thing which
is the very antithesis of the system it has replaced and which should be
wholly successful in a single generation, if courage is shown and the
whip unflinchingly used.

The chief trouble, in the opinion of the writer, has been the simplicity
of the problem and not its complexity. By eliminating the glamour which
surrounded the Throne, and by kicking away all the pomp and circumstance
which formed the age-old ritual of government, the glaring simplicity
and _barrenness_ of Chinese life--when contrasted with the complex
West--has been made evident. Bathed in the hard light of modern
realities, the poetic China which Haroun al-Raschid painted in his
Aladdin, and which still lives in the beautiful art of the country, has
vanished for ever and its place has been taken by a China of prose. To
those who have always pictured Asia in terms of poetry this has no doubt
been a very terrible thing--a thing synonymous with political death. And
yet in point of fact the elementary things remain much as they have
always been before, and if they appear to have acquired new meaning it
is simply because they have been moved into the foreground and are no
longer masked by a gaudy superstructure.

For if you eliminate questions of money and suppose for a moment that
the national balance-sheet is entirely in order, China is the old China
although she is stirred by new ideas. Here you have by far the greatest
agricultural community in the world, living just as it has always lived
in the simplest possible manner, and remitting to the cities (of which
there are not ten with half-a-million inhabitants) the increment which
the harvests yield. These cities have made much municipal progress and
developed an independence which is confessedly new. Printing presses
have spread a noisy assertiveness, as well as a very critical and
litigious spirit, which tends to resent and oppose authority.[27] Trade,
although constantly proclaimed to be in a bad way, is steadily growing
as new wants are created and fashions change. An immense amount of new
building has been done, particularly in those regions which the
Revolution of 1911 most devastated. The archaic fiscal system, having
been tumbled into open ruin, has been partially replaced by European
conceptions which are still only half-understood, but which are not
really opposed. The country, although boasting a population which is
only some fifty millions less than the population of the nineteen