VIII WORLD CONDITIONS THAT ARE AFFECTING CHINA' S EVERAL outside forces have pressed steadily and heav ily upon the exclusiveness and conservatism of the Chinese, and though they have not yet succeeded in changing the essential character of the nation, they have set in motion vast movements which have already convulsed great sections of the Empire and which are destined to affect stupendous transformations. The first of these forces is foreign commerce. To understand the operation of this force, we must consider that its impact has been enormously increased by the extension of facilities for intercommunication. The extent to which these have revolutionized the world is one of the most extraordinary features of our extraordinary age. It is startlingly significant of the change that has taken place that Russia and Japan, nations 7,000 miles apart by land and a still greater distance by water, are able in the opening years of the twentieth century to wage war in a region which one army can reach in four weeks and the other in four days, and that all the rest of the world can receive daily information as to the progress of the conflict. A half century ago, Russia could no more have sent a large army to Manchuria than to the moon, while down to the opening of her ports by Commodore Perry in 1854, the few wooden vessels that made the long journey to Japan found an unprogressive and bitterly anti-foreign heathen nation with an edict issued in 1638 still on its statute books declaring—“ So long as the sun shall continue to warm the earth, let no Christian be so bold as to come to Japan; and let all know that the King of Spain himself, or the Christian's God, or the great God 'Part of this chapter appeared as an article in the American Monthly Review of Reviews, October, 1904. ΙΟΙ of all, if He dare violate this command, shall pay for it with his head." Nor were other' far-eastern peoples any more hospitable. China, save for a few port cities, was as impenetrable as when in 1552 the dying Xavier had cried-"O Rock, Rock, when wilt thou open!" Siam excluded all foreigners until the century's first quarter had passed, and Laos saw no white man till 1868. A handful of British traders were so greedily determined to keep all India as a private commercial preserve that, forgetting their own indebtedness to Christianity, they sneered at the proposal to send missionaries to India as "the maddest, most expensive, most unwarranted project ever proposed by a lunatic enthusiast," while as late as 1857, a director of the East India Company declared that "he would rather see a band of devils in India than a band of missionaries." Korea was rightly called "the hermit nation" until 1882; and as for Africa, it was not till 1873 that the world learned of that part of it in which the heroic Livingstone died on his knees, not till 1877 that Stanley staggered into a West Coast settlement after a desperate journey of 999 days from Zanzibar through Central Africa, not till 1884 that the Berlin Conference formed the International Association of the Congo guaranteeing that which has not yet been realized "liberty of conscience" and "the free and public exercise of every creed." Even in America within the memory of men still living, the lumbering, white-topped "prairie schooner" was the only conveyance for the tedious overland journey to California. Hardy frontiersmen were fighting Indians in the Mississippi Valley, and the bold Whitman was "half a year" in bearing a message from Oregon to Washington. The Hon. John W. Foster tells us in his "Century of American Diplomacy" that "General Lane, the first territorial governor of Oregon, left his home in Indiana, August 27, 1848, and desiring to reach his destination as soon as possible, travelling overland to San Francisco and thence by ship, reached his post on the first of March following-the journey occupying six months. At the time our treaty of peace and independence was signed in 1783, two stage-coaches were sufficient for all the passengers and nearly all the freight between New York and Boston." It is only seventy years since the Rev. John Lowrie, with his bride and Mr. and Mrs. Reed, rode horseback from Pittsburg through flooded rivers and over the Allegheny Mountains to Philadelphia, whence it took them four and a-half months to reach Calcutta. Nor was this all, for scores of the conveniences and even necessities of our modern life were unknown at the beginning of the nineteenth century. To get some idea of the vastness of the revolution in the conditions of living, we have but to remind ourselves that "in the year 1800 no steamer ploughed the waters; no locomotive traversed an inch of soil; no photographic plate had ever been kissed by sunlight; no telephone had ever talked from town to town; steam had never driven mighty mills and electric currents had never been harnessed into telegraph and trolley wires." 1 "In all the land there was no power loom, no power press, no large manufactory in textiles, wood or iron, no canal. The possibilities of electricity in light, heat and power were unknown and unsuspected. The cotton gin had just begun its revolutionary work. Intercommunication was difficult, the postal service slow and costly, literature scanty and mostly of inferior quality."* How marvellously the application of steam as a motive power has united once widely separated regions. So swiftly have the changes come and so quickly have we adapted ourselves to them that it is difficult to realize the magnitude of the transformation that has been achieved. We can ride from Pittsburg to Philadelphia in eight hours and to Calcutta in twenty-two days. The journey across our own continent is no longer marked by the ox-cart and the campfire and the bones 1 The Rev. Dr. Theodore Cuyler. Address of the Bishops of the M. E. Church, 1900. |