EAST AND WEST.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1581, 26 October 1912, Page 4

EAST AND WEST.

The trouble in the Balkans, and in J another way, tho restless condition of China, are arguments in favour of the view that the Eastern races cannot be Westernised in a hurry. When the Turkish revolution took place a few years ago, many Western people believed that the Turks had fallen into line with Western ideas and principles. But the Young Turks have made a great mess of things, and the Turks generally are the same as they ever were. The most appalling atrocities are still enacted to prove that the East is what it was. Nor is China any less Chinese than when Meredith Townshend wrote his Asia and Europe. When -Count Noqi committed suicide last month, we were all.struck by his religious devotion .t0..01d- Japanese custom, but most of us must have ' thought that this great modern soldier may, as a modern and cultured man, have felt a modern regret that he should have to behave in the ancient way. On this point Sib ValentineChirol, one of the foremost authorities on Asia, wrote a deeply interesting letter to the Times of September 16. He was reminded of "another equally striking illustration_ of the gulf which in some essential respects divides the East from the West." Some 15 years ago the Chinese Minister in London was Lo Fung-luh, a man with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Western, and especially English, literature and science and philosophy. When Sir Valentine Chiroi, last visited him, tho Minister was dying of a painful disease. He was taken to the bedroom:

With a curiois whimsical smilo on his drawn face ho asked me to take a 6eat, and "kindly wait a few- moments until I have done with th.s gentleman." He was lying on a low coach, and he pointed to a wizened littlo Chinaman who was crouching beside him on tho ground over a smoking brazier. For about five minutes the Chinese medicine main continued to chant in a shrill nasal voice, whilst from timo to timo taking up a pinch of ashes from tho brazier and sprinkling thorn over different parts of Lo Fung-luh's body with strange passes find incnntnlions. He thereupon kow-towed throe times and retired. "I thought my dear friend," Lo Fmig-luh then said to me, "it might interest you to see how a Chinaman, steeped in your Western literature, saturated with your Western scienco and dies-na Chinaman!"

"East is East, and "West is West." There is, however, a wider lesson in this incident, in Geneiul Nogi's suicide, in the Chinese Republican atrocities, and in the continued "unspeakablene'ss" of the Turk.. They who think Westorn clothes and Western constitutions transform Eastern hearts are mostly those who think that an Act of Parliament can transform humanity."