Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 22

There is one thing, of course, that would never do: it would never do to write about India without saying something about lions, tigers, and snakes. Last of all, therefore, let me come to this topic.

I didn't see any tigers, let me say frankly, except those in cages--though there was one in Calcutta which had slain men and women before they caught him, and whose t.i.tanic fury as he lunged against his cage-bars, gnas.h.i.+ng at the men before him, I shall never forget. A jackal howled at my room-door in Jeypore one night; between Jeypore and Bombay monkeys {259} were as thick as rabbits were in the old county where I was reared; in Delhi only lack of time prevented me from getting interested in a leopard hunt not many miles away; en route to Darjeeling I saw a wild elephant staked out in the woods near where he had evidently been caught; and near Khera Kalan I saw wild deer leaping with their matchless grace across the level plains.

"In my district," one missionary told me, "five or six people a month are killed by tigers and panthers and even more by snakes. One panther carried off a man from my kitchen. We found his body half-eaten in the jungle. It is customary when a body is found in this condition for hunters to gather around it and await the return of the tiger or panther. He will come back when hungry, and there is no other way so sure for getting a man-eater."

As for snakes, I may mention that when I spent the night with a friend in Madura I was shown a place near the house where a deadly cobra had been seen (his bite kills in twenty minutes), while upon retiring I was given the comforting a.s.surance that it was not safe to put my foot on the floor at night without having a light in the room!

As I rode out with Dr. J. P. Jones, of Pasamaila, he pointed to a gra.s.sy mound near the roadside and said.

"See that grave over there? There's rather an interesting story connected with it which I'll tell you. One day about four years ago three snake-charmers came to my house, and as I had an American friend and his son with me, I decided for the boy's sake to have them try their art. Only two of the men had flutes, but one went into my garden and one took up his post on another side of the house, and began to play. It wasn't long before one called out, 'Cobra!' and sure enough there was the snake, which he captured; but on coming back he declared that he had been bitten. In fact, he showed a bruise, but I knew that snake-charmers counterfeit these bites, so I would not believe him.

Then the other charmer also cried {260} 'Cobra!' and captured another snake. They showed me the fangs of each serpent, and I gave them four annas. 1 also offered them four annas more if they would kill the serpents; but of course they would not. 'Man kill cobra, cobra kill man,' is one of their sayings. And so they left, but the man who captured the first snake hadn't gone twenty steps before he fell in convulsions and died. He had really been bitten, and that is his grave which you see there."

Madura, India.

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XXVI

WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US

But, after all, what may the Orient teach us? The inquiry is a pertinent one. Perhaps it is all the more pertinent because, while acknowledging that the old East may learn much from the young West, we are ordinarily little inclined to look to the Orient for instruction for ourselves. In fact, we are not inclined to look anywhere.

That the germ and promise of all the new j.a.pan was in the oath taken by the young Mikado in 1868, "to seek out knowledge in all the world,"

we are ready to admit, and we are also ready to admit the truth of what Dr. Timothy Richard said to me in Peking last November. "This revolutionary progress in China has come about," he remarked, "because for twenty years China has been measuring herself with other countries. It is a comparative view of the world that is remaking the empire."

In our own case unfortunately, certain natural conditions as well, perhaps, as the excessive "Ego in our Cosmos," conspire to keep us from this corrective "comparative view of the world." We are not hemmed about by rival world-powers, whose activities we are compelled to study, as is the case with almost every European nation. Barring the Philippines (and their uncertain value) we have no far-flung battle line to lure our vision beyond borders. And thus far our growing home markets have been so remunerative that not even commerce has induced as to look outward, with the incidental results of {262} bringing us to realize our defects and remedy them, our strong points and emphasize them.

For these reasons, I made my trip through the Orient with an increased desire to bring home the lessons its long experience should teach us.

And now that I come to summarize these lessons I find a single note running through all--from beginning to end. And this keynote may be given in a single word. Conservation: the conservation not only of our natural resources, but of racial strength and power, of industrial productiveness, of commercial opportunities, and of finer things of the spirit.

Taking up first the matter of natural resources, I may mention that hardly anything that I saw on my entire trip burned itself more deeply into my memory than the heavy penalty that the Celestial Empire is now paying for the neglect of her forests in former years.

In the country north of Peking I found river valley after river valley once rich and productive but now become an abomination of desolation--covered with countless tons of sand and stone brought down from the treeless mountainsides. So long as these slopes were forest-clad, the decaying leaves and humus gave a sponge-like character to the soil upon them, and it gave out the water gradually to the streams below. Now, however, the peaks are in most cases only enormous rock-piles, the erosion having laid waste the country roundabout; or else they are mixtures of rock and earth rent by gorges through which furious torrents rush down immediately after each rainfall, submerging once fruitful plains with rock and infertile gully-dirt. Where the thrifty, pig-tailed Chinese peasant once cultivated broad and level fields in such river valleys, he is now able to rescue only a few half-hearted patches by piling the rock in heaps and saving a few intervening arable remnants from the general soil-wreck.

Especially memorable was the ruin--if one may call it such--of a once deep river, its bed now almost filled with {263} sand and rock, that I crossed on my little Chinese donkey not far from the Nankou Pa.s.s and the Great Wall. Even the splendid arches of a bridge, built to span its ancient flood, were almost submerged in sand. Instead of the constant stream of water that once gladdened the lowlands, there is in each rainy season a mad torrent that leaves a ruinous deposit behind, and, later, long weeks when the river-bed is as dry as a desert. So it was when I saw it last fall; and the old stone bridge, almost sand-covered like an Egyptian ruin, was at once a melancholy monument to the gladness and fertility of a vanished era, and an argument for forest-conservation that should carry conviction to all who see it.

The next day as I rode amid the strange traffic of Nankou Pa.s.s I found this argument translated into even more directly human terms. For of the scores of awkward-moving camels and quaint-looking Mongolian horses and donkeys that I saw homeward-bound after their southward trip, a great number were carrying little bags of coal--dearly bought fuel to be sparingly used through the long winter's cold in quant.i.ties just large enough to cook the meagre meals, or in extreme weather to keep the poor peasants from actually freezing. Only in the rarest cases are the Chinese able to use fuel for warming themselves; they can afford only enough for cooking purposes.

Yet in sight of the peasant's home, perhaps--in any case, not far away--are mountain peaks too steep for cultivation, but which with wise care of the tree-growth would have provided fuel for thousands and tens of thousands, and at a fraction of the price at which wood or coal must now be bought.

j.a.pan, Korea, and India--the whole Orient in fact--bear witness to the importance of the forestry messages which Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt have been drumming into our more or less uncaring ears for a decade past. When I reached Yokohama I found it impossible to get into the northern part of the island of Hondo because of the {264} flood damage to the railroads, and the lives of several friends of mine had been endangered in the same disaster. The dams of bamboo-bound rocks that I found men building near Nikko and Miyanos.h.i.+ta by way of remedy may not amount to much; but there is much hope in the general programme for reforesting the desolated areas, which I found the j.a.panese Department of Agriculture and Commerce actively prosecuting.

Here is a good lesson for America. In Korea, however, the j.a.panese lumbermen, even in very recent years, have given little thought to the morrow and with such results as might be expected. The day I reached Seoul, one of its older citizens, standing on the banks of the Han just outside the ancient walls, remarked, "When I was young this was called the Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places nearly filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great damage was done by overflows right here in Seoul."

Yet another kind of conservation to which our people in Occidental lands need to give more earnest heed is the conservation of the individual wealth of the people. The wastefulness of the average American is apparent enough from a comparison of conditions here with conditions in Europe--when I came back from my first European trip I remarked that "Europe would live on what America wastes"--but a comparison of conditions in America with those in the Orient is even more to our discredit. In Lafcadio Hearn's books on j.a.pan we find a glorification of the j.a.panese character that is unquestionably overdone on the whole, but in his contrast between the wasteful display of fas.h.i.+on's fevered followers in America and the ideals of simple living that distinguished old j.a.pan, there is a rebuke for us whose justice we cannot gainsay. Take an old j.a.panese sage like Baron s.h.i.+busawa, who, like Count Ok.u.ma, it seems might well have been one of Plutarch's men, and you are not surprised to hear him mention the extravagance of America as the thing that impressed him more {265} than anything else in traveling in our country. "To spend so much money in making a mere railroad station palatial as you have done in Was.h.i.+ngton, for example, seems to me uneconomic," he declared.

What most impressed him and other Oriental critics with whom I talked, be it remembered, was the wastefulness of expenditures not for genuine comforts but for fas.h.i.+on and display--the vagaries of idle rich women who pay high prices for half-green strawberries in January but are hunting some other exotic diet when the berries get deliciously ripe in May, and who rave over an American Beauty in December but have no eyes for the full-blown glory of the open-air roses in June. It is such unnatural display that most grates against the "moral duty of simplicity of life," as Eastern sages have taught it.

"When I was in the Imperial University here in Tokyo," a j.a.panese newspaper man said to me, "my father gave me six yen a month, $3 American money. I paid for room, light, and food $1.20 a month; for tuition, 50 cents; for paper, books, etc., 30 cents; and this left me $1 for pocket money expenditures, including the occasional treat of eating potatoes with sugar!" In such Spartan simplicity the victors of Mukden, Liao-yang and Port Arthur were bred.

The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, whose tomb at Nikko situated at the end of a twenty-five mile avenue of giant cryptomerias, is the Mecca of all tourists, has expressed in two memorable sayings the j.a.panese conception of the essential immorality of waste, of the regard that is due every product of human labor as being itself in some sense human or at least a throb with the blood of the toiler who has wrought it and moist with the sweat of his brow.

When virtual dictator of j.a.pan, Iyeyasu was seen smoothing out an old silk kakama. "I am doing this," he said, "not because of the worth of the garment in itself, but because of what it needed to produce it. It is the result of the toil of some poor woman, and that is why I value it. If we do not think while {266} using these things, of the toil and effort required to produce them, then our want of consideration puts us on a level with the beasts." Again, when opposing unnecessary purchases of costly royal garments, he declared. "When I think of the mult.i.tudes around me, and the generations to come after me, I feel it my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods in my possession."

No wonder Hearn declares of this "cosmic emotion of humanity" which we lack that "we shall certainly be obliged to acquire it at a later date simply to save ourselves from extermination."

The importance of saving the wealth of nations from the wastes of war and the wastes of excessive military expenditures is another lesson that one brings home from a study of conditions abroad. While our American jingoes are using j.a.pan as a more or less effective bogy to work their purposes, peace advocates might perhaps even more legitimately hold it up as a "horrible example" to point their moral as to how war drains the national revenues and exhausts the national wealth. In the Mikado's empire the average citizen to-day must pay 30 per cent, of his total income in taxes, the great proportion of this enormous national expenditure growing out of past wars and preparations for future wars. No wonder venerable Count Ok.u.ma, once Premier of the Empire, said to me: "I look for international arbitration to come not as a matter of sentiment but as a matter of cold financial necessity. Nations have labored for centuries to build up the civilization of to-day: it is unthinkable that its advantages must be largely sacrificed for the support of enormous non-productive armies and navies. That would be simply the Suicide of Civilization."

For the lesson of all this I may quote the words of Dr. Timothy Richard, one of the most distinguished Englishmen in China, in the same conversation from which a fragment was quoted in the beginning of this article:

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"The world is going to be one before you die, sir," he said as we talked together just outside the walls of the Forbidden City. "We are living in the days of anarchy. Unite the ten leading nations; let all their armaments be united into one to enforce the decrees of the Supreme Court of the World. And since it will then be the refusal of recalcitrant nations to accept arbitration that will make necessary the maintenance of any very large armaments by these united nations, let them protect themselves by levying discriminating tariff duties against the countries that would perpetuate present conditions."

All this I endorse. The necessity of preserving the national wealth from the wastes of war I regard as one of the most important lessons that we may get from the Orient. And yet I would not have the United States risk entering upon that military unpreparedness which must prove a fool's paradise until other great nations are brought to accept the principle of arbitration. The proper programme is to increase by tenfold--yes, a hundredfold--our personal and national efforts for arbitration, at the same time remembering that so long as the community of nations recognizes the Rule of Force we cannot secede and set up a reign of peace for ourselves. If it takes two to make a quarrel, it also takes two to keep a peace. We must be in terrible earnest about bringing in a new era, and yet we cannot commit the folly of trying to play the peace game by ourselves. It is not solitaire.

Even more important, whether we consider it from the standpoint of the general welfare or as a matter of national defence, is the conservation of our physical stamina and racial strength. Whether the wars of the future are commercial or military it doesn't matter. The prizes will go to the people who are strong of body and clear of mind.

"The first requisite," said Herbert Spencer, "is a good animal," and not even the success of a Peace Court will ever prevent the good animal--the power of physical vigor and hardness with its {268} concomitant qualities of courage, discipline, and daring--from becoming a deciding factor in the struggle between nations and between races. It has been so from the dawn of history and it will ever be so.

And just here we may question whether the growth of wealth and luxury in the United States is not tending here, as it has tended in all other nations, toward physical softness and deterioration. It may be argued on the contrary that while a few Occidental children are luxury-weakened, a great body of Oriental children are drudgery-weakened. But is there not much more reason to fear that in our case there is really decay at both ends of our social system--with the pampered rich children who haven't work enough, and with the hard-driven poor who have too much? The overworking of the very young is certainly a serious evil in America as well as in Asia; and even in this matter the Eastern folk are perhaps doing as well, according to their lights, as we are. In China manufacturing is not yet extensive enough for the problem to be serious; but in both j.a.pan and India I found the government councils thoroughly aroused to the importance of conserving child-life, and grappling with different measures for the protection of both child and women workers. My recollection is that the four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were no girls) that I found at work in a Madras cotton mill already have better legal protection than is afforded the child-workers in some of our American states.

For a long time, too, we have been accustomed to think of the Oriental as the victim of enervating habits and more or less vicious forms of self-indulgence. But while this may have been true in the past, the tide is now definitely turning. Fifty years of agitation in the United States have probably accomplished less to minimize intemperance among us than ten years of anti-opium agitation has accomplished in ridding China of her particular form of intemperance. I went to China too late to see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking; {269} too late to see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the banks of the Yangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I found such notices as the following concerning morphine, cocaine and similar drugs:

"In accordance with instructions received through the Inspector-General from the Shuiwu Ch'u the public is hereby notified that henceforth the importation into China of cocaine ... or instruments for its use, except by foreign medical pract.i.tioners and foreign druggists for medical purposes, is hereby prohibited."

And these foreign doctors handling cocaine are heavily bonded. The Chinaman of to-day is giving up opium, is little given to other forms of intemperance, is afire with new enthusiasm for athletics and for military training; and he is already so physically adaptable that I found him as hardy and untiringly energetic beneath an equatorial sun in Singapore as in the rigorous climate of north-central Manchuria. It made me wonder if the "meek who are to inherit the earth" in the end may not prove to be the Chinese!

Perhaps if the United States were a less powerful nation, or if we realized more fully the keenness of the coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy, we might find our patriotism a stronger force in warding off some of the evils that now threaten us. In his address to the German navy, Emperor William recently urged the importance of temperance because of the empire's need of strong, clear-headed men, unweakened by dissipation; and there can be little doubt that some such patriotic motive has had not a little to do with the anti-opium movement in awakening China. Certainly the j.a.panese with their almost fanatical love of country are easily influenced by such appeals, and keep such reasons in mind in the training of their young. "For the sake of the Emperor you must not drink the water from these condemned wells; for the sake of the Emperor you must observe these sanitary precautions--lest you start an epidemic and so weaken the {270} Emperor's fighting forces!" So said the j.a.panese sanitary officers in the war with Russia; and when the struggle ended Surgeon-General Takaki was able to boast in his official report:

"In the Spanish-American War fourteen men died from disease to one from bullets. We have established a record of four deaths from disease to one from bullets."

In studying these Eastern peoples one is also led inevitably to such reflections as Mr. Roosevelt gave utterance to in his Romanes lectures a few months ago. Not only are the Orientals schooled from their youth up to endure hardness like good soldiers, but their natural increase contrasts strikingly with the steadily decreasing birth-rate of our French and English stocks. In j.a.pan I soon came to remark that it looked almost as unnatural to see a woman between twenty and forty without a baby on her back as it would to see a camel without a hump; and Kipling's saying about the j.a.panese "four-foot child who walks with a three-foot child who is holding the hand of a two-foot child who carries on her back a one-foot child" came promptly to mind. In view of these things it is not surprising to learn that in the last fifty years j.a.pan has increased in population, through the birth rate alone, "as fast as the United States has gained from the birth rate plus her enormous immigration." The racial fertility of the Chinese is also well known; a Chinaman without sons to wors.h.i.+p his spirit when he dies is not only temporarily discredited but eternally doomed. As for India, that every Hindu girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow is a common saying, and readers of "Kim" and "The Naulahka" will recall the ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not also a mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen.

Mr. Putman Weale abundantly justifies the t.i.tle of his new book, "The Conflict of Color"--the seeming foreordination of some readjustment of racial relations if present tendencies continue--when he a.s.serts that while the white races double {271} in eighty years, the yellow or brown double in sixty, and the black in forty.

This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of racial relations, leads us very naturally to inquire, What are the qualities that have given the white race the leaders.h.i.+p thus far? And what may we do for the conservation of these qualities?

There are, of course, certain basic and fundamental reasons for white leaders.h.i.+p that I need not elaborate. For one thing, there is the tonic air of democratic ideals in which long generations of white men have lived and developed as contrasted with the stifling absolutism of the East. There is also our emphasis upon the worth of the Individual, our conception of the sacredness of personality, as compared with the Oriental lack of concern for the individual in its supreme regard for the family and the State. And even more important perhaps is the fact that the white man has had a religion that has taught--even if somewhat confusedly at times--that "man is man and master of his fate," that he is not a plaything of destiny, but a responsible son of G.o.d with enormous possibilities for good or evil, whereas the Oriental has been the victim of benumbing fatalism that has made him indifferent in industry and achievement, though it has given him a greater recklessness in war. It would also be difficult to exaggerate the influence which our radically different estimate of woman has had upon Western civilization. And here we have to consider not only woman's own direct contributions to progress, but also the indirect influence of our regard for woman, not as an inferior and a plaything, but as a comrade and helpmeet. How frequently the ideal of English chivalry--

"To love one maiden only, cleave to her, To wors.h.i.+p her by years of n.o.ble deeds"--

has been the inspiration of the best that men of our race have wrought, it needs only a glance at our literature to {272} suggest.

These things are indeed basic and fundamental and the question of their conservation, the preservation of the ideals of the Occident as compared with those of the Orient, is supremely important not only to us as a nation but to all our human race. But when one comes to consider only the sheer economic causes of the difference between Oriental poverty and Occidental plenty, it seems to me impossible to escape the conviction, already expressed and elaborated that it is mainly a matter of tools and knowledge, education and machinery.

In the Orient every man is producing as little as possible; in the Occident he is producing as much as possible. That is the case in a nutsh.e.l.l.

With better knowledge and better tools, half the people now engaged in food-production in Asia could produce all the food that the entire rural population now produces, and the other half could be released for manufacturing--thereby doubling the earning power and the spending power of the whole population.