It will have been seen in this volume--and, indeed, no student of Chinese affairs will need to be told--that the nature and extent of the preparations which the progressive Chinese have been carrying on during the last twenty years are simply astounding. They assuredly are. China, equally as she has been immovable for so many centuries, has shown us that now it is not a question of getting her to move so much as keeping her from moving too quickly. But, on the other hand, I have been in some parts of interior China where not a single sign of reform in the common life is noticeable. Behind in the village, however, there has invariably been found one or two of {289} the scholarly men who have taken into their being a certain spirit of reform despite the fact that they could not work out the Utopian era which had been promulgated in the revolutionary literature they had been reading and with which the country has for many years been flooded. The time now has come when these floodgates may be opened. In a considerable amount of travel in various parts of China I have often been struck with these Revolutionaries, who appeared, under the then prevailing conditions of government, misguided fanatics. It was because of the restraint placed upon them by the Manchu officials that they were slow in openly pursuing their revolutionary tactics and working out the reforms which their party were constantly agitating. In another work on China, published just six days before the Revolution broke out,[1] the author in a concluding note wrote the following: "I had come to see how far the modern spirit had penetrated into the recesses of the Chinese Empire.... One must begin again, no matter how dimly, to perceive something of the causes which are at work. By the incoming of the European to inland China a transformation is being wrought, not the natural growth of a gradual evolution, itself the result of propulsion from within, but produced, on the contrary, by artificial means, in bitter conflict with inherent instincts, inherited traditions, innate tendencies, characteristics, and genius, racial and individual. In the eyes of the Chinese of the old school these changes in the habits of life infinitely old are improving nothing and ruining much--all is empty, vapid, useless to God and to man. The tawdry shell, the valueless husk of ancient Chinese life is here still, remains untouched in many places; but the soul within is steadily and surely, if slowly, undergoing a process of final atrophy. But yet the proper opening up of the country by internal reform and not {290} by external pressure has as yet hardly commenced in immense areas of the Empire far removed from the Imperial city of Peking.... I cannot but admit that whilst in most parts of my journey there are distinct traces of reform--I speak, of course, of the outlying parts of China--and some very striking traces, too, and a real longing on the part of far-seeing officials to escape from a