t, our Miss Durhams in the
Balkan Peninsula, and our Miss Bells in Mesopotamia, who wander far
afield, gleaning valuable facts and laying before their countrymen and
countrywomen conclusions based on acquired knowledge and wide
experience. But their efforts are only partially successful. They are
often shivered on the solid rock of preconceived prejudices, and genuine
but ill-informed sentimentalism. A large section of the English public
are, in fact, singularly wanting in political imagination. Although they
would not, in so many words, admit the truth of the statement, they none
the less act and speak as if sound national development in whatsoever
quarter of the world must of necessity proceed along their own
conventional, insular, and time-honoured lines, and along those lines
alone. There is a whole class of newspaper readers, and also of
newspaper writers, who resemble that eminent but now deceased Member of
Parliament, who told me that during the four hours' railway journey from
Port Said to Cairo he had come to the definite conclusion that Egypt
could not be prosperous because he had observed that there were no
stacks of corn standing in the fields; neither was this conclusion in
any way shaken when it was explained to him that the Egyptians were not
in the habit of erecting corn stacks after the English model. All these
classes readily lend an ear to quack, though often very well-intentioned
politicians, who go about the world preaching that countries can be
regenerated by shibboleths, and that the characters of nations can be
changed by Acts of Parliament. This frame of mind appeals with
irresistible force to the untrained Eastern habit of thought. T'ang--a
leading Chinese Republican--Mr. Bland says, "like all educated Chinese,
believes in the magic virtue of words and forms of government in making
a nation wise and strong by Acts of Parliament." And what poor,
self-deluded T'ang is saying and thinking in Canton is said and thought
daily by countless Ahmeds, Ibrahims, and Rizas in the bazaars of
Constantinople, Cairo, and Teheran.

What has Mr. Bland to tell us of all the welter of loan-mongering,
rococo constitution-tinkering, Confucianism, and genuine if at times
misdirected philanthropy, which is now seething in the Chinese
melting-pot?

In the first place, he has to say that the main obstacle to all real
progress in China is one that cannot be removed by any change in the
form of government, whether the r