.

Although there have been many wars in China, the natural outlook of the
Chinese is very pacifistic. I do not know of any other country where a
poet would have chosen, as Po-Chui did in one of the poems translated by
Mr. Waley, called by him _The Old Man with the Broken Arm_, to make a
hero of a recruit who maimed himself to escape military service. Their
pacifism is rooted in their contemplative outlook, and in the fact that
they do not desire to change whatever they see. They take a pleasure--as
their pictures show--in observing characteristic manifestations of
different kinds of life, and they have no wish to reduce everything to a
preconceived pattern. They have not the ideal of progress which
dominates the Western nations, and affords a rationalization of our
active impulses. Progress is, of course, a very modern ideal even with
us; it is part of what we owe to science and industrialism. The
cultivated conservative Chinese of the present day talk exactly as their
earliest sages write. If one points out to them that this shows how
little progress there has been, they will say: "Why seek progress when
you already enjoy what is excellent?" At first, this point of view seems
to a European unduly indolent; but gradually doubts as to one's own
wisdom grow up, and one begins to think that much of what we call
progress is only restless change, bringing us no nearer to any desirable
goal.

It is interesting to contrast what the Chinese have sought in the West
with what the West has sought in China. The Chinese in the West seek
knowledge, in the hope--which I fear is usually vain--that knowledge may
prove a gateway to wisdom. White men have gone to China with three
motives: to fight, to make money, and to convert the Chinese to our
religion. The last of these motives has the merit of being idealistic,
and has inspired many heroic lives. But the soldier, the merchant, and
the missionary are alike concerned to stamp our civilization upon the
world; they are all three, in a certain sense, pugnacious. The Chinese
have no wish to convert us to Confucianism; they say "religions are
many, but reason is one," and with that they are content to let us go
our way. They are good merchants, but their methods are quite different
from those of European merchants in China, who are perpetually seeking
concessions, monopolies, railways, and mines, and endeavouring to get
their claims supported by gunboats. The Chinese are not, as a rule, g