Slowly, foot by foot, the clumsy craft crept up the river. And strangely the scene held its peaceful, intensely busy character. Everywhere, as if there were no revolution, as if the old river had never known wreckage and bloodshed, the country folk toiled in the fields. Junks passed. Irrigating wheels turned endlessly. Fishermen sat patiently watching their cormorants or lowering and lifting their nets. A big English steamer came booming down, with white passengers out of bloody Hankow (the looting and burning of the native city must have been going on just then, before the reinforced imperial troops drove the republicans back across the river). They layabout in deck chairs, these white passengers; or, doubtless, played bridge in the smoking-room. And Doane, as so often during his long life, felt his thoughts turning from these idle, self-important whites, back to the oldest of living peoples; and he dwelt on their incalculable energy, their incredible numbers, their ceaseless individual struggle with the land and water that kept them, at best, barely above the line of mere sustenance. It was difficult, pondering all this, to believe that any revolution could deeply stir this vast preoccupied people, submerged as they appeared to be in ancient habit. The revolution could succeed only if the Manchu government was ready to fall apart from the weakness of sheer decadence. It was nothing, this revolution, but the desperate work of agitators who had glimpsed the wealth and the individualistic tendencies of the West. And the hot-blooded Cantonese, of course. Most of the Chinese in America were Cantonese. The revolution was, then, a Southern matter; it was these tropical men that had come to know America. That was about its only strength. The great mass of yellow folk here in the Yangtze Valley, and through the coast provinces, and all over the great central plain and the North and Northwest were peaceable at heart; only those Southerners were truculent, they and the scattered handfuls of students. And yet, China, in the hopeful hearts of those who knew and loved the old traditions, must somehow be modernized. Sooner or later the Manchus would fall. The vast patient multitude must then either learn to think for themselves in terms of modern, large-scale organization or fall into deeper degradation. The European trading nations would strike deep and hard in a sordid struggle for the remaining native wealth. The Japanese, with iron policy and intriguing hand would destroy their institutions and bring them into a pitiful slavery, economic and military. His own life, Doane reflected, must be spent in some way to help this great people. The individual, confronted by so vast a problem, seemed nothing. But the effort had to be made. Since he was not a trader, since he could not hope now to find himself in step with the white generation that had passed him by, all that was left was to pitch in out here. The call of the martyred Sun Shi-pi pointed a way.