date, two of the best having been invented since it was published in 1910. To our shame, however, it must be said that the condition of slaughter-houses and methods of slaughtering as described by Mr. Cash are those still prevailing in the majority of towns and villages in this country to-day.

LETTICE MACNAGHTEN.

NOTHING has been more fatal or more misleading in the last few weeks than the way party capital has been made by both sides out of the events that have taken place in China. The general public of this country remains in complete ignorance of the real state of affairs.

We are told on the one hand that China is in the grip of Red agents. Kharakhan, we imagine, overshadows Peking as Rasputin did the Court of Russia. While those who read the Labour Press have visions of China rising as one man to free her women and children from the slavery of Western factory owners.

She

But China is not Bolshevik, and the British merchants are not slave-drivers. China is uncomfortable and discontented. has lost face not only before the world, but in her own inmost heart. The Revolution of 1911 was to inaugurate freedom: it has brought licence. It was to inaugurate prosperity it has VOL. XCVIII-No. 582

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brought insecurity. It was to inaugurate a new order or society : it has brought disorder in social and political life. The vaunted democracy of the West, which she thought she could have for the asking, has not come at her bidding. The old régime secured for her at least an ordered life, commercial security, and a measure of prosperity; and now the increased prosperity which Western industrialism promised her continually eludes her grasp, because, as she is discovering, it needs better order and more complete security than was needed for her old ways of life. For a time there was hope-hope that one or other of the military leaders would secure supremacy and then put himself under the orders of a constitutional Parliament and a constitutional President. Today that hope is flickering out. Those who speak to public opinion in China can point to no royal road to prosperity and peace. Even the penny-wise moralists of the local Press, for all their words, have nothing to say. Being uncomfortable and discontented, it is no wonder that grievances which, in their proper setting, would seem to be very small indeed assume the present dangerous proportions-dangerous alike to China, to Britain and the world

at large.

For China cannot get on without Britain and Britain cannot get on without China, and any conflict between them would go far to range the whole world into two great racial groups at war with one another.

The issue will be decided by what Britain does in the next few months. Are we going to treat China, as we treat Japan, as an equal? Or shall we go on acting on the assumption generally adopted by leader-writers in the daily Press that China will always in the end bow without reserve to the wishes of the Powers'? In this article no attempt will be made to suggest policy or determine blame. The writer will endeavour only to interpret China and her aspirations so that his readers may understand how vital are Britain's actions and, even more, Britain's attitude at this time.

The first essential to the understanding of China is to put out of mind altogether our Western conceptions of national organisation. Our organisation in the West is primarily political. The clue to the stability of the United States of America, for instance, is her admirable constitution; and Britain's stability as a nation and as a commonwealth depends primarily on her political institutions. Local government is a comparatively recent developmert. In China the exact reverse is the case. The clue to her comparative stability for four thousand years is the strength of her local government. It may be in some ways inefficient compared with our highly developed municipal organisations, but it

secures that, locally at any rate, people govern themselves. Moreover, under the old Manchu régime, China was little more than a loose federation of great provinces with the Emperor as a symbol of unity. Within the provinces the general administration was in the hands of a highly-trained governing class. But the real source of China's strength lay in her innumerable local organisations-by clan, and trade and village. All the things that really affected everyday human life were in the hands of these exceptionally democratic groups.

The inevitable result was a lack of patriotism, or rather of that patriotism which is willing to sacrifice everything for the country as a whole. Japan provides a very striking contrast. Her Samurai had no local loyalty. Patriotism (bushido, the utter surrender if necessary of life itself to the Emperor as the divine leader of the nation's life) was the supreme virtue. In China the supreme virtue has been in the past family, and not national, loyalty.

Meanwhile modern conditions have made it imperative for China to become a nation in the modern sense. She must find somehow a national spirit, a spirit that is prepared to put China before family, or trade or village. That spirit she is at last discovering. The awakening of it began in the war; and inevitably it began among that section of her people most in touch with Western ideas of nationalism and most out of touch with local politics and local needs. It was the students in the colleges and high schools of the big cities, away for most of the year from their villages, and studying as well as their own classics the literature of the West, in which nearly all the heroes are national leaders—it was the students who were the first Chinese patriots in our Western sense. They led public opinion in its protest against the twentyone demands presented by Japan at the close of the war. Whatever we may have thought of their methods at that time, there was no doubting their patriotism. Relying on the public opinion which they aroused, their delegates at Versailles refused, in spite of tremendous pressure, to sign the Versailles Treaty. Their refusal made the Washington Conference possible and saved Shantung for China. We cannot therefore disregard the student community in China, nor, however much we may regret their actions, can we despise them. They are in the truest sense the greatest hope for China's future. And, if we regret that their patriotism seems of necessity to be anti-foreign, let us remember our own readiness to regard foreigners with suspicion. Strangely enough, one of the greatest of the younger Chinese leaders, who represented her 'Peoples Organisations' at the recent Opium Conference at Geneva, speaking last summer to a great audience of British students, said: 'You give us in China the impression that

your nationalism must be "anti-something" if it is to live at all.' Let us not condemn others for what is a natural tendency in all peoples, and from which, if we can only be honest with ourselves, we must know we are not free.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the recent comments on things Chinese in the British Press has been the singling out for special reproof those Chinese who are most like ourselvesstudents, however mistaken they may be, as patriotic as our students in 1914, ready to die for their country; and that old Oliver Cromwell at Peking, with his great six-foot-two frame, his devotion to his men, his love of China, his absolute refusal to kow-tow to any foreigners. General Feng is perhaps more thickheaded than many Chinese; he may yield a little to the temptation to show the anti-Christians among his countrymen that, just because he is a Christian, he is second to none in his passionate desire to serve China. He may be a little self-seeking, if you can call it self-seeking when a man who has proved that he can discipline troops, and bring order out of chaos, longs to be able to do for all China what he has done for two provinces. He has his faults, but they are faults that are more common in Britain than in China. There is no excuse for our not understanding him : rather we should strive in every way we can to show that we too wish China well, that we too believe in well-disciplined armies, in devoted generalship, in stamping out prostitution and preventing the cultivation of opium, and in an ardent and devoted patriotism. Because, at the moment, Chinese patriotism is anti-British, we must not be misled into thinking that it is pro-Bolshevik. Bolshevist propaganda is there in plenty, but it is incidental to the whole situation. Russia is trying to make capital out of the present situation, but China is not in her pocket, and never will be. In fact in this rapprochement between Russia and China there is great hope for the world's future. Russia and China have always been closely linked. Even when China was closed to the rest of the West she had diplomatic representatives at the Russian Court. China has many things in common with Russia, especially in her communal life, and in the great land mass that makes her country. But the Chinese are less emotional than the Russians, more practical, more business-like; they will be a moderating influence on Russia's extreme views, and their friendship will do more to make Russia see faults in her present system than our Western hostility can ever do.

That Britain is singled out for attack is less easy to understand. But anti-British feeling is no new thing. During the later stages of the war a cartoon appeared in the Chinese Press of John Bull-not as we like to fancy him, patronising or harassed or beneficent but with one foot on a submarine and the other on a