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THE HONGKONG WEEKLY PRESS AND wipe out of existence the unnatural total. abstinence idea, must also include a stern dismissal of that amused tolerance which sees in excess only an accidental slip about which there is nothing particularly unmanly, Until then, we must expect to hear both employers and employed complaining.
erroneous emphasis we have just alluded to. The dipsomaniac, intermittent or chronic, is a familiar figure, giving amusement to the thoughtless, pity to the humane, dis- appointment and annoyance to the employer, and trouble to the authorities. Very few of the people so affected by the behaviour of the drunkard enter into consideration of the causes of his habit. Those who smile at him are contemptuous; those who regret his state do not search out exenses for him : the others are only too fain to dismiss him. altogether, and to look out for another who does not succumb to "the temptations of the Orient." Why do so many bright and otherwise sensible men take to drinking? In most cases it begins, we suppose, with sheer boredom. That pessimistic malady that takes thought for the morrow and the past, and seeks in the collection of sensations forgetfulness of the torturing thought that nothing much is
'the good of it all," is mainly responsible. We
K
e are convinced, moreover, that the loss ofaiths and the modern scorning of religions has helped greatly the neglect of the old, manly virtue of self-control. Life is no better understood since superstition is being swept out of it, and it is not all who reach pessimism through pride of intellect. Quite as numerous are they who, looking for no other life, expect too much of this
one.
If these clamant desires took the form they once did, and the form of the militant, animal strenuousness preached by KIPLING, there might not be so much harm done. But the simple thrills of mere exis- tence have ceased to satisfy. The result, in the East, where the daily round and com- mon task" is gray-bordered often by lune liness, is disastrous. The expounders of the faiths are surely not altogether blameless. Just as our teetotal contemporary repels us by the extremity of his cult, so the preachers have perhaps done, and helped to cause the re-action they now observe with so much regret. Self-control must have been the real aim of earlier Buddhism and of earlier Christianity. Over-zealous disciples, by misinterpreting that aim as self-abnegation and self-annihilation, have they not render- ed really good advice non-effective? If they had not pushed the pendulum so far in one direction, haply it would not have swang so far in the other.
!
CORRECTED IMPRESSIONS,
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[September 5, 1904.
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as anachronistic and "uncivilised." Another popular misconception is that the Japanese has a detachment and mobility unknown to western peoples. This fancy originated with the globe-trotter who glanced into Japanese interiors and missed the "whatnot" and the sideboard, the "upright grand" and the umbrella stand, We are still being im- pressed with the “fact that the Japanese wants are simple and easily supplied. belongings can be packed in a bundle and carried on his back." As for us, we put our money in a stone cottage and fill it with permanent furnishings, to which we are rooted like a vegetable. It is nonsense, of course. We have nothing to dread in a comparison of our respective acquisitive tendencies. The Japanese, rich or poor, hoards more than he can carry on his back. and in the matter of "great possessions is no more in accord with the Sermon on the Mount than we are. The real factor of Japan's success in war is not to be found in these idle fancies. It rests, as we have previously pointed out, on patriotism. Patriotism of the Japaues and English kind is not general in great Empires. The more nearly its area approximates to the parochial, the livelierit is like to be. Russia, China, these are too big to have this effectual patriotism. Thus the race not to the swift, nor the battle to the big.
OPIUM AND MISSIONARIES,
13
A
(Daily Press, 1st September.) WE are getting a little tired of being told that in the Russo-Japanese war there is ap- parent that element usually referred to as the "unprecedented." It may be the first time that the Orient has clashed in real warfare with the Occident; but it is by no means the first time in the world's history that a great Power has been shocked by the effective intervention of a new recruit to the ranks of the nations. That east is east, and west west, and never the twain shall meet, &c., is strictly true in only a geogra- phical sense. Japan both past and present has met European civilisations in many essential things. Japan is not a barbarous nation newly veneered with civilisation. Japan is a civilised nation of long standing with the barbarism no nearer to the surface than is that of other nations; but perhaps the Japanese veuser, either of its former making or later acquisition, is of a less opaque kind, Japan before the foreign in- vasion was as much a civilized nation as Rome was, when JULIUa was invading bar- barian Britain, long e'er Russia began to
(Daily Press, 2nd September.) wear even the swaddling clothes of social
Few books published of late years regarḍ- refinement. Rome was presently to suffering our relations with China are more similar surprises to those now being felt by suggestive or more misleading than Mr. A. Russin, and, apparently, shared by the DAVENPORT's "China from Within." unthinking world. The invasion of Spain strange medley of fact and prejudice, it yet by the Moors was more unprecedented
possesses crannies crammed with observa- and startling than the over-running of Man- tions which set the reader thinking for churia by the Japanese. Even the great himself. Mr. DAVENPORT, from his long invincible British power had to be surprised personal experience in the Consular Service at the presumption of a lot of rough Ameri-
in China, is personally able to speak with can colonists, and to put up with an unpre-authority on the subject of the Opium Trade cedented result. There is in the present in China, and easily demolishes the false duel nothing more surprising than the issues raised by the societies of goody- English conquests of Gaul. It does seem goodies who clamour for the total suppres late in the day to find the wonder based on
sion of the opium trade between India and the superficial differences in the respective China. These false issues, as he well shows, cartographic areas. Throughout history,
are founde, first on wilful ignorance of the from the roving Danes and their English nature, origin and growth of the opium heirs, the wandering Norsemen and the traffic between India and China, and No task of civilization has been so pin- multiplying Semites, we have seen the little secondly ou equally wilful misstatement and fully laborious as the subjugation of leavens leavening the large lumps. The
positive untruth. The whole is a obarac- appetite: those who decry appetite a change wrought in big Africa by little teristic exemplification of the vicarious together do but discourage, it may be, some Europe is another illustration. No more righteousness of the day, which, in the
who might otherwise understand that life wise is this pers stently recurrent error that words of HUDIBRAB, Would is no pilgrimage upon which the wayfarer civilisation is a new thing under the Rising should afflict his soul. The nan who Sun. Japan had its literature while we preaches the other extreme of "eat, drink were still scratching badly drawn pictures and be merry, for to-morrow we die," does on soft stone and earthenware. Japan no better, for the morbid reflection tacked treated its women as we do even now, on to his otherwise sound advice spoils it, honestly considered; only Japan made no and incites to excess. Literature teems pretence of chivalry while it legislated with stories of people who, for the gratifica-
"walnut-tree laws, man-made. It kept tion of present desires, sold themselves to up the wasteful feudalistic etiquette to a the Devil. The cream of the old-fashioned much more recent date, but whereas our story nacally came with the debtor's dodges real secialism did not begin until our feuda to elude a settlement of the bargain. The lism left off, Japan bad a healthy communal man who has, in order to drown his ennui, system running contemporaneously with its given himself to drinking, finds it, and swashbuckling doings. That is why Japan must find it, next to impossible to evade a remains Japanese under its European final payment for his weakness. What is veueer, because there was nothing radical wanted is a healthy public opinion, inclining that required to alter. This Oriental tree neither to the foolish, teetotal avoidance of had civilized roots: its new features are the good things of life, nor to the false pride merely shoots grafted on: the tree remains. of the taproom that makes so many men Its inventive faculties have not had to be afraid to own that enough is as good as a awakened from the torpor of barbarism, feast. Either asceticism or debauch is bad. They were as fully developed as ours, and There is surely a happy mean, in which a the great conversion of the last half century man may laugh and quaff, enjoy friendship is nothing more than a diversion-of these and freedom from thought for awhile; and equally evolved powers into similar channels yet retire sober and respected to a healthy of activity to ours, and away from direc- repose? That healthy opinion, which will│tions that struck the earlier foreign visitors
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Compound for sins it felt inclined to By damning those it had no mind to. After all, the scales in which humanity must eventually be weighed have a remark- able tendency to rest où an even beam. In Europe we hold in high social esteem the great brewer and the wine merchant; why seek to rob the Indian ryot and the darker- skinned merchant of Bombay?
The Chinaman ignores the aroma of our choicest vintage and turns for consolation to his elaborate pipe and whiff of the choicest Malwa. The thinner-skinned horse refuse the succulent but prickly thistle, which is better armed relation the donkey eagerly devours to his great personal advantage; who is to judge between them? There are certain so-called vices resulting from an abuormal development of justincts necessary to the healthy development of the The whole human family find neces. race. sary the use of some narcotic or stimulut, for the two fade into one another, be it tea or coffee, or hemp or opium, or tobacco or alcohol, in one form or other. Each of them may be used to such an extreme as to become detrimental. Even tea, apparently
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