CHINA’S SPIRITUAL BAGGAGE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 99, 9 December 1911, Page 5

CHINA’S SPIRITUAL BAGGAGE.

What has been the fundamental thing-which has changed the attitude if the Chinese to their rulers? The ‘‘Nation” declares that “the cement of superstition—to use a rough ■vord of a system so venerable—is dissolving,' and with it the religious power of the dynasty. S6me ferment of scepticism must have preceded-any revolt against the Manchu dynasty. “Any anti-dynastic movement in China must necessarily be anti-religi-ous. The Taipings had their own entirely heterodox faith, a new religion, which the eighteenth century would lave styled ‘enthusiastic.’ We hear nothing of any similar teachings among the rebels of to-day, and we suppose that their tendency must be to some form of free thought. The dynasty, _ alien and usurping though it was in its origins, had none the less placed itself at the apex of the whole system of ancestor worship. Theocrat and Autocrat. “Tho Emperor was, in some sense, theocrat as well as autocrat. Ho solved tho heavens as each good householder serves the spirits of his family. Ho was tho pivot of a nice organism of natural and magical forces, and disaster to earth and sky must have followed any interruption in the ritual which ho alone could perform. “It is, not easy to conceive a rebellion—above all, a Republican rebellion —unless the mass of the educated mid-dle-class, at all events, in Southern China, has consciously abandoned this burdensome -inheritance and lightened its fifoul of a vast load of spiritual baggage. The rebellion as a military adventure may succeed or fail. The immense and significant fact is that tho Chinese have rebelled, not merely against the Manchus, but against tho mental chains which had kept them subject. When all is over, it is possible that a Manchu child will still sit on the throne. But a theocrat will no longer reign in Pekin. __ “The struggle is tne issue between North and South, between the conscious Chinese Nationalists of the Yangtse Valley and the drilled official Chinese who will obey tho Manchu Court, between the wholly emancipated generation which accepts Sun-Yat-Sen for its leader, and the Opportunist halfeducated generation represented by Yuan-Sbih-Kai. One party or the other may triumph. But if the Manohu dynasty survives, it will be at the price of sweeping reforms, and its continuance will rest no longer on superstition but on policy, backed by a superior use of the common weapons of Western organisation and Western science. In any event this rebellion marks the Itegimiing of Die modern epoch in China. It will lie strange if tiie destinies of hundreds of millions of human beings are settled by a few battles between little armies of professional troops that barely muster 50,000 men between them. Yet what part can these millions—untrained, unarmed, unwarliko by the habit of prejudice and long centuries of peaceful civilisation—take in the fray? Some Important Questions. “Must not the hold avowal of ‘Socialism’ (which seems to mean tho single tax on land) provoke a formidable resistance from all that is wealthy and influential in this mature and materialised community? Can the allegiance of a nation reared in theocracy he secured without a personal head, and can the provinces of so vast and various an Empire be held together by a bond so abstract? The commentator of a movement so remote, so novel, so audacious, must content himself at present with asking questions.”