to talk of their conscious nationalism and patriotic ideals in the face of their administrative and legislative record, North and South, for the past ten years? Can anyone deny that the only law which has been recognized in China since the Revolution of 1911 is the law of armed force, or that the only thing which matters in Chinese politics, from Mukden to Canton, is money?

IV

What, then, of the future? The restoration of peace and prosperity in China, and her continued existence as an undivided and independent nation, depend first and foremost upon a clearer perception of the essential facts of the situation and the adoption of a firmer policy in America and Great Britain. Next, if the pernicious purposes of Bolshevism are to be checked, if some sort of order is to be reëstablished throughout the land, it is even more essential to-day than it was in 1921 for America, England, and Japan to come together and, uniting in a common purpose of good will toward China, support the law-abiding and welldisposed elements in the country in gradually producing the authoritative government which it needs. Continuance in a policy of facile optimism, noninterference, and graceful concessions is impossible, unless we are prepared completely to evacuate China as a field for our trade, industrial enterprise, and other activities, to fold up our tents like the Arab and leave it to the Japanese to dispute possession of the field hereafter with the Muscovite. Continuance in a policy which is prepared to surrender wholesale our treaty rights, and particularly extraterritoriality, must of necessity involve evacuation. As a distinguished American writer succinctly puts it, 'Extraterritoriality is a necessity of the

case if foreigners are to remain in the country.'

The question of extraterritoriality is, like many others in this world of hard facts, not to be solved by virtue of abstract moral principles. China's moral right to object to the privileges thereunder enjoyed by foreigners is as incontestable as her moral right to object to the presence of foreigners on her shores, or her right to claim admission for her surplus millions into the United States and Canada on grounds of 'racial equality.' But none of these rights is admissible in practice, for the simple reason that when we come down to realities 'racial equality' is a snare and a delusion. Twenty years ago England and America pledged themselves by treaty to relinquish their extraterritorial privileges 'when satisfied that the state of the Chinese laws and their administration justify them in so doing.' If it was then impossible for Europeans to submit their persons and property to Chinese conceptions of law and justice, how much less can they do so to-day, when the last remnants of responsible government have disappeared in the North and Bolshevism is spreading like a plague in the South?

One of the most remarkable features of the present situation is that public opinion in the United States, which has set so good an example to the world by steadfastly refusing to have any dealings with Bolshevism, now extends its sympathy and moral support to the Cantonese faction in China, which is largely controlled and financed by the Communists of Moscow and openly identified with Bolshevist propaganda. Encouraged by American sympathy and by the peace-at-any-price attitude of the British Government (as manifested in the Hankow Concession agreement), this Cantonese wing of the Kuomintang Party now makes no secret

of its intention to go much further than the abolition of the foreigner's extraterritorial rights. Following Moscow's example and advice, it proposes not only to repudiate forthwith all existing obligations and agreements, but to clear the country of all foreigners, prohibit foreign shipping in Chinese waters, and nationalize' all foreign factories, banks, and private property. An outline of the party's programme (rapidly growing by what it feeds on) is set forth in resolutions drafted for the People's Conference, lately published in a work entitled China and the Nations, by Wong Ching-wai, the chairman of the Kuomintang Executive Committee.

If, pursuing paths of peace and political idealism, America and Great Britain are prepared to abandon their treaty rights in China and the fruits of two centuries of legitimate commercial enterprise, it should at least be understood that the hostility which they are endeavoring thus to placate is far more Russian than Chinese in origin. The group of political adventurers which calls itself the Cantonese Nationalist Party has risen to unexpected heights of power by the aid of Bolshevist subsidies and Bolshevist propaganda,

skillfully addressed to the natural chauvinism and predatory instincts of the lowest classes. But there is nothing in its leadership, record, or political methods to justify a serious belief in its capacity either to win the support of the better elements in the nation or to establish an effective government acceptable to the masses. If our treaty rights, and with them our lawful place in the sun of the Far East, are to be surrendered to their artificially created agitation, let there be no mistake: Soviet Russia, and not the unhappy Chinese people, will gain by our selfdenying forbearance. The future of China will still lie on the knees of the gods, and her destinies will eventually be determined, in all human probability, by the course of events on her Northern borders. But this much may safely be predicted, that the cause of her national independence, and even of her continued existence as an undivided State, will not be promoted, but rather jeopardized, by the elimination of the commercial enterprise and political influence of the Englishspeaking nations. Are we really prepared to face the prospect of that elimination for the sake of a forlorn hope in political idealism?

ON no subject do loose thought and loose talk more freely abound than on that of Asia. The yellow peril, we know, was once the Kaiser's pet bugbear, and his affection for it used to bring no little ridicule on that august personage. But our nerves had not then been shaken by the war. Nowadays the yellow-cum-brown peril has established itself in the affections of French, English, and American journalists and publicists; they love it for its very ugliness, as the Spanish Hapsburg loved his dwarfs or the eighteenthcentury marquise her black page-boy. This fearful creature, this Caliban, 'has a name and a face,' — I am quoting M. Henri Massis, the French observer of world politics, or rather it has two names and two faces: Bolshevism and Asiaticism. It is not his fault if our flesh does not creep as he displays this awe-inspiring monster, this great evil spirit, trying, in Chesterton's words, 'to melt everything in the same crucible.' On this subject Latin and Anglo-Saxon are equally impressionable.

Dr. Lothrop Stoddard in several volumes has marshaled battalions of facts which darken the horizon, even as that firebrand, Count Okuma, foresees the hordes of Asia black on the rims of the Balkans and the Alps. As we read his picturesque pages we feel that Europe indeed has its back to the wall of the gray Atlantic and that the very hearth and home of our civilization is

threatened. Dr. Lothrop Stoddard is more hopeful than many others. "The great nations of the West,' says M. Romain Rolland, 'are on the eve of ruin,' and his sensitive intellect seems to take almost a gloomy satisfaction in the reflection that the 'mad dogs of Europe' are tearing each other to pieces, that their talk of 'supremacy' and 'revenge' makes the victory of Asia the more imminent. But let no American take unction to his soul and thank God that He made America differently from Europe. For such political philosophers, however great their disillusionment, will never allow that the United States does well in remaining out of the cockpit as far as possible; they point out with admirable logic that the ganglion of American culture lies in Europe, and that if European civilization dies its revised American edition will equally perish. ‘Asiaticism' is the common enemy against Europe and America. Asiaticism and Bolshevism, which is the contribution of Russia, the renegade from the European system, these are the forces which threaten to overwhelm the West under their spate of destruction. The Soviet Government, having made friends with Japan and galvanized the enormous body of China with the doctrines of militant communism, is at the head of a movement so runs the argument—which is inimical to the ordered progress, the social activities, even the moral and ethical codes which

Europe has evolved at such enormous pains.

The vision is the more horrific from its very vagueness. It is concerned with the profound forces of history, forces that can hardly be separated into their constituent elements. And it is so difficult to preserve one's intellectual detachment in the presence of Bolshevism! It seems to embody all sorts of fearful compounds; the nihilistic thought of Asia added to the European desire for action, the bitterness of the Jewish race, and the intellectual waste products of industrialism these are some of its ingredients. To such add the indubitable stirrings of Asia, taking into account the European race-memory which is not unmindful of Attila and others of his kidney, and you have the makings of a very alarming demon, so alarming that, when Mr. Zinoviev talks of the eight hundred million Asiatics who are to lay European society in the dust, you and I and all of us are almost ready to take that pleasant gentleman at his word. Almost but not quite. For if we look steadily at the beast which is so anxious to impress us with its length of tooth and claw he undergoes a strange metamorphosis. As in those dreams where one meets a lion but on patting him finds that he is the most amiable of dogs, so our Caliban at a second view is apt to take the likeness of any social reformer. His beard becomes clipped, his teeth display themselves in a smile of zealous enthusiasm, and out of his mouth flows not the breath of slaughter but a stream of statistics. A subject so enormous offers so many facts that one can prove any thesis. It is possible to argue that Tolstoy - who is anathema to the Soviet authorities-is the intellectual parent of the Russian revolt against Western imperialism and capitalism, which in reality are only synonyms for government and the right of

the individual to the fruits of his labor. Gandhiism, now an exploded political force, has often been instanced as the protest of India against the spread of our social and industrial ethos. And one can quote numberless examples of the common habits among Oriental politicians of girding at Western 'materialism.' But to me Caliban steadily refuses to seem monstrous, and the more I look at the question the more it appears that, far from Europe being in danger of submersion by Asiaticism, there has been no period in the world's history when the predominance of Europe over Asia in the region of ideas has been more secure.

II

Before giving facts to support this contention, I may be allowed, since generalizations are the common stock in trade of those who frighten us with the vision of Asia redivivus, to draw one or two of my own. In the first place, therefore, I would point out that the social structure of the West has been built upon a theory of knowledge first regularly formulated by Francis Bacon. Bacon's object was 'not to make men perfect, but to make imperfect men comfortable,' and for the last two and a half centuries the 'new philosophy,' as it was once called, has been transforming, not only the face of the earth, but the ideas, the minds, and the hearts of the men and women who walk upon it.

Bacon has not thus conquered at first hand. His Novum Organum has never been widely read. He has, however, 'moved the intellects which have moved the world.' The English philosophers of the nineteenth century owe him a debt that can hardly be overestimated, and anyone who has come into contact with the intellectual youth of Asia will know how these young men

are stirred by the plodding systems of the utilitarians and of Herbert Spencer; their writings, and not the mysticism of a Tagore or the nihilism of a Tolstoy, are the quarry from which contemporary Asia has hewn its ideas. Thus the slogan of progress echoes to-day wherever you travel, from Beirut to Peking, a progress depending on a continued expansion of man's command over the resources and the power of nature, and demanding as its first essential the technique of Western government. Macaulay, a writer who has had enormous influence in the schools and colleges of the Orient, celebrated the achievements of the Baconian philosophy in a famous passage: 'It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished disease. . . . I cannot quote it all. Its naïve materialism sounds quaint to us from the vantage ground of a century which has grown accustomed to the benefits it has conferred. But it is the language which Asiatic statesmen talk to-day. Mustapha Kemal Pasha in Turkey, King Amanullah Khan in Afghanistan, Riza Shah in Persia, King Feisal in Iraq, Mr. Chen in China, speak in accents sufficiently similar to suggest that the rebirth they postulate will produce, not the nameless horrors of a Tamerlane or a Jenghiz Khan, not the monster with 'a name and a face,' which publicists, eyeing the eastern horizon, see striding toward us, but an Asia desiring to become as like Europe as possible.

Europe, I write, when I should really say America. For pragmatical America has managed to put the Baconian philosophy on a firmer intellectual basis than it has ever been able to make for itself in Europe. The religion of business, that logical outcome of Baconism, has been established more securely in the United States than even among that nation of shopkeepers whose empire, I suppose, is the finest example of

big business the world can show to-day. It resembles other religions in having man and not God as its kernel; but it is man who finds himself able to commune most freely with God, not in the sim ple life of poverty nor in the solitude of the desert, but in an environment created by a plentiful supply of commodities which can be procured only by modern industrial processes. That religion, that philosophy, that reaction to life, call it what you will, is the motive force of Asia to-day.

III

It is not easy to grasp the implications of this profound spiritual change among the peoples of Asia, the change from a static to a progressive organization of society. Few are willing to look at the matter with unbiased judgment; the past is too strong for them. Though they all admit that there is a new world, it is for them but the old writ large. They still see East and West divided by the gulf of thought. The very vastness of the subject tends to vagueness, and under their guidance we lose ourselves easily in clouds of conjecture, surmise, and prophecy.

But if we look at the problem piecemeal we shall see everywhere striking confirmation of the tendencies I have outlined. A generation ago Pan-Islamism was a serious anxiety to British statesmen, and the policy both of Great Britain and of France, the two European Powers with the greatest stake in Mohammedan countries, was sensibly influenced by the fears that it aroused. So late as 1919 these two Governments were seriously embroiled over their rivalry in the Islamic world: we saw France aiming at an hegemony by winning over the Turks in Angora, while Great Britain, true to its object of holding the road to India, supported the Arab bloc that was to be a counter