thecarriage, get his servant to stand behind him,so as to make a kind of screen, and there onthe floor dispose of the carefully prepared foodhe had brought with him in tin boxes. Butthis kind of thing must surely end in makingthe whole system look ridiculous. The bestway to get rid of caste is to mix people up, andthere is no such mixing as that of railwaytravel. Again, the introduction of factoriesmust react upon caste, for caste is not takenaccount of by employers. At a mill which Ivisited in Agra I was told that the only diffi-culty caused by caste was in connection withBrahmins and with sweepers. No one wouldwork with a sweeper, and a Brahmin may maketrouble with any other caste. Otherwise, for


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INDIAindustrial purposes, caste disappears. Caste,in short, will vanish as the social conditionswhich fostered it vanish; and these, I think,are bound to vanish whether or no the Britishrule is perpetuated, by the economic forceswhich now have the whole world in theirgrip-The position of women, too, another pecu-

liar feature of Indian civilisation, is beingprofoundly affected by Western influences.First, by the education of men, for educatedmen want educated wives. Secondly, bythe education of girls, which is an importantand growing feature of Indian life. Educatedgirls in India, as in other countries, marry laterand demand more. In the present transitionstage very real domestic tragedies result fromthe conflict between mothers-in-law broughtup on the old system and daughters-in-lawbrought up on the new one, and this, perhaps,will happen for many generations. Still, forgood or for evil, whoever rules India, and evenif she rules herself, this change, I believe, willproceed. There is something in it world-wideand secular, and it is one of the profoundestsocial changes which the modern world iswitnessing.


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTThere is one other point on which I will

touch, one to which I attach great importance,the effect of contact with the West on Indianarts and crafts. There can be no doubt thatthese generally have declined, if not perished;and the immediate cause is the competitionof Western wares. This is most evident intextiles, where factory-made goods, mainlyimported, but partly also manufactured inIndia, are killing the old domestic industries.But the decline seems to be general; I, atany rate, saw nowhere any modern products,whether in brasswork, wood-carving, embroi-dery, or enamel, which seemed to me to haveany merit. To attribute this decline, how-ever, merely to the competition of Westernwares is not to go to the bottom of the matter.For the question remains, Why are Westernwares preferred? The answer that they arecheaper is sufficient, no doubt, in the caseof goods used by the mass of the people ; cheap-ness, if you are poor, will override, in the Eastas in the West, all other considerations. Butthere is something more than this. SomeIndian arts, that of painting, for instance,that of architecture on a grand scale, and thearts allied to it, always depended in India on


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INDIAthe patronage of princes. These princes stillexist and are still wealthy. But they preferto patronise bad Western art. Why? Obvi-ously because they have no real taste, and theprestige of the West overrides everything elsein their mind. They want to have houses andclothes as like as possible to those of Europeans.And this raises the general question, to me avery interesting one, whether taste in allOriental countries has not been for genera-tions merely a habit ; whether people went onmaking and using beautiful things merelybecause their fathers and grandfathers haddone so; and as soon as anything new isoffered, run to that, not only for the sake ofcheapness, but for the sake of novelty andsnobbery. My observations in China and inJapan, as well as in India, suggested to mevery forcibly that this is the truth that thearts of the East have long been dead, longbefore contact with the West, so far as activeand intelligent taste is concerned, and thattheir collapse before the Western invasion isdue not only to the cheapness of Westerngoods, but to an actual preference for themon other grounds, or, at any rate, an absenceof preference for the more beautiful native

39


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTproducts. Indians attribute the decline oftheir arts and crafts, as they attribute every-thing else, to the malign activities of theBritish Government. I believe they do notgo deep enough. They should attribute it tothe lack of effective and positive taste amongtheir own leaders.To sum up, I find in India a peculiar

civilisation, antithetical to that of the West.I find a religious consciousness which negateswhat is really the religious postulate ofthe West, that life in time is the real andimportant life; and a social institution,caste, which negates the implicit assump-tion of the West, that the desirable thing isequality of opportunity. I find also that inIndia the contact between East and Westassumes a form peculiarly acute and irritat-ing, owing to the fact that India has beenconquered and is governed by a WesternPower. But the contact, none the less, ishaving the same disintegrating effect it pro-duces in other Eastern countries. And I donot doubt that sooner or later, whether orno British rule maintains itself, the religiousconsciousness of India will be transformed bythe methods and results of positive science,


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INDIAand its institutions by the economic influencesof industrialism. In this transformation some-thing, of course, will be lost. But my ownopinion is that India has more to gain and lessto lose by contact with the West than anyother Eastern country.


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PART II. CHINAWHEN I landed in China, indeed, whenI first saw the Mongolian type at Darjeeling,I was aware of a feeling as though anoppressive cloud had lifted. I realised thenhow strange and how tragic India hadbeen to me, how utterly alien I had feltthere. The brooding over the whole countryof a spirit not merely religious, but reli-gious in a sense so remote from anythingreligion has meant in the West; the tremen-dous forces antagonistic to man marchingover the land, famine, plague, malaria, drought,flood; the handful of English camped there,fighting these things with so little help andso little hope; the gulf between rulers andruled; the spirit of revolt, which yet seemedto have in it no real capacity or promise;all these things, felt sub-consciously evenmore than consciously, had lain like a night-mare upon me, clouding all the interest andall the pleasure of my travels. India wassublime, but it was terrible. China, on the


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CHINAother hand, was human. At the first sight ofthese ugly, cheery, vigorous people I lovedthem. Their gaiety, as of children, theirfriendliness, their profound humanity, struckme from the first and remained with me to thelast. I can imagine no greater contrast thanthat between their character, their institutions,their habits, and those of the Indians. TheChinese are, and always have been, profoundlysecular, as the Indians are, and always havebeen, profoundly religious. It is true, ofcourse, that the Chinese have had religion, asthe Europeans have had it; Buddhism cameto them from India as Christianity came to usfrom Judaea, and Taoism was an indigenousgrowth. They have had also saints andmystics, as Europe has had them. ButBuddhism and Taoism have never suited theChinese character any more than Christianityhas suited the European. Both Buddhismand Taoism quickly degenerated to meresuperstition, systems of magic, imaginarymeans to obtain material ends. It was, andis, Confucianism with its rationalism, itsscepticism, its stress on conduct, that expressesthe Chinese spirit. Over India gleam thestars; over China the sun shines. Mankind


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTis the centre of the Chinese universe, as theAbsolute is the centre of the Indian. Con-fucianism may easily be translated into termsof Western positivism ; it could never be trans-lated into terms of Hinduism. The religionof the mass of the Chinese has always beenmere superstition, whereas in India, as I havesaid, it appears to be true that the superstitionsymbolises a real spiritualism. Ancestor wor-ship is the centre of the Chinese system; butthat, perhaps, ought not to be called worship atall. It is rather commemoration, and as suchall educated Chinamen regard it. 1 It is thusrather a social than a religious institution, andserves to bind the family together rather thanto foster a spiritual life. Its bearing on life isa bearing on conduct, and it is but an intensi-fied form of the feeling which, even in the West,leads a man of distinguished family to feel thathe must try to be worthy of his ancestors.What distinguishes the Chinese attitude inthis matter from that of the modern West isits backward rather than its forward look.

1 Probably only the educated. To the mass, Iexpect, it is really " worship," in the sense that theyexpect to receive benefits from the spirits to whomthey offer.


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CHINAWe look to our descendants, they to their fore-bears. And the discrediting of Confucianismunder the new regime is due to its supposedconservatism rather than to any idea that itis irrational and superstitious. In this matterof religion the Chinese have only to throw overtheir superstition and over the educatedsuperstition never had any hold and theywill be immediately in line with the West. InIndia, as we saw, things are far otherwise.For what is most characteristic and profoundin the Indian spirit is antagonistic to andirreconcilable with rationalism and science.

This, which I call the secularism of theChinese attitude to life, is also expressedin their art. The art of India, in my judg-ment, has, as art, little or no value (this,of course, is a highly controversial opinion),but it is tremendously significant of thespiritual life of India. It is all symbolic,and it is symbolic of those grandiose abstrac-tions in which the Indian mind delights. Itexpresses an over-world of spiritual forces ofwhich the world of sense is a shadowy andillusory manifestation. It does not interpret,it negates the ordinary life and the ordinaryconsciousness. That is why it is so disquiet-


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTing, so terrible, so monstrous to the westernspirit. But the art of China is through andthrough human. It is the kind of art thatRomans, too, or Englishmen might have pro-duced, if they had been gifted with aestheticgenius ; the art of reasonable concrete-mindedmen, with a keen sensitiveness to the pathosand gaiety of human life, and the beauty andgrandeur of nature. It is characteristic ofChinese landscape-painting that it shouldinclude representation of the human observer.Their artists do not, it is true, treat nature asa mere background to human life, as, forexample, the great Venetian artists do; butneither do they treat it as the vehicle oftremendous supernatural forces, which is thespirit of Indian art. They treat it as a beauti-ful object, itself real, contemplated by a saneand sensitive human spirit. So with theirpoetry. It is of all poetry I know the mosthuman and the least symbolic or romantic.It contemplates life just as it presents itself,without any veil of ideas, any rhetoric or senti-ment; it simply clears away the obstructionwhich habit has built up between us and thebeauty of things, and leaves that, showingin its own nature, revealed but not recreated.


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CHINAChinese art and Chinese poetry have the spiritof Wordsworth and of the most modern literarymovement in France. Their art is a realism,though not an actualism; a vision of whatthis life is as seen by those who can see it,not of some other world behind or above oroutside it.The fundamental attitude of the Chinese

towards life is thus, in my judgment, andalways has been, that of the most modernWest, nearer to us now than to our mediaevalancestors, infinitely nearer to us than India.And the same is true, at bottom, of socialinstitutions. China, so far as I know, is theonly country whose civilisation has been forcenturies, if not always, democratic. Therehas never been caste in China, there hasbeen, I think, less even of class than in mostcountries. That equality of opportunitywhich is the essence of democracy, andwhich has been denied by every other civili-sation, has been affirmed by China in theory,and to a great extent in practice, from thedate at which her written annals begin.There has never been a priestly caste, therehas never been a governing caste. The rich,of course, have necessarily had advantages


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTin the race as they have with us, but thebarrier between rich and poor has never beenas great as it is in the modern West, and ithas been at least as easy, probably easier, torise from bottom to top. And this social factis reflected in the bearing and manners of theChinese. I have never been in a countrywhere the common people are at once so self-respecting, so independent, and so courteous.In America, for example, everybody appearsto think it necessary to assure you that theyare as good as you are by behaving rudely toyou. Nothing of the kind obtains in China,for it would never occur to them that theyare not as good. There is none of this self-conscious assertion of their rights; still lessis there anything of that obsequiousnesswhich one meets everywhere in India. TheChinese man is the democratic man. He isalready, so far as his attitude to himself andto his fellows is concerned, what democratshope the western man may become. Hisattitude is democratic, just as it is positiveand secular. And this underlying and funda-mental likeness to the man of the modernWest is, in my judgment, far more importantand significant than the superficial differences


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CHINAwhich are usually dwelt upon by westerntravellers and residents.

There is one other important point inwhich China contrasts with India. Chinahas been and remains politically independentand united. This statement needs somequalification, but it is essentially true.The Tartars and the Manchus have con-quered China, but they have imposed on hernothing but a dynasty. They have adoptedcompletely the manners, customs, ideas ofthe conquered. Of China it is truer eventhan of Greece that Capta Jerum victoremcepit. Not so India. The Mahometans, inspite of conversions, remain Mahometans,different in religion, different in sentiment,different in social institutions, from the Hindus.Nothing yet has brought the two communitiesinto harmony; and their antagonism is still,and perhaps increasingly, an important factorin the Indian situation. Again, India, untilthe British conquest, has never been weldedinto a political unity. The largest nativeempires, like that of Asoka, the largest alienones, like that of the Moguls, never includedthe whole peninsula. And, in addition, therehave been always the vertical divisions of caste.


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTBut China, except for short periods, has beenfor two thousand years at least under onehead; and though the provinces have had avery large measure of autonomy, they havebeen administered by officials appointed bythe Central Government, and have recognisedits existence by the payment of taxes. Thevarious dialects of China, though unintelligibleone to another, are varieties of the samelanguage; and the common script has alwaysgiven to the educated a common medium ofcommunication, much as Latin gave it tomediaeval Europe. China has been a politicalunity, even though a loose one; and thoughthis unity has not given rise to a strongnational feeling, there is in China a basis forsuch feeling more real and more powerful thananything that seems to exist in India. Forthis reason, among others, China would notbe so easy to conquer as India was, nor soeasy to govern by any race that did notassimilate itself to Chinese customs andstandards.

I see, then, in China, so far as the most funda-mental conditions are concerned, a far greatersimilarity to the modern West than to India.But, of course, points of similarity to India


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CHINAand of difference from the West do strike theeye. Like India, but unlike western Europe,China is predominantly agricultural, and thebulk of her people are peasants. Like India,and unlike the West, indeed to a much greaterdegree than India, she is untouched by indus-trialism. The era of railways, of mines, offactories, is but just beginning, and the im-mense resources of the country have hardlybeen tapped. Like India, and unlike themodern West, the family is the cardinal pointon which all her social life and a great partof her government turns. And this familysolidarity, while it fulfils many of the functionswhich in the West have to be undertaken byGovernment, is a very serious obstacle to theintroduction of western forms of businessfor example, the joint-stock company. Still,these differences, important as they are, arecomparatively superficial; and it would, Ibelieve, for good or for evil, be much easier towesternise China than it would be to westerniseIndia. The Chinese would only have to applytheir attitude to life in a new way; but theIndians would have to transform theirs. TheChinese are already secular, practical, matter-of-fact ; they require, to westernise them, only


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTa new technique. But the Indians require anew spirit.

Although, however, as I have suggested,it would be easier to westernise Chinathan to westernise India, the process ofwesternisation has not as yet gone so far inthe one country as in the other. Effectivecontact between Europe and China datesonly from the opium war. 1 From thatdate the activities of the western powers inChina have been continuous, discreditable,and indefensible. But though the powershave robbed China, have bullied her, haveinterfered with her independence and sovereignrights, have imposed upon her teaching whichshe did not want and trade which she thoughtdisastrous and immoral, they have so far madeno serious attempt to conquer and annex her.The servitude of China is financial; but thehistory of Egypt shows how easily financialmay pass into political control. It may be sowith China; the next few months or yearswill decide. But meantime and up to nowChina is independent. The activities, com-mercial and other, of the foreigners have been

1 In spite of Mr. Morse's apologies, I consider thisto be the proper description of that war.


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CHINAmostly confined to the treaty ports. Andthough these are now very numerous andinclude a number of cities far inland on theYang-tze, they are of course but isolated pointsin the vast territory of China. And even inthese ports the western spirit has hardlytouched even the externals of Chinese life.The foreign communities build their own citiesoutside the native city ; there they administerthemselves, lead their own life as in Europe,their life of business and of sport, and never,if they can help it, enter the native city or anypart of the interior of China. The Britishfirms, who were first in the field, did and stilldo their business through themedium ofChinesemerchants, and have no direct relation withtheir customers in the country. They neverstir from the treaty ports, and they knownothing and care nothing about Chinese condi-tions except so far as these may react upontheir business. " We see too much of thingsChinese here," the agent of a British firm saidto me, when I made some comment on theChinese city. And the sentiment, I believe,is pretty general among Europeans in China.While these conditions prevailed there was

nothing in the presence of the foreign traders


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTwhich need have led to any radical change inChinese institutions or ideas. But the con-ditions are now rapidly changing. The newenterprise, especially of Germans and Japanese,is sending bagmen acquainted with the lan-guage all over the interior of China. Oil andcigarettes are the pioneers of this commercialinvasion. The skin-disease of advertisementis beginning to disfigure the face of the country,and German art nouveau appears in the stationsof the railway from Tsinan-fu to Pekin. Thegrip of the West has begun to close, and willmore and more be felt in the general dissemina-tion of ugliness, meanness, and insinceritythroughout the empire.

More important, however, I think, thancommercial enterprise in disturbing the secu-lar tradition of China has been missionaryactivity. I did not, indeed, gather, and Ido not believe, that China is in process ofChristianisation or will ever be Christianised,though I have met Chinese Christians and,I think, sincere ones. But the missionarieshave been the pioneers of western education,and it is western education that has made therevolution. All the new leaders have beeneducated, first at missionary schools and


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CHINAcolleges in China, then abroad, mainly in Japanand the United States. And this educationhas produced a new and surprising type ofChinese. Nothing in my travels has struckand perplexed me more than this. China hasalways been regarded as the type of the un-changing. If ever there was a stable nationalcharacter, a stable national mentality, itmight have been supposed that it would bethere, in a homogeneous people of the samestock, never conquered, or at least neveraffected in race, in manners, in laws, in lan-guage, by conquest; never interrupted ordisturbed for centuries in their traditionalideas and their traditional manner of life.Here, surely, if anywhere, sudden revolutionwas impossible. Here change, if it came atall, would come by slow degrees, fighting itsway against an immense and profound psycho-logical immobility. But what happens infact ? A Chinese taken as a boy and broughtup in a missionary school, then transferredduring the impressionable period of life toa

foreign country to completehis education,

returns to China transformed through andthrough. There is no vestige of conservatismleft in him. He has adopted not only the


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTmanners, the dress, the speech, the veryintonation of a foreign country; he hasadopted its whole mental and moral outfit.There is nothing in China he does not want totransform, nothing he does not believe he cantransform. This is particularly true of theChinese educated in America. I met in Can-ton some of the chief officials of the revolu-tionary government, the chief justice, theforeign secretary and others. I was astounded.They were exactly like American under-graduates. Their whole mentality, so far asI could see, was American. They had notonly the manners, the dress, the speech; theyhad the confidence, the light-heartedness, theeasy and disconcerting superficiality. On theother hand, those educated in England werecomparatively critical, sober, and cautious.Those educated in Japan, I was informed, hadthe revolutionary elan of that country; andwhen the second revolution broke out, thestudents that were in Japan crowded over enmasse to join the revolutionary troops. Theone student I met from Germany looked andspoke like a German. This conversion may,of course, be superficial. There may be under-lying it an unchanged basis of Chinese char-


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CHINAacter. But if so, it is the superficial part thatis active in China. It is these young men thathave made the revolution and established theRepublic ; that are doing all they can to sweepaway the old China, root and branch, and buildup there a reproduction of America. There isnothing, I think, which they would not alter ifthey could, from the streets of Canton to thefamily system, from the costume of a police-man to the national religion. This attitude oftheirs exasperates the foreigners, who seem asmuch disgusted and alarmed at the actualappearance of a new China as they used to becritical and censorious of the old one. But itis, after all, very natural. These young menfind their country a prey to foreign aggression.They see that the only way to meet the foreign-ers is to meet them on their own ground, andthey have before them the triumphantlysuccessful example of Japan. It must, how-ever, be admitted that there has not appearedin China any group of men of the capacity andpower of the statesmen who piloted Japan intothe new era. The young men have ideas inplenty, but they have no experience, and, itwould seem, no practical capacity. Too oftenthey have not character. For it is, I fear,


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTindisputable, as it is undisputed, that manyof the new officials and of the new legislatorsare corrupt as well as incompetent. Certainlyit is remarkable and, so far as my knowledgeof history goes, unique that in a great revolu-tion in a nation of four hundred millions oneman only should emerge with the capacity forgovernment; and Yuan Shih Kai, I believe,will not appear to history to be more than anastute and tenacious opportunist. The recentrevolution has exposed the incapacity and thelack of character of the southern leaders. And,however sympathetic one may be with therevolutionists, the question forces itself uponone whether we have not here another demon-stration that old bottles will not hold newwine; that ideas derived from an alien civilisa-tion may transform the brain, but cannotpenetrate the soul of a different race. I sus-pect, at any rate, that in young China thereis some dislocation between their convictionsand their character, which makes them in-effective for action towards ends in which theygenuinely believe.On the other hand, the problem before therepublican revolutionaries is a vast one, andone which no country has solved without years


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CHINAof confusion and bloodshed. European /criticsare apt to forget this. It took France a cen-tury of successive revolutions and reactionsbefore the Republic was definitely established.Two revolutions and a series of civil wars werenecessary to get rid of the Stuarts in England.The surprising thing in China is that thedynasty has disappeared with so little effortand so little regret. For among all the possi-bilities of the future, the one which is univer-sally repudiated is a Manchu restoration.Still, to get rid of the Manchus is one thing,to set up a new government is another. Thebreach of continuity has beencomplete, as com-plete as in revolutionary France. Nothingin Chinese history or tradition has preparedthem for a representative republic, and it isquite possible that it is not under a republicthat the new era, which in any case is inevit-able, will be best inaugurated and furthered.At present, however, it must be admitted thatrepublican institutions have not been given afair chance. That, I believe, has been theweakness of the President's policy. Insteadof endeavouring to gain the confidence of allparties in the National Assembly, and to getall to work together for the common good, he


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTseems to have set out from the beginning todiscredit the Assembly. When I was in Pekinthe two Houses were meeting day after dayand doing no business because a quorum couldnot be obtained; and this was due to thedeliberate abstension of the Chin-Pu-Tangparty, which is admittedly the party of thePresident, and which, no doubt, was in hispay. True, serious differences of policy haddeveloped between him and the southernparty. He had contracted the quintuple loanover the head of the Assembly in defiance oftheir protest and in violation of the spirit, ifnot the letter, of the constitution. But thefact that he did so is precisely an exampleof what I should call his bad statesmanship.What is worse, he was believed to be privy tothe assassination of Sung, the southern leader;and as the facts have never been allowed tocome out in Court, he must continue to lieunder that suspicion. If the National Assem-bly hitherto has been impotent and futile, thefault, I believe, lies rather with the Presidentthan with them.1 But these, after all, are

1 Since this was written, the President has dissolvedall elective bodies in China, and made himself anabsolute dictator.

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CHINAtransitory conditions. The fundamental factis that the revolution was accomplished by ahandful of men educated in foreign customsand foreign ideas, and working-with a mer-cenary army (for it is clear that the troops whohave taken part on either side are mercenarieswho transfer their allegiance from one partyto the other according as they are paid).There is no national movement in China, forthere is no Chinese nation, in the sense thatthere is an English or a French or a Germannation. The Chinese, as I have already pointedout, though they have never been dividedas India has, have never been united by acommon political consciousness. Their socialorganisation has rested not on the centralgovernment, but on the family and the village.Government has been a mechanism imposedfrom above to make roads and canals, to dojustice, and to collect taxes. And the com-parative isolation of China for many centuries,the absence of wars waged for very existence,such as have built up the European system,prevented the formation of national sentimentby outside pressure. The Chinese have beenthe most peaceable, and, in many respects,the most civilised people the world has seen.


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTThey have not had, because they have notneeded, a national self-consciousness, andthey cannot improvise one in a moment.There can be no doubt, I imagine, that themass of the people do not know what therevolution is about; and that they welcomedit less because it got rid of the Manchus thanbecause it relieved them for a time from thepayment of taxes.

It does not, however, follow, as Europeancritics often imply, that China can neveracquire a political sense or work a constitution.Given education, a press, better means ofcommunication, and in a generation thechange might be effected. The Chinese, asexperience has now shown, are the mosteducable of people; and this, no doubt,applies to the masses no less than to the hand-ful who have hitherto had the opportunity.And the education has begun. In elemen-tary schools modern subjects are beginning tobe taught; geography, history, elementaryscience, the existence, the character, and thepower of other nations. I myself, visitinga school in a small village on the Upper Yang-tze, far from all foreign influence, found anEnglish-speaking teacher who had been edu-


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CHINAcated by missionaries, an English spelling andreading book, maps of China and of the world,and drawings of bacteria. These things mustbe taking effect. And those who seem still tothink that the revolution in China is a mereflash in the pan, implying no radical transfor-mation, are likely before many years havepassed to be verymuch astonished. What mayhappen politically, whether the governmentbe republican or monarchical, on the Ameri-can or the French or the German model, iscomparatively unimportant. The importantthing is that the educational process has begun,the education both of events and of schooling ;and that to education the Chinese are emin-ently responsive. For good and for evil theold China is a thing of the past. The penetra-tion by western ideas has begun, and whetherit go faster or slower it will go far and go to theend.


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PART III. JAPANTURNING now to Japan I find here, too,affinities with the West and contrasts withIndia. Japan is the only country I havevisited which reminds me of what I supposeancient Greece to have been. This, at anyrate, is true of externals. The costume of themen, leaving bare the legs and arms, and theirperfect proportions and development, were aconstant delight to me. The most Hellenicthing I ever saw was a group of Japaneseyouths practising jiu-jitsu naked under thetrees of a temple garden, or by moonlight onthe seashore. Again, the Japanese theatremust be more like the theatre of ancientGreece than anything now extant. The audi-ence in their loose white robes ; the magnificentposing of the actors; the chant in which thetext is declaimed; the dance; the choice, forsubject, of ancient heroic legend, all these arestriking points of resemblance. And though,as Mr. Archer has pointed out, the actual


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JAPANform of the theatre recalls rather Elizabethanthan Greek conditions, the total effect tomy judgment was much more Hellenic thanShakespearean. Again, in Japan, as in ancientGreece, there is a universal prevalence of art.The skill and the taste still persist. Everycommon thing is beautiful, the cups, the tea-pots, even the very toys. The houses, fromthe aesthetic point of view, are the most perfectever designed. Fineness of taste and skill ofhand seem to be general, save where thewestern invasion has destroyed them. Addto this the impression one receives in Japan ofa people " simple, sensuous, and passionate,"quick to laugh, quick to quarrel, quick to die,or kill, in everything intense and unreflective,and you get a resemblance with the Greekswhich is, I think, more than superficial. Thepoints in which the Japanese character andcreation are unlike and inferior to the Greekdepend upontheir comparative lack of intellect.The Greeks were the originators in the West ofphilosophy and science, and their literature isas remarkable for its intellectual content asfor its aesthetic form. The Japanese haveoriginated nothing; they took all their ideasfrom China; and their literature and art isE


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTcuriously unintellectual. Their whole civilisa-tion, indeed, beautiful and passionate as it is,is thin and simple when compared with thatof ancient Greece. If, in a word, Japan is theGreece of the East, it is a Greece withoutSocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Thucy-dides. A curiously truncated Greece! Yet,I think, the foundation, so to speak, is thesame. The same temperament, passionateand aesthetic; only a lack of the criticaland constructive power of mind which hasmade the Greeks, after the lapse of twothousand years, still the living masters ofthe West.But it is, of course, not only with ancientGreece that the civilisation of Japan pre-

sents important analogies. In institutions,and in all those aspects of character which areaffected by institutions, it was, until the revo-lution, an almost complete reproduction ofmediaeval Europe. Japanese feudalism was, inevery point, similar to European, save that itwas simpler and intenser, and, of course, un-complicated by the influences, ethical, social,and political, of the Catholic Church. If theessentials of feudalism be, as I think they are,a hierarchic organisation of society under the


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JAPANrule of a military caste, and the predominance,in the scheme of virtues, of those peculiar tothat caste courage, loyalty to a chief, andpersonal honour then Japanese feudalism,which lasted up to the revolution of the nine-teenth century, presents an exact parallel tofeudalism in Europe. And its virtues andqualities still persist in Japan; they are saidto have been, and no doubt were, the secretof their success in the war with Russia; andthey constitute the greatest distinction be-tween Japanese civilisation and that of Indiaor of China on the one hand, and of the Weston the other. It is for that reason that I saychivalry is the dominant note of Japanesecivilisation, understanding by chivalry thequalities fostered by a feudal regime. Thesequalities are summed up in the Japanese term" bushido," and they centre about the nationalreligion of Shintoism, the essence of which isdevotion to ancestors, and in particular to thedivine ancestors of the Emperor. Shintoismis the true religion of Japan; and it wasa sound instinct (though, as it turned out,the policy prompted by it was a failure) whichled the statesmen of the new era to fosterShintoism at the expense of Buddhism. For


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTBuddhism, though it has had great influencein Japan, as is testified by the innumerabletemples which are the chief beauty of thecountry, and the tender and profound religiousart of the earlier period, was really as aliento the Japanese spirit as Christianity to theEuropean. The Japanese are not by nature,any more than the Chinese, disbelievers in life.They are active, sensuous, ambitious, at needaggressive. They have to an eminent degreethe qualities of citizens and patriots; and theinfluence of Buddhism has been with themmore aesthetic than ethical. Japanese feudal-ism converted the Buddha's doctrine of re-nunciation into the Stoicism of the warrior.The Japanese Samurai renounced desire, notthat he might enter Nirvana, but that he mightacquire the contempt of life which would makehim a perfect warrior. In him, the knightincluded and swallowed up the saint. Andthe Samurai, meditating in a teahouse on thebeauty, the brevity, and the pathos of life, andpassing out to kill or to die, is as typical ofthe Japanese attitude to life as the wanderingSannyasin is of the Indian.But this civilisation of Japan, so com-

plete, so simple, so homogeneous a military


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JAPANsystem preserved, oddly enough, withoutdegeneration, through more than two cen-turies of peace, and deliberately secludedfrom all influences from without that mighthave disturbed it is already a thing 6fthe past. As in India, as in China, as allover the world, the aggressive western powersforced themselves and their ideals upon thereluctant nation. But Japan, a small homo-geneous, military State, inspired by a strongpatriotic sentiment, met the advance in quitea different way from any other nation. Inorder to avoid being westernised by the powersshe decided to westernise herself. To save herlife she made up her mind to lose it. Thesystem she had cherished so carefully shethrew overboard almost in a day; and ageneration saw a centralised monarchy sub-stituted for a nominal suzerainty, the militarycaste converted into officers in a national army,education in science, theoretical and applied,substituted for education in the Chinese andJapanese classics, feudalism abolished, andindustrialism triumphantly inaugurated. Iknow of nothing in history analogous tothis extraordinary transformation except theearlier conversion of Japan to Chinese ideals


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTand practice. I proceed to comment morein detail on some aspects of this trans-formation.To take first externals. In Japan, as in

India and in China, but in Japan in pre-eminentdegree, one is struck by the rout of aesthetictaste before the western invasion. In old Japan,roughly, everything was beautiful ; in modernJapan everything is hideous. Fortunately, inexternals, old Japan is almost everywhere inevidence. It is in a few great cities that thechange appears. Tokyo, for example, is be-coming ugly with an intensity of ugliness Ihave seen nowhere else. The modern build-ings in European style are as meaningless andas dead as all architecture in the West, andthey have not the compensation of thatkind of Egyptian slave-made impressivenesswhich characterises recent building in westerncapitals. The statues in the European stylehave a grotesque monstrosity which makeseven the monuments of London appear digni-fied by comparison. The European costumeof the official and educated classes fortun-ately the mass of the people still adhere tothe Japanese style is a model of vulgarityand ineptitude. Japanese taste is altogether


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JAPANdisoriented as soon as it has to deal with Euro-pean and American conventions. Perhaps,as I have already suggested, the taste hadreally long ceased to exist, and become a merehabit with no power of resistance. Howeverthat may be, it is fortunate that so far, inmost crafts, the old tradition still persists, andJapanese pottery, lacquer, weaving, and em-broidery are still being produced not unworthyof their artistic past. How long this maycontinue I cannot prophesy. A general ex-tension of the factory system would of coursedestroy it. Some Japanese, it is true, areaware of the value of their own traditions andof the devastating effect of industrialism onart and beauty, and may possibly make asuccessful effort to conserve what they stillpossess. I confess, however, that I am notvery hopeful of this. For among educatedJapanese I have met few who seem to careabout such things, and these few were apt tobe conservative and reactionary, and withoutmuch practical influence. The terrible prestigeof the West covers and recommends every-thing bad in it as well as everything good,and the Japanese, most imitative of nations,seem to desire only to be able to say at every


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTpoint that they are as good as the mostadvanced western nation.Turning from this, to my mind, very im-

portant point, to those social and politicalquestions which in the present age almostmonopolise public attention, the entry ofJapan into the western industrial systemis carrying with it all the consequenceswhich that system has produced in Europeand America. There is a gradual exodusfrom the country to the town, due to whatis now felt to be the dulness and the lackof opportunity of life on the soil, and theattraction of superior wages. Pauperism,unknown under the old regime, is becoming aproblem, and though there is no poor law inJapan, there appears to be need for one. Un-employment is beginning to show itself; andthe factory system is developing abusessimilar to those which disgraced its early his-tory in Europe, abuses which the Japanesehave not yet begun to combat by legislation.For though there is a factory law on theStatute Book, it has not yet been put intooperation, ostensibly on the ground of lack offunds, really, as I was informed, because ofthe influence with the Government of the


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JAPANgreat manufacturers. The growth of nationalwealth, in short, is being accompanied by allthose evils of disorganisation and unjust dis-tribution which constitute the political andsocial problem of the West. And these evilsare intensified by a financial system whichraises the bulk of the national revenue bytaxes on the necessities of the poor.

This brings me to the question of the Govern-ment of Japan, a system which has been muchpraised, but which seemed to me, in its prac-tical operation, to be the worst and mostominous factor in the present situation.Traditionally, as is well known, the politicaland national sentiment of Japan centredabout the Emperor. The sentiment, no doubt,was obscured during the period of the Shogun-ate, when the Emperor was a mere figure-head. But long before the aggression of theWest produced the great crisis an internalmovement was working for the restorationof the Mikado's power. That restorationwas effected by the revolution of 1867, andeffected by the voluntary abdication of theShogun. And the tradition of personal loyaltyto the Emperor, as an actual descendant andrepresentative of gods, the tradition, that is, in


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CIVILISATIONS OF THE EASTa very intense form, of his divine right, was anasset which the statesmen of the revolutionwere not likely to throw away in laying thefoundations of modern Japan. When, there-fore, they made a constitution they naturallyturned for a model rather to Germany than toAmerica or France or England. They madethe Emperor the centre of the whole politicalstructure, and clause after clause in the con-stitution endeavours to secure, so far as theletter of the law can do it, that monarchicalgovernment in Japan shall never be trans-formed into parliamentary government as wehave it in England. To foster this feelingabout the Emperor, the machinery of publiceducation is brought to bear. On statedanniversaries the children do reverence to theMikado's portrait. His proclamation, whichmakes himself and his divine ancestors thesource and centre of all the history and polityof Japan, is the text on which all moralinstruction is a commentary. A deliberateattempt is made to mould the mind of youngJapan to religious veneration for the head ofthe State; and to this general attitude alldomestic and personal morality is subordin-ated. The Emperor is put forward as the


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JAPANhead, not only of the political, but of the socialand ethical structure of Japan. It is, however,interesting to note that in spite of the posi-tion thus given to the Emperor, he does not,in fact, appear to govern in person. Until re-cently he governed through and by and, itwould seem, in subordination to the remark-able group of men called the elder statesmen ;a group as much unknown to the constitutionas the Cabinet is in England, and owing theirposition to the confidence of the sovereign,and to their prestige and influence among theofficers of the army and navy. It is thesemen hitherto that have governed Japan. Theirideal is bureaucratic. They have never de-sired or intended that the representativeelement in the constitution should become thegoverning element, or that public opinionshould reach that stage of development inwhich it can really dictate to ministers.

an essay on the civilizations of india, china & japan_lowes dickenson

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