X
THE influences that are thus surging into the Middle Kingdom are tremendous. The beginnings of China's foreign trade date back to the third century, though it was not until comparatively recent years that it grew to large proportions. To-day the leading seaports of China have many great business houses handling vast quantities of European and American goods. The most persistent effort is made to extend commerce with the Chinese. That the effort is successful is shown by the fact that the foreign trade of China increased from 217,183,960 taels in 1888 to 583,547,291 taels in 1904. This shows the enormous gain of 168 per cent., though this is slightly modified by the fact that the report for 1904 includes goods to the value of 402,639 taels carried by Chinese vessels which, though plying between native and foreign ports, were not formerly reported through the customs. According to official reports, the foreign trade of China has been growing rapidly during recent years, the only falling off having been in the Boxer outbreak year 1900. In 1891, the imports into China were, in round numbers, 134,000,000 taels and the exports were 101,000,000, a total of 235,000,000, and an excess of imports of 33 per cent. In 1904 the imports had advanced to 344,060,608 taels and the exports to 239,486,683 taels, a total of 583,547,291 taels, an increase of 148 per cent. and an excess of imports of 44 per cent. In 1899 the total foreign trade of China had reached 460,000,000 taels. The next year it dropped to 370,000,000 taels, but in 1901 it sprang to 438,000,000 taels, and has advanced nearly 150,000,000 taels within the past three years.
The share of the United States is larger than one might infer from the reports, as no inconsiderable part of our trade goes to China by way of England and Hongkong and is often credited to the British total instead of to ours. American trade has, moreover, rapidly increased since 1900. We now sell more cotton goods to China than to all other countries combined, the exports having increased from $5,195,845 in 1898 to $27,000,000 in 1905. In the year 1904, 63,529,623 gallons of kerosene oil valued at $7,202,110 were shipped from the United States to China. The development of the flour trade has been extraordinary, the sales having risen from $89,305 in 1898 to $5,360,139 in 1904.
In Hongkong, I found American flour controlling the market. I learned on inquiry that years before, a firm in Portland, Oregon, had sent an agent to introduce its flour. The rice-eating Chinese did not want it, but the agent stayed, gave away samples, explained its use and pushed his goods so energetically and persistently that after years of labour and the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars a market was created. Now that firm sells in such enormous quantities that its numerous mills must run day and night to supply the demand, and the annual profits run into six figures. That city of Portland alone exported to Asia, chiefly China, in 1903:-- 849,360 barrels flour $2,974,620 522,887 bushels wheat 413,901 46,847,975 feet lumber 647,355 Miscellaneous merchandise 352,879 ------- Total $4,414,651
While cotton goods, kerosene oil and flour are our chief exports to China, there is a growing demand for many other American products. The utility of the American locomotive has become so apparent that in 1899, engines costing $732,212 were sent to China and additional orders are received every few months. With the enormous forests bordering the Pacific Ocean in the states of Oregon and Washington, and with the development of cheap water transportation, there is a rapidly widening market in China for American lumber. Eastern Asia is too densely peopled to have large forests, and those she has are not within easy reach. Native lumber, therefore, is scarce and often small and crooked. That in common use comes from Manchuria and Korea. I was impressed in Tsing-tau to find that the Germans are using Oregon lumber and to be told that it is considered the best, and in the long run, the cheapest. Oregon pine costs more than the Korean and Manchurian, but it is superior in size and quality. The transportation charges to the interior, however, are a heavy addition. Manchurian pine can be delivered at such an interior city as Wei-hsien, via the junk port of Yang-chia-ko and thence by land, for twenty dollars, gold, per thousand square feet, which is considerably less than the Tsing-tau retail price for Asiatic lumber. Oregon lumber costs in Shanghai, thirty-two dollars gold, per thousand, but an importer estimated that it could be delivered at Tsingtau for twenty-five dollars gold per thousand in large quantities.
The exports of the United States to China, according to the reports of Consul-General Goodnow of Shanghai, increased from $11,081,146 in 1900 to $18,175,484 in 1901 and $22,698,282 in 1902, while for 1904 they reached the total of about $24,000,000, a gain of nearly 125 per cent. since 1900 and of several hundred per cent. as compared with 1894.
Meantime, the United States imported from China goods to the value of $30,872,244 in 1904, which is an increase of $14,255,956 over the imports for 1901. Silk and tea are the principal items in this trade, the figures for the former being $10,220,543 and for the latter $7,294,570, though of goatskins we took $2,556,541, wool $2,325,445, and matting $1,615,838. The United States is now the third nation in trade relations with China. This is the more remarkable when we consider the statement of the late Mr. Everett Frazar of the American Asiatic Association that in January, 1901, there were only four American business firms in all China. When our business men establish their own houses in China instead of dealing as now through European and Chinese firms, it is not unreasonable to expect that the United States will outstrip its larger rivals Great Britain and France, though, as I have already intimated, it is one thing to ship foreign goods to China and quite another thing to control them after their arrival, for the Chinese are disposed to manage that trade themselves and they know how to do it.
Unfortunately the stream of foreign trade with China has been contaminated by many of the vices which disgrace our civilization. The pioneer traders were, as a rule, pirates and adventurers, who cheated and abused the Chinese most flagrantly. Gorst says that ``rapine, murder and a constant appeal to force chiefly characterized the commencement of Europe's commercial intercourse with China.'' There are many men of high character engaged in business in the great cities of China. I would not speak any disparaging word of those who are worthy of all respect. But it is all too evident that ``many Americans and Europeans doing business in Asia are living the life of the prodigal son who has not yet come to himself.'' Profane, intemperate, immoral, not living among the Chinese, but segregating themselves in foreign communities in the treaty ports, not speaking the Chinese language, frequently beating and cursing those who are in their employ, regarding the Chinese with hatred and contempt,--it is no wonder that they are hated in return and that their conduct has done much to justify the Chinese distrust of the foreigner. The foreign settlements in the port cities of China are notorious for their profligacy. Intemperance and immorality, gambling and Sabbath desecration run riot. When after his return from a long journey in Asia, the Rev. Dr. George Pentecost was asked-- ``What are the darkest spots in the missionary outlook?'' he replied:--
``In lands of spiritual darkness, it is difficult to speak of `darkest spots.' I should say, however, that if there is a darkness more dark than other darkness, it is that which is cast into heathen darkness by the ungodliness of the American and European communities that have invaded the East for the sake of trade and empire. The corruption of Western godliness is the worst evil in the East. Of course there are noble exceptions among western commercial men and their families, but as a rule the European and American resident in the East is a constant contradiction to all and everything which the missionary stands for.''
Most of the criticisms of missionaries which find their way into the daily papers emanate from such men. The missionaries do not gamble or drink whiskey, nor will their wives and daughters attend or reciprocate entertainments at which wine, cards and dancing are the chief features. So, of course, the missionaries are ``canting hypocrites,'' and are believed to be doing no good, because the foreigner who has never visited a Chinese Christian Church, school or hospital in his life, does not see the evidences of missionary work in his immediate neighbourhood. The editor of the Japan Daily Mail justly says:--
``We do not suggest that these newspapers which denounce the missionaries so vehemently desire to be unjust or have any suspicion that they are unjust. But we do assert that they have manifestly taken on the colour of that section of every far eastern community whose units, for some strange reason, entertain an inveterate prejudice against the missionary and his works. Were it possible for these persons to give an intelligent explanation of the dislike with which the missionary inspires them, their opinions would command more respect. But they have never succeeded in making any logical presentment of their case, and no choice offers except to regard them as the victims of an antipathy which has no basis in reason or reflection, That a man should be anti-Christian and should de- vote his pen to propagating his views is strictly within his right, and we must not be understood as suggesting that the smallest reproach attaches to such a person. But on the other hand, it is within the right of the missionary to protest against being arraigned before judges habitually hostile to him, and it is within the right of the public to scrutinize the pronouncements of such judges with much suspicion.''
Charles Darwin did not hesitate to put the matter more bluntly still. He will surely not be deemed a prejudiced witness, but he plainly said of the traders and travellers who attack missionaries:--
``It is useless to argue against such reasoners. I believe that, disappointed in not finding the field of licentiousness quite so open as formerly, they will not give credit to a morality which they do not wish to practice, or to a religion which they undervalue or despise.''
These facts are a suggestive commentary on the popular notion that civilization should precede Christianity. The Rev. Dr. James Stewart, the veteran missionary of South Africa, says that it is an ``unpleasant and startling statement, unfortunately true, that contact with European nations seems always to have resulted in further deterioration of the African races. . . . Trade and commerce have been on the West Coast of Africa for more than three centuries. What have they made of that region? Some of its tribes are more hopeless, more sunken morally and socially, and rapidly becoming more commercially valueless, than any tribes that may be found throughout the whole of the continent. Mere commercial influence by its example or its teaching during all that time has had little effect on the cruelty and reckless shedding of blood and the human sacrifices of the besotted paganism which still exists near that coast.'' Of his experience in New Guinea, James Chalmers declared:--``I have had twenty-one years' experience among natives. I have lived with the Christian native, and I have lived, and dined, and slept with cannibals. But I have never yet met with a single man or woman, or with a single people, that civilization without Christianity has civilized.''
Substantially similar statements might be made regarding other lands.
``The more we open the world to what we call civilization, and the more education we give it of the kind we call scientific, the greater are the dangers to modern society, unless in some way we contrive to make all the world better. Brigands armed with repeating rifles and supplied with smokeless gunpowder are brigands still, but ten times more dangerous than before. The vaste hordes of human beings in Asia and Africa, so long as they are left in seclusion, are dangerous to their immediate neighbours; but, when they have railroads, steamboats, tariffs, and machine guns, while they retain their savage ideals and barbarous customs, they become dangerous to all the rest of the world.''
A Christless civilization is always and everywhere a curse rather than a blessing. From the Garden of Eden down, the fall of man has resulted from ``the increase of knowledge and of power unaccompanied by reverence.... No evolution is stable which neglects the moral factor or seeks to shake itself free from the eternal duties of obedience and of faith. . . . The Song of Lamech echoes from a remote antiquity the savage truth that `the first results of civilization are to equip hatred and render revenge more deadly, . . . a savage exultation in the fresh power of vengeance which all the novel instruments have placed in their inventor's hands.' ''
What is civilization without the gospel? The essential elements of our civilization are the fruits of Christianity, and the tree cannot be transplanted without its roots. Can a railroad or a plow convert a man? They can add to his material comfort; they can enlarge the opportunities of the gospel, but are they the gospel itself? What does civilization without Christianity mean? It means the lust of the European and American soldiers which is rotting the native Hawaiians, the European and American liquor which is debauching the Africans, the opium which is enervating the Chinese, 6,000 tons a year coming from India at a profit of $32,000,000 to the English Government.
How can such a civilization prepare the way for Christianity? As a matter of fact, the Chinese already have a civilization, and if our civilization is considered apart from its distinctively Christian elements, it is not so much superior to the Chinese as we are apt to imagine. The differences are chiefly matters of taste and education. The truth is that always and everywhere,--
``civilization, so far from obliterating iniquity, imports into the world iniquities of its own. It changes to some degree the aspects of iniquity, but does not make them less. Further than that its effect is rather regularly to dress iniquity in a less repulsive and more attractive form, and in that way makes it more difficult to get rid of than before. There is no sin so insinuating as refined and elegant sin, and of that civilization is the expert patron and champion. The sin that is the devil's chief stock in trade is not what is going on in Hester Street, but on the polite avenues. . . . Evangelization conducts to civilization, but civilization has no necessary bearing on evangelization; that is to say, there is in civilization no energy inherently calculated to yield gospel facts. By carrying schools and arts, trade and manufacture, among people that are now savages you may be able to refine the quality of their deviltry, but that is not even the first step towards making angels, or even saints of them.''
Lowell is said to have administered the following stinging rebuke to the skeptical critics who sneered about missionaries and declared the adequacy of civilization without them:--
``When the microscopic search of skepticism, which has hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a Creator, has turned its attention to human society and has found a place on this planet ten miles square where a decent man can live in decency, comfort and security, supporting and educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted; a place where age is reverenced, manhood respected, womanhood honoured, and human life held in due regard; when skeptics can find such a place ten miles square on this globe where the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way, and laid the foundation and made decency and security possible, it will then be in order for the skeptical literati to move thither and there ventilate their views.''
But we may add Darwin's conjecture that ``should a voyager chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far.'' Bishop Thoburn says that no nation without Christianity has ever advanced a step, and that while in Washington there are 6,000 models of plows invented by Americans, India is using the same plow as in the days of David and Solomon. But wherever Christ's gospel goes, true civilization appears. ``A better soul will soon make better circumstances; but better circumstances will not necessarily make a better soul.''
``We must be here to work, And men who work can only work for men, And not to work in vain must comprehend Humanity, and so work humanly, And raise men's bodies still by raising souls.''
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment