The conflict, however, is not racial, it
is a question of civilization. Were it racial only, to my way of
thinking we should be beaten hopelessly.
And as I write this in a Chinese inn, in the heart of Yuen-nan--the
"backward province"--surrounded by the common people in their common,
dirty, daily doings, a far stretch of vivid imagining is needed to see
these people in any way approaching the Westernization already current
in eastern provinces of this dark Empire.
This is what I wrote sitting on the top of a mountain during my tour
across China. But it will be seen in other parts of this book that
Western ideas and methods of progress in accord more with European
standards are being adopted--and in some places with considerable
energy--even in the "backward province." In travel anywhere in the
world, one becomes absorbed more or less with one's own immediate
surroundings, and there is a tendency to form opinions on the
limitations of those surroundings. In many countries this would not lead
one far astray, but in China it is different. Most of my opinion of the
real Chinese is formed in Yuen-nan, and it is not to be denied that in
all the other seventeen provinces, although a good many of them may be
more forward in the trend of national evolution and progress, the same
squalidness among the people, and every condition antagonistic to the
Westerner's education so often referred to, are to be found.
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