Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/75

 other man was instrumental in bringing him into the world, it becomes an outrage, a mischief, and a folly. It strikes at the root of all sense of right and wrong. Such is the perversion of that sense among the Chinese at present that probably not one man who reads the Peking Gazette will think there is anything strange in the fact of the Emperor protecting the human tigress who murdered her own son in cold blood. The child is taught even by the proverbial philosophy of China to look upon his parent as a god, while the parent appears to wield autocratic power over the life he has been the accidental means of giving.

There is possibly only one element in this distorted doctrine which is at all healthy. The Emperor, as Son of Heaven, owes filial duty to his Celestial Progenitor, and if he does not pay it his commission is withdrawn. In plain language, if he is a bad sovereign, the disfavour of Heaven is shown by manifold disasters and portents; and when this is the case the people have a right to rebel against the man whom Heaven thus openly rejects. So far, the extreme phase of filial piety results beneficially for the people. But in all other respects it is liable to prove a blight and a hindrance to the country, at once representing and encouraging the old bad spirit of conservatism and cruelty which worked such desolation among men in the bygone ages of the world.