THE OTHER SIDE | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 24, 1900

THE OTHER SIDE.

London Express.

THERE is in London, holding a high position in a firm of Eastern merchants, a Chinese who for many years has belonged to the Boxers’ secret society in China. “You English,” he observed to a London Express reporter, speaking English with remarkable fluency, “look at Chinese matters only from your own point of view. Ah! if you could only look at them from ours! Western civilization is to us a mere mushroom. It is a thing of yesterday. We consider ourselves at least two thousand years ahead of you.

“There was a time when we had, like you, our ‘struggle for life,’ our race for wealth, our ambition for power, our haste and hurry and worry. We, too, had your clever inventions,—gunpowder, printing, and the rest,— but we have lived long enough to find out how essentially unnecessary all these things are.

“We have also had our periods of doubt, fanaticism, and dissension in matters of religion. We have had our martyrs, our reformations, our non-conformists, our intolerance, and finally our toleration,—yes, thousands of years ago.

“But, as I say, we have outgrown it all. From the experience of past centuries we have learned wisdom; from the mistakes and disasters of our ancestors we have learned that none of the things for which we strove were really worth striving for.

“Our passions and ambitions have settled down into a calm desire for happiness in this world; our religion is reduced to a philosophy of life, which the test of the last two thousand years has proved to be absolutely sound.

“We believe that the best thing to pursue in this life is happiness, and we teach our children that their happiness can be secured only by the performance of duty, by the observance of moral and business obligations, and by surrounding one’s self with a circle of equally happy friends and relatives.

“If a Chinaman prospers beyond the lot which falls to his kindred, he finds his greatest happiness in sharing his good fortune with them. And in China we never cease to work. There is no such thing as ‘retiring from business.’ Work is part of our pleasure, because it is part of our duty.

“All through China you will find the same level, uniform spirit of content. You may think we live lives of ignorance and squalor and idleness, but I assure you it is not so. We are as well off as we want to be, and no man can improve on that.

“Now, these being our circumstances, you of the Western world come to us with what you call your new ideas. You invite us to build railways, so that we may fly from place to place at a speed which for us has neither necessity nor charm. You want to build mills and factories so as to debase our beautiful arts and crafts, and produce tawdry finery in place of the beautiful textures and hues which we have evolved after ages of experiment.

“Against all this we protest. We want to be let alone. We want to be free to enjoy our beautiful country and the fruits of our centuries of experience. When we ask you to go away, you refuse; and you even threaten us if we do not give you our harbors, our land, our towns.

“And now, having carefully considered the matter, we of the so-called Boxers’ society have decided that the only way to get rid of you is to kill you. We are not naturally blood-thirsty. We certainly are not thieves. But when persuasion and argument and appeals to your sense of justice are of no avail, we find ourselves face to face with the fact that the only resource is to put you out of existence.

“If we wanted your railways and machines, we could, of course, buy them; but we do not. We have no use for them. We have learned to do without them. Yet you say you will force us to buy them whether we will or not. Is that just? I say it is an impertinence — an outrage.

“A good deal is made of the fact that we are not soldiers. Well, we have ceased to be soldiers because we have become civilized. War is a barbarism. The effect of our having arrived at our present stage of civilization is that we have increased and multiplied beyond every other race on the face of the earth. In spite of our great morality (which seems to be very shocking to you, although we recognize in it only a wise provision of nature), the Chinese race is increasing at a greater rate than any other people in the world.

“We could, if we chose, overwhelm the rest of mankind. That we do not do so is due to the perfection of our civilization, our philosophy, and our morals. We number four hundred million human beings, and who could withstand us if we chose to assert our power! Do you think we are unconscious of it? On the contrary, we understand it only too well. Let the white races of the earth appreciate the fact that we, and not they, are its masters.

“There have been twenty so-called successful invasions of China. But what has happened? Have invaders dominated the Chinese?—No. The conquered have absorbed their conquerors. All have become Chinese. The very Jews who have come among us have been absorbed by our race—a thing which has never happened elsewhere.

“Let me repeat that all the forces which divide men in the West have practically no existence in China. Politics, religion, private ambitions, the necessity for expansion, land hunger, gold hunger,— all these have no existence in China. You think that because a Chinaman is inert, careless, and simple, he is a child. There never was a greater mistake.

“He has learned the secret of being happy. His life is placid, and nothing troubles him so long as his conscience is clear.

“There you have our character in a sentence. Let us alone, and we will let you alone.”