t foreigners may think
of them, the Chinese are by no means fools. They possess the wisdom of
the ages,--of their own peculiar kind. They have had a long experience
with foreigners, saddening and enriching, and cynicism is the outgrowth
of such experience. China has suffered at the hands of the great powers,
has suffered at the hands of England, Russia, France, and Germany alike.
She is virtually in the position of a vassal state, not to any one of
these nations but to all of them, and they have pillaged and despoiled
her for a century and a half. To one of them she owes the curse of
opium, which was forced upon her for commercial reasons--a curse which
she is about ready to throw off. She is weak and corrupt, but it is to
the advantage of her foreign masters to keep her in a state of weakness
and corruption. At the present moment she is paying huge indemnities to
various European powers as compensation for the losses they sustained
during the Boxer uprising in 1900, the Boxer trouble being an attempt on
the part of China to rid herself of the foreign invader. To one of these
countries, Russia, she is paying an indemnity part of which consists of
the expenses of thousands of troops which had no existence except on
paper. It is hardly possible for the Chinese to believe, in the light of
their own experience, that the various European nations at death-grips
in this war are actuated by the noble sentiments they profess to be
fighting for. The assurances from Europe, cabled daily to the Chinese
press, that the Allies are fighting for liberty, for justice, for
civilization, for the protection of small nations, mean nothing to the
Chinese. Such professions leave them cold. To the Oriental mind this
gigantic struggle is between a nation who is mistress of the world (and
the world's markets) and a nation who wishes to become mistress of the
world (and the world's markets). With seventy-nine per cent. of her
territory under foreign control, China can hardly believe in the
disinterested motives of the fighting nations.

The other day I saw a little incident on the street that puts the case
in a nutshell. Two big Mongolian dogs were locked together in a fight
to the death. Each had the other in a death-grip, and they rolled over
and over in the dust, surrounded by a great crowd of people who stood
by indifferently and watched them fight it out. This is the attitude
of China toward the European War, the attitude of the calm,
indiff