WHITE SAVAGES AT PLAY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 8, 21 February 1901, Page 17

WHITE SAVAGES AT PLAY.

Ok reading the published accounts of the barbirities practised by the * Christian ' troops from the West in t\\i land of the heathen Chinee, one is tempted to ask, in the Linguae of Truthful Jamks :—

la our civilisation a failure ' Or is the Caucasian played out /

We have before us several independent accounts o! me ntiocities perpetrated by the Westerns in the Innd of Fiower--. One of these stories of blood and crime is the outcome of an ofFici.il investigation. Others are from newspaper currespondents at the front. But the most complete and terrible indictment of the uniformed Caucasian savages comes from the pen of Dr. E. .1. Dillon, who was for a long time resident in China, who was an eyewitness of much of what he relates, and whoso article upon the subject appears in the January number of the Conlnnporary Rfvicw. Making all reasonable allowance for exaggeration, there still lemains a solid substratum of horrible facts which imply hideous orgies of massacre and outrage far worse than those which roused (Jrcat Britain to such magnificent indignation over the Bulgarian atrocities of more than twenty years ago.

' The characteristic traits of this international campaign,' says Dr. Dillon, 'so far as Chinamen have felt its effects, ha\ c been bloodshed, rapine, and rape. Males and children have been killed, not always with merciful speed, and more than once they were half-killed and possibly buried alive, the soldiers 1 time being short and their victims many.' Looting of the private property of Chinese non-combatants has been carried out witli thorough-going completeness and on d Vast .^aL. At Tungtschuu the Chinese made no resistence, no lighting took place, and the allies entered into peaceable possession of the city. Notwithstanding this the non-combatant natives, both pagan and Christian, were ' killed in sport and bayoneted in play.' ' I speak as an eyewitness,' says Dr. Dillon, ' when I say, for example, that over and over again the gutters" of the city of Tungtschau ran red with blood, and I sometimes found it impossible to go my way without getting my boots bespattered with human gore. There were few shops, private houses, and courtyards without dead bodies and pools of dark blood. Amid a native population whose very souls quaked at the sight of a rifle, revolver, or military uniform, a reign of red terror was inaugurated for which there seems no adequate motive. Even if all the Chinese within the city had risen in revolt against the foreigners, the latter would have quelbd it without an effort. Yet they were kept with a Damocles' sword continually falling on their heads. No native's life or property was safe for an hour. Men I had been speaking to before lunch were in their graves by sundown, and no mortal will ever know the reason why. The thirst of blood has made men mad. . . . The Chinese were treated as Christians were in the reign of Nero.'

'No prisoners were taken,' writes a German marine ; ' that is to say, if they are made they are at once shot down when the battle is over. 1 ' European troops,' says Dr. Dillon, l give no quarter, even to men who are not their enemies.' At Taku three hundred unarmed and inoffensive coolies were massacred by the Russians in cold blood. Along the Pe.ho the western barbarians used bullet and bayonet to such a lively tune that the river became ' at once an Aceldama and a Cloaca Maxima' — oozy and foul with festeiing human corpses. And in the blazing villages along its banks ' men, women, boys, girls, and babes in arms were shot, stabbed, and hewn to bits in the labyrinth of streets, and their murdered bodies became the prey of pariah dogs. The treatment accorded to females ' from six to sixty years old' defies description. Its coarse brutality maybe inferred from the following facts : Dr. Dillon states that 'wives and daughters hanged themselves on trees or drowned themselves m garden wells in order to escape a much worse lot '; and the Japan Wwi:/// Matl, basing its statement on official investigation, says in a recent issue : ' It sends a thrill of horror through every white man's bosom to learn that forty missionary women and twenty-five little children were butchered by the Hovers, but Mr. Taguslhi, whose testimony is beyond impeachment, and who speaks in the sequel of ituestigdtion personally conducted by himself, tells us that in Tungtschau alone, a city where the Chinese made no resistance and there was no fighting, 573 women of the upper classes committed suicide rather than survive the indignities they had suffered. Women of the lower quarters fared similarly, he tells us, at the hands of the soldiers, but were not unwilling to survive their shame.' The European and American troops went to China under the pretence of being the ' vindicators of public order.' They have degraded themselves into becoming ' the gladiators of history.'

The acts of military savagery and barbarism have not been confined to any Western nationality. Every Christian ilag in China has been disgraced. But, by common consent, the palm of sheer villainy is accorded to the semicivihseil Cossacks whom Russia brought to the Far East to ' reason ' with the Chinaman. The Japanese alone seem to have come out of the discreditable business with some shreds of national honor left. At Port Arthur in 1894 they gave no quarter. In the early days of the Chinese imbroglio the rank and file manifested a decided inclination to follow the example of the Western savages with whom they were associated. But their generals set their faces as hard as flint against military cruelty, 'visitingthe offenders brought before them,' says Dr. Dillon, * with such terrible punishment that among their troops the practice died suddenly

out, and the Japs succeeded in setting an example of political wisdom to all the foreign allies. In bittle fearless and fierce, they were wont to spare the lives of harmless people in all towns and cities, and to post up notices calling upon all their allies " to spare and not to molest the inmates, who are good and loyal people." ... In worldly wisdom, as in their commissariat and hospital organisation, the Japanese were considerably ahead of the best of the Allies.' Elsewhere in his aruclt; ]h. Bill.en aujs . 'The Japanese who throughout the invasion of China were on their Sunday behavior, were the only Power among the Allies who understood the natives, gained their confidence, restored perfect order, and re-established the reign of law. The Japanese districts of Tientsin and Pekin, for instance, were model cities, quite apart from all others. They were crowded with Chinamen who returned and were going about their ordinary business without fear for life or property.' In a word, the yellow Eastern pagan soldier has set an' example of studied self-restraint and moderation to the degraded ' Boxer' from the West.

Despite the convenient fiction of international law, the three wars now being carried on can in no way lay claim to the title of ' civilised.' In the Philippines, as Mr. Richarii Brinsley Sheridan, in a recent book, has pointed out, the American man-slayers have 'in forty-eight hours slaughtered more defenceless people than did the Spaniards in two centuries.' The war in South Africa has been for some time a crusade against helpless women and children. And the war in China, as described by European eye-witnesses, is a mere red orgie of massacre and outrage as infamous as anything that has been perpetrated by the Boxers. "We need a Gladstone to lash the world into withering indignation at the atrocities of those disgraceful campaigns. In the meantime it is refreshing to note the fine sarcasm contained in Mark Twain's ' Salutation Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth ' : ' 1 bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Xiao-chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the lookingglass.' But it would take an ocean of water, a mountain of soap, and sundry train-loads of concentrated disinfectants to wash out the deep dishonoring stain of those disgraceful wars.