The Fight For The Republic In China | Page 7

an authority with which they were never really clothed save for
ceremonial purposes (principally perhaps because the Court was
entirely withdrawn from view and very insolent in its foreign
intercourse) a conception of High Mightiness was spread abroad
reminiscent of the awe in which Eighteenth Century nabobs spoke of

the Great Mogul of India. Chinese officials, quickly discovering that
their easiest means of defence against an irresistible pressure was to
take refuge behind the august name of the sovereign, played their role
so successfully that until 1900 it was generally believed by Europeans
that no other form of government than a despotism sans phrase could
be dreamed of. Finding that on the surface an Imperial Decree enjoyed
the majesty of an Ukaze of the Czar, Europeans were ready enough to
interpret as best suited their enterprises something which they entirely
failed to construe in terms expressive of the negative nature of Chinese
civilization; and so it happened that though the government of China
had become no government at all from the moment that
extraterritoriality destroyed the theory of Imperial inviolability and
infallibility, the miracle of turning state negativism into an active
governing element continued to work after a fashion because of the
disguise which the immense distances afforded.
Adequately to explain the philosophy of distance in China, and what it
has meant historically, would require a whole volume to itself; but it is
sufficient for our purpose to indicate here certain prime essentials. The
old Chinese were so entrenched in their vastnesses that without the play
of forces which were supernatural to them, i.e., the steam-engine, the
telegraph, the armoured war-vessel, etc., their daily lives could not be
affected. Left to themselves, and assisted by their own methods, they
knew that blows struck across the immense roadless spaces were so
diminished in strength, by the time they reached the spot aimed at, that
they became a mere mockery of force; and, just because they were so
valueless, paved the way to effective compromises. Being adepts in the
art which modern surgeons have adopted, of leaving wounds as far as
possible to heal themselves, they trusted to time and to nature to solve
political differences which western countries boldly attacked on very
different principles. Nor were they wrong in their view. From the
capital to the Yangtsze Valley (which is the heart of the country), is
800 miles, that is far more than the mileage between Paris and Berlin.
From Peking to Canton is 1,400 miles along a hard and difficult route;
the journey to Yunnan by the Yangtsze river is upwards of 2,000 miles,
a distance greater than the greatest march ever undertaken by Napoleon.
And when one speaks of the Outer Dominions--Mongolia, Tibet,

Turkestan--for these hundreds of miles it is necessary to substitute
thousands, and add there to difficulties of terrain which would have
disheartened even Roman Generals.
Now the old Chinese, accepting distance as the supreme thing, had
made it the starting-point as well as the end of their government. In the
perfected viceregal system which grew up under the Ming Dynasty, and
which was taken over by the Manchus as a sound and admirable
governing principle, though they superimposed their own military
system of Tartar Generals, we have the plan that nullified the great
obstacle. Authority of every kind was delegated by the Throne to
various distant governing centuries in a most complete and sweeping
manner, each group of provinces, united under a viceroy, being in
everything but name so many independent linked commonwealths,
called upon for matricular contributions in money and grain but
otherwise left severely alone. [Footnote: A very interesting proof--and
one that has never been properly exposed--of the astoundingly
rationalistic principles on which the Chinese polity is founded is to be
seen in the position of priesthoods in China. Unlike every other
civilization in the world, at no stage of the development of the State has
it been necessary for religion in China to intervene between the rulers
and the ruled, saving the people from oppression. In Europe without the
supernatural barrier of the Church, the position of the common people
in the Middle Ages would have been intolerable, and life, and virtue
totally unprotected. Buckle, in his "History of Civilization," like other
extreme radicals, has failed to understand that established religions
have paradoxically been most valuable because of their vast secular
powers, exercised under the mask of spiritual authority. Without this
ghostly restraint rulers would have been so oppressive as to have
destroyed their peoples. The two greatest monuments to Chinese
civilization, then consist of these twin facts; first, that the Chinese have
never had the need for such supernatural restraints exercised by a
privileged body, and secondly, that they are absolutely without any
feeling of class or caste--prince and pauper meeting on terms of