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THE HEATHEN
CHINEE |
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Harper’s
Weekly, March 29, 1879, pages 246-247(Article) |
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The
Heathen Chinee! Why do we give him such a disparaging epithet?
"He’s too filthy, the
moon-eyed leper. He lives in one room of a tenement shanty, with
twenty others as nasty as himself. He has a bad, fishy smell. As to
morality, he makes himself tipsy with opium, and—look at his
joss-house."
The real offense of the Chinese is
that he cheapens labor. The ostensible offense is that his paganism
engenders vices which make him a demoralizing element of society.
His weakness consists in this, that he has no vote.
But there is something more
important than a vulgar outcry. Many highly respectable persons, who
would not willfully do him any injury, are from usage unable to
speak of him except in obnoxious terms. A very enlightened and
liberal body, the Chamber of Commerce of New York, in its address to
the President asking him to withhold his signature to the
anti-Chinese Bill, speaks of China as the "heathen
empire."
Then, as we all know very well, our
popular poets have not spared him. In stanzas of no uncertain merit
he figures under his accustomed name as a cheat at cards.
The Amaiman cuts off a cow’s tail,
dries it, hangs it up on a peg, and then falls down and worships it
as a goddess. That is heathenism, paganism. But that is not what a
Chinaman would do.
Has this people contributed any
thing to the advancement of civilization? Has it conferred any
benefits on mankind? All nations without exception must submit to be
tried by that test. In an answer to these questions, directed to the
Chinese, we shall find a measure of our obligations to them—of the
courteous treatment they are entitled to demand at our hands. |
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Through
how many years of slowly advancing civilization must China have
passed, how great must her social necessities have become, before
she reached her invention of printing from wooden blocks, and its
necessary requisites, the manufacture of paper and of suitable ink.
Yet these she had accomplished a thousand years before our era! How
much industry and ingenuity must she have expended before she had
learned to make steel into thin strips, to temper and to impart the
magnetic virtue to it by touching it in a certain way with a
loadstone! What momentous consequences have happened to the world by
her detection of polarity in a strip so touched! In the hands of
Columbus it led to two great discoveries—that of the West India
Islands and that of the line of no magnetic variation. Without the
former there would not have been any United States, whose back-door
is now slammed in the faces of those who helped to find the way to
its front-door. As to the latter, did it not, in consequence of the
bull of Pope Alexander VI. —one of the most important bulls ever
issued—lead to the south route to India by way of the Cape of Good
Hope? Did it not cause the great industrial revolution that changed
the commercial front of Europe from the North Mediterranean to the
Atlantic? Above all, when Magellan accomplished the circumnavigation
of the earth, did it not settle forever the greatest geographical
problems? Nobody after that denied that the earth is a globe. Does
not her discovery of the temporary magnetism of soft iron rest at
the basis of many of our most brilliant modern inventions? Without
it where would be our dynamo-electric machines, our Gramms, our
Ruhmkorf coils, our expectation of electric illumination? What was
it that sustained Oersted in all the disappointments that for twenty
years preceded his capital discovery of electro-magnetism, one of
the glories of this century, but this, that the law of magnetic
attractions and repulsions is the same as that for electricity? The
one is due to the Chinese, the other to the French. |
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We must
count among the most important of Chinese inventions that of
gunpowder. They studied very thoroughly the chemical qualities of
sulphur, charcoal, nitre, and this mixture of them. They did not
care to apply it to warlike uses, but exhausted their skill in its
pyrotechnic display. Their fire-works are the finest in the world. A
good Jesuit tells us how he saw with astonishment a trellis of red
grapes, green leaves, and the wood of the trellis represented in
fire. We have no works of the kind which they do not surpass. Nor
should their reluctance to apply this invention to warlike uses
excite our surprise. They constitute an immense pacific population,
which has lost the instinct of conquest. The young American should
remember with gratitude how effectually they enable him to celebrate
the birthday anniversary of his nation. They excel in the art of
dyeing, the making of colors, the manufacture of splendid pigments
from carthamus, indigo, the preparation of sugar. Their bells, such
as the great bell of Pekin, are among the grandest triumphs of
casting. In the working of metals they possess many secrets. Their
magic mirrors, which show by reflection of sun rays from their
polished front the images of things represented on their rough back,
are at this moment objects of curiosity and disputation in London. |
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Let us not
forget their porcelain. Can it ever be surpassed in purity,
delicacy, beauty? Well might the Romans prize these murrhine cups at
many times their weight of gold.
It would be in vain for me to
attempt any adequate statement of their contributions to industrial
art. Of all people they see quickest the practical side of a fact.
We have no hydraulic constructions as imposing as the Chinese canal
system; it rivals our railway system. We have no Artesian wells that
exceed in depth some of theirs. We have no fortifications as
extensive as the Chinese wall.
Well, but, says somebody, what about
mechanical engineering? Where is their steam-engine, their
locomotive? |
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China has
been driven by the emergencies of her political condition to
discourage labor-saving inventions. It was not for her to do any
thing that might deprive her enormous population of work. Wherever
force was required, she had plenty of hands; the genius of her
people gave her plenty of patience. Her necessities of
inter-communication were abundantly supplied by her magnificent
canal system. She did not care about speed, nor does she care about
it even now, when the railway is within her reach, though she could
spend thousands of millions upon it. She doubts whether it is
compatible with her social condition, her quiet habit of life. She
believes that the life of man may be more happily, more nobly spent
than in a disgraceful rush after money.
The offensive
expression, "Heathen Chinee," is, however, not so much in
allusion to her lack of scientific capacity as to her supposed
religious condition. Let us look for a moment at that.
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About five
hundred years before our era China passed through an intellectual
crisis. It was the epoch of Loa-tse and Confucius. These great, and
I think I may add good men, looked with dismay on the religious
condition of their countrymen. They saw how difference of opinion,
and its consequence, divisions into sects, had arisen and were daily
increasing. They saw in what a disastrous manner society was
affected by those dissociations. The countless sects which were
swarming into life stood in an isolated and in many instances an
inimical relation to each other. It was a scene of rivalry and
hatred, tempered by hypocrisy. Confucius in his youth had sought the
friendship of Lao-tse, who was by fifty years his senior. Both had
arrived at the conviction that men can never be made to think alike
on religious subjects. Then is it not best to let such subjects
alone in our intercourse with each other, and content ourselves with
devising a social system which shall be a guide to courtesy in our
relations with others, to contentment, and happiness to ourself?
From a profound examination of the religious condition of China,
Confucius had thus come to the conclusion that it is not given to
man to attain to certainty or unity in theological matters, and
therefore it is useless for him to concern himself with them. In the
course of ages many forms of polytheism and monotheism had
prevailed. Each had had its day. Confucius says to his countrymen:
"I teach you nothing but what you can discover for yourselves.
Look around and use your own reason. No superior power has sent me.
I am nothing but a man like yourselves. Don’t make existence a
wild fever of excitement; be virtuous, be patient. The sun shines on
the dial of life but for a few hours; seize and enjoy the bright
moment as you may. What is the use of running after the parting
shadow of time? Let every man rule himself and his family in
accordance with virtue. Let him obey the emperor, who is the
representative of the law, as he desires his children to obey him.
In the long ages that are passed our fathers were extracting wisdom
from experience; let us never forget that we are what we are because
of what they thought. Let us set firmly before our eyes the
conclusions to which they came. Let us do homage to our dead. Let
not the grave hide from us forever so much that is noble and
beautiful and good." |
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Is not
ancestral worship parted by many degrees from heathenism?
So arose this worship in China.
Doubtless it has greatly conduced to political stability, though it
has retarded progress. The Chinese has no desire to be more learned
than his forefathers. His guide in life can scarcely be called a
religion; he considers it as nothing more than a means of conducting
himself honorably and prudently, of teaching him how to discharge
his social and political duties, of cultivating industry, modesty,
sobriety, gravity, decorum, thoughtfulness. He says to his friends,
"Religions are many, reason is one; let us be brothers." |
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Lao-tse,
the forerunner of Confucius, stands, as it were, on the boundary
line of the physical aspirations of the old Chinese times and the
indifferentism of the new. He recommends his countrymen not to give
up the investigation of nature, and especially to direct their
attention to the preparation of an elixir of life. That the
vegetable world contains material admirably calculated for the
benefit of man, both in a physical and moral sense, seemed to be
proved by the discovery of tea, one of the most valuable gifts that
Chinas has made to the human race. Intoxicating drinks were not
forbidden, as was subsequently the case among the Mohammedans, nor
their use forcibly restrained by law, as among us. They were simply
displaced by what was acknowledged to be a better beverage. Not
known to Europeans until the close of the sixteenth century, the
infusion of the leaf of this plant has had among us the same
beneficent effect that it has had among the Chinese, and that
especially as regards our female population. |
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But
perhaps the grandest example that China has offered to the human
race is her attempt—far from being unsuccessful—at the
organization of her national intellect. By a system of well-designed
competitive examinations she singles out her ablest men; to these
eventually she entrusts the management of state affairs. The basis
from which she starts is universal education. People sometimes are
astonished at the solidity and durability of her institutions, and
wonder how she can control four hundred millions of subjects. The
explanation is to be found in this, her policy. And now Christian
nations, even our own, are attempting to follow her example, to lay
their foundation on universal education, compulsory if need be, and
then to sort out their ablest minds. The Chinese method, which takes
literature as its standard, would be unsuitable among us, but the
principle might be applied in other modes better suited to our case. |
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Surprise
is often expressed that so many Chinese inventions and discoveries
reached Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. An
explanation has been sought in the commercial transactions of Venice
and Genoa, but, singularly enough, the wars of Gengis-Khan seem to
have been completely overlooked. The empire of this Tartar conqueror
reached from China to Poland. A contemporary estimate of its
intellectual importance is marked by the foundation of a
professorship of the Tartar language in the University of Paris. A
great service might be rendered to modern literature by one who
would carefully study the political effect of these military
movements, which occurred when Europe was at what might be called an
epoch of her life. It was the boast of this great Mongol conqueror
that any person might pass through his dominions from one end of
Asia to the other without molestation or even question. There was no
reason why Chinese discoveries should not come. |
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Now I have
offered some reasons why we should cease to speak of the Chinese in
terms of opprobrium, why we should look upon them with sincere
respect. Heathen Chinee! Let us abstain from that insult. It may,
however, perhaps be said that while all this applies to the educated
and polite classes, it does not apply to the degraded specimens that
are so obnoxious to the Californians. To this I answer that what
concerns us is the present use of this people, and their prospective
capabilities. At present they are here as laborers, and must be
compared with the laboring emigrants of any other nation. So far as
industry, frugality, sobriety are concerned, they do not appear to
disadvantage in that comparison. But when the time comes that
awakened justice or the rivalries of politicians shall give to them
what seems to be in a republic necessary for self-protection—a
vote—they will begin to settle here, and the career they will be
capable of may be foretold by what in past ages they have done.
John W. Draper. |
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Harper’s
Weekly, March 29, 1879, pages 246-247(Article) |
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