Читать книгу China's Revolution, 1911-1912: A Historical and Political Record of the Civil War онлайн

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"I do not mean," said Lord William Cecil, "only by sending out missionaries, but also by teaching the future rulers of this great industrial people the truth and value of a Christian civilisation. The pessimist says this is impossible, and thus sounds the knell of our social legislation; but the Christian says the world is built for progress, and the acquisition of China to our civilisation is our opportunity for making the world a happier place. If we could at this moment help the Chinese to value the high principles which underlie our Western thought, China might be rendered happy by the brilliant light of a Christian civilisation and the world saved from a disaster of having labour sink from a Christian to a semi-Oriental status."

And although the fall of the Manchu dynasty will open the pathway into real progress in this land, we must agree that there is an infinite pathos in the Child-Emperor, ignorant, innocent, abdicating the throne which his forefathers had won, a mere pawn in the game between Chinese and Manchus. But pathetic as this incident is, we must not let its pathos obscure in our minds its more important aspects; it is not only the abdication of an Emperor we have to consider, but it is also the destruction of the conventional and artificial Chinese civilisation before the vigorous civilisation of the West. Vast China, with its four hundred millions of industrious population, with its infinite resources of coal, iron, and other minerals, with its traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Lamaism, has become part, and a very large part, too, of Western civilisation.