WITHOUT religion, without progress, without aspiration, these people are without civilization. The conflict between the West and the East, between Europe and China, is not a conflict of civilizations; it is a misnomer to call it so. A people who discovered the compass, and are without commerce, discovered movable type and are without a press; a people whose best means of locomotion has been the wheelbarrow, and who have suffered in consequence frequent and devastating famines in a land of plenty; a people with coal-fields in a single province adequate to supply the world with coal for twenty centuries, but without mines because disturbance of the ground might disturb the subterranean dragons, can not be termed civilized. Neither are the Chinese barbarians. They occupy a middle ground between the civilized and the barbaric peoples of the globe; they are embodied conservatism; for twenty centuries they have lived in a state of arrested development, well satisfied so to live.—The Outlook.