ortant
affinities with those of China, but they have also important
differences; moreover they are decidedly less complex. Chinese problems,
even if they affected no one outside China, would be of vast importance,
since the Chinese are estimated to constitute about a quarter of the
human race. In fact, however, all the world will be vitally affected by
the development of Chinese affairs, which may well prove a decisive
factor, for good or evil, during the next two centuries. This makes it
important, to Europe and America almost as much as to Asia, that there
should be an intelligent understanding of the questions raised by China,
even if, as yet, definite answers are difficult to give.

The questions raised by the present condition of China fall naturally
into three groups, economic, political, and cultural. No one of these
groups, however, can be considered in isolation, because each is
intimately bound up with the other two. For my part, I think the
cultural questions are the most important, both for China and for
mankind; if these could be solved, I would accept, with more or less
equanimity, any political or economic system which ministered to that
end. Unfortunately, however, cultural questions have little interest for
practical men, who regard money and power as the proper ends for nations
as for individuals. The helplessness of the artist in a hard-headed
business community has long been a commonplace of novelists and
moralizers, and has made collectors feel virtuous when they bought up
the pictures of painters who had died in penury. China may be regarded
as an artist nation, with the virtues and vices to be expected of the
artist: virtues chiefly useful to others, and vices chiefly harmful to
oneself. Can Chinese virtues be preserved? Or must China, in order to
survive, acquire, instead, the vices which make for success and cause
misery to others only? And if China does copy the model set by all
foreign nations with which she has dealings, what will become of all of
us?

China has an ancient civilization which is now undergoing a very rapid
process of change. The traditional civilization of China had developed
in almost complete independence of Europe, and had merits and demerits
quite different from those of the West. It would be futile to attempt to
strike a balance; whether our present culture is better or worse, on the
whole, than that which seventeenth-century missionaries found in the
Celestial Empire i