CHAPTER III.

_SOLIDARITY, CO-OPERATION, AND IMPERIAL FEDERATION._

Everybody Guaranteed by Somebody Else.--Buying back Office.--Family Responsibilities.--Guilds.--All Employés Partners.--Antiquity of Chinese Reforms.--To each Province so many Posts.--Laotze's Protest against Unnecessary Laws.--Experiment in Socialism.--College of Censors.--Tribunal of History.--Ideal in Theory.

Possibly that state of society in which the individual is the unit is a more advanced form of civilisation; but it is impossible to understand China unless it be first realised that the individual life is nothing there, and that the family is the unit; and yet further, that no one stands alone in China, as is so painfully the case in England, but that every one is responsible for some one else, guaranteed by some one else. And here, to those who wish to read a really exact, circumstantial account of the Chinese and their ways, let me recommend _John Chinaman_, by the Rev. George Cockburn, quite the best book I have read on the subject, and one that deserves a wider circulation than it has attained, being written in terse, epigrammatic English, with a flavour of Tacitus about it. Alas! the writer is no more,--a silent, reserved, black-browed Scotchman, with a fervour of missionary zeal glowing under a most impassive exterior. The riot, in which all our own worldly goods in China were destroyed, wrecked for ever the nervous system of his strong, handsome, brave young wife. And what with that and the details of daily life, all laid upon the shoulders of a man by nature a student and a visionary, he left China, and soon after passed away beyond the veil, where, if we share the Chinese belief, let us trust his spirit is gladdened by words of appreciation of the one little volume in which he embodied the fruits of years of work and thought in China, dying, as far as I remember, almost as it appeared. The wreckage of missionary lives and hopes is one of the tragedies of European life in China, and one which a little more understanding and sympathy on the part of missionary boards at home might often, it would seem, avert.

But to return to the Chinese. If you engage a servant, he is _secured_ by some one to a certain amount, and all you have to do is to ascertain whether the security is in a position to pay should the other decamp with your property, also whether a higher value is likely to be at his disposition. If yours is a well-arranged household, this head man engages the other servants and secures them, reprimanding and discharging them at his pleasure. He, of course, gets a certain amount of the wages you think you are paying them. This, in China, the land of it, is called a "squeeze." But it seems perfectly legitimate, as indeed all squeezes seem legitimate from the Chinese point of view, only sometimes carried to excess. It is the same in business. It is not quite the same in official positions, because there the Viceroy of a province pays so much to get his post, and so do the lesser officials under him. The theory in China is that superior men will always act as such, whatever their pay may be. Therefore a Chinese Viceroy of to-day receives theoretically the living wage of centuries ago. Practically he receives squeezes from every one with whom he is brought in contact, and has paid so much down to acquire the post that unless he holds it for a term of years he is out of pocket. The post of Taotai, or Governor of Shanghai, is one of the most lucrative in China. Tsai, who has made friends with all of us Europeans as no Taotai ever did before--dining out and giving dinner parties, and even balls--Tsai is known to have paid so much to obtain the post as would represent all he could hope to get in every way during two years of office: about £20,000. He was dismissed from his post November, 1898; but possibly may be able to bribe heavily enough to get it back. Li Hung-chang and his two particular dependants of former days, the late Viceroy of Szechuan, degraded because of the anti-foreign riots there, and Shêng, Chief of Telegraphs and Railways, etc., etc., have all done this again and again. When English people were laughing over Li's yellow jacket and peacock feather being taken from him, certain eunuchs of the Palace were growing rich over the process of getting them back again. The eunuch in the closest confidence of the Empress is always said to charge about £1,000 for an interview, and till lately none could be obtained but through him. When a man has enormous wealth, and is degraded, every one naturally feels it is a pity nothing should be got out of him, and he equally naturally is willing to pay much in order to be reinstated in a position to make more. Until the officials of China are properly paid, it is unreasonable to expect them to be honest. And yet some are so even now: not only Chang-chih-tung, the incorruptible Viceroy of Hupeh and Hunan, who, it may be noticed, is constantly being invited to Peking, but--_never_ goes. But others in subordinate positions are pointed out by Chinese: "That is one of the good old school of Chinamen. He takes no bribes, and is the terror of the other officials."

In family life Chinese solidarity has its inconveniences, but it altogether prevents that painful spectacle to which people seem to have hardened their hearts in England, of sending their aged relatives to the workhouse instead of carefully tending them at home as the Chinese do, or of one brother or sister surrounded by every luxury, another haunted by the horror of creditors and with barely the necessaries of life. If you are to help your brother, you must, of course, claim a certain amount of authority over his way of life. In China the father does so; and when he dies, the elder brother sees after _and_ orders his younger brother about; and the younger brother, as a rule, submits. In each of those large and beautiful homesteads in which Chinese live in the country, adding only an additional graceful roof-curve, another courtyard, as more sons bring home more young women to be wives in name, but in reality to be the servants-of-all-work of their mothers, and the mothers of their children--in each of these harmonious agglomerations of courtyards, it is the eldest man who directs the family councils. Thus, when a man dies, the deciding voice is for his eldest brother, not for his eldest son; than which probably no custom could tend more to conservatism, for there never comes a time when the voice of youth makes itself heard with authority.

Not only are all the members of a family thus knit together by mutual responsibilities, but families are again thus knit. It is the village elders who are responsible if any crime is committed in the district. It is they who have to discover and bring back stolen articles; it is they who have to quiet disturbances and settle disputes about boundaries. The principle of local self-government has in the course of centuries been perfected in China, where all that Mr. Ruskin aims at appears to have been attained centuries ago: village industries, local self-government, no railways, no machinery, hand labour, and each village, as far as possible each self-sufficing family, growing its own silk or cotton, weaving at home its own cloth, eating its own rice and beans, and Indian corn and pork. Schools are established by little collections of families, or tutors engaged, as the case may be. In either case the teacher is poorly paid, but meets with a respect altogether out of proportion to his salary. It is all very ideal; but the result is not perfect, human nature being what it is. In many ways, however, it appears a much happier system than our English system, and perhaps in consequence the people of China appear very contented. As a rule in the country each family tills its own bit of ground, and--where opium has not spread its poisonous influence--has held the same for centuries. The family tree is well known, and Chinese will tell you quietly "We are Cantonese," or "We are from Hunan," and only careful inquiry will elicit that their branch of the family came thence some three centuries ago.

In the towns the guilds represent family life on a larger scale. A man comes from Kiangsi, let us say, to Chungking, over a thousand miles away, and having probably spent months on the journey. He has brought no letters of introduction, but he straightway goes to the guild-house of his province, with its particularly beautiful green-tiled pagoda overlooking the river, a pale-pink lantern hanging from the upturned end of each delightful roof-curve, and there, making due reverence, he relates how he is So-and-so, the son of So-and-so, and straightway every one there knows all about him, and can easily ascertain if his story be correct. Here are friends found for him at once, a free employment agency, if that is what he is after, or a bureau of information about the various businesses of the city, their solvency and the like. Here is a lovely club-house, where he can dine or be dined, have private and confidential conversations in retired nooks, or sit with all the men of his province sipping tea and eating cakes, while a play is performed before them by their own special troupe of actors, who act after the manner of their province. I do not know who first started the legend that Chinese plays last for days, if not weeks. But it is not true, any more than that green tea is rendered green by being fired in copper pans and is poison to the nerves. Tea is green by nature, though it may be rendered black by fermentation, and is always fired in iron pans; and weak green tea as drunk in China is like balm to the nerves compared to Indian tannin-strong decoctions. In like manner Chinese plays are really short, though they make up in noise for what they lack in length.

If occasion needed, the guild would see after the newcomers funeral, even give him free burial if the worst came to the worst. And though we reckon the Chinese people such an irreligious race, and the guild-houses are naturally only frequented by men, chiefly by merchants (for the Chinese are a nation of traders), yet in every guild-house there is a temple. And before every great banquet part of the ceremony of marshalling the guests to their seats (and a very stately ceremony it is) is pouring a libation of wine before an altar in the banqueting-hall, before which also each guest bows in turn as he passes to the place assigned him.

But probably the custom that has the greatest effect upon Chinese life is that, just as twelve centuries ago they introduced competitive examinations, to which we have now in our nineteenth century of Christianity turned as to a sheet-anchor, so centuries ago the Chinese resorted to the principle of co-operation. In a Chinese business, be it large or be it small, pretty well every man in the business has his share; so that you are sometimes astonished when a merchant introduces to you as his partners a set of young men, who in England would be junior clerks. Even the coolie wrappering the tea-boxes says "_We_ are doing well this year," and works with a will through the night, knowing he too will have his portion in the increased business this increased work signifies. The way, indeed, in which Chinese work through the night is most remarkable. Men will row a boat day and night for four or five days, knowing that the sum of money gained will thus be quicker earned, and only pausing one at a time to take a whiff at a pipe or to eat. They will press wool all through the night to oblige their employer without a murmur, if only given free meals whilst doing this additional work. The truth is, the habit of industry has been so engendered in Chinese as to be second nature, their whole system tending to encourage it, whilst ours, with our free poor-houses and licensed public-houses, tends rather in the other direction; our Trades Unions seem trying all they can to further diminish the incentives to good work on the part of skilled workmen by denying them any higher wage than that obtained by the incompetent. Co-operation after the Chinese model will, it is to be hoped, eventually put this right again. There is so much we might learn from the Chinese; but we have never followed the system we press upon Oriental nations, of sending out clever young students to other countries to see what they can learn that would be advantageous among our own people. In some ways China would serve as a warning. But a civilisation, that reached its acme while William the Norman was conquering England, and that yet survives intact, must surely have many a lesson to teach.

Besides all this mutual support and responsibility, Chinese customs are such that, as people often say somewhat sadly, you cannot alter one without altering all. The people here referred to are not the twenty-years-in-China-and-not-speak-a-word-of-the-language men, but Europeans who have tried to study the Chinese sympathetically. As it is, if you were to alter their houses and make them less draughty and damp, then all their clothing must be altered. That is again the case if you try to encourage them to play cricket--for which there is no sufficient level space in the west of China--or take part in other sports. But if you were to attempt to alter their clothing before you had rebuilt their houses, they would all be dying of dysentery or fever. In like manner, if you attempted to dragoon the Chinese into greater cleanliness, or into taking certain sanitary precautions, you would require a police force, which does not exist. But how to obtain that until you have got this self-respecting, self-governing people to see any advantage in being dragooned?

The solidarity of the Chinese race is one of the reasons it has lasted so long upon the earth, and its civilisation remained the same. It is twenty-one centuries since the Emperor Tze Hoang-ti said "Good government is impossible under a multiplicity of masters," and did away with the feudal system. It is twelve centuries since the Chinese found out what Burns only taught us the other day, that "A man's a man for a' that," and, giving up the idea of rank, began to fill posts by competitive examinations. Another of their most remarkable methods we shall probably copy whenever we begin seriously to consider Imperial Federation. They never send any man to be an official in his own province. Thus we should have Canadian officials in places of trust here or in Australia, and Australians in England or Canada. _And to each province in China so many Government posts, civil and military, are assigned._ If England had followed this method, there might be the United States of England now instead of America, for no system is better calculated to knit closely together the outlying regions of a great empire, than that in accordance with which every official in turn has to be examined as to his qualifications for office at the capital, and to return there to pay his respects to his sovereign before entering upon each new office.

The contemplation of China is discouraging: to think it got so far so long ago, and yet has got no farther! The Emperor Hoang-ti, who lived 200 B.C., may be supposed to have foreseen the deadening effect that government by literary men has upon a nation, for he burnt all their books except those that treat of practical arts. He was even as advanced as Mr Auberon Herbert, and warned rulers against the multiplication of unnecessary laws. Laotze, China's greatest sage, although too spiritually-minded a man to have gained such a following as was afterwards obtained by Confucius, again insists that the spiritual weapons of this world cannot be formed by laws and regulations: "Prohibitory enactments, and too constant intermeddling in political and social matters, merely produce the evils they are intended to avert. The ruler is above all things to practise _wu-wei_, or inaction."

The Chinese, it seems, experimented in socialism eight centuries ago. The Emperor Chin-tsung II., at a very early age, and led thereto by Wu-gan-chi, the compiler of a vast encyclopædia, conceived the idea that "the State should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with the view of succouring the working classes and preventing their being ground to the dust by the rich." To quote again from W. D. Babington's _Fallacies of Race Theories_: "The poor were to be exempt from taxation, land was to be assigned to them, and seed-corn provided. Every one was to have a sufficiency; there were to be no poor and no over-rich. The literati in vain resisted the innovations, the fallacy of which they demonstrated from their standpoint. The specious arguments of the would-be reformer convinced the young Emperor and gained the favour of the people. Wu-gan-chi triumphed. The vast province of Shensi was chosen as the theatre for the display of the great social experiment that was to regenerate mankind. The result was failure, complete and disastrous. The people, neither driven by want nor incited by the hope of gain, ceased to labour; and the province was soon in a fair way to become a desert." Mencius, Confucius' greatest follower, taught that "the people are the most important element in the country, and the ruler is the least." Mencius openly said that if a ruler did not rule for his people's good it was a duty to resist his authority and depose him.

Whilst other nations have vaguely asked _Quis custodiet custodes?_ the Chinese invented the College of Censors and the Tribunal of History, both selected from their most distinguished scholars. It is the duty of Censors to remonstrate with the Emperor when necessary, as well as to report to the College, or to the Emperor himself, any breach of propriety in courts of justice or elsewhere. They have no especial office but to notice the doings of other officials. The Tribunal of History is busy recording the events of each Emperor's reign; but no Emperor has ever seen what is written about him, nor is any history published till the dynasty of which it treats is at an end. Chinese history is full of examples of the courage and adherence to truth with which the members of this tribunal have been inspired.

It is all so beautiful in description, one sighs in thinking it over. But it must be remembered that it was yet more beautiful, startlingly beautiful, at the period of the world's history when it was all originated, and that to this day the Chinese peasant enjoys a degree of liberty and immunity from Government interference unknown on the Continent of Europe. There is no passport system; he can travel where he pleases; he can form and join any kind of association; his Press was free till the Empress Tze Hsi, probably inspired by Russian influence, issued her edict against it in 1898; his right of public meeting and free speech are still unquestioned. Public readers and trained orators travel about the country instructing the people. The system of appealing to the people by placarding the walls has been very far developed in China. There is there complete liberty of conscience. And at the same time, as all people who know China will testify, the moral conscience of the people is so educated that an appeal to it never falls flat, as it often would in England. Try to stop two men fighting, saying it is wrong to fight, and you will hear no one say in China, "Oh, let them fight it out!" Appeal to the teaching of Confucius, and every Chinaman will treat you with respect, and at least try to appear guided by it. How far in Europe would this be the case with a citation from the Bible?

The system of education, the crippling of the women by footbinding, and consequent enfeebling of the race, together with the subsequent resort to opium-smoking, are the three apparent evil influences that spoil what otherwise seems so ideal a system of civilisation. Possibly we should add to this, that the system of Confucius--China's great teacher--is merely a system of ethics, and that thus for generations the cultured portion of the nation has tried to do without a religion, although falling back upon Taoism and Buddhism to meet the needs of the human heart. That any civilisation should have lasted so long without a living religion is surprising. But Buddhism has evidently had an enormous influence upon China, though its temples are crumbling now, its priests rarely knowing even its first elements. The good that it could do for China it has done. And now another influence is needed.