PROBLEMS IN CHINA 307 



as affording a discontented subject people opportunities to combine 

 against their rulers. It will be evident that to march armies suffi- 

 cientl}'' large to subdue 400,000,000 people througli such a country — 

 armies almost all of whose munitions of war Avould have to be trans- 

 ported from the coast — would be a phj^sical impossibility. 



Then the Chinese, when hard pressed, are capable of using means 

 -of defense against which the best equipped European armies, led by 

 the al)lest generals, Avould be as powerless as if they were naked sav- 

 ages. On one occasion tlie inhabitants of the northern province of 

 Honan, being unable to meet an invading army in the field, " cut 

 through the dikes of the Yellow River, ' China's Sorrow,' and flooded 

 the M'hole country." Tiie invaders escaped to the mountains, l)ut 

 upward of 200,000 natives perished in the flood, and the city of 

 Kaifeng was destroyed. Another time, "in the first period of the 

 jNIanchu dynast3% the Chinese had the patriotism and resolution to 

 lay waste their own coasts as far as twenty leagues up the country, 

 and destroy villages and cities, burn woods and cornfields — in fact, to 

 create an immense desert— in order to annihilate the power of a for- 

 midable pirate, who for a long time had held in check the whole 

 strength of the empire." What this extraordinar}'' people have done 

 more than once in their stress they would do again under similar 

 •circumstances. 



But are they united and animated by the single desire of driving 

 out the " foreign devils " ? It does not seem to me that there is an_v 

 evidence of this other than the mere assertion of writers who have 

 •apparently taken it for granted. A united purpose impelling the 

 ignorant myriads of Chinese, divided in speech and in habits of life 

 and separated by vast distances, is inconceivable. Hatred of the for- 

 eigners is, I believe, in large measure confined to the ruling classes, 

 whose powers and privileges are threatened b_y the new religion and 

 the reforms which it l)rings with it. The Chinese magistrate who sells 

 justice to the highest bidder naturally hates the consular court. It 

 is they and tlie literati, or educated class, from whose ranks they are 

 drawn, who foment these disturl)ances ; who placard the cities with 

 inflaniinatory invitations to rise up against the foreigners ; who circu- 

 late scandals about the Christian rites, similar to the assertions made 

 and Ijelieved in France and Austria about the Jews. That they are 

 al)le to arouse tiie common ])eople to action here and there, esp(!cially 

 in the coast provinces and in large cities and their neighborhoods, 

 Q'ecent events have proved, it is possible, but hardly conceivable 



