INTRODUCTIONThe Religion of Good-citizenship
Sage, thun ivir nicht rechtl Wir mussen den Pobel betrugen,
Scih nur, ivie ungeschickt, sich nur ivie wild er sich zeigt\ Ungeschick und
wild sind alle rohen Betrogenen ;
Seid nur redlich und fiihrt ihn zum Menschlichen an.
Goethe
THE great war at the present moment is absorbing all the attention of the
world exclusive of everything else. But then I think this war itself must make
serious thinking people turn their attention to the great problem of
civilisation. All civilisation begins by the conquest of Nature, i.e. by
subduing and controlling the terrific physical forces in Nature so that they can
do no harm to men. The modern civilisation of Europe to-day has succeeded in the
conquest of Nature with a success, it must be admitted, hitherto not attained by
any other civilisation. But there is in this world a force more terrible even
than the terrific physical forces in Nature and that is the passions in the
heart of man. The harm which the physical forces of Nature can do to mankind, is
nothing compared with the harm which human passions can do. Until therefore this
terrible force,_the human passions_is properly regulated and controlled, there
can be, it is evident, not only no civilisation, but even no life possible for
human beings.
In the first early and rude stage of society, mankind had to use
_ Aren't we just doing the right thing? the mob we must befool them;
See, now, how shiftless! and look now how wild! {or such is the mob-Shiftless
and wild all sons of Adam are when you befool them;
Be but honest and true, and thus make human, them all.
physical force to subdue and subjugate human passions. Thus hordes of savages
had to be subjugated by sheer physical force. But as civilisation advances,
mankind discovers a force more potent and more effective for subduing and
controlling human passions than physical force and this force is called moral
force. The moral force which in the past has been effective in subduing and
controlling the human passions in the population of Europe, is Christianity. But
now this war with the armament preceding it, seems to show that Christianity has
become ineffective as a moral force. Without an effective moral force to control
and restrain human passions, the people of Europe have had again to employ
physical force to keep civil order. As Car-lyle truly says, " Europe is Anarchy
plus a constable. " The use of physical force to maintain civil order leads to
militarism. In fact militarism is necessary in Europe to-day because of the want
of an effective moral force. But militarism leads to war and war means
destruction and waste. Thus the people of Europe are on the horns of a dilemma.
If they do away with militarism, anarchy will destroy their civilisation, but if
they keep up militarism, their civilisation will collapse through the waste and
destruction of war. But Englishmen say that they are determined to put down
Prussian militarism and Lord Kitchner believes that he will be able to stamp out
Prussian militarism with three million drilled and armed Englishmen. But then it
seems to me when Prussian militarism is thus stamped out, there will then arise
another militarism, _the British militarism which again will have to be stamped
out. Thus there seems to be no way of escape out of this vicious circle.
But is there really no way of escape? Yes, I believe there is. The American
Emerson long ago said, "I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar musket
worship, _though great men be musket worshippers; and 'tis certain, as God
liveth, the gun that does need another gun, the law of love and justice alone
can effect a clean revolution." Now if the people of Europe really want to put
down militarism, there is only one way of doing it and that is, to use what E-merson
calls the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice, _in
fact, moral force, With an effective moral force, militarism will become
unnecesary and disappear of itself. But now, that Christianity has become
ineffective as a moral force the problem is where are the people of Europe to
find this new effective moral force which will make militarism unnecessary?
I believe the people of Europe will find this new moral force in China, _in
the Chinese civilisation. The moral force in the Chinese civilisation which can
make militarism unnecessary is the Religion of good citizenship. But people will
say to me, "There have also been wars in China. " It is true there have been
wars in China; but, since the time of Confucius ,years ago, we Chinese have had
no militarism such as that we see in Europe to-day. In China war is an accident,
whereas in Europe war has become a necessity. We Chinese are liable to have
wars, but we do not live in constant expectation of war. In fact the one thing
intolerable in the state of Europe, it seems to me, is not so much war as the
fact that every body is constantly afraid that his neighbour as soon as he gets
strong enough to be able to do it, will come to rob and murder him and he has
therefore to arm himself or pay for an armed policeman to protect him. Thus what
weighs upon the people of Europe is not so much the accident of War, but the
constant necessity to arm themselves, the absolute nec-cessity to use physical
force to protect themselves.
Now in China because we Chinese have the Religion of good citizenship a man
does not feel the need of using physical force to protect himself; he has seldom
the need even to call in and use the physical force of the policeman, of the
State to protect him. A man in China is protected by the sense of justice of his
neighbour; he is protected by the readiness of his fellow men to obey the sense
of moral obligation. In fact, a man in China does not feel the need of using
physical force to protect himself because he is sure that right and justice is
recognised by every body as a force higher than physical force and moral
obligation is recognised by every body as something which must be obeyed. Now if
you can get all mankind to agree to recognise right and justice, as a force
higher than physical force, and moral obligation as something which must be
obeyed, then the use of physical force will become unnecessary; then there will
be no militarism in the world. But of course there will be in every country a
few people, criminals, and in the world, a few savages who will not or are not
able to recognise right and justice as a force higher than physical force and
moral obligation as something which must be obeyed. Thus a-gainst criminals and
savages a certain amount of physical or police force and militarism will always
be necessary in every country and in the world.
But people will say to me how are you to make mankind recognise right and
justice as a force higher than physical force. I answer the first thing you will
have to do is to convince mankind of the efficacy of right and justice, convince
them that right and justice is a power; in fact, convince them of the power of
goodness. But then a-gain how are you to do this? Well, _in order to do this,
the Religion of good citizenship in China teaches every child as soon as he is
able to understand the meaning of words, that the Nature of man is good. *
Now the fundamental unsoundness of the civilisation of Europe to-day, it
seems to me, lies in its wrong conception of human nature;
its conception that human nature is evil and because of this wrong
conception, the whole structure of society in Europe has always rested upon
force. The two things which the people of Europe have depended upon to maintain
civil order are Religion and Law. In other words, the population of Europe have
been kept in order by the fear of God and the fear of the Law. Fear implies the
use of force. Therefore in order to keep up the fear of God, the people of
Europe had at first to maintain a large number of expensive idle persons called
priests. That, to speak of nothing else, meant so much expense, that it at last
became an unbearable burden upon the people. In fact in the thirty years war of
the Reformation, the people of Europe tried to get rid of the priest. After
having got rid of the priests who kept the population in order by the fear of
God, the people of Europe tried to maintain civil order by the fear of the Law.
But to keep up the fear of the Law, the people of Europe have had to maintain
another class of still more expensive idle persons called policemen and
soldiers. Now the people of Europe are beginning to find out that the main-tainence
of policemen and soldiers to keep civil order, is still more ruinously expensive
than even the maintainence of priests. In fact, as in the thirty years war of
the Reformation, the people of Europe wanted to get rid of the priest, so in
this present war, what the people of Europe really want, is to get rid of the
soldier. But the alternatives before the people of Europe if they want to get
rid of the policeman and soldier, is either to call back the priest to keep up
the fear of God or to find something else which, like the fear of God and the
fear of the Law, will help them to maintain civil order. That, to put the
question broadly, I think, everybody will admit, is the great problem of
civilisation before the people of Europe after this war.
Now after the experience which they have had with the priests, I do not think
the people of Europe will want to call back the priests. Bismarck has said, "We
will never go back to Canossa." Besides, even if the priests are now called
back, they would be useless, for the fear of God is gone from the people of
Europe. The only other alternative before the people of Europe therefore, if
they want to get rid of the policeman and soldier, is to find something else,
which, like the fear of God and the fear of the Law, can help them to maintain
civil order. Now this something, I believe, as I have said, the people of Europe
will find in the Chinese civilisation. This something is what I have called the
Religion of good citizenship. This Religion of good citizenship in China is a
religion which can keep the population of a country in order without priest and
without policeman or soldier. In fact with this Religion of good citizenship,
the population of , China, a population as large, if not larger than the whole
population r of the Continent of Europe, are actually and practically kept in
peace and order without priest and without policeman or soldier. In China, as
every one who has been in this country knows, the priest and the , policeman or
soldier, play a very subordinate, a very insignificant ( part in helping to
maintain public order. Only the most ignorant class in China require the priest
and only the worst, .the criminal class in China, require the policeman or
soldier to keep them in order. Thus I say if the people of Europe really want to
get rid of Religion and Militarism, of the priest and soldier which have caused
them so much trouble and bloodshed, they will have to come to China to get this,
what I have called the Religion of good citizenship.
In short what I want to call the attention of the people of Europe and
America to, just at this moment when civilisation seems to be threatened with
bankruptcy, is that there is an invaluable and hitherto unsuspected asset of
civilisation here in China. The asset of civilisation is not the trade, the
railway, the mineral wealth, gold, silver, iron or coal in this country. The
asset of civilisation of the world today, I want to say here, is the
Chinaman,_the unspoilt real Chinaman with his Religion of good citizenship. The
real Chinaman, I say, is an invaluable asset of civilisation, because he is a
person who costs the world little or nothing to keep him in order. Indeed I
would like
here to warn the people of Europe and America not to destroy this invaluable
asset of civilisation, not to change and spoil the real Chinaman as they are now
trying to do with their New Learning. If the people of Europe and America
succeed in destroying the real Chinaman, the Chinese type of humanity; succeed
in transforming the real Chinaman into a European or American, i.e., to say, a
person who will require a priest or soldier to keep him in order, then surely
they will increase the burden either of Religion or of Militarism of the world,
_this last item at this moment already becoming a danger and menace to
civilisation and humanity. But on the other hand, suppose one could by some
means or other change the European or American type of humanity, transform the
European or American into a real Chinaman who will then not require a priest or
soldier to keep him in order,;_just think what a burden will be taken off from
the world.
But now to sum up in a few plain words the great problem of civilisation in
Europe arising out of this war. The people of Europe, I say, at first tried to
maintain civil order by the help of the priest. But after a while, the priest
cost too much expense and trouble. The people of Europe then, after the thirty
years war, sent away the priest and called in the policeman and soldier to
maintain civil order. But now they find the policeman and soldier are causing
more expense and trouble even than the priests. Now what are the people of
Europe to do? Send away the soldier and call back the priest? No, I do not
believe the people of Europe will want to call back the priest. Besides the
priest now would be useless. But then what are the people of Europe to do? I see
Professor Lowes Dickinson of Cambridge in an article in the Atlantic Monthly,
entitled "The War and the Way out, " says: "Call in the mob." I am afraid the
mob when once called in to take the place of the priest and soldier, will give
more trouble than even the priest and the soldier. The priests and soldiers in
Europe have caused wars, but the mob will bring revolution and anarchy and then
the state of Europe will be worse than before. Now my advice to the people of
Europe is: Do not call back the priest, and for goodness sake don't call in the
mob, _but call in the Chinaman; call in the real Chinaman with his Religion of
good citizenship and his experience of ,years how to live in peace without
priest and without soldier.
In fact I really believe that the people of Europe will find the solution of
the great problem of civilisation after this war, _here in China. There is, I
say here again, an invaluable, but hitherto unsuspected asset of civilisation
here in China, and the asset of civilisation is the real Chinaman. The real
Chinaman is an asset of civilisation because he has the secret of a new
civilisation which the people of Europe will want after this great war, and the
secret of that new civilisation is what I have called the Religion of good
citizenship. The first principle of this Religion of good citizenship is to
believe that the Nature of Man is good; to believe in the power of goodness; to
believe in the power and efficacy of what the American Emerson calls the law of
love and justice. But what is the law of love? The Religion of good citizenship
teaches that the law of love means to love your father and mother. And what is
the law of justice? The Religion of good citizenship teaches that the law of
justice means to be true, to be faithful, to be loyal; that the woman in every
country must be self-lessly, absolutely loyal to her husband, that the man in
every country must be selflessly, absolutely loyal to his sovereign, to his King
or Emperor. In fact the highest duty in this Religion of good citizenship I want
to say finally here is the Duty of Loyalty, loyalty not only in deed, but
loyalty in spirit or as Tennyson puts it,
To reverence the King as he were
Their conscience and their conscience as their King,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ.
THE SPIRIT OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE
A Paper that was to have been read before the Oriental Society of Peking
LET me first of all explain to you what I propose, with your permission, this
afternoon to discuss. The subject of our paper I have called "The Spirit of the
Chinese people."! do not mean here merely to speak of the character or
characteristics of the Chinese people. Chinese characteristics have often been
described before, but I think you will agree with me that such description or
enumeration of the characteristics of the Chinese people hitherto have given us
no picture at all of the inner being of the Chinaman. Besides, when we speak of
the character or characteristics of the Chinese, it is not possible to
generalize. The character of the Northern Chinese, as you know, is as different
from that of the Southern Chinese as the character of the Germans is different
from that of the Italians.
But what I mean by the spirit of the Chinese people, is the spirit by which
the Chinese people live, something constitutionally distinctive in the mind,
temper and sentiment of the Chinese people which distinguishes them from all
other people, especially from those of modem Europe and America. Perhaps I can
best express what I mean by calling the subject of our discussion the Chinese
type of humanity, or, to put it in plainer and shorter words, the real Chinaman.
Now, what is the real Chinaman? That, I am sure, you will all agree with me,
is a very interesting subject, especially at the present moment, when from what
we see going on around us in China today, it would seem that the Chinese type of
humanity_the real Chinaman_is going to disappear and, in his place, we are going
to have a new type of humanity_the progressive or modern Chinaman. In fact I
propose that before the real Chinaman, the old Chinese type of humanity,
disappears altogether from the world we should take a good last look at him and
see if we can find anything organically distinctive in him which makes him so
different from all other people and from the new type of humanity which we see
rising up in China today.
Now the first thing, I think, which will strike you in the old Chinese type
of humanity is that there is nothing wild, savage or ferocious in him. Using a
term which is applied to animals, we may say of the real Chinaman that he is a
domesticated creature. Take a man of the lowest class of the population in China
and, I think, you will agree with me that there is less of animality in him,
less of the wild animal, of what the Germans call Rohheit, than you will find in
a man of the same class in a European society. In fact, the one word, it seems
to me, which will sum up the impression which the Chinese type of humanity makes
upon you is the English word "gentle." By gentleness I do not mean softness of
nature or weak submissiveness. "The docility of the Chinese," says the late Dr.
D. J. Macgowan, "is not the docility of a broken-hearted, emasculated people. "
But by the word " gentle" I mean absence of hardness, harshness, roughness, or
violence, in fact of anything which jars upon you. There is in the true Chinese
type of humanity an air, so to speak, of a quiet, sober, chastened mellowness,
such as you find in a piece of well-tempered metal. Indeed the very physical and
moral imperfections of a real Chinaman are, if not redeemed, at least softened
by this quality of gentleness in him. The real Chinaman may be coarse, but there
is no grossness in his coarseness. The real Chinaman may be ugly, but there is
no hideousness in his ugliness. The real Chinaman may be vulgar, but there is no
aggressiveness, no blatancy in his vulgarity. The real Chinaman may be stupid,
but there is no absurdity in his stupidity. The real Chinaman may be cunning,
but there is no deep malignity in his cunning. In fact what I want to say is,
that even in the faults and blemishes of body, mind and character of the real
Chinaman, there is nothing which revolts you. It is seldom that you will find a
real Chinaman of the old school, even of the lowest type, who is positively
repulsive.
I say that the total impression which the Chinese type of humanity makes upon
you is that he is gentle, that he is inexpressibly gentle. When you analyse this
quality of inexpressible gentleness in the real Chinaman, you will find that it
is the the product of a combination of two things, namely, sympathy and
intelligence. I have compared the Chinese type of humanity to a domesticated
animal. Now what is that which makes a domesticated animal so different from a
wild animal? It is something in the domesticated animal which we recognise as
distinctively human. But what is distinctively human as distinguished from what
is animal? It is intelligence. But the intelligence of a domesticated animal is
not a thinking intelligence. It is not an intelligence which comes to him from
reasoning. Neither does it come to him from instinct, such as the intelligence
of the fox, _ the vulpine intelligence which knows where eatable chickens are to
be found. This intelligence which comes from instinct, of the fox, all,_even
wild, animals have. But this, what may be called human intelligence of a
domesticated animal is something quite different from the vulpine or animal
intelligence. This intelligence of a domesticated animal is an intelligence
which comes not from reasoning nor from instinct, but from sympathy, from a
feeling of love and attachment. A thorough-bred Arab horse understands his
English master not because he has studied English grammar nor because he has an
instinct for the English language, but because he loves and is attached to his
master. This is what I call human intelligence, as distinguished from mere
vulpine or animal intelligence. It is the possession of this human quality which
distinguishes domesticated from wild animals. In the same way, I say, it is the
possession of this sympathetic and true human intelligence, which gives to the
Chinese type of humanity, to the real Chinaman, his inexpressible gentleness.
I once read somewhere a statement made by a foreigner who had lived in both
countries, that the longer a foreigner lives in Japan the more he dislikes the
Japanese, whereas the longer a foreigner lives in China the more he likes the
Chinese. I do not know if what is said of the Japanese here, is true. But, I
think, all of you who have lived in China will agree with me that what is here
said of the Chinese is true. It is well-known fact that the liking_you may call
it the taste for the Chinese_grows upon the foreigner the longer he lives in
this country. There is an indescribable something in the Chinese people which,
in spite of their want of habits of cleanliness and refinement, in spite of
their many defects of mind and character, makes foreigners like them as
foreigners like no other people. This indescribable something which I have
defined as gentleness, softens and mitigates, if it does not redeem, the
physical and moral defects of the Chinese in the hearts of foreigners. This
gentleness again is, as I have tried to show you, the product of what I call
sympathetic or true human intelligence_an intelligence which comes not from
reasoning nor from instinct, but from sympathy_from the power of sympathy. Now
what is the secret of the power of sympathy of the Chinese people?
I will here venture to give you an explanation_a hypothesis, if you like to
call it so_of the secret of this power of sympathy in the Chinese people and my
explanation is this. The Chinese people have this power, this strong power of
sympathy, because they live wholly, or almost wholly, a life of the heart. The
whole life of Chinaman is a life of feeling_not feeling in the sense of
sensation which comes from the bodily organs, nor feeling in the sense of
passions which flow, as you would say, from the nervous system, but feeling in
the sense of emotion or human affection which comes from the deepest part of our
nature_the heart or soul. Indeed I may say here that the real Chinaman lives so
much a life of emotion or human affection, a life of the soul, that he may be
said sometimes to neglect more than he ought to do, even the necessary
requirements of the life of the senses of a man living in this world composed of
body and soul. That is the true explanation of the insensibility of the Chinese
to the physical discomforts of unclean surroundings and want of refinement. But
that is neither here nor there.
The Chinese people, I say, have the power of sympathy because they live
wholly a life of the heart_a life of emotion or human affection. Let me here,
first of all, give you two illustrations of what I mean by living a life of the
heart. My first illustration is this. Some of you may have personally known an
old friend and colleague of mine in Wuchang_known him when he was Minister of
the Foreign Office here in Peking_Mr. Liang Tun-yen, Mr. Liang told me, when he
first received the appointment of the Customs Taotai of Hankow, that what made
him wish and strive to become a great mandarin, to wear the red button, and what
gave him pleasure then in receiving this appointment, was not because he cared
for the red button, not because he would henceforth be rich and independent,
_and we were all of us very poor then in Wuchang, _but because he wanted to
rejoice, because this promotion and advancement of his would gladden the heart
of his old mother in Canton. That is what I mean when I say that the Chinese
people live a life of the heart_a life of emotion or human affection.
My other illustration is this. A Scotch friend of mine in the Customs told me
he once had a Chinese servant who was a perfect scamp, who lied, who "squeezed,
" and who was always gambling, but when my friend fell ill with typhoid fever in
an out-of-the-way port where he had no foreign friend to attend to him, this
awful scamp of a Chinese servant nursed him with a care and devotion which he
could not have expected from an intimate friend or near relation. Indeed I think
what was once said of a woman in the Bible may also be said, not only of the
Chinese servant, but of the Chinese people generally:_"Much is forgiven them,
because they love much. " The eyes and understanding of the foreigner in China
see many defects and blemishes in the habits and in the character of the
Chinese, but his heart is attracted to them, because the Chinese have a heart,
or, as I said, live a life of the heart_a life of emotion or human affection.
Now we have got, I think, a clue to the secret of sympathy in the Chinese
people_the power of sympathy which gives to the real Chinaman that sympathetic
or true human intelligence, making him so inexpressibly gentle. Let us next put
this clue or hypothesis to the test. Let us see whether with this clue that the
Chinese people live a life of the heart we can explain not only detached facts
such as the two illustrations I have given above, but also general
characteristics which we see in the actual life of the Chinese people.
First of all let us take the Chinese language. As the Chinese live a life of
the heart, the Chinese language, I say, is also a language of the heart. Now it
is a well-known fact that children and uneducated persons among foreigners in
China learn Chinese very easily, much more so than grown-up and educated
persons. What is the reason of this? The reason, I say, is because children and
uneducated persons think and speak with the language of the heart, whereas
educated men, especially men with the modern intellectual education of Europe,
think and speak with the language of the head or intellect. In fact, the reason
why educated foreigners find it so difficult to learn Chinese, is because they
are too educated, too intellectually and scientifically educated. As it is said
of the Kingdom of Heaven, so it may also be said of the Chinese
language:_"Unless you become as little children, you cannot learn it. "
Next let us take another well-known fact in the life of the Chinese people.
The Chinese, it is well-known, have wonderful memories. What is the secret of
this? The secret is: the Chinese remember things with the heart and not with the
head. The heart with its power of sympathy, acting as glue, can retain things
much better than the head or intellect which is hard and dry. It is, for
instance, also for this reason that we; all of us, can remember things which we
learnt when we were children much better than we can remember things which we
learnt in mature life. As children, like the Chinese, we remember things with
the heart and not with the head.
Let us next take another generally admitted fact in the life of the Chinese
people_their politeness. The Chinese are, it has often been remarked, a
peculiarly polite people. Now what is the essence of true politeness? It is
consideration for the feelings of others. The Chinese are polite because, living
a life of the heart, they know their own feelings and that makes it easy for
them to show consideration for the feelings of others. The politeness of the
Chinese, although not elaborate like the politeness of the Japanese, is pleasing
because it is, as the French beautifully express it, la politesse du coeur, the
politeness of the heart. The politeness of the Japanese, on the other hand,
although elaborate, is not so pleasing, and I have heard some foreigners express
their dislike of it, because it is what may be called a rehearsal politeness_a
politeness learnt by heart as in a theatrical piece. It is not a spontaneous
politeness which comes direct from the heart. In fact the politeness of the
Japanese is like a flower without fragrance, whereas the politeness of a really
polite Chinese has a perfume like the aroma of a precious ointment_instar
unguenti fra-grantis_ which comes from the heart.
Last of all, let us take another characteristic of the Chinese people, by
calling attention to which the Rev. Arthur Smith has made his reputation, viz.
:_want of exactness. Now what is the reason for this want of exactness in the
ways of the Chinese people? The reason, I say again, is because the Chinese live
a life of the heart. The heart is a very delicate and sensitive balance. It is
not like the head or intellect, a hard, stiff, rigid instrument. You cannot with
the heart think with the same steadiness, with the same rigid exactness as you
can with the head or intellect. At least, it is extremely difficult to do so. In
fact, the Chinese pen or pencil which is a soft brush, may be taken as a symbol
of the Chinese mind. It is very difficult to write or draw with it, but when you
have once mastered the use of it, you will, with it, write and draw with a
beauty and grace which you cannot do with a hard steel pen.
Now the above are a few simple facts connected with the life of the Chinese
people which anyone, even without any knowledge of Chinese, can observe and
understand, and by examining these facts, I think, I have made good my
hypothesis that the Chinese people live a life of the heart.
Now it is because the Chinese live a life of the heart, the life of a child,
that they are so primitive in many of their ways. Indeed, it is a remarkable
fact that for a people who have lived so long in the world as a great nation,
the Chinese people should to this day be so primitive in many of their ways. It
is this fact which has made superficial foreign students of China think that the
Chinese have made no progress in their civilisation and that the Chinese
civilisation is a stagnant one. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that, as far
as pure intellectual life goes, the Chinese are, to a certain extent, a people
of arrested development. The Chinese, as you all know, have made little or no
progress not only in the physical, but also in the pure abstract sciences such
as mathematics, logic and metaphysics. Indeed the very words "science" and
"logic" in the European languages have no exact equivalent in the Chinese
language. The Chinese, like children who live a life of the heart, have no taste
for the abstract sciences, because in these the heart and feelings are not
engaged. In fact, for everything which does not engage the heart and feelings,
such as tables of statistics, the Chinese have a dislike amounting to aversion.
But if tables of statistics and the pure abstract sciences fill the Chinese with
aversion, the physical sciences as they are now pursued in Europe, which require
you to cut up and mutilate the body of a living animal in order to verify a
scientific theory, would inspire the Chinese with repugnance and horror.
The Chinese, I say, as far as pure intellectual life goes, are to a certain
extent, a people of arrested development. The Chinese to this day live the life
of a child, a life of the heart. In this respect, the Chinese people, old as
they are as a nation, are to the present day, a nation of children. But then it
is important you should remember that this nation of children, who live a life
of the heart, who are so primitive in many of their ways, have yet a power of
mind and rationality which you do not find in a primitive people, a power of
mind and rationality which has enabled them to deal with the complex and
difficult problems of social life, government and civilisation with a success
which, I will venture to say here, the ancient and modern nations of Europe have
not been able to attain_a success so signal that they have been able practically
and actually to keep in peace and order a greater portion of the population of
the Continent of Asia under a great Empire.
In fact, what I want to say here, is that the wonderful peculiarity of the
Chinese people is not that they live a life of the heart. All primitive people
also live a life of the heart. The Christian people of medieval Europe, as we
know, also lived a life of the heart. Matthew Arnold says:_"The poetry of
medieval Christainity lived by the heart and imagination." But the wonderful
peculiarity of the Chinese people, I want to say here, is that, while living a
life of the heart, the life of a child, they yet have a power of mind and
rationality
which you do not find in the Christian people of medieval Europe or in any
other primitive people. In other words, the wonderful peculiarity of the Chinese
is that for a people, who have lived so long as a grown-up nation, as a nation
of adult reason, they are yet able to this day to live the life of a child_a
life of the heart.
Instead, therefore, of saying that the Chinese are a people of arrested
development, one ought rather to say that the Chinese are a people who never
grow old. In short the wonderful peculiarity of the Chinese people as a race, is
that they possess the secret of perpetual youth.
Now we can answer the question which we asked in the beginning:_What is the
real Chinaman? The real Chinaman, we see now, is a man who lives the life of a
man of adult reason with the heart of a child. In short the real Chinaman is a
person with the head of a grown-up man and the heart of a child. The Chinese
spirit, therefore, is a spirit of perpetual youth, the spirit of national
immortality. Now what is the secret of this national immortality in the Chinese
people? You will remember that in the beginning of this discussion I said that
what gives to the Chinese type of humanity_to the real Chinaman_his
inexpressible gentleness is the possession of what I called sympathetic or true
human intelligence. This true human intelligence, I said, is the product of a
combination of two things, sympathy and intelligence. It is a working together
in harmony of the heart and head. In short it is a happy union of soul with
intellect. Now if the spirit of the Chinese people is a spirit of perpetual
youth, the spirit of national immortality, the secret of this immortality is
this happy union of soul with intellect.
You will now ask me where and how did the Chinese people get this secret of
national immortality_this happy union of soul with intellect, which has enabled
them as a race and nation to live a life of perpetual youth? The answer, of
course, is that they got it from their civilisation. Now you will not expect me
to give you a lecture on Chinese civilisation within the time at my disposal.
But I will try to tell you something of the Chinese civilisation which has a
bearing on our present subject of discussion.
Let me first of all tell you that there is, it seems to me, one great
fundamental difference between the Chinese civilisation and the civilisation of
modern Europ. Here let me quote an admirable saying of a famous living art
critic, Mr. Bernard Berenson. Comparing European with Oriental art, Mr. Berenson
says:_"Our European art has the fatal tendency to become science and we hardly
possess a masterpiece which does not bear the marks of having heen a battlefield
for divided interests. " Now what I want to say of the European civilisation is
that it is, as Mr. Berenson says of European art, a battlefield for divided
interests; a continuous warfare for the divided interests of science and art on
the one hand, and of religion and philosophy on the other; in fact a terrible
battlefield where the head and the heart_the soul and the intellect_come into
constant conflict. In the Chinese civilisation, at least for the last , years,
there is no such conflict. That, I say, is the one great fundamental difference
between the Chinese civilisation and that of modern Europe.
In other words, what I want to say, is that in modern Europe, the people have
a religion which satisfies their heart, but not their head, and a philosophy
which satisfies their head but not their heart. Now let us look at China. Some
people say that the Chinese have no religion. It is certainly true that in China
even the mass of the people do not take seriously to religion. I mean religion
in the European sense of the word. The temples, rites and ceremonies of Taoism
and Buddhism in China are more objects of recreation than of edification; they
touch the aesthetic sense, so to speak, of the Chinese people rather than their
moral or religious sense; in fact, they appeal more to their imagination than to
their heart or soul. But instead of saying that the Chinese have no religion, it
is perhaps more correct to say that the Chinese do not want_do not feel the need
of religion.
Now what is the explanation of this extraordinary fact that the Chinese
people, even the mass of the population in China, do not feel the need of
religion? It is thus given by an Englishman. Sir Robert K. Douglas, Professor of
Chinese in the London University, in his study of Confucianism, says:_"Upwards
of forty generations of Chinamen have been absolutely subjected to the dicta of
one man. Being a Chinaman of Chinamen the teachings of Confucius were specially
suited to the nature of those he taught. The Mongolian mind being eminently
phlegmatic and. unspeculative, naturally rebels against the idea of
investigating matters beyond its experiences. With the idea of a future life
still unawakened, a plain, matter-of-fact system of morality, such as that
enunciated by Confucius, was sufficient for all the wants of the Chinese. "
That l_amed English professor is right, when he says that the Chinese people
do not feel the need of religion, because they have the teachings of Confucius,
but he is altogether wrong, when he asserts that the Chinese people do not feel
the need of religion because the Mongolian mind is phlegmatic and unspeculative.
In the first place religion is not a matter of speculation. Religion is a matter
of feeling, of emotion; it is something which has to do with the human soul. The
wild, savage man of Africa even, as soon as he emerges from a mere animal life
and what is called the soul in him, is awakened, _ feels the need of religion.
Therefore although the Mongolian mind may be phlegmatic and unspeculative, the
Mongolian Chinaman, who, I think it must be admitted, is a higher type of man
than the wild man of Africa, also has a soul, and, having a soul, must feel the
need of religion unless he has something which can take for him the place of
religion.
The truth of the matter is, _the reason why the Chinese people do not feel
the need of religion is because they have in Confucianism a system of philosophy
and ethics, a synthesis of human society and civilisation which can take the
place of religion. People say that Confucianism is not a religion. It is
perfectly true that Confucianism is not a religion in the ordinary European
sense of the word. But then I say the greatness of Confucianism lies even in
this, that it is not a religion. In fact, the greatness of Confucianism is that,
without being a religion, it can take the place of religion; it can make men do
without religion.
Now in order to understand how Confucianism can take the place of religion we
must try and find out the reason why mankind, why men feel the need of religion.
Mankind, it seems to me, feel the need of religion for the same reason that they
feel the need of science, of art and of philosophy. The reason is because man is
a being who has a soul. Now let us take science, I mean physical science. What
is the reason which makes men take up the study of science? Most people now
think that men do so, because they want to have railways and aeroplanes. But the
motive which impels the true men of science to pursue its study is not because
they want to have railways and aeroplanes. Men like the present progressive
Chinamen, who take up the study of science, because they want railways and
aeroplanes, will never get science. The true men of science in Europe in the
past who have worked for the advancement of science and brought about the
possibility of building railways and aeroplanes, did not think at all of
railways and aeroplanes. What impelled those true men of science in Europe and
what made them succeed in their work for the advancement of science, was because
they felt in their souls the need of understanding the awful mystery of the
wonderful universe in which we live. Thus mankind, I say, feel the need of
religion for the same reason that they feel the need of science, art and
philosophy; and the reason is because man is a being who has a soul, and because
the soul in him, which looks into the past and future as well as the present_
not like animals which live only in the present_feels the need of understanding
the mystery of this universe in which they live. Until men understand something
of the nature, law, purpose and aim of the things which they see in the
universe, they are like children in a dark room who feel the danger, insecurity
and uncertainty of everything. In fact, as an English poet says, the burden of
the mystery of the universe weighs upon them. Therefore mankind want science,
art and philosophy for the same reason that they want religion, to lighten for
them "the burden of the mystery, ....
The heavy and the weary weight of All this unintelligible world. "
Art and poetry enable the artist and poet to see beauty and order in the
universe and that lightens for them the burden of this mystery. Therefore poets
like Goethe, who says: "He who has art, has religion, " do not feel the need of
religion. Philosophy also enables the philosophers to see method and order in
the universe, and that lightens for them the burden of this mystery. Therefore
philosophers, like Spinoza, "for whom, " it has been said, "the crown of the
intellectual life is a transport, as for the saint the crown of the religious
life is a transport," do not feel the need of religion. Lastly, science also
enables the scientific men to see law and order in the universe, and that
lightens for them the burden of this mystery. Therefore scientific men like
Darwin and Professor Haeckel do not feel the need of religion.
But for the mass of mankind who are not poets, artists, philosophers or men
of science; for the mass of mankind whose lives are full of hardships and who
are exposed every moment to the shock of accident from the threatening forces of
Nature and the cruel merciless passions of their fellow-men, what is it that can
lighten for them the
"burden of the mystery of all this unintelligible world?" It is religion. But
how does religion lighten for the mass of mankind the burden of this mystery?
Religion, I say, lightens this burden by giving the mass of mankind a sense of
security and a sense of permanence. In presence of the threatening forces of
Nature and the cruel merciless passions of their fellowmen and the mystery and
terror which these inspire, religion gives to the mass of mankind a refuge_a
refuge in which they can find a sense of security ; and that refuge is a belief
in some supernatural Being or beings who have absolute power and control over
those forces which threaten them. Again, in presence of the constant change,
vicissitude and transition of things in their own lives_birth, childhood, youth,
old age and death, and the mystery and uncertainty which these inspire, religion
gives to the mass of mankind also a refuge_a refuge in which they can find a
sense of permanence; and that refuge is the belief in a future life. In this
way, I say, religion lightens for the mass of mankind who are not poets,
artists, philosophers or scientific men, the burden of the mystery of all this
unintelligible world, by giving them a sense of security and a sense of
permanence in their existence. Christ said: " Peace I give unto you, peace which
the world cannot give and which the world cannot take away from you." That is
what I mean when I say that religion gives to the mass of mankind a sense of
security and a sense of permanence. Therefore, unless you can find something
which can give to the mass of mankind the same peace, the same sense of security
and of permanence which religion affords them, the mass of mankind will always
feel the need of religion.
But I said Confucianism, without being a religion can take the place of
religion. Therefore, there must be something in Confucianism which can give to
the mass of mankind the same sense of security and permanence which religion
affords them. Let us now find out what this something is in Confucianism which
can give the samesense of security and sense of permanence that religion gives.
I have often been asked to say what Confucius has done for the Chinese
nation. Now I can tell you of many things which I think Confucius has
accomplished for the Chinese people. But, as to-day I have not the time, I will
only here try to tell you of one principal and most important thing which
Confucius has done for the Chinese nation_the one thing he did in his life by
which, Confucius himself said, men in after ages would know him, would know what
he had done for them. When I have explained to you this one principal thing, you
will then understand what that something is in Confucian-ism which can give to
the mass of mankind the same sense of security and sense of permanence which
religion affords them. In order to explain this, I must ask you to allow me to
go a little more into detail about Confucius and what he did.
Confucius, as some of you may know, lived in what is called a period of
expansion in the history of China_a period in which the feudal age had come to
an end; in which the feudal, the semi-patriarchal social order and form of
government had to be expanded and reconstructed. This great change necessarily
brought with it not only confusion in the affairs of the world, but also
confusion in men' s minds. I have said that in the Chinese civilisation of the
last ,years there is no conflict between the heart and the head. But I must now
tell you that in the period of expansion in which Confucius lived there was also
in China, as now in Europe, a fearful conflict between the heart and the head.
The Chinese people in Confucius' s time found themselves with an immense system
of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, laws_in fact, an
immense system of society and civilisation which had come down to them from
their venerated ancestors. In this system their life had to be carried forward;
yet they began to feel_they had a sense that this system was not of their
creation, that it by no means corresponded with the wants of their actual life;
that, for them, it was customary, not rational. Now the awakening of this sense
in the Chinese people ,years ago was the awakening of what in Europe to-day is
called the modern spirit_the spirit of liberalism, the spirit of enquiry, to
find out the why and the wherefore of things. This modern spirit in China then,
seeing the want of correspondence of the old order of society and civilisation
with the wants of their actual life, set itself not only to reconstruct a new
order of society and civilisation, but also to find a basis for this new order
of society and civilisation. But all the attempts to find a new basis for
society and civilisation in China then failed. Some, while they satisfied the
head_the intellect of the Chinese people, did not satisfy their heart; others,
while they satisfied their heart, did not satisfy their head. Hence arose, as I
said, this conflict between the heart and the head in China ,years'ago, as we
see it now in Europe. This conflict of the heart and head in the new order of
society and civilisation which men tried to reconstruct made the Chinese people
feel dissatisfied with all civilisation, and in the agony and despair which this
dissatisfaction produced, the Chinese people wanted to pull down and destroy all
civilisation. Men, like Laotzu, then in China as men like Tolstoy in Europe
to-day, seeing the misery and suffering resulting from the conflict between the
heart and the head, thought they saw something radically wrong in the very
nature and constitution of society and civilisation. Laotzu and Chuang-tzu, the
most brilliant of Laotzu' s disciples, told the Chinese people to throw away all
civilisation. Laotzu said to the people of China: "Leave all that you have and
follow me; follow me to the mountains, to the hermit's cell in the mountains,
there to live a true life_a life of the heart, a life of immortality."
But Confucius, who also saw the suffering and misery of the then state of
society and civilisation, thought he recognised the evil was not in the nature
and constitution of society and civilisation, but in the wrong track which
society and civilisation had taken, in the wrong basis which men had taken for
the foundation of society and civilisation. Confucius told the Chinese people
not to throw away their civilisation. Confucius told them that in a true society
and true civilisation_in a society and civilisation with a true basis men also
could live a true life, a life of the heart. In fact, Confucius tried hard all
his life to put society and civilisation on the right track; to give it a true
basis, and thus prevent the destruction of civilisation. But in the last days of
his life, when Confucius saw that he could not prevent the destruction of the
Chinese civilisation_what did he do? Well, as an architect who sees his house on
fire, burning and falling over his head, and is convinced that he cannot
possibly save the building, knows that the only thing for him to do is- to save
the drawings and plans of the building so that it may afterwards be built again;
so Confucius, seeing the inevitable destruction of the building of the Chinese
civilisation which he conid not prevent, thought he would save the drawings and
plans, and he accordingly saved the drawings and plans of the Chinese
civilisation, which are now preserved in the Old Testament of the Chinese
Bible_the five Canonical Books known as the Wu Ching, five Canons. That, I say,
was a great service which Confucius has done for the Chinese nation_he saved the
drawings and plans of their civilisation for them.
Confucius, I say, when he saved the drawings and plans of the Chinese
civilisation, did a great service for the Chinese nation. But that is not the
principal, the greatest service which Confucius has done for the Chinese nation.
The greatest service he did was that, in saving the drawings and plans of their
civilisation, he made a new synthesis, a new interpretation of the plans of that
civilisation, and in that new synthesis he gave the Chinese people the true idea
of a State_a true, rational, permanent, absolute basis of a State.
But then Plato and Aristotle in ancient times, and Rousseau and
Herbert Spencer in modern times also made a synthesis of civilisation, and
tried to give a true idea of a State. Now what is the difference between the
philosophy, the synthesis of civilisation made by the great men of Europe I have
mentioned, and the synthesis of civilisation_the system of philosophy and
morality now known as Confu-cianism? The difference, it seems to me, is this.
The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and of Herbert Spencer has not become a
religion or the equivalent of a religion, the accepted faith of the masses of a
people or nation, whereas Confucianism has become a religion or the equivalent
of a religion to even the mass of the population in China. When I say religion
here, I mean religion, not in the narrow European sense of the word, but in the
broad universal sense. Goethe says:_" Nur saemtliche Menschen erkennen die
Natur; nur saemtliche Menschen leben das Menschliche * . Only the mass of
mankind know what is real life; only the mass of mankind live a true human
life." Now when we speak of religion in its broad universal sense, we mean
generally a system of teachings with rules of conduct which, as Goethe says, is
accepted as true and binding by the mass of mankind, or at least, by the mass of
the population in a people or nation. In this broad and universal sense of the
word Christianity and Buddhism are religions. In this broad and universal sense,
Confucianism, as you know, has become a religion, as its teachings have been
acknowledged to be true and its rules of couduct to be binding by the whole
Chinese race and nation, whereas the philosophy of Plato, of Aristotle and of
Herbert Spencer has not become a religion even in this broad universal sense.
That, I say, is the difference between Confucianism and the philosophy of Plato
and Aristotle and of Herbert Spencel_the one has remained a philosophy for the
learned, whereas the other has become a religion or the equivalent of a religion
for the mass of the whole Chinese nation as well as for the learned of China.
In this broad universal sense of the word, I say Confucianism is a religion
just as Christianity or Buddhism is a religion. But you will remember I said
that Confucianism is not a religion in the European sense of the word. What is
then the difference between Confucianism and a religion in the European sense of
the word? There is, of course, the difference that the one has a supernatural
origin and element in it, whereas the other has not. But besides this difference
of supernatural and non-supernatural, there is also another difference between
Confucianism and a religion in the European sense of the word such as
Christianity and Buddhism, and it is this. A religion in the European sense of
the word teaches a man to be a good man . But Confucianism does more than this;
Confucianism teaches a man to be a good citizen. The Christian Catechism
asks:_"What is the chief end of man'?" But the Confucian Catechism asks:_"What
is the chief end of a citizen ?" of man, not in his individual life, but man in
his relation with his fellowmen and in his relation to the State? The Christian
answers the words of his Catechism by saying:" The chief end of man is to
glorify God. " The Confucianist answers the words of his Catechism by saying:
"The chief end of man is to live as a dutiful son and a good citizen. " Tzii Yu,
a disciple of Confucius, is quoted in the Sayings and Discourses of Confucius,
saying: "A wise man devotes his attention to the foundation of life_the chief
end of man. When the foundation is laid, wisdom, religion will come. Now to live
as a dutiful son and good citizen, is not that the foundation_the chief end of
man as a moral being?" In short, a religion in the European sense of the word
makes it its object to transform man into a perfect ideal man by himself, into a
saint, a Buddha, an angel, whereas Confucianism limits itself to make man into a
good citizen_ to live as a dutiful son and a good citizen. In other words, a
religion
in the European sense of the word says:_"If you want to have religion, you
must be a saint, a Buddha, an angel;" whereas Confucian-ism says:_"If you live
as a dutiful son and a good citizen, you have religion."
In fact, the real difference between Confucianism and religion in the
European sense of the word, such as Christianity or Buddhism, is that the one is
a personal religion, or what may be called a Church religion, whereas the other
is a social religion, or what may be called a State religion. The greatest
service, I say, which Confucius has done for the Chinese nation, is that he gave
them a true idea of a State. Now in giving this true idea of a State, Confucius
made that idea a religion. In Europe politics is a science, but in China, since,
Confucius' time, politics is a religion. In short, the greatest service which
Confucius has done for the Chinese nation, I say, is that he gave them a Social
or State religion. Confucius taught this State religion in a book which he wrote
in the very last days of his life, a book to which he gave the name of Ch'un
c/i'im(^^, Spring and Autumn. Confucius gave the name of Spring and Autumn to
this book because the object of the book is to give the real moral causes which
govern the rise and fall_the Spring and Autumn of nations. This book might also
be called the Latter Day Annals, like the Latter Day Pamphlets of Carlyle. In
this book Confucius gave a resume of the history of a false and decadent state
of society and civilisation in which he traced all the suffering and misery of
that false and decadent state of society and civilisation to its real cause_to
the fact that men had not a true idea of a State; no right conception of the
true nature of the duty which they owe to the State, to the head of the State,
their ruler and Sovereign. In a way Confucius in this book taught the divine
right of kings. Now I know all of you, or at least most of you, do not now
believe in the divine right of kings. I will not argue the point with you here.
I will only ask you to suspend your judgment until you have heard what I have
further to say. In the meantime I will just ask your permission to quote to you
here a saying of Carlyle. Carlyle says: "The right of a king to govern us is
either a divine right or a diabolic wrong. " Now I want you, on this subject of
the divine right of kings, to remember and ponder over this saying of Carlyle.
In this book Confucius taught that, as in all the ordinary relations and
dealings between men in human society, there is, besides the base motives of
interest and of fear, a higher and nobler motive to influence them in their
conduct, a higher and nobler motive which rises above all considerations of
interest and fear, the motive called Duty; so in this important relation of all
in human society, the relation between the people of a State or nation and the
Head of that State or nation, there is also this higher and nobler motive of
Duty which should influence and inspire them in their conduct. Bnt what is the
rational basis of this duty which the people in a State or nation owe to the
head of the State or nation? Now in the feudal age before Confucius' time, with
its semi-patriarchal order of Society and form of Government, when the State was
more or less a family, the poeple did not feel so much the need of having a
clear and firm basis for the duty which they owe to the Head of the State,
because, as they were all members of one clan or family, the tie of kinship or
natural affection already, in a way, bound them to the Head of the State, who
was also the senior member of their clan or family. But in Confucius' time the
feudal age, as I said, had come to an end; when the State had outgrown the
family, when the citizens of a State were no longer composed of the members of a
clan or family. It was, therefore, then necessary to find a new, clear, rational
and firm basis for the duty which the people in a State or nation owe to the
Head of the State_ their ruler and sovereign. Now what new basis did Confucius
find for this duty? Confucius found the new basis for this duty in the word
Honour.
When I was in Japan last year the ex-Minister of Education, Baron Kikuchi,
asked me to translate four Chinese characters taken from the book in which, as I
said, Confucius taught this State religion of his. The four characters were Ming
fen to. yi (^'^_^fo^C) . I translated them as the Great Principle of Honour and
Duty. It is for this reason that the Chinese make a special distinction between
Con-fucianism and all other religions by calling the system of teaching taught
by Confucius not a chiao (^_the general term in Chinese for religion with which
they designate other religions, such as Buddhism, Mohammedanism and
Christianity_but the ming chiao (^ ^C)_the religion of Honour. Again the term
chum tzu chih too (^ ^.$lM) in the teachings of Confucius, translated by Dr.
Legge as "the way of the superior man, " for which the nearest equivalent in the
European languages is moral law_means literally, the way_the Law of the
Gentleman. In fact, the whole system of philosophy and morality taught by
Confucius may be summed up in one word: the Law of the Gentleman. Now Confucius
codified this law of the gentleman and made it a Religion, _a State religion.
The first Article of Faith in this State Religion is Ming fen ta yi_the
Principle of Honour and Duty_which may thus be called: A Code of Honour.
In this State religion Confucius taught that the only true, rational,
permanent and absolute basis, not only of a State, but of all Society and
civilisation, is this law of the gentleman, the sense of honour in man. Now you,
all of you, even those who believe that there is no morality in politics_all of
you, I think, know and will admit the importance of this sense of honour in men
in human society. But I am not quite sure that all of you are aware of the
absolute necessity of this sense of honour in men for the carrying on of every
form of human society; in fact, as the proverb which says: "There must be honour
even among thieves, " show_even for the carrying on of a society of thieves.
Without the sense of honour in men, all society and civilisation would on the
instant break down and become impossible. Will you allow me to show you how this
is so? Let us take, for example, such a trivial matter as gambling in social
life. Now unless men when they sit down to gamble all recognise and feel
themselves bound by the sense of honour to pay when a certain colour of cards or
dice turns up, gambling would on the instant become impossible. The merchants
again_unless merchants recognise and feel themselves bound by the sense of
honour to fulfil their contracts, all trading would become impossible. But you
will say that the merchant who repudiates his contract can be taken to the
law-court. True, but if there were no law-courts, what then? Besides, the
law-court_how can the law-court make the defaulting merchant fulfil his
contract? By force. In fact, without the sense of honour in men, society can
only be held together for a time by force. But then I think I can show you that
force alone cannot hold society permanently together. The policeman who compels
the merchant to fulfil his contract, uses force. But the lawyer, magistrate or
president of a republic_how does he make the policeman do his duty? You know he
cannot do it by force; but then by what? Either by the sense of honour in the
policemen or by fraud.
In modem times all over the world to-day_and I am sorry to say now also in
China_the lawyer, politician, magistrate and president of a republic make the
policeman do his duty by fraud. In modem times the lawyer, politician,
magistrate and president of a republic tell the policeman that he must do his
duty, because it is for the good of society and for the good of his country; and
that the good of society means that he, the policeman, can get his pay
regularly, without which he and his family would die of starvation. The lawyer,
politician or president of a republic who tells the policeman this, I say, zises
fraud. I say it is fraud, because the good of the country, which for the
policeman means fifteen shillings a week, which barely keeps him and his family
from starvation, means for the lawyer, politician, magistrate and president of a
republic ten to twenty thousand pounds a year, with a fine house, electric
light, motor cars and all the comforts and luxuries which the life blood labour
of ten thousands of men has to supply him. I say it is fraud because without the
recognition of a sense of honour_the sense of honour which makes the gambler pay
the last penny in his pocket to the player who wins from him, without this sense
of honour, all transfer and possession of property which makes the inequality of
the rich and poor in society, as well as the transfer of money on a gambling
table, has no justification whatever and no binding force. Thus the lawyer,
politician, magistrate or president of a republic, although they talk of the
good of society and the good of the country, really depend upon the policeman' s
unconscious sense of honour which not only makes him do his duty, but also makes
him respect the right of property and be satisfied with fifteen shillings a
week, while the lawyer, politician and president of a republic receive an income
of twenty thousand pounds a year. I, therefore, say it is fraud because while
they thus demand the sense of honour from the policeman; they, the lawyer,
politician, magistrate and president of a republic in modem society believe,
openly say and act on the principle that there is no morality, no sense of
honour in politics.
You will remember what Carlyle, I told you, said_that the right of a king to
govern us is either a divine right or a diabolic wrong. Now this fraud of the
modern lawyer, politician, magistrate and president of a republic is what
Carlyle calls a diabolic wrong. It is this fraud, this Jesuitism of the public
men in modem society, who say and act on the principle that there is no
morality, no sense of honour in politics and yet plausibly talk of the good of
society and the good of the country; it is this Jesuitism which, as Carlyle
says, gives rise to "the widespread suffering, mutiny, delirium, the hot rage of
sansculottic insurrections, the cold rage of resuscitated tyrannies, brutal
degradation of the millions, the pampered frivolity of the units" which we see
in modern society to-day. In short, it is this combination of fraud and force,
Jesuitism and Militarism, lawyer and policeman, which has produced Anarchists
and Anarchism in modem society, this combination of force and fraud outraging
the moral sense in man and producing madness which makes the Anarchist throw
bomb and dynamite against the lawyer, politician, magistrate and president of a
republic.
In fact, a society without the sense of honour in men, and without morality
in its politics, cannot, I say, be held together, or at any rate, cannot last.
For in such a society the policeman, upon whom the lawyer, politician,
magistrate and president of a republic depend to carry out their fraud, will
thus argue with himself. He is told that he must do his duty for the good of
society. But he, the poor policeman, is also a part of that society_to himself
and his family, at least, the most important part of that society. Now if by
some other way than by being a policeman, perhaps by being an anti-policeman, he
can get better pay to improve the condition of himself and his family, that also
means the good of society. In that way the policeman must sooner or later come
to the conclusion that, as there is .no such thing as a sense of honour and
morality in politics, there is then no earthly reason why, if he can get better
pay, which means also the good of society_no reason why, instead of being a
policeman, he should not become a revolutionist or anarchist- In a society when
the policeman once comes to the conclusion that there is no reason why, if he
can get better pay, he should not become a revolutionist or anarchist_that
society is doomed. Mencius said:_"When Confucius completed his Spring and Autumn
Annals"_the book in which he taught the State religion of his _and in which he
showed that the society of his time_in which there was then, as in the world
to-day, no sense of honour in public men and no morality in politics_was doomed;
when Confucius wrote that book, "the Jesuits and anarchists (lit. bandits) of
his time, became afraid."
But to return from the digression, I say, a society without the sense of
honour cannot be held together, cannot last. For if, as we have seen, even in
the relation between men connected with matters of little or no vital importance
such as gambling and trading in human society, the recognition of the sense of
honour is so important and necessary, how much more so it must be in the
relations between men in human society, which establish the two most essential
institutions in that society, the Family and the State. Now, as you all know,
the rise of civil society in the history of all nations begins always with the
institution of marriage. The Church religion in Europe makes marriage a
sacrament, i.e.,something sacred and inviolable. The sanction for the sacrament
of marriage in Europe is given by the Church and the authority for the sanction
is God. But that is only an outward, formal, or so to speak, legal sanction. The
true, inner, the really binding sanction for the inviolability of marriage_as we
see it in countries where there is no church religion, is the sense of honour,
the law of the gentleman in the man and woman. Confucius says, "The recognition
of the law of the gentleman begins with the recognition of the relation between
husband and wife. "** In other words, the recognition of the sense of honour_the
law of the gentleman_in all countries where there is civil society, establishes
the institution of marriage. The institution of marriage establishes the Family.
I said that the State religion which Confucius taught is a Code of Honour,
and I told you that Confucius made this Code out of the law of the gentleman.
But now I must tell you that long before Confucius' time there existed already
in China an undefined and unwritten code of the law of the gentleman. This
undefined and unwritten code of the law of the gentleman in China before
Confucius' time was known as li (U) the law of propriety, good taste or good
manners. Later on in history before Confucius' time a great statesman arose in
China_the man known as the great Law-giver of China, generally spoken of as the
Duke of Chou (^^_) (B.C. )_who first defined, fixed, and made a written code of
the law of the gentleman, known then in China as li, the law of propriety, good
taste or good manners. This first written code of the gentleman in China, made
by the Duke of Chou, became known as Chou li_the laws of good manners of the
Duke of Chou. This Code of the laws of good manners of the Duke of Chou may be
consideral as the pre-Confucian religion in China, or, as the Mosaic law of the
Jewish nation before Christianity is called, the Religion of the Old
Dispensation of the Chinese people. It was this religion of the old
dispensation_the first written code of the law of the gentleman called the Laws
of good manners of the Duke of Chou_which first gave the sanction for the
sacrament and inviolability of marriage in China. The Chinese to this day
therefore speak of the sacrament of marriage as Chou Kung Chih Li (J^^-^l^L)_the
law of good manners of the Duke of Chou. By the institution of the sacrament of
marriage, the pre-Confucian or Religion of the Old Dispensation in China
established the Family. It secured once for all the stability and permanence of
the family in China. This pre-Confucian or Religion of the Old Dispensation
known as the laws of good manners of the Duke of Chou in China might thus be
called a Family religion as distinguished from the State religion which
Confucius afterwards taught.
Now Confucius in the State religion which he taught, gave a new Dispensation,
so to speak, to what I have called the Family religion which existed before his
time. In other words, Confucius gave a new, wider and more comprehensive
application to the law of the gentleman in the State religion which he taught;
and as the Family religion, or Religion of the Old Dispensation in China before
his time instituted the sacrament of marriage, Confucius, in giving this new,
wider, and more comprehensive application to the law of the gentleman in the
State religion which he taught, instituted a new sacrament. This new sacrament
which Confucius instituted, instead of calling it li_the Law of good manners, he
called it ming fen to. yi, which I have translated as the Great Principle of
Honour and Duty or Code of Honour. By the institution of this ming fen to. yi or
Code of Honour Confucius gave the Chinese people, instead of a Family religion,
which they had before_a State religion.
Confucius, in the State religion which he now gave, taught that, as under the
old dispensation of what I have called the Family religion before his time, the
wife and husband in a family are bound by the sacrament of marriage, called Chou
Kung Chih Li, the Law of good manners of the Duke of Chou_to hold their contract
of marriage inviolable and to absolutely abide by it, so under the new
dispensation of the State religion which he now gave, the people and their
sovereign in every Slate, the Chinese people and their Emperor in China, are
bound by this new sacrament called ming fen to. yi_ the Great Principle of
Honour and Duty or Code of Honour established by this State religion_to hold the
contract of allegiance between them as something sacred and inviolable and
absolutely to abide by it. In short, this new sacrament called ming fen to. yi,
or Code of Honour which Confucius instituted, is a Sacrament of the Contract of
Allegiance, as the old sacrament called Chou Kung Chih Li, the Law of Good
Manners of the Duke of Chou which was instituted before his time, is a sacrament
of marriage. In this way Confucius, as I said, gave a new, wider, and more
comprehensive application to the law of the gentleman, and thus gave a new
dispensation to what I have called the Family religion in China before his time,
and made it a State religion.
In other words, this State religion of Confucius makes a sacrament of the
contract of allegiance as the Family Religion in China before his time, makes a
sacrament of the contract of marriage. As by the sacrament of marriage
established by the Family Religion the wife is bound to be absolutely loyal to
her husband, so by ihis sacrament of the contract of allegiance called ming fen
ta yi, or Code of Honour established by the State religion taught by Confucius
in China, the people of China are bound to be absolutely loyal to the Emperor.
This sacrament of the contract of allegiance in the State religion taught by
Confucius in China might thus be called the Sacrament or Religion of Loyalty.
You will remember what I said to you that Confucius in a way taught the Divine
right of kings. But instead of saying that Confucius taught the Divine right of
kings I should properly have said that Confucius taught the Divine duty of
Loyalty. This Divine or absolute duty of loyalty to the Emperor in China which
Confucius taught derives its sanction, not as the theory of the Divine right of
kings in Europe derives its sanction from the authority of a supernatural Being
called God or from some abstruse philosophy, but from the law of the
gentleman_the sense of honour in man, the same sense of honour which in all
countries makes the wife loyal to her husband. In fact, the absolute duty of
loyalty of the Chinese people to the Emperor which Confucius taught, derives its
sanction from the same simple sense of honour which makes the merchant keep his
word and fulfil his contract, and the gambler play the game and pay his gambling
debt.
Now, as what I have called the Family religion, the religion, the religion of
the old dispensation in China and the Church religion in all countries, by the
institution of the sacrament and inviolability of marriage establishes the
Family, so what I have called the State religion in China which Confucius
taught, by the institution of this new sacrament of the contract of allegiance,
establishes the State. If you will consider what a great service the man who
first instituted the sacrament and established the inviolability of marriage in
the world has done for humanity and the cause of civilisation, you will then, I
think, understand what a great work this is which Confucius did when he
instituted this new sacrament and established the inviolability of the contract
of allegiance. The institution of the sacrament of marriage secures the
stability and permanence of the Family, without which the human race would
become extinct. The institution of this sacrament of the contract of allegiance
secures the stability and permanence of the State, without which human society
and civilisation would all be destroyed and mankind would return to the state of
savages or animals. I therefore said to you that the greatest thing which
Confucius has done for the Chinese people is that he gave them the true idea of
a State_a true, rational, permanent, and absolute basis of a State, and in
giving them that, he made it a religion, _a State religion.
Confucius taught this State religion in a book which, as I told you, he wrote
in the very last days of his life, a book to which he gave the name of Spring
and Autumn. In this book Confucius first instituted the new sacrament of the
contract of allegiance called ming fen ta yi, or the Code of Honour. This
sacrament is therefore often and generally spoken of as Chun Chiu ming fen to.
yi (^i-^.^^^. JO, or simply Chun Chiu ta yi_(^^C^CjiC) i. e., the Great
Principle of Honour and Duty of the Spring and Autumn Annals, or simply the
Great Principle or Code of the Spring and Autumn Annals. This book in which
Confucius taught the Divine duty of loyalty is the Magna Charta of the Chinese
nation. It contains the sacred covenant, the sacred social contract by which
Confucius bound the whole Chinese people and nation to be absolutely loyal to
the Emperor, and this covenant or sacrament, this Code of Honour, is the one and
only true Constitution not only of the State and Government in China, but also
of the Chinese civilisation. Confucius said it is by this book that after ages
would know him_know what he had done for the world.
I am afraid I have exhausted your patience in taking such a very long way to
come to the point of what I want to say. But now we have got to the point where
I last left you. You will remember I said that the reason why the mass of
mankind will always feel the need of religion_I mean religion in the European
sense of the word_is because religion gives them a refuge, one refuge, the
belief in an all powerful Being called God in which they can find a sense of
permanence in their existence. But I said that the system of philosophy and
morality which Confucius taught, known as Confucianism, can take the place of
religion, can make men, even the mass of mankind do without religion. Therefore,
there must be, I said, something in Confucianism which can give to men, to the
mass of mankind, the same sense of security and sense of permanence which
religion gives. Now, I think we have found this something. This something is the
Divine duty of loyalty to the Emperor taught by Confucius in the State religion
which he has given to the Chinese nation.
Now, this absolute Divine duty of loyalty to the Emperor of every man, woman,
and child in the whole Chinese Empire gives, as you can understand, in the minds
of the Chinese population, an absolute, supreme, transcendent, almighty power to
the Emperor; and this belief in the absolute, supreme, transcendent, almighty
power of the Emperor it is which gives to the Chinese people, to the mass of the
population in China, the same sense of security which the belief in God in
religion gives to the mass of mankind in other countries. The belief in the
absolute, supreme, transcendent, almighty power of the Emperor also secures in
the minds of the Chinese population the absolute stability and permanence of the
State. This absolute stability and permanence of the State again secures the
infinite continuance and lastingness of society. This infinite continuance and
lasting-ness of society finally secures in the minds of the Chinese population
the immortality of the race. Thus it is this belief in the immortality of the
race, derived from the belief in the almighty power of the Emperor given to him
by the Divine duty of loyalty, which gives to the Chinese people, the mass of
the population in China, the same sense of permanence in their existence which
the belief in a future life of religion gives to the mass of mankind in other
countries.
Again, as the absolute Divine duty of loyalty taught by Confucius secures the
immortality of the race in the nation, so the cult of ancestor-worship taught in
Confucianism secures the immortality of the race in the family. Indeed, the cult
of ancestorworship in China is not founded much on the belief in a future life
as in the belief of the immortality of the race. A Chinese, when he dies, is not
consoled by the belief that he will live a life hereafter, but by the belief
that his children, grandchildren, great-grand-children, all those dearest to
him, will remember him, think of him, love him, to the end of time, and in that
way, in his imagination, dying, to a Chinese, is like going on a long, long
journey, if not with the hope, at least with a great "perhaps" of meeting again.
Thus this cult of ancestor-worship, together with the Divine duty of loyalty, in
Confucianism gives to the Chinese people the same sense of permanence in their
existence while they live and the same consolation when they die which the
belief in a future life in religion gives to the mass of mankind in other
countries. It is for his reason that the Chinese people attach the same
importance to this cult of ancestor-worship as they do to the principle of the
Divine duty of loyalty to the Emperor. Mencius said: "Of the three great sins
against filial piety the greatest is to have no posterity." Thus the whole
system of teaching of Confucius which I have called the State religion in China
consists really only of two things, loyalty to the Emperor and filial piety to
parents_in Chinese, Chung Hsiao. Intact, the three Articles of Faith, called in
Chinese the san kang, three cardinal duties in Con-fucianism or the State
religion of China, are, in their order of importance_first, absolute duty of
loyalty to the Emperor; second, filial piety and ancestor-worship; third,
inviolability of marriage and absolute submission of the wife to the husband.
The last two of the three Articles were already in what I have called the Family
religion, or religion of the old dispensation in China before Confucius' time;
but the first Article_absolute duty of loyalty to the Emperoi_was first taught
by Confucius and laid down by him in the State religion or religion of the new
dispensation which he gave to the Chinese nation. This first Article of
Faith_absolute duty of loyalty to the Emperoi_ in Confucianism takes the place
and is the equivalent of the First Article of Faith in all religions_the belief
in God. It is because Confucianism has this equivalent for the belief in God of
religion that Confucianism, as I have shown you, can take the place of religion,
and the Chinese people, even the mass of the population in China, do not feel
the need of religion.
But now you will ask me how without a belief in God which religion teaches,
how can one make men, make the mass of mankind, follow and obey the moral rule
which Confucius teaches, the absolute duty of loyalty to the Emperor, as you can
by the authority of God which the belief in God gives, make men follow and obey
moral rules given by religion? Before I answer your question, will you allow me
first to point out to you a great mistake which people make in believing that it
is the sanction given by the authority of God which makes men obey the rules of
moral conduct. I told you that the sanction for the sacrament and inviolability
of marriage in Europe is given by the
Church, and the authority for the sanction, the Church says, is from God. But
I said that was only an outward formal sanction. The real true inner sanction
for the inviolability of marriage as we see it in all countries where there is
no Church religion, is the sense of honour, the law of the gentleman in the man
and woman. Thus the real authority for the obligation to obey rules of moral
conduct is the moral sense, the law of the gentleman, in man. The belief in God
is, therefore, not necessary to make men obey rules of moral conduct.
It is this fact which has made sceptics like Voltaire and Tom Paine in the
last century, and rationalists like Sir Hiram Maxim today, say, that the belief
in God is a fraud or imposture invented by the founders of religion and kept up
by priests. But that is a gross and preposterous libel. All great men, all men
with great intellect, have all always believed in God. Confucius also believed
in God, although he seldom spoke of it. Even Napoleon with his great, practical
intellect believed in God. As the Psalmist says: "Only the fool_the man with a
vulgar and shallow intellect_has said in his heart, ' There is no God. '" But
the belief in God of man of great intellect is different from the belief in God
of the mass of mankind. The belief in God of men of great intellect is that of
Spinoza: a belief in the Divine Order of the Universe. Confucius said: "At fifty
I knew the Ordinance of God" * _i.e., the Divine Order of the Universe. Men of
great intellect have given different names to this Divine Order of the Universe.
The German Fichte calls it the Divine idea of the Universe. In philosophical
language in China it is called Tao_the Way. But whatever name men of great
intellect may give to this Divine Order of the Universe, it is the knowledge of
this Divine Order of the Universe which makes men of great intellect see the
absolute necessity of obeying rules of moral conduct or moral laws which form
part of that Divine
Order of the Universe.
Thus, although the belief in God is not necessary to make men obey the rules
of moral conduct, yet the belief in God is necessary to make men see the
absolute necessity of obeying these rules. It is the knowledge of the absolute
necessity of obeying the rules of moral conduct which enables and makes all men
of great intellect follow and obey those rules. Confucius says: "A man without a
knowledge of the Ordinance of God, i.e., the Divine Order of the Universe, will
not be able to be a gentleman or moral man."* But then, the mass of mankind, who
have not great intellect, cannot follow the reasoning which leads men of great
intellect to the knowledge of the Divine Order of the Universe and cannot
therefore understand the absolute necessity of obeying moral laws. Indeed, as
Matthew Arnold says:
"Moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously followed as
laws are and must be for the sage only. The mass of mankind have neither force
of intellect enough to apprehend them as ideas nor force of character enough to
follow them strictly as laws. " It is for this reason that the philosophy and
morality taught by Plato, Aristotle and Herbert Spencer have a value only for
scholars.
But the value of religion is that it enables men, enables and can make even
the mass of mankind who have not force of intellect nor force of character, to
strictly follow and obey the rules of moral conduct . But then how and by what
means does religion enable and make men do this? People imagine that religion
enables and makes men obey the rules of moral conduct by teaching men the belief
in God. But that, as I have shown you, is a great mistake. The one and sole
authority which makes men really obey moral laws or rules of moral conduct is
the moral sense, the law of the gentleman in them. Confucius said: "A moral law
which is outside of man is not a moral law.
Even Christ in teaching His religion says: "The Kingdom of God is within
you." I say, therefore, the idea which people have that religion makes men obey
the rules of moral conduct by means of teaching them the belief in God is a
mistake. Martin Luther says admirably in his commentary on the Book of Daniel:
"A God is simply that where-on the human heart rests with trust, faith, hope and
love. If the resting is right, then the God, too, is right; if the resting is
wrong, then the God, too, is illusory. " This belief in God taught by religion
is, therefore, only a resting, or, as I call it, a refuge. But then Luther says:
"The resting, i.e. the belief in God, must be true, otherwise the resting, the
belief, is illusory. In other words, the belief in God must be a true knowledge
of God, a real knowledge of the Divine Order of the Universe, which, as we know,
only men of great intellect can attain and which the mass of mankind cannot
attain. Thus you see the belief in God taught by religion, which people imagine
enables the mass of mankind to follow and obey the rules of moral conduct, is
illusory. Men rightly call this belief in God_in the Divine Order of the
Universe taught by religion_a faith, a trust, or, as I called it, a refuge.
Nevertheless, this refuge, the belief in God, taught by religion, although
illusory, an illusion, helps towards enabling men to obey the rules of moral
conduct, for, as I said, the belief in God gives to men, to the mass of mankind,
a sense of security and a sense of permanence in their existence. Goethe says:
"Piety, (From-migkeit) i.e., the belief in God, taught by religion, is not an
end in itself but only a means by which, through the complete and perfect
calmness of mind and temper (Gemuethsruehe) which it gives, to attain the
highest state of culture or human perfection." In other words, the belief in God
taught by religion, by giving men a sense of security and a sense of permanence
in their existence, calms them, gives them the necessary calmness of mind and
temper to feel the law of the gentleman or moral sense in them, which, I say
again, is the one and sole authority to make men really obey the rules of moral
conduct or moral laws.
But if the belief in God taught by religion only helps to make men obey the
rules of moral conduct, what is it then upon which Religion depends principally
to make men, to make the mass of mankind, obey the rules of moral conduct? It is
inspiration. Matthew Arnold truly says: "The noblest souls of whatever creed,
the pagan Empedocles as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the
necessity of inspiration, a living emotion to make moral actions perfect." Now
what is this inspiration or living emotion in Religion, the paramount virtue of
Religion upon which, as I said. Religion principally depends to make men, to
enable and make even the mass of mankind obey the rules of moral conduct or
moral laws?
You will remember I told you that the whole system of the teachings of
Confucius may be summed up in one word; the Law of the Gentleman, the nearest
equivalent for which in the European languages, I said, is moral law. Confucius
calls this law of the gentleman a secret. * Confucius says: "The law of the
gentleman is to be found everywhere, and yet it is a secret. " Nevertheless
Confucius says:
"The simple intelligence of ordinary men and women of the people even can
know something of this secret. The ignoble nature of ordinary men and women of
the people, too, can carry out this law of the gentleman. " For this reason
Goethe, who also knew this secret_the law of the gentleman of Confucius, called
it an "open secret. "Now where and how did mankind come to discover this secret?
Confucuis said, you will remember, I told you that the recognition of the law of
the gentleman began with the recognition of the relation of husband and wife_the
true relation between a man and woman in marriage. Thus the secret, the open
secret of Goethe, the law of the gentleman of Confucius, was first discovered by
a man and woman. But now, a-gain, how did the man and the woman discover this
secret_the law of the gentleman of Confucius?
I told you that the nearest equivalent in the European languages for the law
of the gentleman of Confucius, is moral law. Now what is the difference between
the law of the gentleman of Confucius and moral law_I mean the moral law or law
of morality of the philosopher and moralist as distinguished from religion or
law of morality taught by religious teachers. In order to understand this
difference between the law of the gentleman of Confucius and the moral law of
the philosopher and moralist, let us first find out the difference that there is
between religion and the moral law of the philosopher and moralist. Confucius
says: "The Ordinance of God is what we call the law of our being. To fulfil the
law of our being is what we call the Moral Law. The Moral Law when refined and
put into proper order is what we call Religion. " * Thus, according to
Confucius, the difference between Religion and moral law_the moral law of the
philosopher and moralist_is that Religion is a refined and well ordered moral
law, a deeper or higher standard of moral law.
The moral law of the philosopher tells us we must obey the law of our being
called Reason. But Reason, as it is generally understood, means our reasoning
power, that slow process of mind or intellect which enables us to distinguish
and recognise the definable properties and qualities of the outward forms of _
things. Reason, our reasoning power, therefore, enables us to see in moral
relations only the definable properties and qualities, the mores, the morality,
as it is rightly called, the outward manner and dead form, the body, so to
speak, of right and wrong, or justice. Reason, our reasoning power alone, cannot
make us see the undefinable, living, absolute essence of right and wrong, or
justice, the life or soul, so to speak, of justice. For this reason Laotzu says:
"The moral law that can be expressed in language is not the absolute moral law.
The moral idea that can be defined with words is not the absolute moral idea. "
* The moral law of the moralist again tells us we must obey the law of our
being, called Conscience, i.e., our heart. But then, as the Wise Man in the
Hebrew Bible says, there are many devices in a man's heart. Therefore, when we
take Conscience, our heart, as the law of our being and obey it, we are liable
and apt to obey, not the voice of what I have called the soul of justice, the
indefinable absolute essence of justice, but the many devices in a man' s heart.
In other words Religion tells us in obeying the law of our being we must obey
the true law of our being, not the animal or carnal law of our being called by
St. Paul the law of the mind of the flesh, and very well defined by the famous
disciple of Auguste Comte, Monsieur Littre, as the law of self preservation and
reproduction; but the true law of our being called by St. Paul the law of the
mind of the Spirit, and defined by Confucius as the law of the gentleman. In
short, this true law of our being, which Religion tells us to obey, is what
Christ calls the Kingdom of God within us. Thus we see, as Confucius says.
Religion is a refined, spiritualized, well-ordered moral law, a deeper higher
standard of moral law than the moral law of the philosopher and moralist.
Therefore, Christ said: "Except your righteousness (or morality) exceed the
righteousness (or morality) of the Scribes and Pharisees (ie., philosopher and
moralist) ye shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. "
Now, like Religion, the law of the gentleman of Confucius is'also a refined,
well-ordered moral law_a deeper higher standard of moral law than the moral law
of the philosopher and moralist. The moral law of the philosopher and moralist
tells us we must obey the law of our being called by the philosopher, Reason,
and by the moralist, Conscience. But, like Religion, the law of the gentleman of
Confucius tells us we must obey the true law of our being, not the law of being
of the average man in the street or of the vulgar and impure person, but the law
of being of what Emerson calls "the simplest and purest minds" in the world. In
fact, in order to know what the law of being of the gentleman is, we must first
be a gentleman and have, in the words of Emerson, the simple and pure mind of
the gentleman developed in him. For this reason Confucius says: "It is the man
that can raise the standard of the moral law, and not the moral law that can
raise the standard of the man. " *
Nevertheless Confucius says we can know what the law of the gentleman is, if
we will study and try to acquire the fine feeling or good taste of the
gentleman. The word in Chinese li (U) for good taste in the teaching of
Confucius has been variously translated as ceremony, propriety, and good
manners, but the word means really good taste. Now? this good taste, the fine
feeling and good taste of a gentleman, when applied to moral action, is what, in
European language, is called the sense of honour. In fact, the law of the
gentleman of Confucius is nothing else but the sense of honour. This sense of
honour, called by Confucius the law of the gentleman, is not like the moral law
of the philosopher and moralist, a dry, dead knowledge of the form or formula of
right and wrong, but like the Righteousness of the Bible in Christianity, an
instinctive, living, vivid perception of the indefinable, absolute essence of
right and wrong or justice, the life and soul of justice called Honour.
Now, we can answer the question: How did the man and woman who first
recognised the relation of husband and wife, discover the secret, the secret of
Goethe, the law of the gentleman of Confucius? The man and woman who discovered
this secret, discovered it because they had the fine feeling, the good taste of
the gentleman, called when applied to moral action the sense of honour, which
made them see the undefinable, absolute essence of right and wrong or justice,
the life and soul of justice called Honour. But then what gave, what inspired
the man and woman to have this fine feeling, this good taste or sense of honour
which made them see the soul of justice called Honour? This beautiful sentence
of Joubert will explain it. Joubert says: "Les hommes no sont justes qu' envers
ceux qu' ils aiment. Man cannot be truly just to his neighbour unless he loves
him. Therefore the inspiration which made the man and woman see what Joubert
calls true justice, the soul of justice called Honour, and thus enable them to
discover the secret_the open secret of Goethe, the law of the gentleman of
Coufucius _is Love_the love between the man and the woman which gave birth, so
to speak, to the law of the gentleman; that secret, the possession of which has
enabled mankind not only to build up society and civilisation, but also to
establish religion_to find God. You can now understand Goethe's confession of
faith which he puts into the mouth of Faust, beginning with the words:
Lifts not the Heaven its dome above? Doth not the firm-set Earth beneath us
lie?
Now, I told you that it is not the belief in God taught by religion, which
makes men obey the rules of moral conduct. What really makes men obey the rules
of moral conduct is the law of the gentleman_the Kingdom of Heaven within us_to
which religion appeals. Therefore the law of the gentleman is really the life of
religion, whereas the belief in God together with the rules of moral conduct
which religion teaches, is only the body, so to speak, of religion. But if the
life of religion is the law of the gentleman, the soul of religion, the source
of inspiration in religion, _is Love. This love does not merely mean the love
between a man and a woman from whom mankind only first learn to know it. Love
includes all true human affection, the feelings of affection between parents and
children as well as the emotion of love and kindness, pity, compassion, mercy
towards all creatures; in fact, all true human emotions contained in that
Chinese word Jen('\~H), for which the nearest equivalent in the European
languages is, in the old dialect of Christianity, godliness, because it is the
most godlike quality in man, and in modern dialect, humanity, love of humanity,
or, in one word, love. In short, the soul of religion, the source of inspiration
in religion is this Chinese word Jen, love_or call it by what name you
like_which first came into the world as love between a man and a woman. This,
then, is the inspiration in religion, the paramount virtue in religion, upon
which religion, as I said, depends principally to make men, to enable and make
even the mass of mankind obey the rules of moral conduct or moral laws which
form part of the Divine Order of the universe. Confucius says: "The law of the
gentleman begins with the recognition of husband and wife; but in its utmost
reaches, it reigns and rules supreme over heaven and earth_the whole universe. "
We have now found the inspiration, the living emotion that is in religion.
But this inspiration or living emotion in religion is found not only in
religion_I mean Church religion. This inspiration or living e-motion is known to
everyone who has ever felt an impulse which makes him obey the rules of moral
conduct above all considerations of self-interest or fear. In fact, this
inspiration or living emotion that is in religion is found in every action of
men which is not prompted by the base motive of self-interest or fear, but by
the sense of duty and honour. This inspiration or living emotion in religion, I
say, is found not only in religion. But the value of religion is that the words
of the rules of moral conduct which the founders of all great religions have
left behind them have, what the rules of morality of philosophers and moralists
have not, this inspiration or living emotion which, as Matthew Arnold says,
lights up those rules and makes it easy for men to obey them. But this
inspiration or living emotion in the words of the rules of conduct of religion
again is found not only in religion. All the words of really great men in
literature, especially poets, have also this inspiration or living emotion that
is in religion. The words of Goethe, for instance, which I have just quoted,
have also this inspiration or living emotion. But the words of great men in
literature, unfortunately, cannot reach the mass of mankind because all great
men in literature speak the language of educated men, which the mass of mankind
cannot understand. The founders of all the great religions in the world have
this advantage, that they were mostly uneducated men, and, speaking the simple
language of uneducated men, can make the mass of mankind understand them. The
real value, therefore, of religion, the real value of all the great religions in
the world, is that it can convey the inspiration or living emotion which it
contains even to the mass of mankind. In order to understand how this
inspiration or living emotion came into religion, into all the great religions
of the world, let us find out how these religions came into the world.
Now, the founders of all the great religions in the world, as we know, were
all of them men of exceptionally or even abnormally strong emotional nature.
This abnormally strong emotional nature made them feel intensely the emotion of
love or human affection, which, as I have said, is the source of the inspiration
in religion, the soul of religion. This intense feeling or emotion of love or
human affection enabled them to see what I have called the indefinable, absolute
essence of right and wrong or justice, the soul of justice which they called
righteousness, and this vivid perception of the absolute essence of justice
enabled them to see the unity of the laws of right and wrong or moral laws. As
they were men of exceptionally strong e-motional nature, they had a powerful
imagination, which unconsciously personified this unity of moral laws as an
almighty supernatural Being. To this supernatural almighty Being, the
personified unity of moral laws of their imagination, they gave the name of God,
from whom they also believed that the intense feeling or emotion of love or
human affection, which they felt, came. In this way, then, the inspiration or
living emotion that is in religion came into religion; the inspiration that
lights up the rules of moral conduct of religion and supplies the emotion or
motive power needful for carrying the mass of mankind, along the straight and
narrow way of moral conduct. But now the value of religion is not only that it
has an inspiration or living emotion in its rules of moral conduct which lights
up these rules and makes it easy for men to obey them. The value of religion, of
all the great religions in the world, is that they have an organisation for
awakening, exciting, and kindling the inspiration or living emotion in men
necessary to make them obey the rules of moral conduct. This organisation in all
the great religions of the world is called the Church.
The Church, many people believe, is founded to teach men the belief in God.
But that is a great mistake. It is this great mistake of the Christian Churches
in modern times which has made honest men like the late Mr.J.A. Froude feel
disgusted with the modern Christian Churches. Mr. Froude says: "Many a hundred
sermons have I heard in England on the mysteries of the faith, on the divine
mission of the clergy, on apostolic succession, etc., but never one that I can
recollect on common honesty, on those primitive commandments, 'Thou shalt not
lie' and 'Thou shalt not steal. '" But then, with all deference to Mr. Froude, I
think he is also wrong when he says here that the Church, the Christian Church,
ought to teach morality. The aim of the establishment of the Church no doubt is
to make men moral, to make men obey the rules of moral conduct such as " Thou
shalt not lie" and "Thou shalt not steal." But the function, the true function
of the Church in all the great religions of the world, is not to teach morality,
but to teach religion, which, as I have shown you, is not a dead square rule
such as "Thou shalt not lie" and" Thou shalt not steal," but an inspiration, a
living emotion to make men obey those rules. The true function of the Church,
therefore, is not to teach morality, but to inspire morality, to inspire men to
be moral; in fact, to inspire and fire men with a living emotion which makes
them moral. In other words, the Church in all the great religions of the world
is an organisation, as I said, for awakening and kindling an inspiration or
living emotion in men necessary to make them obey the rules of moral conduct.
But how does the Church awaken and kindle this inspiration in men?
Now, as we all know, the founders of all the great religions of the world not
only gave an inspiration or living emotion to the rules of moral conduct which
they taught, but they also inspired their immediate disciples with a feeling and
emotion of unbounded admiration, love, and enthusiasm for their person and
character. When the great teachers died, their immediate disciples, in order to
keep up the feeling and emotion of unbounded admiration, love, and enthusiasm
which they felt for their teacher, founded a Church. That, as we know, was the
origin of the Church in all the great religions of the world. The Church thus
awakens and kindles the inspiration or living emotion in men necessary to make
them obey the rules of moral conduct, by keeping up, exciting and arousing, the
feeling and emotion of unbounded admiration, love, and enthusiasm for the person
and character of the first Teacher and Founder of religion which the immediate
disciples originally felt. Men rightly call not only the belief in God, but the
belief in religion a faith, a trust; but a trust in whom? In the first teacher
and founder of their religion who, in Mo-hammedanism is called the Prophet and
in Christianity the Mediator. If you ask a conscientious Mohammedan why he
believes in God and obeys the rules of moral conduct, he will rightly answer you
that he does it because he believes in Mohammed the Prophet. If you ask a
conscientious Christian why he believes in God and obeys the rules of moral
conduct, he will rightly answer you that he does it because he loves Christ.
Thus you see the belief in Mohammed, the love of Christ, in fact the feeling and
emotion, as I said of unbounded admiration, love, and enthusiasm for the first
Teacher and Founder of religion which it is the function of the Church to keep
up, excite and arouse in men_is the source of inspiration, the real power in all
the great religions of the world by which they are able to make men, to make the
mass of mankind obey the rules of moral conduct.
I have been a long way, but now I can answer the question which you asked me
awhile ago. You asked me, you will remember, how without a belief in God which
religion teaches_how can one make men, make the mass of mankind, follow and obey
the moral rule which Confucius teaches in his State religion_the absolute duty
of loyalty to the Emperor? I have shown you that it is not the belief in God
taught by religion which really makes men obey moral rules or rules of moral
conduct. I showed you that religion is able to make men obey the rules of moral
conduct principally by means of an organisation called the Church which awakens
and kindles in men an inspiration or living emotion necessary to make them to
obey those rules. Now, in answer to your question I am going to tell you that
the system of the teachings of Confucius, called Confucianism, the State
Mencius, speaking of the two purest and most Christlike characters in Chinese
history, said: "When men heard of the spirit and temper of Po-yi and Shu-ch*i,
the dissolute ruffian became unselfish and the cowardly man had courage. "
Mencius Bk. Ill, Part II, IX, religion in China, like the Church religion in
other countries, makes men obey the rules of moral conduct also by means of an
organisation corresponding to the Church of the Church religion in other
countries. This organisation in the State religion of Confucianism in China
is_the school. The school is the Church of the State religion of Confucius in
China. As you know, the same word " chiao" in Chinese for religion is also the
word for education. In fact, as the Church in China is the school, religion to
the Chinese means education, culture. The aim and object of the school in China
is not, as in modern Europe and America to-day, to teach men how to earn a
living, how to make money, but, like the aim and object of the Church religion,
to teach men to understand what Mr. Froude calls the primitive commandment,
"Thou shalt not lie" and" Thou shall not steal" ;in fact, to teach men to be
good. "Whether we provide for action or conversation, " says Dr. Johnson.
"whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious
and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next, an acquaintance with the
history of mankind and with those examples which may be said to embody truth and
prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. "
But then we have seen that the Church of the Church religion is able to make
men obey the rules of moral conduct by awakening and kindling in men an
inspiration or living emotion, and that it awakens and kindles this inspiration
or living emotion principally by exciting and arousing the feeling and emotion
of unbounded admiration, love, and enthusiasm for the character and person of
the first Teacher and Founder of religion. Now, here there is a difference
between the school_the Church of the State religion of Confucius in China_and
the Church of the Church religion in other countries. The school_ the Church of
the State religion in China_it is true, enables and makes men obey the rules of
moral conduct, also like the Church of the Church religion, by awakening and
kindling in men an inspiration or living emotion. But the means which the school
in China uses to awaken and kindle this inspiration or living emotion in men are
different from those of the Church of the Church religion in other countries.
The school, the Church of the State religion of Confucius in China, does not
awaken and kindle this inspiration or living emotion in men by exciting and
arousing the feeling of unbounded admiration, love, and enthusiasm for
Confucius. Confucius in his lifetime did indeed inspire in his immediate
disciples a feeling and emotion of unbounded admiration, love, and enthusiasm,
and, after his death, has inspired the same feeling and emotion in all great men
who have studied and understood him. But Confucius even while he lived did not
inspire, and, after his death, has not inspired in the mass of mankind the same
feeling and emotion of admiration, love, and enthusiasm which the founders of
all the great religions in the world, as we know, have inspired. The mass of the
population in China do not adore and worship Confucius as the mass of the
population in Mohammedan countries adore and worship Mohammed, or as the mass of
the population in European countries adore and worship Jesus Christ. In this
respect Confucius does not belong to the class of men called founders of a
religion. In order to be a founder of a religion in the European sense of the
word, a man must have an exceptionally or even an abnormally strong emotional
nature. Confucius indeed was descended from a race of kings, the house of Shang,
the dynasty which ruled over China before the dynasty under which Confucius
lived_a race of men who had the strong emotional nature of the Hebrew people.
But Confucius himself lived under the dynasty of the House of Chow_a race of men
who had the fine intellectual nature of the Greeks, a race of whom the Duke of
Chou, the founder, as I told you, of the pre-Confucian religion or religion of
the old dispensation in China was a true representative. Thus Confucius was, if
I may use a comparison, a Hebrew by birth, with the strong emotional nature of
the Hebrew race, who was trained in the best intellectual culture, who had all
that which the best intellectual culture of the civilisation of the Greeks could
give him. In fact, like the great Goethe in modern Europe, the great Goethe whom
the people of Europe will one day recognise as the most perfect type of
humanity, the real European which the civilisation of Europe has produced, as
the Chinese have acknowledged Confucius to be the most perfect type of humanity,
the real Chinaman, which the Chinese civilisation has produced_like the great
Goethe, I say, Confucius was too educated and cultured a man to belong to the
class of men called founders of religion. Indeed, even while he lived Confucius
was not known to be what he was, except by his most intimate and immediate
disciples.
The school in China, I say, the Church of the State religion of Confucius,
does not awaken and kindle the inspiration or living emotion necessary to make
men obey the rules of moral conduct by exciting and arousing the feeling and
emotion of admiration, love, and enthusiasm for Confucius. But then how does the
school in China awaken and kindle the inspiration or living emotion necessary to
make man obey the rules of moral conduct? Confucius says: "In education the
feeling and emotion is aroused by the study of poetry; the judgement is formed
by the study of good taste and good manners; the education of the character is
completed by the study of music. " The school_ the Church of the State religion
in China_awakens and kindles the inspiration or living emotion in men necessary
to make them obey the rules of moral conduct by teaching them poetry_in fact,
the works of all really great men in literature, which, as I told you, has the
inspiration or living emotion that is in the rules of moral conduct of religion.
Matthew Arnold, speaking of Homer and the quality of nobleness in his poetry,
says: "The nobleness in the poetry of Homer and of the few great men in
literature can refine the raw, natural man, can transmute him. " In fact,
whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are
pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if
there be any virtue and if there be any praise_the school, the Church of the
State religion in China, makes men think on these things, and in making them
think on these things, awakens and kindles the inspiration or living e-motion
necessary to enable and make them obey the rules of moral conduct.
But then you will remember I told you that the works of really great men in
literature, such as the poetry of Homer, cannot reach the mass of mankind,
because all great men in literature speak the language of educated men which the
mass of mankind cannot understand. Such being the case, how then does the system
of the teachings of Confucius, Confucianism, the State Religion in China, awaken
and kindle in the mass of mankind, in the mass of the population in China, the
inspiration or living emotion necessary to enable and make them obey the rules
of moral conduct? Now, I told you that the organisation in the State Religion of
Confucius in China corresponding to the Church of the Church Religion in other
countries, is the School. But that is not quite correct. The real organisation
in the State Religion of Confucius in China corresponding exactly to the Church
of the Church Religion in other countries is_the Family. The real Church_of
which the School is but an adjunct_the real and true Church of the State
Religion of Confucius in China, is the Family with its ancestral tablet or
chapel in every house, and its ancestral Hall or Temple in every village and
town. I have shown you that the source of inspiration, the real motive power by
which all the great Religions of the world are able to make men, to make the
mass of mankind obey the rules of moral conduct, is the feeling and emotion of
unbounded admiration, love and enthusiasm which it is the function of the Church
to excite and arouse in men for the first Teachers and Founders of those
Religions. Now the source of inspiration, the real motive power by which the
State Religion of Confucius in China is able to make men, to enable and make the
mass of the population in China obey the rules of moral conduct is the " Love
for their father and mother." The Church of the Church Religion, Christianity,
says: "Love Christ." The Church of the State Religion of Confucius in China_the
ancestral tablet in every family_says "Love your father and your mother. " St.
Paul says:_"Let every man that names the name of Christ depart from iniquity. "
But the author of the book on Filial Piety(^^), written in the Han dynasty, the
counterpart of the lm.ita.tio Christi in China, says: "Let everyone who loves
his father and mother depart from iniquity. " In short, as the essence, the
motive power, the source of real inspiration of the Church religion,
Christianity, is the Love of Christ, so the essence, the motive power, the
source of real inspiration of the State Religion, Confucianism in China, is the
"Love of father and mother"_ Filial Piety, with its cult of ancestor worship.
Confucius says: "To gather in the same place where our fathers before us have
gathered; to perform the same ceremonies which they before us have performed; to
play the same music which they before us have played: to pay respect to those
whom they honoured; to love those who were dear to them; in fact, to serve them
now dead as if they were living, and now departed, as if they were still with
us, that is the highest achievement of Filial Piety." Confucius, further
says:_"By cultivating respect for the dead, and carrying the memory back to the
distant past, the good in the people will grow deep. " Cogitavi dies antiques,
et annos eternos in menti habui. That is how the State Religion in China,
Confucianism, awakens and kindles in men, the inspiration or living emotion
necessary to enable and make them obey the rules of moral conduct, the highest
and most important of all these rules being the absolute Duty of Loyalty to the
Emperor, just as the highest and most important rules of moral conduct in all
the Great Religions of the world is fear of God. In other words, the Church
Religion, Christianity, says:_"Fear God and obey Him." But the State Religion of
Confucius, or Confucianism, says:_"Honour the Emperor and be loyal to him. " The
Church Religion, Christianity, says:_"If you want to fear God and obey Him, you
must first love Christ. " The State Religion of Confucius, or Confucianism,
say:_"If you want to honour the Emperor and be loyal to him, you must first love
your father and mother. "
Now I have shown you why it is that there is no conflict between the heart
and the head in the Chinese civilisation for these last , years since
Confucius'time. The reason why there is no such conflict is because the Chinese
people, even the mass of the population in China, do not feel the need of
Religion_I mean Religion in the European sense of the word; and the reason why
the Chinese people do not feel the need of religion is because the Chinese
people have in Confucianism something which can take the place of Religion. That
something, I have shown you, is the principle of absolute Duty of Loyalty to the
Emperor; the Code of Honour called Ming fen ta yi, which Confucius teaches in
the State Religion which he has given to the Chinese nation. The greatest
service, I said, which Confucius has done for the Chinese people is in giving
them this State Religion in which he taught the absolute Duty of Loyalty to the
Emperor.
Thus much I have thought it necessary to say about Confucius and what he has
done for the Chinese nation, because it has a very important bearing upon the
subject of our present discussion, the Spirit of the Chinese People. For I want
to tell you and you will understand it from what I have told you, that a
Chinaman, especially if he is an educated man, who knowingly forgets, gives up
or throws away the Code of Honour, the Ming fen ta yi in the State Religion of
Confucius in China, Which teaches the absolute Divine Duty of Loyalty to the
Emperor or Sovereign to whom he has once given his alle-giance, such a Chinaman
is a man who has lost the spirit of the Chinese people, the spirit of his nation
and race: he is no longer a real Chinaman.
Finally, let me shortly sum up what I want to say on the subject of our
present discussion_the Spirit of the Chinese People or what is the real
Chinaman. The real Chinaman, I have shown you, is a man who lives the life of a
man of adult reason with the simple heart of a child, and the Spirit of the
Chinese people is a happy union of soul with intellect. Now if you will examine
the products of the Chinese mind in their standard works of art and literature,
you will find that it is this happy union of soul with the intellect _which
makes them so satisfying and delightful. What Matthew Arnold says of the poetry
of Homer is true of all Chinese standard literature, that "it has not only the
power of profoundly touching that natural heart of humanity, which it is the
weakness of Voltaire that he cannot reach, but can also address the
understanding with all Voltaire' s admirable simplicity and rationality. "
Matthew Arnold calls the poetry of the best Greek poets the priestess of
imaginative reason. Now the spirit of the Chinese people, as it is seen in the
best specimens of the products of their art and literature, is really what
Matthew Arnold calls imaginative reason. Matthew Arnold says:_"The poetry of
later Paganism lived by the senses and understanding: the poetry of medieval
Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the
modern spirit's life, of the modern European spirit to-day, is neither the
senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination, it is the imaginative
reason."
Now if it is true what Matthew Arnold says here that the element by which the
modern spirit of the people of Europe to-day, if it would live right_has to
live, is imaginative reason, then you can see how valuable for the people of
Europe this Spirit of the Chinese peo-pie is,_this spirit which Matthew Arnold
calls imaginative reason. How valuable it is, I say, and how important it is
that you should study it, try to understand it, love it, instead of ignoring,
despising and trying to destroy it.
But now before I finally conclude, I want to give you a warning. I want to
warn you that when you think of this Spirit of the Chinese People, which I have
tried to explain to you, you should bear in mind that it is not a science,
philosophy, theosophy, or any "ism, " like the theosophy or " ism" of Madame
Blavatsky or Mrs. Besant. The Spirit of the Chinese People is not even what you
would call a mentality_ an active working of the brain and mind. The Spirit of
the Chinese People, I want to tell you, is a state of mind, a temper of the
soul, which you cannot learn as you learn shorthand or Esperanto_in short, a
mood, or in the words of the poet, a serene and blessed mood.
Now last of all I want to ask your permission to recite to you a few lines of
poetry from the most Chinese of the English poets, Wordsworth, which better than
anything I have said or can say, will describe to you the serene and blessed
mood which is the Spirit of the Chinese People. These few lines of the English
poet will put before you in a way I cannot hope to do, that happy union of soul
with intellect in the Chinese type of humanity, that serene and blessed mood
which gives to the real Chinaman his inexpressible gentleness. Wordsworth in his
lines on Tintern Abbey says:_
"... nor less, I trust To them I may have owed another gift Of aspect more
sublime: that blessed mood In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the
heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:_that
serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on, _
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of
joy, We see into the life of things. "
The serene and blessed mood which enables us to see into the life of things:
that is imaginative reason, that is the Spirit of the Chinese People.
THE CHINESE WOMAN
Matthew Arnold, speaking of the argument taken from the Bible which was used
in the House of Commons to support the Bill for enabling a man to marry his
deceased wife's sister, said: "Who will believe when he really considers the
matter, that when the feminine nature, the feminine ideal and our relations with
them are brought into question, the delicate and apprehensive genius of the
Indo-European race, the race which invented the Muses, and Chivalry, and the
Madonna, is to find its last word on this question in the institution of a
Semitic people whose wisest King had seven hundred wives and three hundred
concubines?"
The two words I want for my purpose here from the above long quotation are
the words " feminine ideal." Now what is the Chinese feminine ideal? What is the
Chinese people's ideal of the feminine nature and their relations to that ideal?
But before going further, let me, with all deference to Matthew Arnold, and
respect for his Indo-European race, say here that the feminine ideal of the
Semitic race, of the old Hebrew people is not such a horrid one as Matthew
Arnold would have us infer from the fact that their wisest King had a multitude
of wives and concubines. For here is the feminine ideal of the old Hebrew
people, as we find it in their literature: "Who can find a virtuous woman? for
her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in
her. She rises also while it is yet night and giveth meat to her household and a
portion to her maidens. She layeth her hands to the spindle and her fingers hold
the distaff. She is not afraid of snow for her household ; for all her household
are clothed in scarlet. She openeth her mouth with wisdom and in her
tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household
and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed,
her husband also and he praiseth her. "
This, I think, is not such a horrid, not such a bad ideal after all,_this
feminine ideal of the Semitic race. It is of course not so etherial as the
Madonna and the Muses, the feminine ideal of the In-do-European race. However,
one must, I think, admit,_the Madonna and the Muses are very well to hang up as
pictures in one' s room, but if you put a broom into the hands of the Muses or
send your Madonna into the kitchen, you will be sure to have your rooms in a
mess and you will probably get in the morning no breakfast at all. Confucius
says, "The ideal is not away from the actuality of human life. When men take
something away from the actuality of human life as the ideal,_that is not the
true ideal."* But if the Hebrew feminine ideal cannot be compared with the
Madonna and the Muses, it can very well, I think, compare with the modern
European feminine ideal, the feminine ideal of the Indo-European race in Europe
and America to-day. I will not speak of the suffragettes in England. But compare
the old Hebrew feminine ideal with the modern feminine ideal such as one finds
it in modern novels, with the heroine, for instance of Dumas' Dame aux
Cornelias. By the way, it may interest people to know that of all the books in
European literature which have been translated into Chinese, the novel of Dumas
with the Madonna of the Mud as the superlative feminine ideal has had the
greatest sale and success in the present up-to-date modern China. This French
novel called in Chinese the Cha-hua-nuhas even been dramatised and put on the
stage in all the up-to-date Chinese theatres in China. Now if you will compare
the old feminine ideal of the Semitic race, the woman who is not afraid of the
The Universal Order XIII.
snow for her household, for she has clothed them all in scarlet, with the
feminine ideal of the Indo-European race in Europe to-day, the Camelia Lady who
has no household, and therefore clotheth not her household, but herself in
scarlet and goes with a Camelia flower on her breast to be photographed: then
you will understand what is true and what is false, tinsel civilisation.
Nay, even if you will compare the old Hebrew feminine ideal, the woman who
layeth her hands to the spindle and whose fingers hold the distaff, who looketh
well to the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness, with the
up-to-date modem Chinese woman who layeth her hands on the piano and whose
fingers hold a big bouquet, who, dressed in tight fitting yellow dress with a
band of tinsel gold around her head, goes to show herself and sing before a
miscellaneous crowd in the Confucian Association Hall: if you compare these two
feminine ideals, you will then know how fast and far modern China is drifting
away from true civilisation. For the womanhood in a nation is the flower of the
civilisation, of the state of civilisation in that nation.
But now to come to our question : what is the Chinese feminine ideal? The
Chinese feminine ideal I answer, is essentially the same as the old Hebrew
feminine ideal with one important difference of which I will speak later on. The
Chinese feminine ideal is the same as the old Hebrew ideal in that it is not an
ideal merely for hanging up as a picture in one' s room; nor an ideal for a man
to spend his whole life in caressing and worshipping. The Chinese feminine ideal
is an ideal with a broom in her hands to sweep and clean the rooms with. In fact
the Chinese written character for a wife is composed of two radicals meaning a
woman and meaning a broom. In classical Chinese, in what I have called the
official uniform Chinese, a wife is called the Keeper of the Provision Room_a
Mistress of the Kitchen . Indeed the true feminine ideal, _the feminine
ideal of all people with a true, not tinsel civilisation, such as the old
Hebrews, the ancient Greeks and the Romans, is essentially the same as the
Chinese feminine ideal: the true feminine ideal is always the Hausfrau, the
house wife, la dame de menage or chatelaine .
But now to go more into details. The Chinese feminine ideal, as it is handed
down from the earliest times, is summed up in three obediences and Four Virtues.
Now what are the four virtues? They are: first womanly character; second,
womanly conversation; third, womanly appearance ;and lastly, womanly work .
Womanly character means not extraordinary talents or intelligence, but modesty,
cheerfulness, chastity, constancy, orderliness, blameless conduct and perfect
manners. Womanly conversation means not eloquence or brilliant talk, but refined
choice of words, never to use coarse or violent language, to know when to speak
and when to stop speaking. Womanly appearance means not beauty or prettiness of
face, but personal cleanliness and faultlessness in dress and attire. Lastly,
womanly work means not any special skill or ability, but assiduous attention to
the spinning room, never to waste time in laughing and giggling and work in the
kitchen to prepare clean and wholesome food, especially when there are guests in
the house. These are the four essentials in the conduct of a woman as laid down
in the "Lessons for Women", written by Ts'ao Ta Ku or Lady Ts'ao, sister of the
great historian Pan Ku of the Han Dynasty.
Then again what do the Three Obediences in the Chinese feminine ideal mean?
They mean really three self sacrifices or "live tor's?" That is to say, when a
woman is unmarried, she is to live for her father; when married, she is to live
for her husband ; and, as a widow, she is to live for her children. In fact, the
chief end of a woman in China is not to live for herself, or for society; not to
be a reformer or to be president of
the woman's natural feet Society; not to live even as a saint or to do good
to the world; the chief end of a woman in China is to live as a good daughter, a
good wife and a good mother.
A foreign lady friend of mine once wrote and asked me whether it is true that
we Chinese believe, like the Mohammedans, that a woman has no soul. I wrote back
and told her that we Chinese do not hold that a woman has no soul, but that we
hold that a woman, _a true Chinese woman has no self. Now speaking of this "no
self" in the Chinese woman leads me to say a few words on a very difficult
subject, _a subject which is not only difficult, but, I am afraid almost
impossible for people with the modern European education to understand, viz.
concubinage in China. This subject of concubinage, I am afraid, is not only a
difficult, but also a dangerous subject to discuss in public. But, as the
English poet says.
Thus fools rush in where angels fear to tread,
I will try my best here to explain why concubinage in China is not such an
immoral custom as people generally imagine.
The first thing I want to say on this subject of concubinage is that it is
the selflessness in the Chinese woman which makes concubinage in China not only
possible, but also no immoral. But, before I go further, let me tell you here,
that concubinage in China does not mean having many wives . By Law in China, a
man is allowed to have only one wife, but he may have as many handmaids or
concubines as he like. In Japanese a handmaid or concubine is called te-kaki, a
hand rack or me-kaki an eye rack;_i. e. to say, a rack where to rest your hands
or eyes on when you are tired. Now? the feminine ideal in China, I said, is not
an ideal for a man to spend his whole life in caressing and worshipping. The
Chinese feminine ideal is, for a wife to live absolutely, selflessly for her
husband. Therefore when a husband who is sick or invalided from overwork with
his brain and mind, re-quires a handmaid, a hand rack or eye rack to enable him
to get well and to fit him for his life work, the wife in China with her
selflessness, gives it to him just as a good wife in Europe and America gives an
armchair or goat' s milk to her husband when he is sick or requires it. In fact
it is the selflessness of the wife in China, her sense of duty, the duty of self
sacrifice which allows a man in China to have handmaids or concubines.
But people will say to me, "why ask selflessness and sacrifice only from the
woman? What about the man?" To this. I answer, does not the man, _ the husband,
who toils and moils to support his family, and especially if he is a gentleman,
who has to do his duty not only to his family, but to his King and country, and,
in doing that has, some time even to give his life: does he not also make
sacrifice? The Emperor Kanghsi in a valedictory decree which he issued on his
death bed, said that "he did not know until then what a life of sacrifice the
life of an Emperor in China is. " And yet, let me say here by the way, Messrs.
J. B. Bland and Backhouse in their latest book have described this Emperor
Kanghsi as a huge, helpless, horrid Brigham Young, who was dragged into his
grave by the multitude of his wives and children. But, of course, for modern men
like Messrs. J. P. Bland and Backhouse, concubinage is inconceivable except as
something horrid, vile and nasty, because the diseased imagination of such men
can conceive of nothing except nasty, vile and horrid things. But that is
neither here nor there. Now what I want to say here is that the life of every
true man_from the Emperor down to the ricksha coolie_and every true woman, is a
life of sacrifice. The sacrifice of a woman in China is to live selflessly for
the man whom she calls husband, and the sacrifice of the man in China is to
provide for, to protect at all costs the woman or women whom he has taken into
his house and also the children they may bear him. Indeed to people who talk of
the immorality of concubinage in China, I would say that to me the Chinese
mandarin who keeps concubines is less selfish, less immoral than the European
in his motor car, who picks up a helpless woman from the public street and,
after amusing himself with her for one night, throws her away again on the
pavement of the public street the next morning. The Chinese mandarin with his
concubines may be selfish, but he at least provides a house for his concubines
and holds himself for life responsible for the maintenance of the women he
keeps. In fact, if the mandarin is selfish, I say that the European in his motor
car is not only selfish, but a coward. Ruskin says, "The honour of a true
soldier is verily not to be able to slay, but to be willing and ready at all
times to be slain. " In the same way I say, the honour of a woman_a true woman
in China, is not only to love and be true to her husband, but to live
absolutely, selflessly for him. In fact, this Religion of Selflessness is the
religion of the woman, especially, the gentlewoman or lady in China, as the
Religion of Loyalty which I have tried elsewhere to explain, is the religion of
the man, _the gentleman in China. Until foreigners come to understand these two
religions, the "Religion of Loyalty and the Religion of Selflessness" of the
Chinese people, they can never understand the real Chinaman, or the real Chinese
woman.
But people will again say to me, "What about love? Can a man who really loves
his wife have the heart to have other women besides her in his house?" To this I
answer, yes, _ Why not? For the real test that a husband really loves his wife
is not that he should spend his whole life in lying down at her feet and
caressing her. The real test whether a man truly loves his wife is whether he is
anxious and tries in every thing reasonable, not only to protect her, but also
not to hurt her, not to hurt her feelings. Now to bring a strange woman into the
house must hurt the wife, hurt her feelings. But here, I say, it is what I have
called the Religion of Selflessness which protects the wife from being hurt: it
is this absolute Selflessness in the woman in China
which makes it possible for her not to feel hurt when she sees her husband
bring another woman into the house. In other words, it is the selflessness in
the wife in China which enables, permits the husband to take a concubine without
hurting the wife. For here, let me point out, a gentleman, _a real gentleman in
China, never takes a concubine without the consent of his wife and a real
gentlewoman or lady in China whenever there is a proper reason that her husband
should take a concubine, will never refuse to give her consent. I know of many
cases where having no children the husband after middle age wanted to take a
concubine, but because the wife refused to give her consent, desisted. I know
even of a case where the husband, because he did not want to exact this mark of
selflessness from his wife who was sick and in bad health, refused, when urged
by the wife, to take a concubine, but the wife, without his knowledge and
consent, not only bought a concubine, but actually forced him to take the
concubine into the house. In fact, the protection for the wife against the abuse
of concubinage in China is the love of her husband for her. Instead, therefore
of saying that husbands in China cannot truly love their wives because they take
concubines, one should rather say it is because the husband in China so truly
loves his wife that he has the privilege and liberty of taking concubines
without fear of his abusing that privilege and liberty. This liberty, this
privilege is sometimes and even_when the sense of honour in the men in the
nation is low as now in this anarchic China, of ten abused. But still I say the
protection for the wife in China where the husband is allowed to take a
concubine, is the love of her husbaud for her, the love of her husband, and, I
must add here, his tact _the perfect good taste in the real Chinese gentleman. I
wonder if one man in a thousand among the ordinary Europeans and Americans, who
can keep more than one woman in the same house without turning the house into a
fighting cockpit or hell. In short, it is this tact, _the perfect good taste in
the real Chinese
gentleman which makes it possible for the wife in China not to feel hurt,
when the husband takes and keeps a handmaid, a hand rack, an eye rack in the
same house with her. But to sum up, _it is the Religion of selflessness, the
absolute selflessness of the woman, _the gentlewoman or lady and the love of the
husband for his wife and his tact,_the perfect good taste of a real Chinese
gentleman, which, as I said, makes concubinage in China, not only possible, but
also not immoral.. Confucius said, "The Law of the Gentleman takes its rise from
the relation between the husband and the wife. "
Now in order to convince those who might still be sceptical that husbands in
China truly love, can deeply love their wives, I could produce abundant proofs
from Chinese history and literature. For this purpose I should particularly like
to quote and translate here an elegy written on the death of his wife by Yuan
Chen (TCHO, a poet of the T'ang dynasty. But unfortunately the piece is too long
for quotation here in this already too long article. Those acquainted with
Chinese, however, who wish to know how deep the affection, _affection, true love
and not sexual passion which in modern times is often mistaken for love, _how
deep the love of a husband in China for his wife is, should read this elegy
which can be found in any ordinary collection of the T'ang poets. The title of
the elegy is, _ "Lines to ease the aching heart." But as I cannot use this elegy
for my purpose, I will, instead, give here a short poem of four lines written by
a modern poet who was once a secretary of the late Viceroy Chang Chih-tung. The
poet went togther with his wife in the suite of the Viceroy to Wuchang and after
staying there many years, his wife died. Immediately after he too had to leave
Wuchang. He wrote the poem on leaving Wuchang. The words in Chinese are
The meaning in English is something like this:_
This grief is common to everyone,
One hundred years how many can attain ?
But ' tis heart breaking, o waters of the Yangtze,
Together we came, _but together we return not.
The feeling here is as deep, if not deeper; but the words are fewer, and the
language is simpler, even than Tennyson's.
Break, break, break On the cold grey stones,sea!
Butfor the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!
But now what about the love of a wife in China for her husband? I do not
think any evidence is needed to prove this. It is true that in China the bride
and bride-groom as a rule never see each other until the marriage day, and yet
that there is love between even bride and bride-groom, can be seen in these four
lines of poetry from the T' ang dynasty: _
The meaning in English of the above is something like this, In the bridal
chamber last night stood red candles;
Waiting for the morning to salute the father and
mother in the hall, Toilet finished,_in a low voice she asks her sweet-
heart husband,
"Are the shades in my painted eyebrows quite a la mode."
But here in order to understand the above, I must tell you something about
marriage in China. There are in every legal marriage in China six ceremonies :
first, asking for the name, i.e., formal proposal; second receiving the silk
presents, i. e., betrothal: third fixing the day of marriage; fourth fetching
the bride; fifth pouring libation before the wild goose, i.e., plighting troth,
so-called because the wild goose is supposed to be most faithful in connubial
love; sixth _ temple presentation. Of these six ceremonies, the last two are the
most important, I shall therefore here describe them more in detail.
The fourth ceremony, fetching the bride at the present day, is, except in my
province Fukien where we keep up the old customs, _ generally dispensed with, as
it entails too much trouble and expense to the bride's family. The bride now,
instead of being fetched, is sent to the bride-groom's house. When the bride
arrives there, the bridegroom receives her at the gate and himself opens the
door of the bridal chair and leads her to the hall of the house. There the bride
and bride-groom worship Heaven and Earth, i. e. to say, they fall on their kness
with their faces turned to the door of the hall with a table carrying two red
burning candles before the open sky and then the hushand pours libations on the
ground, _in presence of the pair of wild geese (if wild goose cannot be had, an
ordinary goose) which the bride has brought with her. This is the ceremony
called Tien yen pouring libation before the wild goose; plighting of troth
between man and woman_he vowing to be true to her, and she, to be true to him,
just as faithful as the pair of wild geese they see before them. From this
moment, they become, so to speak, natural sweetheart husband
and sweetheart wife, bound only by the moral law, the Law of the Gentleman,
_the word of honour which they have given to each other, but not yet by the
Civic Law. This ceremony therefore may be called the moral or Religious
marriage.
After this comes the ceremony called the mutual salutation between bride and
bride-groom. The bride standing on the right side of the hall first goes on her
knees before the bride-groom, _he going on his knees to her at the same time.
Then they change places. The bride-groom now standing where the bride stood,
goes on his knees to her, _ she returning the salute just as he did. Now this
ceremony of chiao pai mutual salutation, I wish to point out here, proves beyond
all doubt that in China there is perfect equality between man and woman, between
husband and wife.
As I said before, the ceremony of plighting troth may be called the moral or
Religious marriage as distinguished from what may called the civic marriage,
which comes three days after._In the moral or religious marriage, the man and
woman becomes husband and wife before the moral Law_before God. The contract so
far is solely between the man and woman. The State or, as in China, the Family
takes the place of the State in all social and civic life_the State acting only
as Court of appeal, _the Family takes no cognisance of the marriage or contract
between the man and woman here in this, what I have called the moral or
religious marriage. In fact on this first day and until the civic marriage takes
place on the third day of the marriage, the bride is not only not introduced,
but also not allowed to see or be seen by the members of the bride-groom's
family.
Thus for two days and two nights the bride-groom and the bride in China live,
so to speak not as legal, but, as sweetheart-husband and sweetheart-wife . On
the third day, _then comes the last ceremony in the Chinese marriage_the
Miao-chien, the temple presentation or civic marriage. I say, on the third day
because that is the rule deriguer as laid down in the Book of Rites. But now to
save trouble and expense, it is generally performed on the day after. This
ceremony_the temple presentation, takes place, when the ancestral temple of the
family clan is nearby, _of course in the ancestral temple. But for people living
in towns and cities where there is no ancestral temple of the family clan
nearby, the ceremony is performed before the miniature ancestral chapel or
shrine_which is in the house of every respectable family, even the poorest in
China. This ancestral temple, chapel or shrine with a tablet or red piece of
paper on the wall, as I have said elsewhere, is the church of the State Religion
of Confucius in China corresponding to the church of the Church Religion in
Christian countries.
This ceremony_the temple presentation begins by the father of the bridegroom
or failing him, the nearest senior member of the family, going on his knees
before the ancestral tablet_thus announcing to the spirits of the dead ancestors
that a young member of the family has now brought a wife home into the family.
Then the bridegroom and bride one after the other, each goes on his and her
knees before the same ancestral tablet. From this moment the man and woman
becomes husband and wife, _not only before the moral Law or God, _ but before
the Family, before the State, before Civic Law. I have therefore called this
ceremony of miao chien, temple presentation in the Chinese marriage, _the civic
or civil marriage. Before this civic or civil marriage, the woman, the bride,
_according to the Book of Rites,_is not a legal wife-When the bride happens to
die before this ceremony of temple presentation, she is not allowed_according to
the Book of Rites_to be buried in the family burying ground of her husband and
her memorial tablet is not put up in the ancestral temple of his family clan.
Thus we see the contract in a legal civic marriage in China is not between
the woman and the man. The contract is between the woman
and the family of her husband. She is not married to him, but into his
family. In the visiting card of a Chinese lady in China, she does not write, for
instance, Mrs. Ku Hung-ming, but literally "Miss Feng, gone to the home of the
family (originally from) Tsin An adjusts her dress." _The contract of marriage
in China being between the woman and the family of her husband,_the husband and
wife can neither of them repudiate the contract without the consent of the
husband's family. This I want to point out here, is the fundamental difference
between a marriage in China and a marriage in Europe and America. The marriage
in Europe and America, _is what we Chinese _would call a sweet-heart marriage, a
marriage, bound solely by love between the individual man and the individual
woman. But in China the marriage is, as I have said, a civic marriage, a
contract not between the woman and the man, but between the woman and the family
of her husband, _in which she has obligations not only to him, but also to his
family, and through the family, to society, _to the social or civic order; in
fact, to the State. Finally let me point out here that it is this civic
conception of marriage which gives solidarity and stability to the family, to
the social or civic order, to the State in China. Until therefore, let me be
permitted to say here, _ the people in Europe and America understand what true
civic life means, understand and have a true conception of what it is really to
be a citizen, _ a citizen not each one living for himself, but each one living
first for his family, and through that for the civic order or State, _there can
then be no such thing as a stable society, civic order or State in the true
sense of the word. _A State such as we see it in modern Europe and American
to-day, where the men and woman have not a true conception of civic life, _such
a State with all its parliament and machinery of government, may be called, if
you like, _a big Commercial Concern, or as it really is, in times of war, a gang
of brigands and pirates, _but not a State. In fact, I may be permitted further
to say
here, it is the false conception of a State as a big commercial concern
having only the selfish material interests of those who have the biggest shares
in the concern to be considered, _this false conception of a State with the
esprit de corps of brigands, which is, at bottom, the cause of the terrible war
now going on in Europe. In short, without a true conception of civic life there
can be no true State and without a true State, how can there be civilisation. To
us Chinese, a man who does not marry, who has no family, no home which he has to
defend, cannot be a patriot, and if calls himself a patriot, _we Chinese call
him a brigand patriot. In fact in order to have a true conception of a State or
civic order, one must first have a true conception of a family, and to have a
true conception of a family, of family life, one must first of all have a true
conception of marriage, _marriage not as a sweetheart marriage, but as a civic
marrage which I have in the above tried to describe.
But to return from the digression. Now you can picture to yourself how the
sweet-heart wife waiting for the morning_to salute the father and mother of her
husband, toilet finished, in a low voice, whispers to her sweet-heart husband
and asks if her eyebrows are painted quite a la mode_Here you see, I say, there
is love between husband and wife in China, although they have not seen each
other before the marriage_even on the third day of the marriage. But if you
think the love in the above is not deep enough, then take just these two lines
of poetry from a wife to her absent husband.
The day when you think of coming home . Ah \ then my heart -will already be
broken.
Roselind in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" says to her cousin Celia:" coz,
coz, my pretty little coz, that thou knowest how many
fathom deep I am in love! But I cannot be sounded: my affection hath an
unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal. " Now the love of a woman, _of a wife
for her husband in China and also the love of the man_of the husband for his
wife in China, one can truly say, is like Rosolind's love, many fathom deep and
cannot be sounded; it has an unknown bottom like the bay of Portugal.
But, I will now speak of the difference which, I said, there is between the
Chinese feminine ideal and the feminine ideal of the old Hebrew people. The
Hebrew lover in the Songs of Solomon, thus addresses his lady-love: "Thou art
beautiful,my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with
banners\ " People who have seen beautiful dark-eyed Jewesses even to day, will
acknowledge the truth and graphicness of the picture which the old Hebrew lover
here gives of the feminine ideal of his race. But in and about the Chinese
feminine ideal, I want to say here, there is nothing terrible either in a
physical or in a moral sense. Even the Helen of Chinese history, _the beauty,
who with one glance brings down a city and with another glance destroys a
kingdom she is terrible only mataphorically. In an essay on "the Spirit of the
Chinese People, " I said that the one word which will sum up the total
impression which the Chinese type of humanity makes upon you is the English
word, "gentle. " If this is true of the real Chinaman, it is truer of the real
Chinese woman. In fact this "gentleness" of the real Chinaman, in the Chinese
woman, becomes sweet meekness. The meekness, the submissiveness of the woman in
China is like that of Milton's Eve in the "Paradise Lost, " who says to her
husband,
God is thy law, thou, mine ; to know no more Is woman ' s happiest knowledge
and her praise .
Indeed this quality of perfect meekness in the Chinese feminine ideal you
will find in the feminine ideal of no other people, _of no
other civilisation, Hebrew, Greek or Roman. This perfect, divine meekness in
the Chinese feminine ideal you will find only in one civilisation, _the
Christian civilisation, when that civilisation in Europe reached its perfection,
during the period of the Renaissance. If you will read the beautiful story of
Griselda in Boccacio's Decameron and see the true Christian feminine ideal shown
there, you will then understand what this perfect submissiveness, this divine
meekness, meekness to the point of absolute selflessness, _in the Chinese
feminine ideal means. In short, in this quality of divine meekness, the true
Christian feminine ideal is the Chinese feminine ideal, with just a shade of
difference. If you will carefully compare the picture of the Christian Madonna
with, _not the Budhist Kuan Yin, _but with the pictures of women fairies and
genii painted by famous Chinese artists, you will be able to see this
difference, _the difference between the Christian feminine ideal, and the
Chinese feminine ideal. The Christian Madonna is meek and so is the Chinese
feminine ideal. The Christian Madonna is etherial and so is the Chinese feminine
ideal. But the Chinese feminine ideal is more than all that; the Chinese
feminine ideal is debonair. To have a conception of what this charm and grace
expressed by the word debonair mean, you will have to go to ancient Greece,
_o ubi campi Spercheosque et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta!
In fact you will have to go to the fields of Thessaly and the streams of
Spercheios, to the hills alive with the dances of the Laconi-an maidens, _the
hills of Taygetus.
Indeed I want to say here that even now in China since the period of the Sung
Dynasty (A. D. ), when what may be called the Confucian Puritanism of the Sung
philosphers has narrowed, petrified, and in a way, vulgarised the spirit of
Confucianism, the spirit of the Chinese civilisation_since then, the womanhood
in China has lost much of the grace and charm, _expressed by the word debonair.
Therefore if you want to see the grace and charm expressed by the word debonair
in the true Chinese feminine ideal, you _will have to go to Japan where the
women there at least, even to this day, have preserved the pure Chinese
civilisation of the T'ang Dynasty. It is this grace and charm expressed by the
word debonair combined with the divine meekness of the Chinese feminine ideal,
which gives the air of distinction to the Japanese woman, _ even to the poorest
Japanese woman to-day.
In connection with this quality of charm and grace expressed by the word
debonair, allow me to quote to you here a few words from Matthew Arnold with
which he contrasts the brick-and-mortar Protestant English feminine ideal with
the delicate Catholic French feminine ideal. Comparing Eugenic de Guerin, the
beloved sister of the French poet Maurice de Guerin, with an English woman who
wrote poetry, Miss Emma Tatham,_Matthew Arnold says: "The French woman is a
Catholic in Languedoc; the English woman is a Protestant at Margate, Margate the
brick and mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its
prose, all its uncomeliness, _and let me add, all its salubrity. Between the
external form and fashion of these two lives, between the Catholic Madlle de
Guerin s nadalet at the Languedoc Christmas, her chapel of moss at Easter time,
her daily reading of the life of a saint, _between all this and the bare, blank,
narrowly English setting of Miss Tatham' s Protestantism, her "union in Church
fellowship with the worshippers at Hawley Square, Margate, " her singing with
the soft, sweet voice, the animating lines:
My Jesus to know, and feel His Blood flow ' Tis life everlasting, ' tis
heaven below\ "
her young female teachers belonging to the Sunday school and her
"Mr. Thomas Rowe, a venerable class-leader" _what a dissimilarity. In the
ground of the two lives, a likeness; in all their circumstances, what
unlikeness! An unlikeness, it will be said, in that which is non-essential and
indifferent. Non-essential,_ yes; indifferent,_no. The signal want of grace and
charm _ in the English Protestantism's setting of its religious life is not an
indifferent matter; it is a real weakness. This ought ye to have done, and not
to have left the other undone.
Last of all I wish to point out to you here the most important quality of
all, in the Chinese feminine ideal, the quality which preeminently distinguishes
her from the feminine ideal of all other people or nations ancient or modern.
This quality in the women in China, it is true, is common to the feminine ideal
of every people or nation with any pretension to civilisation, but this quality,
I want to say here, developed in the Chinese feminine ideal to such a degree of
perfection as you will find it nowhere else in the world. This quality of which
I speak, is described by the two Chinese words yu hsienwhich, in the quotation I
gave above from the "Lessons for Women, " by Lady T'sao, _I translated as
modesty and cheerfulness. The Chinese word yu literally means retired, secluded,
occult and the word hsien ( ?) literally means " at ease or leisure. " For the
Chinese word yu, _the English "modesty, bashfulness" only gives you an idea of
its meaning. The German word Sittsamkeit comes nearer to it. But perhaps the
French pudeur comes nearest to it of all. This pudeur, I may say here, this
bashfulness, the quality expressed by the Chinese word yu is the essence of all
womanly qualities. The more a woman has this quality of pudeur developed in her,
the more she has of womanliness, _of femininity, in fact, the more she is a
perfect or ideal woman. When on the contrary a woman loses this quality
expressed by the Chinese word yu, loses this bashfulness, this pudeur, she then
loses altogether her womanliness, her femininity,
and with that, her perfume, her fragrance and becomes a mere piece of human
meat or flesh. Thus, it is this pudeur, this quality expressed by the Chinese
word yu in the Chinese feminine ideal which makes or ought to make every true
Chinese woman instinctively feel and know that it is wrong to show herself in
public; that it is indecent , according to the Chinese idea, to go on a platform
and sing before a crowd in the hall even of the Confucian Association. In fine,
it is this yu hsien, this love of seclusion, this sensitiveness a-gainst the
"garish eye of day;" this pudeur in the Chinese feminine ideal, which gives to
the true Chinese woman in China as to no other woman in the world, _a perfume, a
perfume sweeter than the perfume of violets, the ineffable fragrance of orchids.
In the oldest love song, I believe, of the world, which I translated for the
Peking Daily News two years ago_the first piece in the Shih Ching or Book of
Poetry, the Chinese feminine ideal is thus described,
The birds are calling in the air, _ An islet by the river-side ;
The maid is meek and debonair, Oh! Fit to be our Prince ' s bride .
The words yao t 'iao have the same signification as the words yu sien meaning
literally yao) secluded, meek, shy, and t'iao attractive, debonair, and the
words shu nu mean a pure, chaste girl or woman. Thus here in the oldest love
song in China, you have the three essential qualities in the Chinese feminine
ideal, viz. love of seclusion, bashfulness or pudeur, ineffable grace and charm
expressed by the word debonair and last of all, purity or chastity. In short,
the real or true Chinese woman is chaste; she is bashful, has pudeur; and she is
attractive and debonair. This then is the Chinese feminine ideal, _the "Chinese
Woman. "
In the Confucian Catechism which I have translated as
the Couduct of Life, the first part of the book containing the practical
teaching of Confucius on the conduct of life concludes with the description of a
Happy Home thus:
" When wife and children dwell in unison,
' Tis like to harp and lute well-played in tune,
When brothers live in concord and in peace,
The strain of harmony shall never cease.
Make then your Home thus always gay and bright.
Your wife and dear ones shall be your delight.
This Home in China is the miniature Heaven, _as the State with its civic
order, the Chinese Empire, _is the real Heaven, the Kingdom of God come upon
this earth, to the Chinese people. Thus, as the gentleman in China with his
honour, his Religion of Loyalty is the guardian of the State the Civic Order, in
China, so the Chinese woman, the Chinese gentlewoman or lady, with her debonair
charm and grace, her purity, her pudeur, and above all, her Religion of
Self-lessness, _is the the Guardian Angel of the miniature Heaven, the Home in
China.
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE
All foreigners who have tried to learn Chinese say that Chinese is a very
difficult language. But is Chinese a difficult language? Before, however, we
answer this question, let us understand what we mean by the Chinese language.
There are, as everybody knows, two languages_I do not mean dialects,_in China,
the spoken and the written language. Now, by the way, does anybody know the
reason why the Chinese insist upon having these two distinct, spoken and written
languages? I will here give you the reason. In China, as it was at one time in
Europe when Latin was the learned or written language, the people are properly
divided into two distinct classes, the educated and the uneducated. The
colloquial or spoken language is the language for the use of the uneducated, and
the written language is the language for the use of the really educated. In this
way half educated people do not exist in this country. That is the reason, I
say, why the Chinese insist upon having two languages. Now think of the
consequences of having half educated people in a country. Look at Europe and
America to-day. In Europe and America since, from the disuse of Latin, the sharp
distinction between the spoken and the written language has disappeared, there
has arisen a class of half educated people who are allowed to use the same
language as the really educated people, who talk of civilisation, liberty,
neutrality, militarism and panslavinism without in the least understanding what
these words really mean. People say that Prussian Militarism is a danger to
civilisation. But to me it seems, the half educated man, the mob of half
educated men in the world to-day, is the real danger to civilisation. But that
is neither here nor there.
Now to come to the question: is Chinese a difficult language? My answer is,
yes and no. Let us first take the spoken language. The Chinese spoken language,
I say, is not only not difficult, but as compared with the half dozen languages
that I know, _the easiest language in the world except, _Malay. Spoken Chinese
is easy because it is an extremely simple language. It is a language without
case, without tense, without regular and irregular verbs; in fact without
grammar, or any rule whatever. But people have said to me that Chinese is
difficult even because of its simplicity; even because it has no rule or
grammar. That, however, cannot be true. Malay like Chinese, is also a simple
language without grammar or rules; and yet Europeans who learn it, do not find
it difficult. Thus in itself and for the Chinese colloquial or spoken Chinese at
least is not a difficult language. But for educated Europeans and especially for
half educated Europeans who come to China, even colloquial or spoken Chinese is
a very difficult language: and why? Because spoken or colloquial Chinese is, as
I said, the language of uneducated men, of thoroughly uneducated men;
in fact the language of a child. Now as a proof of this, we all know how
easily European children learn colloquial or spoken Chinese, while learned
philogues and sinologues insist in saying that Chinese is so difficult. Chinese,
colloquial Chinese, I say again is the language of a child. My first advice
therefore to my foreign friends who want to leam Chinese is "Be ye like little
children, you will then not only enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but you will
also be able to learn Chinese."
We now come to the written or book language, written Chinese. But here before
I go further, let me say there are also different kinds of written Chinese. The
Missionaries class these under two categories and call them easy wen li and
difficult wen li. But that, in my opinion, is not a satisfactory classification.
The proper classification, I think, should be, plain dress written Chinese;
official uniform
Chinese; and full court dress Chinese. If you like to use Latin, call them:
litera communis or litera officinalis (common or business Chinese) ; litera
classica minor (lesser classical Chinese) ; and litera classica major (higher
classical Chinese).
Now many foreigners have called themselves or have been called Chinese
scholars. Writing an article on Chinese scholarship, some thirty years ago for
the N. C. Daily News, _ah me! those old Shanghai days, Tempora mutantur, nos et
mutamur in illis,_I then said:
"Among Europeans in China, the publication of a few dialogues in some
provincial patois or the collection of a hundred Chinese proverbs at once
entitles a man to call himself a Chinese scholar. ""There is, " I said, "of
course no harm in a name, and with the extraterritoriality clause in the treaty,
an Englishman in China may with impunity call himself Confucius, if so it
pleases him. " Now what I want to say here is this: how many foreigners who call
themselves Chinese scholars, have any idea of what an asset of civilisation is
stored up in that portion of Chinese literature which I have called the Classica
majora, the literature in full court dress Chinese? I say an asset of
civilisation, because I believe that this Classica majora in the Chinese
literature is something which can, as Matthew Arnold says of Homer' s poetry,
"refine the raw natural man: they can transmute him. " In fact, I believe this
Classica majora in Chinese literature will be able to transform one day even the
raw natural men who are now fighting in Europe as patriots, but with the
fighting instincts of wild animals; transform them into peaceful, gentle and
civil persons. Now the object of civilisation, as Ruskin says, is to make
mankind into civil persons who will do away with coarseness, violence, brutality
and fighting.
But revenons a. nos moutons. Is then written Chinese a difficult language? My
answer again is, yes and no. I say, written Chinese, even what I have called the
full court dress Chinese, the classica majora Chinese, is not difficult,
because, like the spoken or colloquial
Chinese, it is extremely simple. Allow me to show you by an average specimen
taken at random how extremely simple, written Chinese even when dressed in full
court dress uniform, is. The specimen I take is a poem of four lines from the
poetry of the T'ang dynasty describing what sacrifices the Chinese people had to
make in order to protect their civilisation against the wild half civilised
fierce Huns from the North. The words of the poem in Chinese are:
which translated into English word for word mean:
Swear sweep the Huns not care self,
Five thousand embroidery sable perish desert dust;
Alas! Wuting riverside bones, Still are Spring chambers dream inside men!
A free English version of the poem is something like this:_
They vowed to sweep the heathen hordes From off their native soil or die:
Five thousand taselled knights, sable-clad,
All dead now on the desert lie.
Alas\ the white bones that bleach cold
Far off along the Wuting stream,
Still come and go as living men
Home somewhere in the loved one ' s dream .
Now, if you will compare it with my poor clumsy English version, you will see
how plain in words and style, how simple in ideas, the original Chinese is. How
plain and simple in words, style and ideas: and yet how deep in thought, how
deep in feeling it is.
In order to have an idea of this kind of Chinese literature, _deep thought
and deep feeling in extremely simple language, _you will have to read the Hebrew
Bible. The Hebrew Bible is one of the deepest books in all the literature of the
world and yet how plain and simple in language. Take this passage for instance:"
How is this faithful city become a harlot! Thy men in the highest places are
disloyal traitors and companions of thieves; every one loveth gifts and
fol-loweth after rewards; they judge not the fatherless neither doth the cause
of the widow come before them. "(Is. I -), or this other passage from the same
prophet:_"I will make children to be their high officials and babes shall rule
over them. And the people shall be oppressed. The child shall behave himself
proudly against the old man and the base against the honourable! " What a
picture! The picture of the awful state of a nation or people. Do you see the
picture before you now? In fact, if you want to have literature which can
transmute men, can civilise mankind, you will have to go to the literature of
the Hebrew people or of the Greeks or to Chinese literature. But Hebrew and
Greek are now become dead languages, whereas Chinese is a living language_the
language of four hundred million people still living to-day.
But now to sum up what I want to say on the Chinese language. Spoken as well
as written Chinese is, in one sense, a very difficult language. It is difficult,
not because it is complex. Many European languages such as Latin and French are
difficult because they are complex and have many rules. Chinese is difficult not
because it is complex, but because it is deep. It is difficult because it is a
language for expressing deep feeling in simple language. That is the secret of
the difficulty of the Chinese language. In fact, as I have said else where,
Chinese is a language of the heart: a poetical language. That is the reason why
even a simple letter in prose written in classical Chinese reads like poetry. In
order to understand written Chinese, especially
what I call full court dress Chinese, you must have your full nature, _the
heart and the head, the soul and the intellect equally developed .
It is for this reason that for people with modern European education, Chinese
is especially difficult, because modern European e-ducation developes
principally only one part of a man' s nature_his intellect. In other words,
Chinese is difficult to a man with modern European education, because Chinese is
a deep language and modem European education, which aims more at quantity than
quality, is apt to make a man shallow. Finally for half educated people, even
the spoken language, as I have said, is difficult. For half educated people it
may be said of them as was once said of rich men, it is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle, than for them to understand high classical Chinese
and for this reason: written Chinese is a language only for the use of really
educated people. In short, written Chinese, classical Chinese is difficult
because it is the language of really educated people and real education is a
difficult thing but as the Greek proverb says, "all beautiful things are
difficult. "
But before I conclude, let me here give another specimen of written Chinese
to illustrate what I mean by simplicity and depth of feeling which is to be
found even in the Classica Minora, literature written in official uniform
Chinese. It is a poem of four lines by a modem poet written on New? Year's Eve.
The words in Chinese are:
which, translated word for word, mean: _
Don ' ( say home poor pass year hard,
North wind has blown many times cold, Next year peach willow hall front trees
Pay-back you spring light full eyes see.
A free translation would be something like this:
TO MY WIFE Fret not, _though poor we yet can pass the year ;
Let the north wind blow ne' er so chill and drear, Next year when peach and
willow are in bloom, You' II yet see Spring and sunlight in our home.
Here is another specimen longer and more sustained. It is a poem by Tu Fu,
the Wordsworth of China, of the T'ang Dynasty. I will here first give my English
translation. The subject is
MEETING WITH AN OLD FRIEND In life, friends seldom are brought near;
Like stars, each one shines in its sphere. To-night,_oh\ what a happy night [
We sit beneath the same lamplight. Our youth and strength last but a day. You
and I_ah! our hairs are grey . Friends! Half are in a better land, With tears we
grasp each other ' s hand. Twenty more years, _short, after all, I once again
ascend your hall. When we met, you had not a wife ;
Now you have children, _such is life\ Beaming, they greet their father ' ^
chum ;
They ask me from where I have come. Before our say, we each have said, The
table is already laid. Fresh salads from the garden near,
Rice mixed with millet, _frugal cheer . When shall we meet ? ' tis hard to
know . And so let the wine freely flow. This wine, I know, will do no harm. My
old friend' s welcome is so warm . To-morrow I go, _to be whirled. Again into
the wide, wide world.
The above, my version I admit, is almost doggerel, which is meant merely to
give the meaning of the Chinese text. But here is the Chinese text which is not
doggerel, but poetry _poetry simple to the verge of colloquialism, yet with a
grace, dignity pathos and nobleness which I cannot reproduce and which perhaps
it is impossible to reproduce, in English in such simple language.
JOHN SMITH IN CHINA
" The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his
own but he also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of
existence after his own ."*.... GOETHE.
Mr. W. Stead once asked: "What is the secret of Marie Corelli's popularity?"
His answer was: "Like author, like reader; because the John Smiths who read her
novels live in Marie Corelli' s world and regard her as the most authoritative
exponent of the Universe in which they live, move and have their being." What
Marie Corelli is to the John Smiths in Great Britain, the Rev. Arthur Smith is
to the John Smiths in China.
Now the difference between the really educated person and the half educated
one is this. The really educated person wants to read books which will tell him
the real truth about a thing, whereas the half educated person prefers to read
books which will tell him what he wants the thing to be, what his vanity prompts
him to wish that the thing should be. John Smith in China wants very much to be
a superior person to the Chinaman and the Rev. Arthur Smith writes a book to
prove conclusively that he, John Smith, is a very much superior person to the
Chinaman. There-fore, the Rev. Arthur Smith is a person very dear to John Smith,
and the "Chinese Characteristics" become a Bible to John Smith.
But Mr. W. Stead says, "It is John Smith and his neighbours who now rule the
British Empire." Consequently I have lately taken the trouble to read the books
which furnish John Smith with his ideas
* "Der Philister negiert nicht nur andere Zustande als der seininge ist, er
will auch dass alle ubrigen Menschen auf seine Weise existieren sollen,
"_goethe.
on China and the Chinese.
The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table classified minds under the heads of
arithmetical and algebraical intellects. "All economical and practical wisdom, "
he observes, " is an extension or variation of the arithmetical formulaplusequal
. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the
expression a plus b equal c. " Now the whole family of John Smith belong
decidedly to the category of minds which the Autocrat calls arithmetical
intellects. John Smith' s father, John Smith senr, alias John Bull, made his
fortune with the simple formulaplusequal . John Bull came to China to sell his
Manchester goods and to make money and he got on very well with John Chinaman
because both he and John Chinaman understood and agreed perfectly upon the
formulaplusequal . But John Smith Junr, who now rules the British Empire, comes
out to China with his head filled with a plus b equal c which he does not
understand_and not content to sell his Manchester goods, wants to civilise the
Chinese or, as he expresses it, to "spread Anglo-Saxon ideals . " The result is
that John Smith gets on very badly with John Chinaman, and, what is still worse,
under the civilising influence of John Smith's a plus b equal c Anglo-Saxon
ideals, John Chinaman, instead of being a good, honest, steady customer for
Manchester goods neglects his business, goes to Chang Su-ho' s Gardens to
celebrate the Constitution, in fact becomes a mad, raving reformer.
I have lately, by the help of Mr.Putnam Weale's "Reshaping of the Far East"
and other books, tried to compile a Catechism of Anglo-Saxon Ideals for the use
of Chinese students. The result, so far, is something like this:_
. _ What is the chief end of man?
The chief end of man is to glorify the British Empire.
. _Do you believe in God? Yes, when I go to Church.
._ What do you believe in when you are not in Church? I believe in
interests_in what will pay.
. _What is justification by faith? To believe in everyone for himself.
. _What is justification by works? Put money in your pocket.
. _What is Heaven?
Heaven means to be able to live in Bubbling Well Roa * and drive in
victorias.
. _What is Hell?
Hell means to be unsuccessful.
. _What is a state of human perfectibility? Sir Robert Hart' s Custom Service
in China.
. _What is blasphemy?
To say that Sir Robert Hart is not a great man of genius.
. _What is the most heinous sin? To obstruct British trade.
. _For what purpose did God create the four hundred million Chinese?
For the British to trade upon.
. _What form of prayer do you use when you pray? We thank Thee,Lord, that we
are not as the wicked Russians and brutal Germans are, who want to partition
China.
. _Who is the great Apostle of the Anglo-Saxon Ideals in China.
Dr. Morrison, the Times Correspondent in Peking. It may be a libel to say
that the above is a true statement of Anglo-Saxon ideals, but any one who will
take the trouble to read Mr. Putnam Weale's book will not deny that the above is
a fair represen-
* The most fashionable quarter in Shanghai.
tation of the Anglo-Saxon ideals of Mr. Putnam Weale and John Smith who reads
Mr. Putnam Weale's books.
The most curious thing about the matter is that the civilising influence of
John Smith' s Anglo-Saxon ideals is really taking effect in China. Under this
influence John Chinaman too is now wanting to glorify the Chinese Empire. The
old Chinese literati with his eight-legged essays was a harmless humbug. But
foreigners will find to their cost that the new Chinese literati who under the
influence of John Smith's Anglo-Saxon ideals is clamouring for a constitution,
is likely to become an intolerable and dangerous nuisance. In the end I fear
John Bull Senior will not only find his Manchester goods trade ruined, but he
will even be put to the expense of sending out a General Gordon or Lord
Kitchener to shoot his poor old friend John Chinaman who has become non compos
mentis under the civilising influence of John Smith's Anglo-Saxon ideals. But
that is neither here nor there.
What I want to say here in plain, sober English is this. It is a wonder to me
that the Englishman who comes out to China with his head filled with all the
arrant nonsense written in books about the Chinese, can get along at all with
the Chinese with whom he has to deal. Take this specimen, for instance, from a
big volume, entitled "The Far East: its history and its questions, " by Alexis
Krausse.
"The crux of the whole question affecting the Powers of the Western nations
in the Far East lies in the appreciation of the true inwardness of the Oriental
mind. An Oriental not only sees things from a different standpoint to (!) the
Occidental, but his whole train of thought and mode of reasoning are at
variance. The very sense of perception implanted in the Asiatic varies from that
with which we are endowed!
After reading the last sentence an Englishman in China, when he wants a piece
of -white paper, if he follows the ungrammatical Mr.
Krausse's advice, would have to say to his boy:_"Boy, bring me a piece of
black paper. " It is, I think, to the credit of practical men a-mong foreigners
in China that they can put away all this nonsense about the true inwardness of
the Oriental mind when they come to deal practically with the Chinese. In fact I
believe that those foreigners get on best with the Chinese and are the most
successful men in China who stick toplusequal , and leave the a plus b equal c
theories of Oriental inwardness and Anglo-Saxon ideals to John Smith and Mr.
Krausse. Indeed when one remembers that in those old days, before the Rev.
Arthur Smith wrote his "Chinese Characteristics," the relations between the
heads or taipans of great British firms such as Jardine, Matheson and their
Chinese compradores * were always those of mutual affection, passing on to one
or more generations; when one remembers this, one is inclined to ask what good,
after all, has clever John Smith with his a plus b equal c theories of Oriental
inwardness and Anglo-Saxon ideals done, either to Chinese or foreigners?
Is there then no truth in Kipling' s famous dictum that East is East and West
is West? Of course there is. When you deal withplusequal , there is little or no
difference. It is only when you come to problems as a plus b equal c that there
is a great deal of difference between East and West. But to be able to solve the
equation a plus b equal c between East and West, one must have real aptitude for
higher mathematics. The misfortune of the world to-day is that the solution of
the equation a plus b equal c in Far Eastern problems, is in the hands of John
Smith who not only rules the British Empire, but is an ally of the Japanese
nation, _John Smith who does not understand the elements even of algebraical
problems. The solu-* Chinese employed by foreign firms in China to be agents
between them and Chinese merchants.
tion of the equation a plus b equal c between East and West is a very complex
and difficult problem. For in it there are many unknown quantities, not only
such as the East of Confucius and the East of Mr. Kang Yu-wei and the Viceroy
Tuan Fang, but also the West of Shakespeare and Goethe and the West of John
Smith. Indeed when you have solved your a plus b equal c equation properly, you
will find that there is very little difference between the East of Confucius and
the West of Shakespeare and Goethe, but you will find a great deal of difference
between even the West of Dr. Legge the scholar, and the West of the Rev. Arthur
Smith. Let me give a concrete illustration of what I mean.
The Rev. Arthur Smith, speaking of Chinese histories, says:_
"Chinese histories are antediluvian, not merely in their attempts to go back
to the ragged edge of zero of time for a point of departure, but in the
interminable length of the sluggish and turbid current which carries on its
bosom not only the mighty vegetation of past ages, but wood, hay and stubble
past all reckoning. None but a relatively timeless race could either compose or
read such histories: none but the Chinese memory could store them away in its
capacious abdomen! "
Now let us hear Dr. Legge on the same subject. Dr. Legge, speaking of
thestandard dynastic histories of China, says:
"No nation has a history so thoroughly digested; and on the whole it is
trustworthy."
Speaking of another great Chinese literary collection. Dr. Legge says:_"The
work was not published, as I once supposed by Imperial authority, but under the
superintendence and at the expense (aided by other officers) of Yuen Yun,
Governor-General of Kwangtung and Kwangse, in the th year of the last reign, of
Kien-lung . The publication of so extensive a work shows a public spirit and
zeal for literature among the high officials of China which should keep for-
eigners from thinking meanly of them. "
The above then is what I mean when I say that there is a great deal of
difference not only between the East and West but also between the West of Dr.
Legge, the scholar who can appreciate and admire zeal for literature, and the
West of the Rev. Arthur Smith who is the beloved of John Smith in China.
A GREAT SINOLOGUE
Don ' t forget to be a gentleman of sense, -while you try to be a great
scholar ;
Don' t become a fool, while you try to be a great scholar .
Confucius Sayings, Ch:VI. II.
I have lately been reading Dr. Giles' "Adversaria Sinica, " and in reading
them, was reminded of a saying of another British consul Mr. Hopkins that "when
foreign residents in China speak of a man as a sinologue, they generally think
of him as a fool. "
Dr. Giles' has the reputation of being a great Chinese scholar. Considering
the quantity of work he has done, that reputation is not undeserved. But I think
it is now time that an attempt should be made to accurately estimate the quality
and real value of Dr. Giles' work.
In one respect Dr. Giles has the advantage over all sinologues past and
present,_he possesses the literary gift: he can write good idiomatic English.
But on the other hand Dr. Giles utterly lacks the philosophical insight and
sometimes even common sense. He can translate Chinese sentences, but he cannot
interpret and understand Chinese thought. In this respect. Dr. Giles has the
same characteristics as the Chinese literati. Confucius says, "When men' s
education or book learning get the better of their natural qualities, they
become literati."
To the Chinese literati, books and literature are merely materials for
writing books and so they write books upon books. They live, move and have their
being in a world of books, having nothing to do with the world of real human
life. It never occurs to the literati that books and literature are only means
to an end. The study of books and literature to the true scholar is but the
means to enable him to inter-
pret, to criticise, to understand human life.
Matthew Arnold says, "It is through the apprehension either of all
literature, _the entire history of the human spirit, _or of a single great
literary work as a connected whole, that the power of literature makes itself
felt. " But in all that Dr. Giles has written, there is not a single sentence
which betrays the fact that Dr. Giles has conceived or even tried to conceive
the Chinese literature as a connected whole.
It is this want of philosophical insight in Dr. Giles which makes him so
helpless in the arrangement of his materials in his books. Take for instance his
great dictionary. It is in no sense a dictionary at all. It is merely a
collection of Chinese phrases and sentences, translated by Dr. Giles without any
attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method. As a dictionary for the
purposes of the scholar. Dr. Giles' dictionary is decidedly of less value than
even the old dictionary of Dr. Williams.
Dr. Giles' Chinese biographical dictionary, it must be admitted, is a work of
immense labour. But here again Dr. Giles shows an utter lack of the most
ordinary judgment. In such a work, one would expect to find notices only of
really notable men.
Hie manus ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi, Quique sacerdotes casti, dum
vita manebat, Quique pii votes et Phoebo digna locuti, Inventas aut qui vitam
excoluere per artes, Quique sui memores aliquos fecere merendo.
But side by side with sages and heroes of antiquity, with mythical and
mythological personages, we find General Tcheng Ki-tong,
Mr. Ku Hung-ming, Viceroy Chang Chi-tung and Captain Lew Buah, _the last
whose sole title to distinction is that he used often to treat his foreign
friends with unlimited quantities of champagne!
Lastly these "Adversaria,"_Dr. Giles' latest publication_will not, I am
afraid, enhance Dr. Giles' reputation as a scholar of sense and judgment. The
subjects chosen, for the most part, have no earthly practical or human interest.
It would really seem that Dr. Giles has taken the trouble to write these books
not with any intention to tell the world anything about the Chinese and their
literature but to show what a learned Chinese scholar Dr. Giles is and how much
better he understands Chinese than anybody else. Moreover, Dr. Giles, here as
elsewhere, shows a harsh and pugnacious dogmatism which is as un-philosophical,
as unbecoming a scholar as it is unpleasing. It is these characteristics of
sinologues like Dr. Giles which have made, as Mr. Hopkins says, the very name of
sinologue and Chinese scholarship a byword and scorn among practical foreign
residents in the Far East.
I shall here select two articles from Dr. Giles' latest publication and will
try to show that if hitherto writings of foreign scholars on the subjects of
Chinese learning and Chinese literature have been without human or practical
interest, the fault is not in Chinese learning and Chinese literature.
The first article is entitled "What is filial piety." The point in the
article turns upon the meaning of two Chinese characters. A disciple asked what
is filial piety. Confucius said: se nan 'fa^ (lit, colour difficult).
Dr. Giles says, "The question is, and has been for twenty centuries past,
what do.these two characters mean?" After citing and dismissing all the
interpretations and translations of native and foreign scholars alike. Dr. Giles
of course finds out the true meaning. In order to show Dr. Giles harsh and
unscholarly dogmatic manner, I shall here quote Dr. Giles' words with which he
announces his discovery. Dr.
Giles says:_
"It may seem presumptuous after the above exordium to declare that the
meaning lies a la Bill Stumps (! ) upon the surface, and all you have to do, as
the poet says, is to
Stoop, and there it is;
Seek it not right nor left!
"When Tzu-hsia asked Confucius, 'What is filial piety?' the latter replied
simply,
"' se to define it, nan is difficult, 'a most intelligible and appropriate
answer."
I shall not here enter into the niceties of Chinese grammar to show that Dr.
Giles is wrong. I will only say here that if Dr. Giles is right in supposing
that the character se is a verb, then in good grammatical Chinese, the sentence
would not read se nan, but se chih wei nanto define it, is difficult. The
impersonal pronoun chi it, is here absolutely indispensable, if the character se
here is used as a verb.
But apart from grammatical niceties, the translation as given by Dr. Giles of
Confucius answer, when taken with the whole context, has no point or sense in it
at all.
Tzu hsia asked, what is filial piety? Confucius said, " The difficulty is
with the manner of doing it. That merely when there is work to be done, the
young people should take the trouble of doing it, and when there is wine and
food, the old folk are allowed to partake it, _do you really think that is
filial piety?" (Discourses and Sayings Ch. .. ) Now the whole point in the text
above lies in this, _that importance is laid not upon what duties you perform
towards your parents, but upon how _in what manner, with what spirit, you per-
_ Compare another saying of Confucius Il!f'^"fe Oi' iao yen ling se,
plausible speech and fine manners (Discourses and Sayings Ch. .. )
form those duties.
The greatness and true efficacy of Confucius' moral teaching, I wish to say
here, lies in this very point which Dr. Giles fails to see, _ the point namely
that in the performance of moral duties, Confucius insisted upon the importance
not of the what, but of the how. For herein lies the difference between what is
called morality and religion, between mere rules of moral conduct and the
vivifying teaching of great and true religious teachers. Teachers of morality
merely tell you what kind of action is moral and what kind of action is immoral.
But true religious teachers do not merely tell you this. True religious teachers
do not merely inculcate the doing of the outward act, but insist upon the
importance of the manner, the inwardness of the act. True religious teachers
teach that the morality or immorality of our actions does not consist in what we
do, but in how we do it.
This is what Matthew Arnold calls Christ' s method in his teaching. When the
poor widow gave her mite, it was not what she gave that Christ called the
attention of his hearers to, but how she gave it. The moralists said, "Thou
shalt not commit adultery." But Christ said, "I say unto you that whosoever
looketh on a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery. "
In the same way the moralists in Confucius' time said: Children must cut
firewood and carry water for their parents and yield to them the best of the
food and wine in the house: that is filial peity. But Confucius said, "No; that
is not filial piety." True filial piety does not consist in the mere outward
performance of these services to our parents. True filial piety coonsists in
how, in what manner, with what spirit we perform these services. The difficulty,
said Confucius, is with the manner of doing it. It is, I will finally say here,
by virtue of this method in his teaching, of looking into the inwardness of
moral actions that Confucius becomes, not as the Christian missionaries say, a
mere moralist and philosopher, but a great and true religious teacher.
As a further illustration of Confucius method, take the present reform
movement in China. The so-called progressive mandarins with applause from
foreign newspapers are making a great fuss_even going to Europe and America,
_trying to find out what reforms to adopt in China. But unfortunately the
salvation of China will not depend upon what reforms are made by these
progressive mandarins, but upon how these reforms are carried out. It seems a
pity that these progressive mandarins, _instead of going to Europe and America,
to study constitution could not be made to stay at home and study Confucius. For
until these mandarins take to heart Confucius' teaching and his method and
attend to the how instead of the what in this matter of reform, nothing but
chaos, misery and suffering will come out of the present reform movement in
China.
The other article in Dr. Giles "Adversaria Sinica" which I will briefly
examine, is entitled_ "The four classes. "
The Japanese Baron Suyematzu in an interview said that the Japanese divided
their people into four classes, _soldiers, farmers, artisans and warriors. Upon
this Dr. Giles says. "It is incorrect to translate shih (rb) as soldier; that is
a later meaning." Dr. Giles further says, "in its earliest use the word shih
(dr) referred to civilians. "
Now the truth is just on the other side. In its earliest use, the word shih
(dr) referred to gentlemen who in ancient China, as it is now in Europe, bore
arms, _the noblesse of the sword. Hence the officers and soldiers of an army
were spoken of as shih tsu.
The civilian official class in ancient China were called shi _ clericus.When
the feudal system in China was abolished (nd cent. B.C. , ) and fighting ceased
to be the only profession of gentlemen, this civilian official class rose into
prominence, became lawyers and constituted the noblesse of the robe as
distinguished from the shihthe noblesse of the sword.
H. E. the Viceroy Chang of Wuchang once asked me why the
foreign consuls who were civil functionaries, when in full dress, wore
swords. In reply I said that it was because they were shih which in ancient
China meant not a civilian scholar, but a gentleman who bore arms and served in
the army. H. E. agreed and the next day gave orders that all the pupils in the
schools in Wuchang should wear military uniform.
This question therefore which Dr. Giles has raised whether the Chinese word
shih means a civilian or a military man has a great practical interest. For the
question whether China in the future will be independent or come under a foreign
yoke will depend upon whether she will ever have an efficient army and that
question again will depend upon whether the educated and governing class in
China will ever regain the true ancient meaning and conception of the word
shihnot as civilian scholar, but as a gentleman who bears arms and is able to
defend his country against aggression.
CHINESE SCHOLARSHIP
PART I
Not long ago a body of missionaries created a great deal of amusement by
styling themselves, on the cover of some scientific tracts, as "famous savants"
su ju (Titfill) . The idea was of course extremely ridiculous. There is
certainly not one Chinaman in the whole Empire who would venture to arrogate to
himself the Chinese word ju, which includes in it all the highest attributes of
a scholar or literary man. We often hear, however, a European spoken of as a
Chinese scholar. In the advertisement of the China Review, we are told that "
among the missionaries a high degree of Chinese scholarship is assiduously
cultivated. " A list is then given of regular contributors, "all, " we are to
believe, "well-known names, indicative of sound scholarship and thorough mastery
of their subject. "
Now in order to estimate the high degree of scholarship said to be
assiduously cultivated by the missionary bodies in China, it is not necessary to
take such high ideal standards as those propounded by the German Fichte in his
lectures upon the Literary Man, or the American Emerson in his Literary Ethics.
The late American Minister to Germany, Mr. Taylor, was acknowledged to be a
great German scholar; but though an Englishman who has read a few plays of
Schiller, or sent to a magazine some verses translated from Heine, might be
thought a German scholar among his tea drinking circles, he would scarcely have
his name appear as such in print or placard. Yet among Europeans in China the
publication of a few dialogues in some provincial patois, or collection of a
hundred proverbs, at once entitles
a man to be called a Chinese scholar. There is, of course, no harm in a name,
and, with the exterritorial clause in the treaty, an Englishman in China might
with impunity call himself Confucius if so it pleases him.
We have been led to consider this question because it is thought by some that
Chinese scholarship has passed, or is passing, the early pioneering, and is
about to enter a new stage, when students of Chinese will not be content with
dictionary-compiling or such other brick-carrying work, but attempts will be
made at works of construction, at translations of the most perfect specimens of
the national literature, and not only judgment, but final judgment, supported
with reasons and arguments, be passed upon the most venerated names of the
Chinese literary Pantheon. We now propose to examine: st, how far it is true
that the knowledge of Chinese among Europeans is undergoing this change; ndly,
what has already been done in Chinese scholarship; rdly, what is the actual
state of Chinese scholarship at the present day; and in the last place, to point
out what we conceive Chinese scholarship should be. It has been said that a
dwarf standing upon the shoulders of a giant is apt to imagine himself of
greater dimensions than the giant; still, it must be admitted that the dwarf,
with the advantage of his position, will certainly command a wider and more
extensive view. We will, therefore, standing upon the shoulders of those who
have preceded us, take a survey of the past, present, and future of Chinese
scholarship; and if, in our attempt, we should be led to express opinions not
wholly of approval of those who have gone before us, these opinions, we hope,
may not be construed to imply that we in any way plume ourselves upon our
superiority: we claim only the advantage of our position.
First, then, that the knowledge of Chinese among Europeans has changed, is
only so far true, it seems to us, that the greater part of the difficulty of
acquiring a knowledge of the language has been removed.
"The once prevalent belief, " says Mr. Giles, "in the great difficulty of
acquiring a colloquial knowledge, even of a single Chinese dialect has long
since taken its place among other historical fictions." Indeed, even with regard
to the written language, a student in the British Consular Service, after two
years' residence in Peking and a year or two at a Consulate, can now readily
make out at sight the general meaning of an ordinary despatch. That the
knowledge of Chinese a-mong foreigners in China has so far changed, we readily
admit; but what is contended for beyond this we feel very much inclined to
doubt.
After the early Jesuit missionaries, the publication of Dr. Morri-son's
famous dictionary is justly regarded as the point de depart of all that has been
accomplished in Chinese scholarship. The work will certainly remain a standing
monument of the earnestness, zeal and conscientiousness of the early Protestant
Missionaries. After Morrison came a class of scholars of whom Sir John Davis and
Dr. Gutzlaff might be taken as representatives. Sir John Davis really knew no
Chinese, and he was honest enough to confess it himself. He certainly spoke
Mandarin and could perhaps without much difficulty read a novel written in that
dialect. But such knowledge as he then possessed, would now-a-days scarcely
qualify a man for an interpreter-ship in any of the Consulates. It is
nevertheless very remarkable that the notions about the Chinese of most
Englishmen, even to this day, will be found to have been acquired from Sir John
Davis' s book on China. Dr. Gutzlaff perhaps knew a little more Chinese than Sir
John Davis; but he attempted to pass himself off as knowing a great deal more
than he did. The late Mr. Thomas Meadows afterwards did good service in exposing
the pretension of Dr. Gutzlaff, and such other men as the missionaries Hue and
Du Halde. After this, it is curious to find Mr.Boulger, in his recent History of
China, quoting these men as authorities.
In France, Remusat was the first to occupy a Chair of Chinese Professorship
in any European University. Of his labours we are not in a position to express
an opinion. But one book of his attracted notice: it was a translation of a
novel, "The Two Cousins.' The book was read by Leigh Hunt, and by him
recommended to Carlyle, and by Carlyle to John Stirling, who read it with
delight, and said that the book was certainly written by a man of genius, but "a
man of genius after the dragon pattern, "the Ju Kiao Li, * as the novel is
called in Chinese, is a pleasant enough book to read, but it takes no high place
even among the inferior class of books of which it is a specimen. Nevertheless
it is always pleasant to think that thoughts and images from the brain of a
Chinaman have actually passed through such minds as those of Carlyle and Leigh
Hunt.
After Remusat followed Stanislas Julien and Pauthier. The German poet Heine
says that Julien made the wonderful and important discovery that Mons. Pauthier
did not understand Chinese at all and the latter, on the other hand, also made a
discovery, namely that Monsieur Julien knew no Sanscrit. Nevertheless the
pioneering work done by these writers was very considerable. One advantage they
possessed was that they were thorough masters of their own language. Another
French writer might be mentioned, Mons. D' Harvey St. Denys, whose translation
of the T' ang poets is a breach made into one department of Chinese literature
in which nothing has been done before or since.
In Germany Dr. Plath of Munich published a book on China, which he entitled "
Die Manchurei. " Like all books written in Germany, it is a solid piece of work
thoroughly well done. Its evident design was to give a history of the origin of
the present Manchu dynasty in China. But the latter portions of the book contain
information on questions connected with China, which we know not where to find
in any other book written in a European language. Such work as Dr. Williams' s
Middle Kingdom is a mere nursery story-book compared with it. Another German
Chinese scholar is Herr von Strauss, formerly the Minister of a little German
principality which has sincebeen swallowed up by Prussia. The old Minister in
his retirement a-mused himself with the study of Chinese. He published a
translation of Lao Tzu, and recently of the Shih King. Mr. Faber, of Canton,
speaks of some portions of his Lao Tzu as being perfect. His translation of the
Odes is also said to be very spirited. We have, unfortunately, not been able to
procure these books.
The scholars we have named above may be regarded as sinologues of the
earliest period, beginning with the publication of Dr. Morrisons's dictionary.
The second period began with the appearance of two standard works: st, the Tzu
Erh Chih of Sir Thomas Wadend, the Chinese Classics of Dr. Legge.
As to the first, those who have now gone beyond the Mandarin colloquial in
their knowledge might be inclined to regard it lightingly. But it is,
notwithstanding, a great work_the most perfect, within the limits of what was
attempted, of all the English books that have been published on the Chinese
language. The book, moreover, was written in response to a crying necessity of
the time. Some such book had to be written, and lo! it was done, and done in a
way that took away all chance of contemporary as well as future competition.
That the work of translating the Chinese Classics had to be done, was also a
necessity of the time, and Dr. Legge has accomplished it, and the result is a
dozen huge, ponderous tomes. The quantity of work done is certainly stupendous,
whatever may be thought of the quality. In presence of these huge volumes we
feel almost afraid to speak. Nevertheless, it must be confessed that the work
does not altogether satisfy us. Mr. Balfour justly remarks that in translating
these classics a great deal depends upon the terminology employed by the
translator. Now we feel that the terminology employed by Dr. Legge is harsh,
crude, inadequate, and in some places, almost unidiomatic. So far for the form.
As to the matter, we will not hazard our own opinion, but will let the Rev. Mr.
Faber of Canton speak for us. "Dr. Legge's own notes on Mencius, "he says, "show
that Dr. Legge has not a philosophic understanding of his author." We are
certain that Dr. Legge could not have read and translated these works without
having in some way tried to conceive and shape to his own mind the teaching of
Confucius and his school as a connected whole; yet it is extraordinary that
neither in his notes nor in his dissertations has Dr. Legge let slip a single
phrase or sentence to show what he conceived the teaching of Confucius really to
be, as a philosophic whole. Altogether, therefore, Dr. Legge' s judgment on the
value of these works cannot by any means be accepted as final, and the
translator of the Chinese Classics is yet to come. Since the appearance of the
two works above mentioned, many books have been written on China: a few, it is
true, of really great scholastic importance; but none, we believe showing that
Chinese scholarship has reached an important turning point.
First, there is Mr. Wylie' s "Notes on Chinese Literature. " It is, however,
a mere catalogue, and not a book with any literary pretension at all. Another is
the late Mr. Mayers's "Chinese Readers Manual . " It is certainly not a work
that can lay claim to any degree of perfection. Nevertheless, it is a very great
work, the most honest conscientious and unpretending of all the books that have
been written on China. Its usefulness, moreover, is inferior only to the
Tzu-Erh-Chi of Sir Thomas Wade.
Another Chinese scholar of note is Mr. Herbert A. Giles of the British
Consular Service. Like the early French sinologues, Mr. Giles possesses the
enviable advantage of a clear, vigorous, and beautiful
style. Every object he touches upon becomes at once clear and luminous. But
with one or two exceptions, he has not been quite fortunate in the choice of
subjects worthy of his pen. One exception is the "Strange Stories from a Chinese
Studio," which may be taken as a model of what translation from the Chinese
should be. But the Liao-chai-chih-i, a remarkably beautiful literary work of art
though it be, belongs yet not to the highest specimens of Chinese literature.
Next to Dr.Legge's labours, Mr.Balfour's recent translation of the Nan-hua
King of Chuang-tzu is a work of certainly the highest ambition. We confess to
have experienced, when we first heard the work announced, a degree of
expectation and delight which the announcement of an Englishman entering the
Hanlin College would scarcely have raised in us. The Nan-hua King is
acknowledged by the Chinese to be one of the most perfect of the highest
specimens of their national literature. Since its appearance two centuries
before the Christian era, the influence of the book upon the literature of China
is scarcely inferior to the works of Confucius and his schools; while its effect
upon the language and spirit of the poetical and imaginative literature of
succeeding dynasties is almost as exclusive as that of the Four Books and Five
Chinese upon the philosophical works of China. But Mr.Balfour's work is not a
translation at all; it is simply a mistranslation. This, we acknowledge, is a
heavy, and for us, daring judgment to pass upon a work upon which Mr. Balfour
must have spent many years. But we have ventured it, and it will be expected of
us to make good our judgment. We believe Mr. Balfour would hardly condesend to
join issue with us if we were to raise the question of the true interpretation
of the philosophy of Chuang-tzu. "But,"_we quote from the Chinese preface of Lin
Hsi-chung, a recent editor of the Nan-hua King_"in reading a book, it is
necessary to understand first the meaning of each single word: then only can you
construe the sentences, then only can you perceive the arrangement of the
para-graphs; and then, last of all, can you get at the central proposition of
the whole chapter." Now every page of Mr. Balfour' s translation bears marks
that he has not understood the meaning of many single words, that he has not
construed the sentences correctly, and that he has missed the arrangement of the
paragraphs. If these propositions which we have assumed can be proved to be
true, as they can easily be done, being merely points regarding rules of grammar
and syntax, it then follows very clearly that Mr. Balfour has missed the meaning
and central proposition of whole chapters.
But of all the Chinese scholars of the present day we are inclined to place
the Reverend Mr. Faber of Canton at the head. We do not think that Mr. Faber's
labours are of more scholastic value or a higher degree of literary merit than
the works of others, but we find that almost every sentence he has written shows
a grasp of literary and philosophic principles such as we do not find in any
other scholar of the present time. What we conceive these principles to be we
must reserve for the next portion of the present paper, when we hope to be able
to state the methods, aims, and objects of Chinese scholarship.
CHINESE SCHOLARSHIP
PART II
Mr.Faber has made the remark that the Chinese do not understand any
systematic method of scientific enquiry. Nevertheless in one of Chinese
Classics, called " Higher Education * , " a work which is considered by most
foreign scholars as a Book of Platitudes, a concatenation is given of the order
in which the systematic study of a scholar should be pursued. The student of
Chinese cannot perhaps do better than follow the course laid down in that book
namely, to begin his study with the individual, to proceed from the individual
to the family, and from the family to the Government.
First, then: it is necessary and indispensable that the student should
endeavour to arrive at a just knowledge of the principles of individual conduct
of the Chinese. Secondly, he will examine and see how these principles are
applied and carried out in the complex social relations and family life of the
people. Thirdly, he will be able then to give his attention, and direct his
study, to the government and administrative institutions of the country. Such a
programme as we have indicated, can, of course, be followed out only in general
outline; to carry it fully out would require the devotion and undivided energies
of almost a whole lifetime. But we should certainly refuse to consider a man, a
Chinese scholar or a attribute to him any high degree of scholarship, unless he
had in some way made himself familiar with the principles above indicated. The
German poet Goethe says: "In the* Known among foreigners as the "Great Learning
.works of man, as in those of nature, what is really deserving of attention,
above everything, is_the intention." Now in the study of national character, it
is also of the first importance to pay attention, not only to the actions and
practice of the people, but also to their notions and theories; to get a
knowledge of what they consider as good and what as bad, what they regard as
just and what as unjust, what they look upon as beautiful and what as not
beautiful, and how they distinguish wisdom from foolishness. This is what we
mean when we say that the student of Chinese should study the principles of
individual conduct. In other words, we mean to say that you must get at the
national ideals . If it is asked how this is to be attained: we answer, by the
study of the national literature, in which revelations of the best and highest
as well as the worst side of the character of a people can be read. The one
object, therefore, which should engage the attention of the foreign student of
Chinese, is the standard national literature of the people: whatever preparatory
studies it may by necessary for him to go through should serve only as means
towards the attainment of that one object. Let us now see how the student is to
study the Chinese literature.
"The civilisations of Europe, " says a German writer, "rest upon those of
Greece, Rome and Palestine; the Indians and Persians are of the same Aryan stock
as the people of Europe, and are therefore related; and the influence of the
intercourse with the Arabs during the Middle Ages, upon European culture has not
even to this day, altogether disappeared. " But as for the Chinese, the origin
and development of their civilisation rest upon foundations altogether foreign
to the culture of the people of Europe. The foreign student of Chinese
literature, therefore, has all the disadvantages to overcome which must result
form the want of community of primary ideas and notions. It will be necessary
for him, not only to equip himself with these foreign notions and ideas, but
also, first of all, to find their equivalents in the Europe languages, and if
these equivalents do not exist, to disintegrate them, and to see to which side
of the universal nature of man these ideas and notions may be referred. Take,
for instance, those Chinese words of constant recurrence in the Classics, and
generally translated into English as "benevolence, ""justice," and "propriety"
(U). Now when we come to take these English words together with the context, we
feel that they are not adequate: they do not connote all the ideas the Chinese
words contain. Again, the word "humanity, " is perhaps the most exact equivalent
for the Chinese word translated "benevolence;" but then, "humanity" must be
understood in a sense different from its idiomatic use in the English language.
A venturesome translator would use the "love" and "righteousness" of the Bible,
which are perhaps as exact as any other, having regard both for the sense of the
words and the idiom of the language. Now, however, if we disintegrate and refer
the primary notions which these words convey, to the universal nature of man, we
get, at once, at their full significance: namely, "the good, ""the true, " and
"the beautiful. "
But, moreover, the literature of a nation, if it is to be studied at all,
must be studied systematically and as one connected whole, and not fragmentarily
and without plan or order, as it has hitherto been done by most foreign
scholars. "It is, " says Mr. Matthew Arnold, "it is through the apprehension,
either of all literature, _the entire history of the human spirit, _or of a
single great literary work, as a connected whole that the real power of
literature makes itself felt. " Now how little, we have seen, do the foreign
students conceive the Chinese literature as a whole! How little, therefore, do
they get at its significance! How little, in fact, do they know it! How little
does it become a power in their hands, towards the understanding of the
character of the people! With the exception of the labours of Dr. Legge and of
one or two other scholars, the people of Europe know of the Chinese literature
principally through the translations of novels, and even these not
of the best, but of the most commonplace of their class. Just fancy, if a
foreigner were to judge of the English literature from the works of Miss Rhoda
Broughton, or that class of novels which form the reading stock of school-boys
and nursery-maids! It was this class of Chinese literature which Sir Thomas Wade
must have had in his mind, when in his wrath he reproached the Chinese with
"tenuity of intellect. "
Another extraordinary judgment which used to be passed upon Chinese
literature was, that it was excessively over-moral. Thus the Chinese people were
actually accused of over morality, while at the same time most foreigners are
pretty well agreed that the Chinese are a nation of liars! But we can now
explain this by the fact that, besides the trashy novels we have already
noticed, the work of translation a-mong students of Chinese was formerly
confined exclusively to the Confucian Classics. Nevertheless, there are of
course a great many other things in these writings besides morality, and, with
all deference to Mr.Balfour, we think that "the admirable doctrines" these books
contain are decidedly not "utilitarian and worldly" as they have been judged to
be. We will just submit two sentences and ask Mr. Balfour if he really thinks
them "utilitarian and mundane." "He who sins against Heaven, " said Confucius in
answer to a Minister, " he who sins against Heaven has no place where he can
turn to and pray." Again, Mencius says:"! love life, but I also love
righteousness: but if I cannot keep them both, I would give up life and choose
righteousness. "
We have thought it worthwhile to digress so far in order to protest against
Mr. Balfour's judgment, because we think that such smart phrases as "a bondslave
to antiquity, " "a past-master in casuistry" should scarcely be employed in a
work purposely philosophical, much less applied to the most venerated name in
China. Mr. Balfour was probably led astray by his admiration of the Prophet of
Nan-hua, and, in his eagerness to emphasize the superiority of the Taoist over
the orthodox school, he has been betrayed into the use of expressions which,
we are sure, his calmer judgment must condemn.
But to return from our digression. We have said that the Chinese literature
must be studied as a connected whole. Moreover we have noted that the people of
Europe are accustomed to conceive and form their judgment of the literature of
China solely from those writings with which the name of Confucius is associated;
but, in fact, the literary activity of the Chinese had only just begun with the
labours of Confucius, and has since continued through eighteen dynasties,
including more than two thousand years. At the time of Confucius, the literary
form of writing was still very imperfectly understood.
Here let us remark that, in the study of a literature, there is one important
point to be attended to, but which has hitherto been completely lost sight of by
foreign students of Chinese; namely, the form of the literary writings. "To be
sure, " said the poet Wordsworth, "it was the matter, but then you know the
matter always comes out of the manner." Now it is true that the early writings
with which the name of Confucius is associated do not pretend to any degree of
perfection, as far as the literary form is concerned: they are considered as
classical or standard works not so much for their classical elegance of style or
perfection of literary form, as for the value of the matter they contain. The
father of Su Tung-po, of the Sung dynasty, remarks that something approaching to
the formation of a prose style may be traced in the dialogues of Mencius.
Nevertheless Chinese literary writings, both in prose and poetry, have since
been developed into many forms and styles. The writings of the Western Hans, for
instance, differ from the essays of the Sung period, much in the same way as the
prose of Lord Bacon is different from the prose of Addison or Goldsmith. The
wild exaggeration and harsh diction of the poetry of the six dynasties are as
unlike the purity, vigour, and brilliancy of the T' ang poets as the early wreak
and immature manner of Keats is unlike the strong, clear, and correct splendour
of Tennyson.
Having thus, as we have shown, equipped himself with the primary principles
and notions of the people, the student will then be in a position to direct his
study to the social relations of the people; to see how these principles are
applied and carried out. But the social institutions, manners and customs of a
people do not grow up, like mushrooms, in a night, but are developed and formed
into what they are, through long centuries. It is therefore necessary to study
the history of the people. Now the history of the Chinese people is as yet
almost unknown to European scholars. The so-called History of China, by Mr.
Demetrius Boulger, published recently, is perhaps the worst history that could
have been written of a civilised people like the Chinese. Such a history as Mr.
Boulger has written might be tolerated if written of some such savage people as
the Hottentots. The very fact that such a history of China could have been
published, serves only to show how very far from being perfect yet is the
knowledge of Chinese among Europeans. Without a knowledge of their history,
therefore, no correct judgment can be formed of the social institutions of a
people. Such works as Dr. Williams's Middle Kingdom and other works on China
from want of such knowledge, are not only useless for the purpose of the
scholar, but are even misleading for the mass of general readers. Just to take
one instance,_the social ceremony of the people. The Chinese are certainly a
ceremonious people, and it is true that they owe this to the influence of the
teaching of Confucius. Now Mr. Balfour may speak of the pettifogging observances
of a ceremonial life as much as he pleases; nevertheless, even "the bows and
scrapes of external decorum, " as Mr. Giles calls them, have their roots deep in
the universal nature of man, in that side of human nature, namely, which we have
defined as the sense of the beautiful. "In the use of ceremony, " says a
disciple of Confucius, "what is important, is to be natural; this is what is
really beautiful in the ways of the ancient Em-perors. " Again, it is said
somewhere in the Classics: "Ceremony is simply the expression of reverence. "(
the Ehrfurcht of Goethe s Wilk elm Meister) We now see how evident it is that a
judgment of the manners and customs of a nation should be founded upon the
knowledge of the moral principles of the people- Moreover the study, of the
Government and political institutions of a country, _which, we have said should
be reserved by the student to the last stage of his labours, _must also be
founded upon an understanding of their philosophical principles and a knowledge
of their history.
We will conclude with a quotation from " The Higher Education, " or the Book
of Platitudes, as foreigners consider it. "The Government of the Empire," it is
said in that book, "should begin with the proper administration of the State;
the administration of the State begins with the regulation of the family; the
regulation of the family begins with the cultivation of the individual." This,
then, is what we mean by Chinese Scholarship.
This article on Chinese Scholarship was written and published in the "N.C.
daily news" in Shanghai in .
APPENDIX
the religion OF mob-worship OR the war AND the way out
Frankreich' s traurig Geschick, die Grosser! mogen ' s bedenken,
Aber bedenken fiirwahr sollen es Kleine nech mehr ;
Grossen gingen zu Grunde ; dock wer beschittze die Menge
Gegen die Mengef Da -war Menge der Menge Tyrann.
Goethe
Professor Lowes Dickinson of Cambridge University in an eloquent passage of
his article on "The War and the Way out," says: "The future (the future of
civilisation in Europe, he means) cannot be moulded to any purpose until the
plain men and women, workers with their hands and workers with their brains in
England and in Germany and in all countries get together and say to the people
who have led them into this catastrophe and will lead them into such again and
again, "No more! No more! And never again! you rulers, soldiers and diplomats,
you who through the long agony of history have conducted the destinies of
mankind and conducted them to hell, we do now repudiate you. Our labour and our
blood have been at your disposal. They shall be so no more. You shall not make
the peace as you have made the war. The Europe that shall come out of this war
shall be our Europe. And it shall be one in which another European
Dreadful is France's misfortune, the Classes should truly bethink them,
But still more of a truth, the Masses should lay it to heart. Classes were
smashed up; well then, but who will protect now the Masses
'Gainst the Masses? Against the Masses the Masses did rage.war shall be never
possible. "
That is the dream of the socialists now in Europe. But such a dream, I am
afraid, can never be realised. When the plain men and women in the countries of
Europe get rid of the rulers, soldiers and diplomats and take into their own
hands the question of peace and war with another country, I am perfectly sure,
before that very question is decided, there will be quarrels, broken heads and
wars between the plain men and women themselves in every country. Take the case
of the Irish question in Great Britain. The plain men and women in Ireland in
trying to take into their own hands the question even of how to govern
themselves were actually flying at each others' throats and if this greater war
had not come, would at this moment, be cutting each other's throats.
Now in order to find a way out of this war, we must first of all, find out
the origin, the cause of this war; find out who was really responsible for this
war. Prof essor Dickinson would have us believe that it was the rulers, soldiers
and diplomats who have led the plain men and women into this catastrophe,_into
this hell of a war. But I think, I can prove, that it was not the rulers,
soldiers and diplomats who have led the plain men and women into this war, but
it was the plain men and women who have driven and pushed the poor helpless
rulers, soldiers and diplomats of Europe into this hell of a war.
Let us first take the case of the actual rulers, _the Emperors, Kings and
Presidents of Republic now in Europe. Now it is an undisputed fact that with the
exception perhaps of the Emperor of Germany, the actual rulers of the countries
now at war have had no say whatever in the making of this war. In fact the
actual rulers of Europe today. Emperors, Kings and Presidents, bound in hand and
foot and gagged by the mouth as they all are by Constitutions and Magna Chartas
of Liberty, _these actual rulers have no say whatever in the government or
conduct of public affairs in their countries. Poor King George of Great Britain,
when he tried to say something to prevent a civil war over the Irish question,
was peremptorily told by the plain men and women in Great Britain to hold his
tongue and he had actually to apologise through his Prime Minister to the plain
men and women for trying to do his duty as a King to prevent a civil war! In
fact, the actual rulers of Europe today have become mere expensive ornamental
figures as the figures on a seal with which Government official documents are
stamped. Thus being mere ornamental figures without any say or will of their own
as far as the government of their countries is concerned, how can it be said,
that the actual rulers of Europe are responsible for this war?
Let us next examine the soldiers whom Professor Dickinson and everybody now
denounces for being responsible for this war. Ruskin in addressing the cadets at
Woolwich, says: "The fatal error of modern institutions is to take away the best
blood and strength of the nation, all the soul substance of it, that is brave,
and careless of reward and scornful of pain and faithful in trust; and to cast
that into steel and make a mere sword of it, taking away its voice and will; but
to keep the worst part of the nation, whatever is cowardly, avaricious, sensual,
and faithless, and to give to this the authority, to this the chief privilege
where there is the least capacity of thought."The fulfilment of your vow for the
defence of England, "Ruskin went on to say addressing the soldiers of Great
Britain, "will by no means consist in carrying out such a system. You are no
true soldiers if you only mean to stand at a shop door to protect shop boys who
are cheating in-side. " Now Englishmen, and true English soldiers too, who
denounce Militarism and Prussian Militarism,think, should read and ponder over
these words of Ruskin. But what I want to say here is that it is evident from
what Ruskin says here, that if the actual rulers in Europe have practically no
say, the soldiers of Europe today have absolutely no say _whatever in the
government and conduct of affairs in their countries. What Tennyson says of the
British soldiers at Balaclava, is true of the poor soldiers now in this war,
"Theirs was not to reason why, theirs was but to do and die. " In fact if the
acutal rulers in Europe today have become mere expensive ornamental figures, the
soldiers in Europe now have become mere dangerous mechanical automatons. Being
more mechanical automatons without any voice or will of their own as far as the
government of their countries is concerned, how then can it be said that the
soldiers in Europe are responsible for this war?
Last of all, let us examine the case against the diplomats now in Europe.
Now, according to the theories of Government, the Magua Chartas of Liberty and
Constitutions of Europe, the diplomats_the actual Statesmen and Ministers in
charge of the government and conduct of public affairs in a country now are
there merely to carry out the will of the people: in other words, merely to do
whatever the plain men and women in the country tell them to do. Thus we see
that the diplomats, _the Statesmen and Ministers in the Government of the
countries in Europe today, have also become mere machines, talking machines; in
fact mere puppets as in a Marionnettes show; puffed-up puppets without any will
of their own, worked, pulled and moved up and down by the plain men and women.
Being mere hollow puffed-up puppets, with only a voice, but without any will of
their own, how then can it be said that the diplomats, _the Statesmen and
Ministers now in European countries are responsible for this war?
Indeed the most curious thing, it seems to me, in the government of all the
European countries today is that every one who is actually in charge of the
conduct of affairs in the Government, _ruler, soldier as well as diplomat or
Statesman and Minister, is not allowed to have any will of his own; not allowed
to have any power to do what he thinks best for the security and good of the
nation, but every plain man and woman, _John Smith, editor of the " Patriotic
Times, "
Bobus of Houndsditch, once in Carlyle' s time, sausage maker and jam
manufacturer, but now owner of a big Dreadnought ship building yard, and Moses
Lump, money lender, _are given full power to have all their will and all the say
in the government of the country; in fact, the power to tell the actual ruler,
soldier and diplomat what they are to do for the good and security of the
nation. Thus you will find, if you go deep enough into the matter, that it is
these three persons, _John Smith, Bobus of Houndsditch and Moses Lump, who are
responsible for this war. For it was these three persons, John Smith, Bobus and
Moses Lump, I want to point out here, who created that monstrous modern Machine,
_the modern Militarism in Europe, and it was this monstrous Machine which has
brought on this war.
But now it _will be asked why have the actual rulers, soldiers and diplomats
of Europe so cowardly abdicated in favour of these three persons, John Smith,
Bobus and Moses Lump? I answer, because the plain men and women, _even the good
honest plain men and women, such men as Professor Dickinson, _instead of giving
their loyalty and support to the actual rulers, soldiers and diplomats of their
country, have taken the side of John Smith, Bobus and Moses Lump against their
own rulers, soldiers and diplomats. The two reasons a-gain why the plain men and
women in Europe support and take the side of John Smith, Bobus and Moses Lump,
are: first, because John Smith, Bobus and Moses Lump tell the plain men and
women that they John Smith, Bobus and Moses Lump belong to the party of plain
men and women; and, secondly, because the plain men and women in Europe from
their childhood have been taught that the Nature of Man is evil; that every man,
whenever he is invested with power, will abuse his power; and further that every
man as soon as he gets strong enough to be able to do it, will be sure to want
to rob and murder his neighbour. In fact, I want to say here the reason why John
Smith, Bobus and Moses Lump have been able to get the plain men and women in
Europe to help them to force the actual rulers, soldiers and diplomats of Europe
to create the monstrous modern machine, which has brought on this terrible war,
is because the plain men and women in every country, when in a crowd, are always
selfish and cowardly.
Thus, if you go into the root of the matter, you will see that it is not the
rulers, soldiers and diplomats, not even John Smith, Bobus and Moses Lump, but
it is really the good honest plain men and women, such men as Professor Dickison
himself, who are responsible for this war. But Professor Dickinson will
repudiate and say: We plain men and women did not want this war. But then, who
wanted this war? I answer. Nobody wanted this war. Well then, what brought on
this war? I answer, It was panic which brought on this war; the panic of the
mob, _the panic which seized and took possession of the crowd of plain men and
women in all European countries when last August that monstrous modem machine in
Russia which the plain men and women had helped to create, began to move. In
short, it was panic, I say, _the panic of the mob, panic of the crowd of the
plain men and women communicating itself to and seizing and paralysing the
brains of the rulers, soldiers and diplomats of the countries now at war and
making them helpless which has brought on this terrible war. Thus we see, it was
not, as Professor Dickinson says, the rulers, soldiers and diplomats, who have
conducted and led the plain men and women of Europe into this catastrophe, but
it was the plain men and women, _ the selfishness, the cowardice and at the last
moment, the funk, the panic of the plain men and women who have driven and
pushed the poor helpless rulers, soldiers and diplomats of Europe into this
catastrophe, _into this hell of a war. Indeed the tragic hopelessness of the
situation now in Europe I want to say here, lies in the abject, pitiful,
pitiable helplessness of the actual rulers, soldiers and diplomats of the
countries now at war at the present moment.
It is evident therefore from what I have shown in the above, that if there is
to be peace in Europe now and in the future, the first thing to be done is not,
as Professor Dickinson says, to bring or call in, but to remove and keep out the
plain men and women who, when in a crowd, are so selfish and cowardly; who are
so liable to panic whenever the question of peace and war arises. In other
words, if there is to be peace in Europe, the first thing to be done, it seems
to me, is to protect the rulers, soldiers and diplomats from the plain men and
women; to protect them from the mob,_the panic of the crowd of plain men and
women which makes them helpless. In fact, not to speak of the future, if the
present actual situation now in Europe is to be saved, the only way to do it, it
seems to me, is first to rescue the rulers, soldiers and diplomats of the
countries now at war, from their present helplessness. The tragic hopelessness
of the situation now in Europe, I wish to point here, is that everybody wants
peace, but nobody has the courage or power to make peace. I say therefore, the
first thing to be done is to rescue the rulers, soldiers and diplomats from
their present helplessness; to find some means to give them power,_ power to
find a way to make peace. That, I think, can be done only in one way and that is
for the people of Europe, _for the people of the countries now at war, to tear
up their present Constitutions and Magna Chartas of Liberty, and make a new
Magna, Charta_a Magna Charta of Loyalty_such as we Chinese have in our Religion
of good citizenship here in China.
By this new Magna Charta of I^oyalty, the people of the countries now at war
must swear: first not to discuss, meddle or interfere in any way with the
politics of the present war; secondly, absolutely to accept, submit to and abide
by whatever terms of peace their actual rulers may decide upon among themselves.
This new Magna Charta of Loyalty, will at once give the actual rulers of the
countries now at war power and, with power, courage to make peace; in fact,
power and courage at once to order and command peace. I am perfectly sure that
as soon as this power is given them, the actual rulers of the countries now at
war, will at once order and command peace. I say, I am perfectly sure of this,
because the rulers of the countries now at war, unless they are absolute
incurable lunatics or demons, which everybody must admit that they are not, _no,
not even, I will venture to say here, the most slandered man now in Europe, the
Emperor of Germany, _they, the rulers of the countries now at war, must see that
for them together to continue to spend nine million pounds sterling of the blood
and sweat-earned money of their people everyday in order to slaughter the lives
of thousands of innocent men and to destroy the homes and happiness of thousands
of innocent women, is really nothing but infernal madness. The reason why the
rulers, soldiers and diplomats of the countries now at war cannot see this, is
because they feel themselves helpless; helpless before the panic of the mob,
_the panic of the crowd of plain men and women; in fact, as I said because the
panic of the crowd, _the panic of the mob has seized and paralysed their brains.
I say therefore the first thing to be done, if the present actual situation now
in Europe is to be saved, is to rescue the rulers, soldiers and diplomats of the
countries now at war from the panic of the mob, _the panic of the crowd of plain
men and women by giving them power.
The tragic hopelessness of the situation now in Europe, I want to say here
further, lies not only in the helplessness of the rulers, soldiers and
diplomats, but also in the helplessness of everybody in the countries now at
war. Everybody is helpless and cannot see that this war, wanted by nobody and
brought on only by the panic of the mob, is an infernal madness, because, as I
said, the panic of the mob has seized and paralysed the brains of everybody. One
can see this even in Professor Dickinson, who writes to inveigh against the
war,_to denounce the rulers, soldiers and diplomats for bringing on this war.
Professor Dickinson too, without being conscious of it, has the panic of the mob
in his brain. He begins his article by stating that this article of his is not a
"stop the war" paper. He goes on to say:
"Being in the war, I think, as all Englishmen think, we must go on fighting
until we can emerge from it with our terroritory and security intact and with
the future peace of Europe assured as far as human wisdom can assure it. " The
integrity and security of the British Empire and the future peace of Europe to
be obtained only by going on indefinitely spending nine million pounds sterling
of good money and slaughtering thousands of innocent men everyday! The monstrous
absurdity of such a proposition, I believe, has only to be stated, to be seen by
any one who has not the panic of the mob in his brain. The peace of Europe! Why,
I think if this rate of spending and slaughtering goes on for any length of
time, there will certainly be peace, but no Europe left on the map of the world.
Indeed if there is anything which will show how really and utterly unfit the
plain men and women are to decide on the question of peace and war, this
attitude of mind of a man even like Professor Dickinson conclusively shows it.
But the point I want to insist upon here, is that everybody even in the
countries now at war wants peace, but nobody has the power to make peace, to
stop the war. Now the fact that nobody has the power to make peace, to stop the
war, makes everybody believe that there is no possible way of making peace;
makes everybody despair of the possibility of making peace. This despair of the
possibility of making peace it is which prevents everybody in the countries now
at war from seeing that this war wanted by nobody and brought on only by the
panic of the mob, is really nothing but an infernal madness. The first thing to
be done, therefore, in order to make everybody see that this war is nothing but
an infernal madness is to show everybody that there is a possibility of making
peace . In order to make every-body see that there is a possibility of making
peace, the very first and simple thing to do is at once to stop the war; to
invest some one with full power to stop the war; to invest the rulers of the
countries now at war with absolute power by making, as I said, a Magna Charta of
Loyalty, _absolute power to order and command the war to be stopped at once. As
soon as everybody sees that the war can be stopped, everybody in the countries
now at war, everybody except perhaps a few absolute incurable lunatics, will be
able to see that this war wanted by nobody and brought on only by the panic of
the mob,_is really nothing but an infernal madness; that this war, if continued,
will be ruinous even to the countries which will emerge victorious from it. As
soon as the rulers of the countries now at war have the power to stop the war
and everybody in the countries now at war sees and realises that this war is an
infernal madness, it will then and only then be not only possible, but easy for
a man like President Wilson of the United States to make a successful appeal, as
the Ex-President Roosevelt did during the Russo-Japanese war, to the rulers of
the countries now at war to order and command the war to be stopped at once and
then to find a way to make a permanent peace. I say it will be easy then for a
man like President Wilson to make a successful appeal for peace because, I
believe, in order to make peace, the only important thing the rulers of the
countries now at war will have to do is, to build a special lunatic asylum and
arrest and clap into it the few absolute incurable lunatics, _men like Professor
Dickinson who have the panic of the mob in the brain, _the panic for the
integrity and security of the British Empire and the future peace of Europe!
Thus, I say, the one and only way out of this war, is for the people of the
countries now at war, to tear up their present Magna Char-tas of Liberty and
Constitutions, and make a new Magna Charta, a Magna Charta not of Liberty, but a
Magna Charta of Loyalty, such as we Chinese have in our Religion of good
citizenship here in China.
To prove the efficacy of what I now propose, let me here call the attention
of the people of Europe and America to the fact that it was the absolute loyalty
of the people of Japan and Russia to their rulers which made it possible for the
Ex-President Roosevelt to make a successful appeal to the late Emperor of Japan
and the present Emperor of Russia to stop the Russo-Japanese war and to command
and order the peace to be made at Portsmouth. This absolute loyalty of the
people in the case of Japan is secured by the Magna Charta of Loyalty in our
Chinese Religion of good citizenship which the Japanese learnt from us. But in
Russia where there is no Religion of good citizenship with its Magna Charta of
Loyalty, the absolute loyalty of the Russian people has to be secured by the
power of the Knout.
Now see what happened, after the Treaty of Portsmouth, in a country with a
Religion of good citizenship and its Magna Charta of Loyalty, like Japan, and a
country without such a Religion and such a Charta like Russia. In Japan, after
the Treaty of Portsmouth, the plain men and women in Tokyo whose Religion of
good citizenship had been spoilt by the New Learning of Europe, raised a clamour
and tried to create a panic, _but the Magna Charta of Loyalty in the hearts of
the true unspoilt Japanese people with the help of a few policemen in one day
put down the clamour and panic of the plain men and women and there has been not
only internal peace in Japan but peace in the Far East ever since. * But in
Russia after the Treaty of Portsmouth, the plain men and women everywhere in the
country, also raised a clamour and tried to create a panic, and, because there
is no Religion of good citizenship in Russia, the Knout, _which secured the
abso-Peace in the Far East, I say, until lately the mob-worshipping Statesmen of
Great Britain got their apt pupils the now also mob-worshipping Statemen of
Japan, men like Count Okuma, who is the greatest mob-worshipper now in japan,
_to make war against a handful of German clerks in Tsingtau!
lute loyalty of the Russian people, broke and thus ever since the plain men
and women in Russia have had full liberty to make riots and Constitutions, to
raise clamour and create panic._panic for the integrity and security of the
Russian Empire and the Slavonic race and for the future peace of Europe! The
result of all this was that when a petty difference of opinion arose between the
Austrian Emperor and the Emperor of Russia over the degree of punishment to be
meted out for the people responsible for the murder of the Austrian Arch-Duke,
the plain men and women, the mob in Russia were able to raise such a clamour and
create such a panic for the integrity and security of the Russian Empire, that
the Emperor of Russia and his immediate advisers were driven to mobilise the
whole Russian army, in other words, to move that monstrous modern machine
created by John Smith, Bobus and Moses Lump. When that monstrous modern
machine,_ the modern Miliarism in Russia, began to move, there was immediately a
general panic among the plain men and women in all Europe and it was this
general panic among the plain men and women in Europe seizing and paralysing the
brains of the rulers and diplomats of the countries now at war and making them
helpless, which, as I have already shown, brought on this terrible war.
Thus the real origin of this war, if you go deep into the very root of the
matter, was the Treaty of Portsmouth. I say the Treaty of Portsmouth was origin
of this war, because after that Treaty, the Knout,_the power of the Knout,_in
Russia broke and there was nothing to protect the Emperor of Russia from the
plain men and women, _from the panic of the crowd of plain men and women, _in
fact, from the panic of the mob in Russia, _the panic of the mob for the
integrity and security of the Russian Empire and the Slavonic race! The German
poet Heine with wonderful insight considering that he was the most liberal of
all Liberals, in fact the Champion of the Liberalism of his time, says: "The
Absolutism in Russia is really a Dictatorship rather than anything else with
which to bring into life and make possible the carrying out of the liberal ideas
of our modem times (der Absolutismus in Russland ist vielmehr eine Dictatur um
die liberalen Ideen unserer neuesten Zeit in' s Leben treten zu lassen)" . In
fact, I say again, after the Treaty of Portsmouth the Dictatorship, _the Knout,
the power of the Knout in Russia broke and there was nothing to protect the
ruler, soldier and diplomat of Russia from the mob,_that, I say, was the real
origin of this war. In other words, the real origin and cause of this war was
the fear of the mob in Russia.
In Europe in the past the responsible rulers of all the European countries
were able to maintain civil order in their own countries and to keep
international peace in Europe, because they feared and worshipped God. But now,
I want to say, the rulers, soldiers and diplomats in all European countries of
today instead of fearing and worshipping God, fear and worship the mob, _fear
and worship the crowd of plain men and women in their country. The Russian
Emperor, Alexander I, who made the Holy Alliance in Europe after the Napoleonic
wars, was able not only to maintain civil order in Russia, but to keep
international peace in Europe because he feared God. But the present Emperor in
Russia is not able to maintain civil order in his own country and to keep
international peace in Europe, because, instead of fearing God, he fears the
mob. In Great Britain rulers like Cromwell, were able to maintain civil order in
their own country and to keep international peace in Europe, because they
worshipped God. But the actual rulers of Great Britain today, responsible
Statesmen like Lord Grey, Messrs. Asquith, Churchill and Loyd George, are not
able to maintain civil order in their own country and keep international peace
in Europe, because, instead of worshipping God, they worship the mob, _worship
not only the mob in their own country, but also the mob in other countries. The
late Prime Minister of Great Britain
Mr. Campbell Bannerman, when the Russian Duma was dissolved, shouted at the
top of his voice, " Le Duma. est mart. Vive Ie Duma \
I have said that the real origin and cause of this war was the fear of the
mob in Russia. Now I want to say here that, the real first origin and cause of
this war was not the fear of the mob in Russia. The first origin and cause, _the
fans et origo not only of this war, but of all the anarchy, horror and misery in
the world today, _is the worship of the mob, the worship of the mob now in all
European countries and in America, _especially in Great Britain. It was the
worship of the mob in Great Britain which caused and brought on the
Russo-Japanese war. After the Russo-Japanese war came the Treaty of Portsmouth
and the Treaty of Portsmouth, with the help of the shout of the British Prime
Minister, broke the Knout, _the power of the Knout, broke what Heine calls the
Dictatorship and created the fear of the mob in Russia which, as I said, has
brought on this terrible war. It is, I may incidentally say here, this worship
of the mob in Great Britain, this worship of the mob among Englishmen and
foreigners in China; in fact this Religion of the worship of the mob imported
from Great Britain and America into China, _which has brought on the Revolution
and the present nightmare of a Republic in China now threatening to destroy the
most valuable asset of civilisation of the world today, the real Chinaman. I say
therefore that this worship of the mob in Great Britain_this Religion of the
worship of the mob in Europe and America today, unless it is at once put down,
will destroy not only the civilisation of Europe, but all civilisation in the
world.
* The panic of the mob in Great Britain, _especially the selfish panic of the
British mob in Shanghai and in China whose mouthpiece then was the "great" Dr.
Morrison, the "Times" correspondent in Peking, with their shout for the "open
door" in Manchuria alarmed and incited the Japanese into the Russo-Japanese war.
Now, I say, the only thing, it seems to me, which can and will put down this
worship of the mob, this Religion of the worship of the mob which now threatens
to destroy all civilisation in the world today_is this Religion of Loyalty, _the
Sacrament, the Magna Charta of Loyalty such as we Chinese have in our Religion
of good citizenship here in China. This Magna Charta of Loyalty will protect the
responsible rulers, soldiers and diplomats of all countries from the mob, and
enable them not only to maintain civil order in their own countries but also to
keep peace in the world. What is more, this Magna Charta of Loyalty, _this
Religion of good citizenship with its Magna Charta of Loyalty, by enabling all
good men and true to help their legitimate rulers to awe and keep down the
mob_will enable the rulers of all countries to keep peace and maintain order in
their own countries and in the world without the Knout, without policeman,
without soldier; in one word without militarism.
Now before I conclude, I want to say a word about militarism, about German
militarism. I have said that the first origin and cause of this war was the
worship of the mob in Great Britain. Now I want to say here that if the first
origin and cause of this war was the worship of the mob in Great Britain, the
direct and immediate cause of this war was the worship of might in Germany. The
Emperor of Russia is reported to have said before he signed the order for the
mobilisation of the Russian army, "We have stood this for seven years. Now it
must finish. " These passionate words of the Emperor of Russia show how much he
and the Russian nation must have suffered from the worship of might of the
German nation. Indeed the worship of the mob in Great Britain, as I said, broke
the Knout in the hands of the Emperor of Russia which made him helpless against
the mob who wanted war and the worship of might of the German nation made him
lose his temper which drove him to go in with the mob for war. Thus we see the
real cause of this war was the worship of the mob in Great Britain and the
worship of might in Germany. The Bible in our Chinese Religion of good
citizenship says : "Do not go a-gainst -what is right, to get the praise of the
people. Do not trample upon the wishes of the people to follow your own desires.
" * Now to go against what is right to get the praise of the people, is what I
have called the worship of the mob, and to trample upon the wishes of the people
to follow your own desires, is what I have called the worship of might. But with
this Magna Charta of Loyalty, the responsible ministers and Statesmen in a
country will feel themselves responsible not to the mob, not to the crowd of
plain men and women, but to their King and their Conscience, and this will
protect them from the temptation to go against what is right to get the praise
of the people, _in fact protect them from mob worship. The Magna Charta of
Loyalty again will make the rulers of a country feel the awful responsibility
which the great power given them by Magna Charta of Loyalty imposes upon them
and this will protect them from the temptation to trample upon the wishes of the
people to follow their own desires, _in fact protect them from the worship of
might. Thus we see this Magna Charta of Loyalty, _this Religion of good
citizenship with its Magna Charta of Loyalty, will help to put down the worship
of the mob and the worship of might, which, as I have shown, are the cause of
this war.
The French Joubert who had lived through the French Revolution in answer to
the modern cry for liberty said: "Let your cry be for free souls rather than for
free men. Moral liberty is the one vitally important liberty, the liberty which
is indispensible; the other liberty is good and salutary only so far as it
favours this. Subordination is in
(Shu-king or Canon of History in the Confucian Bible: Part II eh. .. )
itself a better thing than independance . The one implies order and
arrangement; the other implies only self sufficiency with isolation . The one
means harmony, the other, a single tone; the one, is the whole, the other is but
the part. "
This then, I say, is the one and only way for the people of Europe, for the
people of the countries now at war, not only to get out of this war, but to save
the civilisation of Europe, _to save the civilisation of the world, and that is
for them now to tear up their present Magna Chartas of liberty and
Constitutions, and make a new Magna Charta, _a Magna Charta not of liberty, but
a Magna Charta of Loyalty; in fact to adopt the Religion of good citizenship
with its Magna Charta of Loyalty such as we Chinese have here in China.
AB INTEGRO SAECLORUM NASCITUR ORDO! *