“CIVILIZATION” AND BARBARITY.
READERS of the Express will remember the gentleman from Tien-tsin, now resident in London, whose views upon the situation in China I have more than once obtained and placed before the public in these columns. Yesterday this gentleman called upon me, instead of asking me to call upon him; and, for the sake of our native manners, I regret to say that he was followed by quite a little crowd of small boys, though, but for his skullcap and pigtail, his costume was quite English. “I have called upon you,” he said, “instead of requesting you to visit my humble quarters,”—there must have been sarcasm in the Celestial gentleman’s mind when he said this, looking around my severely plain working den, and thinking of the tapestried and cushioned luxury of his own semi-Oriental quarters,—“because I want to express opinions the reverse of flattering to the journal in which you have before now done me the honor to reproduce my words and thoughts. “Have you not sneered for years at what you call the insensate barbarity of my people in referring to the invading peoples of other lands as foreign devils? You know you have. Yet this morning the Express publishes broadcast an article headed ‘Keep Out the Foreign Devil.’” “A quotation from an incendiary pamphlet in China, issued by the Boxers to stir up enmity against the whites?—Not at all; but an article published in an English newspaper (and, mark you, other of your leading journals are taking precisely the same tone), and written with the avowed object of preventing poor workmen from my native country obtaining a footing and work in other countries. “Is not that disgraceful? Is not that a ridiculous travesty of your boasted civilization, you people of the West? And, mind you, the Express does but voice a feeling widespread throughout the West. The principal newspapers of Europe and America, of this country, too, are all adopting the same desperately inconsistent attitude. “‘Keep out the Chinaman,’ they say. Hound him out of our labor markets; force him back to his own country; we won’t have the yellow beast competing with our fellow-whites! Australia, America, Europe, and now London, even,—all have the same cry. I myself may quite possibly be forced to relinquish my business here. Is that your Western civilization? “In China, frankly, we hate to have you. These many, many years we have made that as clear as possible. Do not intrude upon us; do not come here; we will not have you! There has been no possibility of your mistaking our feelings in the matter. “But, so far from acceding to our requests, even when we have backed them with force of arms and little massacres, you have remained persistent intruders, uninvited guests, who were begged to go away. “And now—now you will fight. Oh, believe me, I know; I know my Europe; I know how bitterly hard you will fight; and I greatly fear you will succeed. In what?—In forcing yourselves as residents—commercial, diplomatic, and fanatically proselytizing—upon long-suffering China! “Meantime you are shouting from all the corners of your vast dominions: ‘Keep out the Chinaman! Drive back the hated yellow race! Don’t let them come in, even as laborers’—though you have to admit they are better than your own, by the way. “O hopeless and blatant illogicality! O childish unreason of the mushroom West! “Yet, mark you, we Chinese are not the terribly objectionable foreigners that yourselves are in China. “We send no missionaries to worry your authorities, or to unsettle and undermine the beliefs of your ignorant masses. We send no consuls with powers to protect any foreigners who may be connected with our subjects while they sojourn in your lands. “No; we make ourselves wholly amenable to your own laws, and adapt ourselves to your rule and methods, childish though we find them. That is because we are reasonable, a nation of philosophers. “But with you, how far otherwise! You expect to bring your own laws, your own methods, your own habits, with you; you decline altogether to conform to ours, or to adapt yourselves in any way to our system. Yet you expect absolute liberty, immunity from our laws, and even the right to arrogantly exhibit contempt for us and our ways, and to try to force your own upon us. “We deny you this, and you wage bitter war upon us. And at the same time you work yourselves into a frenzy to prevent Chinamen from entering your dominions, even in the humblest possible capacities. “You would drive all Chinamen out of your dominions, and effectually prevent any others from entering them. Well and good! There is nothing particularly unreasonable about that, though you are in a position of having a use and need for Chinamen, while we in China have never had any use or need for you. However, shut them out by all means, if you will, but— “Is not the thing clearer than crystal? Yourselves you must withdraw from our empire, to a man, if you would be even reasonably just and decent. I do not seek logic, far less philosophy, from you. “The present attitude of the mushroom West, particularly now that Britain, its leading newspapers even, has taken up the cry of the rest of Christendom, demanding the shutting out of Chinamen,—the present attitude, I say, is supremely ridiculous, savagely unjust, a travesty, and a mock of civilization.