But, generally speaking, one has to admit that at {244} one appalling stroke this mediæval people have come to mingle in the stream of world politics, behind which they have been lagging for centuries. In the whirl of her present revolutionary excitement, in the rush of the commercial torrent which will sweep through the land, the force of which probably will eclipse even Japan's early activities in the world's trade, we see a light on the surface of the national life of this strange people heralding the dawn of a greater day. Even we who live in China are lost in wonderment; those at a distance find it impossible to form a just estimate of its value. And so vast is the Empire, and so numerous the people, so great still the incongruities and absurdities in everyday life in most parts, that we who spend our lives side by side with the Chinese find difficulty in condensing concrete opinion on any given subject. The one thing that is keeping China back is the Dragon. We foreigners fail efficiently to understand China because we do not understand the Dragon. In China the Dragon has presided for centuries. Wrapped intertwiningly into the private and the national life of the Chinese, this Dragon has reigned supreme over a make-believe, a show of things, and innate insincerity and hollowness unparalleled anywhere among civilised peoples. The Chinese has, because of the Dragon, cramped himself into strange shapes all down through history, and the world has not known what to do with him, so foreign has been his aspect. But now the Revolution tells us that China and hundreds of millions of her people have changed irretrievably--so much must be taken for granted. The change would probably be quicker and better were it not for the Dragon, whose fangs, deeply indented into the national life, render it one great counterpoise to the young Revolutionary party. Another counterpoise to that reform which the New China party would institute at once is the lamentable fact that in a very large proportion of the Empire's area, in isolated parts far removed from {245} spheres more easily affected by the Reform movement, there exists not a single evidence that China is not still in the torpor of the ages. Here we find a disorganised condition of society, and see how many forces work blindly in a wasteful and degenerate manner. I do not say that nothing had changed before the Revolution, for certain phases of reform one could not get away from in even the remotest corners of China. But if we discount the military and opium and a certain kind of popular education, we found little indeed commensurate with the hue and cry of the reform supposed to have been taking place to induce those who do not know that the whole Empire was in a desperate state of eagerness to forge ahead to believe that the Young China had annihilated the Old China.