Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHINA'S POSITION IN THE EAST Much is said about China as the ultimate hope of the East; and many who justly admire the moral and intellectual qualities of individual Chinamen, particularly those of the educated classes, are always ready to protest against any action on the part of Japan which savors of an attempt at aggrandizement at the expense of China. But China has not yet become in the modern sense an autonomous state. In spite of the extraordinary development among her intelligent classes of a national consciousness, the Chinese nation is impotent single-handed to resist external pressure tending to impair its territorial integrity and its national sovereignty. Since it has become a republic and has abandoned many anachronisms in her social, economic and political life, such as the outworn practice of requiring erudite classical knowledge as a qualification for public office, great progress has been made, if not in administration, at least in a recognition of the necessity for adopting methods prevailing in other countries of the world in education, economics and government. Every observant Westerner who visits China is impressed by the enthusiasm and high intelligence of the educated classes, and particularlyof the bodies of students, who appear to be among the principal leaders in the movement for the moral, economic and political regeneration of their country. If these classes of men and women of modern China were representative of its population of four hundred millions, the chance of creating a unified national spirit and introducing into the psychology of the great masses of the people the concept of patriotism and nationality which exists in a high degree in western nations, the outlook would be indeed encouraging. But how long is this going to take? The s...