Page:The problem of China - Russell 1922.pdf/172

170Rh Shinto rites for marriages and Buddhist rites for funerals, because Buddhism is considered more suitable for mournful occasions. Although Buddhism is a universal religion, its Japanese form is intensely national, like the Church of England. Many of its priests marry, and in some temples the priesthood is hereditary. Its dignitaries remind one vividly of English Archdeacons.

The Japanese, even when they adopt industrial methods, do not lose their sense of beauty. One hears complaints that their goods are shoddy, but they have a remarkable power of adapting artistic taste to industrialism. If Japan were rich it might produce cities as beautiful as Venice, by methods as modern as those of New York. Industrialism has hitherto brought with it elsewhere a rising tide of ugliness, and any nation which can show us how to make this tide recede deserves our gratitude.

The Japanese are earnest, passionate, strong-willed, amazingly hard working, and capable of boundless sacrifice to an ideal. Most of them have the correlative defects: lack of humour, cruelty, intolerance, and incapacity for free thought. But these defects are by no means universal; one meets among them a certain number of men and women of quite extraordinary excellence. And there is in their civilization as a whole a degree of vigour and determination which commands the highest respect.

The growth of industrialism in Japan has brought with it the growth of Socialism and the Labour movement. In China, the intellectuals are often theoretical