The Problem of China | Page 4

essentially indestructible, and can afford to wait. The "civilized"
nations of the world, with their blockades, their poison gases, their
bombs, submarines, and negro armies, will probably destroy each other
within the next hundred years, leaving the stage to those whose
pacifism has kept them alive, though poor and powerless. If China can
avoid being goaded into war, her oppressors may wear themselves out
in the end, and leave the Chinese free to pursue humane ends, instead
of the war and rapine and destruction which all white nations love. It is
perhaps a slender hope for China, and for ourselves it is little better
than despair. But unless the Great Powers learn some moderation and
some tolerance, I do not see any better possibility, though I see many
that are worse.
Our Western civilization is built upon assumptions, which, to a
psychologist, are rationalizings of excessive energy. Our industrialism,
our militarism, our love of progress, our missionary zeal, our
imperialism, our passion for dominating and organizing, all spring from
a superflux of the itch for activity. The creed of efficiency for its own
sake, without regard for the ends to which it is directed, has become
somewhat discredited in Europe since the war, which would have never
taken place if the Western nations had been slightly more indolent. But
in America this creed is still almost universally accepted; so it is in
Japan, and so it is by the Bolsheviks, who have been aiming
fundamentally at the Americanization of Russia. Russia, like China,
may be described as an artist nation; but unlike China it has been
governed, since the time of Peter the Great, by men who wished to
introduce all the good and evil of the West. In former days, I might
have had no doubt that such men were in the right. Some (though not
many) of the Chinese returned students resemble them in the belief that
Western push and hustle are the most desirable things on earth. I cannot

now take this view. The evils produced in China by indolence seem to
me far less disastrous, from the point of view of mankind at large, than
those produced throughout the world by the domineering cocksureness
of Europe and America. The Great War showed that something is
wrong with our civilization; experience of Russia and China has made
me believe that those countries can help to show us what it is that is
wrong. The Chinese have discovered, and have practised for many
centuries, a way of life which, if it could be adopted by all the world,
would make all the world happy. We Europeans have not. Our way of
life demands strife, exploitation, restless change, discontent and
destruction. Efficiency directed to destruction can only end in
annihilation, and it is to this consummation that our civilization is
tending, if it cannot learn some of that wisdom for which it despises the
East.
It was on the Volga, in the summer of 1920, that I first realized how
profound is the disease in our Western mentality, which the Bolsheviks
are attempting to force upon an essentially Asiatic population, just as
Japan and the West are doing in China. Our boat travelled on, day after
day, through an unknown and mysterious land. Our company were
noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations
of everything, persuaded that there is nothing they could not understand
and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. One of us
lay at death's door, fighting a grim battle with weakness and terror and
the indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of
loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lay a
great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seemed
that none had leisure to hear the silence, yet it called to me so
insistently that I grew deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the
endless information of the well-informed.
One night, very late, our boat stopped in a desolate spot where there
were no houses, but only a great sandbank, and beyond it a row of
poplars with the rising moon behind them. In silence I went ashore, and
found on the sand a strange assemblage of human beings, half-nomads,
wandering from some remote region of famine, each family huddled
together surrounded by all its belongings, some sleeping, others silently

making small fires of twigs. The flickering flames lighted up gnarled,
bearded faces of wild men, strong, patient, primitive women, and
children as sedate and slow as their parents. Human beings they
undoubtedly were, and yet it would have been far easier for me to grow
intimate with a dog or a cat or a horse than with one of them. I knew
that they would wait there day after day,