THE GREAT UNPROGRESSIVE PEOPLE 355 



Douglas in the Story of the Nations series, in which the facts of 

 Chinese history are briefly and clearly given. I mention these 

 as the authorities on which I have chiefly depended, not in 

 order to depreciate in comparison the works of other writers 

 on China that have not come under my notice. 



I now proceed to the first of the three questions]: The first 



(l) Why for centuries past have the Chinese made no progress pl 

 in civilisation ? 



If the cause of progress is, as I believe, contact in war, trade 

 and general intercourse with neighbouring nations, then there is 

 not much difficulty in answering this question. Partly they 

 have been shut off by natural boundaries, by the mountains ,of 

 Thibet in the west, by deserts on the northwest. On the north, 

 Hwangti (soon after B.C. 220) built the Great Wall to shut out 

 invaders, and beyond these boundaries were nations living far 

 inland under conditions unfavourable to progress and who lagged 

 behind the Chinese in civilisation. The sea coast is very limited 

 in extent considering the size of the celestial empire, and its 

 capacity as a doorway for the entrance of new ideas was much 

 reduced by the Chinese conception of all foreigners as outer 

 barbarians. Heine describes the university beadles at Gottingen 

 as existing in order to prevent the smuggling in of new ideas. 

 But how much more effective for this purpose than any imagin- 

 able officials was the ingrained contempt for outer barbarians 

 among the Chinese ! But we have to account for the origin of 

 the unmitigated contempt for foreigners, and the enormous 

 stretch of land or ocean that separates China from Europe, the 

 natural home of progress, at once comes to our aid. Every- 

 thing that was great and glorious in China was of China's own 

 making. There was nothing in the foreign countries they knew 

 worth borrowing. Therefore foreigners were contemptible. 

 Yet in their days of progress, the conditions that roused their 

 reforming zeal must have been similar to those that stimulate 

 progress now. Chinese civilisation undoubtedly attained to 

 something near its present point through competition and general 

 intercourse between a number of nations that inhabited its present 

 home, rivers forming the chief highways of communication. It 



