"As a system, ancestral worship," says a European writer, "is tenfold more potent for keeping the people in darkness than all the idols in the land." "By its deadening influences," says another, "the nation has been kept for ages looking backward and downward instead of forward and upward."[331] A few years ago, be it repeated, the theory was one that had some weight: not because it was convincing in itself but because facts were wanting by which it could be refuted. The leap of Japan into the front rank of civilised nations has for ever disposed of the argument that ancestor-worshippers are necessarily impervious to change and reform. The cult of ancestors, be it remembered, is nearly if not quite as prominent a feature in the religious life of Japan as in that of China. Says a foreign observer, "The ancestor-worship of the Japanese is no superstition: it is the great essential fact of their lives."[332] Says a native observer, "the introduction of Western civilisation, which has wrought so many social and political changes during the last sixty years, has had no influence whatever in the direction of modifying the custom."[333] According to Lafcadio Hearn, ancestor-worship is "that which specially directs national life and shapes national character. Patriotism belongs to it. Loyalty is based on it." Little wonder is it that, knowing what the ancestral cult has done for Japan, Prof. H. A. Giles in quoting this passage adds a significant remark. "It would seem," he writes, "that so far from backing up missionaries who are imploring the Chinese to get rid of ancestral worship, the sooner we establish it in this country the better for our own interests." That ancestor-worship can be introduced or reintroduced into an occidental country in the twentieth century is of course out of the question: but before we continue to devote human lives and vast treasure to the self-imposed task of uprooting it from its congenial oriental soil, would it not be well earnestly to consider whether our work may not be regarded by our own distant posterity as the most stupendous folly or as the gravest and most disastrous of errors ever committed by the nations of the West? By all means let it be admitted that ancestor-worship helped to make China content--perhaps foolishly content--with her traditional culture, and too heedless of the rapid development of the occidental Powers in wealth and civilisation and scientific equipment: on the other hand it helped to make her people industrious, frugal, patient, cheerful, law-abiding, filial, good fathers, loyal to the past, hopeful and thoughtful for the future. Most emphatically may we say this, that it is not essential to China's future progress that ancestor-worship should be abolished. Among the people of China their ancestors occupy the place of a kind of Second Chamber--a phantom House of Lords, strongly antagonistic to sudden change and to rash experiments whether