National Honor and Christian Missions
IN a recent issue of the New York Times the editor discusses the meaning of the “national honor,” as exemplified by the attitude of the “Christian” Powers toward China. This attitude is doubtless doing much to hedge up the way of Christian missionaries in that country, and we are reminded that we must hasten to do the work that remains before conditions there become even more forbidding. After having “killed some hundred promiscuous and unoffending Chinamen in retaliation for every single European a hair of whose head or a thatch of whose bungalow had been injured,” says the Times, “the European Powers further demanded an ‘indemnity’ which was openly calculated to the very utmost of China’s supposed ability to pay, although we alone expressed our willingness to waive any pecuniary indemnity in consideration of increased trading privileges. But the indemnity was nevertheless fixed at a certain and specified number of the ‘haikwan taels’ which were the sole international currency of which the Chinese knew, and which were computed on a silver basis, silver being the only standard known to the Chinese. Silver went down, down, down, and the obligations of China mounted up, up, up. Finally, after many proceedings on the part of the ‘Christian’ Powers which denoted the intention not merely to exact the pound of flesh, as Shylock did, but to increase the tract to be surgically operated upon according to the emaciation of the patient, the ‘Bankers’ Commission,’ quite naturally under the lead of Russia, has fixed the rate of exchange at a point which increases the obligations of China by $400,000 a year. We protest. Great Britain protests. These two Powers, it seems, still desire to be known as ‘Christian,’ still have some sense of national honor and of national shame. But none of the others has the least. These two are outvoted. “And now we hear that there is a recrudescence of the ‘anti-foreign feeling’ that in Peking. We should think so. To be treated as the Chinese have for these three years been treated by the ‘Christian’ Powers ‘would make a cotton rabbit fight.’ In the point of pugnaciousness the Chinaman may not unfairly be described as a cotton rabbit. But these repeated outrages seem to have brought even him to a fighting mood. Who can blame him? Above all, who can blame the individual Chinaman for rejecting with disgust the Christianity the ethical standards of which he knows by the procedures of the ‘Christian’ Powers in his country?”