Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/30

4 of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth century will be able to minimise the vast importance to the world at large of the remarkable change which has taken place during that period in the relations between the peoples of the East and those of the West.

The whole outlook upon life of the people of Asia is undergoing a process of transformation: they are beginning to look to the future instead of dwelling in the past. The restless spirit of modern industrial competition is warring with the comfortable fatalism which has for centuries enslaved the men of the devout and contemplative East. Asia has always displayed a passionate reverence for the past, and it is not too much to say—of China at any rate—that she has existed for centuries in a state of voluntary bondage to the dead. The worship of ancestors has been the keystone of the religion of the races of the Far East, and throughout the Asiatic Continent the highest expression of the genius and art of her children is to be found in monuments raised to the memory of her illustrious dead—the Taj Mahal