nothing if not fair-minded--why
shouldn't missionaries act as recruiting-agents? What's the use of
spending years converting heathen into Christians, if they are not to
act as Christians? Why should there be any scruples about enlisting
converts for a "Holy War"? They might as well "do their bit" for
civilization, Christian civilization. Besides, "the blood of the
martyrs is the seed of the Church." Moreover, the Treaty of Tientsin,
in 1858, which legalized the sale of British opium, also legalized the
practice of Christianity in China.[3]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: See Appendix II.]

X

DUST AND GOSSIP

I don't suppose a country can go to war, without first having a war
spirit. If the enemy doesn't rouse this spirit, doesn't provoke it, then
some one else must. The ideal war, I suppose, is the one in which the
enemy furnishes the incentive. Poor old China has now got to go to war,
but it is mighty uphill work to create the war feeling. Since Germany
has not provoked it, it must be manufactured somehow, and the task is
now devolving upon those foreign influences which will benefit if China
goes to war. They are getting to work rapidly and adroitly, but the
situation requires some diplomacy. It is so difficult to incite feeling
against one foreign nation without inciting it against them all. The
poor Chinese can't distinguish. They can't understand why they should
be especially irate against Germany at the moment, when rankling
uppermost in their minds is the recent French grab of Lao Hsi Kai, and
the still more recent deal of the Shanghai Opium Combine. It is so
difficult to fan the flame yet not cause too great a conflagration. It
requires nice discrimination, and these poor old heathen minds have a
quaint logic of their own. The game is amusing, interesting, from the
standpoint of the detached onlooker.

Roughly speaking, the people of a nation may be grouped into two
classes, the inciters and the fighters. They are not the same people, as
a rule. The inciters usually work in the rear, as noncombatants or
molders of public opinion. In China--China being what it is, in the
circumstances, and all--the noncombatants who have assumed this task of
arousing the war spirit are foreigners. A delicate task, this arousing
resentment against one set of foreigners without arousing it against
all. It means diplomacy of the first water. Thus, the foreign press is
very insistent that the Huns be got rid of. One Engli