,
its villages and its sacred spots.

I heard of its mines and of its physical wealth. But the world already
knows of that. The world already knows that this physical wealth of
mines and raw material was what made it look good to Germany and Japan.
But the thing that impressed me was its spiritual wealth.

The thing that makes Shantung attractive to the Japanese, of course, is
not the spiritual wealth, as the world well knows. Perhaps the Japanese
have never considered the latter any more than the Germans did; but the
one thing that makes it most sacred to the Chinese, who are, after all,
a race of idealists, is its treasuries of spiritual memories and
shrines.

In the first place, many Chinese will tell you that it is the "cradle of
the Chinese race." I am not sure that histories will confirm this
statement. And I am also not sure that that makes any difference as long
as the idea is buried in the heart of the Chinese people. A tradition
often means as much to a race as a fact. And the tradition certainly is
well established that Shantung is the birthplace of all Chinese history.
So that is one of the deeply rooted spiritual facts that makes Shantung
sacred to the Chinese.

The second spiritual gold mine is that one of its cities, Chufu, is the
birthplace and the last resting-place of the sage Confucius. And China
is literally impregnated with Confusian philosophy and Confucian
sayings.

I took a trip to this shrine in order to catch some of the spiritual
atmosphere of the Shantung loss. The trip made it necessary to tramp
about fifteen miles coming and going through as dusty a desert as I ever
saw, but that was a trifle compared with the thrill that I had as I
stood at last before the little mound about as high as a California
bungalow; the mound that held the dust of this great Chinese sage.
During the war I stood before the grave of Napoleon in France. Before I
went to France I visited Grant's tomb. I have also stood many times
beside a little mound in West Virginia, the resting-place of my mother,
and I think that I know something of the sacredness of such experiences
to a human heart, but somehow the thrill that came to me on that January
morning, warm with sunlight, spicy with winter cold, produced a feeling
too deep for mere printed words to convey.

"If we feel as we do standing here on this sacred spot, think of how the
Chinese feel toward their own sage!" said an old missionary of the
party.

"Yes,"