Such transitions are full of bewilderment to the
European--bewildering to any writer who endeavors to tackle the Empire
as a whole. Each province or couple of provinces should be dealt with
separately, so diverse are the conditions.
But if China, from the highest to the lowest, will only embrace truth
and love her for her own sake, so that she will not abate one jot of
allegiance to her; if China will let truth run down through the
arteries of everyday commercial, social, and political life as do the
waterways through her marvelous country; if China will kill her
retardative conservatism, and in its place erect honesty and conscience;
if China will let her moral life be quickened--then her transition
period, from end to end of the Empire, will soon end. Mineral,
agricultural, industrial wealth are hers to a degree which is not true
of any other land. Her people have an enduring and expansive power that
has stood the test of more than four thousand years of honorable
history, and their activity and efficiency outside China make them more
to be dreaded, as competitors, than any race or any dozen races of
to-day.
But New China must have this new life.
Commerce, science, diplomacy, culture, civilization she will have in
ever-increasing measure just in so much as she draws nearer to western
peoples.
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