Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/399

Rh whole race of man, or from looking with scorn upon entire divisions of the race whom his training has not fitted him to appreciate. "A proper reverence for humanity will not allow him to exalt his own position at the expense of the entire east, or to attempt crudely to force upon a whole continent external domination or those forms of civilization which are the product in some part of himself." From the higher level of human development, expansion and domination we may well feel that the world is destined to profit greatly by present events in the far east if they result in restoring to humanity the whole continent of Asia, free to join in making the history of the next hundred years, free to be itself and to supplement, with all of good there is manifest or dormant in it, the strength and goodness of the west.

The shortest road to a partial success in this endeavor to preserve free nationality in Asia is the development of China's material resources, which will not only enrich China and the world, but will help to arouse the people from their age-long sleep; and it may be that military development consequent upon this awakening will serve to maintain the empire's independence.

But China's independence should concern her friends in the west chiefly because such independence is essential to something far more important: true freedom for the Chinese people. "The dormant powers now awaking in this race and promising such a future for it in the commercial and political affairs of the world demand imperatively that there be set in motion, side by side with this material transformation, forces far more subtle that shall bring about a true renaissance of the nation by influencing profoundly the intellect and the soul of the race. Only so can the Chinese people be speedily restored to the modern world."

Without books, newspapers, the pulpit, political debate, general assemblies, etc., China's people have long been groping in the dark. An ignorant people can not be patriotic, nor can there be any steady progress in commerce, agriculture or manufactures among them. These are not due to any extent to differences in government. Democracy among an ignorant people is impossible, or at least dangerous. Although China's scholars of the old school have a superior education in some respects, it is after all too narrow to fit them for lives of service to their fellows. The literati oppose changes because they are ignorant and fear to tread a new path in the dark.

But the ignorance of the people in general or of the literati is not the most dangerous part of China's ignorance; it is the blatant and conceited ignorance of those young men who know little of the foundations of China's civilization and less of western institutions, who wish to tear down the old without knowing how to build up the new. Ignorant of what it means to govern so great a nation as China and to