Part 22 (2/2)
The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, whose tomb at Nikko situated at the end of a twenty-five mile avenue of giant cryptomerias, is the Mecca of all tourists, has expressed in two memorable sayings the j.a.panese conception of the essential immorality of waste, of the regard that is due every product of human labor as being itself in some sense human or at least a throb with the blood of the toiler who has wrought it and moist with the sweat of his brow.
When virtual dictator of j.a.pan, Iyeyasu was seen smoothing out an old silk kakama. ”I am doing this,” he said, ”not because of the worth of the garment in itself, but because of what it needed to produce it. It is the result of the toil of some poor woman, and that is why I value it. If we do not think while {266} using these things, of the toil and effort required to produce them, then our want of consideration puts us on a level with the beasts.” Again, when opposing unnecessary purchases of costly royal garments, he declared. ”When I think of the mult.i.tudes around me, and the generations to come after me, I feel it my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods in my possession.”
No wonder Hearn declares of this ”cosmic emotion of humanity” which we lack that ”we shall certainly be obliged to acquire it at a later date simply to save ourselves from extermination.”
The importance of saving the wealth of nations from the wastes of war and the wastes of excessive military expenditures is another lesson that one brings home from a study of conditions abroad. While our American jingoes are using j.a.pan as a more or less effective bogy to work their purposes, peace advocates might perhaps even more legitimately hold it up as a ”horrible example” to point their moral as to how war drains the national revenues and exhausts the national wealth. In the Mikado's empire the average citizen to-day must pay 30 per cent, of his total income in taxes, the great proportion of this enormous national expenditure growing out of past wars and preparations for future wars. No wonder venerable Count Ok.u.ma, once Premier of the Empire, said to me: ”I look for international arbitration to come not as a matter of sentiment but as a matter of cold financial necessity. Nations have labored for centuries to build up the civilization of to-day: it is unthinkable that its advantages must be largely sacrificed for the support of enormous non-productive armies and navies. That would be simply the Suicide of Civilization.”
For the lesson of all this I may quote the words of Dr. Timothy Richard, one of the most distinguished Englishmen in China, in the same conversation from which a fragment was quoted in the beginning of this article:
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”The world is going to be one before you die, sir,” he said as we talked together just outside the walls of the Forbidden City. ”We are living in the days of anarchy. Unite the ten leading nations; let all their armaments be united into one to enforce the decrees of the Supreme Court of the World. And since it will then be the refusal of recalcitrant nations to accept arbitration that will make necessary the maintenance of any very large armaments by these united nations, let them protect themselves by levying discriminating tariff duties against the countries that would perpetuate present conditions.”
All this I endorse. The necessity of preserving the national wealth from the wastes of war I regard as one of the most important lessons that we may get from the Orient. And yet I would not have the United States risk entering upon that military unpreparedness which must prove a fool's paradise until other great nations are brought to accept the principle of arbitration. The proper programme is to increase by tenfold--yes, a hundredfold--our personal and national efforts for arbitration, at the same time remembering that so long as the community of nations recognizes the Rule of Force we cannot secede and set up a reign of peace for ourselves. If it takes two to make a quarrel, it also takes two to keep a peace. We must be in terrible earnest about bringing in a new era, and yet we cannot commit the folly of trying to play the peace game by ourselves. It is not solitaire.
Even more important, whether we consider it from the standpoint of the general welfare or as a matter of national defence, is the conservation of our physical stamina and racial strength. Whether the wars of the future are commercial or military it doesn't matter. The prizes will go to the people who are strong of body and clear of mind.
”The first requisite,” said Herbert Spencer, ”is a good animal,” and not even the success of a Peace Court will ever prevent the good animal--the power of physical vigor and hardness with its {268} concomitant qualities of courage, discipline, and daring--from becoming a deciding factor in the struggle between nations and between races. It has been so from the dawn of history and it will ever be so.
And just here we may question whether the growth of wealth and luxury in the United States is not tending here, as it has tended in all other nations, toward physical softness and deterioration. It may be argued on the contrary that while a few Occidental children are luxury-weakened, a great body of Oriental children are drudgery-weakened. But is there not much more reason to fear that in our case there is really decay at both ends of our social system--with the pampered rich children who haven't work enough, and with the hard-driven poor who have too much? The overworking of the very young is certainly a serious evil in America as well as in Asia; and even in this matter the Eastern folk are perhaps doing as well, according to their lights, as we are. In China manufacturing is not yet extensive enough for the problem to be serious; but in both j.a.pan and India I found the government councils thoroughly aroused to the importance of conserving child-life, and grappling with different measures for the protection of both child and women workers. My recollection is that the four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were no girls) that I found at work in a Madras cotton mill already have better legal protection than is afforded the child-workers in some of our American states.
For a long time, too, we have been accustomed to think of the Oriental as the victim of enervating habits and more or less vicious forms of self-indulgence. But while this may have been true in the past, the tide is now definitely turning. Fifty years of agitation in the United States have probably accomplished less to minimize intemperance among us than ten years of anti-opium agitation has accomplished in ridding China of her particular form of intemperance. I went to China too late to see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking; {269} too late to see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the banks of the Yangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I found such notices as the following concerning morphine, cocaine and similar drugs:
”In accordance with instructions received through the Inspector-General from the Shuiwu Ch'u the public is hereby notified that henceforth the importation into China of cocaine ... or instruments for its use, except by foreign medical pract.i.tioners and foreign druggists for medical purposes, is hereby prohibited.”
And these foreign doctors handling cocaine are heavily bonded. The Chinaman of to-day is giving up opium, is little given to other forms of intemperance, is afire with new enthusiasm for athletics and for military training; and he is already so physically adaptable that I found him as hardy and untiringly energetic beneath an equatorial sun in Singapore as in the rigorous climate of north-central Manchuria. It made me wonder if the ”meek who are to inherit the earth” in the end may not prove to be the Chinese!
Perhaps if the United States were a less powerful nation, or if we realized more fully the keenness of the coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy, we might find our patriotism a stronger force in warding off some of the evils that now threaten us. In his address to the German navy, Emperor William recently urged the importance of temperance because of the empire's need of strong, clear-headed men, unweakened by dissipation; and there can be little doubt that some such patriotic motive has had not a little to do with the anti-opium movement in awakening China. Certainly the j.a.panese with their almost fanatical love of country are easily influenced by such appeals, and keep such reasons in mind in the training of their young. ”For the sake of the Emperor you must not drink the water from these condemned wells; for the sake of the Emperor you must observe these sanitary precautions--lest you start an epidemic and so weaken the {270} Emperor's fighting forces!” So said the j.a.panese sanitary officers in the war with Russia; and when the struggle ended Surgeon-General Takaki was able to boast in his official report:
”In the Spanish-American War fourteen men died from disease to one from bullets. We have established a record of four deaths from disease to one from bullets.”
In studying these Eastern peoples one is also led inevitably to such reflections as Mr. Roosevelt gave utterance to in his Romanes lectures a few months ago. Not only are the Orientals schooled from their youth up to endure hardness like good soldiers, but their natural increase contrasts strikingly with the steadily decreasing birth-rate of our French and English stocks. In j.a.pan I soon came to remark that it looked almost as unnatural to see a woman between twenty and forty without a baby on her back as it would to see a camel without a hump; and Kipling's saying about the j.a.panese ”four-foot child who walks with a three-foot child who is holding the hand of a two-foot child who carries on her back a one-foot child” came promptly to mind. In view of these things it is not surprising to learn that in the last fifty years j.a.pan has increased in population, through the birth rate alone, ”as fast as the United States has gained from the birth rate plus her enormous immigration.” The racial fertility of the Chinese is also well known; a Chinaman without sons to wors.h.i.+p his spirit when he dies is not only temporarily discredited but eternally doomed. As for India, that every Hindu girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow is a common saying, and readers of ”Kim” and ”The Naulahka” will recall the ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not also a mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen.
Mr. Putman Weale abundantly justifies the t.i.tle of his new book, ”The Conflict of Color”--the seeming foreordination of some readjustment of racial relations if present tendencies continue--when he a.s.serts that while the white races double {271} in eighty years, the yellow or brown double in sixty, and the black in forty.
This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of racial relations, leads us very naturally to inquire, What are the qualities that have given the white race the leaders.h.i.+p thus far? And what may we do for the conservation of these qualities?
There are, of course, certain basic and fundamental reasons for white leaders.h.i.+p that I need not elaborate. For one thing, there is the tonic air of democratic ideals in which long generations of white men have lived and developed as contrasted with the stifling absolutism of the East. There is also our emphasis upon the worth of the Individual, our conception of the sacredness of personality, as compared with the Oriental lack of concern for the individual in its supreme regard for the family and the State. And even more important perhaps is the fact that the white man has had a religion that has taught--even if somewhat confusedly at times--that ”man is man and master of his fate,” that he is not a plaything of destiny, but a responsible son of G.o.d with enormous possibilities for good or evil, whereas the Oriental has been the victim of benumbing fatalism that has made him indifferent in industry and achievement, though it has given him a greater recklessness in war. It would also be difficult to exaggerate the influence which our radically different estimate of woman has had upon Western civilization. And here we have to consider not only woman's own direct contributions to progress, but also the indirect influence of our regard for woman, not as an inferior and a plaything, but as a comrade and helpmeet. How frequently the ideal of English chivalry--
”To love one maiden only, cleave to her, To wors.h.i.+p her by years of n.o.ble deeds”--
has been the inspiration of the best that men of our race have wrought, it needs only a glance at our literature to {272} suggest.
These things are indeed basic and fundamental and the question of their conservation, the preservation of the ideals of the Occident as compared with those of the Orient, is supremely important not only to us as a nation but to all our human race. But when one comes to consider only the sheer economic causes of the difference between Oriental poverty and Occidental plenty, it seems to me impossible to escape the conviction, already expressed and elaborated that it is mainly a matter of tools and knowledge, education and machinery.
In the Orient every man is producing as little as possible; in the Occident he is producing as much as possible. That is the case in a nutsh.e.l.l.
With better knowledge and better tools, half the people now engaged in food-production in Asia could produce all the food that the entire rural population now produces, and the other half could be released for manufacturing--thereby doubling the earning power and the spending power of the whole population.
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