Page:James Hudson Maurer - The Far East (1912).pdf/10

 more idemnity, five more ports, admission of opium and toleration for the Christian religion.

What a contrast. Opium and Christianity. Surely this concession must have puzzled the Chinese brain.

Poor China could not understand that the religion of their capitalist conquerors is as doubtful and contradictory as their political economy, whose love of liberty, equality and fraternity extends but so far as it helps them to accumulate treasure.

Their patriotism is always measured by gold. To be loyal to their economic interests and supremacy is patriotic, but to question their right to exploit the toilers, drug the nation with opium, or to devastate the earth is in their capitalistic eyes, vile treason.

China had learned her lesson at the expense of twenty-four million dollars, the loss of her best trading ports and thousands of lives.

For thousands of years she got along without being to any great extent molested by the Christians.

She hoped to be treated by the Christians as she treated them.

She asked for nothing more than to be left alone.

It seemed indeed a very difficult problem for her to grasp the significance of this new power that threatened to debauch and financially ruin her.

She seemed indeed blind to the fact that the same economic force that moved China to action also moved the Christians. That it is not ideals and morals that determine man's actions, but that the development of the material conditions under which man lives, determines his ideas and morals. When the material productive forces of society change, the institutions of human society change to suit them.

Ideas on all subjects relating to man in society, including those of right or wrong, between man and his God, are changed by man in accordance with and be- cause of those changed material conditions that control his existence.

While many nations were adapting themselves to the changes in the material productive forces, China was in a commercial sense, asleep.

She believed that she was the greatest of nations; that is was China that set the pace for the rest of the world.

Her quaint Oriental ideas unfitted her for the struggle of existence; she refused, or at least failed to adapt herself to the new material productive forces.

She failed to realize that nations even like