THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, JUNE 15, 1908. THE AWAKENING OF CHINA.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9115, 15 June 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, JUNE 15, 1908. THE AWAKENING OF CHINA.

To those who care to speculate in all humility on the widest problems of the future, our Shanghai correspondent," says the "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 irresistible. It is irresistible because it comes not from above 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 articu-

late will. They have forced it upor the Government, and the Government, as it always does where it regnises that this will has spoken, has adopted its decisions, and contents itself with seeking to guide a current which 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 between Japan and Russia, the traditional veneration in which the Chinese held their own classics, and education limited to those classics, was unshaken. But the first of these wai'3 convinced them by its cruel lessons that this education did not produce sagacious statesmen or skilful soldiers. The second taught them that with Western learning an Asiatic State might victoriously resist one of the greatest of European Powers. They 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 methods of European science 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 these factors results which it could never have achieved without the co-operation of the second. That error must prove fatal to their expectations 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 the stronger. Conservatives, like Chang Chihtung, agree with reformei-s in holding it to be a short cut to national greatness. Both imagine that it will i operate like a spell and dispense them from the slow and painful process of moral regeneration. To 400,C00,000 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 portentious experimept emerge from it with success? The answer is pregnant with great issues .to mankind. It v/ould seem to depend upon , the power of the Chinese to maintain their reverence for the vital truths and principles which unquestionably underlie their old system while they are cultivating, assimilating and adjusting to their own requirements those which are the foundation of the ' new. The measure of that power it would be rash, indeed to estimate.