countries of Europe, has an army and a police-force so small as to allow
one to say that China is virtually disarmed since there are only 900,000
men with weapons in their hands. Casting about to discover what really
tinges the outlook, that must simply be held to be the long delay the
world has made in extending the same treatment to China as is now
granted to the meanest community of Latin America. It has been almost
entirely this, coupled with the ever-present threat of Japanese
chauvinism, which has given China the appearance of a land that is
hopelessly water-logged, although the National Debt is relatively the
smallest in the world and the people the most industrious and
law-abiding who have ever lived. In such circumstances that ideas of
collapse should have spread so far is simply due to a faulty estimate
of basic considerations.

For we have to remember that in a country in which the thoroughly
English doctrine of _laissez faire_ has been so long practised that it
has become second nature, and in which the philosophic spirit is so
undisputed that the pillars of society are just as much the beggars who
beg as the rich men who support them, influences of a peculiar character
play an immense role and can be only very slowly overcome. Passivity has
been so long enthroned that of the Chinese it may be truly said that
they are not so much too proud to fight as too indifferent,--which is
not a fruitful state of affairs. Looking on the world with callous
detachment the masses go their own way, only pausing in their work on
their ancient Festival days which they still celebrate just as they have
always celebrated them since the beginning of their history. The petty
daily activities of a vast legion of people grouped together in this
extraordinary way, and actuated by impulses which seem sharply to
conflict with the impulses of the other great races of the world, appear
incredible to Westerners who know what the outer perils really are, and
who believe that China is not only at bay but encircled--caught in a
network of political agreements and commitments which have permanently
destroyed her power of initiative and reduced her to inanition. To find
her lumbering on undisturbed, ploughing the fields, marrying and giving
in marriage, buying, selling, cursing and laughing, carrying out
rebellions and little plots as though the centuries that stretch ahead
were still her willing slaves, has in the end become to onlookers a