New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable AwakeningBrown, Arthur Judson
History
New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening
Brown, Arthur Judson
China -- Commerce; China -- Foreign relations; China -- Politics and government; Missions -- China
The native Christians, especially the pastors and teachers,
are the very ones who first feel this movement towards a
higher physical life. Nor should we repress it in them, for it
means an environment more favourable to morals and to the
stability of Christian character as well as a healthful example
to the community in which they live. To say, therefore, that
the average annual income of a Hindu is rupees twenty-seven
(nine dollars) is not to adduce a reason for holding the pastors
and evangelists of India down to that scale. They should, indeed,
live near enough to the plane of their countrymen to keep
in sympathetic touch with them. But they should not be expected
or allowed to huddle in the dark, unventilated hovels of
the masses of the people, or, by confining themselves to one
scanty meal a day, have that gaunt, half-famished look which
makes my heart ache every time I think of the walking skeletons
I saw in India. I am not ashamed but proud of the fact
that it costs the average Christian more to live in Asia than it
costs the average heathen, that the houses of the Laos Christians
are better than the single-roomed sheds about them, that
the graduates of our Siam mission schools for girls wear shirt
waists instead of sunshine, that the members of any one of our
Korean churches spend more money on soap than a whole village
of their heathen neighbours whose bodies are caked with
the accumulations of years of neglect, that the sessions of our
Syrian churches are Christian gentlemen in appearance as well
as in fact, and that the houses of our Chinese Christians do not
mix pigs, chickens and babies in one lousy, malodorous
company.
But these altered conditions have not yet brought the ability
to meet them. The cost of living has increased faster than the
resources of the people. Only France and Russia are primarily
political in their foreign policy. England, Germany and
the United States are avowedly commercial. They talk incessantly
about ``the open door.'' Their supreme object in Asia
is to ``extend their markets.'' They are producing more than
they can use themselves, and they seek an opportunity to dispose
of their surplus products. They are less concerned to
bring the products of Asia into their own territories.
Indeed, Germany and particularly the United States have
built a tariff wall about themselves, expressly to protect
home industries from outside competition, and not a few
American manufacturers have recently been on the verge of
panic on account of Japanese competition. Europe and America
are trying to force their own manufactures on to Asia and
to take in return only what they please.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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