I have italicised the words that are of special interest when considered in connection with the statement already quoted from Mr. Lionel Giles. It is true that the praise given to the Japanese is a great deal too high: there is no nation, whether Christian or non-Christian, that deserves such praise. At the same time most Europeans might find it no easy task to prove to the satisfaction of an intelligent visitor from another planet that the Christian nations are, on the whole, more virtuous than the people of Japan. The European advocate would, of course, lay stress on the alleged weakness of Japanese commercial morality, and perhaps with very good cause. But there is no valid reason for supposing that the Japanese, without Christianity, cannot and will not amend their ways in this respect, and in any case commercial immorality receives no more justification from Confucian than it does from Christian ethics.[260] But Japan is not China: and if Confucianism be such a good thing, exclaims the wondering European, how is it that China is in a state of decay, that Chinese officials are corrupt, that the population is sodden with opium, that the country is only now, after centuries of sloth and stagnation, beginning to show an interest in Western civilisation and modern science? The real condition of China, or at least of the Chinese people, is perhaps not so rotten as it is sometimes believed to be, in spite of the grave political and social dangers that at present lie ahead. But waiving this point and admitting that reforms are coming not a day too soon, let us consider one or two of the most obvious causes to which the present state of China may be attributed. China was for many centuries so easily supreme in her own quarter of the globe that a strenuous life became for her unnecessary. Conflict is a law of nature, but owing to peculiar circumstances China as a nation became to a great extent temporarily exempt from that law.[261] She sank into inactivity because it was not necessary for her, as it was and is for the great nations of Europe, to be continually sharpening her wits against those of her neighbours, or to be for ever engaged in the Sisyphean task of redressing "the balance of power." Do the nations of modern Europe sufficiently realise to what extent they owe their progress and civilisation and even their mechanical inventions to the fact that they have all been pitted against each other in a more or less equal struggle for existence in which none has ever succeeded in establishing a supremacy over all the rest? Had powerful and united non-Chinese kingdoms established themselves in the Indo-Chinese peninsula, in India itself, in the plains and mountains of Tibet and Mongolia, in Korea and in mediæval Japan,--kingdoms capable of contending with China on fairly level terms, competent to defend themselves against her attacks yet not strong enough to overcome her,--can it seriously be supposed that