WHAT CHINA IS ASKING FOR.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9103, 1 June 1908, Page 3

WHAT CHINA IS ASKING FOR.

"To those who care to speculate in nil humility on the widest problems of the future, our Shanghai correspondent," says the "London Times," "offers a wide and tempting field. There is no longer any doubt, he tells us, that the old order of thought which has guided the lives of countless millions in the Chinese Empire through a long succession of centuries is passing away for ever. The movement in favour of Western education has become irresitisble. It is irresistible because it comes not from abovo but from below. It represents the genuine will of the people, or rather of those wide middle classes of the people who alone possess an articulate will. Tbey have forced it upon the Government, and the Government, as it always does where it recognises that this will has spoken, has adopted its decisions, and contents itself with seeking to guide a current wihch it cannot stem. The demand for 'Western learning' is, of course, primarily not a demand for knowledge as an end in itself. Until the war with Japan and the war betweur: Japan and Rjssia, the traditional veneration in which the Chinuse held their own classics and education limited to those classics, was unshaken. But the first of these wars c xivinced thum by its cruel lessons that this education did not produce sagacious statesmen or skilful soldiers. The second taught them tiiat with Western learning an Asiatic State might victoriously resist one of the greatest of European Powers. Tney unquestionably missed the full meaning of Japan's success. They attributed to her acquisition of European arts and sciences results which were, in fact, due to her success in grafting those arts and sciences upon rare moral qualities and habits which are wholly independent of them. It is the intimate combination of the objective method of European sctence with her own ethical system which is the explanation of the present strength and greatness of Japan. The Chinese reformers commit the cardinal error of ascribing to the first of thes3 factors results which it could never have achieved without tl e co-operation of the second. That eirjr must prove fatal to - their expi ciations unless they discover it and correct it, or unless it be unconsciously remedied by the sounder instincts of the community as a whole. But this very mistake only makes the education movement tie stronger. Conservatives, like Chang Chihtung, with reformers in holding it to be a short cut to national greatness. Bjth imagine that it will operate like a spell and dispense them from the alow and painful process of moral regeneration. To 400,000,000 of men whose ancient civilisation has resulted in ethical conceptions wholly alien from ours, and whose intellectual ideas are not less diverse, the world of modern thought is, we are told, to be opened. Will the subjects of this portentous experiment emerge form it with success? The answer is pregnant with great issues to mankind."