A Chinese jtm^ at davun on the broad Yangtze "\iang

"
THE
DRAGON
STIRS
AN INTIMATE SKETCH-BOOK
OF CHINA'S KUOMINTANG REVOLUTION
1927-29

Ey
HENRY FRANCIS MISSELWITZ

NEW YORK: HARBINGER HOUSE

 Copyright 1941 by Henry Francis Misselwitz

rignts reserved. reproduction in "wnole or

in part forbidden, except for slLort excerpts
quoted, by reviewers.

FIRST EDITION

PRINTED ENT THE! TJNTTEiD STA.TE3S OF 1

 CONTENTS
PREFACE

1 THE DRAGON STIRS 11

2 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 18

3 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 32

4 "WHY WE ARE IN CHINA" 52

5 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 65

6 RED RULE AT HANKOW 87

7 UP TO THE FRONT 103

8 THE RED FLAME FADES 121

9 "NINGPO MORE FAR" 132

10 A "NEW DEAL" FOR CHINA 144

11 CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S RETURN 157

12 RED REBELLION 167

13 CHRIST OF THE "CHINA ROAD" 174

14 THE MARINES GET GOING 186

15 THE END OF CHANG TSO-LIN 191

16 TOKYO'S DILEMMA 202

17 A DREAM THAT RIVALS GENGHIS KHAN 206

18 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE 215

19 THE DRAGON LEARNS TO FLY 229

20 BURIAL OF SUN YAT-SEN 239

21 PERSONAL PUBLICITY 248

22 THE "BoY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 262

23 THE ROAD AHEAD 276

INDEX 287
 PREFACE

The Chinese are united today temporarily. They were finally

aroused, along with much of the rest of the world, by Japan's in-
vasion of China. Smouldering coals of deep hatred against the Japanese
burst into quenchless flames. Internal strife was forgotten in the
white heat of a new menace from outside their Middle Kingdom, and
the Chinese made peace at home for the moment there in the tinder-
box Asia against a common foe. The intolerable heat of their
of
hatred of the invaders from tiny, insular Japan welded all China into
one vast loathing, incoherent mass.
One definite and significant result was the first faint sign of real
unity among the many totally different types of Asiatic peoples in that
broad, illiterate land.Japan's invasion of China did more to unite
those peoples those restless sons of Han than any other one thing
or any other leader had done since the revolution in 1911, which
overthrew the craven, effete and criminally corrupt old Manchu Dy-
nasty in Peking, the ancient Capital.
It is the birth of a new China, as the Dragon stirs and awakes,
with which we are concerned in the following pages, rather than
another book on Japan's sanguinary "undeclared war" with an un-
wieldy neighbor in the chaotic Orient. Here is a stirring cross-section
of those vital daysa few years ago, when China began fumbling for
a national consciousness and took the first faltering steps upward
toward unity.
The Chinese were far from united when I first reached Shanghai,

early in 1927. A
deep-rooted uprising had begun far in the deep
South of China, at Canton, and was convulsing all east Asia. It was
the Kuomintang, or People's Party, against the war lords at Peking,
in the North. The rebels from China's far South were led by Chiang
Kai-shek, then a youthful commander who was to become their General-
issimo. They swept swiftly northward, through the Yangtze Valley,
seizing province after province in their relentless advance, and shout-
ing : "Down with the Peking war lords !" and "Down with the Foreign
Devils 1" in their ruthless fury. Foreigners from the West were de-
nounced to the people of China as their enemies then, as now, by leaders
in the Kuomintang.

It is this tense period, the dawn of the current era in the exotic

Orient, which is discussed in this volume. No effort was made to

write a "stop press" story of China, with bulletin-like accounts of her

frenzied, heroic attempts to ward off the land-hungry Japanese with

our financial and material aid. Rather, I have concentrated essentially
on the beginnings of China's struggle toward unity as a nation, so very

recently, while her soul-baring People's Revolution swept to victory

around me.

My name and a bit of personal history may be of interest. Missel-

witz is an old German name, from Saxony on the border of Poland.
I was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1900, at the turn of the
century. My father was born in New York eighty-two years ago, and
he and my mother still live in Missouri. His father was born in

Saxony, and fell with a German girl who had lived long in France.
in love

They fled Germany in the middle of the last century and settled first in
New York. Shortly after my father was born there, the family moved to
Philadelphia where he was reared. He, Herman Francis Misselwitz,
became a Philadelphia lawyer; and about the time when Horace Greeley
was telling young men in the growing nation, reunited following our
Civil War, to "go west," he went west.
There in Leavenworth, then a thriving trading post and jumping
still none too safe journey across the continent to the
off place for the

West Coast and California, he hung out his shingle. And there this
sandy haired, blue-eyed Saxon from Manhattan met my mother. She
was a tiny young lady, not long from the blue grass country of her
native Kentucky. Shy dark eyes, like caves of sunlight, shone from
her delicate features beneath a cloud of jet black hair piled high in a

pompadour, then fashionable. From them, I get my light brown hair

and dark brown eyes. Mother was but 4 feet 11 inches tall. Her
name then was Grace Ella Fields. She came of a mixture of English-

Norman French on her father's side he was Heniy Clay Fields, of

our United States postal service and of Scotch and Dutch on her

mother's side.Rer mother was Laura Belle Embry, of Kentucky, who

became an ardent temperance leader of the post-war (Civil War) era
and one of the very early members of the Women's Christian Tern-
perance Union headed by her friend and associate, the dynamic Frances
Willard, in Wichita, Kansas.
I was born as the twentieth century began, near the very heart
of the United States.I asked a friend in Berlin a few years
ago
to look into the family name Misselwitz, and determine if I weren't at
least partly Jewish so that, as I put it in a letter to him, I couldn't "be
a genius, too/' like so many Jews are in music and the other arts, to
say nothing of their success as bankers and in almost any kind of
commerce or business My friend, a foreign correspondent originally
from New Orleans, La., had the name Misselwitz looked up and after ;

an extensive search in the Reichstag library in Berlin and through a

professional genealogist there, he wrote back to the effect that ''back-
to the year 800 A
D. you're 100 per cent Aryan, and could even suit
Hitler on that score ... so I'm very much afraid you can't become a

genius in that way or I might add, in any other !"

In recognition of their helpful services, which played a large part
in making this book possible, thanks are due to several persons and

organizations, including B. W
Fleisher, publisher of The Japan Adver-
tiser,an American daily morning newspaper printed in English in
Tokyo, for whom I first went to the Far East in 1924. The Advertiser
since has been sold to the Japanese government.

Thanks and my appreciation likewise are due to the United Press,

for giving assignment in Shanghai, early in 1927; to The New
me an
York Times, for appointing me their chief correspondent in China,
later in the same year; to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The
New York Times, for telling me I could use material gathered for
the paper while I was in China, as the basis for much of this book;
and to Carroll Kenworthy, in Washington, DC., who as an expert
on the Orient, did much to answer my queries or to get them answered
at the Chinese and Japanese embassies while this was being written.

H. F. M.

February, 1941
Santa Monica, Calif.
 To
MY MOTHER
 THE DRAGON STIRS

Chinese had the first league of nations on earth. The idea

THE worked smoothly for nearly three centuries, until the Dragon
Throne in Peking was overthrown in 191 1. The machinery for
this initial attempt at a league among men was set up when the
Manchus swarmed south over the Great Wall of China and conquered
half a continent. They took over the Middle Kingdom, as the Chinese
themselves invariably call their country, and in 1644 inaugurated their
autocratic rule over all the provinces. The Manchu regime had its
capital at Peking, now Peiping.
Like the Tartars, Mongols and others who have come into close
contact with the Chinese races and there are many widely varied

peoples in that land the Manchus in time were absorbed. The pro-
cess was passive, scarcely noticeable from generation to generation.
None from outside the Great Wall ever has been capable of with-
standing the ultimate and seemingly inevitable dominance of the
Chinese. Possibly Japan may control the land we know as China.
The latest possible subjugation of those peoples for gener-
may last
'

ations, even centuries. It might well prove .a^great. "civilizing ^bpon*

.to- the Chinese bringing them modern life and its attendant bene-
factions the radio, airplanes, and even the last word in.
such as
plumbing and heating now so sadly lacking in countless millions of
Chinese homes. But at last the descendants of these twentieth cen-
tury militarists may be absorbed.
The Manchus first league of nations by banding the
ruled their
various Chinese provinces together into what they called the Middle
Kingdom. They believed that the land we call China, and quite
erroneously consider one nation, was literally the center of the earth
and that Peking was the dead center of the Universe. One day not
long ago I stood on a stone at the great Temple of Heaven in the
erstwhile Forbidden City within Peking. I shouted for the echo,

11
12 THE DRAGON STIRS
honoring custom. The voice actually did sound somewhat hollow,
as it usually does in a telephone booth anywhere rather an odd

inasmuch as the "dead center" is right out in the open.

experience,
How the foxy old architects arranged that stunt, which was convincing
to many for so long, is still a riddle.
A military governor was placed in authority in each Province under
the rule of the Son of Heaven and his court advisers in Peking, Each
military governor swore allegiance to the Manchu Emperor. He paid
taxes, or tribute, at stipulated intervals and ruled his territory in

peace. As long as the revenue flowed in regularly, Peking made no

effort to interfere. The Provinces enjoyed an extended period of

tranquillity under this calm, though perhaps stultifying, arrangement.

There was no question of states' rights for the simple reason that

each state, province, nation or whatever you care to call it had

full freedom of action. They merely paid "taxes" to the central

Government, and went their own way.

It made not the slightest difference in the world to a simple
peasant from the Shanghai area that he could not speak with a man
from Peking or anyone from other remote cities and distant areas in
that vast land. Even today, a citizen of the Chinese Republic who
hails from Peking cannot talk with a man or woman from, say, Can-
ton. And a Hankow-man
could not, and cannot now, talk with any-
one of normal, peasant mentality from any of the other cities. They
simply do not talk the same language.
As a result, an official or "mandarin*' language grew up. The
word "mandarin" means "official." For instance, when one speaks
of a "mandarin coat" somewhat popular in the West, the literal

reference is to a garment once worn by an official of the old Manchu

regime. Men \ve would call governors, mayors, judges and the like
wore these badges of office, and usually they were resplendent, to
impress the common people. These official*, all over the Middle
King-
dom conversed in the Mandarin language, and eventually scholars in

every province learned it in addition to their own tongue. It became

widespread in later years and scholars under the Mancluus were highly
respected. They proved invaluable to the men running the machinery
of the government which ruled much of Asia.
But the "man in the street" remains unable to converse with men
from other parts of China. Those who can read and write, however,
 TTIE DRAGON STIRS 13

can get their thoughts over by writing them for others if both know
enough of the countless hieroglyphs, or characters, which the Chinese
persist inusing in preference to the Roman alphabet, Few of the

400,000,000 Chinese a guess, for no accurate census is available

have mastered that formidable task. There is an effort now meeting
with some measure of success to teach them the "thousand characters"

system of simplified writing and reading, and radio programs help to

bioadcast knowledge to the masses. In the main, the Chinese remain
an inert mass of illiterate peoples who distrust not only men from
any foreign land, but each other. A
man from the next province is

"a foreigner/' to millions of the common peasantry, and coolies.

This is one fundamental reason why the Chinese still lack unity

They are united at the moment against the Japanese invaders. The
white-hot heat of their hatred for the sturdy little men from Japan

may weld them together permanently. If so, the sons of Cathay

will not have died in vain.

^
But as a matter of fact, a Canton-man and a Peking-man now
jare no more alike than an Italian or a Spaniard, and an Irishman. The
Cantonese is usually short, swarthy or dark yellow, hot-headed, and
-a "go-getter" in business. They are the Chinese one ordinarily finds
abroad. In the United States, thousands are laundrymen. Their
speech sounds sibilant, more "sing-song" in tone than other Chinese

languages. They are the revolutionaries, the restless souls of Asia.

ft was from Canton that the latest civil war began, when the first
seeds of national unity were planted.
The men from the north are taller than those of the Canton area.

,They speak a different tongue. It is better modulated, and more

pleasing to hear. These men are less volcanic. They are more often
the scholars, bankers, soldiers. Some go into business or the pro-

fessions They rarely travel, as do the Cantonese.

Theoriginal Chinese revolutionaries who overthrew the Manchu
dynasty in 1911 moved too rapidly for their own good. They de-
stroyed authority, but had none with which to replace it. The ousted
Son of Heaven was forced to watch bandits and war lords scramble
for power in his rotting realm.
The uproarwithin China kept the world guessing for years. Few
people in the United States or elsewhere understand why the Chinese
always have fought among themselves.
14 THE DRAGON STIRS
In the first place, it should be understood that the causes of war
in the vast and teeming Provinces of China are identical with the
causes of war anywhere. In other words, they are economic and
political the two can be separated.
if The difference is that these
causes affect the individuals involved more directly than they usually
do elsewhere. A man joins an army in China because he needs the
money offered. He is out of work, he cannot find a jo)). An in-

creasing number now join to fight Japan, and are sincerely patriotic

chiefly because the Japanese threaten the economic existence of the

Chinese.

The majority see in the uniform a license to loot; in the rifle, a

chance togain a wealth of sorts; in the roving life of a soldier, what

little romance there is to be had out of an existence that is at best
barren.

Conservative estimates place China's armed forces at from 1,500,-

000 to 2,000,000 men, but none can count accurately the hordes in
the armies and bandit bands that roam their sanguinary way about
the wartorn face of a tired Cathay. Famine has added to the horror

of civilwars for decades and of Japanese invasions in latter years;

and thousands of men are ready to go into an army or join a desperate
bandit band to keep from starving. Their increased numbers add to
the vital social problems they would escape; but their impulse is cer-

tainly natural under the circumstances.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and other leaders in the old

Nanking regime, now on a wartime basis at Chungking, are hampered

by lack of communications and by the natural mountain lairs to be
found in many provinces. Efforts to maintain law and order are
feeble even in normal times. Any government, as Tokyo will now
find out at Nanking, will have difficulty in bettering the situation
rapidly. Even a bona fide Chinese Central government would have
difficulty in maintaining order over all China until such time as rail-

roads and highways can be built, the peasantry educated and a strong
national army evolved from the present still loosely federated forces.
Bandits have been a traditional scourge of China for centuries.
These roving robbers are considered as certain there as death and
taxes. The bandit-suppression generals occasionally found it
expedient
to incorporate bandit
gangs into their armies rather than try to fight
 THE DRAGON STIRS IS

it out with the outlaws. "Bandit one day, soldier the next" is a
truism in China.
There is a classic story told along the China coast of how the
first police force in the world came to be formed there. I outline it

here, to demonstrate the thoroughly resigned attitude toward these

"Jesse James" men of Asia.
Apowerful bandit chieftain in olden times, it is said, fell in love
with the daughter of a wealthy merchant in the area in which the
bandit and his men held sway. He was long unable to win her. But
one day he thought of a scheme. He ordered his men to raid the
merchant's palatial warehouse and when they divided the loot, all
he took was an ivory miniature of the merchant's daughter.

Disguising himself as a traveler, the bandit Chief took the mini-

ature to the merchant's home a few days later.

"I beg you, sir,"

said, he permit me to return this ivory
"to
miniature which chanced upon in a shop in the village. I learned
I

of your loss, and am pleased to return it to you."

The merchant was not fooled. He told the bandit that he recog-

nized him and asked what he wanted. The bandit replied amiably.
Now that they understood one another, he said, he wanted merely to
marry the merchant's daughter. The merchant refused. He declared

indignantly it was impossible that a daughter of his should wed a

thief, and they talked of other things

Finally a counter-proposal was made by the merchant. He com-

plained of the heavy levies which the bandit's raids were making on
his properties and offered to pay the chieftain a certain number of
pieces of silver each year if the bandit would only quit robbing him,
and would assure him of immunity to loss through thievery by others.
They made a deal after the habitual polite haggling and swore an
oath to the pact.
A week or so later the bandit called his prosperous band together.
He had been quite busy in the meantime. When they had all come
together he addressed them with his proposal. He had seen most of
the merchants in his territory and he had got the others to agree
to pay set sums a year for immunity.

"The total, my brethren/' he said, "by far exceeds the amount we

have averaged by working hard as bandits in recent years. Hence,
we may retire and yet be assured of incomes greater than if we
16 THE DRAGON STIRS
continue to ply our ancient and honorable profession among the
worthy gentry of these noble hills."
There was no little dissension at first. The bandits hesitated to

give up the ancient profession which they and their ancestors

had
followed for generations. But in the end, all agreed to their chief's

plans. They would cease to plunder ; likewise, they agreed to prevent

lival bands from robbing their generous patrons. In a word, the first

police force on earth was founded.

The bandit leader, now a respectable chief -of -police, paid court to
the merchant's daughter. In due course, the story runs, they were
married and lived happily ever after.
True or not, this gives an insight into the average Chinese psy-
chology on banditry. Bandits continue to play an important part in
the military life of the land. During Japan's "undeclared war" and
for years afterwards, bandits may be expected to roam from uniform
to uniform and back again with astonishing abandon.
In Tokyo, there is a strong and rapidly growing sentiment among

the loyal subjects of Emperor Hirohito for a greater, and ever more
powerful Japan. Their new cry is, "Asia for the Asiatics!" They
hope to achieve Utopia in the Oriental hemisphere. And most im-

portant to us, the Japanese would evict the century-old dominating

influence of the white man from all the Far East and rule them-
selves.

Even among the Chinese, of latter days, the Japanese have some
supporters in the surge toward renewed vigor and authority for the
yellow races of the world. Others who occasionally join the Japanese
in this phase of their drive for power are the peoples of India, the
Filipino Moro, Tagalog and others the Siamese, Tibetans,
races

Mongols, Arabs and even the Turks and roving Moslem tribes of
North Africa.
Passionately, always in the guise of high patriotism, the Japanese
hope that one day they will achieve control of the entire Far East. Many
of these zealots would even include Australia in their far-flung
scheme. Nippon's statesmen envisage Japan as the spearhead of this
movement, emerging one day as the greatest power in history. In
the last century another island kingdom England, in the Occident
rose to such heights through the dreams and exploits of Lord Clive
of India; of Gladstone, Disraeli and their imperialistic
men-of-the-pen,
 THE DRAGON STIRS 17

such as the late Rudyard Kipling. Thus it is not too far-fetched a

dream now for yellow men who ponder on that, to aspire to similar

glory and achievements

There are observers at the embassies, legations and consulates in
the Orient who believe that fair-skinned peoples in the rest of the
world would be wise just now to ignore Japan's determined little

military men and their antics, regardless of what they do.

However,
that is not our chief concern here It is a fascinating study, and
the Japanese invasion of China undoubtedly will be the subject of

many books, itself. But I shall discuss here the rugged men and
swift events that have kept the Far East in mystic turmoil for more

than a quarter of a century.

The decade 1927-37 began with the start of the violent Kuomintang
Revolution at Canton. I shall describe the rebels' seizure of Shanghai
and the turbulent events which followed while I was living out there
in the thick of it.
 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL

officer from the United States Marine Corps abruptly leaned

THE across our dining table at the American Club in Shanghai and
surprised me with a sudden question.
4
'Can you keep a secret?" he asked.
His voice had become low and oddly intense. It was far from ap-
propriate to the heedless atmosphere around us, I told him I could,
if
necessary, but said that being a war correspondent at the height of
the Kuomintang Revolution convulsing all China meant cut-throat com-
petition, particularly in "secrets." There were literally scores of other
press men who had been sent out East by the syndicated press services
as well as countless individual newspapers and magazines in practically

every civilized country on earth.

"I can/' I said, ".but you can't make me like it. Why?"
He thought for a moment. Then :

"You'll know this by morning anyway; I might as well tell you

now. But will you keep your source, at least, absolutely a secret
between us?"
"Positively."
"Okay," he answered, "but don't quote me. I'll deny it! Now
listen, this is straight dope. It's official, or will be by morning, any-
I might issue our
way. communique myself. So get this:
"The Cantonese are on the march. Their troops are closing in this
minute. Shanghai will fall in the next forty-eight hours. And that's
a fact."
"I won't quote you," I promised, "but now!
let's get out of here,
If that's from your Marine Intelligence reports, it goes to New York
tonight. I'm cabling it urgent. And without qualification.
"You'd better be right or rather, I had! Come on."
We hurried over to the gloomy-looking ramshackle United Press

18
 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 19

offices, two blocks down Foochow Road toward the Bund, or water-
front. The officer and I stumbled down a black, cobble-stoned blind
alley to my desk. wrote an urgent cable to the United Press in
I

London, then my relay point to the United States. It read:

CANTONESE TROOPS MARCHING. FALL SHANGHAI

UNLATERN MONDAY INEVITABLE.
That was all. But it was enough.
1

"Boy/ I shouted. ''Chop chop! Get going !"

A came running. He grabbed the dispatch, hopped on his
coolie

bicycle and was off for the Telegraph Building, two blocks away on

Avenue Edward VII. A few minutes after the Marine officer's quiet
announcement at the American Club, word was on its way. It gave
a smashing lead for my Saturday afternoon papers all over the United
States and South America, and the evening editions in Europe. The
world had waited weeks, while China's revolution was at stalemate.
Many foreigners were thoroughly convinced the North China war
lords had won. Some that eventful night even cabled their friends or

newspapers back home that Shanghai was still invincible. Fate proved
the contrary, and also was kind to me.
The difference in time made my fortune possiblesthat, and inviting
a Marine officer to dinner with me at the American Club, in a purely

casual moment. Nine o'clock at night in Shanghai is eight o'clock

the morning same day in New York, for New York is thirteen
of the
hours behind Shanghai. Time was with me; also the Marine. We
had been working together ever since his arrival on the troop trans-
port ship Chaumont several weeks before this night. We had swapped
tips and mutual confidences, and now he gave me the tip on what we had
been waiting for all those frenzied days in that most baffling of cities,

Shanghai.
This incident occurred on March 19, 1927. China was in a
tremendous upheaval. Her sons were engaged in revolution. Some
called it civil war. Her men from the North and those from the
South were fighting in a desperate struggle for mastery. Brothers
fought brothers, as in our "War between the States." The Soviet
Union was (and remains) more than an interested observer. The
rebellion had a Russian Advisorate sent out from Moscow. It was

headed by Mikal Borodin. Today, he runs an English-language

20 THE DRAGON STIRS
newspaper in Moscow sic transit gloria mundi. Japan likewise was
far from idle. She had no "advisorate" on either side officially.
But her militarists, ever enchancing their power abroad, had an "ace
in the hole" in the person of the Boy Emperor, a scholarly but help-
less young man of the old Manchu Dynasty in Peking who had
changed his name to plain "Mr. Henry Pu-yi."
The Russians fled later in 1927. Japan tenaciously hung on.
Eventually, in 1931, she seized Manchuria, renamed it Manchukuo and
put the Boy Emperor on the throne of his ancestors. He is a Man-
chu. Some day, the Japanese militarists in their lust for glory and
power (or patriotism, as they are fully convinced) may be expected
to place puppet again on his Dragon Throne in Peiping.
their It

could happen but that is another story. All China, meanwhile, re-
mains in chaos, and probably will, for years.
I followed up the dispatch with a brief description of the advance
as described by the Marine. He said his Intelligence Corps lieutenants
had been out toward the rebel Cantonese lines all that Saturday, and
had talked with the advance guards.
"The drive is on, no question," he said. "There'll be a good show
on by morning, or Monday at the latest."

Wegot off those dispatches and then made a round of the Shanghai
defenses both in the International Settlement and in the French
Concession. Most of the Americans Shanghai were located
living in
in the latter area, chiefly within small cannon range of the native city.
In fact, some of their homes that turbulent, unforgettable spring, were
damaged by shells.

On
the streets, patrols of foreign troops from half a dozen nations
around the world kept the curfew. Our press and military passes,
however, made us immune to the strictly enforced orders that all
civilians be off the streets by 10 p.m.
Shanghai, in that eventful spring of 1927 when the Nationalist
(Kuomintang) armies from the South came roaring into the Valley
of the Yangtze, was even more than usual the exotic blend of East and

West. It spread its gaiety and wickedness its innocence among the
missionaries, and its filth among the lowest dives along the low banks
of the Whangpoo River, a few miles upstream from the place where
the broad, yellow Yangtze meets the sea
While troops of far nations concentrated in martial
array behind
 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 21

barbed wire and sandbag emplacements, the populace Chinese as

well as foreign danced an amazing whirl in a wartime atmosphere
of thorough abandon. Young Chinese maids foxtrotted to American
lazz in swank night
clubs as luxurious as any in Paris, Berlin or
New York.
They danced with Chinese youths educated in the uni-
versities of Europe and the United States. Old Chinese, swathed in
the coarse blue clothing of the country-side, mingled with the younger

generation. Foreigners from the four corners of the earth came and
went on endless missions. Some were spies working for the South,
the North, the Japanese anybody who would pay them. But most
01 them were businessmen with eye to a quick profit. And of course,
there were the scores of press correspondents there to "cover" the

story for readers to whom the city was but a name.

But in the main they were traders descendants of men who went
out in the romantic clipper ship days of the last century, and who now
owned spacious estates on the fashionable outskirts of the metropolis.
Others appeared with get-rich-quick schemes in which high intrigue
more often than not played a sinister part. Tall Sikhs from India,
rifles slung in readiness over their towering shoulders, policed the In-
ternational Settlement, their bright turbans, black beards and flashing
eyes all part of the picturesque setting. United States Marines, smart
in their uniforms, British "Tommies," French sailors and their
swarthy Anamites from Indo-China, Japanese troops and marines,
Italians, and Portuguese swarmed in and around the city the men
in the Allied Army of Defense who threw a ring of bayonets around

Shanghai and kept it safe from the Chinese armies struggling for
possession of the native part of that river port.
Foreign men-of-war lay anchored off the Bund, ready to protect
the lives and property of nationals from overseas. There were forty-
six foreign warships strung out along the narrow waterway at the
height of the revolution. In the foreign areas, six miles along the
river front and within a perimeter of nearly thirty miles, handsome

modern mansions, banks, hotels as fine as any on earth, and beauti-

fully appointed clubs, all flourished. Taxicabs, buses, trackless trolley-
cars ran on the broad avenues, cluttered with rickshaws and ancient,

creaking Chinese wheelbarrows. Overhead, commercial planes from

Hungjao Airport outside the city, or elsewhere, droned hourly despite
thewar beneath them,
 22 THEDRAGONSTIRS
On the Bund stood the Shanghai Club with its "longest bar in
the world" packed three deep at noon and night for half a block along
its burnished dark wooden length. It is just below Avenue Edward

VII, boundary between the French Concession and the International

Settlement. A
few blocks away, down Foochow Road, the American
Club faced the Municipal Building itself a magnificent stone structure
covering a city block. The American Club, an eight-story building
of

red brick, modern in every detail, was packed day and night, its every
room filled with men brought there by the war, A score or more

British officers took quarters there, finding it more cheery than a

hotel or another club.

Night clubs ran until dawn. Patrons inside after 10 p.m. were
unable to go home until the curfew was lifted at dawn, about 4 a.m.

The police were controlled by the British in the International Settle-

ment. The Commissioner was British, as were the Inspectors and
other officers. Under them were the Sikhs, some Chinese and a few
Russian patrolmen and traffic officers.

The was so named because it is composed

International Settlement
of the old and Japanese and what was to have been the
British
American Concessions. The American Concession was to have been
between the British and Japanese. But the United States in the last

century, when this arrangement was being made on the mudflats of

the mosquito-infested Whangpoo River, at the express orders of the

Chinese who wanted
badly to segregate the "foreign barbarian"
traders that pestered them with goods refused to take a concession
in Shanghai or anywhere in China.
The British and Japanese as a result proposed a combination, and
the International Settlement was bora. The French took their con-
cession, which became a separate part of Shanghai, governed by a
French Municipal Council, under the French Consul-General. Shang-
hai was a triply divided city, then, of some 3,250,000 inhabitants

predominantly, of course, Chinese.

Of the total population, possibly 50,000 were foreigners. There
were about 5,000 Americans, 8,000 British, and
possibly 2,000 other
Europeans, most of them either French or German. There were also
some 15,000 or more Russians, chiefly emigres forced to leave home
by the rise of the Bolshevik regime. These fled to China through
Siberia by way of Harbin, in what was Manchuria. There were
 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 23

20,000 or so Japanese or other Asiatics, as well. The Japanese owned

most of the opulent cotton-textile mills in Shanghai.

It was in this setting and at a most exciting period in Shanghai's

modern history that the Marine Captain and I made our way around
the outlying defenses that Saturday night. We actually found nothing
extraordinary, although the French apparently had had word of the

advance and were more than usually alert. In fact, they had been
criticized somewhat by the other general officers of the foreign
Shanghai Defense Force, and at one time in the proceedings the Inter-
national Settlement contingent put up barbed-wire entanglements for
a mile or more down Avenue Edward VII, separating the French
Concession on the other side, which faced the Chinese "native city"
of Nantao.
But while the Defense Force officers may have known, certainly
few among the civilian population were aware that the Nationalists
from Canton were disregarding orders from the temporary Red-con-
government up the Yangtze River at Hankow, and were
trolled rebel

moving on Shanghai. It had originally been planned to proceed to

Peking overland, by the back door, leaving Shanghai to fall once
the revolutionhad captured the ancient Capital. But leaders in the
Nationalist including General Chiang Kai-shek, broke with
Army,
Hankow and Russian Advisorate, captured Shanghai and set up
its

the semi-conservative regime in 1927 at Nanking.

The Cantonese, or Nationalists as they insisted on being called
(because the movement was not purely Cantonese), had been dug in
about eighteen miles south of Shanghai for a month, waiting for word
to attack. Their presence at first startled the complacent Shanghai
populace, including the Americans, but when nothing happened week
after week, their jitters began to subside as much as they could in
that atmosphere of uncertainty and military display. The foreigners
proceeded with plans for their evacuation to the Bund and thence, if

necessary, to warships in the river.

The city was astir with intense excitement. Yet only a handful
knew the climax was due that week end.
The next day, March 20, was a clear, warm, spring Sabbath. I
had luncheon with J. B. Powell, publisher of a local weekly in English
and Chicago Tribune. He and I and
special correspondent for the
a guest drove outside the lines that Sunday afternoon, against the
24 THE DRAGON STIRS
orders of our Consular and Naval authorities and ran into advancing

Cantonese! We
had passed numerous cars on the drive, filled with
correspondents and photographers out for the news and the thrill. We
all got plenty of both. The retreating Northern troops were putting
up a half-hearted resistance to the Nationalist drive. We ran into
hundreds of them on the ten-mile drive through what, even then,
seemed a peaceful, pastoral scene
We left Shanghai, and motored rapidly past farmers going about
their little truck-farming chores as usual. The road toward Minghong,
a nearby village, was dotted with more and more Northern soldiers
in little groups or alone, straggling not from but toward the front

lines. Further along, some carried boxes swung clumsily on bamboo

poles. These we discovered were the ammunition bearers. They in-
creased in number as we proceeded, until there was a steady stream
of these coolie troops transporting bullets to their comrades in this

primitive fashion. The war, it was apparent, was much closer to

Shanghai than most people in the Settlement knew.

The defeated troops looked at us in surprise. Some seemed none
too cheerful, but we had no difficulties until we rounded a bend and
came into view of a tiny bridge, little more than a culvert, about a

quarter of a mile away. It was guarded by about a hundred men.

We decided to drive down to this bridge, inquire about things and then

return to Shanghai. As we drove up one of the soldiers, evidently

an officer, dashed toward us waving his arms and shouting. The chauf-

feur, visibly frightened, interpreted:

"Just now shooting/' he sputtered.

*4
He say no can go. Must
go back-side, plenty chop-chop!"
It was true. We were in the front lines. On either side of the

bridge men gray uniforms, stretched out as skirmishers, formed an

in

irregular line as far as we could see. They lay behind an embank-

ment by the canal or creek which the bridge spanned. From time to
time, apparently without orders, they took a pot-shot at the enemy.
Others glided around barns, the trees here and there, or raised Chin-
ese graves anywhere they could find shelter and kept up a scattering
fire at the enemy. The Cantonese line was gradually pushing across
the intervening lowlands. They were, I should say, about a quarter
of a mile away. Their faint rifle shots indicated they were carrying
on a similar hit-and-miss method of warfare As far as one could
 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 25

tell, there were no casualties on the Northern side, and certainly the

only hope these alleged defenders of Shanghai had of hitting the enemy
lay in chance.
But there was a chance that the enemy might shoot in our direction.

The chauffeur needed no orders to whisk that little machine around,

although he "killed" the motor twice in doing so on the narrow country
lane. We
streaked away from the front at a mile a minute, back to

safety within Shanghai's lines of men and steel and to the cable wires.
Shanghai fell the next day, on March 21, 1927, to the marching
men from Canton. All through a moonlit Sunday night the blue-gray
lines swept in waves across the soft meadows. Hardly a shot was
fired in actual defense of the port. The Northern troops, dispirited,
virtually leaderless, fled in rout, deserting the city. Some were trapped
along the railroad and at North Station, just outside the International
Settlement. A reign of terror began that Monday morning. Armed
laborers in black gowns scurried through the narrow streets in the
native areas, firing indiscriminately. Chinese citizens poured into the
foreign-protected areas by the thousands, a miserable stream of des-
titute families.

It was on morning that the 4th Regiment of the

this bright spring

United States Marines also "took" Shanghai. The men had been
quartered on board the transport Chaumont, tied up downstream for
two weeks awaiting word they were needed. There was some talk
even of sending them on to Manila if the "show" failed to break, or
if the Northern forces attacked, pushing the rebels back into the south.
The Marines were restless. They came ashore gladly, ready for a
fight or a frolic, but immensely glad to get their feet on Nanking Road,
marching to billets in the Western District where a few days later
they stood shoulder to shoulder with the famed Coldstream Guards
from London. Together they fought off a half-maddened Chinese
rabble seeking to pour through barbed wire entanglements into the
International Settlement.
With bands playing, the Marines had landed. Their "tin hats'*

and side-arms glistened in the sunshine. Foreigners, including hun-

dreds of local American residents, cheered. But the Chinese looked
on stolidly, hating this display of foreign force even though they knew
itmeant further protection for them. The 6th Regiment landed some
weeks later. For most of the spring and summer of 1927, the United
26 THE DRAGON STIRS
States had over 4,000 fighting menUncle Sam's part of
in Shanghai,

an allied foreign defense force that at one time totaled more than
25,000 men. This was exclusive of the naval forces. The Marines
got plenty of action the minute they stepped ashore. They took up
their posts in the front linesaround the western rim of the Inter-
national Settlement and stuck there for weeks, until the city calmed
down once more under the smug, victorious forces of the Cantonese-

inspired Kuomintang armies.

Shanghai fell practically without a struggle, except
for one or two
clashes which were sharp and bloody. One occurred when a corps of
White Russians (desperate emigres enlisted in the Northern Army to

keep from starving in a strange land) were trapped and tried to fight

their way out from behind the Cantonese lines. They manned an
armored on the Nanking Railway with
train its terminal at the Shang-
hai North Station, and finally surrendered.
The Northern Chinese soldiers, however, panic-stricken on that
Monday when the Cantonese attacked in force, threw down their guns.
They stormed the International Settlement, begging for protection.
One incident of this kind occurred about dusk at the North Honan
Road gates, between the native city and the Settlement. A sandbag
blockhouse there inside the tall iron gates was manned by a squad
of very young British troops. A youth hardly out of his 'teens was
in command. The Northern rabble stormed the gates, and in their
panic fired on the men whom they sought as protectors. They were
met with a return fire. The firstranks pressing against the iron bars
were shot down apparently without mercy. There was no help for it.

Snipers along Range Road, which crosses North Honan Road at

the Settlement limits, fired indiscriminately on both sides. I got to

this sector just after the clash between the British and Chinese, in
time to get in on the interpreted instructions to the Chinese to lay
down their guns if they would enter. It was almost dark. Together
with four or five other foreign correspondents, I had motored out
Szechuan Road from the heart of Shanghai. We left our car some
blocks behind. Clinging close to a ten-foot-high brick wall guarding
the front yards of most houses facing Range Road, we
crept along
toward the North Station blockhouse, three blocks away. I counted
three or four dead Chinese, one in Northern uniform, lying in their
own blood in the street. We scurried along under the protection of
 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 27

that friendly wall. We had to run for it in crossing the two inter-

secting streets, making it one man know, no

at a time. So far as I
one took a shot at us. Still, the fact that they might, sniping from
shuttered windows and from dark roofs, was a thought that did not
calm the nerves, none too good by that time, anyway.
The Chinese forces, cowed, finally laid down their rifles and began
to stream into the Settlement, before jubilant Southern forces could
catch up with them and make them prisoners. The victors actually
did seize thousands, but I watched about 2,000 badly battered men
shamble to comparative, if
temporary, safety through the gates and
barbed wire.
They were the most desolate, dispirited body of men I ever saw
in my life. Their uniforms were ragged and torn ; scores were wounded
and poorly bandaged. A few were fortunate enough to get rickshaws,
pulled by a comrade but in the main, wounded and well, they hobbled
;

along. Their grass sandals and flapping wrap-puttees were in tatters,

and disintegration seemed to possess the very souls of these men,

sorry looking members of another "lost battalion."

They were interned for several weeks but finally were repatriated
to Shantung Province, to the north, on foreign ships saved to fight
some other day by the same foreign devils that they themselves and
the Southern Nationalists were one in damning. All Chinese, regardless
of their incessant jumble of politico-military faiths, at least had that

bitter hatred against outside interference within their troubled Middle

Kingdom. On unity inside their ancient Great Wall, these yellow
men themselves were fatally divided. They still are.

Meanwhile, white men and women up-country, including scores of

Americans, were in very real danger of their lives from the victorious
Southern hordes who swept everything before them up to" the southern
bank of the Yangtze. They were urged to evacuate as rapidly as

possible. In fact, the United States consular authorities had been

missionaries and business men the
trying for months to impress upon
necessity of hurrying back to the less dangerous treaty ports. Many
did.

One correspondent, an Australian, was less fortunate. He was

killed up-country, near a small town called Chengchow, north of Han-
kow, in Honan Province. At least, he was engulfed while walking
down the railroad tracks to inspect a "model village" a mile away
28 THE DRAGON STIRS
from Chengchow. His host, the Belgian Consul-General stationed
up
the Yangtze at Hankow,
reported him missing when he hurried back
to the river port alone. A search was ordered by the "Christian
General/' Feng Yu-hsiang. Marshal Feng had just returned from
exile in Moscow.His headquarters were temporarily at Chengchow.
The correspondent, a war veteran from Europe's battlefields, had inter-
viewed the impenetrable Feng. It was not quite the sensible thing
to do and was undertaken against the advice of friends, official and
otherwise. But Feng's return to China was news. I nearly went
up from Hankow myself. Only the fact that I had just seen Feng
over at Hsuchow-fu, near Shantung, and heard from his own hps of

his desertion of the Russian Advisorate and his "deal" (it proved
transient) with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the revolutionary chief,
prevented such a possibly fatal excursion.
Feng's "search" was fruitless. The mystery of the disappearance
remains a secret. Some thought the man killed by soldiers or bandits.
Others blamed the prevalent anti-foreignism which propagandists of
the revolution spread throughout the length and breadth of China.
Even the simplest peasant was infected. School children sang anti-

foreign ballads. They shouted "Down with the Foreign Devils I" and
"Down with Imperialism!" along with the multitude. In any case,
the body was never found. Whether the man was kidnaped or whether
he died a sudden death, I cannot say.
The name of this martyr to journalism was Frank Riley, the son
ofa bishop in Australia. Riley said that he had escaped from a Ger-
man prison camp during the first World War. After that he had lived
in various countries,
including Mesopotamia. He was a delightful
companion, a chap about thirty-five years of age, tall, with black hair
and intelligent eyes. His dispatches went to The London Times. I

always suspected he had some sort of connection with the British

Foreign Office. I never knew. He was the sort of man who had
the "long view," instinctively. He saw peoples and problems in per-

spective, an essential to good reporting anywhere.

Scores of foreigners, however, took sides. In the main, these were
missionaries. They felt they knew the Chinese races thoroughly, and
insisted they were safe. Many maintained that if they wanted to re-
main, that was their business. And these refused to budge. A number
of them and a score or more of American business men, as well as the
 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 29

consular officials who stuck by their posts, were in Nanking when the
victorious troops got out of hand on Thursday of the week that Shang-
hai fell

I had an urgent call from Captain (now Rear- Admiral) Wallace

Vernou, chief-of-staff on the old flagship U. S. S. Pittsburgh, that
Thursday,
"All hell's busted loose at Nanking," the Captain said over the

ship-to-shore telephone. "We laid down a barrage to bring out Amer-

icans and other foreigners. The British have joined us. I think
there were no foreign casualties. I'll let you know more when we
hear from our men on the Noa"
The U. S. S. Noa was a destroyer on the Yangtze Patrol Lieut.
Commander Roy C. Smith was in command. The British destroyer
H. M. S. Emerald joined the Noa in saving more than fifty foreign
men, women and children and seeing that they got safely downstream
to Shanghai.
The "Nanking Incident" occurred on March 24. The Southern
forces were out of control. They looted the city. Drunk with victory,
the men killed and raped foreigners as well as Chinese in the then
new capital. The United States and British destroyers lying off Nan-

king in the Yangtze River opened fire when called on by the refugees
ashore, in imminent danger of their lives. The Noa fired first, although
the British skipper was the superior naval officer present. Commander
Smith had asked the English captain for his approval. He got it.
Both vessels laid down a heavy barrage around "Socony Hill," the
Standard Oil Company of New York's headquarters in Nanking, con-
centration point 'for the refugees. It saved the lives of all present.

Smith had sent a landing party ashore, commanded by the late

Ensign Woodward
Phelps. (Phelps subsequently shot himself in New
Phelps, an officer born to the tradition of the sea, led his
York.)
squad to "Socony Hill." He and his men rescued members of the
United States Consulate-General staff, as well as some refugees who
had The hordes swept on toward the hill. Phelps
gathered there.
ordered a signalman to stand on the roof. Under fire, the American
sailor signaled the ship. Back on the Noa, Commander Smith watched

for the signal. He

disregarded formal naval regulations. Calling to
his the late Lieut. Ben Staude (who afterwards com-
gunnery officer,
mitted suicide in Southampton, England), he shouted:
30 THE DRAGON STIRS
"I don't know whether we'll get a court-martial or a decoration
for this but let 'er go, Benny!"
Benny obeyed. Not a living soul could have penetrated the thun-
derous barrage which the Noa and Emerald laiddown. The foreigners,

knotting sheets together, scrambled down the ancient sixty-foot wall

which surrounds Nanking. They scuttled across the lowlands bordering

the river and were quickly taken off in small boats to the destroyers.

The Noa brought several refugees down the river. Most of the
others came on friendly Chinese river steamers. Commander Smith
got no court-martial!
Inside the International Settlement and French Concession the gay
routine went on and on. The inhabitants were disturbed little, if at

all, by the war going on all around them. The old five-barred flag of
the original Chinese Republic was replaced by the scarlet Kuomintang
emblem of the Nationalists a red flag, with a white star in the blue
field in the upper left hand corner. It fluttered everywhere in the
breeze, a flapping emblem of the "new deal" in China.
American sailors and United States Marines long were a familiar
sight on the streets there. We kept a permanent "China Patrol" of
warships on duty along the coast, and up the Yangtze for more than
a thousand miles. The 4th Regiment, U. S. Marine Corps, remains
stationed in Shanghai. Until the country is less chaotic these forces
will stay to protect our interests there. The men frequent the same
dance halls and other amusement spots in the beguiling "Paris of the
East," which members of the other services patronize.

Occasionally from a corner, when men of the Noa and Emerald

got together you would hear this ditty a paraphrase by the late Lieut.
Staude of an old Marine ballad, The Halls of Montesuma, commem-
"
orating the Nanking Incident." It goes :

From the dance halls of old Shanghai

To the walls of old Nanking,
We have met all kinds oj women,
And we've fought all kinds of men.
Chorus
// the Noa and the Emerald
Ever join in fight again,
Ifll be good-bye to Chiang Kai-shek
And to Hell with Eugene Chen!
 WHEN SHANGHAI FELL 31

Eugene Chen was foreign minister in the now defunct Red-con-

regime at Hankow, in Central China, some six hundred miles
trolled

up the Yangtze River.

The foreigners, within ten days after the city's fall, returned to
their normal routine of club life, roulette, night clubs, golf, tennis,

dogs and horse racing. Shanghai under the Kuomintang revolu-

tionists and foreign allied
"Army of Occupation" appeared to have
changed but little from Shanghai under the North China war lords
and the British.
 THE "NANKING INCIDENT"

"Nanking Incident/* as it became known around the startled,

THE uncomprehending world, happened on Thursday of the week
which began with Shanghai's fall. The marching men from Can-
ton seized Shanghai on Monday and took Nanking, 175 miles inland
on the Yangtze, on Thursday. The fall of Shanghai was a peaceful
event compared to the horrors which accompanied the seizure of power
in the pleasant city of Nanking. The Kuomintang troops, sweeping
ever northward toward Peking, their goal, got out of hand completely
Their officers could do nothing with their wild-eyed men from South
China.
Men in uniforms, rifles in hand, pillaged the town. They looted
and sacked that town as a
city has rarely been looted, even in China.
The worst part of that "incident" was that there were two score or
more foreigners residing there who refused all advice to clear out.
These "old China-hands" thought they "knew the Chinese." They
believed they could trust them, soldiers or no soldiers. They found
out they were wrong those who lived.
What these men and sturdy women did not know was that any
man with a gun, riding the high crest of victory, is not responsible
for his actions. He may do anything, and usually does. That is an
axiom of war.
The victorious soldiers roamed through the city, destroying, pil-
laging, raping the women, killing the men. Many horrible events
occurred, but few were so cold-blooded as the wanton murder of Dr.

J. E. Williams, a missionary. He had lived for years among the Chin-

ese and could talk to them in their language. He also thought that
remaining in Nanking was safe. Many others, too, preferred to re-
main and "save face" with their trusted Chinese friends. But many
who saved face lost their lives. Dr. Williams, a kindly, elderly
man of God, was one. He was the head of Nanking University. To go
along with the trend of the times, he had agreed to make a Chinese
32
 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 33

nominally the President of the University He became Vice-Presi-

dent, but still governed that missionary institution

The change was due to the wave of anti-f oreignism and nationalism
which swept over Asia. Dr. Williams lost his life when a youth in
uniform, bent on robbery, loot and rape, shot the missionary dead.
The gunman doubtless had not the faintest inkling of Dr. William's

identity or the good he was doing countless Chinese in the Nanking

area. It did not matter to the youth. He killed him, leisurely robbed
the corpse and went on his carefree way rejoicing in his share of the
spoils of war. These included the dead man's watch. It is doubtful

whether the gay young man with the gun could read the timepiece
but time meant nothing to him then. The ticking may have amused
his infantile mind, or the glint of the gold may have attracted his eye.

The "Nanking Incident" is a black spot on the escutcheon of the

Kuomintang Revolution. The Chinese admit that. For one thing,

foreigners were involved. That meant "international complications."
The Chinese revolutionaries were not ready for such complications
They had a war of their own on their hands. Also, themen then at
Hankow preferred avoiding Shanghai and Nanking, down near the
coast, until Peking was taken. They wanted to go on up the Kin-han
Railway to the ancient Capital. They feared such "incidents/' involving
not only the usually easy going United States Government, but tougher
customers to deal with when protection of their nationals is concerned,
such as Great Britain.

But men within the Kuomintang disliked the growing influence of

Moscow and Communism. This group included Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek, the new Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary Annies.
They therefore took Shanghai and Nanking in a sudden swift bit of

strategy, and split definitely with the radical bloc in control of the

"government" set up at Hankow, in the center of China. And the

Nanking bloc eventually won

General Chiang organized the Na-
out.

tional Government at Nanking in April 1927, less than a month after

the "Nanking Incident." He controls Chungking today as President

of the Executive Yuan, or Council His Man Friday, Lin Sen, has
the nominal title of President of the Chinese Republic. But Chiang
Kai-shek rules "Free China" with dictatorial powers. The only vestige
of the Communist influence in China is the Committee form of govern-
34 THE DRAGON STIRS
ment, and sporadic outbreaks of Communist bands in the interior
South-Central sections.
The official report on the "Nanking Incident" was made that ex-

citing week by the United States Consul there, Mr. John K. Davis.
His data was made available to me and I believe has never before
been printed generally, in full. Consul Davis, a man then in his forties,
whose wife went through the "Incident/' wrote his report under dif-
ficulty. He remarked as he ended it on board a United States war-
ship of our Yangtze River Patrol, that "the task of drafting
it
by
longhand when without my glasses, of which I was robbed by Na-
tionalist soldiers, and by artificial light, has been painfully laborious
and slow."
Nevertheless, the work is an interesting, precise resume of what

happened that week Nanking, especially insofar as the events af-

at

fected the foreigners there. Mr. Davis called his report Anti-Foreign :

Outrages at Nanking on March 24, 1927. No one in the foreign com-

munity was concerned very deeply about what happened to the Chi-
nese, but it may be assumed these "occurrences" were at least as grue-
some. The Consul's report treats without mincing words of what
happened to American women who refused to heed advice and get
out while the getting was good.

Mr. Davis was forced to flee from the United States Consulate In

Nanking with and two small children the morning of March

his wife

24, finding refuge in the Standard Oil Company's house on Socony

Hill. Here he, together with E. T. Hobart, a Standard Oil executive,
and members of the Consular staff, kept the Chinese off for hours
before forced to order the signal for relief from destroyers in the
river. Mr. Davis' report, therefore, is based on his own eyewitness
experiences in addition to conversations with others who went through
the affair.

He described how the United States Consulate was looted, and

brought out vividly the manner in which the American flag was inten-
tionally desecrated by Chinese soldiers. He said, in a paragraph on
the flag incident:

"The flag was first hauled down and then raised upside down,
evidently as an insult; it was then hauled down, torn and the
halyard cut and taken away."
 "
THE NANKING INCIDENT" 35

This and the looting, Mr. Davis added, were done "by Nationalist
troops in uniform." It was this point that men in the Hankow "gov-
ernment" desired to argue, contending that an International Com-
mission to inquire into the Nanking affair was the only "civilized"

way togo about establishing whether or not Nationalist soldiers were

guilty; and, secondly, if so, whether the Hankow government could
be held responsible. To this "Note," written by Eugene Chen Han-
kow's Minister for Foreign Affairs and note-writer par excellence
none of the Powers involved publicly replied.
Consul Davis' official report on the "Nanking Incident," prepared

at Nanking while he was temporarily a refugee on board the U. S. S.

Isabel, I reproduce here in full.

THE ANTI-FOREIGN OUTRAGES AT NANKING

ON MARCH TWENTY-FOURTH, 1927
From John K. Davis, Consul.
Nanking, China.
Date of preparation: April 2, 1927.
Date of mailing: April 3, 1927.
File No. 800/300.
The outrages against foreign lives and property perpetrated by
soldiers of the Nationalist army on March 24 affected so many
American citizens located in widely separated parts of the city

and involved so much property, that it is impossible even now

to give a comprehensive picture of American injuries and losses.
In this report, however, an effort will be made to give a general
picture and to supply such pertinent information as is supported
by my own personal observation, sworn affidavits by American
citizens and by statements of thoroughly reliable Chinese members
of the Nanking Consular staff.

L INJURIES AND LOSSES SUFFERED BY AMERICANS:

a. To Persons:

The most serious single incident that occurred was the cold-
blooded murder of Dr. J. E. Williams, Vice-President of Nan-

king University, by a uniformed Nationalist soldier at 8 a.m. on

the twenty-fourth. From the sworn statements of Dr. Bowen,
Mr. Speers and Mr, Lowdermilk, enclosures Nos. 1, 2 and 3
36 THE DRAGON STIRS
to this report, it will be seen that no provocation whatsoever was
given by the victim and that the murder was entirely wanton.
Further, after killing Dr. Williams, the soldier callously robbed
his body.

As be seen by the affidavit of Miss Minnie Vautrin and

will

five other members of the Ginling College for Women, enclosure

No. 11, a comparatively short time after the murder of Dr.

Williams, the Nationalist soldiers looting the Ginling College
recognized and obeyed a Nationalist officer, thus conclusively

proving that they were not "agents" Chihli-Shantung of the

army. Since the Ginling College is the first foreign compound

west of the University of Nanking where Dr. Williams was
murdered and is less than half a mile from it, with no other
houses intervening, it is evident that the murderer was one of

a large group, the members of which were clearly proven to be

Nationalist soldiers.
Next in seriousness after the murder of Dr. Williams was the

shooting and wounding by a uniformed Nationalist soldier of

Miss Anna E. Moffett, Secretary of the American Northern
Presbyterian Mission. From the affidavit of Miss Miriam E.
Hull, enclosure No. 4, it will be seen that this crime was entirely

unprovoked, deliberate and peculiarly brutal The sworn state-

ment of William Jamieson, enclosure No. 5, also gives a general
idea of the attitude of the soldiers at this time, whose main ob-
ject was the stealing of property, and who were uniformly brutal
in the means employed to force their victims to disclose the
whereabouts of their valuables.
There occurred two known cases of attempted violation of
American women by uniformed Nationalist soldiers, and it is

believed that other similar cases occurred of which I have not

yet been informed. For obvious reasons of modesty, the two

victims do not wish their names given and were
unwilling to
make written sworn statements. However, both women are
known to me and are thoroughly and not given to hys-
truthful
teria or exaggeration. In one case the woman was held by one
or more soldiers while the would-be rapist pulled up her clothing
and was only stopped by the fortunate rushing in of a civilian
rable bent on loot in the wake of the soldiers.
 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 37

Brutality was so invariably the rule that to include all known

cases would require a far longer report that it is possible now
to prepare under my present limitations of staff and office equip-
ment.
From my personal observation I can vouch for the rough
handling and robbing of Mr. E. T. Hobart, Vice-Consul Paxton
and myself at the residence of Mr. Hobart. were repeatedlyWe
menaced with loaded pistols and rifles and by bayonets. One
soldier started to shoot Mr. Hobart in order that he
might get
and only desisted when I promised
off a tightly fitting finger ring,
that it would be promptly taken off, and pointed out that they
would get more money if we were not killed.
Women were treated with as much brutality as men and the
absence of a larger number of reported instances of extreme
brutality to them \vas due (1) to the fact that the greater part
of the American women and children had heeded advice and my
already been evacuated; and (2) because of those who were in
the city, many were either assembled in the places of greatest

safety or were hidden away singly or in small groups in the

houses of friendly Chinese.
Mrs. Bates, whose husband's statement appears as enclosure
No. 6, was very roughly handled and partly stripped by Na-
tionalist soldiers. Mrs. Brenton, an American lady of 60 or
more who lay seriously ill in a chair, had her bedding torn off
her and was searched and robbed; and a young American nurse
was made to show her garters (see affidavit of Mr. Alspech,
enclosure No. 7). One young American woman, who from
feelings of modesty refused to make a sworn statement in writ-
ing, had her sanitary napkin torn off her by a Nationalist sol-
dier. Mrs. Mills (enclosure No. 6) reports the threatening of
an old lady because she could not get off her wedding ring
quickly enough.
In Mr. L. J. Owen's affidavit (enclosure No. 10), he states
that his wife, whom I know
be pregnant, had a bayonet pressed
to

to her abdomen and her dress ripped and her underclothing

searched. Their two little girls were also roughly handled.
Miss Van Vliet (see enclosure No. 1) was robbed, parti-
38 THEDRAGONSTIRS
ally and then searched, the soldiers feeling her garter
stripped
clasp and intending to remove it until
convinced of its lack of
intrinsic value. Even children of tender age were not exempt.
Mr. Lowdermilk (enclosure No. 3) states they were searched,
while Mr. Speers (enclosure No. 2) tells of the deliberate firing

at a child of seven.
The greatest brutality was shown the majority of the Amer-
ican men. They were beaten, repeatedly threatened with loaded
fire arms, shot at and many had their outer clothing stripped

off their backs. Dr. Jones in his statement (enclosure No. 9)

described how Mr. A. A. Taylor (British) was dragged along
with a rope around his neck and was shot at, and many other
instances will be found described in the enclosed sworn state-

ments.

b. Robbing and Destruction of American Property:

Only second in importance to the taking of American life

and lesser American persons were the wholesale

violence to

robbery and destruction of American property.

Practically all Americans in the city were robbed of all their

belongings on their persons and in their homes, and usually with

great violence and brutality. Details of the circumstances will be
found in the enclosed sworn statements. Even stairways, win-
dow frames, doors and in short everything which could be torn
out, were taken away. Not content with this destruction, three
institutional buildings, the Hillcrest School for American chil-
dren, Nanking Theological Seminary and one building of
the
the Friends* (Quaker) Mission Hospital were burned. Approxi-

mately ten American residences suffered a similar fate.

Some American Com-
business offices and the Standard Oil

pany's installations in Pukow and the riverine suburb of Hsia-

kwan are believed up to now to be intact, an immunity growing
out of their location and the fact that the naval barrage stopped
the worst violence before the Nationalist soldiers had
got down
to the river.

c. Attack Upon American Consulate:

The most outrageous destruction of American property from

 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 39
an international standpoint, however, was the attack upon and
the thorough looting of the American Consulate shortly before
noon on March 24 by Nationalist soldiers. Entry was gained
through the rear entrance upon which in large Chinese char-
acters was a sign "American Consulate," so that the attack could
not have been through "misunderstanding/* Moreover, the flag
on the flag staff was fully visible from all around.
The soldiers came and
in holding their rifles ready to shoot

calling out "kill the foreigners,""show us where the foreigners

are so that we may kill them" and similar threats. Upon being
told by the Chinese staff and the servants that this was the
American Consulate and that Americans were friendly to the
Chinese, the soldiers replied that all foreigners were alike and
were to be killed.
When satisfied that no Americans were there, the soldiers

proceeded to steal everything in the office and residence and to

break up what they could not carry away. They paid special
attention to the safes and metal filing cabinets and endeavored

by threats and force to compel the Chinese employes to open

the former. Using various implements, they then attacked the
safes and managed to make a good sized hole in the back of one.

Fortunately, the compartment reached only contained stationery,

upon the discovery of which they decided that this safe was not
worth further effort.
The soldiers even took off metal beds, metal file cabinets and
When they had all they wanted,
similar large pieces of furniture.
and common people were urged by them to come in
the loafers
and take what was left As a result, the Chinese staff report
that the building is looted clean with the exception of the safes,
two stoves, scattered books and papers and some desks, the
latter, however, being seriously damaged.
The flag was first hauled down and then raised upside down,

evidently as an insult; it was then hauled down, torn and the

halyard cut and taken away.
Thus, the American Consulate was robbed of virtually all
its furniture and equipment and the American Consul stripped
40 THEDRAGONSTIRS
of all his household furnishings, clothing and personal property
all by the Nationalist troops in uniform.

No effort was made to stop this orgy until subsequent to the

naval barrage, and after all the damage had been done.
2, INJURIES TO OTHER NATIONALS-
In a manner similar to that used against Americans, all other

foreigners, including Japanese,

were assaulted and robbed, but
it is
significant that while some 13 American buildings
were burned,
no buildings owned by other nationals were so treated.
The Japanese Consulate was the first government center
attacked. The large number of Japanese assembled there were
robbed and brutally mistreated. According to the statement of
the Japanese naval officer then in charge here, shots were de-

liberately and several

times fired at the Japanese Consul who
was ill in bed. Three Japanese members of the consular staff

were attacked and wounded by Nationalist soldiers, while the

consular offices and residences were thoroughly robbed and
looted. Japanese hotels, hospitals, places of business and resi-

dences all suffered similar fates. One Japanese sailor was also
shot and killed.
A French Catholic father was murdered. The commander
of the Alerte stated that a Nationalist officer followed by his
men entered the school where the priest was and, without any

warning whatsoever, himself shot him.

An was also shot and killed by Na-
Italian Catholic priest

tionalist soldiersand without provocation.

Nationalist soldiers are reported to have poured kerosene on

parts of the Catholic church, but were prevented from actually

setting fire to it by Chinese neighbors who feared for the safety
of their own property.
The life, having two men
British suffered the heaviest loss of

killed, Dr. L. S. Smith, a much respected and honored local

practitioner, and Mr. Huber, the Harbormaster of the Chinese
Maritime Customs. Both were murdered at the British Con-
sulate Generalwhere they had been taking refuge. Mr. Bertram
Giles and Captain Spear were also shot and wounded at the
Consulate General. Both the murders and wounding were done
 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 41

by Nationalist soldiers who knew where they were and, in Mr.

Giles* case, who their victim was.

The British Consulate General was thoroughly looted by suc-

cessive waves of Nationalist soldiers and the two wounded men

accompanied by Mrs. Giles and a Miss Blake were for 31 hours

in the back room of the gate house. Although the outrages at
the Consulate General, including the wounding of Mr. Giles,
were matters of common knowledge throughout the city, nothing
whatsoever was done towards affording adequate protection and
relief until the afternoon of March 25.

British citizens wherever found were robbed and abused in

the same manner as Americans, and their residences, places of

business and the hulks, alongside of which ships load and dis-

charge, were
all
thoroughly looted. Although none of their
buildings were burned, in many cases the door and window
frames were torn out, and in one case, even the floors were dug

up.

3. CHINESE OFFICERS AND TROOPS RESPONSIBLE:

General Cheng Chien, Commander-in-Chief of the 6th Na-
tionalist Army and Director of the Right (South) Bank of the

River, is the high Commanding Officer whose troops are re-

sponsible for the outrages. It will probably be useless to en-

deavor to fix the responsibility upon any particular division, as
at least parts of both the 2nd and 6th Nationalist Armies were
in the city at the time of the incidents. The Red Swastika
Society's officers informed us, however, that the Commander of
the 4th Division (2nd Nationalist Army) was actually in the
city on the 24th; it has also been subsequently learned that
General Hu Yao-tau, Commander of the 2nd "Independent"
Division, was also then in the city.

My Chinese staff inform me that the troops which attacked

and looted the American Consulate belonged to the 2nd Inde-
pendent Division. However, this fact should not be mentioned
as it might result in the persecution of our very loyal employes
who have already suffered both loss and hardship because of
their connection with our office.
42 THE DRAGON STIRS
4 PROOFS OF ORGANIZATION AND PREMEDITATION:
As will be noted from an examination of the certified copies
of sworn affidavits of some 30 Americanwhich are ap-
citizens

a number of the
pended to this report as enclosures or exhibits,
more level headed of the Americans have stated it as their firm
belief that the outrages of March 24 were not only committed
with the knowledge and consent of the higher Nationalist officers,
but were part of a premeditated and carefully arranged plan to
drive Americans and other foreigners out of China. From their
written and verbal statements, as well as from the series of

events that came under my personal observation and the state-

ments made to me by uniformed Nationalist soldiers and petty

officers, I am
fully convinced both (1) of the guilty knowledge

of, and the consent to, the outrages on the part of the higher
officers, including General Cheng Chien, and (2) that the Nan-
king Incident was carefully planned in advance by at least a
part of the controlling leaders of the so-called Nationalist move-
ment. This is a serious statement, but I believe that after care-

fully examining the enclosed affidavits and noting the following

points, the Department and Legation will fully concur in my

conclusions :

a. Time Within Which Outrages Occurred:

It has been claimed in a public statement by Mr. Eugene
Chen that the Nanking incidents were the work of disguised
agents of the Chihli-Shantung Army and were planned with a
view to bring discredit upon the Nationalist government. There are
many proofs that this was not and could not have been the case.
The single item of the time within which the outrages occurred
almost simultaneously and throughout the city, is sufficient
alone to prove that they could not have occurred without the

knowledge and consent of the higher Nationalist commanders.

Commencing at about 8 in the morning, they continued with
ever increasing violence until after the naval barrage which
began
at 3:25 in the afternoon. Not only so, but the three consulates
are all located on the principal street of the city, and whatever
took place there must have been promptly and known to
fully
the higher officers.
 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 43

Further, although General Cheng Chien, Commander of the

6th Army, issued an order for the protection of foreign lives
and property, according to his own written statement, after hear-

ing the naval barrage, this was not enforced. For while the
barrage stopped violence to persons, foreign buildings were looted
on the 25th and 26th, according to the statements of servants
who would have no reason to lie in this regard. Moreover,
petty looting at the British Consulate General by soldiers con-
tinued on the 28th and the residences of the British employes
of the Tientsin-Pukow Railway at Puchen, three miles above
Pukow, were reported as looted on the first of April. Had it

been true that the outrages were the work of Northern soldiers,
they could not possibly have been continued under the noses of
the Nationalists for so long.
In the affidavit of Miss Minne Vautrin (enclosure No. 11),
she states that at about 10 in the morning of March 24 an officer,
the brother of a Ginling College student, came to the college
and rendered assistance in protecting the American teachers.
As must have seen and heard of many of the
at that time he

outrages against Americans, including the murder of Dr. Wil-

liams, and certainly would have reported them; the uninter-

rupted continuance of the worst incidents for $y2 hours there-

after could not have occurred without the full knowledge and
consent of the higher officers.

b. Similarity of Incidents Throughout City:

The anti-foreign outrages which were perpetrated in a large
number of separate premises located, in some instances, as much
as five miles apart were all characterized by so striking a simi-

larity as to indicate that they were carried out in the execution

of a prearranged In practically each case the soldiers en-

plan.
tered the foreign premises threatening the occupants with rifles
or pistols and calling for the foreigners whom they stated they
would kill. When foreigners were found, they were first robbed
and then forced at the point of loaded fire arms to disclose the

whereabouts of concealed valuables. After all these had been

given up, the soldiers proceeded to kill or otherwise mistreat

44 THE DRAGON STIRS
their victims, in many cases stripping them of their outer

clothing.

was noted by Mr. Hobart and myself and also reported by

It

missionaries who at the time were many miles from us, that the
soldiers bore every evidence of having been worked up by care-

ful propaganda perform deeds which they naturally feared to

to

commit. It was noted that when one soldier gave evidence of

being somewhat restrained by our attitude and arguments, one

of his fellows would remind him that he belonged to the "revo-

lutionary army" which did not fear foreigners and purposely

killed them all.
In the majority of cases, and notably at the American and

Japanese Consulates, after the soldiers had taken what they could
carry, they forced the local people at the point of the gun to

come in and loot also This was palpably done in order to create
*
an alibi in advance that the "ignorant and stupid' people might
later be blamed.

The looters proceeded in groups of 4, 6 or more, which moved

on when directed by one of their number, evidently a petty
to do so.
officer, This plan was noticed both at the Standard
Oil residence and at the American missions many miles away.
See the affidavit of Dr. Bowen (enclosure No. 1).

c. Lesser Officers Were Often With Looters And Could

Control Them When They Desired:

Had the looters been Northern agents, they would not have
been accompanied in some cases by Nationalist officers, nor
would they have been recognized as Nationalist soldiers by, or
have obeyed the orders of, such officers. Yet in the sworn
statements of Miss Minnie Vautrin and other Ginling College

faculty members (enclosure No. 11) it is distinctly shown that

not only was a Nationalist officer on the scene of looting, but
that he was able, when he chose, to exercise control over the

soldiers. As this action took place at about 10 in the

morning,
it
clearly proves that the Nationalist commanding officers must
have known at approximately 10-30 just what outrages were
being perpetrated by their men. Their failure to take any re-
 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 45

straining action until after the naval barrage, which did not occur
until five hours later, is a clear indication of their guilty knowl-

edge of and acquiescence in the outrages. In view of the control

exercised over the Nationalist soldiers elsewhere, the permitting
of the anti-foreign orgy at Nanking also indicates premeditation.
It is inconceivable that the higher commanding officers were un-
able to control their men for practically eight hours and then,
upon the barrage from the American and British naval vessels,
suddenly became able to exercise such control. The unavoidable
conclusion is that control was exercised according to the desires
of the higher commanding officers, and that since at approxi-
mately 4 p. m. the troops were suddenly and promptly called
together, they had for the preceding eight hours been functioning
under orders
The fact that the looting by their soldiers was seen by and
acquiesced in by various Nationalist officers is clearly brought
out in the sworn statement of Dr. A. J. Bowen, President of the

Nanking University (enclosure No. 1) and by several other

statements in the enclosed affidavits.

d. Looting Soldiers Directed by Whistles And Assembled by

Bugle Calls:
Reverend Walter R. Williams (enclosure No. 12) states that
the successive bands of looting soldiers were moved on by shrill
whistles evidently blown by leaders. As Mr. Williams was at
that time in hiding and not then being molested, he was in a
peculiarly advantageous position carefully to note what took place,
an ability not enjoyed by those whose observations were made
while actually undergoing violence at the hands of Nationalist
soldiers. For this reason, and because he is a peculiarly con-
servative and truthful individual, his statement in this regard
should be given special weight.

According to the statements of Reverend Walter R. Williams,

Mr. James M. Speers, Dr. Harry F. Rowe, and Dr. Donald W.
Richardson (enclosures Nos. 12, 2, 13, and 14, respectively),
immediately after the naval barrage bugles sounded the soldiers
were evidently assembled or called off under orders. As no
46 THEDRAGONSTIRS
bugles had been previously noted, it appears that the commanding
officers did nothing to call off their men until frightened by the
naval gun fire, but were able at will almost instantly to bring
their men under general control.

e. Looting Well Organised and in Some Cases Directed by

Civilians Who Know Nanking:
From my own observation on the Standard Oil hill and from
the sworn statements made by missionaries, notably by Dr.
Bowen, Mr. Owen and Mrs. C. H. Flopper (enclosures Nos.
1, 10, and 15), it was clear that the looting
was not haphazard
but was carried out in a generally organized manner. The small

groups seemingly had known objectives and all followed 'the same
procedure of robbing, securing of concealed valuables by intimi-
dation and violence to Americans.

According to statements of Messrs. Speers, Jones, Smith and

Mrs. Mills (enclosures Nos. 2, 9, 16 and 8, respectively), looting

groups of Nationalist soldiers were led, in several cases, by Chi-

nese civilians who, being familiar with Nanking, guided the
looters to known objectives. This point is of great importance

as it indicates that the outrages were planned in advance and that

Nationalist civilians were utilized in directing and guiding the

soldiers in their campaign of outrage and terrorization.

f. All Civilian Looting Ordered or Led by Nationalist Sol-

diers :

As it all looting was done by Northern

has been asserted that
soldiers or by the local people, it should be carefully noted that
from enclosures Nos. 17, 2, 4, 18, 13, 19, 20, 15, 7, and 26, it is
distinctly established by sworn statements by thoroughly reliable
American citizens that although considerable looting was done
by local people, was only committed when ordered or led by
it

the soldiers. In other words, although some civilian looting did

occur, it was never initiated by the people who merely followed
the soldiers' lead.
At the American Consulate when the police endeavored to

stop some from taking out bundles of articles which

late looters

they had picked up, they (the police) were covered by the guns
 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 47
of passing soldiers who said that the people should be allowed
to loot foreign property at will At this time the proclamation
ordering the protection of foreign lives and property had already
been posted at the consular entrance gate.

g. Exemption of Chinese Houses Indicates Motiue Injury to

Foreigners and Not Mere Loot:

From several of the enclosed statements it will be seen that
Chinese houses were exempt from looting. In the affidavit of
Mr. Holroyd (enclosure No. 22) it is pointed out that the resi-
dence of Mr. Ip, a Cantonese member of the University of Nan-
king, escaped looting although located in the midst of a group
of American residences. Had mere looting been the object of
the troops, or had they been actually out of control, this building
would also have been robbed. Thus the prime actuating motive
of the outrages is seen to be injury to foreigners and not loot
alone.

h. Evidences of Planning :

From the statements of Reverend W. R. Williams (enclosure

No. 12) and of Reverend W. P. Roberts (enclosure No. 23)
it appears that certain steps were definitely planned in advance.
Mr. Williams heard soldiers stating that foreigners were to
be stripped to their underwear and that to kill a foreigner would
be to gain prestige. As this was exactly the procedure followed
in several cases in different parts of the city, it is evident that
this was a prearranged plan, the eventual execution of which
was only frustrated by the unanticipated naval barrage.
Mr. Roberts was told by a Nationalist officer that the anti-

British hatred was caused by the finding of a dead Englishman

among the dead "white" Russian soldiers and that this discovery
had so inflamed the minds of the Nationalist soldiers that they

had determined to kill all Russians and Englishmen whom they

found. Mr. Roberts believes that this is evidence of propa-

ganda purposely used to stir up the soldiers that they would not
hesitate to kill. It appears probable that this conclusion was
fully warranted.
48 THE DRAGON STIRS
i.
Refusal oj Responsible Officers to See Foreign Consuls:

Efforts to get into touch with the higher Nationalist officers

were made by me throughout the entire day of March 24th,
through the police officials, by giving my card to soldiers and

through the self-styled Political Bureau in the Hsiakwan surburb.

Similar efforts were made by other foreign officials. While it is
understandable that some messages miscarried it is impossible
that all did so, and it is only too plain that the higher officers

did not desire or intend to be seen by foreign officials. Their

motive for this refusal is obvious ;
were they to see such officials

and be officially informed of the outrages, they could not disclaim

knowledge or responsibility.
Even in the evening when General Cheng Chien sent word
through the Red Swastika Society asking that the barrage not
be repeated, he refused to send any responsible high officer to

discuss the situation with Rear Admiral H. H. Hough, Captain

England of the Emerald and myself. This refusal was continued
on the 25th, when an impudent and evasive reply was received
from him.

j. Neglect to Take Advance Precautions:

Had the Nationalists desired to protect foreign lives and prop-

erty, as was claimed by General Chiang Chieh-shih (Chiang Kai-

shek) in his statement to press representatives in Shanghai, ad-
vance steps would have been taken in view of the known pres-
ence in Nanking of three foreign consulates and a large foreign

population. The fact that no such steps were taken, clearly proves
that the Central Committee had no desire for the protection of

foreigners, but on the contrary, and for its own purposes, desired
that anti-foreign outrages should occur. It is believed, however,
that personally General Chiang Chieh-shih probably had no ad-
vance knowledge of this plan and perhaps regrets the occur-
rence. However, General Chiang does not control the Nationalist
government and his own personal seemingly more reasonable
attitude cannot be considered as representing that of the con-

trolling element in his party.

 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 49
k. Troops Committing Outrages Were Southern Chinese :

The troops which committed the outrages were from their

speech unquestionably Southerners. The large number with whom
I was forced to parley for over two hours at Mr. Hobart's resi-
dence and the several with whom I spoke before leaving the
American Consulate were either Hunanese or from Kiangsi and
few were evidently from Kwangtung, as they could not speak
Mandarin. They wore straw sandals and many had the typical

Cantonese, large round bamboo hats strapped to their backs.

5. EFFECT OF THE BARRAGE:

The naval barrage which was put down by the U. S. S. Noa,
the U. S. S. Preston and H. M. S. Emerald in order to save
the 52 foreigners beseiged in the Standard Oil house, unquestion-

ably saved the lives not only of this party, but of a smaller 'group
at the British Consulate General, of the large group of Japanese
at the Japanese Consulate and of some 120 Americans mainly as-
sembled at the University of Nanking. It was directed at the
open hill country immediately around the Standard Oil residences
and while a few shells went beyond, the damage done to Chinese
life, other than to the attackers of the residences in question, was
infinitesimal the damage to Chinese property was also negligible.
;

Not only the country around the Standard Oil hill open and
is

with only occasional groups of farm houses, but the same state-
ment is true of the country beyond and in line with the fire. The
City of Nanking was not bombarded and all of the statements to
the contrary by Mr. Eugene Chen are palpably mendacious and
intended to deceive the Western world.

The statements of Americans in their sworn affidavits as to

the beneficial effect of the naval barrage are too numerous to be

quoted here but should be carefully noted. In general these

statements agree that the naval gun fire saved the lives of all
foreigners then within the city walls; that it instantly stopped
the firing off of rifles and pistols by looting Nationalist soldiers;
that it possible the evacuation of foreigners on March 25th;
made
that caused the blowing of bugles to call off the looters; that
it

the worst violence and looting was instantly stopped by it; that
50 THEDRAGONSTIRS
civilian looters were awed and restrained; and, in brief, that it

produced all of the results desired both effectively and promptly.

6. CONCLUSION.
Fromthe facts as brought out above, and from the abundant
material contained in the enclosed affidavits, it is shown that on
March 24th there occurred a deliberate and evidently prearranged

campaign and outrage against all for-

of unparalleled violence

eigners in Nanking by portions of the 2nd and 6th Nationalist

armies. Besides doing nothing to restrain his troops until forced
to do so by the naval barrage, the Nationalist commanding officer

officer to discuss
consistently refused to send any high ranking
the incidents and arrange for the relief of the foreigners left in
the city, whose actual evacuation as described in my despatch
of March 28th, was only made possible by a strong threat to
bombard the city. Further, after the outrage he has shown no
contritionand has done nothing whatsoever towards making
amends or punishing those guilty on the contrary, he has main-
;

tained an attitude of truculence and impudence, and has lightly

dismissed the incidents as the work of local "bad characters"

instigated by Northern agents.

It has been impossible to cover all points and it is hoped,
therefore, that the Department and Legation will not confine their

attention to those elucidated in his report, but will carefully ex-

amine the mass of valuable material contained in the enclosed

copies of sworn statements by American citizens.

7. THIS REPORT PREPARED UNDER DIFFICULTIES:

In spite of the very generous assistance of Lieutenant-
Commander Frank H. Luckel and the officers of the U. S. S.
John D. Ford, the preparation of this report has been attended
with much difficulty. The task of drafting it by longhand when

without my glasses, of which I was robbed by Nationalist sol-

diers, and by artificial light, has been painfully laborious and
slow. A shortage of typewriters on board and limitations of
space have also delayed its completion. These conditions are
accountable for the many obvious imperfections in style and

appearance.
 THE "NANKING INCIDENT" 51

In making the enclosed copies of affidavits, it has been im-

possible todo good typing and many corrections in ink have been
required to make them exact.
Finally credit is due Vice-Consul Paxton for his constant
assistance and to Clerk A. H. Zee who has come on board and
worked far into the night in order that this report might be

completed and put upon a down river steamer.

John K. Davis
American Consul

Davis* report would seem self-sufficient. It remains on file in

Washington as the official version of the "Nanking Incident," in which

so many foreigners (including American men, women and some chil-

dren) were involved.

 "WHY WE ARE IN CHINA"

if any, of the men in the United States Navy and Marine

had a very clear
FEW,
Corps officers as well as enlisted personnel
idea of why they were sent to China in such numbers by the
American Government during the chaos which began with the Kuo-
mintang Revoution.
Some eventually gained a rudimentary knowledge (1) of the basic
causes of the trouble that was endangering all life and property in
Asia, native as well as foreign; and (2) that they, for this very funda-
mental reason, were sent East to protect American lives and property
in that persistently erupting area in the Orient. Their task was not to
interfere with domestic difficulties of the Chinese, but to prevent these

frequent outbreaks from interfering too greatly with the activities of

American families who chose or were obliged to reside in that almost
constant "danger zone" in the Far East.
This protection of foreign "lives and property" became a catch-

phrase among the inhabitants of China during the Canton-inspired

revolution which swept northward over the entire country beneath
the Great Wall, from 1926 to 1928. With some observers, this ordi-
narily serious business of our men in uniform became known as the
"protection of 1. & p." or "lives and property as usual, don't you
know."
The fighting men fell in with the popular attitude of the traders
toward the Chinese imbroglio and the Chinese peoples involved in
that surge. They rarely knew the causes of the turmoil which
brought
them on the long voyage to the Orient, let alone understood the races
of yellow-skinned, slant-eyed peoples around them. There is nothing

odd in that lack of comprehension by men in the Navy or Marine

Corps. In the first place, theirs was certainly "not to reason why."
Their oath to the flag and their own country was but "to do or die."
These men had not the slighest interest in the cause of China's trou-

52
 S3

bles. The majority were a happy-go-lucky lot of men, without a care

in the world. The "tour of duty" out China-way was just another
assignment which made the life of a soldier, sailor or Marine so ap-
pealing to men who were romantic, sentimental or naive enough to
look for a thrill
by "joining up." They were largely intent on taking
their fun where they found it "causes" be damned. They were
strangers in a strange land, and that was enough.
To combat this "know-nothing" lethargy among the United States
Navy Far East during the Kuomintang Revolution, an officer
in the

aboard the U. S. S. Cincinnati issued a mimeographed Memorandum

1

to fellow-officers and enlisted men in our fleet on the ''China Station/

The Cincinnati was flagship of a cruiser squadron rushed to China
during the height of the trouble in the spring of 1927. The sister

ships were cruisers U. S. S. Richmond and the U S. S. Memphis.

They were sent out to reinforce the normal strength of our Asiatic
fleet in those abnormal times.
In addition, the United States had two bodies of Marines at Shang-
hai then the 4th and 6th Regiments. Their ignorance of why the
Chinese fought, endangering foreign lives and property, was abysmal
but, be it emphasized, no more abject than that of the average trader
who moved into a strange land for the usual reason, namely, to make
money.
The Memorandum was issued by Lieut. Stanley A. Jones, a gun-

nery officer Jones rose from the ranks.

of exceptional intelligence.
He was a natural student, and passed on his own information to the
others with him in the China "adventure." The outline of history
which the Lieutenant gave was a comprehensive study of the situ-

ation in the Orient. He gave a thumb-nail sketch of the reasons for

our government's intense interest in 1927 in developments among
the Chinese races. He called it, "Our Mission to China," and in a
few words told what that mission was. The unique Memorandum
follows, in its entirety:

OUR MISSION TO CHINA

To the crew of the U. S. S. Cincinnati:

It is appropriate at this time to acquaint you all with the

object of our cruise to China. Our mission is to protect the lives

54 THE DRAGON STIRS
and property of American citizens, and by reciprocity, we protect
the lives of other foreigners.

You might ask:-

1. What are American citizens doing in China?
don't they leave China their lives are in
2. Why if danger?
3. What grievance have the Chinese against foreigners?
4. What countries are particularly involved, and what will
be our relations with them under the present difficulties?
5. What countries are in sympathy with the Chinese in their
present stand?
6. Cannot the Chinese government handle their own affairs?
These seem to be the logical questions likely to arise in

the minds of those who are not acquainted with the situation
in the Far In reply thereto, the following extracts from
East.
various sources, coupled with first hand knowledge of the Chinese

question gathered during seven years of duty on the China sta-

tion, should enlighten you as to why the foreigner is persistent
in his interest to get China on her feet.

Asa result of the experience of one John Ledyard of Con-

necticut with the Captain Cook Expedition to the Pacific, the
first ship to sail from America to engage in trade with Asia was

the Empress of China Ledyard returned from the northwest

coast of America with stories of the fur trade being carried on

with Canton. He told of traders buying furs for sixpence which

sold in Canton for $100. These tales interested merchants of
Boston and New York so the Empress of China was fitted out

and sailed for Canton on February 22, 1784. She returned May
12, 1785.
The return of the Empress of China created somewhat of a
sensation. A report of the cruise to our President contained the
statements that the Americans were treated as barbarians. Even
today, among the illiterate Chinese, we are referred to as foreign
devils. Americans and Europeans have always been unwelcome
prospectors in China. Until the year 1842 Canton was the only
port of China open to foreign trade; and the merchants who
attempted to do business with the Chinese suffered many in-
justices. The foreigners made every effort to come to friendly
 "WHY WE ARE IN CHINA" 55

terms with the Chinese, yielding to Chinese authority as cir-

cumstances demanded.
In 1821 a seaman, Francis Terranova, from an American
ship out of Baltimore, was turned over to the Chinese for pun-
ishment for the killing of a Chinese bumboat woman. The
punishment for slaughter under Chinese law was only a small fine.

As an indication of the prejudice against foreigners, Terranova

was strangled without even a hearing.
Until 1840, the United States Government offered little or
no protection to our citizens in China. Since then, however, we
have entered into treaties with the Chinese and become interested
and involved in Far Eastern affairs, along with other Powers
who are competitors in the commercial field.

John Quincy Adams, in a lecture in 1841, before the Mass-

achusetts Historical Society, said : The fundamental principles of
the Chinese Empire are anti-commercial. It admits no obligation
to hold commercial intercourse with others, It utterly denies
the equality of other nations with itself, and even is independent
It holds itself to be the center of the terraqueous globe, equal to
the heavenly host, and all other nations with whom it has any
relations, or commercial, as outside, tribal barbarians,
political

reverently submissive to the will of its despotic chief. It is upon

this principle,openly avowed and inflexibly maintained, that the
principal maritime nations of Europe for several centuries, and
the United States of America from the time of their acknowl-

edged independence, have been content to hold commercial inter-

course with the Empire of China. It is time tJiat this enormous
outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first

principles of the rights of nations should cease.

The caus of the warthe "kowtow," the arrogant and
is

unsupportable pretensions of China that she will hold commercial

intercourse with the rest of mankind, not upon the terms of equal

reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of re-

lation between lord and vassal.
Adams was Secretary of State at the time of Terranova's
execution, and well understood the Chinese attitude toward
foreigners.
56 THE DRAGON STIRS
In 1842, the Treaty of Nanking (British) provided for the
opening of the ports of Foochow, Ningpo, Amoy and Shanghai
for the purposes of trade.

The first American Commissioner, resident in China, was

Caleb Gushing. He left the United States with detailed instruc-
tions and with the authority to make a treaty to regulate trade.
After the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, England believed
that Cushing's missionwould be fruitless. However, he proved
himself an able diplomat and won several concessions from China
without intimidation. Cushing's treaty, known as the Treaty of

Wanghai, contains the doctrine of extraterritoriality, over which

there has recently been much discussion. The text of the ar-

ticles with reference to extra-territorial rights is as follows : "Sub-

jects of China who
may be guilty of any criminal act toward
citizens of the United States shall be arrested and punished by

the Chinese authorities according to the laws of China, and citi-

zens of the United States who may commit any crime in China
shall be tried and punished only by the consul or other public
official of the United States thereto authorized according to the

laws of the United States," And, "all articles in regard to rights,

whether of property or person, arising between citizens of the
United States and China shall be subject to the .jurisdiction of,

and regulated by, the authorities of their own government." And

u
this article also adds: and all controversies occurring in China
between the citizens of the United States and the subjects of
any other government shall be regulated by the treaties existing
between the United States and such governments, respectively,
without interference on the part of China. That until the Chi-
nese laws are distinctly made known and recognized, the punish-
ment for wrongs committed by foreigners upon the Chinese or
others shall not be greater than their applicability to the like
offense by the laws of the United States or England; nor shall

any punishment be inflicted by the Chinese authorities upon any

foreigner until the guilt of the party shall have been fairly and
dearly proven."
In drafting this treaty, Gushing evidently had in mind the
famous Terranova case. Other Powers now have the same
 "
\V HY W E ARE I N C H XA"
I 57

agreement with China. The Treaty of Wanghai provided also

for the right of American citizens to establish residences in treaty

ports. Thus, the Treaty of Wanghai marked the entrance of

the United States into Far Eastern politics.
In our dealings with China we have endeavored to follow
all

diplomatic channels rather than military. The present unrest

is by no means our first experience with the anti-foreign feeling
in China. During the Taiping Rebellion in 1853 the walled city
of Shanghai came into the possession of the rebels. The customs
house was looted and the Imperial Chinese Government sought
assistance in the suppression of the rebels. While it has always
been the policy of the United States not to interfere with the
internal politics of a nation, we consented to concerted action of
the treaty Powers in rendering assistance to the Imperial Gov-
ernment of China. The United States took no part in the affair
because of our own civil war at home. The Taiping Rebellion
ended in 1863 in favor of the Imperial Government.
On account of the corruptness of Chinese officials and as a
guarantee for loans made by
the treaty Powers, all revenue is
collected at the treaty ports by the Chinese Maritime Customs,
which is officered by the Powers.
In 1923, Sun Yat-sen, who was then the leader of the Can-
tonese, threatened to seize the customs house at Canton and
collect
t
his own*' revenue. The Powers saw to it that his in-
tentions did not materialize. The writer was present at Canton
on this occasion. Sun issued a statement to the effect that, while
the Chinese people might expect a second Lafayette, the Powers
concentrated men-of-war at Canton to prevent him from taking
over what he believed wr ere his just rights. The Powers could
not yield to Sun Yat-sen's demand without violating their treaty
with the Peking Government. Sun was not recognized as in any
way connected with the Chinese Government.
The Cantonese, with their recent successes, are now in control
of all the treaty ports south of and along the Yangtze River.
Even though they are in control they cannot collect the revenue,
due to the treaties which exist between the Powers and the rec-
ognized Peking Government. This provokes the anti-foreign
 THE DRAGON STIRS
feeling. Should the Cantonese overthrow the Peking Govern-
ment, they will no doubt negotiate for the modification of existing
treaties. It is the opinon of many correspondents that the

Powers will not consent to the abrogation of extra-territoriality

rights. Also, that the best solution to the Chinese question is

the appointment of a council or commission, expert in govern-

mental organization, to straighten out the government in China.
Another anti-foreign demonstration took place in 1900 when
a secret society, known as the "Boxers/' said to have been in

collusion with the Manchu Government, attacked the foreign lega-

tions at Peking and massacred native Christians and foreign mis-
sionaries. The Legation guards were unable to handle the situ-
ation, so a force of 19,000 troops
composed of British, American,
Russian, French and Germans, advanced on Peking. This affair
cost the Chinese Government $337,500,000. The idemnity levied

by the Powers was $750,000,000, but through the good offices

of the United States, it was reduced.

The death of the Emperor in 1908 hastened the overthrow of

the Manchu Dynasty. Sun Yat-sen organized a revolutionary
party in 1910 and became the leader of a movement for a gov-
ernment by the people. This move was successful, and Dr. Sun
abdicated his leadership in 1911 in favor of Yuan Shi-kai, who

subsequently became the first President of the Chinese Republic.

Yuan was confronted with a very difficult task, for neither he
nor his associates had the experience necessary for the establish-
ment of a stable federal government.
During the organization of
the Cabinet some dissension developed regarding the representa-
tives of the provinces. In 1916, a movement was started to
abolish the Republic and return to a monarchy. Yuan Shi-kai
was to become Emperor. This step met with wide opposition
throughout the country. Sun Yat-sen set up a Provincial Gov-

ernment in Canton and started another revolutionary campaign

that has been active ever since.

Sun Yat-sen was tireless in his efforts to

gain foreign recog-
nition, but was unsuccessful. After the Powers blocked his plans
to take over the Canton Customs in 1923, he accepted the aid and
counsel of Soviet Russia. The propaganda and activity of Red
 "WHY WE ARE IN CHINA" 59
Russia has prevailed among the Cantonese forces for the past
three years. Russia, an outcast so far as world politics is con-
cerned, is the only country allied to the Cantonese and is agita-
ting the anti-foreign feeling in China.
A study of American participation in Chinese affairs clearly
indicates that were it not for the United States, China would
not be enjoying the sovereign rights she has today.
The United States Government and other European Powers,
having due regard for the recognition of treaties made according
to the laws of nations, are represented atShanghai ready to use
force, if necessary, to enforce our treaty rights. The forces of
the various provincial war lords, viz. Chan Kai-shek (Chiang
Kai-shek) of the Cantonese, Wu
Pei-fu, of the Central Govern-
ment; Chang Tso-lin, of the Manchurians, and Feng Yu-hsiang,
the so-called "Christian General/' are all mercenary. They are
often disloyal and will fight for anyone who is able to pay them
and feed them. More often they receive their pay through the
privilege of looting.
"The national spirit of the Chinese people has been devel-

oped," writes Dr, Wellington Koo to the British Legation at

Peking. Perhaps so, but it would be far better that this "na-
tional spirit" be directed against the tactics of the Chinese war
lords who and can be expected to prove a further menace
are,
to the organization of the Chinese Government, than toward the

foreigners who are anxious to see a stable government at Peking.

The British and American Governments have both expressed
a desire for the modification of existing treaties. We cannot
deal with rebels.

Summing up the information contained in this thesis, the

answers to the opening questions are:

1. American citizens are in China engaged in legitimate trade

by right of treaty.
2. While treaties call for the protection of lives of our na-

tionals, we tolerate the actions of the Chinese rebels. Our

citizenslook to us for protection. Some expressions of
opinion would have us believe that in order to demand
our rights as Americans citizens, we should remain within
 THEDRAGONSTIRS
the boundaries of our country. The prosperity of our
nation is founded on our commercial relations with the
rest of the world. In order to maintain our national

prestige, commercial interests require their representatives

to establish residences in foreign countries. They should
at least be protected against racial and religious prejudice,
and protected against the laws of a country where the loss

of a human life is often not recorded.

3. Modern China believes the existing treaties to be unequal

and unjust. They forget the fact that the national indebted-
ness of China is in the neighborhood of one billion dollars.
4 All of the Powers of Europe, the United States and Japan,
are concerned in the present situation in China. They are
allied in the determination that the foreign Settlement at

Shanghai shall not be disturbed.

5. None but Red Russia. She is trying to drag China down

to her level
6. China has not proven herself able to handle her own dif-

ficulties.The Government is bankrupt.

(SIGNED) Stanley A. Jones,

Lieut., U. S. N.

This document tells its own story and answers the questions in
bly tabulated form, which all could read, given the desire. Few had
ven that, of course;
professional fighters rarely care to get so deeply
iterested in the subject nearest them. The Lieutenant's Memorandum,

lerefore, did but little good other than to show an exceptionally clear
icture of the basic relations between the Chinese peoples and the
aces from abroad
* * *

Sometimes the afternoon sun shone through the gray of February's

louds that lowered most days in the winter of 1927-28 over the
Vhangpoo River flats. When it did, the rays set aglow the bur-
ished curves of a silver cup on a desk in a cold stone building in the
sart of Shanghai Then spattered sunlight, broken into myriad tiny
lafts,brightened the eyes of the man in uniform at the desk, and he
ioked at the loving-cup with admiration and pride. The man was
01 H. C. Davis, commanding officer of the Fourth Regiment, United
 " "
WH Y WE ARE I N C H I NA 61

States Marine Corps, stationed in Shanghai. The building was his

headquarters. The cup bore this inscription :

Presented to the Fourth Regiment, United States Marine

Corps, by Major-General J. Duncan, Commanding British Shang-

hai Defense Force, as a memento of our friendly cooperation in

Shanghai, 1927-28.
The Duncan Cup was presented to the Fourth Regiment on
January 17, 1928, at Colonel Davis' headquarters.General Duncan,
who became Major-General Sir John Duncan and who returned
later

to England after nearly a year's service in China, presented it himself

as a personal token of appreciation of the friendship and cooperation
which existed between the American and British defense forces in the

Far East. The General had appeared on the morning of the presen-
tation at theAmerican Marine headquarters, unaccompanied by any of
his staff. In honor of that event, a full company of Marines had been

present with rifles, steel helmets and light marching equipment. The
regimental band and the Marine fife and drum corps had taken part.
General Duncan had been given two ruffles and flourishes which he
rated as a Major-General.

Just across the room, facing Colonel Davis' desk, another trophy
stood, also won in friendship. It was a flagstand bearing a silver
plaque, and on it was the inscription :

Presented to the Fourth Regiment, United States Marine

Corps by the First Battalion, the Green Howards, to Commem-

orate Their Service Together in Shanghai, 1927.

The crest of the Green Howards, a British regiment, was at the

bottom of the plaque, and the Marine crest, with its motto, Semper
was engraved at the top. The American
fidelis, flag and the Fourth
Regiment's colors were crossed, in the stand.
Throughout those earlier months the American and British and
other defense forces cooperated in a remarkable spirit of friendship.
The Nations allied in the Great War in Europe again had to place
fighting forces in the field, this time in China. And the manner in
which they worked together and formed lasting friendships was the
subject of much favorable comment out East. When the Green
Howards left for England, the officers of the American Marines in

Shanghai gave their officers a farewell dinner in the American Club,

62 THE DRAGON STIRS
the night of December 28. 1927 As they departed on board a trans-
port on January 6, 1928, there was a company of American Marines
down to see them off, and the Marine Band turned out for the occa-
sion. The "Tommies'* and the "Yanks" were buddies.
The same sort of spirit was noticeable in the two navies during
the entire year in China. While there was no formal arrangement
covering the subject, American and British, and others too, in com-
mand of naval vessels up the Yangtze River, took it upon themselves
io protect the lives and property not only of their own nationals, but
of other foreigners as well. The "Nanking Incident" was a striking
example of the spirit was apparent throughout.
of cooperation that
It will be recalled that American and British destroyers at Nanking
fired when called upon by refugees ashore in danger of their lives that

spring of 1927. Every day the American and British commanding

officers conferred together. The Japanese also attended. Although a
British officer, Captain England, was the superior naval officer present
at the time, when Lieut -Comdr Roy C Smith, Jr., commanding the
U S. S. Noa, requested his permission to fire first if necessary, Cap-
tain England readily granted it.

And now, in the wardroom of the U. S. S. Noa there is a beau-

tiful silver cigarette box, suitably engraved, presented to the destroyer
not to the commanding officer, his officers or any other individual,

but to the Noa by the British warship, H. M. S. Emerald. In

the wardroom of the Emerald stands a large silver cocktail shaker.
It was the gift to the British ship from the Noa. Already a tradition
has arisen : the shaker never is to be used except when an officer from

the U. S. S. Noa comes on board the H. M. S. Emerald.

These are but a few of the incidents showing the cooperation and
spirit of friendship which marked the relations of the American and
British forces in China. The fact that General Duncan and the late
Admiral Mark L. Bristol, commanding the American naval forces
in the Orient, were also close personal friends should be remarked.
their official calls, the British General and the American
Following
Admiral were often together at social functions, and General Duncan
was frequently a guest at the Shanghai residence of Admiral and Mrs,

Bristol. This personal diplomacy, this getting to know the men of

other nations in charge of the affairs of their peoples, previously de-
monstrated in Turkey, again marked Admiral Bristol as an unusual
 " "
WHY W E ARE I N C H I NA 63

and outstanding naval man who, it was widely agreed, fitted in

per-
fectly with his job in the Orient in those trying days.
In relating these incidents I have discussed only the United
States and Britain because these two nations had the largest defense
China during 1927. It must not be thought that the other
forces in
Powers represented were not almost as friendly. However, speaking
other languages, their men did not become as well acquainted as did
the British and Americans. And, again, having smaller forces, there
was little occasion for the individual units of the French, for example,
or the Italians or others to work together intimately

A study of the American and British forces in 1927-28 discloses

that altogether the United States had, according to official figures,

4,399 officers and men in the Marine Corps in China, 1,000 Army
officersand men, and the usual complement of United States Navy
gunboats, destroyers and other men-of-war in the "China Station,"
together with three cruisers sent out to augment normal naval strength.
These were the light cruisers Cincinnati, Richmond and Marblehead,
under command of Rear-Admiral J. R. Y. Blakely. The British
defense force in Shanghai was cut to 4,500 officers and men.
The American China of nearly 4,500 Marines in 1927-
strength in
28 was the greatest in the history of our relations with the East. The
Fourth Regiment, less the Second Battalion, embarked for China at
San Diego on February 3, 1927, aboard the U. S. S. Chaitmont. They
arrived in Shanghai on February 24 of that year. The regiment
remained aboard the ship until March 21, the day the Nationalists
captured Shanghai, when men were ordered ashore to protect
the
American lives and property. The Sixth Regiment (minus the Third
Battalion), the Third Brigade Headquarters and Headquarters Com-
pany, and the Third Brigade Service Company, one battery of the
Tenth Artillery and a Marine Aviation squadron sailed from San
Diego on board the transport Henderson on April 7, 1927, following
a request for reinforcements. In the meantime, Brig.-Gen. Smedley D.
Butler arrived, landing the day after the "Nanking Incident."
Other additions were made shortly after the Henderson sailed.
The passenger liner President Grant was chartered for use as a trans-

port and sailed April 17 for the Philippines with the Third Battalion
of the Sixth Regiment and the Second Battalion of the Fourth Regi-
64 THE DRA GON STIRS
ment, together with the First Battalion of the Tenth Artillery (less
one battery), one light tank platoon, the Fifth Company Engineers,
and part of another Marine aviation squadron. The rest of this avia-
tion squadron was picked up at Guam and the vessel proceeded to
Olongapo, near Manila. The men were held there in reserve and
subsequently brought to Shanghai. The Fourth Marines have re-

mained there ever since. The rest of the Third Brigade was shifted
to Tientsin in June, where was stationed until withdrawn.
it General
Butler, who is now dead, made Tientsin his headquarters.
The Marines fell into regular encampment routine much as though

they were in San Diego or anywhere else, aside, of course, from the
initial novelty of their surroundings. The men were given every
opportunity to get all they could in the way of an education out of their
"tour of duty*' in China by sight-seeing. And they had their sports
and amusements there as in America. The Marine dramatic club gave
occasional plays in the Navy Y. M. C. A. The men had basketball
teams, played football and other sports and went in for boxing matches
which were attended by civilians and men in uniform, alike. The
Marine Band played for various formal and social affairs, and some
formed a dance orchestra that was popular and often
of the musicians

played at the Columbia Country Club tea-dances. In the summer

Shanghai had a baseball league, and the Marines' team always was
among the best.
 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE

after Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek captured Nank-

and set that ancient city up as the new Capital of China, I
SHORTLY
king
went up the Yangtze-kiang to Hankow, in the heart of that war-
ring land. The kiang part of the name means "river," although this
really is very little like the way the Chinese themselves pronounce it

the word sounds more like "giang," with a hard G, when spoken by a
Chinese. Why we spell it with a K is another Chinese puzzle.

The Yangtze is one of the longest, widest, deepest and most

treacherous streams on earth. overflows, flooding the
It frequently

placid countryside for miles until the valley resembles an inland sea,
storm-tossed and angry. The Chinese take such evidence of the
unfathomable caprices of the river god in resigned or philosophical
manner: as a whim of the elements, over which they have no control.
So they accept it with a shrug, bury their dead, and rebuild their
dismantled homes and towns which they realize must be destroyed
again another day. There are flood control movements, but they have
failed to accomplish much. Until recent years the Chinese peoples
could not be persuaded even to try to stand in the way of an inexorable

god, bent on mischief. They felt, and still feel, that to do so is to

risk an even greater vengeance.
The Yangtze remains unbridged to this day. From the source
to its broad mouth at the sea, there is no bridge across its impetuous
current. Construction of one is not only prohibitive because of the
cash outlay involved, but it is still too dangerous a job in structural

engineering.
The size and power of the Yangtze may be grasped when it is
known that men-of-war as large as the 10,000-ton U. S. S. Cincinnati,
a sea-going light cruiser, not only can but do cruise right up the
center of China along this river's deep channel. The Cincinnati spent
the summer of 1927 at Hankow, her guns adding their protection to

65
66 THE DRAGON STIRS
those of gunboats on the customary U. S. Yangtze Patrol in behalf of
American lives and property up the river. The cruiser was pre-
vented from returning to the sea by low water during that hot, fetid
summer in the Hankow area. I was there during the exciting days at

the end of the Russian Advisorate in the seat of the revolution when
Mikal Borodin and his comrades fled.

My first trip up the Yangtze was made in the latter part of the

spring of 1927.* A little river steamer, the S. S. Loongwo, operated

by a British navigating and trading concern, made the trip with a con-

voy of foreign war-craft, including American destroyers.

The Yangtze at that period in China's warring history was the
dividing line between troops of the Kuomintang and those of the
Northern war lords. From the stream's flat banks they took pot-shots
at each other and at us f
A
Chinese cowpradore, or clerk, had been
killed by a stray shot on the previous trip, and this brought the war
home to the crew and to us. No one was hurt on our trip, although
we were occasionally under fire.

My files show notes and copies of dispatches which I sent back

while on that cruise into the heart of China and her revolution. They
are reproduced here to give an idea of what the voyage was like to a

"griffin" (less than a year in China, and anyone is a "griffin" to an old

China-hand), like myself. In a sense it was like a Frenchman's

cruising up the Mississippi on a French boat, convoyed by French

war-craft for most of us among that ship's company certainly were
not Chinese,

Impressions to my editor follow:

Yangtze River S,erics No 1.

ON BOARD THE STEAMER LOONGWO, April 20.

Far away, high amid the mountains of Tibet, that old father of

pirates, the Yangtze, begins its rollicking, pillaging course through

* I had been The United Press
\vith Associations on a retainer basis. They
decided in New York to keep the post there then a "part-time" assignment. It
was later made a regular Bureau. Frederick Moore, chief of The York New
Times staff in the Far East, had already offered a billet as full time corre-
spondent with them, and under the circumstances I was forced to accept. Walter
Duranty came across Siberia from Moscow and was stationed that summer in
Peking. Frederick Moore remained as chief at Shanghai; and I completed this
Hankow and reporting the decline of the
three-way coverage set-up by going to
Reds there.Later, when Mr Moore and Mr Duranty left, I became the chief
correspondent in China for The New York Times, remaining until late in 1929.
 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 67
China to where, yellow with looted soil, its broad mouth, near

Shanghai, eternally flings its soggy bandit's burden into the sea.
Leaping mountain streams, leisurely tributaries in long valleys
and, in the flat lowlands, creeks and tiny rivulets seeping to their

level, combine and strengthen the broad-chested old bri-

to abet

gand from half of Asia.

that exacts tribute
A mantle of romance, thick as the silken folds of an opulent
Mandarin's coat, hides the coarse figure of this robber river. It
cannot be seen as The Yangtze must ever be veiled in
it is.

tradition.Steaming along its muddy course between its flat,

commonplace banks, one cannot but remember the tales of its
history; that this river has, they say, run red with the blood of
ancient warriors almost as often as its golden flood has swept

angrily over the lowlands in the spring; that in the pleasant life

of China's early culture, gorgeous processions, rich in splendor

with the brocade and yellow gold of potentates and princesses,
bobbed along highway; that in times of conquest, stern war-
this

craft, manned by savage men from beyond the hills to the west,
came down to ravage and conquer and the invaders tarried,
and were absorbed.
The Yangtze, predominantly cruel, proves kind to some.
Sweeping across the lowlands in flood times, the river, spreading
havoc in its path, leaves a carpet of fertile silt, and those who
survive are glad. They prosper.
Prospering, they sought markets for their products. In turn,
they formed a market for other products, these agricultural mil-
lions in the Yangtze Valley, and in less than a century traders
from the West have built up a sturdy commerce with these
people.
War has again torn at the heart of that commerce. Revolu-
tion beginning in Canton has swept northward, and the Yangtze
today is a line of demarcation between the north and the south.
River packets still ply a dangerous trade up the Yangtze. The
number of river steamers is growing steadily less. The markets
up-country are dull and stagnant The Chinese are afraid to buy.
The armies, first one and then another, confiscate whatever they
desire. The revolution is costly.

Many men-of-war from nations abroad are plying the Yang-

68 THE DRAGON STIRS
tze today, in ever increasing numbers. Merchantmen have given
way, in the main, to warships once more.
Stern gray craft
escort river steamersup and down the Yangtze, for soldiers of
the north and of the south fire indiscriminately on all shipping.
It is not, therefore, without a feeling of adventure that one
boards a river steamer these days and embarks for Hankow, as I

did last night. Shanghai, that wickedest city, they say, in China,
is safe behind the lines of men and barbed wire entanglements
as safe as New York itself could be, so far as attack from the
Chinese is concerned. Shanghai, bulging with people, refugees
from everywhere in the interior, is well guarded. The foreigner
in China at present is, ostrich-like, hiding his head in the sand.
The people of Shanghai are ridiculed by the foreigner who lives

inland. These men point out the futility of existence, commer-

cially, in China if only a city like Shanghai is held. It's the body
of trade they would save.
Menlike these inland traders keep the river steamers run-

ning. Pioneers in commerce, they go into the country and sell

the Chinese goods always on a cash basis in these troubled

times, to be sure, but the point is that they sell products from

abroad and prevent trade from dying. There are two of these
men on board, tobacco merchants on their way to Wuhu to
straighten out their office there and to seek to carry on despite
the revolution. One is an American, the district manager from
Nanking; the other is British. The latter has been in China off
and on for sixteen years. He is typical of these traders, speaks
the language in half a dozen dialects, hardy, a big fellow, afraid
of nothing. He has just come out of Pengpu, he said, going
north by train to Tientsin and thence south to Shanghai by boat.
And then, straight away back into the thick of it. His experi-
ences would fill a large volume.
The Loongwo, scheduled to sail at midnight last night,
finally got under way at about three o'clock this morning. The
British sailors on guard from the flagship Hawkins patrolling
the dock and the steamer, while inspring a feeling of comparative

safety, also were constant reminders that this trip up-river was
not exactly the safest thing in the world just at present. I was

surprised to find the steamer nearly full. strange person in A

 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 69

my cabin with me speaks only Russian and a few, a very few,

words of German. There are, as a matter of fact, about a dozen
Russians on board, all bound for Hankow; four or five Chinese
in first cabin; my two tobacco merchant friends, a Commander

Ward coming out from England to take a post on the British

cruiser Vindictive now at Hankow; and a Catholic priest.

my bunk shortly after midnight, I was soon

Clambering into
asleep, despite the shrill cries of the wharf coolies and their
staccato sing-song chant as they loaded cargo into the hold. The
hoarse blast of the fog horn awakened me several hours later. I
peered out into the mists. The dawn was drear. Phantom ships
drifted slowly past in the semi-twilight of the new day. I slept

untilmidmorning and then, dozing, listened to the strange noises

around me the swish of swirling water against the ship's sides
:
;

the low hum of the engines; someone in the saloon playing

There's a Long, Long Trail A-winding; voices on the promenade
deck outside; snatches of conversation: "looks pretty bad,". . .

"Cantonese have been,". . . "business . . . terrible . . .

dangerous
3
. . .
glad these warships are *. . . .

I went out on deck. We were stuck in the mud. The tide

was going out. Two
other ships and a river gunboat were

sighted off our stern, seen dimly through the mist. The wind
blew a gale. Two hours later we got off somehow, after endless
maneuvering. The other vessels had gone ahead a little and
waited for us. I, for one, was glad to have that American gun-
boat along. Our group of four ships (we picked up another
during the afternoon) made slow speed. One ship could only do
eight knots, and that held back the whole procession.
The day wore on. Commander Ward, the two tobacco
merchants and myself, and, in a way, "the Padre/' thrown more
or less together by our common interests and language, formed
a bit of a clique. The Padre, a little chap with horn-rimmed
spectacles, was forever peering at the shore through a pair of
binoculars. He announced about three o'clock the sighting of
a group of Chinese warships.
There were four of them in all. The American gunboat
Peary, which had been just alongside the Loongwo, shoved ahead
70 THE DRAGON STIRS
a little as we drew near. The Chinese, flying the Cantonese flag,
were lined up in a row. The place is known as the Crossroads,
itbeing at the mouth of a tributary to the Yangtze River. Each
dipped her flag in reply to our salute of a similar nature as we
passed. This was the only evidence of war the whole day long.
Aside from our convoy and these ships, and the fact that our
steamer has quarter-inch iron plates lined up all around the deck
as armor against fire from either shore, we might as well have

been steaming up the Mississippi River. Not a soldier did we

sight all the first day up the river.

Yangtze River Series No. 2.

ON BOARD THE S. S. LOONGWO, Yangtze River,

April 21. A man named H. C. Felling who has been, he says,

in China for more than sixteen years, off and on, sat at dinner
on this steamer last night and painted as dismal a picture of the
Chinese people as one could well imagine.
The man, a tobacco merchant born in London and in the
employ of an American organization, spoke of cruelty difficult
to conceive. He told tales of the hell the White Russian soldiers
have been through ; of Chinese soldiers who, taking other Chinese
and Russians prisoners, have set their captives aflame after

pouring kerosene over their clothing.

"One popular method of torture," he said, "is known as
giving the victim 'the thousand cuts.' Men are cut all over their
bodies, each cut too small to be fatal but enough to be exceed-
ingly painful. The victims live for days ; sometimes, before they
finally find relief in death.
"I have also seen women tortured horribly, their breasts
cut off,some victims burned, one skinned alive. You have no
idea what is going on in the interior during these wars. It is

frightful."
What the women of China have suffered, he says, the world

will never know. They must suffer without protest, these Chi-
nese mothers of the men who pillage their own people from one
year's end to the next.
"They jump in the wells in frantic efforts to escape the
 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 71

soldiers," Felling said. "Often, we have been unable to get water

because the wells have been full of dead women and children.
"The merchants never know when they may next lose their
entire stock. I know of one man, and his case is typical, who

lost everything he had once a year three years running. Yet

he started up again each time. It is marvelous the way they
stick to it. Yet what can the poor devils do?"
Felling described how they get their armies, these Chinese
war lords who have been the curse of the nation since the 1911
revolution.

"Suppose," he said, ''General Chang Chung-chang wants 40,-

000 men out of Shantung province. He sends out an order for
that many troops. The province is divided into districts. Each
district has a headman. The headman of the district advises the
headmen and towns and villages in his area
of the various cities
that they must produce so many soldiers by a certain date.
"The village or city headman calls a meeting of the heads
of all the families in his town. He tells them how many men
the city must produce. Then they pro-rate the thing. A family
with three boys sends two, one with four sends three, and so on.
They never take a son ifhe is the only boy in the family. The
Chinese are very strict on the family system. There must be
an heir.
"In a few days you have your 'army' of 40,000 men. They
are trained a very short while and then sent into battle. That
is how you get your 'volunteer armies' in China. The soldiers
are, in themain, inexperienced and they can't fight. In a battle,
they are as likely as not to turn and run for it any time they
think they are getting the worst of it. They have no stomach for

fighting. They are afraid. They are even afraid to quit the

army. Up against any real opposition they run like rabbits,

those fellows."

It seems to be true that they do, too. It is significant to note

that the Nationalist revolution has come to the Yangtze almost
without opposition. They took Shanghai without a struggle.
Nanking was expected to be a battle. It was a Northern rout.

One wonders what would happen if the Northerners were to fight

72 THE DRAGON STIRS
and win a victory. Felling believes the Southerners would run
just as quickly.
"Of course," he said, "the Nationalists are a bit different.
They've got a cause to fight for. They seem to have a little more
spirit than the Northern soldiers."

Felling has just come out of Pengpu, north of Nanking on the

Pukow-Tientsin railway line. He said the Northerners have
looted that city thoroughly. The losses are enormous to Chi-
nese as well as to foreign firms, he said.

Yangtze River Series No. 3

ON BOARD THE S. S. LOONGWO, Yangtze River,
April 21. I interviewed the white
Chinkiang to-
last woman in

day. Mrs.
She B.
isM. Smith, an American, the wife of a
Standard Oil Company man who is "carrying on" in Chinkiang.
Mrs. Smith didn't have much to say. She said it is not

dangerous in Chinkiang. Not as much as one might think,

anyway. She and Mr. SmithBetty and Bruce, they are, a

happy young pair married not very long live on a launch just
alongside the Standard Oil installation in Chinkiang. There isn't
a white man, woman or child on shore.
"We don't have such a bad time," Mrs. Smith said. "We
know all the Navy men here, and we usually dine on board the
American gunboat. It really isn't as bad as you might think.

Not so good, either, at that," and she laughed a bit. For a

young girl like Mrs. Smith, Chinkiang offers very few attrac-
tions at present. It is rather dull not being able to go ashore.
And the circle of foreigners is, even with the Navy, both British
and American (there was one gunboat of each here today),
rather small.
Mrs. Smith was chiefly interested in her mail. The trains
to Shanghai run now and
then and the river boats bring mail
twice a week, so they are not so out of touch with the world.
She is from Binghamton, New York and admits that at times

she wouldn't mind being back there. seemed most incongruous

It

to find this girl, bobbed hair, nice eyes and wearing the latest

thing in a sleeveless sport dress, bravely sticking it out with

her husband, living on a little launch.
 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 73
The Loongwo arrived at Chinkiang shortly after noon today.
The day was perfect, warm, the sun shining in a sky devoid
of clouds. About 11:30 a. m. we saw our first soldiers, a few
here and there on the north bank. They were Marshal Sun
Chuan-fang's men, as one could tell by their gray uniforms and
the little hats they wear. They are like Robin Hood hats, peaked
and with slanting bills. All they lack is a cocky little feather.
But they do not look very cocky, these fellows. They have very
little spirit, to say the least. None of them fired. Fortresses
on the south bank looked ominous, their guns trained on the
river, but nothing happened.
Chinkiang is not a very large city. It lies scattered along
the waterfront, a hodge-podge of houses overshadowed at the east
end of the city by the Standard Oil plant. We came alongside
the Jardme-Matheson Company's hulk where an old resident, a
British representative of the shipping company, told us nobody
is left on shore at all. He, like the rest of the little community,
is living on board the hulk. All live in boats.
Two tobacco merchants on board the Loongwo knew the oil

merchant, so I joined them and rode over in their launch to call.

Smith, the oil man, said that he is still doing a little business.
"We demand cash on delivery, however/' he said. "Only way
we can do it." He said there wasn't much to do, but insisted
that ''business is really rather good, despite the war and our cash
requirements."
It seems that Americans are getting the British trade. The
feeling against the British is rather high everywhere, and there
are persistent efforts to boycott all British goods.
For some reason, we spent the night in Chinkiang harbor.
Last night we spent anchored in midstream. The river boats do
not, it seems, travel at night now. It is only a few hours' run

up to Nanking from here but we were unable to get under wa\

early enough due to one thing and another with
in the afternoon,

the gunboats and our cargo; so the skipper decided to remain

all night. Again I went for a ride around the harbor with the
tobacco merchants, this being apparently quite safe despite the
warlike attitude of the Nationalist troops along the Bund. At
dusk, we calkd on the Smiths once more and there met an
74 THE DRAGON STIRS
officer from the American gunboat Paul Jones, stationed here.
He said everything had been rather quiet recently. His chief

complaint, when he found out who I was, was that The New
York Times was not being delivered until at least two months
after date of publication.

Martial law goes into effect at six o'clock, but we were per-
mitted to stay out after that time. The sun sank and after a

twilight not ten minutes long, darkness fell over the harbor.
We took the Paul Jones officer back to his ship and then chugged
back to the Loongwo for the night

Yangtze River Series No. 4.

ON BOARD THE S. S. LOONGWO, NANKING, April

22. We had our baptism of fire this morning. Soldiers on the
south bank and, a little further on, on the north not far from

Nanking, let fly at us indiscriminately. Their aim, fortunately,

was bad. None of us was hit, no bullets,as far as I have

learned, striking any of the steamers in our adventurous quartet

of four river boats. Our convoy, the American gunboat Paul
Jones, also was untouched.
The Paul Jones returned the fire from the south bank with
a brief spurt ofmachine gun fire. There was no further shooting.
On board, none was excited, although the Chinese boys were
inclined to be a bit frightened. They lay flat on the deck wher-
ever they happened to be. One yesterday, in fact, when we
were passing the forts below Chinkiang, dropped the dishes he
was serving at table and ran for the galley, there to join his
fellows prone on the deck. He explained that that was orders,
since the Chinese compradore had been shot dead on the pre-
vious trip.
The passengers were permitted to do as they pleased. I re-

mained, for the most part, inside my cabin during the firing. So
did most of us. A few bravely foolish souls took a turn about the
promenade deck. They dodged after each shot, involuntarily. We
were, however, pretty safe inside our wall of armor plate.
Nanking, crown jewel of the Yangtze, lay glistening at noon
in the warm spring sunshine. The harbor, the Bund, Hsia-kwan,
a suburb, all were deserted, not a soul in sight.
 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 75
We steamed rapidly past in midstream. On the northern
bank, the town of Pukow stretched its ramshackle acreage here
and there along the river. At that point yonder, a steamer lay
sunk. It was the vessel, I am told, on which Madame M. Bor-
odin, wife of the Russian adviser to the Nationalists at Hankow,
was recently taken captive. Its stark masts stuck tip into the
blue at a crazy angle. We finally berthed a mile or more beyond
Nanking in midstream. We were opposite the British warship
Emerald, lying off between us and the north bank. The United
States gunboat Paul Jones, stationed at Chinkiang, returned there.
The Ford pulled into a berth just above the Emerald. Further
on, a Japanese gunboat lay three warships in all.

The reason we did notNanking was that intermittent

tie up at

firing between Nanking and Pukow was going on and it was

considered too dangerous to remain in the line of fire. The
Northerners, so said officers from the Emerald who came aboard
to see about getting provisions, have a good lot of heavy artil-

lery. Each morning they "strafe" the Southerners in Nanking,

and the Southerners reply. The boom of artillery could be heard
from time to time as we lunched, and an occasional rattle of
rifle fire added to the war noises in the harbor. It is doubtful

whether either side did much damage in their firing.

Nanking from the steamer was uncanny in its desertion and
quiet. What must usually be a busy harbor was swept clean
even of its sampans. These last swarmed around us and the
other river steamers in droves, safe in our company, the miserable
coolies seeking a fare, alms, anything to earn a few coppers.
Theirs a sorry plight.
is

Pukow, its back to a long, low range of mountains, was too

far away to be seen clearly, even with field glasses. Nanking
we could view quite plainly. Two Nationalist gunboats, tiny fel-
lows, steamed slowly up the creek outside the city's wall. The
tobacco merchant, who has lived in Nanking, pointed out the
places of interest.
"See that house on the hill, away back there, in line with
that smoke stack? Well," he said, "that's Socony House. That
is where the foreigners gathered and the American and British
gunboats bombarded the place so they could escape. Right along
76 THEDRAGONSTIRS
there on the next hill is the BAT. house (British-and- Amer-
"
ican Tobacco Company), and further along and he told me of
places of interest. All these houses, two miles or more away
across the flat lowlands, were in plain view from the river.
The black line of Nanking's city wall runs an uncertain course
for miles along the river, perhaps a mile or so back from the
Bund. Nanking from the river does not give an impression of

size or of particular beauty. Its modern buildings in the busi-

ness section lend a certain spick-and-span-ness to the place, and

its wall recalls the splendor of another day But even so, my
impression was of anything but awe. Nanking as a thing of
beauty, seen from midstream, will not last forever.
Two young British officers from the Emerald came on board,
one to get the provisions, the other after the mail Both were
lads yet in their teens, rosy-cheeked boys with a serious air, nice

young fellows, strangely youthful for their chevrons. The men,

old enough to be their fathers, answered with a "sir," to each

query and were completely respectful.

It was two o'clock before we got under way again, this time

alone. The other three steamers had gone ahead with our con-
voy. It seems there is little to fear along the route between here
and Wuhu. Throughout the afternoon the south bank was dot-

ted from time to time with soldiers walking about amid their

dingy little mud-hut barracks, thatched roofs yellow against the

green fields of grain. We saw no Northerners the whole after-
noon, but the North holds everything right up to the Yangtze,
from all reports. They come to the river whenever they please,
take a few pot-shots (both sides fire on foreign vessels without
discrimination) and go their way again.
Darkness had settled over the river when we reached Wuhu,
on the south bank, about eight o'clock. Our erstwhile com-
panions had reached port before us and there were no berths
left. We
anchored in midstream again for the night. The Wuhu
harbor was a busy place with four river steamers arriving. Sig-
nals flashed from the gunboats and the cruiser Caradoc, naval
motorboats popped about, two calling to inquire as to our wel-
fare and the British to leave an armed guard on board with
"
instructions to "keep all soldiers off this ship
 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 77
The few remaining foreigners, I learned from the officers of
these motorboats, are living in ships in the harbor. They go
ashore during the day but return at night to their floating homes.
The Chinese have done a little looting, but it seems that they have
returned the Recreation Club to the foreigners,moving the
troops barracked there to other billets. Aside from an occasional
effort to board river steamers and go elsewhere, the Nationalist

troops have apparently caused little trouble. Three tried to do

that yesterday, theyoung British officer remarked. They were
slightly wounded with bayonets while the sailors insisted that

they remain ashore.

Lights down, anchored in midstream with an armed guard
on board to protect us, our ship's company turned in tonight
with a feeling of comparative security. What could 20,000 Can-
tonese soldiers do in a case like that? Nothing. In fact, our
chief complaint is news from the outside world. Aside
lack of
from a word here and there from these youthful officers who
get it from their naval radio dispatches and these not always
accurate and never with any detail we are completely cut off.
The general impression seems to be that the North controls every-
thing right up to the Yangtze once more and that the Nationalists
are holding on to their positions on the south bank. The Com-
munists apparently continue to hold the dominant position in
Hankow.

Yangtze River Scries No. 5.

ON BOARD THE S. S. LOONGWO, WUHU, April 23.

This has been an day on board the Locngwo. The coolies
idle

have been busy enough unloading cargo and loading other stuff
for up-river with a terrific shouting and din the whole day long.
The passengers, forced to remain aboard, idled about the deck,
reading and fretting at the delay.
The two tobacco merchants One, H. C. Felling,
left us here.
is remaining inWuhu. The
other, a chap from Boston named
Foley, is returning to Shanghai on the next boat, the Tuckwo,
which is due to sail downstream tomorrow, Sunday. Foley is
taking my dispatches to Shanghai where they are to be relayed.
There is no other way of getting them out from up here at
78 THEDRAGONSTIRS
present. Communications are impossible. Even if one could
get to the telegraph office safely, it is doubtful whether the mes-

sage would get through within three or four days. And then
itwould doubtless be subjected to the strictest censorship.
The first news of what is
going on around us came through
today in the form of a carbon copy of the American Pr,ess wire-
less kindly given us by the captain of the British cruiser here,

the Caradoc. He also told us the news of the ultimatum of the

Powers which, seems, has been handed Hankow. He was not

it

sure whether or not a similar document had been handed General

Chiang Kai-shek at Nanking. Furthermore, we heard that the

allies have given orders to their captains of the Yangtze patrol

to reply "with all they've got" to any further firing from either
shore. It seems they now intend to stop this playful halit of the

Chinese soldiers.
The Loongwo docked alongside the hulk about dawn, and we
were awakened to the amazing turmoil that only a small band
of Chinese coolies can make. The harder they work the more

they shout, these fellows. Beggars in sampans and one actually

in an oblong wooden tub with wooden shovels for oars swarmed
around the steamer, adding their shrill cries to the hubbub.
Above it all was an occasional shouting for all the world like
the noise heard on approaching a football stadium at home when
one is, however, still some blocks away from the game.
This, it turned out, was a sound made by companies of Can-
tonese soldiers drilling on the Bund, not a hundred yards from
our ship. The soldiers, whole companies of them, shouted their
officer's command in unison as they sought to execute the order.
Four or five companies were marching about drilling, and very

badly, too. Here and there on the green parade-ground others

singly, or in squads of four or six, stalked about doing the "goose-
"
step Or rather, a Cantonese version of that German exercise
for troops which was strange to observe. Most of them bent the
knee so that they gave the impression of a circus horse the one
that the ringmaster tells the local yokels will "now execute the
waltz."
The day has been perfect, clear, warm, not hot, with a cool
breeze blowing. Wuhu, like most of these river towns, lies
 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 79
stretched out all along the waterfront. Hills rise abruptly be-
hind the city, and on their tops fine foreign homes have been
built. These, I am told, are now occupied by Nationalist troops.
Foreigners do not live ashore and now even during the daytime
rarely go as far as the Bund. There are less than a dozen still

here. They live on launches or hulks alongside the Bund. An

armed guard protects them.
Wuhu is, in a way, a rather pretty little city. It has a
Chinese population of about 100,000 persons. In normal times,
there are perhaps 100 foreigners living here. The customs house,
now virtually idle, stands in the center of things on the Bund, a
clock on its tower tolling the hours. Below the clock now is a
great picture of the late Eh-. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Kuo-
mintang. The Bund and one of the avenues leading back toward
the hills are partially shaded by rows of trees,an unusual thing
in this part of the world. One seldom sees a tree anywhere along
the Yangtze to Hankow.
After (lunch) I went over to the hulk alongside which
tiffin

we were docked and talked with the shipping company agent

there His name is C. B. Wortley. He is a Britisher, as most of
these men are up here. J. Canim, of the Standard Oil, is still
here, and H. L. Mecklenburgh, a tobacco man, also an American,
is carrying on for the present. The Commissioner of Customs
is a Belgian, Baron de Cartier.
Wortley said that there has been no excitement here for some
time. He said, however, that a few days ago a number of sol-
diers and students came down from Hankow and started trouble.
"
Orders came from Nanking, from Chiang Kai-shek, I'm told,
to run these students out of here," Wortley said. "They have
been leaving as fast as possible ever since. I still see a few of
them around, agitators for the 'Bolshies/ You're taking some of
them on the Loongwo back to Hankow."
And so we are. There are a number of these so-called stu-
dents who came on board at Wuhu, down below. The captain
'
said they can't be prevented from coming aboard in what are

still, ostensibly at least, peace times. If they cause no trouble

they won't be molested, he said.

Scheduled to get under way at twelve noon and then at two
80 THE DRAGON STIRS
o'clock, the Loongwo finally pulled out at five o'clock. At the

western extremity of Wuhu, two Chinese gunboats lay at anchor,

steam up, flying the Cantonese flag. We did not dip our flag
this time, nor, to be sure, did they. The next stop is Kiukiang.
Without mishap, we should arrive late Sunday afternoon to-
morrow, that is by steaming all night. We are alone, without

convoy or accompanying merchantmen. Up to dark we saw no

soldiers. A few miles above Wuhu, on the south bank, we
passed a little village that has been thoroughly looted.
The brick
customs house, vacant, stared at us with blank eyes. Each
window and door frame had been torn out and carted away,

leaving a jagged outline of brick.

Yangtze River Series No. 6.

ON BOARD THE S. S LOONGWO, KIUKIANG, April

24. One of the paradoxes of this revolution in China occurred
here today. The Chinese Kuommtang foreign commissioner, a
man named Mr. Y. Z. Lieu, fleeing for his life from Kiukiang,
came on board the Loongivo and is
being given the safe passage
and sanctuary which he desires In other words, the foreigners
the British, American, Japanese and other warships up-river
are giving protection to an official of the government whose sol-
diers, responsible or not, have made it essential for the white man
to evacuate much of China.

He thoroughly appreciative And he declares that his party,

is

the Kuomintang moderates, want the foreigners to stay in China,

and he adds that the Nationalists are doing everything in their
power to make it safe for everybody including himself. He is

going to Hankow on the Loongivo because he cannot go any-

where else. He must flee from Kiukiang, for the radical ad-
herents are sending their troops there They are expected any
moment. The telegraph is useless, Mr. Lieu says, at least to him.
He has or no news of events outside this vicinity.
little

The Loongwo reached Kiukiang about four o'clock this after-

noon after an uneventful day. The customs launch came along-
side. We anchored in midstream because there was no room at

the hulk. The and American destroyers are alongside, one

British
of each. There also is a Japanese cruiser here and an American
 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 81

and a British gunboat The captain of the British warship Wild

Swan came on board with an armed guard. He scrutinized the
passports of the Russians we are transporting to Hankow and
then left.
Businessmen who came on board for a brief visit said that
the Chinese on shore are nonplused. They don't know which
way to turn, it is just on the border between
seems, for Kiukiang
the Red and Moderate influences in the Kuomintang. Gen-
the
eral Chiang Kai-shek's men were still here when we left. But
they may not stay. The Reds are expected momentarily, and
the others will probably retreat down-river until they find re-
enforcements. The dozen or so foreigners are living in houses

along the Bund. Each, I am told, has a bag packed and is ready
to make a run for a warship alongside at a moment's notice. Busi-

ness is virtually nil, the representatives of the various

companies
remaining to clean up back accounts and to keep in touch until
the day, if any, when they may expect to find conditions more

nearly normal.
There has been little or no fighting here in the last few days.
We got under way at five o'clock, off for Hankow, our next stop.
Mr. Lieu, Foreign Commissioner in Kiu-
until this afternoon

kiang, is being given every courtesy on board. He has been placed

at the captain's table in the dining saloon, where in his halting

English this evening he eagerly told us of his desire to be friendly

toward foreigners, and the desire of the Kuomintang to be the
same. His is a rather pitiful tale, but he clings to the silver
lining which he believes, he says, is behind the present dark <^oud
of dissension in the Nationalist Party.
"We must put out the Communists,*' Mr. Lieu told us. "This
split had to come. They have no troops. We will win out and
then we can continue our drive on the North. But/' he re-
peated, "we had to break with the Communists in our party. It
had to come." There was in his attitude a "Don't you see?"
plea.
Later, he came along to my cabin where I could talk at length
with him about his plans and those of his party, and we talked
for an hour about the situation, which, he declares, does not
mean the breakdown of the Nationalist movement, but which, it
82 THE DRAGON STIRS
appears to me, looks bad for adherents to the theories of the late
Dr. Sun Yat-sen. The disintegration is apparent on all sides.
Whether Chiang Kai-shek and his loyal political advisers and
friends can patch up the floundering ship of a semi-state is con-

jectural.
"I think we can/' said Commissioner Lieu. 'The Communists
at Hankow have no troops to speak of. General Chiang will
surround Hankow, I think, as he did Shanghai. Then he will

capture it again. There is no doubt about it. He will, I think,

bring the south to help him accomplish this. Once

men up from
he wins a victory, he will have no trouble. The under-officers
in the Communist forces are not with the Reds. They are for
our country," he said earnestly, with a touch of the dramatic,
"not for one man or for the Communists. That is true.
"General Teng Yen-tah, head of the Political Bureau in

Hankow, has no power. He has no troops. General Tang Shen-

tse, the Hunan leader, has a big force, but he is not for the Com-
munists. He
has been persuaded to act independently and refuse
to accept orders from General Chiang Kai-shek. He only wants
to increase his own force. He is a very foolish and selfish man.
He is commander of the Eighth Army, and has many troops.

But he is neither Communist nor Kuomintang. He is, I think,

independent a selfish man."
The Commissioner said that General Chiang Kai-shek would
bring up forces from the south. I asked him from where. He
said from Kweichow, Fukien and Kwantung, around Canton, his

stronghold.
These men, who, he said, number scores of thousands in all,
would, he admitted, have to walk, in the main, to Hankow. That
will take a long time. The country is mountainous and wild, and
it will be hot soon. A march across that vast area will be a

trying military maneuver. It might be done. But it is like

marching a band of ill-paid, badly trained young fellows, mere

boys most of them, from Arizona to Michigan, more or less,
across the Rocky Mountains. It's a job that will prove hard to
do. The Commissioner said it would take time, but refused to
be downcast (The Chinese know "time" is always present and

available, though one man's life-span be brief.)

 IN THE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 83
As we talked, the crazy quilt picture of China slowly ap-
peared. The Nationalists, split among themselves, fighting for
control of their own party against the Communists' influence, are
one part of the picture. There are enough patches in that half
to makethe task of knitting them together in anything like a co-
ordinate pattern almost futile and certainly discouraging. And
on the North of this Yangtze are other factions, united for the
moment against the Nationalist movement. Marshal Chang
Chung-chang and his ally, Marshal Sun Chuan-fang of Shanghai,
are said to be somewhere in the near vicinity of Nanking and
Hankow. Marshal Sun has not held a very high head since his
ignominious defeat and cry for assistance in Chekiang Province,
and at Shanghai. He can hardly be expected to feel thoroughly
safe with Marshal Chang, an enormous old bandit from Shan-
tung. Chang's history reads like a Wild West tale, or a yellow-
back that might be entitled From Coolie to Marshal the Tale of
a Successjul Warrior. He certainly worked his way up in his
chosen profession, from a wharf coolie through the essential
stages of banditry to the military control of Shantung and now
the temporary ally of Marshal Chang Tso-lin, of Mukden and
Peking.
Marshal Wu and faded, a very
Pei-fu, once powerful, is old
small bit of the picture right now, and one, everybody seems to
believe, who will not return to his erstwhile brilliance and power.
He is content with the quiet life of a poet and scholar. He has
gained a reputation for scholarship and as a poet, chiefly, his
critics affirm, because he is one of the few militarists of the old

school who could even read or write. He is somewhere in north-

ern Honan, it seems, content to let his successors in militarism
carry on the ancient feudal pastime of the Chinese.
Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang in Shensi with perhaps 100,000 men,
is expected to remain with General Chiang Kai-shek. Commis-
sioner Lieu fervidly averred that the widely known "Christian
General" will never go back on Chiang. He has sent a delegate
to the Nanking Conference, Mr. Lieu pointed out, and his army
is to be a vital factor in the taking of Peking some day. Mr.
Lieu was not sure when that victory could be expected to occur.
Things are too unsettled.
84 THE DRAGON STIRS
The Commissioner was bitter against Russia. He said the

Soviet is trying to get at the Powers through China, using this

nation as a catspaw. "They don't want a war in their own
country/' he said. "They desire to stir up one here, to have the
field of their battle with the capitalistic Powers, as they call them,

in China. Thus, Russia is not harmed. I don't think they will

send an army to China," he added in response to a query.
He said he had advised General Chiang Kai-shek to accept aid
from Japan, and to cooperate with Japan. That brought in
another part of the picture of disintegrated China, namely, Mar-
shal Chang Tso-lin. I said that if Chiang Kai-shek worked with

Japan he would have to work with Marshal Chang, too. But

would never come
the Commissioner, a true Cantonese, said that
to pass.
"General Chiang Kai-shek will never shake hands with Mar-
1 '

shal Chang Tso-lin, he said. "Why? Well, because they have

been enemies too long. They can't work together in China
But Japan must work with China; and if we take all of China,
we will have to work with Japan. That is natural. Japan is so
close, it isnecessary to her existence. America and Britain are
too far away. We would be friendly, of course, to everybody."
So that part of the picture, or the crazy quilt (to stick to
the figure), will not fit in with the rest. Hence, the unity of
China may have to wait again for a while, Mr. Lieu admitted.
Then there is Yunnan, that vast province on the border of
Burma where brigands and opium smugglers abound. That is a
frayed edge of the quilt which causes no little trouble to the
toilers. Yunnan, it will be recalled, a few months ago had a
revolution all on its own, and now instead of the military gov-
ernor in charge, there is a Citizens' Committee of Five running

things. They say it isn't Communistic, exactly. That it is a

''commission form" of government. Yet it has a certain crimson

tinge to it which won't wash away Furthermore, Yunnan is a

wild country, sparsely settled and infested with bandits. It is
another problem which these toilers must face who would unite
this China of today a feudal state whose people are
admittedly
centuries behind the times in thought, culture, education and in
their dealings with one another. Their warlords still, one must
 IN TTIE VALLEY OF THE YANGTZE 85

fear, are similar to the feudal barons of Europe in the Middle

Ages whose loyalty was, as the Chinese is today, none too
certain an affair. Itcould be bought by the highest bidder. So
can that of the average Chinese military chieftain. These
things I said or implied. Yet the Commissioner remained
optimistic.
We discussed names and places. The Commissioner said that
Hunan Province is Communism. He said that there
the hotbed of

they demand that everybody who has more than $200 must divide
it with his fellow-men. This seems to be the usual report on
Hunan. I heard recently that they have tried out dividing up
the land and instituting all the Communistic for Communal)
f'^rms of government.

General Chen Chien, in command of the Sixth Army, has gone

to Hankow. He was in Nanking. He commanded the armies that
captured and looted that ill-fated city on "March 24. Commissioner
Lieu thinks General Chen will stay in Hankow. Chien Tsu-min,
late commander of the Kweichow army, is dead. He was exe-
cuted at Chanteh, in western Hunan, at the order of GeneralTang
Shen-tse, now The Commissioner thought, therefore,
at Hankow.
that General Chien's men, some 35,000, would be loyal to General

Chiang Kai-shek, sworn enemy of the man who killed their chief.
General Teng Yen-tah is a "very bad man/' the Commissioner
declared. He is the recognized "Reddest of the Reds" at Hankow:
he and George Hsu-chien, Minister of Justice.

Eugene Chen? The Commissioner was not sure where he

Chen might like to get back
stands but seemed inclined to think
with the Moderates. He had heard that Chen, the Hankow For-

eign Minister, wants to get to Shanghai, but the Radicals are hold-
ing him virtually a prisoner. He thinks that Chen "might be all
right," but it isn't certain.

"Don't tell Eugene Chen/' the Commissioner said as we said

goodnight, "that I am on the Loongwo" I promised I would not

breathe a word of his presence in Hankow. It would not be

healthy. We are due before noon tomorrow, April 25.

This exciting trip up-river to Hankow ended on April 25, 1927, as

scheduled. I landed in some trepidation but was not molested. The
86 THE DRAGON STIRS
most anguish which I suffered was during a mile walk along the Bund
to the United States Consulate-General, to meet Col. Frank P. Lockhart,
our genial Consul-General there. He put me up at the Consulate-
General for my stay, which lasted several weeks. The ''anguish*' was
due to the heat not to bands of insulting Chinese on murder bent.
 RED RULE AT HANKOW

dust, fine, hot, thick as a rug, lay heavily over the macad-

RED amized sections of the Bund

only in a few spots, stretched
at Hankow. The street,
slender length two miles and
its
paved

more along the Yangtze. No breeze stirred, but an occasional hurtling

motorcar spurted handfuls of dirt over pedestrians and disappeared in
a dull red cloud. These rare automobiles usually bore on their hoods
the Nationalist flag, also predominantly red, with its white star in a
corner of blue.
The dull red clouds were stifling. Morning was sultry even on the
twenty-fifth of April. Hankow was hot. The heat wave was premature.
But Hankow's climate is similar to the middle-south of the United
States. Its summers are long and sticky and fetid. The city is strik-
ingly similar to any river port along the Mississippi River, below St.
Louis. If you could exchange the Chinese coolies for Negroes, the
towns would almost appear identical. The coolies shout and "hee-haw"
as they carry their burdens on bamboo poles or piled high on their

sturdy broad shoulders and necks, just as Negroes shout and sing as
they work. Hankow, to be sure, is a little more cosmopolitan. But
there is a striking similarity except for one thing: recurrent wars.
Even that was not noticeable as one disembarked from a river
steamer and walked along the Bund. It was noticeable, to be sure, that
an abnormal situation prevailed in 1927. The chief reason was the pres-
ence of some thirty or more foreign warships in the river there. On the
Yangtze's rising, rumpled waters floated a remarkable collection of fight-
ing craft of half a dozen nations there to see that foreign lives and prop-
erty were protected, regardless of what Chinese faction held the lerri-
tory which includes Wuhan.
Wuhan is the name given the three cities that have been built up
around the joining of the Han and Yangtze Rivers at this point. On the
southern bank of the Yangtze is Wuchang; immediately opposite is
87
88 THE DRAGON STIRS
Hankow and ; just to the west of Hankow is Hanyang. The three cities
have a total population of perhaps two million. Wuhan is the "gate-

way to the West" of China. It controls the interior markets by vir-

tue of its position on the Yangtze. There are still almost no rail-
roads in the rich central and western provinces, and goods must flow

along the river routes. The Yangtze in modern times is what the
Mississippi was fifty to seventy-five years ago. Fortunes have been
made and are still being made in the river transport business in the

Yangtze valley.
Hankow is the principal port of the three cities. There foreign
interests are centered. The Bund is lined with large modern build-

ings which house foreign commercial firms, including magnificent

structures for the banks. The foreign consulates-general are along
the Bund. These buildings all face the river. The river side of the

a parkway lined with trees and benches, bor-

street is given over to

dering a broad sidewalk where one may promenade in search of air

on humid nights.
There is one big difference between the present and the "good
old days," they say. Formerly the Bund's parkway was reserved en-
tirely for the use of foreigners. Now it is alive with Chinese, chiefly

coolies, lolling in the shade of its green trees. The Bund was built by
the foreigners, each nation with a concession doing its share. The
British Concession is at the far end of the Bund that is, farthest up-
stream; the old Russian Concession is next; the French after that;
then, the oldGerman Concession and at the lower end, the Japanese
;

Concession. This last usually cut off by barbed wire barricades

is

and sandbags so that it remains free from Chinese loafers.

On leaving the Loongwo, I was advised by the Captain and others
not to take a rickshaw. There had been reports of trouble with the
coolies, who, it was said, had been making exorbitant charges and had
been insulting on all occasions. Hence I plodded along the Bund to
the American Consulate-General, a mile or so from where our steamer
docked. Later, I found that there was little or no reason for endur-

ing this discomfort. The

coolies were not then in the least
obstrep-
erous. They charged the usual low prices and were inclined to assist

any foreigner cheerfully. The change from a week prior to my ar-

rival was described as remarkable.

This, in fact, was the subject which all

foreigners were discussing
 RED RULE AT HANKOW 89

that April 25, 1927. The American Consul-General, Col. Frank Lock-
hart, was the first to mention it. I asked whether it were safe to ride
in rickshaws and he said that he thought it was adding that the
change which had come over the coolies was amazing. He was at a
loss to explain it to himself satisfactorily, but was inclined to believe,

as most foreigners were, that the change was caused by the presence
of the numerous foreign warships in the river. The attitude of the
coolies apparently changed chiefly because of government orders to
them to be kind to foreigners. The government worked through the
Labor Unions and seemed to be in complete control, as far as the
workers were concerned.
Most of the Americans still in Hankow were residing in the Amer-
ican Consulate, using cots in the rooms. The Consul-General offered
me his hospitality. I accepted. It seemed the better part of valor
the hotels in Hankow, like hotels in many a river town, were far from
luxurious. And at that time there was no assurance that they would
be too safe.

From the Consulate, I proceeded to the American flagship Isabel

to call on Rear-Admiral H. H. Hough, then in charge of the Ameri-
can Navy patrol in the Yangtze. After paying my respects, I with-
drew and met the captain and officers of the flagship. I was given use

of the Isabel's launch to get my luggage off the Loongwo and trans-
port it to the dock. I had some slight difficulty in getting the bags
transported from the dock to the Consulate. No wharf coolie was in
sight, and one of the sailors handed the bags over to a coaling coolie.
Innocent of any breach of coolie etiquette,
proceeded ahead of the
I

fellow toward the Bund, across the wooden pier that extends out over
the foreshore. Looking around at his sudden outcry, I discovered be-
fore we had gone yards that he had been beset by three or four
fifty

rough looking characters who seemed to be insisting that he release

my baggage. Alone, unable to speak the language and, for the mo-

ment, unable to understand the cause of the argument, I could do

nothing. From had heard, I was ready to believe we

the stories I
were being robbed on the shore in broad daylight.
I shoved one of the attackers aside, finally, after he had struck

my coolie frequently on the face and head with the flat of his hand,

and told the fellow to continue, brandishing my stick the while. It

failed to work. They returned to the fray, and one motioned that he
90 THE DRAGON STIRS
wanted to carry the bags, pointing to my coolie and then to the coal-

ing junk. The fellow I had was smirched with and appar-
coal dust

ently had been unloading the junk. It seemed that that was his job
his "pigeon" as they say in the vernacular there and he could not do
anything else even he should want to be enterprising. If he did, he
if

cut some other coolie out of a bowl of rice. I paid the first chap

twenty cents Mex. (or about eight cents in U. S. currency at the

time). When two others grabbed my two bags, each taking one, I
decided, rather than suggest that one take both of them, to let them
have their way. At the Consulate a block away I gave them a Mexi-
can dollar to fight over and they grinned their way back into oblivion.
It was probably three or four times their usual wage for that sort of

job, but getting rid of the pair of them without an "incident" was
worth the forty cents it cost me. I was told later that hitting or

shoving one of these fellows a week earlier would have been almost
like signing one's own death warrant.

There were only two or three places to eat in Hankow at that

time. The most popular was the U. S. Navy Y. M. C. A., a block
from the American Consulate and just off the Bund. The hotels
there were two of them were serving food again, and the Hankow
Club was running its dining-room for members and guests. I had

tiffin with a man from the Consulate and two Standard Oil men at
the Y. M. C. A. The afternoon was spent in making appointments
with Hankow's officials, including the Minister for Foreign Affairs,
Mr. Eugene Chen, and that remarkable adviser, Comrade Mikal Boro-
din. He was the man behind most of the Kuomintang Revolution
the "brains" of the whole show.
The whole day was extraordinarily quiet so far as warfare or un-
restwas concerned, and the wild reports about Hankow's "tenseness"
were absurd. The city, aside from the warships and the occasional
Nationalist soldier seen on the streets, was as quiet then as Detroit.
Tea at the Hankow Race Club was another surprise. Here, as the
sun went down, I sat with Bruno Schwartz, of New York, then pub-
lisher of the Hankow
Herald, and listened to music by the club band.
There were scores of persons sitting on the broad lawn before the
clubhouse, chatting as in everyday life
anywhere, war the farthest
thing from their minds. A number of women, too, were present,
mostly Germans, and a few French. I was still impressed then with
 RED RULE AT HANKOW 91

the idea that Hankow was dangerous, and inclined to believe that
these people who refused to take it seriously were sitting on the edge
of a volcano. But Mr. Schwartz disabused my mind of such illusions.
The other women in Hankow were the Russians, including the

dancing girls of the cabarets. The cabaret system of Hankow was a

unique thing. Not that it isn't still to be found anywhere in China's

large cities but to find it there at a time like that was utterly odd.
It was the climax to a grotesque day not at all like the one I had

expected to find. After dinner, with two sound and respectable busi-
ness men who were not at all of the "tired'' type, I rounded out the
first day's education in the ways of that city by a visit to the cabarets.
There were probably half a dozen in one block. The orchestras

pounded out music which in the gaudily lighted street blended into
one raucous howl of jazz. The cabarets were, after all, merely dance
halls, though in palmier days they had had entertainers. The best
description, I think, of the street and the dance halls in 1927 is to be
found in a comparison with the typical motion picture "set" depicting
the dance halls of America's Wild West in the days of '49. There
was no pretense of finery. Only one place had even an attempt at it,
and here one found vari-colored electric lights stuck in a line around
the walls about ten feet above the floor. It gave a weird effect, gaudy,
a burlesque on the Christmas spirit.
The girls, Russians all, were a clever They danced with
lot.

sailors in the afternoon, and at night with men ranks and posi-
of all

tions and nationalities who for one reason or another had come to
those places. My guides pointed out to me diplomats, captains of
ships, heads of large foreign firms, lawyers, doctors, bankers, Chinese
officials. It was one of the most bizarre sights to be seen anywhere

in the world. Officials of foreign governments mingled with offi-

of the Hankow
cials government in those dives; Communists from
Moscow danced side by side with the men they were seeking to force
out of China; young girls, always Russians, laughed at them and
danced with them all, demanding frequently, "You buy me a small
bottle wine, pliss?"

The "wine" was usually a pint of vile imitation champagne which

was sold to the men at $8 a bottle, Mex., the girl getting $1 as her
commission. If she danced, she was given a ticket worth forty cents,
Mex. Everything in China is still on this "silver basis," originally
92 THE DRAGON STIRS
imported from Mexico to aid trade. The girls did not become wealthy
but they earned a living in this fashion. Some of them, I was told,

learned many things which enabled them to enhance their usual in-

come.
Some, the whisperings said, were spies. In these cafes which
formed so much a part of Hankow's life during those strange days,
they were supposed to learn much from foreigners and to retail their
knowledge to certain channels where it could prove useful. The un-
witting victim often let something drop that had value in the muddled
scheme of cross-purposes in the Orient. Whether their spy scare was
true, I do not know. It was highly possible, at least. But certainly
there were songs of Moscow sung often in those dance halls of Han-
kow; and the red dust that lay in the narrow, rickshaw-cluttered
"Street of the Cabarets" was often swirled into angry eddies by the

hurtling motor cars of the Bolsheviki.

I interviewed Eugene Chen the next day. Everybody interviewed
Mr. Chen then. He was Foreign Minister in the radical Hankow
Government and was, therefore, a major source of information about
China's actions, desires and reactions. He was the "official spokes-
man*' of the Hankow Nationalist Administration. All paths, there-

fore, for the horde of men who flocked from all over the world into
Hankow and out again, led to his busy door.
The Foreign Minister was occupied with the mechanics of a revolu-
tion. He sought as a member of the Cabinet to run that section of
China then under Hankow's control; and Chen was worried at that

time by a crisis within the Kuomintang, the split which, for a while,
divided the Nationalist forces. However, occupied with these things
and the possible necessity of replying to another Note from the Powers
on the "Nanking Incident," Mr. Chen sat for an hour and told of his
conception of the aims and aspirations of the Kuomintang Revolution.
He pleaded for "sanity among the powers" in their attitude toward

China. He hoped that the Powers would not blockade the Yangtze.
He did not deny that they could, but said that China hoped the Powers
t(
would refrain from that sort of action. I don't think that this 'will

happen," he said, "unless the world has gone mad." Yet, he won-
dered about the thirty or more foreign warships in Hankow then.
"If they blockade the Yangtze," he said, "we still have rice and

peanut oil. We shall continue to eat and to have lamps. And, after
 RE D R U LE AT HAX K W 93

all, we do not sit up nights and read very much." He smiled. "We
will, I think, get along. But I hope most sincerely that that does not

happen."
Eugene Chen, a man nervously energetic, sank back into his blue
plush chair and regarded me, awaiting the next query. He was a
rather slight man, perhaps fifty years old then, his black hair shot
with gray, his thin hands gesticulating in emphasis or explanation of
his remarks. Journalist and temporary statesman of the new China,
his was a pleasant personality. One might not agree with his opin-
ions, his views, the activities of the men with whom he was allied in
seeking to unite China under Nationalism but his personality on ;
first

acquaintance was certainly not against him.

"The Nationalist revolution will continue as planned/' he said in

reply to my next question. ''We will not permit the defection of

Chiang Kai-shek to stop us. We will deal with him later. In the
meantime we plan to proceed with our drive to the north. I think

you will find something interesting happening in the next few weeks.
I do not say months, but weeks. We already have the lower half, or
more, of Honan Province. Chang Tso-lin's armies hold but a scant

section on the north. We will soon control all of Honan.

"Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang is with us. He will not stay with
Chiang Kai-shek. He is now in Shensi. Our forces will combine
and drive Chang Tso-lin back into Manchuria. It will not be long.
A few weeks. Interesting developments are at hand. We originally

planned to proceed on Peking via Hankow. The split in the party has
caused a temporary delay. Now, we are on the march."

_Chen said that the breach with Chiang Kai-shek had been long
expected. The plan of the revolution, he said, never had been to take
*"5fiangha"i" or Nanking in 1927. First, he said, they wanted to get to
Peking inland. Nanking in particular had, the Minister said earnest-

ly, forever been, a Nemesis, a city of ill omen to revolutions. But

Chiang Kai-shek turned against advices from the Government. He
called Chiang a "rebel and a militarist of the old school," out for

"personal gain and glory." "The split," Chen insisted, "is final, there
is no doubt of it. We
will deal with Chiang Kai-shek when once we

get Peking. He has only 30,000 men at the most, and they will be

kept busy with the Northern troops. We don't fear their attacking

Hankow/'
94 THE DRAGON STIRS
These figures, of course, varied extraordinarily from figures given
earlier that spring by General Chiang Kai-shek's adherents. The
Nanking block asserted that Hankow had few men. It was impos-
sible to count them, so I can but relate what each side declared then.
In 1927 one could only await developments to determine which side
was correct. Chen, of course, lost out, and had to flee later that same
year but he could not foresee those events then.
One reason the Minister said the Government had opposed taking

Shanghai until later was the danger of conflict with foreign troops
there. He said that the holding of Shanghai by the Powers with
7
force was against "the principles of Nationalism' in China; that it

was "an intolerable and a "challenge to China's sov-

situation,"

ereignty." Hence, the troops must go, Chen said, and with the
Nationalists in control they must, to be true to their cause, demand
that the troops depart. They did make their demand, but the troops
remained.
He said Chiang Kai-shek had disobeyed orders in taking Shang-
hai, and his Government in Hankow was not responsible for what
might occur next. The matter of the foreign Settlement and the
French Concession there he felt would "have to await the time when
Hankow controls that part of China, as well as Peking."
"The foreign Powers defeat their own end in sending troops to

China," Chen added. "The presence of those troops has done more
to arouse the people of China against foreign imperialism than all our
propaganda ever could have hoped to do. It means China is not free.
No nation that has its country virtually run by foreigners is free.
The super-government of China has been the Diplomatic Corps at
Peking. In Shanghai, of course, there is the local government in
the Settlement. Its duty is to police the city. I call it a scavenger
government it keeps things clean."
The United States, Chen said, was making a great mistake in

being, as he saw it, misled by the British into following their lead in
China. Until America sent troops out to Shanghai, he said, the
Chinese had looked upon the United States as a friend. However,
now that she had joined Britain in using force, he said it was diffi-
cult to continue to maintain "our traditional friendship with the Amer-
ican people." Chen was born in Trinidad, and was a British subject
but he denounced Great Britain.
 RED RULE AT HANKOW 95
Chen emphatically that the Hankow Government was not
said
Communistic. He denied reports which were common in Shanghai,
that the principles of the Kuomintang in Hankow were being colored
red.

"We are just now tackling in the Hankow Government the eco-
nomic questions facing us," the Foreign Minister said. "We are
advising the workers that it is best to better their position gradually

and not seek to obtain at once a 100 per cent increase in wages. Ours
is a workers' and peasants' revolution. They have worked for many
generations at wages too low almost to permit them to exist. If a

man gets sick and is out of work, he and his whole family must starve.
That is not right. We want to change that, and we think the workers
are entitled to better treatment.
"The labor unions themselves are taking responsibility of control-

ling the workers. Labor leaders are in control of the situation. They
are advising the workers to go slow and take gradual increases.
"On the farms, things are different. In Hunan, it is true we have
tried the experiment of dividing up land. A man will be a better
citizen if he is a land owner. He will fight for his land. Hence, we
are trying it out to see how it works. That, no doubt, is where these
rumors about our Communistic principles originate. China never will
be Communistic. We will not do away with private ownership of
property. The fact that the peasant owns land will, we believe, make
him a better citizen."
Chen said that foreigners in China were comparatively safe. He
said that they were as safe in Hankow as in New York. Hence, he
was bitter against warships being sent there. "They only aggravate the
Chinese/' he said. He added that they were not needed. This
brought up the "Nanking Incident," and the position of foreigners in
China in general.
"Foreigners in China are, as a rule, safe from any harm," Chen
avowed. "In the case of Nanking, we do not accept guilt for what-
ever happened during the taking of that city. course, pay We will, of

for any damage done to the American Nanking. Consulate at

"But the charge that we deliberately organized the attack on for-
eigners there we do most certainly deny. The only way to settle the
matter, as we see it, is to have an investigation. That is the way
these things are done in any other country. Why not in China?"
96 THE DRAGON STIRS
Chen again referred to statements, made by the Nat'onalists, that

many thousands of Northern troops were still in Nanking when the

Cantonese captured the city. He implied that these men were more
likely the ones guilty of the looting. was pointed out that Ameri-
It

cans and British coming from Nanking had sworn the attack was by
men in Nationalist uniforms, chiefly from Hunan Province. Chen
then said the only way to settle the affair was to have an international
committee look into it. The Minister said China wanted foreigners
to remain. He said also, however, that there was a revolution in

China and that it

might at times be dangerous. If foreigners thought
it too dangerous, they should leave, he said; but he emphasized that
4<
the Chinese were not anti-foreign and do not want the foreigners
to depart."

"We want them to remain," Chen added. "We are not fighting
the foreigners. We are determined, however, to do away with the

Imperialistic policies of foreign governments toward our country. We

want our country back. We want the unequal treaties abolished, along
with extra-territoriality. We are ready to prove ourselves able to
handle our nation now. We'd like the chance/'
Comrade Mikal Borodin was the dominating figure in the Hankow
Government during its rocket-like career. He was dynamic head of
the Russian Advisorate and directed the more radical branch of the

Kuomintang Revolution. He controlled Hankow's regime for a time

in the days when it was at its peak, and the Reds ruled in China.

His word was law, and he was far from silent. He made few speeches
or public appearances but he was the "power behind the throne."
;

It was too good to last; and when the wheel of fortune turned

abruptly against him, Borodin bowed to the inevitable and fled over-
land through Mongolia to Siberia and made the long trek to Moscow.
His career of power in Asia was brief but spectacular and in all ways
absolute. It was this last fact that caused his fall Chinese led by
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek saw the omnipotence of Moscow as

exemplified by Borodin, its agent ; so they threw him out. He became

an editor in Moscow.
At the height of his mission in Hankow, Borodin was a world
figure. He was a revolutionary from his youth, and even before the

Revolution in Russia, had been forced to flee his native land.

JI917
He went to the United States before the World War and attended
 RED RULE AT HANKOW 97

school at Valparaiso University in Indiana. He met his wife, a

school teacher, in Chicago, and after their marriage he conducted a
School of Political Economy. His name is Berg, I believe, and he
and his wife ran the school under that name. He returned to Russia
at the time of the 1917 revolution. Eventually, he took the name
Borodin (or was Berg assumed ?) and was given the mission in China.

Naturally, I wanted to see him in Hankow. The appointment was

arranged by Rayna Prohme, a dynamic young woman from Chicago,
then editing The People's Tribune, organ of the Red rule. She was
the wife of William Prohme, another journalist of rare intelligence
who at that time was head of the Nationalist News Agency a propa-
ganda organization in Shanghai. Both are now dead. Rayna (as
everyone came to know this quite amazing girl with her shock of
flaming red hair) died some years ago in Moscow of overwork and
brain fever; Bill died in 1935 in Honolulu, after suffering for years
from a pulmonary illness. Despite political differences, all who met
Rayna and Bill were influenced by their personalities and their clarity
of vision.

In Hankow, Rayna was very much alive and arranged my entree

to the great man's sanctum that week in late April with no apparent
trouble. She said: ''You want to see Borodin? Okay, I'll see what
can be done." I got a note the third day I was in Hankow, telling
me that the meeting had been arranged. Borodin had offices on the
second floor of a building in the old German Concession (seized by
the Chinese in the World War). After waiting half an hour, I was
ushered into his presence He was about fifty, tall, heavy but well
with a thick mane of black hair. He had a flowing black mus-
built,

tache, setting off a face marked by an aquiline nose and candid dark
eyes. While I was there, Borodin strode restlessly about, sucking a

pipe. He spoke volubly, and in perfect English. He was an imposing

figure, living up to his reputation for sagacity as well as fearlessness.

I asked Borodin how he happened to join the Chinese revolutionary

movement.
'The late Dr. Sun Yat-sen invited me to come to China four years

ago," he said. "I am in their revolution as an individual though

naturally I have my own ideas for conducting it for the good of their

people. I have no connection with Moscow."

98 THE DRAGON STIRS
Borodin said that there could be no truly Communist State in
China at that time.

"If the Communist Party of China were being named today," he

said, "it could not be called Communist. I have found it is impossible

to communize the Chinese simply because it is not possible to com-

munize poverty. The Chinese peoples are different from the Russians
or the Americans. It might be possible to communize the United

States, where you have vast wealth and property can be communal,
or owned by the community. JJutChina is poverty-stricken. Com-
munism (in its pure sense) is impossible. Hence, our theories are
changed. We
seek, of course, to aid the plight of laborers and the
fanner, or peasant, classes."
The split which was to overthrow him so swiftly was explained
from his point of view.
<4
We
broke with Nanking, or General Chiang Kai-shek, for two

major reasons," he said. "First, Chiang began the Northern Expedi-

tion from Canton in 1926 with 50,000 men. He reached the Yangtze
Valley with 400,000 troops. In that vast army there were scores of
rabble who joined to save their necks. Their officers were not in-
spired with the purposes of this revolution they influenced Chiang
Kai-shek to seize Shanghai, solely to fill their own pockets with gold.
"Second, General Chiang Kai-shek came under the influence of
the merchants and compradore class in Shanghai. He got a few mil-
lion dollarsfrom them and agreed to hold down labor so the greedy
might continue to wax fat and wealthier. Chiang was also swayed by
the foreign banks and is lost in the shadows of those iniquitous

temples of the money-changers in Shanghai. Hence, as far as the

Chinese movement, or revolution, is concerned, he is doomed."
But for once, Borodin erred. He, not Chiang, was the doomed
man, as a revolutionary in China.

He explained his attitude toward the foreign Powers.

"If the Powers see in Chiang Kai-shek a second Marshal Chang
Tso-lin they will try to throw China back into chaos, and anti-foreign-
ism will continue indefinitely. This revolution will not end there.
These peoples are aroused. Momentarily stopped, they will continue
toward their destiny blindly at times, yes; but they will continue
toward the goal we now desire. It is inevitable. To aid them and
us, the Powers should now recognize the Nationalist Government
 RED RULE AT HANKOW 99

here in Hankow. It is for your government in Washington, for any

foreign government, to make up its mind which is China's true
gov-
ernment, best equipped to lead these peoples toward achievement of
their goal. If they cannot make up their minds, turmoil will persist

and present conditions in China will remain indefinitely.

"The United States seems to be growing as imperialistic as Great
Why back any factions? Well,
Britain has been for the past century.

why do you back one Nicaragua and not the other? You
side in

support factions there simply because you have special interests in

Central America, and all Latin America. You are an imperialistic
nation."

.The man insisted that the purpose of the Chinese revolution was
primarily to aid laborers and men and women on the farms. These
social problems must be solved, he said, before the Chinese peoples
could become united. The Kuomintang Revolution, as viewed
by him,
was a farm reliefprogram a joint Farmer-Labor Movement, in its
highest sense. His desire seemed to be to aid the Chinese in their
"industrial revolution," similar to the one in England and America of
the past hundred years; to aid them to become an industrial nation,
and thus offer a greater market for farm products of every sort.

Thus the yellow man could emerge as a power on earth.

Borodin invited me to lunch at his apartment a day or so later.

At that time he put out a feeler toward an American loan to the

Hankow Government, emphasizing and reiterating that China was

getting no money from Moscow at that time. I had asked if Moscow

would not be a better prospect, or if they were not getting revenue

there.

"Not one cent," Borodin said, "absolutely not a cent. The Soviet
Union always rather economical.
is We
are spending around $200,-

000,000 Mex. a year here in this revolution. We can get this from
various taxes, of course, in time." He insisted Hankow was "good
for the hire of the money," and certainly would meet her foreign
debts. "We desire to stabilize our credit abroad," he said. "We have
no idea of renouncing our debts, or those we may incur.

"Furthermore, you were not stopped by the bogey of 'security' in

the case of Europe during the World War. What security did Amer-
ica have then? None! With a loan, we could refund China's na-
tional debt; and we would pay it off in a certain period of time, say
100 THE DRAGON STIRS
half a century the same as France, or any other nation. America
need have no fear of lack of security here."
From later history concerning international obligations, it would
appear that Borodin's opinions were not so far-fetched as they seemed
in Hankow then. But nothing ever came of that visionary scheme in
China; at least, not for the Communist-controlled regime far up the

Yangtze.
As one vital result of the more lenient attitude toward foreign-
ers, the tiny colony of foreigners carried on life in Hankow virtually
the same as before the Chinese struggle. Aside from the fact that
business stood almost idle, the men and the few women went about
their daily life unmolested. Various clubs were open. Bars were al-

ways nearly full. At noon and in the evening the French Club and
the Hankow Club were the most popular. The beautiful Hankow
Race Club had its usual tea-dances, with a foreign orchestra each
evening. The golf course was in use and the tennis courts occupied
but the whole thing reminded me of a skeleton strutting about. In
normal times that vast club is the meeting-place of 200 or 300 persons
each afternoon. In those days, perhaps a score or so gathered there,
the only women being Germans. There were 70 Americans still in
Hankow, 100 British, about 500 Japanese and 250 Germans. Japanese
business reopened a few days later.
The Japanese made the firmest stand and refused Hankow's de-
mand for the removal of their armed guards as well as their barbed
wire and sandbags. The Japanese Concession was reminiscent of
Shanghai, and passes were required to enter. The rest of Hankow,
however, was wide open. Nationalist soldiers and officers strutted
about the streets everywhere. Thousands of foreign sailors aboard
warships in the harbor were not permitted shore leave for weeks be-
cause of an "incident" in the Japanese Concession. Banks remained
closed, but eventually the men in the Hankow Government found a
way to permit them to operate at a profit, despite the temporary silver

embargo.
The
only foreign newspaper there then was The People's Tribune,
published by the government. However, The Hankow Herald re-
opened with its first new issue the next Friday morning after my
arrival. There was no stopping Bruno Schwartz, the editor and pub-
lisher of this wide-awake American daily. The reopening of the banks,
 RED RULE AT HAN ROW 101

as well as the return of many Japanese, indicated a general lessening

of the tension, at least temporarily. Soon it was no longer dangerous
to walk about at
night anywhere, except the native city. The
in

French Concession was not touched, Annamites policing the streets as

they did in Shanghai. The movies were running nightly. Foreigners,
especially Americans, moved back into their homes. The American
Consulate now had only myself as guest in a barracks-style quarters
on the third floor. I slept on an iron cot shipped there from Kenosha,

Wisconsin.
The government-owned telegraph lines were operating, but their
functioning was unsatisfactory. Privileges to war correspondents to
send their messages collect were cancelled, for the Hankow office did
not cooperate with Nanking and Shanghai during the split with the

Kuomintang leaders down the Yangtze. Dispatches had to go out by

messenger on board an occasional British river steamer, or through a

foreign destroyer going "out" to the coast. They were relayed abroad
by cable from Shanghai, but were invariably several days or even a

fortnight late, if delivered at all.

Hot and pantingcoolies, already noisy and dirty enough beneath

layers of penetrating red dust which rose from clay of the river
banks, swarmed the streets in various stages of undress. They popped
the inevitable Chinese firecrackers everywhere day and night, adding
to the din of Hankow at the start of that nightmarish summer. Their
contribution to the confusion of daily existence (and the way they gave
the lie to the popular Western belief in the inscrutability of the "si-

lent Oriental'* was a thing to behold!) was no aid to the nerves, already

jumpy and frayed by events in recent weeks.

The Yangtze was a remarkable sight then, unlike anything before
or since. The broad stream was literally crammed with warships of
many nations. Their impressiveness cannot be exaggerated. From
my window in the seemed aglow at night.
United States Consulate, it

Lights from many craft gleamed through the darkness, and the men
on board sent frequent signals to one another. Often these naval
signals were merely some ship's officer inviting another to tiffin the
next day, butit didn't matter there was mystery and awe in the sight.
Powerful searchlights peered over the stream's surface for strange

objects which were often afloat on that dark river's sinister current
102 THE DRAGON STIRS
These added their fingers of blaze to the whole a touch of the
Northern lights in effect.

In a short time I was to return to Shanghai and the trustworthi-

ness of a foreign-run cable-head there. June had just drawn the cur-
tain on her eventful weeks when I headed back down the Yangtze,
not without a sigh of relief.
 UP TO THE FRONT

"Christian Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang, was back

General/'

THE from a sojourn Moscow. There were rumors that he might

in
confer with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek somewhere near the
Front in the Kuomintang Revolution's advance toward the north. His
position in the Nanking-Hankow split was vital to China's revolt.
My task was to discover what it was from the astute Marshal in per-
son, if possible. In less than two weeks, he came east to meet Gen-
eral Chiang at Hsuchow-fu, in Kiangsu Province, near the Shantung
border.
So I went there also.

Mystery survives but faintly in the heart of China. In June 1927,

with two other foreign correspondents I spent a fortnight in the inte-
rior. We visited the war front and we traveled hundreds of miles
through a land of farmers. Peasants at work in peaceful valleys are
not glamorous; and tales of days when ancient tyrants ruled and
warred, and this land of the Dragon was unknown to a wondering
West, faded in the warm sunshine of June's modern days.
Old temples still existed and towering pagodas reared their storied
fingers into the blue; but the temples rotted hi decay, skeletons of an
older glory, occupied by troops who, like gray rats, scuttled in and out
of vacant doors. The pagodas, one felt, must have been used as silos
for the grain China's golden harvest which, like her gold in another
day, was sapped from its source to provide the ever-diminishing sinews
of war so that the Kuomintang Revolution might go on.
China, in being born again, destroyed every vestige of her former
self.The dragon shuffled off its ancient coil. The process is tragic,
yet a view of it at close range in 1927 had its merits in a series of
queer experiences in the East.
We
were three on that expedition to quaint Hsuchow-fu, in the
extreme northern tip of Kiangsu Province, near the Shantung Province
103
104 THE DRAGON STIRS
border, where the Nanking Nationalist line had been pushing gradu-
ally northward and eastward to the Pacific. During the entire trip we
noticed not the slightest anti-foreignism among the Chinese people,

despite the thorough-going propaganda of the Nanking authorities

against what they termed ''imperialists/' which the average Chinese

naturally expected to include all foreigners. The propaganda posters

were everywhere. Most of them were illustrated, in order that the
illiterate Chinese (the vast majority of the people) might get some
faint idea of what it was all about. And the "imperialist" was in-

evitably, of course, a white foreigner. We also saw a number of anti-

Japanese posters during this trip, which were characterized by figures

of Japanese troops despoiling the Chinese.

up to the front on Sunday, June 12,

I started for the exciting trip

1927, going as far asNanking with former Senator Hiram Bingham,

of Connecticut, who, with his son, Woodbridge Bingham, had been

making a thorough tour of China, both North and South. In Nanking,

I met Robert S. Pickens, a special correspondent for the Chicago
Tribune, and a Danish correspondent named Dr. Aage Kaarup Nielsen.
Dr. Nielsen was a South Polar explorer, among other things, and for
six or seven years had been traveling for three Scandinavian news-

papers, returning to Europe to lecture and write books on what he

had hired a cook, took food and bottled drinking water, and
seen. I

with a translator started for Nanking and the front.

I left Shanghai at 9:10 a.m., going to
Nanking in a private car
with the Binghams and Mr. Julean Arnold, the American Commercial
Attache in Shanghai. We
arrived about four o'clock in the afternoon.
An under-secretary from the Nanking Foreign Office met us, together
with two officers from the United States destroyer Peary, stationed
there,and we proceeded to the Garden Hotel. After getting settled,
Mr. Arnold and I, with the Foreign Office secretary (a chap named
Chang), called on the late Dr. C. C. Wu, the Nanking Foreign Min-
ister. Dr. Wu told us briefly of the desire of his Government to have
the foreigners return to Nanking, assuring us that neither he nor his

colleagues were anti-foreign. We compared Nanking's Government

with the Hankow Nationalist group, and Dr. Wu said the only dif-
ference was Nanking was anti-Red. The general mechanism of
that
the two governments was the same. These people, however, did not
feel that labor should be placed yet in such an exalted position.
 UP TO THE FRONT 105

Mr. Arnold and I, with Chang, departed for a tour of Nanking.

We Nanking University and drove through the ground
visited of

Ginling College for girls. Both were functioning and expected to

graduate classes that week. The

missions supporting them, men in

charge told me, were planning to continue to do so, despite the fact
that no foreign teachers remained.
The hotel at Nanking where I stayed, while not the most modern
in the world, was a surprise. The rooms were large and comfortable.
The place was full then, and I took over a room belonging to Pickens,
who had gone to Shanghai over the week end. Nanking was quieter
than I had been led to believe, and none of us, seemed, was in the
it

slightest danger. However, the next day I noticed a few isolated evi-
dences that all was not well in the relations between foreigners and
the Chinese.
Next morning we went on another tour of Nanking. The Stand-
ard Oil house, where fifty-odd foreigners had gathered during the
"Nanking Incident," was a wreck. It was a stiff climb up the hill on
the outskirts of Nanking to where it stood overlooking the city and
the Yangtze River. There was an old tin cup four feet high, a trophy
made of Standard Oil five-gallon tins, standing in the yard, battered

and bent. On its defaced surface one could still make out the words
painted in black on the trophy. They read: "American Team, In-
ternational Polo," and beneath this, one under the other, were the
names of members of the team. Below this list was the date, 1921 ;

and at the bottom, a rudely sketched figure of a horse. The Chinese

rabble considered this sentimental trophy too trivial to bother stealing.

They left little else. The bath tubs were gone, all light and water
fixtures had been ripped out, windows broken, baseboards stripped off,

everything left in complete confusion.

Letters and parts of envelopes lay everywhere, together with old

newspapers and magazines. A

torn page from The New York Times

lay in a hallway with scraps of personal letters to the men from their

mothers, wives, friends.Desolation hung like a shroud around this

once lively house whose eaves now dripped rain. Blank, sightless
windows gazed unseeing across the verdant landscape, over the valley
and river flats below to where the yellow Yangtze sweeps gracefully
out of sight past Lion Hill to the west.

Julean Arnold and I called again at Nanking University, where we

106 THE DRAGON STIRS
met the Acting Dean. He and another professor, both American col-

lege graduates, took us to visit the home of an American professor

who had evacuated, John Reisner, It was occupied by Nationalist
troops who sought to obstruct our entrance. We pushed by and went
inside. Further desolation. No furniture was left other than a bat-
tered piano, its ivory keys stripped from the board, its strings snapped,
useless. We
were ordered out before we could go farther, the sol-
diers, ugly and menacing, speaking in guttural tones to our Chinese
friends. My translator told me they had called the professors ''run-
1 '

ning dogs of imperialism, a then popular Chinese slogan.

It was our first sign of anything like anti-foreignism, although the

Senator's son had told us of an occurrence the night before that was
worse. He was to spend the night on the U. S. S Peary, and about
8 o'clock went down to the dock to meet a launch he had been told
would await him. He found no launch, so took a sampan. The navy
men told him the launch had waited for him, but that while waiting
at dusk a Chinese mob gathered and demanded that they be allowed
aboard to inspect the boat. The sailors refused and were greeted by
a shower of stones. Rather than create a disturbance, the Americans
decided to withdraw It cost young Bingham $2, he said, to hire a
sampan to the Peary The is 20 or 30 cents for this ten-
usual price
minutes' rowing to midstream.
Mr left at noon
Arnold After tiffin, the Foreign Office secretary

brought us invitations to a dinner being given for Senator Bingham.

During the afternoon, we visited the American Consulate. Here again
we found a wreck safes battered, papers scattered everywhere, trunks
:

emptied, two or three bedsteads minus bed clothing or mattresses.

Outside, a policeman stood guard. There was little to guard. A Na-
tionalist seal had been placed over the doors of the huge office safe.

It was not opened, but evidences were many of a battle with the
bay-
onets of soldiers. From there, we
home of the late Dr.
visited the

John Williams, the Nanking University man who was murdered. It

was occupied by troops.
I sat next to General Chiang Kai-shek at dinner that
evening. It
was the time I had seen him since late April, in
first
Shanghai, and
we talked of his victories and what he planned to do next. He said
he wanted the Americans to come back to Nanking, and that he would
see that they were safe. He also said he would order the troops out
 UP TO THE FRONT 107

of foreign propert} somebody would submit to

if the him a list of

houses so occupied, and their owners.

I made arrangements on Tuesday to go north to the Hsuchow-fu

front, the Nanking outpost at the tip of Kiangsu Province, near Shan-
tung. Chiang Kai-shek offered me a guard when I talked with him in

the afternoon, and this I gladly accepted. He also wrote two letters

to his generals at the front, introducing me and asking that they ex-
tend courtesies. My local passport was a queer flimsy document, be-
ing really a military pass, but Chang (my interpreter) said it would
get meby anywhere in Nanking-controlled territory.

Chiang Kai-shek gave me his autographed photograph. He again

stressed his desire to have Americans return to Nanking. I suggested
that the anti-imperialistic posters they had up all around were hardly

conducive to the return of foreigners they should be changed and

posters favorable to the white man put up. The Commander-in-Chief

said this "might be done." He said also that he and Marshal Feng
Yu-hsiang were in complete accord, and that Marshal Yen Hsi-san in
Shansi Province west of Peking was working with him in the Nation-
alist revolution. But one cannot tell. It was fatal to rely on such in-
formation, even when given by men in high places. They all had
their own interests to protect.

Dr. Nielsen, the Danish correspondent, arrived at the Garden Hotel

that evening. He
and Pickens, who had returned, and I planned to
get under way the next morning by train. There was no way of
telling what sort of train it would be, however, for most of the rolling
stock had gone northward with the retreating Shantung soldiers.
The three of us and Secretary Chang had "Chinese chow** that

night on a picturesque canal boat. Brown-bodied boatmen sculled us

along; Chinese lanterns bobbed on all sides; there was the sound of
Chinese music and thin voices of the sing-song girls, the chatter
shrill

of Mah Jongg
tiles as we floated along. A
scene of color and laugh-
ter and paper lanterns, reflected in the dark water. No wars or
rumors of wars here. The Chinese are like that.

However, I found on Wednesday that getting away from Nanking

was not as easy as one might think. The train left at seven instead
of nine, as we had been told, and the Chinese chap who told us wrong
was very sorry. One is impotent in the face of that "very sorry" ex-

pression of the East. Our military "guard/' a rather inconsequential

 108 THE DRAGON STIRS
young officer, told us that another left at two o'clock, and we planned
to take that. But we hadn't figured on the cook. This remarkable
person left early in the morning to buy provisions for the journey;
and he returned just at two o'clock, promptly. We had told him the
train left at two, hence he must get back in time. He arrived on the

dot, at two, and when it was explained in detail and not without a
bil of force that it was improbable we could get to the ferry and across
the Yangtze River all in an instant to catch the train, comprehension
and sorrow spread over his demure features. He, too, it turned out,
was "very sorry." In the meantime, we had to wait until another

morning to go.
We got under way toward the front on Thursday. It took
finally
ttefrom four-thirty that rainy morning until ten at night to get started
from Pukow, but at last we were on the train, and that was some-
thing.

Rising in the gray dawn, we rushed to get the Pukow ferry at five
o'clock. Our special officer failed to appear, like a dandy little fellow,

leaving us to worry about our own future. The cook we had sent

ahead, and he was waiting on the station platform for us beside a

coolie train jammed with soldiers. He said that it was possible that
train might pull out at seven o'clock, but had his doubts.

I said it
might pull out at seven or any other o'clock for all we
cared we couldn't ride on
There wasn't a square inch of space
it.

anywhere on any one of those freight cars; and if there had been, we
could never have packed our cook and his three packing cases of

provisions aboard. It was hopeless. Our officer had failed to appear

anywhere along the route, but now as we were gazing about he blew
in and said there wouldn't be a train until at least two o'clock that
afternoon.
But we moved our cook and his luggage and ourselves alongside
another and a far better train which, I discovered by asking one of
the soldiers who spoke English, was waiting for General Chiang Kai-
shek. The Commander-in-Chief was expected to go up to the front
that day, he said. There were two first-class compartment cars which
suggested prodigious possibilities!
I asked our interpreter to get it across to the "Little Colonel" with

us that we desired to enter one of these cars and rest until the Gen-
eral arrived. He was shocked and surprised, and escorted us to the
 UP TO THE FRONT 109

waiting room instead. After half an hour, as we sat on hard chairs

and watched the Chinese guzzle soup, he pounced
in this fetid place

in on us and announced a train was leaving in a few minutes and that

we had better take it.

Elated, we dashed out all ready for Big Things. He led us back

to the wide open spaces of that coolie train. He skipped nimbly

ahead through a light drizzle and we, our ardor dampened by many
things when we gazed on this familiar sight, followed warily. Even
the escort was a bit crestfallen. He had evidently taken somebody's
word for it that that train offered excellent accommodations for a
trio of war correspondents and hardy and used to
their friends, all

roughing it! We looked at the train where soldiers and coolies sat
on trucks, filled open coal cars, exuded from grain cars and sat
perched everywhere atop anything, with their umbrellas. \Ve looked
sorrowfully at our wayward escort and then we walked away. It

simply could not be done.

As we strolled along in the light drizzle, I thought more and more
of cushions and that first class carriage I told our interpreter that

we were now going to open the car and sit therein until further no-

tice. He doubted it. But my companions, disgusted and ready to

try it, for we couldn't be worse off, assented. I tried the door to the

car. It was locked. A young stepped out of the next car, and
officer

It turned out that he was a member of the

I appealed to him. Propa-
ganda Corps and a former newspaper man from Shanghai and 'Peking
who used to work on a paper that Eugene Chen had edited. His
name was Paul Chu, he said, and he was a graduate of an American
mission college in China. I told him the General had invited us to

go to Hsuchow-fu, that we were

getting no attention at all, and that
all in the trip so far had been no howling success.
all,

He pointed out that the car which we wanted to enter was locked.
I this, but suggested we pay a little social call on the Station
admitted
Master and see what he would do. We did. The Station Master
learned we were guests of the Commander-in-Chief, which, in a way,
was true. He was apologetic. And what is more to the point, he

opened that car! We

parked in a compartment for the rest of our
to Hsuchow-fu, for despite efforts on the part of our little
journey
officer-escort, we refused to budge from our comfortable compartment,
where one might lie stretched out on a leather upholstered seat and
110 THE DRAGON STIRS
sleep. looking document which
Bob Pickens produced an important
\ve had had at the hotel in
Nanking, given us by the Foreign Office.
It actually did declare, under the Government Seal, that we were

guests of the Foreign Office and were not to be disturbed. We were

left alone henceforth and had a good ride.
The cook, back in the baggage car, was afraid to open his pro-

vision boxes for fear the playful soldiers quartered with him might
insist on their share. So we ate rice in large bowls and washed it clown
with lemonade. The day passed slowly. We photographed the coolie
train with accompanying cars loaded with six motor trucks that,
its

with white-arched backs, looked like covered wagons. They were for
we were told.
use at the front in transport service and as ambulances,
The Propaganda boys were busy the whole day long painting pictures
of the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen on the train and copies of the Kuomin-

tang emblem everywhere, as well as putting up new and better posters.

*

Our 'guard" joined us without display late in the afternoon, glad

to admit defeat and desert his baggage car quarters now jammed with

troops presume, of General Chiang's guard. He said Chiang's

part, I

departure was still indefinite, but \ve had decided to stick by our

compartments (we now had taken two adjoining ones and kept them),
if it took a week. The Chinese were most friendly, and I found one
of the "boys" on the train spoke English with an American accent.
It seems he worked in Vladivostok when we had troops in Siberia
during the World War.
About six o'clock, we went onto the platform for a stroll It was
a lucky hunch. We met the managing director of the railway and he
was glad to talk to foreigners and practise his English. His name
was Wood perversion of some Chinese name, of course and he was
a graduate of an American university. He was much interested in
our trip; and he suggested we might have trouble getting train ac-
commodations from Hsuchow-fu back to Pukow. I had thought of
the same thing. So Mr. Wood wrote a note to his man at Hsuchow-
fu and ordered him to give us a private car when we wanted it.
General Chiang Kai-shek arrived at 9:40, and five minutes later
we were off for Hsuchow-fu. He caught sight of us as he marched
past, and returned our salute. With a great blowing of many bugles,
we pulled out for the north at 9:45 p.m.
What spitters the Chinese are Our car, in the narrow aisle out-
t
 UP TO THE FRONT 111

side our compartments, was alive with noises by daybreak, and the
loudest of these was the spitting by even-body, everywhere, prefer-
ably, it seemed, on the floor. It was a game of "hock, spit and jump/'
with us doing the jumping. One of those things you have to get used
to in China, and elsewhere in the East. It is a national custom.

We had to sleep in our clothing during the night, Xo bed clothes.

I used my brief-case (which was all my luggage, incidentally, on that

tour) as a pillow. It was a beautiful night with moonlight across
the meadows and frequent lakes and quite chilly. As we stopped at
each town, the Political Bureau poster propaganda boys went about

putting up new and shiny posters on everything. Our train was lit-

tered with signs. On the General's car a big black-and-white poster

in Chinese read: To CONGRATULATE GENERAL CHIANG KAI-SHEK ON
HIS NORTHERN EXPEDITION 10,000 YEARS! This last was a typical
Chinese expression meaning long lifeand happiness. Dr. Sun's photo-
graph was painted on the car, and there were the usual slogans, as
DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM! DOWN WITH THE COMMUNIST PARTY!
and CLEAN UP THE MILITARISTS!
The up at six o'clock in the morn-
cook, like a good fellow, turned
ing with tinned food and and the boy brought tea and hot water.
fruit,

The train's personnel, aside from the many troops, included num-
erous people of importance, among them representatives of Marshal

Feng Yu-hsiang. Two of them, very good fellows, came in for a chat.
They swore that Feng was all for General Chiang, and they said he
was already half-way to Hsuchow-fu on the Lunghai Railway Line
One chap also swore Feng was dead against the Communist Party in
China. This seemed to me rather strange, after the help Feng Yu-
hsiang, the alleged "Christian General," got from Moscow after his
defeat in Peking in 1925. The doubtful man seemed rather to be Yen

Hsi-san, in Shansi, But, they said, he was bound to come over to the
South. One of the men, Ting Tuan-siao, a former director of the
Peking-Mukden Railway, said he thought Chang Tso-lin would hold

Peking to the last ditch. Both were bitter against Japan for sending
troops to Shantung. So was everybody, it seemed. They recalled

Japan's aidingChang Tso-lin against Kuo Sung-lin in Manchuria in

December and January, 1925-26, when Tokyo declared a ''neutral
zone" at Mukden and staved off what seemed to be certain defeat for

Chang.
112 THE DRAGON STIRS
We passed numerous stations. Everywhere crowds turned out to
greet their General. The country was as flat as Kansas beautiful
farm country, stretching away for miles in all directions as far as one
could see. We started from Pukow through a low range of moun-

tains, and high hills, background, were still visible

brown in the

against the blue sky. We

passed through Fu Li Chi at 10 a.m. It
was one of the prettiest purely Chinese hamlets I ever saw. Mud
houses with white tile roofs, curling up at the eaves ... a walled

temple high on a far hill . . .

beggars, some old and bent, others

young and naked. them coppers, and as the train pulled out
I tossed

a big boy grabbed one coin of three I'd thrown a naked little chap not
over three years of age. The baby howled, and I shouted loudly and
without dignity at the rascal. He dropped the coin and fled.
Wereached Hsuchow-fu at noon. A
milling, banner-waving re-

ception awaited General Chiang Kai-shek. Hsuchow-fu en fete, a

holiday declared, greeted our party. got rickshaws We
to the Garden

Hotel where I met General Pei Chung-hsi, capturer of Shanghai, talk-

ing with Merle Lavoy, a jovial Pathe newsreel veteran who had been
over to the front in Shantung. The place was full of soldiers, for
General Chiang made his GHQ there. We met many officers, includ-

ing the Police Commissioner, who thought a cold drink would go good
after our hot ride. It did.

Another officer arranged for rooms for us through the Chinese

Chamber Commerce. We had tiffin at the hotel and then moved to
of
our quarters. They were in a spacious room inside an old Chinese

temple, with bamboo and many flowers growing in the yard. Major-
General Ma Ho-chow, in charge of the artillery unit with the Tenth
Army, quartered here, called on us. He brought General Pang Tsien-
tsai, also of the Tenth Army, along, a smiling Buddha of a man, good
natured and funny, a broad, rather self-conscious grin always beaming
across his fat, pleasant, brown, round face. Shortening his name,
Pang, we dubbed him Pa, to go with General Ma, our host. The
latter
spoke fairly good English. He was a spirited fellow whose men
must have loved him.
We left at four o'clock, after tea, and interviewed General Li

Chung-jen at his yaman. He agreed to take us up to the front with

him in a few days. It was about 100 li, or a little over 30 miles to
the lines where he was assigned, which with troops would be a two
 UP TO THE FRONT 113

days' march. About six we took our departure, to seek bed clothes
in the market-place. Until we got a policeman at GHQ to help us,
we got nowhere. The merchants, on holiday, refused to open up. We
didn't get our mosquito netting, unfortunately, and all of us had a
hard fight during the night with these pests, and with flies at sun-up.
Lavoy and his cameraman, Chen, were waiting for us when we got
back to our temple-home about seven. They had been to the Eastern
front inShantung with General Pei Chung-hsi, and Lavoy told us of
experiences there. He was a jolly big fellow who had been all over
the world with his camera, in wars everywhere, and on all fronts in

Europe during the World War. He could tell a merry tale well. He
anticipated a break-up in the Northern forces that summer of 1927
and a march to Peking by the Nationalists before many months.
While we were chatting, General Ma joined us and as his contribution
to the party sang a popular American song, / want to see my home
in Dixie! He was tall, with a fierce black mustache, kind eyes and a

roving spirit that was always hitting on something new to say or do.
He was a natural soldier and well-fitted to be a leader of his ragged
and none too spirited troops.
He brought in half a dozen officers ten minutes later and insisted
we all go into his quarters and dine "Chinese-chow" style. Lavoy
had to refuse but we accepted, although the cook had already pre-
pared dinner. We dined by candlelight around a board table, with
food in the center in enormous quantities which we ate with chop-
sticks. Two of the officers spoke Japanese but no other foreign lan-
guage. General Ma finally felt constrained to sing once more and did,
ina hoarse, jovial voice. He then insisted that his guests sing, and
Bob Pickens and I obliged with some of the college songs we both
knew, ending up with Hail, Hail the Gang's All Here, to which our
dignified Generalsthere were five Generals and several lesser officers

present thumped the table resoundingly!

The vice-chairman mass meeting to welcome General Chiang

of the

Kai-shek next day was present at the dinner, and he invited us also
to make a speech. We held a conference on this subject, and it was
finally agreed that I was to make a brief acknowledgment of the
honor done us in Hsuchow-fu, the three of us to be introduced at one
time and I to say the piece.
The next day was Saturday, June 18, and the huge Chinese mass
114 THE DRAGON STIRS
meeting was an impressive success although we did not speak. The
Chinese were long on addresses, and when it was time for our debut
the people were weary of standing m the hot sun and it was past
noon and everybody was hungry, including us. So we left. General
Chiang made a good speech, as usual, and he denied that the Kuo-
mintang members were against Christianity or Confucianism or any-
thing else in the way of religion or freedom of speech and thought.
The meeting was held on a broad plain at the edge of the city,

beyond the wall The sun was broiling hot but we didn't mind that

so much, being guests on a shady platform. General Chiang arrived

about ten o'clock. He saluted us and came over to ask if we'd got
comfortable quarters. The meeting broke up about 12 :30. The stream
of humanity up the hill and back to town was a great sight. The Doc
in a rickshaw covered all over like a covered-wagon was a fantastic

sight in his w hite

r
helmet, riding breeches, khaki coat and camera.
We had a day being hot and no one stirring
siesta after tiffin, the

I awoke at three o'clock to find the room filled with soldiers. They
were an inquisitive lot, all Hunanese, and very "fresh," but they left
quickly when an assembly bell rang. It saved us some embarrassment,
for we would have had to evict them. They had been demanding
cigarettes and tea, some fifty or more of them, and that would have
taken a lot of cigarettes and tea. But we were rid of them, thanks to

the bell which called them to formation. I don't know how they got
in, but we complained to our General Ma, and he posted a guard
which prevented further trouble of this kind.
Our next caller was a student-teacher of art who called for no
good reason except to talk with these "foreign devils." He was pleas-
ant enough, although a fatuous-faced galoot, and he promised to paint
us a fan apiece. He said he thought the people would like the Nation-
alistsonce they got acquainted better, for, he said, many of the offi-
cers were well educated. 'These Nationalists/' he confided, "have
interests in art and literature, while the Northerners are rough fel-

lows, uneducated. I think the Nationalists will be popular, therefore."

Now, that was a new angle on the revolution.

The town was preparing for the welcome of Marshal Feng Yu-
hsiang, who was due in the morning. Posters flew everywhere. We
bought mosquito nets, looked at jade, and after fixing our quarters and
netting for the night, went to General Wang Tien-pei's -quarters for
 UP TO THE FRONT 115

dinner. There we learned we had to move at once, for Feng was to

be given our rooms in the temple So we moved before dinner in a

!

great caravan of rickshaws through the narrow, roughly cobbled streets

of Hsuchow-fu, and dined late at eleven o'clock with the officers of

General Wang's mess. The General had to leave to attend a welcome

committee meeting to prepare for Feng's arrival at dawn the next day.
He was commander of the Tenth Army and an old Wu Pei-fu man;
a cordial host and pleasant, as most of these people were to us. We
were treated like princes on all hands, and even among the people
there was not a trace of anti-foreignism.
Our new quarters were in a deserted girls' school at the edge of
Hsuchow-fu, occupied by General Wang and his guard and the propa-
ganda bureau chaps. It was a barn-like place, but picturesque a fine
view was to be had of the entire city. After dinner, several of the
officersaccompanied us to our rooms. Two of them had studied en-
gineering in France and Germany, and we got along nobly in broken
French, discovering a common knowledge of several French ballads.
One young Major was particularly proud of his Terpsichorean accom-
plishments and proved his statements by essaying the Charleston on
the rough boards of that attic chamber. They left us shortly after

midnight. We remade our billets on doors rigged up as beds the

hardest woodhave yet discovered.
I

We were invited to lunch with Chiang Kai-shek and Feng Yu-

hsiang on Sunday morning, but missed it. Foolishly presuming the
party would be at noon or later, we went about calling on head-

quarters, and rode to the railway station to see the man to whom I had
a note about a private car, if and when we would want it. We got to
the Chamber Commerce where Feng was giving the luncheon at
of

noon and the party was over. It had begun at eleven. What an hour
to eat lunch t
We arranged to interview Feng at his quarters at four
o'clock.

Feng Yu-hsiang proved to be foxy. He gave us no direct answers

on anything. I asked him what he expected to do in Hsuchow-fu.
He said he expected to confer with Chiang Kai-shek. We asked him
why, and he said he had heard much about Chiang and that he, Feng,
was a member of the Kuomintang and wanted to make Chiang's ac-
quaintance. Asked if he had come to offer full cooperation with

Chiang, he said that he had been cooperating with Chiang for many
116 THE DRAGON STIRS
months, anyway, and would continue to do so. He said Borodin was
an acquaintance of his, but that he liked Chiang better. He said he
did not intend to support separately either Nanking or Hankow, be-
cause he declared they would soon merge into one government again.
As to the Communist Party in China, Feng said he could say
nothing, that questions concerning politics were settled by the Central
Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. In that fashion he side-

stepped all major questions.

As we were you still a Chris-
leaving, I said: ''Well, General, are
tian?" He grinned and replied, "Do you think I look like one?"
And that was that. He posed for pictures and, still grinning behind
his three-days' beard, bid us a cordial a little too cordial, I thought
farewell.

We went a dinner that night given by Chiang for Feng at the

to

Garden Hotel Both the Generals made short speeches, rather mean-
ingless, referring to the noble principles of the Nationalist Cause and
calling on everybody to Chiang extolled Feng and
stick together.

welcomed him into the and Feng extolled Chiang for his vic-
fold;
tories in his march north from Canton. After it was over I spoke

briefly to Chiang about getting a photograph of the two of them to-

gether, and he promised to arrange it. So, "home" to our schoolhouse
rooms in rickety rickshaws, through the tumbly old walled city.
The Chiang-Feng conference was due to end the next day, and we
decided that since there was no way to get news out but by messenger,
it was time to get back to Shanghai. We asked Mr. Yu, the Station
Master, to us up.
fix He gave us a private freight car, and put it on
a siding for our use There was nothing else available. Then, while
!

waiting to see Chiang at the hotel, we met a young Major-General,

David Loh, chief of communications at the front, who offered us cots
and a guard. So we were all ready to depart when the conference
ended.
General Wang sent his signed photograph over to us that
Monday
afternoon and later, with his staff, paid us a formal call. It was a
terrific strain on our cook and his tea service, which consisted of
three cups and saucers, four glasses and some tins of cakes and
crackers. But we made it, parking the General and his officers around
on wooden benches and our door-beds. Wang confirmed my impres-
sions of Feng. And it looked as though Nanking could not move
 UP TO THE FRONT 117

north until the Hankow split was settled. They were still afraid of

Feng there. We had a quiet evening at home and decided to move

into our box-car first thing in the morning.
We went aboard at 10 a.m. The train was due to go at noon.

General Loh was as good as his word, and his army cots were on
hand. We found about half a dozen others in our car also

men, we learned, given special privilege to ride with us, some as

guards, others as officials who had important business in Nanking and
had no other means of transportation. We weren't crowded, so it was

all right. I
dropped
4

TPC' cards of farewell at GHQ and returned

to the train at 11:30 all
away. set to get We had got our photo-
graph of Feng and Chiang together, and were assured that Feng was
leaving at noon also, which he did. Chiang said no statement on the
conference would be issued until he got back to Nanking.
Our coolie train got under way at 2:45 p.m. It crawled a scant
ten miles in two hours, and stopped in the rain. We stayed there an
hour arguing with the station man and a military train inspector to
cut the train in half and let part of us go on. That bedraggled engine
could do nothing with the twenty-four cars it was expected to pull.
We ended by backing all the way to Hsuchow-fu once more, where

we spent the night. General Chiang was leaving early Wednesday

morning, and I asked Mr. Yu to attach our car to his train. He said
%

one would leave at ten o clock that night and we had better get it
attached to that. We agreed, and I went back to the siding, rolled

up in a blanket and dropped off to sleep, hoping but not expecting to

get under way that night.

General Loh came to see us about nine o'clock and talked for an
hour about his work and how the Nationalists and Northerners fight,
and about the Red Cross work in China. He said the doctors refuse
to bother with wounded privates in most cases.

'If privates are shot through the leg or shoulder, but could get

well, it makes no They order the burial squad to toss

difference.

them into the and they are buried alive. They are told
'dead* heap

they are of no use, that there is no place to tend to them, and that
they had better die for their country now and save further suffering,"
Loh said. "It is terrible. Officers are sometimes spared."

A moment later, he left and I turned in for the night.

Our interpreter awakened me about 6:30 a.m. the next morning,
 118 THE DRAGON STIRS
and said: "They Ye waiting Chiang and he is going to
for General

leave any minute now. What shall we do?" I ran over to the
Hsuchow-fu station to find soldiers lined up, bugles playing and our
Station Master of absolutely no use. He was "very sorry" that no
train Had left during the night; but he had no time then.
The Police Commissioner was on hand. He tried to get us accom-
modations on another car on the General's train, but was packed.
it

I was frantic and furious, and demanded that our car be switched on
behind. The Station Master tore his hair and said it was too late.

We fought out for a quarter of an hour, but nothing happened.

it

One young fellow said: "Why worry about these crazy foreigners

anyway? The Commander-in-Chief is due any moment. Let them

1 '

holler but don't bother about them. My interpreter translated all

this.

It was misting and the General drove up and the train was about
to leave. Bob and the Doc were still over in the box-car on the
siding, a block away. The General was on the car step. Cheers and
bugles. I grabbed the interpreter, pushed through the mass right up
to the General and paused, speaking rapidly to the interpreter and
looking at Chiang. I told him to tell the General our troubles and

that we wanted to take that train to Nanking. When this was ex-
plained, Chiang smiled and said, "Well, come on in my car." I told

him in my brand of Japanese (he studied in Japan, and I was on an

American newspaper in Tokyo three years) that there were three of
us. He said to get the others. I ran, while the train waited, and
got
Bob and the Doc, told the cook to pack his things and catch the next
train to Pukow and Xanking, and with my camera and brief case, ran
back to the train. We made it. An instant later the train shoved off,
while the crowd roared.
Once we had our a boy appeared and asked us if we
breath,
wanted breakfast. We
had brought no food and had had no chance
to eat. We gladly accepted, and he brought us ham and
eggs, toast
and jam, and the best coffee in months. While we ate,
Chiang dic-
tated to his secretaries. He looked over and asked an hour later if

we had had "chow." He and his staff then dined, just as we had.
The three meals we had were all "foreign-style," the General and his
men eating with knives, forks and spoons, and eating food that for-
eigners eat no rice or other Chinese dishes.
 UP TO THE FRONT 119

After tiffin the chief secretary, a young Captain who was a grad-
uate of the University of Pennsylvania, said that he had a message
which we might like to see. It was a telegram which Feng Yu-hsiang
had sent to Hankow demanding the eviction of Borodin and the other
Communists there, and the merging of the Hankow people with Nan-
king forthwith!
The secretary readit off in fairly good English, and Pickens and

I cabled our papers after reaching Shanghai. The Feng message

looked as though he really meant to stick by Chiang, at least for the
moment. What his game was to be later was still a mystery. Even
the staff officers did not trust him much. I asked General Chiang

what he thought of Feng and whether he believed Feng would stick

by Nanking, and he, of course, said that he trusted Feng and was
convinced the ''Christian General" would continue to support Nanking.
But I doubted it.
If it hadn't been for Bob Pickens we would not have reached Nan-

king that night. He used to work summers in a round-house down

in Carolina The wobbly engine broke down But Bob got out
twice
and fixed it both times, cutting a fireman's shovel handle in two to get
a pin for a driving rod. Then he showed them how to fix the same

pin when it worked loose and the threads on the nuts were worn
smooth as a whistle an hour after the first breakdown.
We reached Pukow about eleven o'clock and ferried across to Nan-
room only after a Chinese moved out, permitting
king, getting a hotel
us to use it. The
hotel was packed, one guest being Fuad Bey,

former Turkish Minister at Tokyo, who was there talking with Dr.
C. C. Wu about a new commercial treaty. We took the morning
train toShanghai, traveling in a car provided for General Huang,
then Mayor of Shanghai, who was also returning after a visit to the
front.

All three of us had only praise for the way in which we were
treated ina country where older residents warned us that our heads
would not be worth their chemical content if we were to venture into
that "wild interior in such troublous times." It was a lark for us,

anyway and on the Chiang-Feng combine at first hand.

I got data

It resulted in the rapid decline of the Red Russian rule in Hankow.

I caught the first river steamer back up the Yangtze on July 2 to

break the details to Comrade Borodin and his Russian Advisorate, and
120 THE DRAGON" STIRS
to watch the end of Moscow's control over the Kuomintang Revolu-
tion. The manner in which their house of cards tumbled about them,

forcing them to flee, was nothing short of astounding. I had to wait

a week for a river boat, and I heard tales from Hankow of the ruth-

less actions of desperate men still vainly seeking a foothold up there.

They foreshadowed the inevitable fall of that regime.

 3 THE RED FLAME FADES

steamer up the Yangtze-kiang left an hour earlier

river

THE had been told it would for the nerve-tingling voyage to

than I

Hankow, and we nearly missed the boat. Frank Riley of The

London Times (The "Thunderer") and I telephoned to check the
time of departure again, for steamers along that water highway in the
muddled days of 1927-28 left any port when the leaving was good.
I had been told at the pier that the S. S. Tuckwo would sail at

noon so Riley and I had a leisurely breakfast at the well-appointed

American Club that idle morning of July 2, when we went "up the
river." He was making it for what apparently turned out to be his
last trip. We packed one bag each, had the Club's doorman call a
motor car, drove to the dock at 1 1 :30 a.m., in what we believed was
ample time and saw the elusive little Tuckwo just breaking away
for her voyage, and ours. We drove on to the pier. Pickens of the
Chicago Tribune, was gesticulating wildly to us. Riley and I jumped
from the car. The Tuckwo was already two yards from the wooden
pier, and the angry waters of the yellow Yangtze were below us.
"Catch this," Bob and threw him my portable type-
I yelled at
writer. "And this." He
got my bag, also. Bob and others on board
kept shouting to us to catch a sampan to midstream and come aboard
there. But instead, Riley, a six-footer and long of limb, made a leap
for over the ever widening gap. I had no time to think. I ran a
it

few paces, made a flying leap in turn and they yanked me on board.
We had made it by the narrowest of margins, but we both were on
board, and safe.

Among our ardent cheerers as we made that unaided flight through

space were two young American women. One was going up-river
to be married to a United States Navy ensign on board the U. S. S.
Cincinnati, a cruiser then standing by at Hankow. The other was her
bridesmaid. They had come from the States, and after meeting her

121
122 THE DRAGON STIRS
finance in Honolulu, the bride decided to "join the Navy" and marry
her sailor. She was called "Chris," and her bridesmaid was Miss

Myrtle Johnson, from Michigan. The wedding took place in Han-

kow, the fiance proving to be a Navy officer named William Eddy.
These women enlivened the trip upstream considerably. The war
was at least superficially quiescent in the unbearable heat of mid-
summer. The voyage was less tense than the one on the Loongwo
in April, and we had a gala time among a more responsive ship's

company. My personal recollections of that Fourth of July off Wuhu

remain especially delightful. The wedding at Hankow a few days
later added a touch of romance to the grim business of warfare. Both
Riley and I attended in the quiet compound of members of the Lu-
theran Church there, many of whom were Swedish.
One not unattractive young person sought to teach me a few rudi-

mentary expressions in that tongue. The only one which I still re-

call from that romantic interlude in the white heat of China's revolu-
tion is: "Jag elskar dig!" To a Scandinavian, those sounds mean "I
love you." The wedding was the only bit of romance which we were
to encounter in Hankow amid the revolutionary events which swirled
about us. Of course, there were still the dancing girls at the cabarets.
In the awful heat, even they faded and their cheap tinsel lost all pre-
tense of glamour.
One evening I had dinner in the "officers' mess" on board the
U. S. S. Cincinnati The cruiser was anchored in midstream The
Yangtze is a mile or more wide at Wuhan, and the clay banks are
low and flat. a breeze were stirring anywhere across that stifling
If

oven, it should waft over that stream's center. There is nothing what-
ever to stop it, no windbreak or barricade of any description. Yet
at seven o'clock that evening a thermometer below decks, with all port-
holes open, registered 107 degrees Fahrenheit. And that was the
"cool of the evening" in Hankow mid-July. in
Old-timers living
there those who see that the lamps of China have oil, the bankers,

the Foreign Service officials of the Consulates,

and the missionaries
and publishers were agreed was the same in any mid-summer,
that it

and that the July of 1927 experienced no unheard-of heat wave.

The Hankow government withered and died in that heat, and
blew away. Mikal Borodin and his comrades,
riding the crest of the
revolution's northward tide when I was among them a few weeks
 THE RED FLAME FADES 123

before, fled haphazardly northwest by motor caravan toward Outer

Mongolia, a friendly though still nominally independent Soviet Re-
public. Eventually they all reached Siberia and proceeded to Moscow.
The heat which caused this swift phenomenon in China's struggle

toward her destiny was of a different nature from that which caused
us so much bodily discomfort. In the main, it was applied by Gen-
eral Chiang Kai-shek and his new regime at
Nanking. His con-
ference with the unpredictable "Christian General/' Marshal Feng

Yu-hsiang, had swung that powerful ex-traitor into line and brought
a public pronouncement by Feng to that effect. Feng quit his Com-
munist friends at Hankow without a quiver. He had just come back
to China from Moscow, making the journey overland through Siberia
and Mongolia His "open door" was through Shensi Province, near
Tibet, to the town of Chengchow, in Honan Province athwart the

railway linking Hankow and Peking. He seized control of Cheng-

chow, promised aid to his "comrades" in Hankow, secretly went to

Hsuchow-fu, conferred there with Generalissimo Chiang and turned
his back on Communism and Hankow. Feng sent a telegram to the
men in the Hankow government, referring to Bdrodin and his Russian
Advisorate there, and politely but firmly telling them to get out. They
did. There was nothing else to do.

At first, Borodin refused to believe in Feng's perfidy. I told him

that I had seen a copy of Feng's telegram, which had been made

available to me while returning with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek

from his meeting with Feng. The Russian's pale face turned livid.
Then he said: "Marshal Feng is our friend. He is my friend, no
matter. He is still with us. I am
sure he stays true to Hankow."
But Feng did not "stay true" to anybody or anything for very ^long.
Rayna Prohme, the red-headed young woman who had so ably
editedThe People's Tribune, also had to flee. She made her way to
Peking and after a few weeks went across Siberia to Moscow. There,
heart-broken but still fighting for the spread of a true conception of
the communal theory of life, she died.

The telegram from Feng to Hankow was a self-portrait of the

"Christian General." The message was addressed to Wang Ching-
wei and other radical Chinese leaders at Hankow. It follows:

When I met you gentlemen in Chengchow, we talked of the

124 THE DRAGON STIRS
oppression of the merchants and other members of the gentry, of

labor oppressing the factory owners and of the oppression of

fanners by landowners.
The people wish to suppress this form of despotism. Many
soldiers who fight at the front suffer because their families are

mistreated in Honan and elsewhere in Central China. In the

name of the Nationalist Party, many things are being done
which are wrong. There is an effort being made to throw our

country into further confusion merely for the personal benefit

of a few individuals. Many of the radical element wormed their

way into our Party Organization in an effort to control the en-

tire Kuomintang Movement. They have done all the unlawful

things they can to this end. Higher members in our Party Or-
ganization have sought to stop this creation of unrest within our
Party, but the radicals have refused to obey orders.
We also talked of remedies for this situation.
The only we also discussed) is, as I see it,
solution (which
as follows: 1) Mikal Borodin, who already has resigned, should
return to his own country immediately; 2) Those members of
the Central Executive Committee in the Hankow Government
who wish to go abroad for a rest should be allowed to do so.

The others may join with the Nanking Government, if they

desire.

In Hsuchow-fu, I discussed this problem with the Nanking

Government officials. When they had heard the results of our
conversations inChengchow, they were both joyous and sad.
They have welcomed the above suggestions. Both Nanking and
Hankow, I believe, understand these mutual problems.
Ineed not remind you gentlemen, of course, that our country
is facing a severe crisis; but in view of this, I feel constrained
to insist that the present is a good time to unite the Nationalist
factions for the fight against our common enemies. It is my
desire that you accept the above solution and reach a conclusion
immediately. Individual conflicts must be overcome so that our
revolution may succeed in the shortest possible time, and Dr.
Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles be put into effect. This is the
only salvation of our country. We
must revere the memory of
Dr. Sun, and we must remember those brave soldiers who have
 THEREDFLAMEFADES 125

given their lives in the cause. Our wounds have not been
healed. Thousands in the north are still under the will of the

militarists. They are anxious for our help. We must unite

forthwith.

General Tang Shen-tse is patriotic and still a true revolu-

tionist, so he should send troops to Chengchow immediately and
cooperate with me in order to capture Peking and complete the
task of our Northern Expedition.

I make these suggestions sincerely, and expect you to accept

them.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, commenting on the above, said:

"I am most happy at this firm stand taken by Marshal Feng Yu-

hsiang. We are planning to continue our northern campaign very

soon now, no longer fearing that our rear may be cut off at Hsuchow-
fu from the west." In less than a month the Reds had gone from
China and Borodin was in the van of that defeated band on the long
overland trek, back to Moscow.
Earlier, Borodin was the first man in the declining Hankow gov-
ernment whom I saw when we reached Wuhan early in July, 1927.
I wanted to get his reaction to that telegram from the ''Christian

General." Whether Borodin saw that his Russian Advisorate's part

in that rapidly shifting revolt was over remains conjectural, but highly

probable. His quick eyes normally not only saw the problems con-
stantly arising all about him, but also saw all around them as well
and sometimes on past them to their inevitable conclusions.
When I talked with him this time, Borodin looked tired. His atti-
tude was still one of defiance to those (to him) lesser men who would

interrupt him as he fought toward his goal of bringing all China into
the world revolution led by Moscow. It was in his spacious offices

again that I saw him

Despite growing agitation here and else-
last.

where against him and his Communist assistants, he insisted that he

was not ready to quit. He felt that his work in China was not yet
finished. He somewhat heatedly that he was following the
reiterated

principles outlined by the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who had invited
Borodin to participate in the Cantonese-inspired Revolution against
Peking, and asserted that the Agrarian Revolution of China "must
go on."
126 THE DRAGON STIRS
He received me cordially enough, evincing great interest in all

happenings in Nanking and Shanghai, particularly since Hankow was

again isolated. The telegraph wires were down and there was no
word except for brief wireless dispatches that reached the Capital. He
wanted to know how General Chiang Kai-shek's government was pro-
ceeding, and how Feng and Chiang were agreeing.

Borodin, Hankowites, professed to believe that

like the rest of the

Chiang Kai-shek ruled Nanking with an iron hand. The chief objec-
tions to Chiang were his alleged militarism and his desire for per-

sonal gain, as Hankow saw

Borodin insisted that Feng's telegram
it.

demanding his resignation was a fake.

"That is not Feng's style," he said. "He didn't write that tele-

gram, I am His personal telegrams to Hankow have been en-

sure.

tirely different. His letters to me are not like that. Queer things
happen in the military and political line-ups in China, however. One
must understand how to take these things. Feng is continuing to
cooperate with us. He has representatives here now. How do you
think he can support such a telegram? I don't believe Feng wrote
it
although he might have been influenced to sign some such docu-
ment."
We returned to this subject later, and Borodin admitted in manner
more than in speech his bitterness at Feng's action, despite his ex-
pressed belief thatFeng remained a loyal supporter of their Wuhan
faction. Borodin then refused to talk further on this subject, saying:
''Feng is my friend. I cannot discuss his actions."
Borodin readily discussed other things.
"Our chief problem right here is an early settlement of the split
with Nanking," he said. "Apparently we must do this by force.
Hence, we are sending a military expedition toward Nanking imme-
diately. We will capture Nanking without a doubt. Our men are
far better fighters than Chiang Kai-shek's troops, who, furthermore,
aren't very loyal. They are ready to come over to our side, once
given the opportunity. Once this split is settled, our Peking cam-
paign will proceed." The Russian also insisted he was not worried
about finances, despite what he termed "propaganda" concerning a
bad economic situation there. He admitted that business was bad at
that time, but added that the revolution would continue despite this,
 THEREDFLAMEFADES 127

at least "as long as rice is available, which it still is in great quan-

tities."

Borodin expressed high interest in a "Nanking Incident" settle-

ment; he declared the Incident "must be settled and not allowed to

die out." He said : "We cannot now prove the guilt for this incident,
but history will show where the true guilt lies. We continue under
the stigma of the world for this affair now. Hence, we must see that
it is settled. The reason Chiang Kai-shek disarmed the Sixth Army
at Nanking wasn't to punish them for the Nanking Affair, but be-
cause they had captured Nanking, and he ordered them to capture
Pukow and move northward without the rest, he himself moving into
Nanking in safety with his own armies. The Sixth Army officers

refused,and opposed him. Hence he disarmed them, shooting down

many soldiers. I wish that America would take the lead and settle
Nanking. It must be cleared up."
Borodin persisted in the idea that the rabble and irresponsible

camp followers did the anti-foreign looting. He barked out a denial

that men at Hankow had
organized that notorious affair.
Borodin laughed at the constant reports that he had already fled
Hankow. He even scouted the idea that his dismissal was imminent
but added that, after all, he was merely an employe of the govern-

ment and would always submit to its mandates.

as such
This seemingly idle comment was prophetic. In less than a fort-
night, Borodin was gone.
The next my itinerary was at the door of Eugene Chen,
stop in
across the street.Chen straightway uttered shrill criticism of a sug-
gestion by Senator Bingham that America send official high commis-
sioners to each of China's various de facto governments. He said that

such action would defeat its own ends, causing an indefinite continua-
tion of China's disunity, and would work against the common cause
which Chen declared his government, through revolutions, sought to
propagate.
Chen said: "The Hankow Government will never agree to such a

suggestion as Senator Bingham's of sending commissioners to each

group in China. I suggest as a counter-proposal that Washington

send a competent official representative to China whose report would

enable America clearly to understand our movement. If such an of-

ficial represented the United States in Peking today things might be

128 THE DRAGON STIRS
different/ but that representative of the British Empire heading your
Legation has never been fair to us. do not want another man
We
sent from or to Peking. What is necessary is a new mind giving a
new and yet expert report on what he sees here not a man with the

ability of a clerk!

"He must have vision and insight, a fresh

mind that can grasp

what we are trying to do here. That would do more to clarify Amer-

ica's understanding of our revolution than anything else I can think

of. But if you send representatives here and to Nanking and Peking,
you tend to continue the separation of these factions indefinitely.

Such quasi-recognition would have the worst effect imaginable. I

doubt that the Senator's idle ideas will receive much attention in

Washington.*'
Chen, like the other officials, continued ostensibly dapper and op-
timistic concerning Hankow's future. He denied that the situation
was any more serious that it had been in May, declaring: "We will

take Nanking within forty days, without a question. Chiang Kai-

shek's men are ready now to come to Hankow as soon as we move in

that direction. His not loyal. He is pandering to Shang-

officers are

hai's merchants and as a revolutionary he is finished."

Chen also, however, bitterly denounced Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang,

dubbing him the "Leopard of China." He added, "But Feng will
never attack Hankow; his hands are full handling Honan Province
which he is able to use now as a result of our appointment. But we
still control Honan."
Chen admitted that Hankow was "considering the position of our
Russian advisers, particularly Borodin." He said, however, that they
would be retained as long as they were useful. Chen saw no reason
to discharge them as yet, adding however that he thought Borodin
really deserved a vacation.

"He has worked in our revolution for the last four years," Chen
said, "and has done remarkably working hard day and night.
well,
Hence, like any man, he needs and deserves a vacation. This does
not mean that we consider suggesting that he actually take one nor
that his work is unsatisfactory. I am merely talking frankly of the
physical situation of any man."
It was difficult to tell just what Chen meant by this, but I am
 THE RED FLAME FADES 129

inclined to believe that he actually meant that any man who works
four years without a rest needs a little time away from the job.
"
Chen also averred: Everything is
going smoothly here in Han-
kow. We are not worried. On the contrary, we remain most con-
fident of the future." Chen's statement was hardly compatible with
daily events that summer in the strange revolutionary regime. Chen,
like Borodin, insisted that the "Nanking Incident*' should be settled
because the world thought that Hankow was guilty. "We will take it
to the League of Nations if necessary," he said. "I made the propo-
sition for an International Investigation Commission. Why don't you
reply? We stand ready to face the facts, but we are not ready to

accept hasty affidavits from biased refugees."

Chen was also gone within the month.
Consul-General Frank Lockhart said later that day that he per-
sonally believed things would continue to worry along in Hankow
indefinitely. The Colonel thought that the stupendous changes in the
last two months had been superficial. Foreigners generally were in-
terested inknowing when America would return a Consul to Nanking.
The traders and bankers were wondering whether any political rea-
sons lay behind the delay. They wanted things returned to normalcy.
The fading glow of the red star of Communism lighted Hankow
but dimly in the few succeeding weeks of that dismal, fateful mid-
summer. All China, from the unwieldy, uncomprehending masses in
Yunnan Province on Burma's border to the steppes of the still

troubled Siberian frontier to the north was infected by the virus of a

new idea. The day of the old-time, self-centered militarist who had
held sway so long, dividing the continent piece-meal, also was closing,

though more slowly than the influence of Communal theories from

abroad. The last days of Hankow's Red regime seem garish, bizarre
in the light of present-day perspective.At the time they seemed very
real indeed and each day of that sunset era was packed with action.
Frank Riley came rushing into my room a day or so after "Chris"
had married her naval officer. He wanted me to join him in a trip
some 200 miles north into Honan Province, to see Marshal Feng
Yu-hsiang at the town of Chengchow. In the first place, I had seen
Feng, and in the second, Chengchow was too far from anything like
reliable telegraph wires. Too much was going on, and I had to watch
it
happen there in Hankow.
130 THE DRAGON STIRS
It was fortunate for me Riley never came back.
that I didn't go.
He disappeared quite mysteriously one day, when about to start the
return journey. He simply walked down the railroad toward a "model

village" which was constructing a mile out from Chengchow

Feng
and was "swallowed by the dragon." Inquiries proved nothing, except
that he was lost, without visible trace. He still is.
Among the correspondents flocking to Hankow then was Vincent
Sheean. Jimmy was educated at the University of Chicago and found
much in common with Rayna Prohme, to whom I introduced him, for
she too came from Chicago. His full name is James Vincent Sheean,
and every one came to know this sentimental but completely lovable
six-foot Irish-American as "Jimmy."

Jimmy and I had innumerable encounters both socially and m re-

porting the Kuomintang Revolution at Hankow. Many of these were

amusing. One I recall was our hailing two Chinese coolies shortly
before dawn. The coolies were engaged in carrying the inevitable
"night soil" to the city's sewage dump. As was customary, they had
their barrel of this vile-smelling concoction, or "honey-bucket" as it is

generally known, slung between them on a six-foot bamboo pole.

The "boys" were shouting lustily as they carefully made their sure-
footedway along the narrow street. The one preceding the "bucket"
<4

yelled "Hai-ho!" and the other shouted, Hai-ho" in vigorous tones,

albeit in lesser volume. Thus, keeping their traditional sing-song, duo-
syllabic rhythm, the coolies wended their way about their business

seriously, if not in perfect quietude.

And then we met them. Suddenly, I found myself holding the
rear end of that bamboo pole and marching along with Mr. Sheean.
He led the procession. The coolies, happy with an "iron" Chinese
dollar apiece (more than a day's full pay) cheered us on as we pro-
ceeded along the darkened street, shouting in rhythm. We made ex-
cellent progress at the outset of this ridiculous adventure. But Jimmy
stubbed his toe. The "bucket" jostled, and the barrel, pole and all,
with a clatter and splash to the pavement.
fell pole-cat would have A
run at our approach when we finally reached the hotel. And so to
bed!
There were ludicrous incidents such as this, but our work in the
main was serious day in and day out.

Bitterness and a certain sense of desperation tempered by the

 THE RED FLAME FADES 131

grimmest determination predominated in Hankow's clouded atmo-

sphere. The struggle against what proved to be the inevitable con-
tinued. Officials were optimistic, outwardly at least, and Hankow
superficially appeared unchanged. The Yangtze was still filled with
foreign warships. All was calm.was the calm before the storm.
It

Then Borodin fled suddenly on July IS. That was the end.
All the Reds were soon gone from China. As far as the eye
could see there was not a Communist Russian anywhere visible..

The Russians had gone, Hankow was quiet again, the fighting to
the north around Chengchow with picked Fengtien Province troops
from Manchuria was ended. News of any sort dwindled, and it was
almost unbelievably hot, so I went back down the Yangtze again to

Shanghai.
General Chiang seemed to be on top of the world at that moment
despite Hankow's loud threats and denunciations, but in less than
u
another month he, too, was out." An apparent sacrifice to appease
Hankow for the moment, he went south to a delightful, calm and
extraordinarily picturesque old temple in Chekiang Province, near his
birthplace.
After a few summer days of idleness in Shanghai, I went there to
see him and find out why.
 "NINGPO MORE FAR"

Chiang Kai-shek resigned from the Kuo-

mintang Revolution at the height of its apparently rapid strides
GENERALISSIMO
toward success in of 1927. Internal dissension broke
August
out among his commanding generals, led in the main by the fiery

young leaders from the Kwangsi Clique who were to prove a thorn
in the side of General Chiang again later He tried compromise,
failed, and quit the revolution.
A month earlier, allied with the "Christian General," Chiang had
run the Reds out of all China. Now he was out himself.
The midsummer resignation was partly due to Japan's entrance
into the picture. These persistent neighbors flocked into Shantung
Province, blocking an easy way of progress up toward Peking.
Chiang felt it was best to ignore Japan for the moment, take Peking
from the "back door" route up the Kinhan Railroad, as originally
planned, and then deal with Tokyo. He wanted first to eliminate
Marshal Chang Tso-hn, then declining in glory and power at Peking.
Dissension arose as to the next move in the Revolution, and Chiang
got out to let the others try their hands at running the advance.
He went south to an old temple in Chekiang Province, via "Ningpo
more far" in that story-book land, to ponder. I followed him into
this pastoral calm to learn why.

It is not far as miles go from Shanghai southeast into Chekiang

Province to the mountain village of Chi-ko, nestling in the green

wooded hills where Chiang Kai-shek was born. Yet to reach this
spot less than 150 miles away one must travel the better part of a

day and a night, and in the heart of that hill country one may find
old China, unchanged by the parade of the years, as ancient and in-

teresting as a page from the book of Marco Polo. Old men and
small boys tend sheep in the verdant valleys beneath tall peaks whose
132
 " "
N I NGPO MORE F A R 133

slender, dense evergreens touch white fuzzy tufts of clouds from the
bowl of blue sky above.
Water punched with sticks by half-naked brown-skinned
buffaloes,
little
fellows, walk interminably in a circle under thatched round roofs
and thus roll a heavy stone over grain, powdering it into a flour with
which these folk make those flat pancakes one sees in big trays at

every hamlet. Men and women under floppy straw sun hats work
long days in the broiling summer sun cultivating endless fields of rice
in exactly the same fashion as their forefathers, now lying in old
raised stone graves, some centuries old.

It was not long ago China go that Kai-shek, son of

as things in

Chiang, the wine merchant, was running about the narrow dirty streets
of Chi-ko, a lively youngster who even then, they say, was always the
leader in boyish games in the village. He liked to play soldier, and
whenever a company of soldiers came that way Kai-shek was thrilled
for days. His father wanted the boy to become proprietor of his com-
fortable business in the little wine shop and carry on the family name
in Fenghwa County as he and his ancestors had done for generations.

But the boy grew into manhood with no thought but of becoming a
soldier. His ambition drew him into military school, and by the time
he was twenty he had gained parental permission to go to Japan to
study military science and tactics. It is said that there he attained

good marks and some little fame for his brilliance as a strategist and
practical soldier. He returned to China to join the revolution against
the Peking military regime and was eventually appointed to his high

post through the influence and friendship he had with the founder of
the Kuomintang movement, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. He had learned some-
thing of politics in the years that he studied soldiering, and this com-
bination aided the ambitious youth in his climb to fame.
A half dozen years had passed since Kai-shek visited his native
village. His parents, they said in Chi-ko, had long since died. The
old name of Chiang is no longer famous for fine vintages of Chinese

light wines. It has a new significance. A native son of Chi-ko had

become the most outstanding figure in the revolution in those half

dozen years of his absence. The villagers did not blame him for

remaining away.
"The lad," they said, "has been busy." And they wagged proud
heads at what young Kai-shek had accomplished. For the Chinese
134 THE DRAGON STIRS
feel almost as proud over the accomplishments of one of their own

village as they do of one of their own family. The lad who had been
busy returned to his native village. That he returned a deposed
leader made not the slightest difference to his fellow townsmen. In-

deed, it was doubtful that

they knew why he had come.
General Chiang hurried through Shanghai from Nanking on his

way home. He left his manifesto of resignation with the civil of-
ficials and went away. I followed him into the quietude of his retreat,
but was not alone in my quest. The Commander-in-Chief made it
I

difficult to reach him but all paths led to his door and day and night

scores of people the tedious pilgrimage to his temple where he

made
sought peace and rest. It was denied him, for his day was as full as
ever of conferences and calls. His vacation lodge was not in his old
home in Chi-ko. It was straight up that tall old mountain, a climb
of about five miles, to where, just over the ridge, a temple sprawled in
a virgin wilderness and cool breezes made life pleasant in the midst
of a torrid August The temple was old and little used. score of A
monks lived there, studying the word of Buddha and maintaining the
ancient place in a degree of order. It was quiet and restful, an ideal

place for one seeking surcease from the turmoil that agitated the valley
below.
It was here we found
General Chiang after journeying a night
that

and a day. There were four

in our party myself and Mr. H. V.
Kaltenborn, at that time Associate Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle,
gathering material for lectures and articles; and two Chinese who
acted as guides and interpreters. Nothing but Chinese, and the dia-
lect of the district at that, was understood there. were the first We
foreigners to visit that village in four or five years, a curious old

parchment-skinned chap told us in Chi-ko. Our caravan created con-

siderable interest and some little amusement, particularly at meal time
Knives and forks were tools of the devil in this land where chopsticks
were still the only utensils of that sort in use.
We left Shanghai at six o'clock in the
evening, Wednesday, August
17, on board the steamer Ningshao, bound for Ningpo as our first
port of call. From there we got into the district of Fenghwa. We
expected to be rather isolated on this Chinese steamer, having heard
tales of the danger of traveling anywhere off the beaten track in those

days, but to our surprise we met another foreigner on board, a Dr.

 135

Thomas of the Baptist Mission in Ningpo, returning to his post after

a visit to Shanghai. And we also discovered a friend in Dr. Fong
Sec, head of the English section of a large publishing house in Shang-
hai. Dr. Fong, with his wife and family, was going to the holy island
of Pu-to (pronounced poo-doo) for a fortnight. His two daughters,
bobbed-haired and wearing modern sport dresses, and Mrs. Fong

spoke perfect English, Mrs. Fong having been born in San Francisco
We joined forces, our two parties feeling at home together. dis- We
covered that a party of half a dozen or so Nationalist officers were

going to see General Chiang, also, so that our journey, it seemed,

would not be lonesome anywhere along the route.
Dr. Thomas said at dinner that there were only about a dozen
foreigners Nfngpo then, as compared to 125 or so in ordinary
in

times. However, he minimized the danger of living there, as most

people do who persist in refusing to evacuate. And so far as I saw
anywhere in the Yangtze Valley and its vicinity, the Chinese on the
whole were not hostile. The soldiers at times became bothersome, but
only rarely.
A queer customer aboard was a little Cantonese chap who called
himself "Professor Young." He spoke English fluently, as well as
German and French and a little Russian, as he pointed out in his per-
sistent conversation and I must say he would probably make a good
reporter, with his insatiable quest for information about everyone he
met. He knew all about me in ten minutes, and despite his vacuous,

smiling moon face and his hair, long as an old-fashioned girl's and
curled up in some monstrous fashion that made it appear bobbed, this
fellow was no dumbbell.
He looked at my card and demanded to know who founded The
New York Times and in what year I had to confess ignorance as to
the answers to both queries, and shall never forgive the fellow for that
bad moment. The Professor had been to America once, he confided,
and was eager to go again. He candidly admitted he traveled "as a
guest of the public," that he had no connections anywhere and that
he picked up a little money now and then by selling photographs of
interesting people and strange places. His album was filled with
photographs of prominent persons in China, with autographs of most.
He criticized Ghandi, spoke intelligently of American journalism and
history and the founders
its of certain great dailies, discussed life in
136 THE DRAGON STIRS
Paris, Berlin and most other cities in Europe, and confessed he had
not been in China for twenty years.
He was then, he admitted, writing a history of China, which he
also admitted was to be a valuable volume. He had no idea how he
would get from Ningpo to General Chiang, and I gave him no infor-
mation. He wanted to exchange Chinese photographs for some of
Japan that I had in my collection.
Ningpo is two hours by steamer up the Yu-yao River, being in-
land, as is every chief port along the China coast. We docked there
on Thursday, August 18. Chinese coolies can make noise in more
ways than anyone else. We arrived at dawn and we knew it at once.

Countless bells of the tiny servant-calling type were jangling the mo-
ment we were in sight of the dock. They sounded like all bedlam
turned loose. I discovered that they belonged to the rickshaw coolies
who rang them constantly while seeking customers and again while
trotting through the narrow winding streets.
We had three hours to wait while our Chinese got a houseboat
and launch and provisions for the upriver trip, so I took a rickshaw
and an interpreter and drove out to the other side of the city to call
on Dr. Barlow, also of the Baptist Mission. I found the good Doctor
up to his armpits in the stream that flows alongside his house, repair-

ing his little boat. He had just acquired an engine and was busily
fixing a place for it at the rear of the flatboat. We chatted awhile
about the new Baptist hospital, which was half Chinese, half foreign
in architecture, and about his work There was little enough to do
just then, it seemed. His family had gone home and he was alone
on the job, with Dr. Thomas and the handful of other foreigners,

mostly merchants and customs people, in Ningpo. He was interested

in news of Chiang Kai-shek and especially in the rumors of his com-

ing mairiage to Miss Mei-ling Soong.

The British-American Tobacco manager in Ningpo, a man named
Varhol, was aboard when I got back. He assisted us in every way
to get things lined for a comfortable journey, furnishing his house-
up
boat and launch, with camp beds and chairs and all the rest of it.
These foreigners in the out ports are most hospitable, and Mr. Varhol
was no exception. Without him, we would have had no end of delay
and trouble. We got under way finally at about 10:30, the tiny launch
tugging us upriver. We started up the Fenghwa River, which joins
 "NINGPO MORE FAR" 137

the Yu-yao at Ningpo. Slowly, for the houseboat was a large affair,
we moved into the river and upstream past scores of picturesque old

junks and myriads of scuttling sampans, along the narrow, dingy old
Ningpo Bund, and so into the open country beyond.

We hadaboard, an excellent meal served by the cook-boy we

tiffin

had acquired Ningpo. The journey so far had been de luxe. Rain
at

squalls delayed our progress from time to time, the wind being against
us, and at one o'clock we found we were less than half way to the place
where we would take sedan chairs or rickshaws across country. At that
rate we would not make General Chiang's temple by night. We con-
ferred, and Mr. Kaltenborn suggested cutting away from the houseboat
and going ahead in the launch. We did this, taking as much food as

possible in two baskets, together with camp cots and toilet articles. After
an hour or so the rain quit and we got only a little wet, using umbrellas
to shield the food and ourselves.

Our progress was interrupted at two-thirty, when a junk moved into

the stream ahead of us and a soldier signaled us to stop. He wanted to
know we could take him and his orderly upriver with us. Already
if

heavily loaded with five of us in the tiny launch, including the boat-
man, we were inclined to refuse his request, but the Chinese advised

against this. So the two clambered aboard and we set off again,
slower than ever.
A few miles on, as we got into the foot hills, the stream dwindled
until our propeller was digging up mud half the time and we were
barely moving. We
muddled through until almost four o'clock when
the boatman grunted and we went aground. We could go no further.
The stream had become little better than a mountain rill a few yards
wide. We
got out and walked to a little village a quarter of a mile
beyond, where we got rickshaws to the place whence we took chairs.
The launch, lightened of all of us but the boatman, came on to the
village, where we left it after instructing the boatman to wait for our
return the next day.
There were some 300 soldiers of General Chiang's guards in this

village of Kiangkow. We were greeted most cordially and had no

trouble in getting rickshaws for the hour's ride to Shaowangrniao, ar-
after an interesting ride through paddy
riving there at five o'clock
fields in the shadow of green mountains. The sun sank low behind
the hills. In thirty minutes we had procured four chairs and a carry
138 THE DRAGON STIRS
coolie for our luggage. With ten chair coolies we were off for Chi-ko,

twenty Chinese "li" distant. A "li" is about a third of a mile.

Riding in a chair is not uncomfortable, but after a while it becomes

tedious, and Mr. Kaltenborn and I found relief in walking at intervals.
Chinese peasants turned to stare at our party as we swung along in
the twilight. We
met many farmers returning home, weary after a
day under that sun, and every one of them was pleasant, looking
docile and kindly and not at all as though we were the hated foreign

devils they were supposed to think us.

We reached Chi-ko at seven-thirty, just as the first stars were
appearing. The town was en fete, scores of children running about

with picturesque lanterns of all shapes and sizes, from big red fish to
a model airplane. It was a parade in honor of their returned General.
We went inside General Chiang's house. It was rather large for
Chi-ko, indicating that the Chiang family had enjoyed a certain degree
of prosperity. Soldiers, apparently officers of his guard, were dining

in the outer room. Our interpreter told us we were most wel-

come, and the officers bowed and smiled genially. We discovered
we were expected Mr. T. V. Soong, former Minister of Finance
in the Hankow regime and a brother-in-law of Chiang's, having
wired ahead.
General Chiang had had a private telegraph line strung up
from Ningpo to his headquarters up in those hills. We brought
out our food and dined at a table given us for that purpose. I

had never been quite so much the center of all eyes before. The
kids' paradebroke up for the moment and the whole town, it
seemed, crammed in at the doors and climbed up to peer in at

the windows as we ate. They said we were the first foreigners

to come that way in four or five years. Many of the children
could not remember ever having seen a wai-go-jen (foreigner)
before. They asked if we were Americans, and when we said we
were, they seemed pleased, grinning broadly.
We had to Tiurry on, for General Chiang was in his temple
high above us on the hill. Leaving Chi-ko about eight o'clock,
we pushed on across the narrow strip of valley between us and
the mountain. At the edge of the village we ran into the lantern
procession. Our chair coolies, undismayed, stalked right down
the same narrow street the parade was coming up, and we were
 "NINGPO MORE FAR" 139

in the midst of bobbing lanterns and clashing cymbals and a

babbling of many voices. It was a great sight, those paper fish,

animals, lanterns of all sizes and forms carried by children, some

infants in arms holding swaying lanterns on thin reeds. Why the

children were giving the demonstration we never discovered.

Perhaps it was their day.

Through the night we jogged, our own chairs forming a sort
of lantern procession. Fireflies in great hordes sparkled amid
the tall grass and scattered bamboo trees. In an hour we noticed
other chair processions. Up the winding mountain path we
climbed, walking part of the way, riding when we got tired.
Those sturdy Chinese coolies were marvels. With our load, two
of them could go right ahead at a great pace up the steepest in-
clines. Their legs are heavily muscled, hard as steel. Below one
could look back into the valley and see other pilgrims traversing
the long path to the mountain top to see the retired leader. His
"seclusion" was a myth.
At last the temple! We arrived before the massive wooden
gates at ten o'clock. There were at least ten chairs and some
An orderly took our cards and a letter Kaltenborn
thirty coolies.
had from T. V. Soong to General Chiang and with a grunt dis-
appeared through the courtyard into the dark building beyond.
We waited. He returned and opened the gates. A shout went
up as the coolies brought in their chairs. The guard harshly
ordered silence. The General had retired.

We were led into an inner chamber and offered food and tea.
We could not see the General that night, but after long parleys
with his secretary we made it clearwe wanted to see him early
the next morning in order to get under way to catch the four
o'clockNingpo boat for Shanghai. We were then shown to an-
other room in the rambling old temple, where we found mats on
wooden couches ready for our use. We were given every cour-
tesy. We got our bed clothing, laid it over the mats, and before
eleven o'clock were asleep, for the silence in those woods was
heavy.
Booming temple bells awakened us at five o'clock the next

morning. Their resonant tones sounded through the woods and

filled the air. The sunlight streamed in at our window. arose We
 140 THE DRAGON STIRS
and found a coolie had brought hot water and towels ... all the
comforts of home. General Chiang's valet, a young man I re-
membered from our Hsuchow-fu trip in June, soon appeared* and
brought us oranges (Sunkist oranges from California) and break-
fast, including hot milk, cakes, bread and a sort of chocolate
wafer. While we were eating, the valet returned and announced
that General Chiang was waiting to receive us.
We found him on the broad verandah outside the main build-
ing of the temple. We
had chairs arranged around a small table
on which hot green tea was placed, together with the inevitable
little delicacies such as nuts, candies, etc. General Chiang was
dressed in a silk suit tailored like that of a foreigner except that
the coat buttoned up around the neck in semi-military fashion.
It was the uniform of the Kuomintang, designed by the late Dr.

Sun Yat-sen. He wore silk socks and patent leather pumps. He

looked cool and rather less worn and drawn than when I had last
seen him on the way back from the Hsuchow-fu front.

He greeted us cordially and shook hands with me, expressing

his appreciation of the hardships one has to go through to get to
this out of the way place and inviting us to remain over the day
so that he might take us on a hike around the hills and show us a

particularly beautiful waterfall not far away. He was sincerely

disappointed when we told him we must rush through the inter-
view and get back to Shanghai where things were happening. He
suggested we might go to the waterfall anyway, and ordered an
escort for the journey. But we could not make it.
General Chiang was bitter against the Japanese. He said he
believed them responsible for his defeat in the north and the
failure of the Nationalists' northern expedition in July.
"Their occupation of Tsinan and the railway blocked us," he
said. "Our success was assured until Japan stepped in."
Chiang said he did not want to talk any more about this, nor
would he go into detail about his quitting as Commander-in-Chief.
He said, "My reasons are in my manifesto given out in Shanghai.
There are no other reasons."
He took his position philosophically. There was a bit of the
egotist in the General, pardonable no doubt in view of his achieve-
ments. He was asked if he didn't think his leaving the revolu-
 141

tion at this time of crucial happeningswas bound to weaken the

cause, and he said: "Yes, I think so." Cryptic enough. But he
said he had to quit in view of what had gone before and referred

again to his long message of resignation. In this he said that

there had been too much opposition to him personally and that
he thought until confidence in him was restored he had better get
out. He bowed to the criticism of Hankow and to the political

exigencies of the moment.

The Commander-in-Chief said he might return to the revolu-
tion. "I am too much a part of it, it is too much a part of me,
for me
to get out for all time. I expect to return to the move-
ment, but I do not know when. I would like to go abroad."
"Where?" I asked.

'To America first," Chiang replied. "You tell me they are

sympathetic there. Well, I would like to go and see. After that,
to Europe and elsewhere. It is all indefinite, of course. But I

need a real rest."

He intimated that overtures were being made to get him back

into the Party. He was undecided but he intended to remain in
his temple retreat for a time, in any case. He smiled when we
referred to the many visitors he was having, even up here. "Yes,"
he said, "one's real friends take the trouble to journey even into
a place like this." He said T. V. Soong was expected in a few
days. Soong wanted to urge Chiang's return.

We
talked for nearly an hour and then, after photographing
the General on his front porch with his eleven-year old son,
Chiang Ching-pang, we left in our chairs at eight o'clock.
Swinging over the ridge and down into the valley below, we
had a half hour of one of the most marvelous views I have ever
seen. We could see for miles across the plains to where moun-
tains rose again on the far side, and below us a mountain stream
widened into a silvery lake whose still waters glistened in the
early morning sunshine.
The journey down to our boat at Kiangkow took from eight
until one. We
got to Kiangkow at noon, but the boatman, re-
membering the mud and the shallow stream, had left his launch
ten li away! We
had to walk it through the midday furnace of
142 THE DRAGON STIRS
that valley and we arrived an hour later on foot through the
humid, swampy rice fields, dripping with perspiration.
The steamer left Ningpo for Shanghai at four o'clock. We de-

cided again not to use the houseboat, which had reached this point

during the afternoon and night, but to hurry along in the launch. At
two forty-five we were only about half way to Ningpo, and the pros-
pects of catching the boat were dim. Then a large launch on the
regular upriver run hove in sight and we hailed it. Clambering
aboard, we found jammed
it full of Chinese of the peasant or coolie

class. They were most friendly, laughing and jabbering away at our
arrival. One remarked in Chinese:
<k
Well, I must say I have seen whiter foreigners than these."
He was doubtless right. Our faces were a bright red, and the
sunburn smarted for days, despite our broadbrimmed straw hats.

The launch got to Ningpo just at four o'clock. We raced along

the Bund a half mile to where our steamer was to depart. It had

gone. We could see it a quarter of a mile down stream but far from
our hopes of catching it. However, our Chinese discovered a steamer
alongside thatwas leaving at four-thirty. We sighed with relief. To
spend a night and a day in Ningpo would have been tiring.
Wegot under way at four-thirty, after paying off our bills and
giving our Chinese friends many thanks for a most diverting trip.
The voyage was uneventful during the evening. We passed the other
ship, incidentally, at about eight o'clock, much to our unholy glee.
After dinner, which we ate in solitary splendor, the Chinese dining
on rice at six o'clock and we having "foreign chow" at seven, we
turned in.

It was three-twenty-five a.m., August 20, when we were awakened

by a series of terrific explosions. Leaning out of my bunk, I peered
into the night. A crash, and a flash of fire came from a dark ship not
400 yards away. Again this was repeated. Shrill cries came from
the women aboard, and men rushed about.
I went on deck in kimono to discover the trouble. It appeared
that a Chinese warship was firing at us. Six shots came roaring over
our head, one landing just ahead of the bow and skittering across the
water. It was no fun, that business, and I returned to search the

cabin for a life belt. There was none.

The Chinese cabin boy, who could speak English, said the ship was
 "NINGPO MORE FAR" 143

a gunboat sent by Chang Tso-lin to bombard the Woosung forts and

harass shipping. This, after he had said the guns were a signal to
lay to and anchor for the night. I told him that story "belong no
good/' and he admitted he was trying to prevent our being worried.
The warship apparently gave it
up as a bad job after six shots and
ceased firing. Why they didn't chase us is still a mystery. But they
turned their broadside away, to my vast relief, and disappeared into
the night. Another version of the story was that they were bombard-

ing the Woosung forts. But we were not yet near Woosung, and
besides the forts did not reply.
I finally went back to sleep to dream of battles until dawn, and
was glad to get a rickshaw at six-thirty as we came alongside the
Bund in Shanghai once more.
 10 A "NEW DEAL" FOR CHINA

Chiang Kai-shek had organized the

Na-
tional Government at Nanking less than a month after that
GENERALISSIMO
city was captured by the revolutionary forces from
the South.
The date was April 18, 1927.
Incidentally, in the Mandarin dialect the word or words, "Nan-

King/' mean, "Southern Capital.*' The first character, "Nan," means

"Southern;" and "King," (Ching, or Jing, as it is pronounced by the
Chinese) means "Capital." That is why the name Peking was altered
(i
to Peiping for Pe-King" meant "Northern Capital" The newly
enriched men of the Kuomintang clung to the theory that there could
be no northern capital. There need be but one, they held, and that
should be Nanking. Hence, they issued a decree in 1928, and the
city that had been known as Peking for ages became known in a sur-
prisingly short time as Peiping, or "Northern Peace,"
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek split with his old comrades in con-
trol at Hankow that turbulent spring of 1927, and his men captured

Shanghai and then Nanking, as described. Chiang disliked the Com-

munist influence in Hankow. was growing in great strides. He
It

wanted to check from Moscow. He distrusted the

this interference
Russian Advisorate, headed by Mikal Borodin. The Russian Advi-
sorate had worked smoothly and with rare precision that cannot be

questioned. It worked for the most part under cover. Borodin rarely
appeared in public or made a speech. He saw to it that it was a
purely "Chinese movement," on the surface he and his men bored
from within, and well.
Chiang had realized what was occurring. He saw the Chinese

losing control of all their plans at home to a new and insidious foreign
"barbarian" bloc. Chiang envisioned them using the Kuomintang
merely as a tool with which to gain eventual mastery of Asia, in the
Russian conception of their goal the "world revolution." From the
144
 FOR CHINA 145

start, the General had advised against the acceptance of aid from
Moscow. He was overruled. But Sun Yat-sen, "Father of the Ruo-
mintang," whom millions in China today revere, had died in Peking
in 1926.

General Chiang, the new Commander-in-Chief of the Kuominchun

(The Peoples* Army) as well as the Kuomintang (The Peoples'
Party), was free to obey his own dictates. He chose to split with
Hankow when the men there refused to follow his commands.

He struck swiftly. Once in control of Shanghai and Nanking,

Chiang sought a "new deal" for the welfare of all Chinese. He sought
it after the dictates of his own desires, not those of the Russian Advis-
orate. The General was free. He could do good in his own manner,
and none could say him nay.
The General, when he sought a "new deal" for the Chinese peo-

ples, first set

up his National Government
at Nanking. He was de-
nounced as a "neo-militarist" by the voluble Eugene Chen at Hankow.
The infant government had its critics, Chinese as well as foreign, from
the start. Its path was a rocky road toward unity and a more abun-
dant life for the downtrodden men, women and children inhabiting all

China.

Chiang was one of the rare men in China who believed that it
was time to let the Chinese in on the better things of this existence.
He was, and remains, a man who has the idea that the various treaties
which foreign nations signed with the now defunct Dragon Throne in

the days of the Manchu Dynasty atPeking should be revised, if not

scrapped. His slogan is still: "Down with the unequal treaties!"
For one thing, the General felt that China should be allowed to run
her own Customs Administration instead of having a foreigner (usu-

ally British) at the head of it. One result was that the old five per
cent ad valorem tariff on everything imported into any "treaty port" in
China was scrapped. The new National Government, nearly two years
after its inception, set up its own first Tariff Schedule on February 1,

1929. Some foreign traders and others objected, but the tariff

remained.

The abolition of extra-territoriality was another goal toward which

the men at Nanking were working. It means the end of consular
courts for the trial of foreigners (including Americans) in China, and
146 THE DRAGON STIRS
the end of the United States Federal Court for China, with head-

quarters in Shanghai.
A
Manifesto to the People was issued shortly after this Chinese
idea of a "new deal" was put into effect with the foundation of the
National Government at Nanking. This historic manifesto was made
available to me in China at the time it was issued. I present this

stirring and vital document here for its value as a matter of record and
information and for its Chiang's conception in
interest as General
those unsettled days of the methods for attaining practical welfare
foi all. His text:

MANIFESTO TO THE PEOPLE

1. The Nationalist revolution against the imperialists and mili-

tarists.

2. The popularity of the Chinese Nationalist Army.

3. The crimes of the Chinese Communists.
4. The three points of fundamental difference between the Kuo-
mintang and the Communist Party.
5. The misleading term, "New Militarist."

6. China's three paths:

a. Military rule.
b. Communist regime.
a The "party government" of the Kuomintang.

The purpose of the Kuomintang, since it is founded on the

San-min principles,promote the welfare of the Chinese
is to

people, to free the entire race and to strive for the equality of
all the nations of the world.
Its task, therefore, is to overthrow militarism and imperial-
ism, to eliminate all wicked and violent forces both within and
without the country and to obtain China's independence, liberty
and equality. This is also a part of the task of the world revo-
lution.

For many years our country has been oppressed continuously

by imperialism which has invaded our territory, infringed upon
our sovereignty, encroached upon our maritime customs, con-
trolled our political and economic life and even killed our
youths
(upon such an occasion, for instance, as the massacre of May
30, 1925.) Imperialism has also imposed unequal treaties upon
 a
A N E w DEAL'* FOR CHINA 147
us and treated us as a semi-colonial possession. Could China
still be regarded as an independent and free state?

In addition to this the foreign imperialistic powers utilize the

ignorance and the ruthlessness of the Chinese militarists in order

to rule China, and they allow the latter's animal instincts to

develop to such a degree that they cannot be checked. At first

these militarists waged war every few years for selfish ends,
then they waged war once a year, and then several wars every
year for many years, thereby breaking up social organizations
and increasing the sufferings of the people. With the national
affairs entrusted to the hands of these incompetent, ignorant and
inhuman creatures, can our people have any hope of existence?
Dr. SunYat-sen, the leader of the Kuomintang, was the
founder of the Republic of China. Actuated by a desire to save
China from the peril of extinction and to give the Chinese people
a more satisfactory life, he founded the San-mln principles, which
are: nationalism, democracy and socialization of economic organi-
zation. Unfortunately, however, after forty years of heroic
effort,he died for the Chinese people and entrusted, in his will,
the loyal members of the Kuomintang and the true believers of
the Scm-wiin principles, with the task of the continuation, to-
gether with the masses of the people, of his unaccomplished work
of nationalist revolution. Since I took the oath to command the
northern expeditionary army, I have always kept Dr. Sun's
ideals as my guide in the struggle with the northern militarists.
Since it aims for the welfare of the country, the nationalist
revolutionary army is not merely for the people, it is also of the

people. Relying upon public support, our army has succeeded

at every stage; at first occupying Hunan and Hupeh and over-

throwing the reactionary militarist, Wu

Pei-fu; then seizing
Kiangsi, Fukien, Chekiang, and Anhwei, thereby eliminating the
cunning militarist, Sun Chuang-fang, and then capturing Shanghai
and Nanking, driving away the brutal militarist, Chang Chung-
chang.
Since Szechwan, Kweichow, Yunnan, Shensi, and Kansu are
now under the glorious flag of the revolutionary army, the power
of the cruel northern militarists has so far decreased that further

strong resistance seems impossible. Wherever our soldiers have

148 THE DRAGON STIRS
gone they have met with the cooperation of the people. The
soldiers notonly cause no trouble among the people but also
consider them as brethren; while the people whole-heartedly and

voluntarily welcome the soldiers with food and kindness. This

shows the popularity of the Kuomintang soldiers among the

people.
The Chinese Communists, having secured membership in the
Kuomintang with malicious intent, masked by our party and
with the protection of our army, unexpectedly extended their
influence everywhere and created a reign of terror through the

agency of their secret and treacherous plots.

They knew that the Kuomintang had its own systematic and
concrete program for national and political reconstruction, so

they purposely utilized notorious politicians, ruffians, rioters

and and abused government power in order to

reckless youths

prevent the program of the Kuomintang from being carried out.

They knew that the Kuomintang supports the peasants' and
laborers' movement and pays a great deal of attention to their

social and economic condition and yet the Communists employed

these treacherous persons mentioned above to harass and oppress
the real peasants and laborers.

On hand they excluded the members of the Kuo-

the one

mintang from participation in the peasants' and laborers' move-

ments, and on the other they ruined the popularity of the Kuo-
mintang among the toiling masses, so that the welfare of the
peasants and laborers has been completely neglected and their
sufferings have increased greatly day by day.
In this way are the tactics of the Chinese Communists work-
ing towards the destruction and complete bankruptcy of the
Chinese social and economic state.

With regard to education, the advancement and acquisition of

knowledge are hindrances to the manipulation of the masses. In
Hupeh, therefore, they adopted the slogans: "To go to school
is not revolutionary and therefore it is
counter-revolutionary."
Under their rule in Hunan and Hupeh education is
practically
neglected.
With regard to foreign policy, they have rejected the policy
of the Kuomintang, which is to deal with a single power first,
 A "NEW DEAL'* FOR CHINA 149

and they have forced the imperialistic powers into a strong and
united front so that China might face enemies everywhere and
be forced, in consequence, to come under the grip of a special
foreign organization.
With regard to party affairs, they knew that we have main-
tained the policy of "Party government" as China's only hope of
salvation, and so they have sneaked into the Kuomintang in
order to upset our system and, by using traitors, to alienate our
comrades. On the one hand they dominated the "central organi-
zation/' and on the other they controlled the lower branches of
the party and excluded the real and loyal members of the Kuo-
mintang from party affairs. Thus have they tried to make the
party Kuomintang in name but Communist in fact.
In military affairs, they saw the rapid advance made by our
army and feared an early success for the nationalist revolution
which would allow no time for the Communist propaganda work
when the program of reconstruction commenced, and so they
alienated our army comrades, interrupted military movements,
held up provisions and ammunition and did every other embar-

rassing thing in their power.

These conditions have all been detailed in my "Declaration to
the Kuomintang Members/' which all persons may read.
In short, they have deceitfully assumed our name in order to
commit every possible crime and they, being the tools of a spe-
cialforeign organization, have made use of mobs and ruffians
and have put into practice their horrible politics. That is the
reason why there is the cry all along the Yangtze Valley, "Down
with the Party men!"
I desire that our people have a clear conception of the
"Party men." I cannot say that of our million Kuomintang

comrades every one is perfect, but the true ones follow our party
principles and cannot permit themselves to be misled by the
deceitful Communist Party. Those who do not conform to the
San-min principles, even though they hold membership in the
Kuomintang, are party traitors and will be punished severely.

I hope that the people will not recognize in them the real Kuo-
mintang members.
With regard to the present revolutionary movement, the Kuo-
150 THE DRAGON STIRS
differs fundamentally from the Communist Party in the
mintang
three following outstanding points:
In the first place, we aim at the freedom of the entire Chinese

people, hence we
require the cooperation of all classes.
The
dictatorship of one class would leave the other classes uneman-
cipated and create another tyrannical and high-handed rule. Our
sincere desire is to have a grand union of farmers, laborers, mer-

chants, students and soldiers. We firmly believe that China does

not need the dictatorship of the proletariat. Furthermore we
believe that if the dictatorship of the proletariat were practised
in China it would not be a true one but would be a mob rule.

Besides, we started the revolution for the people as a whole,

whereas the Communists do it only for the creation of a dictator-
ship of the proletariat with the object of destroying social and
economic foundations wholesale.
Secondly, we
recognize that the people of China should have
the right of self-determination for we understand that only we
ourselves know perfectly our own interests and the ways and
means dealing with them.
of The "super-government of the
Legation Quarter in Peking" should not be replaced by a "super-

government of Borodin" in Hankow.

After our own liberation we ought to help liberate the other

oppressed and weak races, for we cherish the hope and glory of
fighting the battle of humanity. As the revolution in China is

part of the world movement we should hasten the completion

of it. Then we should, independently and voluntarily, join in
the world revolution and not be dragged into it.

Finally, we must lessen the sufferings of our people during

the transition period and, as soon as our military success is com-
plete, we must work of reconstruction so that society
start the

shall have adequate facilities for development. But the Com-

munists try to destroy every social order and usurp the political
power through mob violence, not counting such a cost as
390,000,000 lives for the purpose of creating a state of 10,000,-
000 Communists to be the tool of a special foreign organization
It is true that Dr. Sun consented to admit the Communists

into the Kuomintang as individuals, but not as a unit. So,

speaking of it as the "alliance of the two parties" is a misinter-
 A "NEW DEAL" FOR CHINA 151

pretation of the facts by the Communists. In his consent, Dr.

Sun had two intentions; first to prevent them from practising
the Communist ideals in China and to convert them intellectually
to a belief in the San-min and second, to afford them
principles,
an opportunity to participate in the nationalist revolution. But
this was not done so that they might usurp the party power and
dictate the party policy, disregarding the San-win principles.
Dr. Sun's policy of cooperation with Russia was made pos-
sible only by the Soviet's "equal treatment of our people." It

was not to invite Comrade Borodin purposely to hinder our

revolutionary progress. The determining factor of whether or

not the policy of cooperation with Soviet Russia is to be main-
tained does not lie with China, but the test is whether or not
Soviet Russia can treat us as equals. If Soviet Russia had not
changed her policy we could have still cooperated with her. In
the world only principles dictate policies, policies never dictate

principles.
The insidious intrigues of the Communist Party, whereby
they try to destroy the revolutionary army, the Kuomintang and
the nation, have been exposed. At the very outset they fraudu-

lently placed their members in every corner of our party and

then got control of the so-called "Wuhan central executive com-
mittee," which enabled them to deceive and threaten our Kuo-
mintang comrades and the public. Our "Central Kuomintang
censor committee" could not endure their domination and
tyranny, which was leading toward the end of our party, and
resolutely exposed the illegal and traitorous actions of the so-
called "Wuhan central executive committee," and at the same
time urged our Nationalist Government committeemen to assume
office at Nanking and with Nanking as the capital.

Historically, Nanking was the capital. It had fallen once

and was later reestablished as such by the struggle of our people
for independence and liberty.
Those who are at the helm both of the Party and of the
State are mostly men of experience and of the highest virtue,
who advocated the revolution for years and have been respected
as intellectual pioneers by the whole country.
As the party power has now been restored I shall lead faith-
152 THE DRAGON STIRS
fully all our revolutionary armies northward. I take the oath to

support the Kuomintang to the last and obey its commands, to

accomplish the revolutionary work, to eliminate the sufferings

of the people and to promote the welfare of the country. I trust
that all our people, unwilling to see China being ruined by the
by the Communists,
militarists or will come and give us their

unanimous and full support.

The movement to "Support the Party" and to "Save China"
is at present at its height within the Kuomintang, and this proves
the reality of the Kuomintang and the strong will of its members.
Now I call upon the people to join us in the struggle for the
same cause without the slightest hesitation.
Once more I must inform the whole nation that, considering
the present international and our changing internal
situation

conditions, every class in China must awake immediately and

organize thoroughly for positive readjustments. For years, for-

eigners have believed that Chinese, like sand, lack the capacity
for organization. To save the nation is a high and vital mission
and so we must organize ourselves actively and systematically.
You, peasants and laborers, must not be deceived by the
Communists, but must organize yourselves to assist in the revo-
lutionary work. In accordance with Dr. Sun's program of eco-
nomic survival you may plan for your own permanent welfare.
You, merchants, should do the same with all your power and
resources, for you must not be so short-sighted as to regard the

present as if it were the past, that you need not bother with the
condition of the government and society and that you can do
business behind closed doors and disregard conditions. You
should not think that the workers' hardships need not be your
If the conditions of labor be not
concern. improved, how can
peace be long preserved? Please assist them voluntarily to better
their living conditions.

You, the so-called intellectual class, should

give up your
"easy-chair" Please
life. guide the thought of youth along the
proper lines, promote mass education and apply your special
knowledge and technical skill in the constructive work.
In order to get rid of psychological weakness, passiveness and

torpidity allmust combine together and work for the revolution.

 A "NEW DEAL" FOR CHINA 153

Organization is your strength, work is your salvation. With

your spirit and energy the revolution in China will be crowned
with great success.
The Chinese people should not consider the split between the
Communists and the Kuomintang merely as a problem within the
party. It is a vital problem which concerns all of us.

A friend of mine, sickened with the trend of current affairs,

said that it was still too early to start the movement of opposing
the Communist reign of terror; not because the Communist crimes
have not been exposed, but because our people are not yet fully
conscious of their sufferings. Is that really so? I believe not.
In Hunan and Hupeh the Communists have only just begun the
operation of their policy and yet every one feels that life is un-
endurable. In Hangchow and Shanghai they have only just
made a start and yet all are in terror. In Kwantung, Fukien and
elsewhere, the peasants and laborers have expressed their griev-
ances in numerous letters and telegrams. We
must not wait
until the sword is placed over our necks before we cry out.

Besides, the present international situation is not such that

itcan permit China to be the experimental field for Communism
without the danger of suffering grave consequences. Other
people do not care whether or not the lives and welfare of our
people are at stake, but we do. My beloved fellow countrymen,
now is the time to wake up.
I should let you be oppressed continuously by
Suppose that
the exploited by the imperialists and disposed of
militarists,
under the reign of terror of the Communists, it would mean that
I had deserted my sacred duty as a revolutionary soldier and

had become the arch criminal of the age.

If, however, the Kuomintang comrades and soldiers sacrifice

themselves for the national cause and still you render us no aid,
you not only fail to discharge your duty of citizenship but you
also act against your own conscience.
Toguarantee our free and proper development, we have our
army, to lead you to organize and to assure you satisfactory con-
ditions for earning a living, we have our party of San-min prin-

ciples, and with regard to your ultimate awakening and earnest

participation in the national affairs, that is entirely up to you.
154 THE DRAGON STIRS
The Communist Party has been spreading abroad all sorts of

rumors such as "oppression of the toiling masses by Kuomin-

tang," and "Chiang Kai-shek, the new militarist," These are
due to my opposition to its horrible policies. You must not be
deceived and should investigate the rumors in detail.
we The
temporary surveillance of the Communists was ordered because

they were hampering military operations, this fact being exposed

by the "Kuomintang central censor committee." For the safety
of our soldiers and of the people it was imperative that their
activities should be somewhat restricted during the time of war.
This a military necessity.
is We detain them only until military

operations are completed, but we have no wish to endanger their

lives. This gave rise to the so-called "Party Imprisonment."
With regard to reorganizing the peasant and labor unions con-
trolled by the Communists, this is based on the same idea, and
at the same time we should give the real peasants and laborers
the opportunity for free organization.
We
disarmed the Shanghai Labor Union Corps because it
attacked our and machine guns. On April 13,
army with rifles

1927, the Labor Corps surrounded and attacked the headquarters

of the 2nd Division of the 26th Army but they were repulsed, and

as a result we captured 90 captives, of which 40 were proved to

be soldiers of Chang Chung-chang under the orders of the Com-
munist Party. This proves that the Communists will do any-
thing possible to ruin the cause of the revolution, even though
they conspire with the northern militarists.
It was from documents of all sorts discovered in searching
the Shanghai Labor Union that we ascertained their secret and

dangerous plots. The talk of oppression of the toiling masses by

the Kuomintang is entirely false. If that is true of us we are
willing to be beheaded. It is a fact that the Kuomintang's op-

position to Communism is not opposition to

peasants and labor-
ers. Now is the best opportunity for the real
toiling masses to
arise and organize. For your own interests your organization
must not be neglected. you do not organize yourselves others
If

will do it by assuming falsely your name. Free from the Com-

munist Party's monopolized control all of you have the
oppor-
tunity of making your own organizations. Within the jurisdic-
 A "NEW DEAL" FOR CHINA 155

tion of our Nationalist Government the emergency measures

taken against the Communist Party would do you, the real pea-
sants and laborers, no harm.
As to their malicious charge against me as a ''new militarist"
it is quite ridiculous. Is there a militarist anywhere in the
world who fights for principles? What
the militarists want is
territorial acquisition. Wherever our army has reached, the
people have had their own self-government. What the militarists
desire is wealth. I have fought devotedly for years and of my
personal wealth there is nothing saved. What the militarists
care for is their own skin and what they spare is their soldiers'
lives. From the time when I personally undertook the northern
expedition I led the army at the front and took no thought of

personal danger.
The Chinese militarists get their material and financial sup-
port from the imperialistic powers, while I do not. The devoted
fighting of our men over thousands of miles of territory has been
a sacrifice for principle, but not a sacrifice for me personally. In
such a way have I encouraged my officers and men; in such
a way have they stimulated me. So the defamation maligns not
only me
but also the 30,000 heroic dead of our army. If I am

guilty of any misconduct I am ready to submit myself for trial

and severe punishment by our Kuomintang and by our people.

I leave the judgment of my character to the future.
The Kuomintang is a responsible political party and we can-
not allow the Communists to wreck it. We
believe sincerely that
China ought tobe ruled by "Party Government." The govern-
mental system should not be subjected to such rapid changes of
political thoughts. In order to achieve a good result politically
there must be a class of wise and upright men with definite ad-
ministrative ability, who uphold a sound and suitable prin-
will

ciple. The representative form of government has been tried in

China and has failed because our people lacked political con-
sciousness, and there is no use to try it again.
We propose to rule China through the Party and then we
shallhave the system of check and balance in the government by
the Party and the people. Being suited to Chinese conditions,
the San-min principles of the party constitute the only channel
156 THE DRAGON STIRS
of national salvation. They are unitary and organic and should

be put into operation simultaneously. Imported theories cannot

be compared with them. Moreover, they are favorably accepted
by the far-sighted political thinkers.
At present the Kuomintang is China's only political Party.

It was organized long before the birth of the Republic of China,

It has 1,000,000 members, able, determined, and comparatively

well trained. If has the heroic leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who
led the people in the Nationalist cause for years.

To China through the Party does not mean that all

rule

governmental affairs must be handled by the Kuomintang, but

only that they must be handled in accordance with its
principles,

policies and discipline. We are not like the Communists who

are selfish and narrow-minded. We desire to cooperate also
with those who are not Kuomintang members. Besides, Kuo-
mintang is a public political Party, admission into which is at

all times free. Those who take interest in national party affairs,

with the exception of the opportunists, will be welcomed every-

where. With the removal of the Communists, the Kuomintang's

true face is clear to everyone. Come and join us and form a

united battle front.

Only three paths are now open for the Chinese people. One
is to return to the rule of militarism as the tool of foreign im-

perialistic powers and to fight year after year for selfish ends.
The other is to follow the footsteps of the Communists under
the direction of a special foreign organization with the object of

creating a reign of "Red" terror and wholesale destruction, with-

out consideration of circumstances.

Another way is to follow the San-win principles whereby the

people liberate themselves through deliberate process of politics,
self-determination and self-support. If the people are not willing
to subject China to military rule, an imperialistic regime or the

reign of "Red" terror, let them now join the

Kuomintang in
order to accomplish the Nationalist Revolution, to
emancipate the
Chinese people and to participate in the world revolution.
 CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S RETURN

F THE steady stream of men with

missions urging Chiang Kai-shek
Commander-in-Chief of the Kuomin-
to return to his position as
1^
tang struggle resulted in his return to the revolution with en-
hanced prestige. The opposition faded and the General reassumed
complete control at Nanking in the fall of 1927. He pushed his plan
for taking the ancient capital at Peking, avoiding trouble as far as

possible with Japan but going forward through Shantung Province,

as well as via the Kin-han Railway to the west.
He paused early that winter for a touch of romance when he mar-
ried Miss Mei-ling Soong. She was educated in a religious school in
the United States and is a devoted member of the old Methodist
Episcopal Church (South). She is a sister of Mme. Sun Yat-sen and
of Mme. H. H. Kung, wife of the Finance Minister of China. Her
brother is T. V. Soong, a Harvard graduate and himself long Finance
Minister in the National Government at Nanking in earlier years.
This bloc forms what is known in China as the "Soong Dynasty," an
unusually influential family group in the Far East. The marriage took
place in Shanghai on December 1, 1927.
The Christian ceremony was held at the Soong residence in the
French Concession, but in deference to Chinese custom, a native cere-
mony took place in the ornate ballroom of the old Majestic Hotel.
The General himself has recently embraced Christianity through the
Methodist Episcopal Church and has learned quite a bit of the English
language. The Majestic Hotel has been torn down, but that marriage
ceremony is one which I recall as a welcome romantic interlude in
China's wars.
Early in 1928 General Chiang returned to his thankless task of
leading China. He issued a sharp message to the Third National
Congress, pleading for political unity within the revolution. He ex-
pressed his belief that a Party Dictatorship is the best form of govern-
157
 158 THE DRAGON STIRS
ment for the Chinese peoples under present conditions and sternly
rebuked younger, more radical members of the People's Party who,
he feared, might cause a new split in
the Nanking National Govern-
ment.
"Our Government is not like the political organization of any other

country in the world/' Chiang Kai-shek's message said. "A political

defeat suffered by the Government any other country does not mean
of

as much as it would to the Kuomintang of China. If our Party failed

to carry out its program the whole continent would again be plunged
into a state of political chaos and uncertainty. War might again re-
sult. This must not occur. The foundations of a new development,
politically and every other way, have been laid. It therefore now be-

comes the principal object of the Third National Congress to devise

means whereby the political organization of our Party may be placed
on an even firmer foundation."
General Chiang recalled that for two years and more the chief
tasks before the Revolutionary Party had been the successful conclu-
sion of the expedition against the North and the suppression of bandi-

try and Communistic uprisings. He said that the first of these tasks

had been accomplished and that progress was being made on the sec-
ond. The Reds were evicted in December, 1927, and while radical

uprisings still continued they were not as important as in the troubled

past.
of political tutelage now has begun," the General de-
"The period
clared, "We
have organized a new National Government. We can-
not turn Back nor can we see our labors go for naught. We must
have unity and the support of the Kuomintang/'
About the manifestations by younger members in the Party of
their patent desire to assume leadership, the General became caustic.
"The younger members/' he said, "should be satisfied with activities
of a subordinate nature. They should wait until they have acquired
more experience and have become better trained in
Party affairs. It
is deplorable to hear that small cliques have been formed within our
Party. Such personal organizations are but tools of lesser leaders
who are unduly ambitious."
A
strong tendency toward moderation in regard to labor problems
had long been noticeable in General Chiang Kai-shek's attitude to-
ward workers and fanners. This attitude was one of the reasons for
 CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S RETURN 159

his open break with the Soviet Advisorate under Mikal Borodin. In
his message on Government policy Chiang came out in opposition to
class warfare, asserting that while the Government was desirous of

aiding the farmers and workers it would not allow their uprisings

against employers.
"The aim of the Kuomintang," his message explained, "is to in-
crease the material comfort and prosperity of the peasants and
workers of our country. Not only must we protect their interests but
we must also direct and guide them in their activities so that they may
not fall victims to the sinister schemes of the Communists. We wish
their advancement to be of a permanent nature; and for this very
reason we exercise for the moment their political power for them."
The Kuomintang's policy, in theory at least, is that the present

period of what is termed "political tutelage" is to end when the people

of China have been educated up to the privileges and duties of citizen-

ship a democracy.
in In the meantime, (and forever, the sharp-

tongued critics of the Party dictatorship aver), the Kuomintang

leaders intend to keep control of the country as long as they possibly
can. Chiang referred to the fact that earlier in the revolution the

Kuomintang encouraged the workers and peasants "in their opposition

against the oppression of their employers and landlords."
"But," he continued, "times have changed. Although we have de-
clared against oppression of workers and peasants, we must at the
same time see to it that the workers and peasants themselves do not
become the oppressors that they do not take advantage of their em-

ployers and landlords as they are inclined to do at present. It must

be made clear to the laborers and farmers that any loss sustained by
their employers and landlords means loss to themselves. The Govern-
ment cannot discriminate against one class in favor of any other class,
or classes.
"The Communists preach class warfare. We do not."
Feng Yu-hsiang, the "Christian General," felt otherwise. He was
the champion of Asia's "forgotten man," and remained convinced that

government any government for the Chinese peoples should base

its thesis of practical political economy on immediate aid for the
farmer and coolie, or laborer, classes in society.
His lot in latter years has been the sad one of a man professing
sentiments actuated possibly by sincere motives but thwarted on every
 160 THE DRAGON STIRS
hand by conditions beyond his control. Feng remains the victim of a
capricious fate, a dreamer unable to put his visions for the welfare
of

humanity into practice. One result has been the development in him
of a crafty nature which he uses as a sort of "defense mechanism"

against the defeat of his aims, ideals and ambitions for an emancipated
China ;
without this, he fears oblivion as a leader, failure in his mission
to spread light over Asia. Hence his methods have become inex-
plicable, in large measure.
Few really know the man who is Feng. His critics are legion and
his devious actions remain obscure. He embraces whatever comes to
hand, provided it will aid him toward his goal the betterment of all

Chinese peoples. Feng thus is known popularly as a traitor, a double-

crosser, because, to him, the end for so long has had to justify the
means.
Although personally absent from the Third National Congress
called by General Chiang Kai-shek in March, 1928, Mar-
Nanking in

shal Feng instructed his delegates to support the National Govern-

ment's policies en bloc, in Chiang's strategy for the rapid and success-
ful march on Peking. Some months later after Peking was taken and
the name changed to Peiping, Feng took up temporary residence at
Nanking, the new Capital. He was Minister of War for a time, and
I wanted another interview with this astute politico-military man
Our second meeting was at Nanking, where he told of his philosophy

of how men and women and their children might find a less harsh
existence in the Orient than the one they had.
Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang said that he preferred not to talk politics.
He was, however, quite ready to talk about what he thought was

wrong with China and to expound his ideas of how the Chinese could
best improve their state. So for nearly an hour I sat in the reception
room of his foreign-style residence in a hospital compound in Nanking
and with only occasional interjections to the interpreter listened to
Marshal Feng's program for the economic rehabilitation of the Chinese
peoples.
There were six men present at that interview, three Americans
and three Chinese. Of
the Americans, two were correspondents for
American papers and the other a business man from Shanghai who
wanted to go along and meet the man who, many believed, wielded
the greatest single influence in all the new, semi-united China. The
 CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S RETURN 161

Chinese present were our two interpreters and Marshal Feng himself.
The latter sat on a wicker lounge, his huge frame slouching at ease,
cool that hot morning in the pa jama-like white costume of the Chinese,

his feet encased in a crude pair of common infantry boots. He wore

no hose. His genial round face was grizzled, the fat jowls, strangely
pink in complexion for a Chinese, partially hidden beneath a stubbly
beard of several days' growth.
The Marshal lived a simple life. He still believes, it has been
remarked, in "Jeffersonian simplicity," and he practises what he
preaches in that regard. He wears the uniform which his commonest
soldiers wear. By no insignia may one know him as the man whose
personal leadership built up an army that was loyal to him and that

made him probably one of the most important single figures in China.
It be noted in passing that, believing the leaders of the Kuo-
may
mintang Revolution should not squander the people's money, Marshal

Feng sponsored a policy of strict economy wherever he went in 1928.

In Nanking, which he visited to attend the Fifth Plenary Session of the
Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang early in August, the
"Christian General" discovered the politicians leading lives of ease.
He found them and, as it appeared to him, everybody else gambling
and giving banquets and entertaining in a fashion that, he declared,
was traitorous. was only a few days later that the Minister for
It

the Interior, a Feng appointee, issued an order prohibiting all gam-

bling and decreeing that no longer could China's traditional "sing-

song" girls entertain at feasts along the canals and tiny streams in and
about Nanking.
The populace was irate and the Chamber Commerce got up
of

petitions to force a repeal of the Government's order. The order, they

said, threw at least 10,000 persons out of work. Restaurants lan-

guished and the picturesque canal boats lay idle for want of customers.
"They will soon find work elsewhere," said Marshal Feng. "They
can put their hands to something more profitable to the community."
But the girls and the boatmen said, "We shall bide our time.
This silly order cannot prevail. When this man goes back into his
home country in Honan you will see that things will be as before. It
cannot last, this order against our traditions."

They were right. Even while Marshal Feng remained in power

there was a bit of sing-song girl "bootlegging" noticeable. Here and

162 THE DRAGON STIRS
there the shrill voice of one of these doll-like little entertainers raised

in the sibilant, monotonous wail of the Chinese might be heard on

some nights at places along the tiny streams where the police, one
learned,were more sympathetic than vigilant.
It was not easy to see the Marshal. However, through the secre-
tary to Dr. H. H. Kung, Minister of Finance, our appointment
was
made. The Marshal would be "glad to see you at seven o'clock to-

morrow morning/' He had not been feeling well, otherwise the ap-

pointment would have been an hour earlier. Marshal Feng's calling

hours were ordinarily from 5 to 7 a.m. His idea was that in this way
he could get callers out of the way and then get down to a full day's

uninterrupted work.
"Are you going to attend the Kuomintang's Fifth Plenary Ses-
sion?" I asked when we were seated, teahad been served it invari-
ably is,and that day, getting an early start, we were served tea ex-
actly twenty-seven times and the usual salutations passed.
"Yes/' Marshal Feng replied. No unnecessary words. Just a nod
to the interpreter and the Chinese word for yes, which sounds like
sidi. The Marshal was not a regular member of the Central Execu-
tive Committee but he had been invited to on the meetings that
sit in

summer and was given all powers held by regular members. His
presence then, as a matter of fact, brought considerable relief to many.
"What do you think are the chief problems facing the new Govern-
ment?" somebody asked.
"Demobilization of our huge armies I think certainly comes first,
at home/' Marshal Feng said. "This will take some time. But al-
ready plans are under way. Final action is up to the military council."
"What do you think of Japan's attitude in Manchuria and what
would you recommend that the Nationalist Government do about it?"
was my next query.
"I can't answer that/' Marshal Feng said. "I prefer, rather, not
to answer the question. I have my own ideas, to be sure, but you
must take that up with the Foreign Office. I am just a soldier and
not supposed to talk about foreign diplomatic affairs."
Then came the subject which drew him into an extensive and
animated discussion of China's domestic ills and how he would solve

them. His program as outlined below was submitted in a

compre-
hensive memorandum placed before the Government at its Fifth Plen-
 CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S RETURN 163

ary Session, and since has been considered by experts for years in the
various Ministries which it affects. Marshal Feng's program was
based on education and economic reform. He believed that China's

ills were due chiefly to ignorance and its inevitable coordinates, revolv-

ing around inequality of economic opportunity. Briefly, he had four

major projects:
1. A Government program of immediate action with numerous
practical moves to aid the farmers of China.
2. Better housing facilities.

3. Government support for "infant industries."

4. Construction of at least 100,000 miles of railways and a com-

pletehighway system through China.
am convinced," Marshal Feng said emphatically, "that the Gov-
"I
ernment should appropriate at least $50,000,000 at once for farm
relief.

"Farm relief is particularly needed in Central and Northwest

China. The people of Kiangsu Province (in which Shanghai is lo-

cated), owing to better means of communication and marketing facili-

ties, are immensely wealthy as compared with the poverty-stricken

people of interior China, especially Honan, Shensi and Kansu." These

provinces constituted the area in which the Marshal had been most in
control in recent years. "We must
improve the lot of the farmers
who form the basis of our nation. China is essentially a farming
country. Hence, prosperous farmers mean a happy, prosperous na-
tion."

Marshal Feng said much of the money to be appropriated could be

used in irrigation projects in Central and Northwest China and in

providing communications so that, once a farmer raises his crop, he

can sell it at a profit.
Other phases of farm relief which he touched on included the
establishment of schools and farm banks which could lend money to
the fanners at low rates of interest to enable them to modernize their

equipment. In the schools, he said, he would teach modern farming

methods adapted to conditions in the particular districts. He urged
the use of disbanded troops in irrigation and reclamation projects. In
Honan Province, it is significant to note that Marshal Feng in 1927-28
did much in the way of putting these ideas into effect. He has been

praised for the construction of roads and houses in that province even
164 THE DRAGON STIRS
at a time when he was busily engaged in pushing the northern cam-
paign toward Peking.
"We must see that our people have better houses to live in," Mar-
shal Feng proceeded. "There are tens of thousands of people in the
interior of China in fact, everywhere in our country who- have no

place to live. Some who have exist in the meanest of mud hovels that

melt in any kind of a rain storm. For this reason, I have suggested
that the Government appropriate another $50,000,000 for public wel-
fare work. Part of this money could be a direct appropriation, the
rest could be raised through a domestic bond issue. In the past year
in Honan I have built 1,800 houses and turned them over to needy
families. This, of course, is hardly a start. But it is a practical ex-

ample I hope to do and what I think the Government should

of what
do. We
have been preaching the benefits of our revolution to the
downtrodden masses. It is, I think, time to give them some concrete
example of what the State can do to help its citizens.

"These houses of the type that I have in mind can be built with
demobilized troop labor for as low as $70 to $100 a house. They are

small, but they are well built and serviceable. They are infinitely
better than the mud and mat hovels that the masses are now forced to
call home. I would rent them out at ten cents on the dollar of present
rentals. If a family cannot afford even that, I would turn the house

over to them without charge until such time as they could begin to

pay.
"And another thing: these houses, thousands of them, would be
produced in China. They would be 'made-
built entirely of material

in-China
5
we would aid all classes. We would buy
houses. Thus,
material from the merchants, the lumbermen and so on, and hire men

just out of the army do the work, thus, in part, solving our unem-
to

ployment problem. And the finished product would raise the standard
of living of our people."

I remarked that this was an ideal plan but that it was

likely to
place a premium on laziness. The thought suggested itself that there
would be a large percentage of people who would occupy a house free
and would never try to earn any money aside from a few coppers a
day for food. It might tend to make the State paternal and sap the
initiative of the people.

"Not at all," said Marshal Feng. "The Chinese are not lazy.
 CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S RETURN 165

Given a chance to better themselves, they will progress. Once a

family sees other families waxing prosperous and living on a higher
scale, the tone of the whole community will be raised. There may
be a few slackers but we will devise ways to deal with them when the
time comes."
It sounded strangely like the attempts of English colonists in Vir-
ginia to establish a "communal village" where, history relates, all had
access to the town products and each was supposed to produce some-
thing for the good of the whole. That early attempt at a communistic
state failed.

Feng added that at least 100,000 such houses were needed in

Honan Province alone. "This doesn't mean that I think the Govern-
ment should become paternal/' he said. "The people, after all, are the
real masters of a country. But the masters haven't had a chance to

assert themselves, and their servants, our leaders, have lived in the

masters' houses off the money taken from the real masters of the
State. We must reverse this."

There are some who will see in this a tendency toward Com-
munism. It may be, but as a matter of fact while Feng's economics

may be all wrong according to theory, it cannot be denied that he

wanted to help the people in a practical way. He is a good discipli-
narian and a good administrator, as his otherwise dubious record will
show.
Government support to "infant industries" drew his attention next.

He said:
"The Government should raise $60,000,000 to help our industries
now and those not yet under way, which we need.
just getting started
We should have more and bigger and better cotton mills, tanneries
and factories of all sorts. China has the raw materials. There is no
need for us to export them all. If we aid our farmers we can keep
our exports up almost to their present level and still produce enough
to supply our mills, tanneries, and factories with Chinese grown,
Chinese mined, Chinese produced raw materials. Our natural re-
sources are immense. We must make use of them."
Marshal Feng's ambitious program of economic reform called for a
total expenditure of $300,000,000, Chinese currency. It was not pos-
sible for Nanking to spend that much money on his or any other

development program. But a start was made.

 166 THE DRAGON STIRS
About
railroads and a highway system, Feng said:
"China should have at least 100,000 miles of railroads as soon as
possible. We have less than 10,000 miles now. An appropriation of
$10,000,000 should be made at once so that construction can continue
on certain lines now incomplete. Then another $100,000,000 should
b* obtained, abroad if necessary, for railway construction. We should

go ahead right away with the completion of the Canton-Hankow line,

I think. That would connect Canton with Peking by rail. (This has
been done.) Then the east- west Lunghai line should be completed,
also. This railway should be extended west through Shensi, Kansu
and Chinese Turkestan, ultimately connecting with the railways of

Asia Minor.
"If we
can complete this railway," Marshal Feng concluded, "I
will the people of Shanghai how to travel to Europe by a much
show
shorter route than the trans-Siberian railway. do not intend toWe
connect with that line. We will parallel it more or less, but far to the
south. The National Government, I think, should bear the brunt of
the original cost of starting construction. Eventually, the provinces
can be made to contribute their share."
Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang had arrived in Nanking accompanied by
a personal bodyguard of 100 men. patrolled the hospital com-
They
pound where he lived, marching about the grounds with beheading
swords slung over their backs and Mauser automatic pistols at their
hips. The Marshal was not popular with the people. They hoped he
would soon leave, and he did.
While his subordinate generals and minor officers rode swiftly
about Nanking's streets in limousines with armed guards standing on
the runningboards, Marshal Feng rode with his chauffeur on an army
truck. That was the way he made his official calls the day after he
arrived. Ministers in various departments at Nanking were amazed
to see this great hulk of a man he must be six feet three inches tall
and weigh at least 230 pounds lunge out of the cab of a truck and
step quickly into their offices. Foreigners distrusted Feng, from the
safety of Shanghai and the other well-patrolled "treaty ports." They
still do.
 12 RED REBELLION

moved with amazing swiftness the week end of Decem-

ber 10-12, 1927,when Chiang Kai-shek returned to the Kuo-
EVENTS
mintang revolution. He was officially reinstated on a Friday;
on Saturday he gave his public views of what should be done next
and under cover the Communists to the South were active in rebellion
at Canton on Sunday, the eleventh, all Canton was openly in the grip
;

of a Red Rebellion, 800 miles or more south of Nanking; and on

Monday, the Chinese National Government, led by General Chiang,

decided formally to break off relations with Moscow within all their

revolutionary Nationalist-controlled territory, and to order Soviet

Russia's diplomatic service men out of the country.
The Red Rebellion in the deep south of China broke unexpectedly,
even to the Communist leaders themselves. Their hand had been
forced, and they struck abruptly and with rare brutality even for
China. The Chinese looted, raped, murdered, burned and sacked their
own city even more ruthlessly than they committed similar atrocities
on foreign lives and property.
Their sway was brief. In turn, when they were overthrown by
loyal Chinese soldiery, the days of horror were also brief but
even
more lurid, if possible. Photographs I saw of that wreckage, human
as well as material, told the nauseating, sordid tale more graphically
than could a word picture. Many of the pictures could not be pub-

lished. Thelengths in torture to which the Chinese go are unbeliev-

able but terribly true, be the victim a Chinese man or woman or a
lost soul with white skin from foreign shores. The Chinese through
the centuries have achieved, among other things, an apogee in ways of
torture.
Canton was in the grip of the Reds on Sunday, December 12,
1927. Shanghai was under special patrol, with American marines
doing "night instruction duty."
The British and Japanese defense
168 THE DRAGON STIRS
forces assisted the municipal police in maintaining order as the rising
tide of peasant-labor unrest swept South China. The fate of Ameri-
cans in the Canton area was uncertain for days Wireless dispatches
said that the American naval authorities were seeking to establish con-

tact with the refugees on land.

While the Red revolt in Canton resulted in setting the city afire
in many places as well as in looting, the mob was not anti-foreign
These men were seeking rather to overthrow China's military regime

and establish Communist rule.

Striking during the dark hours prior to that Sunday's dawn the
Red uprising succeeded during the day in disarming the police, rout-
ing General Chang Fa-kwei's meager garrison and gaining complete
control of the city, which the rabble proceeded to loot. Sporadic
fires resulted at the fancy of the power-mad peasantry. Not only
Canton was in the control of the rabble but at least seven other cities

in Kwantung area. The American gunboats Sacramento and

the

Pampanga stood by at Canton. The U. S. S. Asheville joined them

there.

The victorious mob's leaders issued a statement following the

restoration of comparative quiet, declaring in part:
"The combined forces of peasants and workmen have finally taken
over control of Canton. The majority of these participating in the
revolt are troops in the Home Defense Service at Canton. Our work-
men's Red Corps under the direction of Red troops have captured the
Peace Bureau and disarmed the guards."
Peasants circulated handbills bearing such inscriptions as: DOWN
WITH CHIANG KAI-SHEK, GENERAL CHANG FA-KWEI, WANG CHING-
WEI, WHO ARE THE ENEMY OF PEASANTS AND WORKMEN! RED
PEASANTS AND SOLDIERS ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN PROTECT THE
MASSES! All shops were closed. The outskirts of Canton swarmed
with armed peasants and workmen wearing red brassards and appar-

ently with little or no leadership. Mass meetings were held, to

choose leaders for the formation of a Red Government.
The ease with which Canton explained by the fact that most
fell is

of the regular troops there had been called for duty in Honan. Hence
the capture was easy, many of the remaining troops going Red. How-
ever, the Chinese Navy remained loyal to Chang Fa-kwei. He barely
escaped with his life aboard a gunboat. The gates to the city were
 RED REBELLION 169

closed, but efforts to retake the city soon made progress, although
navigation between Canton and Hongkong was impossible.
Information as to how the uprising started is still vague, but I
was on the previous Saturday General Wang Chi-hsing's
told that late

troops suddenly attempted to disarm the 4th regiment of the new

2nd Division, numbering 1,000 men. Fighting ensued, peasants and
workmen taking their cue from the soldiers and joining in the riots.
The Red Rebellion followed.
One result was Nanking's definite decision to break with Soviet
Russia. General Chiang Kai-shek announced that the Kuomintang
leaders had instructed Dr. C. C. Wu, then Nanking's foreign minister,
to proceed with the necessary steps for the withdrawal of all Soviet
consulates in Nationalist territories. (Dr. Wu
dead.) The
is now
leader declared that the party's instructions were "in the form of a

peremptory order," precluding the possibility of the Minister's failure

to act. Dr. Wu
forthwith demanded the withdrawal of all the Soviet
Union's consulates in China. The Soviet Consul-General was B.

Koslovsky in Shanghai. He told me at first that he had "not been

informed." He added that he "must await Dr. Wu's formal action
as well as Moscow's reply." He got them and left.

Chiang Kai-shek said : "The party's action was kept secret hereto-

fore, pending the Foreign Minister's formal action. However, I feel

the announcement is justified now in view of the Canton outburst,
which undoubtedly was the result of Soviet agitation. There is no
doubt but that Dr. Wu will act very quickly. He has not yet had
time to take the usual formal steps following this important decision
as far as a formal note to Moscow is concerned but I am sure he will

proceed forthwith. Soviet agitators are responsible for most of our

troubles in this Canton area, as well as Hankow, Nanking and else-

where, Hence an absolute break immediately is

necessary for the
restoration of peace within our territories."
The latest anti-Red announcement clarified the Canton develop-
ments. It was declared that the peasantry's coup d'etat Sunday re-

sulted from the Kuomintang's sending a telegram to Canton ordering

General Chang Fa-kwei to raid Canton's Soviet Consulate and seize
documents showing that Moscow was behind the peasant-labor up-
General Chiang Kai-shek, as well
risings in various sections of China.
as T. V. Soong and Dr. H, H. Kung, were convinced that these in-
170 THE DRAGON STIRS
structions leaked out at Canton, resulting in the Red revolt and plac-
ing mobs This explained the outburst at that
in control of the city.

time, although for a fortnight there had been signs that trouble was
brewing.
Canton continued in turmoil.

Loyal Kuomintang troops sought to overpower the armed peasan-

try, with swift success. Fifteen Americans and two British evacu-
ated Canton, while armored launches from the U. S. S. Pampanga as
well as the Socony Installation assisted in bringing out refugees from
the suburbs. Refugees concentrated on the island of Shameen. Sha-
meen but a jew yards off shore, in Pearl River.
is Further precau-
tions were taken on shore, the U. S. S. Sacramento landing field-pieces
and installing them on the United States Consulate grounds, which is

on Shameen Island.
The short-lived Red revolt in Canton ended on December 14. The
rabblewas routed, and loyal Kuomintang troops regained control. The
Canton outbreak caused the more moderate revolutionaries to inveigh
more than ever against Moscow's interference. The effect of the ter-

rorists' activities was to turn the Nanking leaders more than ever
against radicalism.
Utterances by Mr. Quo Tai-chi, then Vice-Minister for Foreign
Affairs at Nanking, at an American University Club dinner in Shang-
hai, were indicative of an abrupt turn toward the Right. Quo Tai-
chi, Ambassador in London, told a large gathering of
later China's
4<
prominent Chinese and Americans: The Kuomintang is thoroughly
fed up with the activities of all Communists." He added :

"China is at the crossroads. We are facing a decision between the

Soviet and what may be termed the Anglo-Saxon form of government.
Bitter experience has proved that the Soviets are false gods. Hence,
thoughtful leaders in the Kuomintang are now ready to change. But
we need your support, and the support of all the Western Powers
other than Soviet Russia if our change is to prove practical. We are

decidedly not anti-foreign, although certain of our policies have been

so described.
"The Chinese of the early days considered all foreigners as bar-
barians and beneath them. Then the foreigners had their day. West-
ern mechanical civilization developed, and foreigners coming to
China considered the Chinese backward and uncivilized. It is now
 RED REBELLION 171

high time that both Chinese and foreigners discard these ancient prej-
udices and seek to cooperate toward the best interests of the world/'
General Chiang Kai-shek made further attacks on Moscow and all

the Soviets in the Chinese press. He declared: "The Soviet con-

sulates everywhere in China are serving as centers for the propaga-
tion of Communism. I favor breaking off our relations: otherwise,

the spread of Communism may handicap our revolution. If this had

been done some time ago it is possible that the Canton trouble might
have been avoided. We are definitely against continuing diplomatic
relationswith Soviet Russia, and cannot further cooperate with Russia
as in the past. I also believe we should cooperate with other nations
Communism."
in preventing the spread of

The Nanking Note ordered all Soviet diplomatic officials out of

China in seven days. The text of the Note follows:

The National Government has for some time been informed

by various reports that the Soviet consulates and the Soviet

State's commercial agencies in areas within the jurisdiction of
the National Government have been used as headquarters of Red
propaganda and an asylum for all Communists. Exposure of
these facts has been withheld, in view of international relations
between China and Russia.
On the eleventh of the present month an uprising occurred
in the city of Canton culminating in the forcible occupation of
that city by Communists who cut communications, burned, plun-
dered and massacred throughout the city. This startling event
with all its be attributed mainly to
disastrous consequences may
the fact that the Chinese Communists availed themselves of the
Soviet consulate and Soviet State commercial agencies as a base
for direct operations. Fears were entertained that occurrences
of a like nature may occur elsewhere.
With a view to maintaining peace and order and to prevent-

ing the further spread of such disasters our Government feels

that such a state of things is fraught with incalculable dangers

to our Party and theIt can no longer be tolerated.
State.

Therefore, hereby ordered that our recognition accorded to

it is

consuls of the U. S. S. R. stationed in the various Provinces

shall be suspended in order that the root of this evil influence
172 THE DRAGON STIRS
shall be eradicated and a thorough inquiry instituted. The Min-
istry for Foreign Affairs is now instructed to superintend its sub-
ordinate organs and act in conjunction with the other Govern-
ment authorities concerned to put into execution this mandate
with all due care, and report thereon.

The diplomatic, consular and all trade and other Russian officials
left Before the coming of the New Year of 1928 not
within a week.
a recognized Russian official remained in all China.
China was comparatively quiescent before the start of the storm
toward the North again that spring. Col Henry L. Stimson, now
Secretary of War, was named Governor-General of the now semi-
independent Philippine Islands. The Colonel passed through Shanghai
in February on his way to his post at Manila, and I got on the
steamer and went to the Philippines with him.
On that excursion to view our problems and progress in those
islands at the inception of the Stimson rule, I also got a view of the
effect of the Red turmoil at Canton. It was April, 1928, when I visited

South China and found that Canton, in the heart of one of the richest
provinces in all China, the base of civil wars for a quarter of a cen-
tury and more, was rapidly going about the business of rebuilding
wide areas destroyed during the Red Rebellion the previous December.
The winter weeks and early spring had not seen an appreciable
change in the devastated area, it was true; yet plans were under way
for reconstruction. In the meantime, the thrifty Chinese built them-
selves shops in the gaunt brick walls of burned buildings and were
going about life much as usual.
Blocks and blocks were gutted by the flames that had torn at the
heart of the Southern capital when the Reds, infuriated at the dis-

covery of their plot to overthrow the Canton government, were forced

to attack prematurely. The damage ran into tens of millions of dol-
lars. The estimates varied from $15,000,000 to $40,000,000, this last

figure taking into consideration, would appear, the cost of recon-

it

struction. The estimate is based, as usual, on China's silver currency.

Replacement of burned or bombed buildings cost as much or more
than the original structure and that, it was figured, must be con-
sidered in the estimates of the total loss.

It was depressing to walk along the broad streets of Canton, built

 RED REBELLION 173

according to modern plans made under the regime of the late Dr. C.

C. Wu, who also long was Mayor of Canton. The broad streets, un-
usual in a Chinese city, went through block after block of barren build-

ings whose walls, scarred and blackened, were torn down to make way
for reconstruction. They testified to the fury of the mob
 13 CHRIST OF THE "CHINA ROAD"

in Asia is still a profitable "business" which thou-

sands of roving nomads continue to pursue, but while the devil
BANDITRY
reigns over wide areas, let us pause here to look at the work
which the Christian missionaries are doing in a valiant if so far futile
effort to show the Chinese peoples "the light." Some years ago my
mother gave me a little book entitled, CHRIST OF THE INDIAN ROAD.
It was by a missionary who had spent most of his adult life among

the peoples of India, seeking to show them "the Way." It seems to

me that I might do worse in selecting a title for this interesting phase

of man's struggle for existence in the Orient than by choosing CHRIST
OF THE "CHINA ROAD."
The men and women in our Christian missions have had anything
but an easy time of it in their efforts to convert "the heathen Chinese."
The Chinese accept the gifts of the missionaries, especially those of a
material nature. They allow these men and women from foreign
lands to come into their land and
try to spread their gospel. But in
more than a century the true converts to Christianity among the
Chinese have been few. For centuries they have had their own way
of thinking about infinity and the way of this life and how best to live
ir. They retain their ancient faith in Buddhism, which is the main

religion of Asia.
There are tens of thousands, who have embraced Christ's teachings
as their own, and follow Him
through His missionaries. But these,
though they number some three million souls, are still but a drop in
the bucket. There are still nearly 400,000,000 other Chinese, who re-
main unmoved by these teachings. The same is true in Japan where
Shintoism, a version of Buddhism, the State religion.
is

The work of the missionaries, therefore, is hard in the East. Yet

they persist, and where they can they do a good work, it must be
174
 CHRIST OF THE "CHINA ROAD*' 175

admitted even by the Chinese. Most of the converts are merely "out
for the ride/' out, in other words, for what is in it for them. These
are known to the hard-bitten traders who inhabit the coastal cities as
"the damned rice-Christians." There is truth in that epithet for that
is exactly what many of them are. Their only reason for attending a
Mission School in China is so that they may benefit by the instruction
offered to students, an excellent chance to learn a foreign language,

usually English, which they may use later when they enter trade,
banking, a profession or government service.
Knowledge such as that is very useful, the Chinese know, and they
can get it at a minimum of expense. What they do after graduation
is conjectural. Most of them return to their old faith, take a new
vow formula of ancestor worship and the faith of their
in their set

forebears, and go about their business contented. They think they

have "slipped one over" on "these foreign barbarians," again.
It is true, of course, that some really become converted to Chris-

and live up to the teachings

tianity to which they have been subjected.
However, they are few.
The chief work of the Christian missionaries in China therefore is

confined to two fields of human endeavor, namely, education and sani-

tation, with the latter field covering medical missions generally in Asia.
The evangelical work is important, of course but the Chinese are a

practical lot and actions speak louder than words.

A
preacher can stand up and "speech" at them all day every day
in the week, but unless he does something which can prove beyond

the shadow of a doubt that the way of the foreign, white-skinned Chris-
tians will make this life more liveable, he might just as well save his
breath. For this reason the Christian workers are earnestly trying to
prove to the Chinese that a Christian community is cleaner, the in-
habitants actually live in nicer homes on nicer streets and in nicer

towns, they are therefore happier more prosperous, and the

and also

Christians are better educated because they have more and better
schools in their towns.
The masses of Chinese (or any other people, for that
childlike

matter) can understand a way of life like that, and they are embracing
Christianity for that reason in larger numbers than heretofore, to the

pleasant surprise of the Christian workers.

Naturally, material benefits here and now come first to primitive
176 THE DRAGON STIRS
souls existing in a cruel, barren world. They can see only how they
are to be lifted
up bodily by a new and strange creed they cannot be ;

expected to have the broader vision which encompasses the spiritual

or mental glories to follow. But once aided toward a more pleasant
life with social security for all, and one in which they can be educated
up to an appreciation of the finer things of existence, the "true con-
version" to that mode of living will come to pass.

The medical missions and the educational work through schools

scattered all from Yenching University at Peiping to the
over China
Canton Christian College in the deep South are giving this practical
groundwork today in excellent fashion.
Another good thing which the missionaries did out in China at the
start of this decade was to eliminate (so far as the Chinese are con-

cerned) the incomprehensible denominations through which the Occi-

dental world views God. The simple-minded but logical Chinese failed
to grasp why, when we worshipped
but one Heavenly Father, we also
must have Catholics and Protestants. Or why these, too, are divided
and sub-divided like a real estate development the Methodists (North
and South), the Baptists, the Christians, the Lutherans, Presbyterians,
and so on. The denominations of the Protestant Church did away
with creeds and divisional barriers in 1927, about the time that Gen-
eral Chiang Kai-shek was getting married according to the wedding
ritual of the Methodist Episcopal Church (South) to a devout Method-
ist Church (South) Chinese girl in Shanghai. The Catholics still are
divided into Greek Orthodox, Roman, etc.

This a good place to review the missionary

I think is activities as

they occurred in China at that time.

At Hankow in May of 1927, Bishop L. H. Roots, head of the
American Church Mission, who had refused to evacuate despite Con-
sul-General Frank Lockhart's urgent request, told me he believed that
one result of the crisis would be the entire reorganization of mission-

ary work there. Bishop Roots advised his Church to send a commis-
sion to China to investigate conditions and decide on the best steps to
take in view of the revolutionary activities which had temporarily
ousted Christian men and women from China.
The Bishop received me in his offices in an old red brick building
near the Bund, and cordially welcomed frank discussion of current

problems connected with his work. He admitted that adverse condi-

 CHRIST OF THE "CHINA ROAD" 177

tions were affecting the entire future of Christianity in Asia and

talked earnestly on this subject.

Bishop Roots responded somewhat sharply to my query as to his

reasons for refusing to depart from the dangerous Yangtze River
shores. He said: "I believe that my work is as important as that of
three score business men remaining here now or as yours, for that
matter. Why should I desert until forced to do so, any more than
these business menshould leave the job or anyone else still here?"
The Bishop said that only four foreigners then remained in his

mission, doing work formerly done by one hundred missionaries. They

were himself, T. J. Hollander, Dr Paul Wakefield and John Littell.
"In this crisis I find we are discovering the true value of our
Chinese Christians," the Bishop said. "They are carrying on the work
which we have begun. Our hospital, university and middle school are
still running here, under the direction of the Chinese only. We are
still supporting our institutions the same as before, and they represent
an investment of at least a million dollars, gold, and possibly more.

Our annual maintenance cost runs approximately $400,000, Mex. The

Chinese are in complete control.
"I am unable to say yet what our position will be in the future,
but I am inclined to believe that this test of the Chinese Christians is
a good thing. Whether we need as many foreigners in the future
will

remains to be seen. Personally, I think we will be forced to reorgan-

ize our entire mission work on a new basis, leaving the Chinese Chris-

tians essentially in control. The position of the National Government

is another consideration.They have denied being anti-religious or
anti-Christian, but numerous campaigns against Christianity have been
held in recent months with their consent. Our relations with the gov-
ernment must be reconsidered. The old treaties while nominally still

in force actually are not. We must therefore determine our status with
the Nationalists if they are victorious, as seems probable.
"The Chinese today are not like the Chinese of thirty years ago.
They are aroused now. Of course, only a few actually are articulate
and it is these that we hear and see the most, but the masses also are
changed. I have advised our Mission to wait until these revolutionary
conditions clear up before deciding on a definite policy in China. They
are sending a commission to China to assist the missionaries already
here and to agree on future plans. In the meantime, we have evacu-
178 THE DRAGON STIRS
ated almost all our stations in the Yangtze Valley. Our mission
workers are remaining chiefly at Shanghai temporarily, pending a de-
cision on how to proceed with our work.

"I believe that sentiment among the Nationalists favors religious

freedom in China as a whole. General Tang Shen-tse in charge here
is a Buddhist, others in authority are Confucians, and so on; General

Tang sent a letter to us recently written on paper bearing a watermark

showing an old Buddhist saying, Most merciful compassionate one who
saves individuals and saves the world. I believe that the government

will make some provision for religious freedom eventually, in a formal

way. This present war hysteria cannot last forever."

Bishop Roots said that Hunan Province was the worst spot in
China as far as missionary work was concerned and that all the for-
eigners there south of Hankow had been evacuated. He said that the
Chinese Christians who were left then were unable to continue with
their religious work and no services of any kind were being held. His
mission there was closed as were many of the others. Several were
confiscated by the Chinese Communists.
"The Unions of the peasants are chiefly responsible for these acts/'
4f
Bishop Roots said. The
situation there is bordering on anarchy.

Communism is
good a
too term for it. Mob rule exists in Hunan,
where they now have a rule of the unruly. All missions are closed
and, as I say, church services are not possible at the moment."

Bishop Roots intimated that he and the other missionaries would

take up the entire question eventually with theNanking revolutionary
authorities, if and when the government was able to give attention to
problems concerning internal organization of the continent.
Dissension in the harried ranks of American missionaries broke out
in Shanghai that summer. Shanghai was the religious capital for a
time, where workers from scattered interior posts were congregated

awaiting the doubtful future of Christianity in that land. group of A

Fundamentalists held a meeting and after bitterly denouncing the
Modernists in the mission field set their signatures to a message which
was sent to various church organizations and newspapers in America.

The Fundamentalists carried the fight against their bitter foes, the

Modernists, to the American public, and their message definitely

sought to influence church leaders back home. The message asserted :
 CHRIST OF THE "CHINA ROAD*' 179

"The present evacuation of the missionaries has been permitted by God

as ameans of purifying the missionary enterprise in China."
The Modernists were dubbed "ecclesiastical Bolshevists," the attack

being particularly bitter against the National Christian Council. The

Rev. Dr. Hugh W. White of the Southern Presbyterian Mission, who
presided, belabored his Modernist colleagues in the following vitriolic
fashion in his address: "Satan's adaptation of Jerusalem Christianity
has put into the lead of the Modernist movement a band of ecclesias-
tical Bolshevists who work on the principle of 'boring from within/
feeding on Christianity to destroy it. Modernism is primarily political
and is aimed at our Christian works government, as well as the insti-
tution of marriage on which the Christian social system is based."
The message to America denounced the National Christian Council
as a destructive agencyand demanded that when missionaries again
returned to China they be sent to conduct what the Fundamentalists
termed "orthodox work."
The Rev. E. E. Strother, Secretary of the Christian Endeavor
Union, said: "We are facing a thoroughly organized Modernists' ma-
chine which is like a great army run by well trained officers and a
marvelous intelligence department with secret codes, wireless commu-
nications and well equipped training camps. This army has a vast
number of soldiers willing to follow blindly their own trusted leaders,
even to death. This powerful army is liberally financed and secretly
allied with other great subversive organizations with abundant funds.
Their propagandists are some of the most clever men in the world,

and by their strategy they have succeeded in pulling the wool over
the eyes of a number of people in large countries."

Strother gave a summary of the differences between the Modern-

ist and Fundamentalist beliefs, attacking evolution and quoting the
lateWilliam Jennings Bryan. Feelings in this bitter fight reached a
climax in Shanghai, which is the nerve center of all China for the
missionaries.
These squabbles during a time when missionary problems were
occupying a prominent place in the activities of foreigners generally
caused no little adverse comment there. Among the significant public
remarks was a leading article printed in the Shanghai Times, a liberal
British-owned daily edited by an American. The article gave figures
showing there were only about five hundred missionaries remaining in
180 THE DRAGON STIRS
the interior stations as compared with eight thousand in normal times.
Five thousand had been returned to their homelands either on furlough
or on special leaves of absence fifteen hundred were in Shanghai, and
;

another thousand were temporarily transferred to stations in Japan

and Korea.
The editorial commented : "It is not too much to say that the clock

of missionary progress in China has been set back many generations."

It added, however, "Conditions are bound to improve, at least as far

as the missionaries are concerned, insofar as China will continue to

need for many years to come their healing institutions such as hospi-
tals, schools, and other such organizations which go toward building

a more sane and lasting state of society."

The editorial, after outlining the practical benefits being gained

through Christian Institutions which are essential to the material

welfare Chinese peoples appealed for the return of the mission-
of the

aries in greater numbers. However, while praising the welfare work

of the various missions, hoped that when foreign missionaries did
it

return they would be those "whose eyes have not been dimmed by

political considerations or by the gravity of their own dilemmas."

* * *

If you were to take a train at the North Station in Shanghai on

the Nanking line and travel the fifty-three miles that separate the

picturesque old walled city of Soochow from the sea, you might find
far on the outskirts, approached through the narrowest of winding

shop-packed lanes, a modern American university. You would need

a guide to find it the first time unless you could explain to a rickshaw
coolie where you wanted to go for most of them know this missionary
school and "the Nances/'
The Nances have been living in Soochow for the past quarter cen-

tury or more and everybody there knows who they are. They are
hospitable folk from the south in America and they were sent out to
China when they were young to teach in Soochow University. Dr.
Walter Buckner Nance, a native of Marshall County, Tenn., became
President of the school in 1922. The university is a monument to
his work. It was founded and is
supported by the Methodist Epis-
copal Church (South).
If Dr, Nance invited you to spend a week end with them and had

rickshaws awaiting at the station you would not need to

worry about
 "
CHRIST OF THE CHINA ROAD*' 181

is a "Soochow man," as he puts it.

anything, for he You would prob-
ably learnmore about Soochow's strange history in a week end than
most people would in a much longer time. Furthermore, you would
discover that Mrs. Nance is a charming hostess who has brought a bit
of the old south into the heart of China ;
and that her cook, whom she
taught everything he knows, is a composer of symphonies in Southern
delicacies.

One week end in the late summer of 1927, Dr. Nance showed me
Soochow's temples, a famous garden and the Soochow pagoda. He
was a youngish little man despite his years and his silvery white hair,
and his eyes sparkled with perpetual humor behind rimless glasses.
He was tireless in conducting our tour of Soochow, and he was first

to the top when we scaled the pagoda's dizzy height. Standing on its

narrow topmost balcony we gazed out over Soochow babbling in the

dusk at our feet, its tiled roofs and little whitewashed buildings, typi-
cally Chinese, splotching the scraggly landscape for miles around. In
the distance, the black wall meandered protectingly around the houses.
Soochow, a city of about a which
million, lies chiefly within this wall,
is more than ten miles in circumference.

A temple adjacent the old Soochow pagoda, destroyed at some

time or other during the wars that sweep over this area all too fre-

quently, was under construction. Within, one found gods in the making,
sturdy workmen energetically hewing great Buddhas from long logs
and artisans skilled in their labor busily fashioning the arms, bodies

and stern, pensive faces of these idols to whom they and others soon
would pray.
Soochow has changed little since the Middle Ages. It is, in this,
like most of China's cities. Destroyed from time to time by war or
fire or famine or some other natural disaster, the city is rebuilt and

the survivors carry on. From our pagoda, we could see on all sides
curious mounds overgrown with grass which Dr. Nance explained
were the heaps into which the charred ashes of Soochow were raked
by the survivors after the city was laid waste in the Taiping Rebellion
of the last century. Some of these mounds are thirty or forty feet

high, looming up above the houses round about. Little if anything of

value they say, buried within.
is, Nothing but bricks and stones,
charred rafters and the like have ever been discovered by those with

enterprise and curiosity enough to dig into them.

182 THE DRAGON STIRS
With Mrs. Nance, we visited the shops and bought curios pieces
of ivory and fans. And in a temple we found young monks tracing
ancient scrolls, reproducing the striking pictures drawn by priests
when China was creating art. The tracings may be bought for a pit-
tance, and we added several to our collection of things Chinese.

At night after dinner our party strolled about the campus in the

moonlight and Mrs. Nance showed us her garden of many flowers,

including a remarkable display of chrysanthemums. The campus quad-

rangle is as typical an American campus as one might find in a small

college town anywhere in the United States, its buildings thoroughly

modern. The university has its own
and power system. Tall
light
shade trees form an archway along the broad walk that bounds the

campus. Everything about the university recalls its American counter-

part. Along the campus edge the Soochow moat runs, bounded on its
far side by the city's wall. The contrast is powerful.
Dr. Nance told of the changes that were taking place in the univer-
sity under new regulations governing such institutions. The National-
ist Nanking Government had ordered that all foreign schools must
be registered with the Government and that none but a Chinese may
be the head of a school in China. A
board of control of fifteen mem-
bers, eight of whom are Chinese, was named. A Chinese was chosen
as President to succeed Dr. Nance. The new head of the school was
an alumnus of the university, Prof. Y. C
Yang. Dr. Nance continued
in his new capacity as the so-called "American Adviser."

With these changes, subject to the permanent approval of the

Board of Missions, Soochow University continued to operate, and al-
ready had opened its fall semester that August with an enrollment
approaching normal, there being 181 college students and 243 in the
preparatory school. The changes were not revolutionary, because Dr.
Nance as adviser continued as virtual head of the school.

Inception of a movement seeking to abolish all sectarian lines in

foreign mission work in China resulted, in Shanghai in October 1927,

in a conference among ninety-four Chinese delegates from all parts of
the continent. These delegates, representing sixteen denominations,
voted to dissolve their old status and organize the Church of Christ in
China. Their decision wrote finis to the work of the Presbyterian,

Congregational and other denominational institutions as such, all losing

 CHRIST OF THE "CHINA ROAD" 183

their identity in the new non-sectarian organization. The move, I

believe, had the full support of the home offices of those missions in
the United States and Great Britain.
The Rev. Dr. E. C. Lobenstme, Presbyterian leader who had just
returned from the United States, told me that his organization was
virtually sponsoring such a step. This action, long anticipated, crys-
tallized efforts to establish an entirely Chinese Christian Church with

abroad but not controlled in future by any one not Chinese.

affiliations

Nevertheless, the movement continued to receive foreign support

financially as well as the assistance of foreign missionary advisers.
The foreigners who had been conducting the missionary work until
then declared that their elimination as the controlling heads of the
various missions had long been expected and favored. Many of these
said that they favored having the Chinese administer their own Chris-
tian institutions, and the sooner the better. The Baptists and the few
Methodists who attended the conference insisted that they were present

merely as observers, and that their denominations were not yet fully
prepared to merge with the others into the new and unified associa-
tion in the Orient.

Many missionaries, however, pointed out that advantages of the

non-sectarian organization included the removal of the varied denomi-
national teachings which had always been mystifying to the Chinese
whom they sought to convert. The conferences involved more than
1,000 churches in 16 provinces in China, representing approximately
one-third of the Protestant missionaries there. These became "ad-
visers," but the coalition meant little drastic
change immediately except
in their titles. A Chinese Moderator, the Rev. Mr. Chang Cheng-yi,
was elected by the delegates.
The conference issued a summary of its work, saying : "The church
at present still needs foreign aid* But the members should undertake
the responsibility of dismissing denominationalism and credal strife
and set no limits to the activity of the spirit of God in the wide
sphere of human activity. It is not that the church should enter

politics, but individuals

in it must face these new responsibilities. For-
eigners are urged to be patient and to continue with even greater
energy in their work."
That December another group of foreign mission institutions joined
the new Church of Christ in China. Dr. Lobenstine, Secretary of the
184 THE DRAGON STIRS
National Church Council in China, announced that the English Baptist
Mission in Shantung Province had voted to join the new non-sectarian
Chinese Christian Church.
The announcement said: "This is the first case in the history of
the church where a group of Baptist churches has formally united with
the Congregational, Presbyterian and Reform Churches. few years A
ago in Canada the Methodist Church joined with the Congregational,
ists and the Presbyterians, and the United Church of Canada Mission
in China is now joining with our Church of Christ, thus combining
in this one church the Congregationalists, Presbyterian and those who

were formerly Methodists and Baptists."

The announcement also pointed out that the Shantung Baptists
are a branch of the English Church and should not be confused with
the Southern Baptist Mission from the United States. I learned,

however, that the American Northern Baptists had appointed a com-

mittee to confer with the Chinese concerning their joining the new
and unified church. Members said that final action was then largely
dependent upon the head offices of their denominations at home. The
Canadian Methodists in Szechuan Province were considering a similar
move.
The movement has the support of the majority of foreign mission-
aries on the field of battle in Asia. The Chinese Christian leaders still

emphasize the fact that they have no desire to split with the western
Christians, but merely desire to combine their many disconcerting
creeds into one Christian church directed by Chinese who for the time

being will have numerous western advisers.

The addition of other foreign missions was regarded as an indica-

tion that the nation-wide campaign for unity among the missionaries
was rapidly fructifying.
Some little interest was created by the visit of Archbishop Con-

stantini, representative of Pope Pius XI, who went

to China on tour

early in 1929 and was feted by the National Government in Nanking.

Archbishop Constantini called officially on President Chiang Kai-shek
at Nanking and was also greeted by other high members of the Gov-
ernment. He said he had come "to convey personally the good wishes
of the Pope."

Archbishop Constantini said of his mission to President Chiang

Kai-shek :
 "
CHRIST OF THE C H I N A ROAI>" 185

"I deem
it a great honor to be here as the representative of His

Holiness, Pope Pius XI, the highest authority of the Catholic Faith
in the world. What hope the Pope entertains toward China has been
stated clearly in his circular telegram of August 1, 1928. I am here

to convey personally the wishes of the Pope.

"It is a great pleasure to see peace restored and unification effected
in this country. It is my sincere hope that the National Government
might head toward the way of reform and reconstruction, thus estab-
lishing the permanent foundation of the nation.
"Although Catholic priests who are now
preaching in China belong
to different nationalities, their aim is one, that is, to convey to the

Chinese masses the Gospel of Christ which is one of fraternal love and
equality. The Catholic religion knows no national or racial discrimina-
tion and a religion upholding the equality of mankind.
it is

"We, as priests, have no intention of interfering in the politics and

diplomacy of any nation and our attitude is one of absolute impar-
tiality. We are ready to offer our every assistance to newborn China
in her numerous reforms and tasks of reconstruction. pray for We
God's blessing upon the Chinese people in order to enable them to
enjoy permanent peace and order. We also pray that China may be
established on an equal footing with other Powers, thus ensuring peace
in the whole world."
The missionary scene has changed with the times, of course. One
evidence of the induction of Chinese Christians into service for the
"faith of our fathers" occurred not long ago. saw a brief item about I
it in a daily
newspaper in The dispatch was from
Miami, Florida.
Vatican City and related how Pope Pius XI had set a new precedent
for the Holy See with the formal appointment of a Chinese Catholic to
an office high in Papal circles. The man was Mr. Lo Pa Hong, a
some wealth in Shanghai.
citizen of

He was created "the Pope's Private Valet of the Sword and Cape."
The account indicated that this was the "first time that a non-white
has ever been accorded that honor by a Pope." It seems that "Mr.

Hong," as the report called him, was President of the Catholic Action
Society of China and a frequent and large contributor "to the finan-
cial support of the Catholic missions in China."
Both Catholic and Protestant Chinese are slowly moving more and
more into prominence but even so, their religious fervor is not yet
what the missionaries could wish it. That will require much time,
 14 THE MARINES GET GOING

Kuomintang Revolution engulfed Peking early in June, 1928.

THE The ancient capital fell on June 8 of that momentous year.

Japanese at once became serious. They entered the picture on

The

the Asiatic mainland in a determined way, especially around Peking

and Tientsin and north of the Great Wall in the Three Eastern Prov-
,nces known as Manchuria. They have since, as all know, annexed
sphere of influence" and renamed it Manchukuo.
fct
this particular
The weeks of June were crammed with excitement and events of
historic significance. Old Peking fell, though not without a noble
struggle, and the Southern forces replenished from provinces all along
the long trek from the Pearl River at Canton joyously marched by
the thousands through those stern old gates, swarming everywhere in
profuse enjoyment of their hard fought victory.
The men were happy at gaining their goal, and of looting or of
property damage there was little those winding old avenues so
in

strange to the new battalions literally from another country in the deep
south of China. Foreigners were unharmed. Some were slightly dis-
commoded for a day or two but none, as far as I know, was injured
or lost an appreciable amount of property, if any. And that, in time
of war, is not usual. But the troops, victorious and inclined to be
rampant, were gay. Harm to those who had remained was far from
their thoughts in the week that Peking fell.
Old Marshal Chang Tso-lin, the defeated war lord from Man-
churia, saw the fight was vain. He fled back toward his own capital
of Mukden, above the Great Wall of that China which the old brigand
had hoped to rule as yet another Manchu emperor on the Dragon
Throne in Peking. But Marshal Chang never lived to see his own
capital again, and there are many who still say it was "bad joss" (ill
luck) for him ever to have left the peaceful plains of Manchuria where
he was dictator.
1S6
 THE MARINES GET GOING 187

The coach on which the Marshal was fleeing toward home was
mysteriously blasted to bits on the outskirts of Mukden just as the
train was about Marshal Chang Tso-lin was killed,
to enter the city.
as dramatically and mysteriously as he had lived to rise from bandit
in Manchuria to the man who would be
king over the Chinese, their
4f
ruler and emperor in Peking a modern Son of Heaven.'* Instead,
he died. The explosion was at dawn on the morning of June 4.
The foreign troops in China became interested in the rapid devel-
opments around Peking that week; and so did I. When word came
that old Marshal Chang had taken a private train and fled, we realized
that things were decidedly picking up in the north. And when we
heard in Shanghai, nearly 1000 miles to the south, that in his flight
from Peking the old soldier-brigand-dictator had been assassinated,
there was but one thing for me to do. Like the Marines and the Navy,
I went to the scene first to Tientsin and then across Peichihli Bay
to Manchuria, landing in the Japanese-owned port of Dairen near Port
Arthur.
I got away on a crowded steamer and slept in the library or on

deck chairs. It is fine weather in early June along the China Coast.

Just before we left, I may explain the northern drive by the Kuomin-
tang armies along two major salients was resumed toward Peking.
I also want to stress here the attitude of our own, the British and the

Japanese forces out there at that important juncture in the revolution

The possibility of America's joining with the British in sending
at least part of the troops defending Shanghai northward was increas-

ing daily, and the United States Marines were soon ordered to Tient-
sin. The theater of the Kuomintang Revolution rapidly shifted north-
ward and both the British and the American naval and military author-
ities were inclined to view the situation in the Peking-Tientsin area
with heightened interest if not actual apprehension for the safety of
the many foreigners concentrated there.
The British sent two battalions northward. One proceeded to
their northern base at the town of Wei-Hai-Wei, and the second went
to Tientsin. Major-General John Duncan, chief in command of their
forces in China, sailed for Tientsin accompanied by Viscount Gort, his
chief-of-staff, and an aviation reconnaisance officer. The danger in
the north was believed to be similar to that which had menaced Shang-
hai a year or so before, when the revolution swept over the Yangtze
188 THE DRAGON STIRS
Valley and engulfed that city. A large force, therefore, was sent to

the Peking-Tientsin area. Great Britain, and United States, France

and Japan cooperated in this movement of troops and marines.
In these movements the U. S. Marines sent one regiment to Tien-
tsin. It was the 6th regiment, the men sailing on board the transport
Henderson. General Smedley Butler, in command of the U. S.
Marines in China, returned from the north and arranged details of the
shift. Acting Consul-General Clarence Gauss was transferred to Tien-
tsin in mid-June, former Consul-General Edwin S. Cunningham, who
had held the Shanghai post for years, returning from a leave of
absence.
Also, six United States destroyers were concentrated at Chefoo,
their northern summer base below Tientsin. These included the U. S.
S. Hurlbert, which was already there, and five others. They were the
famous U. S. S. Noa, which fired during the "Nanking Incident" more
than a year before; the Paul Jones, the Preble, the Preston and the
Pruitt.

The entire outlook of the Chinese revolution turned northward, as

a result of optimistic reports from both Nanking and Hankow. Men

at both revolutionary centers claimed victories all along the lines of

the two routes of attack toward Peking, the goal for so many years in
this surgetoward power over all China. One line of march was north
from Hankow along the inland railroad to Peking: the other was up
from Nanking, through Shantung Province, along the sea coast into
Tientsin and thence to Peking, less than 100 miles away. Marshal
Feng Yu-hsiang's drive around Chengchow in the central-China route,
was apparently progressing favorably and the Manchu troops rein-
forcing the Northerners were bottled up beyond Kung-hsien on that
salient.

The Kuomintang men appeared also to have buried the hatchet at

last and to be determined to
go ahead with the battle for Peking with-
out further internal squabbles. Nanking and Hankow seemed to be
in accord as far as the northern expedition was concerned.
A pronouncement was issued by the National Government at Nan-
king seeking to clear up once and for all the "Nanking outrages" of
the previous year. The British authorities conducted unofficial con-
versations with them and a public statement on that troublesome in-
cident in the revolution was the result. A settlement, at least as far
 THE MARINES GET GOING 189

as the British were concerned, was finally arranged. A Settlement

Commission Chinese and foreigners was eventually appointed to
of

arrange the cash payments to be made.

It was generally believed then in official circles in China that the
reason for the concentration of a large foreign defense force in or near
Tientsin was the protection of foreign lives and property in the event
of a Northern troop debacle. The whole move was as much against
danger from Northern Chinese troops who had to flee, as against the
victorious and advancing Southerners in the Kuomintang Army.

High interest was evinced

Shanghai over President Coolidge's
in

approval of the State Department's plan in 1928 to remove our Lega-

tion from Peking to some point on the coast, doubtless Tientsin. The

local reaction was varied in the extreme, however, and I found that
certain Americans as well as British were inclined to criticize what
they regarded as a further indication of Washington's refusal to take
a "firm stand" for the protection of American interests in China. Still
others tended to the view that Washington was eminently correct, even
one high British official admitting that there seemed to be very little
use in maintaining the Legations in Peking when there was apparently
no effort made by the Chinese in power there toward the maintenance
of a civil form of government.

Rear-Admiral J. R. Y. Blakely, in command of our light cruiser

squadron on the China coast, sailed aboard the cruiser Richmond, and
as the ranking naval officer was in command of the naval and marine
forces at Tientsin. Reports persisted that the British would send at
least four battalions north. Their headquarters, however, insisted only
two would be dispatched. This was done.

Meanwhile, a Japanese force of 2000 men arrived at the port of

Tsingtao in Shantung Province. Reports indicated that feeling was
running high against Japan's returning to Shantung, and demonstra-
tions among the Chinese showed a renewed popular antipathy toward
this sudden move.
The interior sectors appeared quiet. One dispatch from Hankow*,
headquarters for that salient, asserted that Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang
had reported Loyang, which seemed probable in view of
his capture of

the stiff fighting in that area for days. Another telegram from there
advised that Chinese Communists in the towns of Changsha, Singtan,
190 THE DRAGON STIRS
Yiyang, Ping-kiang, Changteh and Linyang had been ousted by the
Cantonese troops, who then proceeded to form unions.
coastal packet nosed past Tangku Bar three days after we
Our
leftShanghai, in early June and we tied up alongside Tangku, port of
Tientsin some eighteen miles down the Hai-ho River on the sea There
was considerable fighting going on between the coast and Tientsin
still

as the Kuomintang forces pushed on after the rapidly fleeing Northern

troops, who were leaving in a dispirited rout. As a result, there was

no apparent way to get up river to Tientsin, and once there, there was
no way to get on over to Peking, about ninety miles further inland in
what was then Chihli Province, now called Hopei.
A young Dutchman, Richard Breitenstein, and I went ashore to
reconnoiter, there being nothing else to do Train service at the sta-
tion was dished for the moment none knew when or if a train would
run. Some United States Marines were down for the mail, however,
and they heard of our plight. One told me that there was a U. S.
Marine aviation base nearby, stationed opposite the local Standard Oil

plant on the seacoast.

Without delay we walked over there, a short distance. There were
a dozen or more Marine airplanes at that post then, and they proved
a lifesaver. We
arranged to fly to Tientsin a flight which took about
twenty minutes, directly across the clashing lines firing at one another
below. We flew in an open ship, some 2,500 feet up, and although we
got a good view of that sector in action, the Marine flier and I were
high enough to be out of gunshot range and perfectly safe. We saw
a Japanese destroyer in the Hai-ho replying to shots from the banks
The plane made available to me was an amphibian which had to
go up to headquarters anyway, and I was in luck. We took off from
the Hai-ho ("ho" means river in North China) at Tangku and less
than a half hour later landed on the Race Course outside Tientsin.
I thanked the Marine flier, a Captain, and got a taxi in to town.

There, I could not get up to Peking for several days. So I

found I

registered at the Astor Hotel, bathed and turned in, glad of a bed
after sleeping fitfully and fully clothed on deck chairs since leaving
Shanghai.
 15 THE END OF CHANG TSO-LIN

arrival in Tientsin was on June 10 of that strange month

MY in 1928,
eral Yen
two days after Peking had been taken over by Gen-
Hsi-san, himself a Northern governor in Shansi
Province nearby, but allied with the Kuomintang. The ex-coolie who
became Governor of Shantung, Marshal Chang Chung-chang, was still

holding Tientsin, but he, too, had to flee within the week, and his
troops went over to the victors. Some fled, but in the main they
merely recognized a new chieftain.
The man who occupied Tientsin was General Fu Tso-yi, a moon-
faced but stern military man whose troops were loyal to him and the
Kuomintang Revolution. General Fu was named the new Defense
Commissioner, and I went out in the native city around the foreign
concessions of Tientsin to see him the next day. His aims were not
anti-foreign, he said, and his troops were told to respect foreign prop-
erty there. Certainly no one sought to harm me in the trip to the
General's "yamen," or headquarters, through the narrow native
avenues.
The Commissioner did not know whether the victorious march
would continue then to press on past the Great Wall and into Man-
churia, where old Marshal Chang Tso-lin had just been killed. None
in Tientsin then knew or would comment on this part of the revolu-

tion; they seemed to feel, however, that holding Peking and Tientsin
would keep their troops occupied for the next few months. There was
still some little fighting going on in the outskirts of Tientsin, and the

sound of shooting could often be heard.

I recall touring the foreign defenses late one night, or just before
dawn, while distant rifle fire was audible but nothing of importance
occurred within the concession area. Nothing but the usual round of
unbridled gaiety with which the foreigners Americans, British,
French, Germans, and Russians sought an outlet from the idleness
191
192 THE DRAGON STIRS
always forced on commerce by warfare. They danced here and there
in the halls rather tawdrywhen compared to the more luxurious
places for which Shanghai has become known and most of them spent
hours at numerous Chinese gambling houses, or the one run by an
American peroxide blonde of uncertain vintage and virtue in what
had been the old German Concession there. It ran wide open, and I
was led astray one night long enough to try a fling with the always
fascinating little ivory ball in roulette, where I won $200 Mex., or
about $95 in U. S. currency at that time.
It was still impossible to get through to Peking at the end of a
week, so I left for Manchuria. The local correspondent for The New
York Times then carried on from Tientsin, and his chief, Hallett
Abend, then a part-time man in North China who within a few months
was to succeed me in all Asia with headquarters at Shanghai, was
getting the Peking angle out from there. The strange manner in

which Marshal Chang Tso-lin had died intrigued me, in any case, so
I went to Mukden to see what was occurring across Peichihli Bay

there. My companion, Breitenstein, went along and in mid-June we

landed from a Japanese vessel at the Japanese-controlled city of Dairen
ar the tip of the Manchurian peninsula.
Dairen was a modern city, calm, quiet and peaceful after the chaos

of China. The Japanese built it up from little or nothing and have

their powerful South Manchuria Railway headquarters there. They
were proud of their work not only in Dairen but in all Southern Man-
churia which they then controlled and in all fairness, I must say here
that they had, and have, a right to be proud. The atmosphere of

industry and customary peacetime pursuits was all but overwhelming

to one just fresh from the wars of China.

To find out what was back of all this and what the Japanese in-

tended to do if the men in the Chinese Kuomintang tried to push on

into Manchuria, I sought out an old friend. He was Henry W.
Kinney, an adviser to the South Manchuria Railway, whom I had
known years before in Tokyo. Kinney, a writer, traveller, editor and
erstwhile associate of the late Jack London when the two were resi-
dents of Honolulu earlier in this century, knew all the answers. But
he knew also that they would sound better in America if they came
from a Japanese. So he introduced me to Mr. Yosuke Matsuoka, then
vice-president of the S. M. R. in Dairen, a Japanese diplomat educated
 THE END OF CHANG TSO-LIN 193

in the United States. Matsuoka-San subsequently became world

famous as the head of the Japanese delegation to the League of Na-
tions which walked out of that august assembly some years ago. In
the summer of 1940 he became Foreign Minister in Tokyo.
A high degree of interest approaching anxiety marked the Japanese
attitude as indications increased that the victorious Nationalists did
not intend to stop with the capture of Peking, but were already laying

plans for an onward push into China's Three Eastern Provinces, or

Manchuria. Reports published widely in the Japanese press in Dairen
in 1928 outlined the Southerners' contemplated offensive, and I found
it
apparent that preparations were under way at all strategic points to
meet the crisis which was feared to be imminent. Of course, it failed
to materialize.

Japan had definitely determined not to permit anything to disrupt

the peace and order of Manchuria, determination made clear by a frank
declaration to me by Matsuoka. The opinion prevailed that Japan was
facing the most critical situation in her occupation of Manchuria since
the Russo-Japanese War in 19Q4--05, but officials proceeded on what
was generally regarded as a sane program to offset the possibilities of
civil war entering the Three Eastern Provinces.

"Our policy, frankly, is peace at any price," said Matsuoka. "We

intend to reiterate, necessary, our declaration not to permit either
if

Mukden or Nanking to carry the fighting into Manchuria, If they

are able to get together and settle their political differences peacefully,
all right if not, we shall close the door at Shanhaikwan (at the east-
ern end of the Great Wall) and not permit the Southern armies to

pass."
Matsuoka had been long in the Foreign Office in Tokyo and was
among those closest to the late Baron Tanaka, the Premier, although
he then held no political post.

"Isn't that virtually a protectorate over whoever is in power in

Mukden?" I asked Matsuoka.

"Call it you will/' he replied. "We will not per-
a protectorate if

mit war to disturb Manchuria, where the people are peaceful and pros-

perous. We intend to assure peace at any price in Manchuria, which

is our old and long established policy.
"I admit that this is liable to put us in an embarrassing position.
194 THE DRAGON STIRS
We certainly do not desire to interfere in Chinese politics, all the

criticism to the contrary notwithstanding."

Matsuoka said he believed that he was expressing Tokyo's policy

when he declared that no Southern troops would be permitted to pass
Shanhaikwan if there was
any fighting in the offing.
Nanking's program then to push on in further conquests beyond
Peking, as published in the Japanese press, was to follow this plan:
In the first line of attack under General Chiang Kai-shek, his troops
would advance to Shanhaikwan along the Peking-Mukden Railway via
Tientsin. A second group under Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang would
start for the same destination via Tungchow, Yutien and Fengjun,

Feng being in the middle sector between Chiang's men and those of

General Yen Hsi-san, Governor of Shansi Province and Peking's new

ruler, who was directing the third advance via Jehol Province, north
of the Wall Another significant feature was seen in the participation
of General Pei Chung-hsi, the man who captured Shanghai, later fell

out with Chiang Kai-shek, went to Wuhan and was then in Peking.
This leader of the Kwangsi group had long been a disturbing element
within the Kuomintang. General Pei was said to be leading a fourth

expeditionary force against the north in the general direction of Chie-

fenchow, the strategy apparently being to have his army ready to re-
inforce any others in the event that that should be necessary.
"If they get in the vicinity of Shanhaikwan and Mukden refuses
to surrender," said Matsuoka, "it will mean civil war in Manchuria and
this we shall absolutely not permit. We shall stop them at the door.
There are times when a firm attitude is essential, and this is one of
them. We
do not want to help any faction within China, but we have
got to protect the peace of Manchuria."
Matsuoka was unusually frank and outspoken as he replied to my
queries. Asked why he was so emphatic, he reiterated:
"We must protect our interests in Manchuria."
Then he proceeded with his frank and significant statement.
"Naturally we consider our interests enough reason for our action

here," he said. "However, we might as well admit that Manchuria is

strategically vital to Japan it is our first line of defense. Geographi-

cally, this is true. These are the facts which perhaps will cause us
embarrassment, but we must face the situation and admit that things
are as they are.
 THE END OF CHANG TSO-LlK 195

"But let me add that we do not want turmoil. We do not want to

be misunderstood. We want peace in Manchuria. That is all."

Another thing which he feared might disturb that peace was the
probability that Chang Tso-lin, warlord of Manchuria and erstwhile
Northern Dictator, was dead. Absolutely nobody with authority in
Dairen would say yet whether he was dead or alive. Even Matsuoka
insisted that he could not ascertain the truth.

Hence, the impression was growing hourly as no news came from

Mukden other than rumors one way and the other concerning the war-
lord's condition, that he had succumbed to the wounds he suffered
when his train was bombed several days earlier as he was fleeing from
Peking to Mukden. The whole bombing affair was surrounded by the
deepest mystery. Those who should have known all about it professed
the most complete ignorance, the Chinese blaming the Japanese and
the Japanese being inclined to intimate that Chinese blew up Chang
Tso-lin's train.But nobody was making any definite statement. The
new alignment in Manchurian political affairs had a significant effect
on the Japanese position there. Hence the tenseness surrounding the
bombing of the old Marshal, which contained the seeds of far-reaching
international developments.
I went on up to Mukden, where I found that young General Chang
Hsueh-liang, a capable youth then still in his twenties, had succeeded

his picturesque father as Governor of Fengtien and Dictator of Man-

churia. Mukden that mid-June was bright with five-barred flags, em-
blems of China's first republic by that time flying only in the capitals

of those Three Eastern Provinces celebrating the formal announce-

ment of the advent of a new ruler.

There was a somber note in the surface gaiety, however, born of

certainty that the old Marshal was dead despite the official pronounce-
ment was assuming the dictatorship because of his father's
that his son

critical condition. There was a further reason for the strain of anxiety
beneath the populace's police-adjured jollity. The political plots and

counterplots pervading Manchuria's peaceful plains threatened to up-

root authority, and Chinese and Japanese alike regarded the situation
with concern. Mystery enveloped Mukden.
Two remained unanswered were : who
vital questions that officially

wrecked Chang Tso-lin's train and how? and was the Marshal dead?
Chang Tso-lin's death had not been officially announced by June 19.
196 THE DRAGON STIRS
However, the son had tiffin in the native city that day with a group of

industrial Chinese, including persons closest to the young General, and

it was understood that a statement of his father's death was issued

shortly thereafter.
The Chinese were always thoroughly convinced that Japan was
responsible. The usual motive advanced was that Japan wanted to
cause trouble in Manchuria so that it would be possible for her to

annex the country without too much opposition abroad. This she did
four years later.

The Japanese authorities, on the other hand, stanchly denied ul-

terior motives in Manchuria, the consular as well as military officers

persisting in the contention that the sole interest of Japan was to main-
tain peace and to assist the Chinese to become prosperous. The Japa-
nese Consul-General, Mr. Hayashi, sought to get the Chinese to agree
to issue a joint statement on the bombing, but the Chinese refused.

The indication was that they did not desire a joint inquiry for, con-
vinced that the Japanese did it anyway, they would reject efforts to
prove otherwise.
The Chinese took no action, their leaders pointing out that the
Japanese wanted them to start something to enable Japan to go ahead
and take Manchuria. Hence they shook puzzled heads, admitted strong
anti- Japanese feeling was increasing, and yet declared that they must
bide their time and handle the affair when times were less troublous
at home.
Japan had a garrison of nearly 10,000 men in Mukden then, and
her total force in Manchuria was estimated at nearly 25,000, which
was enough to "enforce peace." Chinese Northern troops continued
to arrive from the south on the Peking-Mukden Railway line,
jammed
with troop trains. Chang Tso-lin left little rolling stock behind him.
Scores of the famous "Blue Express" cars of the Tientsin-Pukow line
were on the sidings at Mukden, as well as cars marked Peking, Han-
kow, etc. His denuding the railways of all cars hampered communica-
tions throughout China for months. The whereabouts of Marshals Sun

Chuan-fang and Chang Chung-chang, Mukden's allied commanders,

was causing speculation. It was believed
that they were in the
vicinity
of Shanhaikwan, and they were expected to retire safely to Dairen.
Chang Hsueh-liang had not formally assumed the mantle in suc-
ceeding his father as Governor of Fengtien Province, although in effect
 THE END OF CHANG TSO-LIN 197

his positionwas the same as that of his father. Japan was apparently
content to permit the young General to assume his father's post, al-

though it seemed quite patent that the Japanese, thoroughly incensed

over Chang Tso-lin's attitude in recent months, wanted a new line-up.
This, incidentally, was among the reasons for the Chinese belief that
the Japanese were behind Chang Tso-lin's assassination. They said
that Japan long sought to evict the old Marshal, who was unwilling
to make certain concessions Japan was said to desire.

Foreign experts who visited the scene of the disaster soon after
itsoccurrence agreed that there must have been at least ISO pounds
of explosive in the mine laid in the pier of the bridge of the South

Manchuria Railway, and that it must have taken several hours to lay
it. Hence, the Japanese soldiers who were guarding the site were
deemed to have been at least "strangely negligent." The Japanese re-
plied that the Chinese guarded their own line below the bridge, where
the Japanese were stationed. But the Chinese asserted that they were
not permitted to send guards within the Japanese railway zone and
had none there. A
man on the train said that he saw no Chinese
guards and that the Japanese did not appear until about twenty
minutes after the explosion.
On June 20, I talked for the first time with young Marshal Chang
Hsueh-liang. He said he intended to pursue a policy having among
its chief goals the eradication of the scourge of war in these three

troubled eastern provinces of China.

Following the early institution of an era of economic development,

he hoped to encourage the investment of American capital in Man-
churia.
"I would welcome financial aid from abroad on the basis of equal-

ity/' said theyoung Marshal. "I would be best pleased if American

capital were invested in Manchuria. However, I do not intend to
grant further special privileges. Foreign corporations coming into our
country must be willing to agree to equality of control that is, half
Chinese and half nationals of whatever foreign countries organize
companies here."
This was similar to the old arrangement for the Chinese Eastern
Railway, which was essentially Russian until bought by Japan.
The youthful successor to Chang Tso-lin, twenty-seven years old
on June 4, 1928, the day his father's train was dynamited, issued a
 198 THEDRAGONSTIRS
formal proclamation the next day giving the details of his policies, but
in this first interview he outlined in advance to The New York Times

correspondent the chief policies of his Government.

He declined to discuss the attitude of Japan but felt Tokyo's show
of force did not represent the attitude of the people. He believed it
was the result of the temporary ascendency of a certain clique in the
Government, which he hoped was a passing phase, and that eventually
he would be able to treat with Japan on a basis of equality unhampered
by special rights. He was evicted by Japan in 1931, however, fleeing
to Nanking.
11
The "}oung Marshal received me at his military headquarters.
He was slender and pale, yet energetic. His thick, black mustache
and serious mien added dignity to his frail youth.

"I shall issue a proclamation giving my aspirations for government

in detail," he said. "They, briefly, are this I shall seek to end war. :

I have been ten years in war and know its horrors. I want, first of

all, to lift this scourge from our people. I hope I shall not be forced
to act otherwise in my foreign policy. I shall demand equal treatment
for China. Eventually, we must abolish the unequal treaties.

"At home, we must reorganize our

outlook. I want our people to

concentrate on the development of Manchuria and look to ourselves,

not outward, for development. There is no need of our seeking to
expand now or encroach on other parts of China. We must build
from within.
fct

l am particularly interested in the development of education,

which is another vital point. My father left me $10,000,000. In my
proclamation you will see me donate every cent to an educational
bureau to be administered wisely, the beginning of universal education
throughout our provinces. This is highly essential to the future peace-
ful development of our country.
"Regarding the Nationalists, we are ready to treat with them on
a basis of equality. In fact, we are already conducting negotiations,
but they are at a standstill for the present, due to the lack of unity
within the National Government. When they are ready to discuss a
new alignment with us, we shall do so, but talk peace only as equals.
If they seek to exclude us and make peace on their own terms natu-

rally we will nothave anything to do with them. I

hope that will not
 THE END OF CHANG TSO-LIN 199

occur and that the Nationalists will establish unity and enable us to
make terms.
ki

Meantime, they are unreliable. For example, General Yen Hsi-

san came to Peking and told us how he would guarantee the safe

departure of our garrison. The Commander left in charge a small

army to maintain peace in Peking until the turn-over. When our
General departed, his men met Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang's troops be-
tween Peking and Tientsin and were disarmed. This disgraceful
breach of faith leaves us doubting that they trust each other.

'These things I will strive to accomplish. You must realize the

program is only tentative and subject to subsequent events. I hope

nothing obstructs its achievement, but in the event that something

unforeseen occurs I do not want yon to think me not frank. I can
only strive for these goals. The main object is to establish faith in my
regime.
"I frankly admit the problem. But this outlines my life's aim."

The Marshal said that Marshals Chang Chung-chang and Sun

Chuan-fang were still with him, Sun commanding the troops given him

by young Chang; and Chang Chung-chang with the remnants of his

Shantung army.
A few days later I went north to Harbin. Northern Manchuria
was astir with anxiety as the people in the Three Eastern Provinces

awaited the solution of the shifting political situation caused by the

capture of Peking by the Nationalists and the dramatic death of Mar-
shal Chang Tso-lin.

Conversations with well-informed persons indicated at least two

things,namely, that the provinces of Kirin and Hailunkiang were

determined to end control by a dictatorship in Mukden no matter
under whom, but particularly under young Marshal Chang Hsueh-
liang; and that it was believed that Manchuria soon would join a
National Federation of China under a Manchurian Central Executive
Committee form of government with the capital remaining at Mukden.
The attitude of Kirin was particularly adamant against con-
tinuation of the old order of things as far as maintenance of a dictator-

ship under the "y un g Marshal" was concerned, the position of Kirin

being that if Chang Hsueh-liang were a suitable ruler for his own
people of Fengtien Province it was satisfactory to Kirin that he rule
200 THE DRAGON STIRS
there, but they would not admit his right to dictate affairs outside of

Fengtien.
affairs were intently watching the
Observers in close touch with
conversations with the National Government at Nanking, and the im-

pression was growing that a tentative agreement had already been

reached under which Manchuria would retain much of its old autonomy
but would join the Nationalists as part of a federation agreement.
This they did, under the "young Marshal." While public opinion
regarded a change to this system with doubt, its adoption was gener-
ally seen as a progressive move toward eventual unity and the ending
of internal political strife which otherwise, it was feared, might con-
tinue indefinitely.
The attitude of Japan toward such agreements was regarded as a
probable obstruction, however. Japanese in authority denied that they
intended to interfere as long as the Chinese settled their political
affairs peacefully. The Japanese military high command at Mukden
was still unanimous in declaring it did not intend to exceed treaty

rights, hence the opinion was gaining ground that Japan was willing
to permit Manchuria to try the Nationalist experiment as long as her
rights were unimpaired and peace was preserved.
In fact, just before leaving Mukden, I received a communication
from Yosuke Matsuoka, saying that he desired to clear up his attitude
on a ''protectorate" there. He considered the use of the word unfor-
tunate, adding: "I wish to emphasize that neither I nor any other
responsible Japanese desires nor contemplates a Japanese protectorate
over Manchuria." Matsuoka's idea was to maintain peace in Man-
churia by preventing the armies of either side from fighting and if this
were construed as protecting any interests it could not be helped but ;

as far as the Tokyo Government formally announcing any intention

of setting up a protectorate in the League of Nations sense, he said
it was simply untrue.
The Chinese, nevertheless, regarded Japan's moves with appre-
hension. Authorities in all quarters counselled a policy of calmness
approaching submissiveness until domestic political affairs subsided.
There had been what was regarded as a strange anti-Soviet cam-
paign in the native city in Harbin. Students were circulating pamphlets
in which two theories were advanced one, that the Japanese, whom
the Chinese were all ready to blame for anything, were trying to arouse
 THE END OF CHANG TSO-LIK 201

trouble, other, that the National Government at Nanking was

and the
backing the movement. Soviet adherents in North Manchuria were

keeping quiet and not entering the political field on one side or the
other, although I found them keeping in particularly close touch with
a Japanese Manchurian colonization plan.
 16 TOKYO'S DILEMMA

again in Mukden toward the end of that June, I came to

BACK the conclusion that Japan was fighting with her back to the
Great Wall of China.
While on the surface all was calm and the Chinese officially ex-
pressed their appreciation of the manner in which Japan's firm policy
in Manchuria had maintained peace while the rest of China suffered
the agonies of seemingly interminable civil war, it was increasingly
apparent to me even then that great forces were moving which even-
tually would tend to force the Japanese either to occupy Manchuria
and put an end to doubt, or withdraw her claims to control and
special privileges. It was doubtful in the extreme that Tokyo would
listen at all to this latter alternative. Therefore, the natural tendency
on the part of the Chinesewas to anticipate that Japan intended to do
everything in her power more firmly to implant her control there.
Whether that attempt was to take the form of a protectorate or
whether it was the intention of the War Office cabinet in Tokyo to
proceed with a bold program of annexation were among the contin-
gencies secretly discussed in the Manchurian capital in 1928. The
Japanese in positions of authority were frankly ready to admit, doubt-
less with the approval of their Premier, Baron Tanaka, that Japan
intended to protect these provinces from attack. The Japanese slogan
remained "Peace at any price," in Manchuria, and they were ready to
stand behind that policy to the limit.

Whether that constituted establishing a protectorate in effect over

whoever happened to be in power in Mukden was not, the Japanese
explained to me, their business. It was their avowed intention to

maintain peace and order in Manchuria, come what might. Even the
Chinese could not but see the wisdom of such a policy, although in
Mukden I heard now and then some Chinese remark that this public
expression on the part of Japan was an insult to the integrity and
202
 TOKYO'S DILEMMA 203

ability of the Chinese to handle their own affairsa "breach of

sovereignty," to use an overworked term.

Japan had a number of strong reasons for her stand in Manchuria,
based fundamentally on these three first, she had gained special rights,
:

at least inSouth Manchuria, by right of conquest from the Russians,

and the economic development of the country; second, Manchuria was
her first line of defense in case of war; and third, Japan, with a
rapidly increasing population moving and forcing the
into her cities

Empire to become an industrial nation, needed not only a sure market

for her manufactures but a place to which her nationals could easily

migrate.
Considerable criticism has been leveled at the Japanese for their

attempts to keep Manchuria separate from the rest of China and their
alleged desire to keep the Three Eastern Provinces, or at least South
Manchuria (including Fengtien and most Kirin province) as a
of

special preserve for Japanese interests. it must be remembered

Again,
that the Japanese acted in a highly human manner, and that many
another nation in similar circumstances might be expected to do like-
wise. Naturally, that does not prevent the Chinese since the advent
of Manchukuo in 1931-32 from feeling that the time has come for them
to regain control of their own country and to throw off what they
regard as shackles imposed by a foreign nation. Thus, the natural
ambitions of two peoples directly opposed to each other, met first on
the fertile, peaceful acres of Manchuria. The death struggle soon
spread.
The road from Tientsin to Peking was now open at last, and the
"Big Four" conference of Kuomintang chieftains was about to reach
a climax there. It behooved me to go there, and at the end of June
we departed from Manchuria. Not, however, without adding another
to our little touring band. He was a U. S. Marine deserter nabbed
by the authoritiesin Mukden and I agreed to escort him back to the

Sixth Regiment headquarters where he belonged, in Tientsin. This

is the way it occurred:

The morning of the day we were to leave Mukden for Dairen,

there to take a steamship across Peichihli Bay to Tientsin, the United

States Consul at the old Manchu capital paid me an unexpected call.

The day previous I had had lunch with him in the pleasant consulate

compound and bade him farewell

204 THE DRAGON STIRS
But our Consul had had a shock since then. A young chap scarcely
out of his teens had been seized by the Japanese authorities within
their Railway Zone at Mukden.
The youth, dressed in tramp-like civilian clothes, had no passport
or other identifying papers but claimed that he was an American. His
first story was that he was off a freighter then in Dairen and, given

overnight "shore-leave," had taken a train ride to Mukden. He said

he would be on his way back then but for the fact that he was abruptly
arrested. Eventually, the Japanese or our Consul I never did dis-
cover which wormed out of the frightened youngster his true identity.
He then quickly told his story, of how he had come to desert the IL S.
Marine Corps at Tientsin, in time of a war in North China in which
they might have been involved.
The "kid," as we came to know our Marine -for he was not much
over eighteen years old, if that said he was from the Middle West.
He joined the Marines to see the world, but had found camp routine
at Tientsin pretty dull after so long a time. Then he met a Russian,
he related, who told him he should not obey orders of "all those guys,"
J
the officers. They had a few drinks, it seems, and the Marine "quit'
the service, joined with his pal, grabbed a train, and landed in jail at
Mukden a short time later. What happened to his Russian friend, I
never learned.

"But my problem is how to get him back to his regiment in Tien-

tsin," said the Consul. "We have no funds for returning deserters.
So Fm putting it
up to you you are leaving for Tientsin at noon,
will go to Dairen tonight, and sail back to China tomorrow. I can't

pay you now, but if you will advance this deserter's fare and meals,
you'll get some kind of a reward or pay from the Corps in Tientsin.
How about it?"

There was no point in refusing, so I said: "Okay, but one thing

must be understood now. I'll pay his way and chaperone this lad, but
I won't sleep with him handcuffed to my arm! If he wants to duck

again tonight when I get him a room in Dairen that is strictly none
of my affair. If he really is ready to face the music and wants to go,
let's go. How about that?"

The Consul agreed. He said there would be no blame attached to

me if the Marine fled again after being placed in my custody.
 TOKYO'S DILEMMA 205
"Have him here at noon for the Express down to Dairen," I said.
"And by the way, what's this deserter's name?"
"Budzinski/' our affable Consul replied, and laughed. "It really is.

He's an American, all right but that's his right name, believe it

or not/'
'
With an unusual name of my own I had no trouble in believing it,

or that the lad was an American. We

already had picked up another
lad just out of Yale and making a world tour as a graduation present,
whom we met at Harbin. His name was Hermann. The next day,
when I bought the four steamship tickets for our squadron trooping
across China even the Japanese man at the counter had to smile. Who
wouldn't, at four chaps travelling together and named Hermann,
Breitenstein, Misselwitzand Budzinski! And we were all Gentiles,
except Hermann, who was a Jew from New York.
On the train down to Dairen I talked with the boyish Marine and
we had no trouble in that quarter.
"It's okay with me," I told him, "if you desert again when we hit

Dairen tonight. I'm going to give you five yen (about $2.50 then)
for a meal or two and a room for the night, and it's up to you to be
on the boat when we sail. If you're not, I won't like it, but what do
you care? You'll be free, free as any hunted man can be. And you
may be free, so to speak, for five, ten or twenty years but some one
of these days the long arm Uncle Sam's law will grab you again.
of

You don't want to go through life as a deserter, a hunted man, do

you? Make up your mind. Here's the money I'll look for you
when we sail for China tomorrow."
And he was there, glad to be sailing back to his outfit There was
no harm in that Marine, and
hope he got off light at headquarters.
I

All we could get on the Japanese vessel back was deck space again.
I had had my fill of deck space travel, but I had to get to Peking, so

we went. Although it was nearly July, that night at sea off North
China was one of the most chilling I ever spent anywhere. The next
day on shore at Tientsin it was stifling, but we all nearly froze to
death on that tiny ship scant shelter from those icy blasts toward the
Manchuria plains which we were leaving.
17 A DREAM THAT RIVALS GENGHIS KHAN

OWN "northern expedition" into the wild of

MY Manchuria ended on a Sunday, when our steamer docked at

Tientsin. I again sought out the Astor House Hotel.
pastures

I had

first to "deliver" the Marine to the base then at Tientsin. The others
went along to the hotel while I sought out the GHQ to turn Budzinski,

poor devil, over to the Marine authorities

It was hot, unbearably hot, that first day of July in North China,
not too far from the oven known as the Gobi Desert. Budzinski was
willing enough to go along, as he had been ever since he was turned
over to me, and for a black sheep, or deserter, I must give him credit
for making no disturbance whatever. In fact, he was glad to be back
where he could see his former "buddies," who at least talked his lan-
guage, and he was quite prepared to take his medicine
But the United States Marine Corps gave us our difficulties on
that hot Sabbath. That was just the trouble it was Sunday. No one
of authority was around. The enlisted man on duty at the desk had
never heard of Budzinski, and could not be bothered. Eventually a
non-commissioned officer heard the "walla- walla," or talk, in the outer
office and put in an appearance. He had heard of a deserter some
weeks ago but never had heard of Budzinski, and was stumped for a
moment. Then the brilliant non-com had an inspiration. He said:
"Wait a minute," and called a Captain on the regimental telephone.
The Captain was not in. It was Sunday. Idea number two: The
sergeant telephoned the officer at his quarters. "He'll be there, all
right," he said. "Last night was Saturday night, you know."
The Captain was there in bed. "Send them over, Sergeant," his
voice sounded through the receiver. Well, we went over. The Captain
said he didn't know, but he supposed he could put Budzinski in the
guardhouse until Monday when the Corps would start functioning
again. That seemed fair enough. It was all we could do, in any case,
206
 A DREAM THAT RIVALS GENGHIS KHAN 207
and I thanked the Captain, a likable young chap, and went on to the
hotel.

When the next day I got our tickets for the haphazard train ride
to Peking a Marine told me at the station that I would be repaid for
Budzinski's fare to Tientsin from Mukden and his night's lodging in

Dairen, by the "reward" due me for "safely conducting a deserter back

to his regiment here." Eventually another Marine was sent all the
way to Peking solely to deliver this "reward" to me. I found it was
more than double the cost of Private Budzinski's return and I still

feel I owe that young man some of the $50 I got.

In Peking, the heat of early July was even worse than in Tientsin.
It reminded me of Hankow far to the south, where one might expect
heat. Even so, the ancient capital, visited for the first time, was really
a treat. There was enough going on to make us forget the climate.
For one thing, the leaders of the Kuomintang Revolution gathered there
that summer for the "Big Four" Conference. They were Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek, Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang, General Yen Hsi-san,
Governor of Shansi Province, and General Li Chung-jen, a southerner
from Kwangsi Province who had been one of the foremost Generals in
the field during the capture of Peking.

Peking fell to the Kuomintang Revolution on June 8, 1928, when

troops loyal to General Yen Hsi-san occupied the city. Their entrance
was peaceful, for the Northern troops had fled.

The conference did little but agree that the next move was to
demobilize China's vast armed forces. The leaders decided that a
Manchurian expedition was unnecessary. The "young Marshal," son
of the late Marshal Chang Tso-lin, was all for the Kuomintang Revo-

lution and the Three People's Principles, and the red emblem of the

Kuomintang with its white sun on a field of light blue in the

upperleft hand corner flew all over Manchuria before the year ended.

All was well with the world, as these "Big Four" saw it then and
they conferred for awhile and went home. Demobilization and the work
of reconstruction were the things to achieve next, they decided. They
were right but those two things have yet to be accomplished. Neither
was possible then or now for many reasons, including incessant strife

within the Kuomintang first, followed by the invasion of warring Japan.

The embalmed body of the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen was entombed at
that time in a temple shrine outside Peking, awaiting the day when it
208 THE DRAGON STIRS
should be buried permanently by his beloved Kuomintang followers in
a Mausoleum which they had constructed on Purple Mountain outside
the capital of the "new China" which he envisaged, at Nanking. At
Peking that fetid July the daily temperature at the hotel was around
110 degrees noon I took a rickshaw out to the temporary resting
at

place to see where the Northerners kept Dr. Sun's body. It was a
beautiful spot. The shrine was high up at the top of an old temple.
Soldiers of the Kuomintang were on guard there. However, troops
paid no appreciable attention to me as I walked alone across the flagged
courtyards to the long flight of stone steps leading upward to the vault.
A portrait of Dr. Sun was visible within the dimly lighted vault, above
the great man's casket. The casket was of metal, sent as a gift by the
Moscow Government; Dr. Sun was their friend and associate. The
two soldiers on guard would not permit me to enter the "holy of
holies/' but they were good-natured and had no objections to my

peering into the gloom within, dark as a cavern after the sunlight out-
side. The next time, and the last, that I was to see Dr. Sun's casket
was when I saw the dark, embalmed body of the Tsung-li, or leader,
the day before the State funeral and entombment in a final resting-

place outside Nanking a year later.

That Fourth of July the United States John Van A.
Minister,

MacMurray, gave the customary Independence Day reception and cock-

tail party. Like all Peking social affairs, it was a gala function. The
guests of all nations, including our cousins the British (at whom we
were angry when that day became a day to remember in American
history), milled about in genial camaraderie and the party was as gay
all around the Legation Compound.
as the Chinese revolutionary victors
Infact, it was
celebrating another revolution for freedom.
The party was but one of the sidelights of the revolution in China.
The whirl of Peking went on apace. The night clubs, somewhat
tawdry affairs at best, and the hotel roof dances went on and on and
on. Within a week I had seen enough of this, of temples, of quaint old

Peking-style homes with "moon-gate" apertures in every garden wall,

of the *'Big Four" Conference of it all. I left. A train to Hankow
was a possibility for a while, but that idea fell through and I took a
coastal steamer back to Shanghai.
The summer of 1928 found the men at Nanking full of victory in

their Kuomintang Revolution and of plans for a yet greater China.

 A DREAM THAT RIVALS GENGHIS KHAN 209

They had got used to traveling at revolutionary speed and dreamed of

a unity that would encompass all Asia. The dreams were fine and the

conception remains a grand idea, but the Nanking victors forgot the
apathy with which the mass of humanity views a new thought.
It was a dream, however, that rivaled the deeds of Genghis Khan.

The dream was of a great nation that, stretching far across almost all
Asia, counts within its borders not only what is known as China
Proper (a vast area in itself) but the provinces in Manchuria, Inner
and Outer Mongolia, and Tibet. In the National Government there
was formed a Committee on Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs. It included

men who are well acquainted with the countries bordering China

Proper and who have visited these wild hinterlands of Asia, even some
who have lived among the nomadic peoples who populate the plains
and plateaux beyond the Great Wall and out to the West where the
Yangtze River begins.
Of course these men have made little progress in the realization of
their dream. Communications into these backlands are as primitive
today, in the main, as in the time seven centuries ago when Genghis
Khan's hordes swept across Asia and started the first "pony express."
There isn't even a vestige of that "pony express" in existence. Occa-
sionally caravans draw out of Peking, through the mountain passes and
up into the plateaux beyond, taking goods to the aboriginal tribes that
live as their ancestors lived. Occasionally horse traders go back into
these places and bring out droves of Mongolian ponies or horses from
Tibet. But commerce is lax, and the task of
uniting these far places
under one government remains extremely difficult.

The obstacles are not all natural. It may be recalled that Outer
Mongolia was for a time a member of the Soviet Union. The influence
of Russia has long been strong in this country, adjacent to Siberia and
forming a second if not first line of defense in case of another war with
Japan. Hence, the Nationalists' plans in this direction will have to
recognize the Russian problems before much progress can be expected.
The Mongols are not entirely averse to coming into a federation with a
strong Chinese government. But they are under strong pressure from
their Russian neighbors.
Several years ago the Mongols staged an uprising and declared
themselves a democratic state, and the "government" at once declared
the Mongolian princes' titles void. A delegation from Charhar, north-
210 THE DRAGON STIRS
west of Peking, was sent to Nanking and the question of uniting with
the Nationalists was discussed. The Mongolians presented a lengthy
petition tracing the development of their obsolete but apparently still
effective form of government. In it, they appealed for autonomous rule

under a Branch Political Council from Nanking. The appeal was

referred to the Committee on Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs. But the
significant point is that the Mongols, to all intents and purposes, have
been ready to unite with Nanking. How practical such a union might

prove is a question, but it is a move toward the goal of which the men
under Chiang Kai-shek once dreamed
Here are the essential proposals suggested by the Mongol dele-

gation :

1. The Mongol clans pledge allegiance to the Nationalist

Government and place themselves under the jurisdiction of the

Kuomintang.
2. In lieu of the present tittung and hsien (district) system
of government the clans shall become the administrative unit,
each clan electing its own representative to a Branch Political
Council. The Council shall be under the direct control of the
Central Political Council in Nanking but shall not be responsible
to any intermediary organ.
3. Lands illegally seized from the clans by the military shall

be returned to the original owners.

4. The clans shall be granted the right to police their own
territory.

These proposals sounded, in a way, like a suit for peace rather

than an offer then to join Nanking. However, either way, once
accepted and working, Inner Mongolia would at least acknowledge the
rule of that government. The leaders of China still plan to bring
Tibet and Mongolia under their flag, possibly as states adhering to the
National Government, but at least part of a United China.
The Mongolian delegation declared they were ready to fly the
Nationalist flag and participate in the National Government then at
Nanking. As a result of this and of the program in the minds of the
nen in Nanking an effort was made to make some sort of formal start
:>n
bringing Tibet and the Mongolians into line. The Nanking Govern-
ment announced a series of regulations governing the organization and
 A DREAM THAT RIVALS GENGHIS KUAN 211

functions of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Committee in the

National regime. (The "Nanking Government" now functions at

Chungking.)
This committee, I am told, is something akin to the Indian Affairs
Committee in
Washington. There is a difference, to be sure, at the

very start, and Inner and Outer Mongolia are far from
for Tibet

being under the control of Nanking. But the duties of the new com-
mittee have to do with the formation of a system whereby the com-

mittee, acting under and with the approval of the National Government,
eventually can set up a civil administration throughout Tibet and

Mongolia, subordinate to Nanking yet functioning with a large degree

of autonomy as far as "state rights" are concerned. The regulations
set forth that the committee's jurisdiction ''shall extend over Mongolia

and Tibet only," and in the second article provide that, aside from a
chairman and vice-chairman, the committee shall include "from nine
to eleven members, appointed by the National Government on the
recommendation of the Chairman of the Executive Yuan."
The Executive Yuan was one of the five "yuan," or Councils, which
handled the business of Government at Nanking. The Committee, in
the Government's announcement of its formation, was admonished to

begin at once on steady work looking to the fulfilment of the vast

program of expansion the leaders in Nanking hoped to see realized.

The body met at least once a week in formal session and in the mean-
time the sub-divisions, such as the Secretariat of the Committee, the

Mongolian Affairs Office and the Tibetan Affairs Office, carried on

the daily routine of carrying out the ideas and projects of the com-
mittee as a whole.
Until 1931 Manchuria flew the Kuomintang, or National Party,
emblem despite opposition there among the leaders so severe as to
result in the execution of two of them. The young governor, Marshal
Chang Hseuh-liang, in a public statement explaining their summary
execution, declared they opposed joining with Nanking. There were
other considerations, including the intimation they had plotted to over-
throw the Mukden regime and extend greater privileges to Japan in
Manchuria, and the allegation that one of them misappropriated money
in connection with his duties as head of the Mukden arsenal.
Provinces in interior China also are yet to be brought into line
definitely. These include Yunnan on the border of Burma, Szechuan
212 THE DRAGON STIRS
just west of Hankow, Kansu and Sinkiang in the northwest. There
will doubtless be long years of border warfare, during which unsub-
jected bands of jobless men, erstwhile soldiers perhaps in the armies
of China, North or South, will prey on the countryside. There will,
it is
admitted, be years of guerrilla fighting of a desultory but irritating
sort, which lack of railways and motor roads and communications
generally will make difficultof suppression. There will be the Jesse

Jameses and the Cole Youngers of the border lands to the West of
China for many a tedious year that is granted. What the men in
charge of this had in mind first was getting a start on their long and,
for them, perhaps, never-ending plan.
The criticism that this is hardly the time to think of seeking further

expansion is
perhaps well grounded. But it is difficult to convince the

Nanking Chinese, now inChungking They saw the

of that fact.

revolution grow in ten years from a tiny uprising around Canton to a

nationwide movement The armies from Canton, Russian guided, with
propaganda and a sick North as their allies, marched with comparative
ease across the entire face of China in less than two years and, in a

measure, unified the nation. It is not difficult, then, for them to dream
of accomplishing something similar in their lifetime for almost all Asia.

There is no telling the outcome of their labors, that is certain. But

it must be admitted that the scope of their scheme alone is something
to admire, to pique the imagination. It is an interesting if not a

currently important phase of the activities of the Chungking Govern-

ment,

Divergence in the spoken language is one of the biggest obstacles

to unity in the Asiatic countries, as in Europe. The Ministry of

Education in the National Government has a program to popularize

the use of Mandarin as the official and, eventually, the only language
of all China. The word "mandarin" means official, in Chinese. A
Mandarin in the old days was a magistrate. Hence, the Mandarin
language was the official court language.
Whenever a man of prominence in China makes an address he
prefers to speak in Mandarin Otherwise his audience might think
him uneducated and unworthy of his high office. Even students in
high schools and colleges in Shanghai and the south of China do not
all speak Mandarin, although the majority of them doubtless can
understand in a general way when spoken to in the official tongue.
 A DREAM THAT RIVALS GENGHIS KHAN 213

It is also a fact that many students returning to China from American

universities when speaking to other students from a different section
of China talk in English. Now and then they may lapse into their
own tongue or speak Mandarin if they are able, but it is interesting
to note that when
they do this they almost invariably accompany their
words with a drawing of the Chinese character in the air or on some
convenient surface.
The written language, of course, is the same throughout China.
The characters, that is, are the same. There may be some shades of
meaning in various sections of the country that differ from others,
but these are comparatively few.
The use of "pidgin English" is well nigh universal among the
lower classes. For example, many of the servants on board the trans-
Pacific liners are Chinese. These Chinese "boys" may come from any
section of China. And when, as often occurs, a Shanghai "boy" wants
to go on an errand while his ship is in port in Hongkong, he speaks
in "pidgin English." This peculiar and picturesque jargon has grown
up along the China coast in the past century.

It is not, generally supposed, a result only of the Chinese

as is

efforts to learn a useful brand of English. It has grown out of efforts

on each side to reach some spoken method of expression readily com-

prehensible to the other. The expressions are made by the use of

English words or perversions of English words, true. But the form

in the main
a direct translation of the Chinese expression for the
is

same meaning. For example, if one wants a rickshaw he tells the

Chinese boy something like this: "My wantchee one piecie rickshaw."
Now that is not as far from what the Chinese would say in his own
language as one might think. This "language" has used English as
its basis on a substructure of Chinese grammatical construction.
The problem of teaching the Chinese masses to speak a new lan-

guage and that is what Mandarin

is to them is a big one. There
are probably asmany languages, or "dialects," in China as there are

languages in Europe. It is almost like trying to teach every man,

woman and child in Europe to speak English, or any other one
language. That might even be easier because the standard of edu-

cation there is infinitely higher, there are public school systems already
in operation and the public generally has learned to read and write.

By far the greater part of the Chinese people cannot even read and
214 THE DRAGON STIRS
write. A start must be made, however, authorities in the Ministry of
Education felt. Hence, a National Language Unification Preparatory
Committee has been appointed.
 18 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE

RECORD of these stirring years which we are discussing

NO would be complete without a chapter devoted to the story of
of the Americans and Englishmen who were then in positions
of authority in China.
This resume of the activities of those leaders of men carries us
back for a brief moment to the somber passing of a Marine officer,
who died by his own hand. The tragic death in Shanghai of Colonel
Charles Sanderson Hill, commanding officer of the 4th Regiment of
the United States Marines,removed one of the most brilliant figures
in this branch of the American
service. Colonel Hill was found dead
in his bedroom Regimental Headquarters Mess in the French Con-
at

cession, at 8:28 on the morning of Monday, September 5, 1927. In

his right hand was an automatic pistol A
bullet through the brain
had caused death. Apparently the barrel of the service weapon had
been placed in his mouth and the pistol discharged.
Colonel Hill had not been in good health since his arrival the
preceding February in command of the first contingent of American
Marines to come out to China in the emergency. Despondency bor-
dering on melancholia, induced by his constant indisposition, was, the
official report said, the apparent motive for his suicide.

His death was a distinct shock to Shanghai, where the commander

had become most popular during his comparatively short residence.
He had been active in the life of the foreign community and his jovial
good nature at the clubs and elsewhere had won him a host of real
friends. Despite his illness, Colonel Hill refused to cease work, and
he appeared through the heat of August at his office at Marine head-
quarters every day up to the last.

The Monday morning of his death Colonel Hill arose as usual, had
breakfast with the American naval medical officer attached to the 4th
Regiment, and went back upstairs. In full uniform, standing beside
his bed, he placed his pistol in his mouth and fired. The doctor heard
215
216 THE DRAGON STIRS
hisbody fall and rushed into the room to find the commander lying
on the floor dead. Lieut.-Colonel F. D. Kilgore, who succeeded
Colonel Hill as commanding officer, telephoned me shortly after eleven
o'clock that morning. "I wish you would come out to Headquarters
as soon as possible," he said. "Colonel Hill died this morning/'
Colonel Charles Sanderson Hill was a graduate both of Annapolis
and West Point, and was regarded as one of the best schooled officers
in the service. His career was outstanding in many ways, and it was
rumored that he was shortly to have been raised to the rank of
Brigadier-General During his long service in the Marine Corps,
Colonel Hill took an active part in various campaigns, including

service in China during the Boxer Rebellion, in the Philippines, in the

Spanish-American War, and overseas duty during the World War.

Prior to the Spanish- American War, he had served as a naval cadet.
In April, 1899, he accepted a commission in the United States Marine
Corps.
During the Boxer Rebellion, Colonel served aboard ship in
Hill

Chinese waters After service in the Philippines he became Marine

Fleet Officer in the Pacific Fleet, taking an active part in the campaign
in Nicaragua in 1912. During the World War Colonel Hill was
attached to the Allied armies as an observer in France, a post at which
he won praise. After the war, he was Commanding Officer of the
Marine Barracks, Navy Yard, Philadelphia, from 1923 to 1926. He
was transferred to San Diego as Commander of the 4th Regiment, and
came to China with them.
* * *

With the appointment early in 1929 of Mr. F. W. Maze, formerly

Commissioner of Customs at Shanghai, as Inspector-General of Cus-
toms, the Inspectorate-General was removed from Peking to Nanking.
The Salt Gabelle offices were closed
Peking some months before
in

and naturally the Chinese Government administrative offices in Peking

under the old regimes were closed when Peking fell. The Nanking
Government determined to make the new capital the capital in fact as
well as in name with the shortest possible delay.
The appointment of Mr. Maze, who is British and now Sir
Frederick Maze, did not come as a surprise, although it was not

generally known that his succession to Mr. A, H. F, Edwardes, also

British, would come so quickly, There had been something of a fight
 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE 217

on between what became known as the Maze and the Edwardes fac-

tions in the Customs Administration. Edwardes was appointed Acting

Inspector-General in February of 1927, succeeding Sir Francis Aglen
who was ousted by the late Marshal Chang Tso-lin, then in power in

Peking. His appointment was for one year. It had expired, but he
continued because of the continuance of the civil war and its attendant
disturbed conditions throughout the country.

Following the fall of Peking, the National Government turned its

attention to affairs of state. One of the problems was the status of

Mr. Edwardes and the possible appointment of a successor. Mr. Maze,

it was known, was friendly toward the new Government while there

were some who felt, perhaps, that Mr. Edwardes, while doubtless

efficient, might not work so well with the Ministry of Finance in

Nanking.
Whatever the opinions were that caused the problem to become
more remains that Mr. Edwardes' re-appointment
or less acute, the fact
or dismissal was held up for months pending a definite decision. Then
in the autumn of 1928 came announcement of the Ministry of Finance
of his appointment as "officiating" Inspector-General. Mr. Maze was
given an associate position in the Customs at the same time, while

continuing as Commissioner in Shanghai. It was bruited about then

that this was merely a "face-saving" proposition for Mr. Edwardes,
and that he would soon have to resign. He did, and in his note of
resignation issued just before the end of the year, he deplored the dual
control.

Mr. Maze was appointed almost at once, as had been expected, and,
probably acting on instructions from Finance Minister T. V. Soong,
ordered the removal of the Administration offices to Nanking. They
functioned in Shanghai pending the construction of adequate office

buildings in the new capital Office space was at a premium and the
Inspectorate-General like many other divisions of the Government
functioned as best it could there and in Nanking.
Mr. Maze had been in the Customs service for more than a quarter
of a century and his appointment was regarded with satisfaction in

most circles. There was some indication at the time of his elevation

to chief of the service that, inasmuch as he might be expected to retire

in two years or so, he was given the office as a temporary compromise.

This was officially denied.

218 THE DRAGON STIRS
It was known, however, that the National Government aspired to
regain complete control of the Customs Administration. Hence, the
rumor persisted that efforts to this end would be forthcoming at no
distant date. The Administration was established originally some
sixty years ago as a means of safeguarding the great foreign debts

secured on the Customs. The Powers interested, chiefly Britain,

Japan and France, can hardly be expected to give up this form of

supervision as long as there are outstanding loans secured on the

tariffs. However, it would not be surprising to see the Customs
Inspectorate-Generalship go to a Chinese in the next few years
* * *

A new era was launched in February, 1929, in China's long dis-

turbed financial situation with the arrival of a commission of sixteen
American economic experts headed by Prof. Edwin Walter Kemmerer,
the "money-doctor," to seek to stabilize the varied currency of the
nation and possibly to change the silver standard to gold. The com-
mission included numerous prominent Americans noted for their knowl-

edge of banking, budgeting, currency, and financing problems.

fiscal

The group was among many similar commissions which were then
with American energy aiding the National Government to proceed
sanely with its ambitious schemes to renovate the war-torn and back-
ward country on modern lines.

Professor not much to say upon landing other than

Kemmerer had
to remark, "A doctor
unable to diagnose the patient prior to an
is

examination," but he added that he intended to get to work imme-

diately. He conferred with the Finance Minister, T. V. Soong, most
of that day and also with the Railways Minister, Sun-Fo. The mild-
mannered but energetic professor in his early fifties, who has revived
the dying finances of numerous nations during his remarkable career,
was noncommittal concerning the aims of the commission but he
seemed most eager to start work on the task for which Princeton
University allowed him to be absent for a year from the chair of
economics.
The chief assignment was the centralizing of Federal control of
China's revenues, to be followed by establishing a uniform currency
of the same exchange value throughout the country. The third task
was to abolish the tael system, which is the custom of using one ounce
of pure silver, known as the tael, as the basis of
exchange, causing a
 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE 219

double transaction when changing foreign currency into any Chinese

money or vice versa. The Commission outlined a budget on the prac-
tical basis of current revenues which covered construction projects of
vast scope and which was designed to repay the numerous foreign
loans to China in the shortest possible period.
Prominent members of the commission were Dr. Arthur Nichols
Young, expert in public credit, who resigned as economic adviser to
the State Department; Dr. Oliver C. Lockhart, Cornell and Buffalo
W. B Poland, West Point, N. Y., expert in
Universities, tax expert;

railway finance; Dr. Benjamin B. Wallace, for some years special

expert to the United States Tariff Commission; Dr. Frederick A.

Cleveland, Boston University, budget expert; F. B. Lynch of the

National City Bank, expert on banking methods; William Watson,

formerly of the faculty of Syracuse University, specialist in fiscal con-

trol; Richard W. Bonneville, formerly of the United States Com-
merce Department, expert in fiscal control; Edward F. Feely of New
York, consultant on export trade financing general secretary of the
3

commission, and Dr. Frank W. Fetter, graduate of Princeton and

Harvard and professor of economics at Princeton, undersecretary.
Other members included the staff and their families, and some remained
longer than a year.
The influx of American advisers, or experts, impressed foreigners
as well as the Chinese with the determination of Nanking to proceed
on what, less than a year earlier, were considered the impractical
visions of dreamers and idealists. The predominant part Americans
played in the rebuilding of China caused increasing comment. Dr.
Kemmerer stressed the fact that all members of the commission for-
merly connected with the Washington Government had severed their
official connections prior to coming to China; hence, the commission

was unofficial. There was no semblance of American governmental

* * *
support whatsoever.
Colonel Henry L Stimson and John Van A. MacMurray, then
American Minister, were guests of Dr. C. T. Wang, former Foreign
Minister of the National Government, and Dr. H. H. Kung, later
Minister of Finance, at an informal private dinner in Shanghai in the

spring of 1929. Among the other guests, aside from American of-
ficials, were other Cabinet members and some of Colonel Stimson's
Chinese friends in high official positions.
220 THE DRAGON STIRS
The function was entirely unofficial. Mrs. Stimson and the wives
of the others were present and there were no speeches, the Governor-
General of the Philippines declining officially to discuss his future or

any other problems during his somewhat hurried journey to Washing-

ton to become Secretary of State. He conferred with Mr. MacMurray
before the dinner, but both officials insisted that their meeting was
purely personal and was not related to Colonel Stimson's probable
direction of America's policy toward China from Washington, the
Colonel explaining that he was naturally interested in Chinese affairs
but, for the present at least, purely as Governor-General of the Philip-

pines and an American citizen.

"You are meeting me as the Governor-General of the Philippines,"
Colonel Stimson told me. "I am positively unable to affirm the rumors
of my appointment to the Cabinet in any post whatever. So far as the

Philippines are concerned, the past year is generally considered to have

made history in our relations with the islands, which is highly grati-
fying to me and to others in my administration. I believe that the

expressed attitude of the Filipino leaders, the desire to cooperate with

the American administration of the islands is entirely sincere. During
the year we have built the framework of this policy which I hope will

long remain and grow. That the old opposition is fading away is

reasonably clear in the great developments along these lines."

Mr. MacMurray said that his visit to Nanking and Shanghai had
no political importance.
"Its only possible relation to public affairs," he said, "was my
inquiry into certain phases of Nanking's new trademark registration
law, which I wish to clarify. I did not discuss politics with Dr. Wang
or any one else yesterday at Nanking, and did not intend to. The
purpose of my visit was primarily to acquaint myself personally with
the progress of affairs at Nanking. Most of the other Ministers have
visitedNanking recently, and
had been planning a similar journey
I

for some time but was unable to leave Peking until now."
* * *

When the late Admiral Mark L. Bristol, commander-in-chief of the

American Naval and Marine forces in the Far East for two years,
departed for Washington at the end of summer of 1929, he left behind
a remarkably large and strikingly sincere circle of friends not
only
among the foreigners throughout the Orient, but Chinese of all walks
 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE 221

of life. The naval officer-diplomat came to China from Turkey,

arriving late in August, 1927, and taking over command of the Asiatic

Station on September 9 of that year from Admiral C. S. Williams.

There have, to be sure, been no unpopular men who have held this

high post in theAmerican Navy, but it is perhaps not incorrect to say

that with the advent of Admiral Bristol's assumption of command a
still more cordial relationship existed between the head of our pro-
tective forces there and the business men, American missionaries and
others who went out to the east to broaden the scope of our commerce
and civilization From the very beginning, Admiral
in the world.
Bristol made it
apparent he wanted to meet the business men, to get
their views, to know their problems. He likewise wanted to meet the
Chinese who were directing the destinies of their country. He met
the men conducting the Nationalist revolution in Shanghai, and later
he went north and in Peking and elsewhere met the men who were
then combating the Southern forces.
He wanted to get at all sides of the situation. And he knew how
to go about it. The sojourn of the Admiral in Asiatic waters was not
his first. He went out to China as an ensign nearly fifty years ago
and later served on the Yangtze Patrol and was in China at the out-

break of the first revolution in 1911, when the Manchu Dynasty was
overthrown and the first attempts at a Republic were ineffectively but
persistently made. Furthermore, his experience as the American High
Commissioner in Turkey, during a strikingly similar period when that
country after the Great War went through a period of national reha-
bilitation and governmental reform, stood the Admiral in good stead

in China.

Guided by his experiences in the Near East following a careful

study of affairs as they were when he arrived in China, Admiral
Bristol formed the conviction that the Nationalist forces in China
would emerge victorious. He naturally could take no sides either in
word or act, but there was a tendency in his attitude to lean toward
the Nationalists as the better force toward progress for the people of
the country. He made it a point never to prophesy. Nevertheless,
his sensing of the trend of events was as accurate a barometer as
could be desired, as things turned out. And he was able to judge
rather better than other observers because of his cordial attitude
toward the Chinese who could give him information concerning what
222 THE DRAGON STIRS
was happening in this or that faction in the revolution or in the North.
Admiral Bristol served in the Asiatic Station at a time when it
was highly important to keep posted. So among the first things he
did was to get acquainted personally with such men as the late Dr.
C. C. then Foreign Minister in the Nanking Government, Dr.
Wu,
C. T. Wang, then not officially in politics but later Foreign Minister
at Nanking and once Ambassador in Washington, General Chiang

Kai-shek, and others.

He met these men, talked with them, and learned much from this
personal contact. The meetings always were purely unofficial, to be
sure. Washington had not then recognized Nanking. The land was
divided by civil war. It was a time requiring diplomatic procedure

indeed to meet the men on both sides with equal tact and interested

friendship. There was never then nor has there ever been any reason
to think Admiral Bristol, by meeting men in the first Nanking Govern-

ment, lent even moral aid to that cause. Nor by discussing affairs
with the men in Peking did he have any notion of influencing them
one way or the other. He was merely seeking information, and he
got it.

And he got some criticism, as well. There was for a while some-

thing of a feeling that the Admiral was not

entirely discreet in meeting
the menleading a revolutionary cause. It was said in various circles
that perhaps he would cause trouble by such actions His friendship
toward the Chinese, whatever their politics, aroused a certain antipathy
among those foreigners who were not able to see the slightest change
in China. His advice never given as advice but merely as opinion
in friendly conversations with American residents that the foreigners
should get better acquainted with the Chinese, accepting them socially
to a greater degree and treating them as equals, brought heated argu-
ments. But there is a changed attitude now, and those who criticized
came to admit the Admiral's foresighted policy was correct.
The Admiral
sat in the American Club in Shanghai one
evening I
recalland discussed things with a group of American observers well
versed in Chinese affairs. Now it was very bad form to quote the
Admiral. He declared the day he arrived that he would not be
quoted then or any other time on any subject, and he also said if he
were quoted he would deny anything in print as coming from him.
He would discuss any subject at length, get the views of those he was
 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE 223
own opinions and then, if a newspaperman be
talking with, give his
present, hewould say in parting: "Use anything you've got from me
as a background if you want, but you can't quote me. These talks
are just for our own information. They work both ways. I may get
something from you and you may get something from me, and we may
both understand the situation better. But don't quote me."
So no one everdid. But now perhaps a word or two the Admiral
said then might not be considered lese majeste. The "observers"
referred to above included two war correspondents, one man travelling
in China gathering material for a book, the American publisher of one
of the largest Chinese newspapers in the nation, the Admiral's Chief-

of-Staff, Capt. Kenneth Castleman, a banker, and two or three men

directing large American commercial interests, who kept up on political
events more than was customary.
The conversation was general for the most part. Someone brought
up the military phase of the revolution; the capture of Shanghai was
mentioned, and the effect of this strategic move on the regime at
Hankow. One man, the writer of books, related his experiences a
few weeks previously with bandits on the Yangtze River. He lost his
wallet and all his ready cash, and his wife lost her jewelry, but the

bandits, or pirates, who boarded the river steamer, did them no bodily
harm. They killed one or two Chinese in their excitement, however,
and shot an American from Hankow through the leg for no apparent
reason.
The relations of foreigners with the Chinese was mentioned. Some-
one wondered whether we should admit them to our clubs. This has
been done now all over China, a revolutionary change. The Admiral
said:
"I think it a splendid idea. We should admit them to the clubs,

by all means. If we treat these people as equals, they will not fail to

react to our friendship. This conception of our superiority has got to

be dispelled. There are Chinese gentlemen in the Government of this
nation today who are by no means our inferiors. It is true, I grant,
that we see countless thousands of inferior Chinese in our daily lives.
The coolies, the lower classes, are our inferiors. The Chinese race
has produced some great scholars and statesmen. There is a great
change going on in China today, and the wave of nationalism sweeping
the country is going to result in even greater changes.
224 THE DRAGON STIRS
"It may take some time, it is true. There are problems that we
cannot even appreciate facing the leaders who want to unify the
Chinese people. We all realize the language difficulty, the lack of
education the mass of Chinese, the lack of ready communications
among
which keep the Chinese apart not only from the world but from them-
selves. These are vast obstacles, but it is possible for the leaders of
the Chinese eventually to overcome them.
"I think a great step has been taken in this country in the past
two years toward awakening a great nation. It is wrong to deny that
change is
occurring. If we understand that and admit the Chinese
to our clubs and treat them socially as equals those who are educated
Chinese gentlemen and gentlewomen we will have learned a lesson
now that we must learn sooner or later.
"This of national is by no means a new
consciousness
spirit

phenomenon. It
swept Europe war and I had a personal
after the

experience with it in Turkey before coming here. The changes in

China are very, very similar to the changes that took place in Turkey.
The abolition of consular jurisdiction, of all special rights of foreigners,
the rising influence of a race consciousness are all similar to the events
and sentiment in China and among the Chinese. We could learn much
by studying the history of Turkey's development since the Great War.
It is futile to deny similar changes are occurring in this country
today."
That, briefly, was Admiral Bristol's credo on China. It was, I

might add, the opinion of most well informed persons living in the east
then. Neither he nor they denied that the change to real unity will
still require time. Perhaps this unity will eventually be in the form
of a federation of states each even more nearly autonomous than at
firstplanned similar in a way to the Federation of German States
welded into a nation less than a century ago by Bismarck.
The Chinese that live in the hinterlands of Asia and millions of
the illiterate living along the Pacific coast know all too little of the

meaning of the programs of their leaders. They are content to con-

sider their family as the unit, their village as their home, their prov-
ince as their universe. They will be loyal to their family and
patriotic
in a varying degree to their native place and their province. But the
idea of a nation will take time to sink in. It was this conception that
Admiral Bristol had gained on his last sojourn in the east. His judg-
 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE 225

ment, it is now generally agreed, was correct. He understood the

problems but firmly believed the traditional American policy of altruism

and friendship would continue to prove best and that the Chinese
would eventually prove themselves not unworthy of that policy.
The social affairs on board the flagship U. S. S. Pittsburgh given
by the Admiral and Mrs. Bristol, who is an entirely charming hostess,
stand out as particularly memorable features of another side of the
Commander-in-Chief s residence there. Chinese as well as Americans
and many persons of other nationalities in that cosmopolitan port
attended the tea dances under the vari-colored awning aft on the
cruiser and the occasional formal evening balls on the spacious flag-
ship's after deck. His cordial geniality and Mrs. Bristol's graciousness

widened their circle of friends each visit.

Admiral Bristol's close touch with the Chinese was extended to the

commanders of other defense forces in Shanghai. He was particularly

friendly with Major-General Sir John Duncan, formerly head of the
British Shanghai Defense Force. The General was a frequent visitor
at the Bristol residence in Shanghai and this close social contact

brought about a mutual understanding that made the solution of

defense problems easier than any formal discussion of similar questions
could have done. * * *

Julean Arnold, the American commercial attache in Peiping, who

returned in May 1929 from an extensive tour through Kwangsi Prov-
ince and south into Yunnan, said upon his arrival in Shanghai that
despite a war with Kwangtung Province around Canton, the people
of Kwangsi were not suffering appreciably and that good roads were
being built in many sections of the province.

"I travelled more than a thousand miles by motor car through

Kwangsi," Mr. Arnold said, "over excellent roads. They are building
new highways all the time, and while it may be some years before
railroads have opened up highways and rivers will
this province, the

carry an increasing amount of the farmers' goods to the east coast

markets."
Mr. Arnold said he travelled virtually alone, without a guard of
any kind, and had no trouble anywhere along the route. He carriedno
"foreign food" along nor any water bags or bottles of distilled water
to drink. He ate Chinese food the whole time, and while he admitted
he got "a bit fed up with it,*' he said he had not worried about his
226 THE DRAGON STIRS
health on this account. Few if any foreigners in the Pacific coast
cities and elsewhere in China eat Chinese food unless they know where
it is prepared and how. Typhoid fever and dysentery are all too
prevalent to take many chances on the sanitation of a Chinese res-
taurant even in the foreign concession areas. It is particularly dan-

gerous at certain seasons of the year to eat green vegetables grown

in China because the Chinese fertilize their truck gardens with human
"night a custom throughout the Far East. "I ate anything and
soil/'

everything as we went along," Mr. Arnold admitted. "Get tough, I

guess, after thirty years out in this country. I've had no ill effects

jet"
Mr. Arnold said he noticed little trouble throughout the province.
"It was as peaceful for mile after mile of fertile farm land as the
middle west home/' he said. "One gets the feeling of being
at terribly
out of touch back in the hinterlands of China. No news of the

developments Nanking in or abroad reached us for days at a time.

Rather a good thing, at that, to get away from the news of turmoil
for awhile, I think. The people down there didn't seem to mind what

happened in Nanking or Shanghai or anywhere else as long as they

had good crops and were not molested."
Bandits in Kwangsi were few, Mr. Arnold said. He said they
were not unknown, but added that only occasionally were their raids

heard of. He painted all in all a most optimistic picture of affairs in

that section of China, from which had arisen in recent months a group
of politicians known as the "Kwangsi clique" who were menacing
Canton and were said to be planning to overthrow the Nanking
Government, forming a combine with the "Christian General."
"The roads system is nothing short of excellent," Mr. Arnold added.
"They have highways crossing the province that intersect with high-
ways running north and south, and one can drive to almost any im-
portant spot in the province by motor.
"Another feature of the new transportation system is the organi-
zation of numerous bus lines that run every direction.
They are
buying more buses all the time, most of them from the United States.
This is true in other provinces, to be sure, but the
development in
Kwangsi is
particularly significant at this time. One may ride from
one end to the other of the province on these lines in
safety."
Telephone lines have been laid out and put into operation, Mr.
 SOME AMERICANS WHO WERE THERE 227

Arnold said. "The long distance telephone service in Kwangsi is

truly remarkable/' he commented. "You can anywhere along the

stop
main highway and telephone ahead to a town two or three hundred
miles away and reserve a room for the night at an inn. The service
is perfect. I was most pleasantly surprised to find this progress in

what has been considered a warlike, backward district of China/'

* * *

Safely back from strange experiences among the nomadic tribes

of Central Asia, Kermit Roosevelt passed through Shanghai late in
May, 1929. Success crowned what for a time seemed to be a futile

hunting trip for the giant panda, under the auspices of the Field
Museum in Chicago, undertaken by Kermit and his brother Theodore

in another chapter of their explorations of little-visited corners of the

earth.

Journeying overland from Rangoon through Burma and thence

across the southwestern top of China into Tibet, scouring mountains,

valleys and snow-clad highlands in quest of the beast which lured them
on their dangerous sporting mission, the Roosevelt party after weeks
of fruitless tracking despaired of sighting, mucha giant
less shooting,

panda. They turned toward China once more from Tibet and in what
is known as the Independent Lola country, a tiny state bordering on
Tibet and China adjacent to Szechuan Province, they found their
quarry.
Nearly six months from the time they departed with Kashmir
guides and carriers from the familiar hill country, Kermit, with the
was en route to America, while Colonel Roosevelt
spoils of the chase,
remained at Saigon for several weeks to continue the hunting ex-
pedition in less sequestered tracts.
"I would be with him yet if my partner had not got hold of me
and dragged me back to work/' Kermit told me at tiffin. "My brother
is remaining at Saigon with Suydam Cutting. The other foreign mem-
ber of the party, Herbert Stevens, a bird specialist, is coming out via
Szechuan and the Yangtze River. He is now about at Chengtu and
should reach here in a few weeks."

Discussing his trip, Mr. Roosevelt said: "We left Shamo Village,
Burma, on the border of China on December 20. My brother, Cutting
and myself, together with the Kashmir carriers, went by mule train
overland to Yunnan, thence into Tibet, where for weeks we wandered
228 THE DRAGON STIRS
in search of the giant panda. But we were unsuccessful, days of
tracking getting us nowhere. Finally we turned west and southward
again, reaching the border of China in Szechuan Province, and thence
went south through the Independent Lola country. Here, one morning
following a rather heavy snowfall, we found panda tracks.
"We were extremely lucky, as a matter of fact, for after only four
hours of tracking we discovered the beast taking its noonday siesta.

My brother and I approached carefully, fired simultaneously and got

him. The Lola runners with us refused to bring the animal into their

village. It seems the giant panda is a sort of minor deity among

them. It was amusing later to find they had called in a priest who
conducted rites to purify the tribe and drive off avenging spirits. The
Lola people never harm the panda. Most of those we met had never
seen one.
"The beast was a specimen, weighing more than 200
beautiful

pounds and measuring nearly seven feet in length. It had a thick coat

of fur with black and white splotches and a white head with black

eyeglasses, a black fringe of hair around the eyes. The animal is

believed to belong to the bear family, but, unlike bears, never hiber-
nate and, furthermore, has forty-two teeth instead of forty. Otherwise,
it is similar to the bear species.
'The panda lives exclusivelyon bamboo shoots, which are amply
provided in its native haunts, which are the high altitudes, ranging
from 8,000 to 14,000 feet. It always stays among thick bamboo forests
and is very fond of honey. Its habits are bearlike, but scientists can
determine from this specimen that it has a definite classification."
He described the Lolas as amiable people, similar to the American
Indians in Although the country through which the party
many ways.
walked for hundreds of miles is one of the wildest parts of Asia and
is infested with bandits, Mr. Roosevelt said he had not met trouble of
any kind and that the people everywhere were most friendly and
cordial.

"When we entered the Lola country," he said, "the chief of the

first village entertained us, and when we left he sent his son along to
assure us safe conduct as far as the next village. In this manner we
were carried through this tiny friendly state, much to the amazement
ot the Chinese when we told the tale of our experiences on returning
to this country."
 19 THE DRAGON LEARNS TO FLY

r * THE dragon of China, slowly awakening from a long slumber

so long that it makes Rip van Winkle's sleep seem like a nap-
1^
shook himself and tried his wings. In the past few years the
dragon has learned to fly. He had earlier made divers vain attempts
but now the beast took to the air with a great whirring and roar.
The Chinese people, in other words, given a breathing spell for peace-
time pursuits in 1928-29 learned the Occident's use of the air as a
medium for travel. This was one of the most revolutionary peacetime
reforms yet to strike Asia, and the Chinese took to the air with
amazing avidity. There had been flights by Chinese pilots in the past,
to be sure; but it was not until the Kuomintang Revolution swept
north on Peiping that it became anything like the vital factor in Chinese
daily life that it has since become.
American aviationinterests were in the van of the "foreign devils"
who taught the Chinese the use of the airplane in recent years. They
were the pioneers in a practical way, and the American-owned Clipper
flying boats led the way in blazing this great trail for China. Their
great airships first flew in 1935-36 at regular intervals on the route
across the broad Pacific to Manila, and they got permission from the
Portuguese Government at Lisbon to alight in waters off the Por-
tuguese concession of Macao, in south China. The British in the
beginning refused permission to alight off their Crown Colony of Hong-
kong, but that also was granted. Connections are made from Macao
and Hongkong with air lines now criss-crossing China. Trans-Pacific
passengers land there and can take a Chinese-controlled commercial
passenger plane north.
This air service between California and China is one of the most
inspiring aerial steps to annihilate space and time in the history of
mankind. The first flight, carrying only air mail and crew, was made
from Alameda, California, to Manila on November 22, 1935, the Clipper
229
230 THE DRAGON STIRS
returning December 2 of that year to her home base at the end of an
awe inspiring round trip across the vast stretches of open water. There
were stops at Hawaii, Midway, Wake Island and Guam, where modern
hotels have been completed for the tourist's overnight stop. It is only

700 miles farther to China from Manila a short flight, compared to

the distance already covered.

In China itself it is now possible to fly almost anywhere. Even
the coolies are no longer surprised at the sight or the sound of a

plane overhead and that, in itself, is an indication of the great revo-

lutionary strides which the peoples of the Dragon have made in recent

years. Until very recently a Chinese "junk*' or sailboat was the

ordinary mode Today there are regular air lines

of travel in Asia.

connecting all the major cities of China. One can fly from Shanghai
to Peiping in six hours Formerly it took two days in good times on
!

an express the famed Blue Express, then the crack railway train.
Or one can fly to Hankow in four hours whereas it took me five
days by steamer up-river and three days down in 1927.

Cheng-tu was formerly an outpost in Szechuan Province almost un-

reachable over the gorges of the Yangtze, rapid and dangerous at any
time above Hankow. Now the flight from Shanghai is made in eight
hours. It is made several times a week now as often as the in-

creasing traffic will allow. The coolie stillhas to use the old style

"junk" on the rivers of his ancestors or at rare intervals, he takes a

train. The prices for flying are above his reach, like the airplanes
themselves. But there is great progress in this field.

At this point, I want days of aviation, when the

to sketch the early

Chinese first started to fly in anything like a practical, serious way.

The Americans had much to do with aviation in China from the start.
Popular interest was piqued early by a flight nearly around the world
by two extraordinarily daring and capable fliers from Michigan in their
plane, the Pride oj Detroit. They were Messrs. Brock and Schlee,
and never forget the September evening in 1928 when they
I shall

appeared out of the south from Hongkong, and landed outside

Shang-
hai. All was prepared for a reception at the Race Course in the center
of Shanghai on Bubbling Well Road but they thought the oval too
small for a take-off and landed at Hunjao Airport at the city limits

instead, keeping us running back and forth like water-bugs for an hour.

Shanghai, a city of thrills inured to war's hysteria, tingled with

 THE DRAGON LEARNS TO FLY 231

visit of America's daring aviators whose world

excitement at the brief
took them there for a single night's way-station pause early in
flight

September 1928. Word of the safe arrival of Schlee and Brock at

Omura Village, near Nagasaki, reached Shanghai late the night of
September 11, and was received with a real sense of relief. Telephones
newspapers and news agencies rang constantly late that afternoon
of all

and evening, with thousands inquiring after the safety of the aviators
whose efficiency and daring captured popular imagination. Their safe
arrival in Japan despite their failure to reach Tokyo, their goal, was
widely applauded.
An aftermath of enthusiasm followed Schlee and Brock as the public
awakened to the significance of the unusual flight. While popular
acclaim was interested chiefly in their heroics, a significant phase of

the universal plaudits was the hearty praise from aviation officers in
the Shanghai defense force of many nations. The British Royal Air
Force officers were deeply impressed and did not hesitate to declare

their pride in the achievement. They unstintingly praised the fliers'

daring and skill from a professional viewpoint as indicating the progress

of aviation. The British airplane carrier officers sent congratulations,

asking the U.
S. Pittsburgh: "Please convey to the pilots of the
S.

Pride of Detroit the congratulations of the Argus on their very fine

performance."
Popular sentiment was summed up in press comment which lauded
the Americans highly. The Shanghai Times, a British-owned daily,
printed an editorial acclaiming the flight as a "magnificent achieve-
ment/' and characterizing it as "the most successful yet undertaken,"
indicating progress of aviation.
tfie The North China Daily News,
British, pointed to the importance of their non-stop flight from Hong-
kong to Shanghai, stating: "The Pride of Detroit has shown that it
of one day. What all realize
is possible to accomplish this in the space
in this performance is the great
progress which airplanes and engines
have made in recent years. One appreciates more and more the

splendid calibre of the men who carry out these flights. We may well
offer our congratulations to the Pride of Detroit and her navigators
on their performance in reaching Shanghai, for it not only creates a
record from New York to China, but if we are not mistaken it estab-

lishes a new local long distance achievement." The last referred to

the non-stop flight from Hongkong.

232 THE DRAGON STIRS
that Schlee and
The China (then American) pointed out
Press,
Brock flew virtually without assistance, remarking: "Mountains, forests
and oceans were found to be no bar to this flight around the world,"
continuing that "thus far, they have had no governmental aid either
from our Army or Navy. But the most difficult stretch is to come
they must cross the Pacific Ocean. Prayers of millions all over the
world go with them as they take off from Japan on this last and most
awesome portion of their flight. We wish them Godspeed."

This paper pointed out that it had no desire to discourage Schlee

and Brock, but added that in the event that they returned safely to
Detroit, "judging from the many disasters, ocean flying might well be
curtailed for a while except when some great scientific object may be
attained. Every country has ambitions nor does any lack brave
aviators to carry them out, but unless the stake is higher than merely
the glory of being the first to do this or that stunt, what is gained?"
The article added a suggestion for scientific research into aviation

problems of the upper ending: 'Then try for world records, but
air,

not just yet. The roads are too few and the milestones too many,
most of them yet unmarked graves."

By November 1928, popular interest in aviation in China had in-

creased by leaps and bounds. One of the most powerful influences was
the unprecedented flight of the Canton, a Ryan-Mahoney monoplane
similar to that in which Lindbergh flew the Atlantic. Piloted by

Captain Chang Hui-chang of the Chinese Air Force, the Canton left
Canton early that fall and made a non-stop flight to Hankow, nearly
a thousand miles. Captain Chang left there and hopped off to Nan-
king, varying his original intention to proceed directly to Peking. At
the capital he was given a tremendous ovation. The foreign as well as
the Chinese press gave his flight wide publicity.

Captain "Chang next flew to Peking Again he was given a great

ovation, and dinners and receptions similar to those of air heroes in
the Occident were tendered him and his two companions by the Chinese
dignitaries. General Yen Hsi-san, governor of Shansi then in
charge
of the Peking-Tientsin area, gave him a dinner The aviators
party.
were feted by the populace, and General Pei Chung-hsi also
gave Chang
a dinner. He was the hero of the hour in Peking.
Captain Chang
flew to Mukden, then capital of Manchuria, prior to returning down
 THE DRAGON LEARNS TO FLY 233
the coast to Shanghai and thence to Canton. All along the way he
was heralded with enthusiasm and high acclaim.
The flight itself would not have been so extraordinary anywhere
but in the Orient. But it was an achievement in China, where aviation
had then played so small a part in war or peace. It is true there
until

was even then a Flying Corps under the War Office. But there were
still few planes in use and aside from rare occasions when they were

used to observe enemy positions, neither force in the Kuomintang

Revolution resorted to any sort of aerial warfare. Mukden possibly
had the best aviation department then in China. There were more
than 100 airships at the Mukden airdrome and I saw their arsenal
branch there, constantly turning out new machines for which engines
were purchased abroad. Airplanes could be seen flying over Mukden
almost any day in summer; but even there they had been used but
seldom in war, and no commercial lines had yet been attempted. Today
it is vastly changed and modernized.
One of the aerial developments at Nanking was the announcement
that the Government was considering organization of a Sino-German
aviation corporation. Officials in the Ministries of War, Interior, In-

dustry, Commerce and Labor, and Finance

conferred on the subject.
Air lines to Europe were discussed as well as commercial routes in
China. The Government was also desirous of inaugurating a line con-

necting the capital and Kalgan. There was some question whether,
under the agreement prohibiting the sale of arms and ammunition by
Americans to China, airplanes could be sold in that country. As a
result, most of the planes first in use were purchased in Europe. How-
ever, the Canton was a Ryan-Mahoney brougham monoplane with a
Wright whirlwind motor.
"It is my opinion that American airplane motors are far superior
1
to all others/ Captain Chang said, just prior to starting on his his-

toric cross-country flight. "They are 'fool-proof for one thing. And
they stand up better in a long run. I would like to see an assembly

plant started in Canton, backed by American capital. There will be

an increasing demand for airplanes in the near future as we establish
air mail and passenger services between our larger cities, and it costs

too much to ship a plane all set

assemblyup. An plant will be needed,
and I would an American aviation company back of it."
like to see

American aviation interests hopped across the Pacific, and a new

234 THE DRAGON STIRS
era was inaugurated in China's communications on April 19, 1929,
when Minister Sun Fo, acting in his capacity as president of the China
National Aviation Corporation, signed a contract with Aviation Ex-

ploration, Inc., a subsidiary of the Curtiss group.

The latter under the
to carry mail for the National Government on three
agreement agreed
trunk lines.
Experts said that the signing of this important agreement opened
one of the greatest fields of commercial flying in the world. The
signing took place in Nanking, following a State Council meeting
during the afternoon to consider the proposals submitted some weeks
earlier. Some objections were encountered at the outset of the nego-
tiations against permitting foreign interests to handle a Government
mail contract. These were overcome, however, by Nanking's some-
what naive organization of the corporation which ostensibly handled

the mail itself but which sublet the contract to the Aviation Ex-
ploration people, so that the effect was precisely the same.

Three trunk lines were proposed immediately, one connecting Nan-

king and Peiping, the second linking Canton to Hankow, and the third

linking Shanghai and Hankow via Nanking thus all interlocking. It

was announced that schools would be established immediately by the

Americans to train Chinese pilots and other personnel, the idea being
to employ Chinese wherever possible as soon as they were capable of
flying. The American pilots were to be kept only as long as they
were essential.

Major William B. Robertson representing the American firm, made

this formal announcement:

This will be a Chinese service under control of the National

Government but with American management and operation for
the time being. The airplanes will display Chinese characters for
the name of the Chinese Corporation and the insignia of the
National Government

Aviation Exploration further receives the

privilege of engaging
in the air transportation of and on own
passengers freight its

account, and to manufacture planes and equipment in China. It

is planned to form a new American
company with a capitalization
of several million dollars (gold), in which the Chinese will be
invited to participate. Rapid communications are the urgent need
 THE DRAGON LEARNS TO FLY 235

of the moment here. It will take years to meet this demand by

rail or motor roads ;

but by aviation it is hoped that China within
a few months will be on a parity with the other nations in air
communications.

European competition was met during the weeks of strenuous

negotiations, as well as that from other American interests in China.
Shanghai was alive with aviators from abroad seeking to establish
lines in all directions. Major Robertson brought four planes to China
while trying to "sell" Nanking his mail contract idea. Their demon-
strations impressed the Chinese officials, particularly Mr. Sun Fo.
The Minister of Railways was enthusiastic after flying in one of these

Nanking from Shanghai. He said many

planes to officials might soon
commute to Nanking by air from Shanghai.
In financing trie new lines, it was explained that the American

company had a guarantee from the Chinese government under the con-
tract stipulating a sliding scale of pay to them of $1.50 (gold) a
pound to $4.50 (gold) a pound, depending on the size of the load
carried. The Chinese also agreed to buy all aerial equipment from the
Aviation Exploration group. Two American pilots, E. L. Sloniger
and Al Caperton, were with Major Robertson and aided in training
Chinese pilots.Widespread opposition developed among Chinese avia-
tion organizations against the American contract. However, officials
of the American group in Shanghai were optimistic about the eventual
carrying out of the terms of their agreement.
It provided that the service was to begin in six months, that the
Americans were to provide the airplanes, pilots, and all other equip-
ment and personnel, and that the Chinese were to provide hangars
and suitable landing fields along the routes proposed. It was further
provided that in the event the revenues from air mail on the lines was
insufficient to meet the rates agreed on, the American company would
operate at a loss and take the Chinese company's promissory notes up
to $2,000,000. It was agreed there was to be a minimum of 3,000

flying miles a day when the lines commenced.

The Robertson group also offered to lend the Chinese Company
another $1,000,000 gold in cash for use in the securing of air fields,
construction of hangars and other expenses incidental to getting started.

Major Robertson returned to New York to arrange further details.

236 THE DRAGON STIRS
The real opposition to the contract came from so-called patriotic

propaganda spread by the Ministry of Communications through the

young aviation groups in China. This Ministry, through rivalry with
the Ministry of Railways, sought to establish its lines first and
did all in its power to obstruct the Railways Ministry's program. As
a result, a memorandum wassubmitted to the Nanking Government

by the members Government Air Force demanding that the

of the

contract be cancelled, causing no little furore but not much action. This

memorandum, because it indicates the length to which this inter-

Ministry fight was carried and because it indicates also the attitude
of the nationalistic young Chinese interested in developing their own

air lines, is given in brief below, the chief points being summarized.

They are:

1. To allow foreign pilots to fly over important centers of the

country is a serious encroachment upon China's air defense.

2. With the Corporation's branch offices scattered throughout
the country, America may send troops to various places on the
pretense they are sent to those places for the protection of those
interests.

3. Other countries may also want to open up new air lines in

China.
4. The American Corporation's machines which are to be
shipped to China will be exempted from payment of import
duties.

5. The Corporation should be organized and financed by

Chinese interests.
6. The American firms will receive from $12,000 to $18,000
daily for their services, which compensation is considered too high.
7. The Government should
help develop local talent and not
finance a corporationwhich employs foreign pilots.
8. Secret contracts may have been signed by the
Corporation
with the American firm.

These objections, while absurd in many respects, represented never-

theless a formidable part of the opposition mentioned. The Chinese
National Aviation Corporation answered them, pointing out for ex-

ample that flying above foreign countries has never been considered
improper or a breach of sovereignty. The American pilots, they
 THE DRAGON LEARNS TO FLY 237

pointed out, were in no way connected with the Government at Wash-

ington, in any case. It was added that certain privileges were given
the company because it was a Chinese Government outfit and for no
other reason, and it should prosper and be aided in every way because
itbegan as a Chinese project. Chinese pilots were used as much as
possiblefrom the start, and eventually when the supply meets the
demand no others will be used. To get something started, however,
foreign pilots were hired by the Government's company.
Minister of Railways Sun Fo on June 19, 1929, formally declared
that the National Government's recent decision to place the airways

under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Communications would not

affect the contract with American interests. Uncertainty, however,
marked the situation with the intimation that the current program
would be retarded further by a sudden change in the status of the
airways. This was a result of the long and constant rivalry between
the Communications and the Railways ministries at Nanking,
Their fight further affected growing radio communications, the

Railways Ministry seeking to control these as well as all things per-

taining to communications in any branch of government service. Orig-
inally tKe specially created Bureau of Reconstruction was given the

right to handle radio, particularly abroad, and signed an agreement

with the Radio Corporation of America. The latter was to furnish a
new station under this understanding, meantime cooperating with the
Chinese office in Shanghai on dispatches through Manila to the United
States or elsewhere.
These "growing pains" have now subsided, as far as can be
ascertained. The Chinese National Aviation Corporation still functions
and so does the R. C A. in China, and dissension in latter years seems
to have disappeared.

Aviation is an old story to the Chinese, and as one result they are

coming to "see China first." The airplane will prove an undoubted aid
in efforts to teach the Chinese people to know themselves and their
own continent. a vast unifying force in Asia, where roads
It also is

are few and waterways are too slow for the pace of life in the awak-

ening Orient. The expense is still prohibitive but in time the very
bulk of the masses will conquer that financial obstacle, and prices will
be lowered so that thousands may fly where tens or hundreds do so
now.
238 THE DRAGON STIRS
The Chinese are rapidly becoming "air minded." They are fatalists

at bottom and gamblers in any case. So they fly with unbridled

enthusiasm.
The airship too has not only brought China into a more compact
mass in Asia, but has brought Asia and the Orient closer to America
and Europe* Clipper ships bring China closer to home we in the
United States will come to know and understand the "inscrutable
Oriental" before long. Our grandchildren, if not we ourselves, will
think nothing of flying over to Shanghai from New York for the
week end.
 20 BURIAL OF SUN YAT-SEN

if ever in her hectic history has China paid more

devout homage to any man than she did to Dr. Sun Yat-sen
RARELY
dawn
the of June 1, 1929.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen was the visionary man who founded the Kuo-
mintang The People's Party in China. He grew up in Hawaii,
where his brushing against the Occidental conceptions of democracy
and equality gave birth to his revolutionary ideals for the peoples of
China, long oppressed not only by foreigners but by their own rapacious
governing class and by the war lords. These ideas in a monarchy such
as China at the start of this century, under a decadent and thoroughly
corrupt iManchu dynasty then ruling from the Dragon Throne at
Peking were revolutionary indeed. No one had heard of such a thing
in the hinterland of China no one wanted to hear of such a concept
at the Manchu Court in the days before the first revolution, But Dr.
Sun Yat-sen heard.
He returned to Canton and slowly began to teach this "insidious"
doctrine in his native land of South China. The idea spread very
gradually, but it was one of the underlying causes of the overthrow
of the Manchu Dynasty in the original revolution against the Peking
throne in 1911. These men fighting for freedom and democratic rule
succeeded, and the revolt was officially proclaimed to have overthrown
the Dragon Throne on February 7, 1912.
The despised Manchu "Boy Emperor," whose name was then
Hsuan-T'ing, abdicated his right to power as the "Son of Heaven"
on that date, or rather, the old Dowager Empress did it for him, for
the "ruler" was but seven years old and even more impotent as

"emperor" then than now. For he "rules'* again on the throne of his
ancestors in Hsinking (formerly Chang-chung) , or "New Capital," in
Japan's "independent State" of Manchukuo. This youth is the last of
the old Manchu line, set up when the Manchu hordes swarmed over
the Great Wall in 1644 and conquered the Chinese peoples.
239
240 THE DRAGON STIRS
The original revolution was a military success but a political failure.
The revolutionaries had a vast land in their temporary power but

they had no idea what to do with it. The "Boy Emperor'* was per-
mitted to live, which some say was a tactical error. Still, even the

Chinese had qualms about murdering a child of seven years, especially

a boy-child, whom they all revere, and even more especially when that
boy-child might, on an off chance, really be the "Son of Heaven" and
inflict terrible catastrophes on the man who slew him.

So the "Boy Emperor" stayed put for a while in the heart of what
was then the Forbidden City at Peking. It now is about as "for-
bidden" as Coney Island and nearly as popular with tourists. (I recall

going through it once in less than an hour. Like the youth at the
Louvre, I think that with roller skates I could have cut the time in

half.) In 1917, he was restored for three days in an abortive putsch,

was overthrown again, finally fled to the asylum of the Japanese Con-
cession in Tientsin, and now has been "restored" again by Japan in
Manchukuo.
War lords sprang up all over China as soon as the watchdogs of
the Dragon Throne were gone. This gave Dr. Sun an entirely new
problem in his beloved but bemuddled China. The Flowery Kingdom
went haywire before he knew it. The World War kept Europe and
most of America busy, and it was not until early in the 1920's that

nations began to bestir themselves about getting "back to normalcy."

Dr. Sun was more than interested in that idea, so back to Canton he
went to begin anew his idea of a government "of the people, by the
people and for the people." It was this expression in Abraham
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address which Dr. Sun used as the germ of his

now almost equally famous "Three People's Principles." He organized

his People's Party and started new machinery for the Kuomintang
Revolution against a newly despotic and corrupt "government" set up
at Peking. The other Powers turned a deaf ear to his pleas for
assistance including the very busy men at Washington under the late
President Harding's administration.
Dr. Sun found open arms at Moscow. He needed The help.
Russians offered men, money, and munitions 'of war, and Dr. Sun

.jumped at the chance to embrace their offer, even though it included

ostensibly accepting their communal conception of the way toward a
better life for the common man. The Russian Advisorate, under our
 BURIAL OF SUN YAT-SEN 241

old friend Mikal Borodin, flourished for a time. The "northern ex-
pedition" resulted with revolutionary rapidity. The Kuomintang
Revolution left the Pearl River at Canton in the late spring of 1926,
and moving to the Yangtze Valley in 1927, captured Peking in
after

June, 1928, two years after its inception. That is a record, in a

revolution of such magnitude.
But Dr. Sun had died. The founder of the Revolution was only
sixty years old, but a very tired man when he went to Peking in a
last effort to prevent the necessity of a war to achieve his ends. There,
in the citadel of the northwhich was the cradle of the corrupt power
which he despised, he died, on March 12, 1925.
His embalmed body lay entombed for a time in a shrine atop an
old temple outside Peiping. A special process was used to embalm the
Doctor's frail body, and I saw it in the State funeral rites four years

after his death, in the casket in which it now lies entombed, outside
Nanking. The State funeral rites began in the darkness before dawn
of the first day of June 1929. The city of Nanking, ill-equipped to
shelter so many visitors, was crammed with humanity. Many for-
eigners were there, and press 'correspondents flocked to the capital on
that historic day.
Few got any sleep the night of that May 31 in Nanking. The
ritual began at three o'clock in the morning. Lady Hay Drummond
Hay, an English woman writing her impressions of the event, Karl von
Wiegand, veteran American correspondent, and I stood around in a
barracks-like building most of the night after twelve o'clock waiting for

something to happen. Then we went over to the place where the

services were beginning. Only Party members were allowed inside.
The us stood outside waiting for the long procession to start to
rest of

the newly completed mausoleum on Purple Mountain, past the ancient

Ming tombs, ten miles outside the city walls.

The funeral procession started began to show in the
just as light
east. was deadly slow and took hours to reach the shrine, where
It

entombment took place at high noon. Dr. Sun's body was placed in a
hearse at the end of the long line of devout followers. Along a new

highway especially constructed for the purpose, the cortege moved

through the valley of the Yangtze,
The funeral proceeded at so slow a pace that I decided to go back
to the hotel and write a cable to the Times about its start, then pick
242 THE DRAGON STIRS
it
up again by motor car at the base of the mausoleum. This I did,

and I am going to give you those paragraphs as written there in the

early morning hush of June 1, 1929.

High on the side of Purple Mountain, far from the busy rush
ofa new nation or the sound of guns in recurrent revolution, the
body of Dr. Sun Yat-sen lies enshrined tonight in its final rest-
ing place at the spot where the dead Leader often, in life, ex-

pressed his cherished desire to be buried.

The began in solemn ceremony before dawn in the
final rites

Central Party Headquarters auditorium where the body has lain

in state for the past three days. The funeral closed shortly after
noon with the formal lowering of the great bronze casket into its

sunken crypt. Outside, the sun made bright the blue and white
granite and marble mausoleum which stood splendid above the
Yangtze fertile lowlands.

Inside, beyond the high-roofed Memorial Hall and past the

huge bronze doors the Tsitng-li's body lies peacefully below

domed walls in a soft twilight which in daytime filters gently in
through tiny stained glass windows. Here only a chosen few
gathered with bowed heads at the entombment of the Leader's
frail passed forever from human sight. These were
frame as it

the members of Dr. Sun's immediate family and his closest fol-

lowers, who had been allowed to be near him during the memo-
rial mourning ceremony at dawn within the dim-lit auditorium
before day broke over the capital. They included the widow,
Mme. Sun Yat-sen the only son of the founder of the Kuomin-
;

tang,Mr. Sun Fo; Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, his erstwhile

aide and a comparatively few others close through blood relation-
;

ships or political association.

A
few moments later this little group slowly retraced their
steps down the long, sweeping granite staircase and departed

along the broad highway which like a ribbon, when viewed from
the heights of the mountainside tomb, connects the shrine through
the old Nanking city walls with the distant new capital of China.
All through the night preparations had continued for the
truly striking program. It was the climax of years of planning.
The whole of Nationalist China had spent a week in official
 BURIAL OF SUN YAT-SEN 243

mourning. The wars for the moment were forgotten and the
continent has been at peace since the funeral train departed from
Peking last Monday carrying the body of Dr. Sun Yat-sen from
its temporary tomb outside the ancient capital southward half
way across China to Nanking. For days, all Nanking incoming
trains and river steamers have been crowded with persons from
all corners of the land. Diplomatic missions of virtually every
nation on friendly relations with the new China arrived to attend
the State entombment.

Long before dawn, soldiers, sailors, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides,

gendarmes and regular police joined in seeking to handle quietly
the great throngs which filled the capital for this event. The
people in a great, long procession marched afoot the miles be-
tween the auditorium in the heart of Nanking and the mauso-
leum along the new Chungshan highway over which the cortege
moved at a snail-like pace. This procession began just at dawn
as the hearse moved into place toward the end of the line of the

living stretching nearly two miles ahead,

Madame Sun Yat-sen (the second), just back from Europe
to attend the funeral services for her dead husband, stood alone
and unsupported. Dressed in austere black, she walked by the
side of her husband's son, Mr. Sun Fo himself about her own

age and was seen to be weeping silently at this renewal of faith

in her husband. With her also were her two sisters, Mme.
Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. H. H. Rung. These and other
members of the immediate family were hidden behind a black-
sheeted shield while they walked from the auditorium in a place
set aside for them just back of the hearse in which the casket

rested. It was draped in a flag of the new republic under the

Kuomintang.
Through warm spring sunshine of the early June morning,
the
members of the Cabinet, high Chinese officials, foreign envoys,
soldiers and others marched in the long trek toward the mauso-
leum Chinese bands played the dirge. Guns in forts atop Lion
Hill outside the walls boomed one hundred and one times in a
national salute of farewell.Like a giant dragon at last awake,
the funeral procession wound through the city's silent massed

throngs into the open countryside.

244 THE DRAGON STIRS
The procession reached the base of the mausoleum at ten
o'clock in the morning, at the end of a six hour march. Here the

casket was unloaded and placed on a bright blue catafalque which

many silent coolies carried upward to the shrine within the

enormous building above. At the tomb, following elaborate and
devout rites, those persons especially invited to attend the funeral

ceremony filed past the crypt.

The city of Nanking observed three minutes of silence exactly
at high noon, and the rites were ended.

Immediately after Dr. Sun's funeral, the men at Nanking turned

toward beautifying their new capital. It needed it. Plans were drawn
up by Henry K. Murphy and Ernest P. Goodrich of New York, for
making Nanking one of the most beautiful capitals in the world. The
old wall running its zigzagway across the hills along the Yangtze was
to be turned into a modern boulevard encircling the city.
At first it was supposed that the wall would have to go. It was
felt even by the Chinese that its presence would retard the city's

development. Hence it was proposed then that the wall be razed and
the bricks used to pave new streets. When Mr. Murphy, the architect
in the city planning program, arrived in China early that February,

he went at once to Nanking. One of the first things he did was to

announce that he thought purely Chinese architecture should be used
throughout in designing the Capital's new public buildings and that
the battered old gray wall should be maintained at all costs.
"It is typical of China/' Mr. Murphy said. "It would be a great
mistake to tear it down. Leave it and we make a broad boulevard
will

on its top, a most valuable asset in every way to the new city. The
wall will thus be useful and at the same time most attractive. By no
means disturb it. If necessary, put gates through it at every street,
but keep the wall."
So they kept the old wall at Nanking.
The capital, situated on the south bank of the Yangtze River, was
a typical old Chinese city of less than a million population. It rambled
all along the countryside for miles, with vast open spaces within the
wall. Elsewhere, its narrow streets traverse
thickly populated sections
where the citizens live packed and jammed together in typical Chinese
fashion. It is still not a pretty city today, but the location for a
 BURIAL OF SUN YAT-SEN 245

beautiful modern metropolis is ideal. The low hills behind the city
rise roundly against the sky, and from the vantage of the Yangtze as
one glides past on a steamer the city is not without charm.
Mr. Goodrich, the engineer, originally went to China to work on
three tasks in connection with the National Government's recon-
struction program These were the Nanking city planning project,
the construction of Nanking's port and the development of a port at
Canton for ocean-going liners.
"I came out to China to assist in the planning of the new Nan-
king/' Mr. Goodrich said in talking of his work there, "and to give
them a practical plan for the construction of ports for ocean liners at

Canton and possibly at Nanking. Mr. Murphy and myself are going
ahead first on the Nanking city planning program. We are making
headway, as he will tell you. He knows more about that end of it

than I do.
"As to the ports at Canton and Nanking, I cannot say yet how
much they will cost, but possibly it will run into millions of dollars.

How they intend to finance this work is none of our concern. are We
interested, to be sure, in the success of the enterprise, but I understand
at Tientsin they arestill working on harbor improvements suggested in

a plan laid down ten or twenty years ago.

"Our idea is to survey the situation as practical engineers, and
once we have the survey completed to lay down a line of work which
will, when carried out, give Canton and
Nanking the most up-to-date
ports possible. We will, I presume, proceed with this work of pre-
senting the Chinese Government with a practical engineering program
for these ports as soon as the city planning program at Nanking is
satisfactorily drawn up. The actual construction work of the ports
will be done, I believe, by construction engineering firms who are
asked to bid on the projects as specified in the port plans I submit
to the Government."
It was estimated the construction of the port at Canton would cost
at least $10,000,000. The port at Nanking would cost that much and
possibly more. Minister Sun Fo, who was first in charge of this work
and who retained Mr. Murphy and Mr. Goodrich in America, said the
financing schemes covering these projects would be backed by the
National Government revenues. Mr. Murphy, an old visitor to China,

was strongly in favor of adhering as closely as possible to the old

246 THE DRAGON STIRS
Chinese style of architecture. He criticized efforts to combine the old
with the new western ideas, not because that sort of combination was
not a good idea but because, he said to me on this subject, the archi-
tectshad gone about the combination in the wrong way.
"I became convinced," Mr. Murphy said, "that the chief difficulty
with the adaptations already made lay in the fact that their designers
had started out with foreign exteriors into which they had introduced
to a greater or less extent Chinese features, with the inevitable result
that the completed buildings remained essentially foreign.
"I decided we must start out with Chinese exteriors into which we
would introduce only such foreign features as were needed to meet
some definite requirements. Of the buildings now completed in the
Ginling College group at Nanking and of the twenty or more now
occupied by Yenching University (at Peiping) my Chinese friends say
they are really Chinese.
"In its natural features and surroundings Nanking has advantages
enjoyed by few capitals in the world/' he added. "In what other

capital can we find parallels for theYangtze River on one side bearing
the commerce of two hundred million people, for the Lotus Lake on
the other with its picturesquely wooded islands and its possibilities
as the park a suburban residential development, for the
center of

rolling terrain which adds so much to the architectural possibilities

of the future thickly built portions of the city proper, for the low hills

bordering Nanking on the north and south, and for the culmination
of these hills at the west in Purple Mountain, rising 1400 feet in a

silhouette of individuality and character? And when you consider

that over half of the seventeen to eighteen square miles within the
walls of Nanking consists of fields nearly empty of buildings of any
kind you will realize how unusual an opportunity is here afforded to
achieve a city plan laid out almost on ideal lines."
Mr. Murphy came out to China across Europe and Siberia, visiting
some twenty cities en route to Nanking. He studied their city plans
with an eye to how to adapt the best features of each to the
city he
was planning. And he found in the city wall a great traffic artery
already to hand.
"Of the man-made features of Nanking," he said, "the most
is the wonderful encircling city wall
striking rambling for twenty-two
miles, undulating gently across the foothills of Purple Mountain,
 BURIAL OF SUN YAT-SEN 247

occasionally dropping to twenty feet in height, averaging forty or

more, and for long stretches rising to a majestic height of over sixty
feet. Many hundreds of years old, sturdily built of high bricks above
a solid granite base, the scene of countless battles for the city, the
walls of Nanking are a priceless heritage of majesty and beauty and ;

my first strong feeling when I arrived was the conviction that these
walls must not be lost as the price to be paid by Nanking for its

modernization.
"When I found the wall was nowhere less than ten feet wide at

the top and measured over twenty-five feet wide for all but a short
stretch, with several miles of wall over forty feet wide and already
paved with stone, I clinched matters by proposing the use of the entire
wall for an elevated motor boulevard twenty-two miles long with

ramps leading up at frequent intervals and with parking spaces and

refreshment stations where the wall widens out at each gate into a

spacious plateau. The accomplishment of this project will give Nan-

king one of the finest panoramic drives in the world."
Following the original "fact-finding survey," Mr. Murphy began
work on the city plan itself, and Nanking slowly is becoming modern.
 21 PERSONAL PUBLICITY

the end of that summer I left the Far East and came home.

AT It was about time, for perhaps I already had "missed too many
is among foreigners along the China
boats," as the old saying
Coast. After more than five years spent in Japan, China, the Philip-
pines and Manchuria I left the Orient on September 1, 1929 or
rather, it was on that Sabbath day that I started to leave.

But before leaving China let us look once more at the scene there.
It was a hodge-podge of politico-military purposes and cross-purposes.
The period of transition in so large a land peopled by so many widely
scattered races must last a generation or more. That is why I have
named this volume The Dragon Stirs. The dragon of China is not
fullyawake even now but he is stirring in his sleep. He is partly
awake and when his entire sinuous body comes to life, dawn will be
over.
That June, 1929, the men at Nanking were engaged in sup-
in

pressing irrepressible "Christian General," Marshal Feng Yu-

the

Hsiang, again. He and the younger Generals in the troublesome

Kwangsi Province clique were raising a rumpus up-country at Han-
kow. The newest breach within the Kuomintang had started in May,
before Dr. Sun Yat-sen's entombment at Nanking. In looking through
my files of dispatches to The New York Times, I find this headline
on May 25: NANKING LINKS FENG TO RED PLOT. Others during
those otherwise pleasant spring days related how Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek Nanking pleaded with Marshal Feng to "abide by peace"
at ;

how hung on Feng's next step, and so on. This

the fate of China
rebellion was smothered, and by July, all seemed quiet on the Chinese
front. But trouble with Soviet Russia was to occur again shortly,
marring my journey back to the States. This was not apparent at
that time, so I went down to the Philippines.
There were several reasons for this. One was that I had been
248
 PERSONAL PUBLICITY
filing cabled dispatches to New York via Manila, giving a "drop-
my
copy" there to a Filipino syndicate of native language newspapers

(chiefly in Tagalog). They were to pay the cable costs as far as

Manila, The New York Times to pay them from there on to New
York. But the Filipino papers did not pay their share, never had
since we began this arrangement months before. It was up to me to
collect, so I went to Manila and did.

Another reason for going just at that time was my meeting with
Dwight F. Davis, of St. Louis, who had recently been appointed to
succeed Colonel Henry L. Stimson as Governor-General of the Philip-

pine Islands. Mr. Davis was passing through Shanghai on his way
to Manila, so I got on the same ship and went along. The genial
donor of the Davis Cup for international tennis competition a splendid
symbol of good will induced through sports was a jovial ship's com-
panion and we became rather well acquainted for such a short meeting
as that four-day boat ride.
I collected the $2,000 or so due my paper in Manila, bade Governor

Davis and Senator Manuel Quezon (now President Quezon) farewell

at Malacanan Palace and went back to Shanghai, arriving in mid-July's

heat. I determined then to return to America.

In the few days which I spent in packing my things preparatory to

the "big push/' troublewas brewing between Moscow and Nanking.
The Chinese raided the Chinese Eastern Railway at Harbin, in North
Manchuria, about that time. The Russians controlled that line, which
was connected with their trans-Siberian railroad from Vladivostok to
Moscow, and they didn't like this raid a bit. They threatened to
invade Manchuria (as the Japanese did later) and there grew up a
warlike tension between the two nations.

My troubles had just begun. I had not been back in Shanghai a

week when I got dysentery, which delayed my departure. By the
time I got out of the hospital and on my feet again, was nearly the
it

end of August, 1929. I cancelled a tentative passage on the O. S. K.

Line via South Africa, and sought instead to get to Europe across
Siberia. But a state approaching war existed in Manchuria by then.
It was necessary to go via Vladivostok and there were no Russian
consular officials in all China, not even in Manchuria, to provide me

with the very much needed passport visa. I determined, nevertheless,

to go on up to Vladivostok, thence through the Amur Valley over the

250 THE DRAGON STIRS
lop of Manchuria and down again, joining the trans-Siberian line
proper at the town of Chita. It was this route I took, without a
Russian visa. None could be obtained in China, but I relied on the
advice of a Soviet press colleague. That turned out to be a mistake,

but he could not help it.

It was a good thing to be getting away really away at last, after

so many years filled with so many rapidly occurring experiences.

These just happened, and they occurred to anyone who was in the Far
East then; but I must say events seemed to crowd on each other's
heels in those years.
One other reason that I had to go was that before I went to the
hospital one local Shanghai paper ran an item that I was leaving on
a boat via South Africa the next day. I went to the hospital instead !

When I got out almost a month later, at the American Club and the
Columbia Country Club where I went with friends again to say fare-
well someone invariably said: "You still here?" One paper ran a
picture of a bespectacled missionary about that time with my name
under and the caption that I was leaving the Orient. You may
it,

imagine the comment, which included: "My, my, such a change and
ill less than a month, too!'* Of course there were many other sides
to mydeparture, but things like that bordering on the ridiculous and
the lighter side left me with relish for the new adventure.

Mydiary of the way in which I left China is the best way to give

you the complete picture of the "return of the native" to New York.

SUNDAY, September 1, 1929:

ABOARD THE S. S. MODESTA, At Sea: I left China

today . two years, seven months.
. . after Arrived in Shang- . . .

hai from Tokyo on Sunday, Feb. 6, 1927, for the U. P. Today,

in a "Walla-walla" launch with Carolyn Converse and Victor

Keen New York Herald-Tribune, I came aboard the S. S.

of the

Modesta, an Anglo-Danish steamer bound for Vladivostok- and

across Siberia and Europe, and the Atlantic home Five . . . !

years here and in Japan is enough. I'm glad to be on my way.

Had a farewell dinner at the Majestic Hotel last night, Vic
being
host just a quiet little affair Vic and Miss Chaplin, 'Gina
. . .

and Bruno Schwartz and Carolyn and myself. Home at dawn

 PERSONAL PUBLICITY 251

. . . hurried final packing and so to the ship . . . Morris Harris

(A.P.) came to the Customs Jetty with us.
There are six other passengers, all Russians. One introduced
himself as a man who, Rover of Tass agency
said, would help
me get a visa at Vladivostok. Took a chance and came on this
trip without a visa, wiring Walter Duranty at Moscow. Our
Captain is a Norwegian just out from Europe with an arms
shipment long in South America, and sings the praises of
. . .

Rio de Janeiro. ... To bed early and very tired, after talking
with the Captain about the unfair new U. S. A/s
shipping sub-
sidy, the beauties of Rio, etc. ... I arrived and left China on a

Sunday. . . .

MONDAY, September 2:
Up noon and after tea and toast in my cabin, on deck to
at
walk a bit and read. Ship's virtually deserted. The Modesto,
. . .

is a far cry from the Pres. Pierce which I came out on in 1924.

Tea at four and feeling a bit ill ... rolling quite a bit, but so
far not so bad. My Russian shipmates assure me I'll have no
trouble landing at Vladivostok. They playedMa Jongg after
dinner tonight and later we sat and had a gay time in the
smoking room. To bed rather late after much "Walla-walla,"
including an argument with our Captain as to the merits of the
English language He insisted it was the best, most expressive
speech in the world, while I said it was one of the worst, lacking
the exactness of the French or even some Chinese languages. . . .

TUESDAY, September 3:
We are halfway to V., steaming peacefully across the Japan
Sea with Korea plainly visible off our port bow, low, gray,
misty. . . . Little fishing boats dot the flat surface of our ocean,
their tiny sails bellied to the slight breeze appearing like the
prints by Japanese artists. The water is a gray-green again after
yesterday's peculiarly deep blue characteristic of the tropics. . . .

And strangely enough, we ran into countless schools of tiny flying

fish ! Never saw those but in the tropics before. On deck today
after tiffin in my cabin, to read Modern Chinese Civilisation, by
Dr. A. F. Legendre, translated by Elsie Martin Jones in Tokyo.
It is a very general plea for intervention in China by the Powers ;
252 THE DRAGON STIRS
but he, like others who're supposed to know and have suggested
this, no program.
offers . . .

Music on the Victrola in the Captain's cabin after dinner.

He provided also H. G. Wells Mr. Britling Sees It Through,

1

a book on Britain's going into the Great War which I read until
the China-boy evicted me from the dining room at ten o'clock.
On deck for a breath of air. Many stars, but a very cool, black

night. . . . The Big Dipper off our port bow, very low in the
sea. To my bunk very lonely, somehow.

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 4:
Mr.
Britling and I had a cool, pleasant day
of it. I like

Wells most of the time. Heavier clothing was comfortable on

deck. Getting rather restless and eager to get ashore, A monot-
onous trip, this. Well, Vladivostok early tomorrow is one con-
solation. wondering about my visa. My Russian shipmates
Still

are confident. "sure no trouble," they say.

. .

THURSDAY, Sept. 5:
We are now in Vladivostok for the first time. Just as soon
it's my last, too. What a ramshackle town! But a beautiful, a

truly beautiful natural harbor, landlocked, its hills rising light

green above the placid water. It has marvelous possibilities, but
nothing's been done to beautify it or the town. The harbor
freezes solid in November and isn't ice-free, they say, until late
spring. Hard to realize Vlad. is about the same latitude as
Rome! And we have no visa today! And that's no
joke in
this case. Because the authorities civilly but just as definitely
said : "You must not come ashore without a visa. Cable Moscow
again if you like. We've heard nothing. But in the meantime,
it's the Modesto, for you." So here I sit alone with my thoughts,
a virtual prisoner on what is now my private yacht. I should
have an answer one way or the other by Saturday to a cable I
sent Moscow again today through the capable Mr. Volchek of
the Russian Dalbank,who accompanied me to the Foreign Agent's
officeand the Police Department of Passports. Or rather, I
accompanied him. He told my tale of woe and negotiated and
finally told me the result He certainly was obliging, but I can't
help feeling that I'd have done far better on my own, with a
 PERSONAL PUBLICITY 253

pure but simple interpreter rather than a guardian. Still, it was

very kind of him. drove to the F. A.'s
. . . We office in an
ancient droshky over a rough, cobblestoned avenue badly in need
of repair and up a suburban-like lane down which small freshets
ran digging treacherous holes in the dirt road which caused us
to pitch about like a ship in a gale, and most perilously too.
Made it and back without a mishap damned clever, these . . .

Ruskies, driving. And

so back to the ship for a late tiffin alone.
And a nap, for I got up early to go ashore, and the jolly old
Customs johnnies appeared at 10 a.m., instead of the advertised
five o'clock on the bulletin board! They always do. ...
They okayed my luggage without difficulty, but insisted on
locking up my files in one of my small travelling bags God . . .

knows where they've got it now; somewhere in Vlad. ... I

hope it comes back. They may be reading all my cables, mail
stories, et al, for years to the Times. . . .
My Captain and I

had dinner in state tonight; then he and the

Mr. first officer,
Irwin Hansen, quite a remarkable fellow, went ashore for what
turned out to be a bit of a night out, rolling in with the dawn.
And so to bed. . . .

FRIDAY, Sept. 6:
Why I ever, as I did on
Wednesday, thought Vladivostok
would be a consolation God only knows. It's beastly, and if I
don't get off this ship before long I'll go mad. Loading
and unloading interminable great boxes of tea all day and night!
No sleep ... no NOTHING. For less than that I'd chuck this
European tour and go right home, very angry. Funny to . . .

look back on, okay . . . but these unending days and nights are
the worst I've known.

SATURDAY, Sept. 7:
Ashore today. Looks as though something has happened. A
flunky came aboard about four p.m. and after some trouble getting
an interpreter said that he had a pass permitting me to land at
once and go anywhere I liked. Fine. Also, he had a message
requiring that I call at the so-called "Central Control Point/'
Passport Division, at nine a.m. on Monday. guess is that My
they got word the visa is okay and that I get it Monday. Fine
254 THE DRAGON STIRS
with one fly in the ointment :
they may insist I take the Express
on the trans-Siberian line Monday night for Moscow, while I

would a lot rather wait a week here, dead as it is, for the
Bristols. The ten-day be mighty dull,
trip across otherwise may
from all accounts. Rained all day but let up a bit about five
. . .

p.m., and with Captain Jorgensen, our skipper, and one bag, went
ashore. .
Registered at the Versailles Hotel on the main
. .

street. Not too bad, but no Ritz at that. Room at five rubles

a day, with a bath of sorts down the corridor. ordered We

dinner in the room only way, no dining room and while a
Chinese boy got me some rubles for my Mex. dollars and fixed
the chow, we took a stroll. Met Capt. C. of the S. S. Arica,
another Norwegian skipper, on the corner, with his "little wife,"
a rather sweet though sad Russian girl, and the four of us back
to the Versailles for chow. This came slowly, but in immense

quantities the boy had put a whole chicken in for chicken soup !

Talked until midnight.

SUNDAY, Sept. 8:
A week yesterday since I had a proper bath the boy apolo-

getically told me bright Sabbath morn, "Velly sorry, no

this

bath today . . .
holiday tomorrow can do." And so another
. . .

of these towel and "sponge baths." Even when I get to it, from
what I've seen, this hotel tub is no dream. Even so, I feel better
today than in weeks. Cool, sparkling day, not a cloud in a

great blue sky. A

tiffin-tea of sorts, with soft-boiled eggs and

the inevitable brown bread (horrible, heavy stuff, all that's avail-
able here now) and with Mrs. M., a Russian woman among our
Modesta passengers en route to Moscow, to the ship to see about
my luggage. Decided to leave it aboard until I see what happens
at the Passport Office tomorrow. Ashore and a decision to go
by excursion train into the country for the afternoon. After
forty minutes by train in a crowded wooden-benched car crammed
with holiday crusaders along the coast of Amur Bay, off and into
the arms almost of Mr. Babinstov ( ?) , also a co-passenger, and
his brother and wife who own a cottage at this sea-side resort.

They asked us to tea -so through the green-wooded hills to their

cottage, and as pleasant a tea as could be imagined "tea" being

 PERSONAL PUBLICITY 255

cold meats, tinned and otherwise, and vodka, with steaming hot
Russian tea in glasses after
tall which I'm getting to like im-
mensely. It was chilly when we left to catch the 7:36 p.m.

train back to Vladivostok. We went to a Russian movie tonight

all Soviet propaganda and had more tea and meat balls and
a sweet for dinner later. So back to the hotel, and to bed which
I had to make. It had not been touched since I left that morning.

MONDAY, Sept. 9:
Judge Allman has come and gone. Got in town today on a
Japanese steamer from Tsuruga and I missed him at first . . .

taking my bath. He came again to the hotel about six p.m.,

. . .

having got his ticket for tonight's train. . . too late now to
cancel it and he went on to Moscow. And I still have no visa.

. . . Saw the Passport Division chap. No word, but wanted me

to fill out an application blank. I did, and he'll phone me if and
when anything happens. This uncertainty is getting mighty old.

TUESDAY, Sept. 10:

My interpreter, a young American chap, strange to say, of
Russian parents, stranded alone here, came along about three
and we went in searcji of Gatesman, the Foreign Agent then . . .

to the Japanese Consulate to see about going to Japan tomorrow

and return here with the Bristols and
to get a visa at Tsuruga,
take the same train. No can do. ... Got Gatesman on the
. . .

phone and finally made an appointment for ten a.m. tomorrow.

Sent Duranty another urgent cable. Hope something happens
soon! War rumors thick as flies at the coffee shops and else-
where in town today. Chinese may fight. Battle going
. . . . . .

on along the Manchurian border since the eighth, they say . . .

also around Habarovsk. Feel out of touch with everything . . .

in this place, for the first time in years. . . . Odd feeling, this
idleness of mine right now. . . .
Recruiting hurriedly going on
here now. Soldiers everywhere singing, marching through the
streets. Looks ominous. Hope it doesn't hold up the train
service . . . not before I get across if I ever do get that visa.

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 11:

Got action today! Met Gatesman at the office at ten a.m.
with Christensen of the Great Northern, and Gatesman had got
256 THE DRAGON STIRS
a telegram from Moscow telling him to fix me up. He did a
lot of
telephoning and we went to the Passport Office and all was
apparently okay. Filed another application, which Mr. C. wrote
out in Russian, and paid twenty rubles and gave them a photo.
Get my passport back with the visa on Friday. Tongue in . . .

cheek until then, but believe it's finally fixed. With Interpreter
Paul to The Red Banner, a Communist sheet then over to . . .

the Modesta. Never walked so much or so far in one day in

all my life ... all over town on multifarious errands. ... No
word from Duranty. To a cinema with Mrs. M. tonight . . .

left at half-time. She told me tonight she was a soldier in the

Czar's army wounded nineteen times during the World
in 1915

War. . . . Remarkable woman. To bed early, very tired.

THURSDAY, Sept. 12:

More bad news. A
from Duranty in Moscow
doleful cable

intimating F. O. there refuses passport visa on what grounds

God only knows. After Gatesman's attitude yesterday and
. . .

his urgent insistence at the Passport Office here that they give

me one at once, else he gets into trouble in Moscow, entirely in-

explicable. Christensen's for dinner tonight, and he and

. . .

Horrdon were still optimistic. Am supposed to get my visa at

noon tomorrow. On the strength of all these things, moved
trunks in from the Modesta today. have to move them right May
back tomorrow! Splendid chow at C's, and later bridge for a
couple of hours. Everyone is certainly amiable and accom-
modating.

FRIDAY the 13th!;

Got the visa today! With Mr. C. to the Passport Office at
noon and everything was okay. Got my U. S. currency changed
into rubles at the Chosen Bank. To the German Consulate where
I got a visa for Germany good for one year. I'm trans-Siberia
bound on Monday what a load off my mind.

TUESDAY, Sept. 17:

We're on the way to Moscow, and at the moment are stalled
at a little place called Red River Station, just a few miles from
Habarovsk, after midnight on a cold, moonlit plain. Had tiffin

Sunday with Admiral and Mrs. Bristol, just in from Japan . . .

 PERSONAL PUBLICITY 257
also dinner and to the train at eleven p.m. Met Captain J. on
the way there. Found two trunks cost me 166.50 rubles baggage
fare! To Moscow, alone . . . almost as much as my own rail-

road ticket and sleeping car, combined, to Berlin! That was a

blow. .
Finally all aboard at twelve midnight and ready to
. .

go ... Christensen and Horrdon also down to see us off, and

two or three more. compartment so far. Get
I'm alone in my
a partner at Habarovsk. Hope much baggage these he's not got ;

compartments are small. One likable chap on board is a

. . .

Swedish engineer, long a resident of China, going home.

FRIDAY, Sept. 20:

Ought to keep this up every day . . . but not much of in-
terest. Hour after hour of rolling prairie routine of eating, . . .

resting, walking, etc., getting a bit of exercise at the various

station stops, and chats with the other restless passengers.
Passed Chita today ... ran into "Nick," chap who barbered at
the American Club in Shanghai. Stranded up here and can't get
back now, due to the war. Country is different now. We're in
Siberia proper. More villages than through the Amur Valley,
the rich yellow land cultivated, and fences all along. Before there
was nothing, hundreds of miles of hills, forests, no cultivation.
Dreary and cold. Had our first snow yesterday. Trees turning
yellow and red in a profusion of fall colors along the Siberian
countryside; much like the middlewest at home. The moonlit
nightsup here are wonderful, clear. A full yellow harvest moon
comes up at dark, as we chase the reddening, setting sun into
the West toward Europe, and fills our yellow world with a soft

light. The forest trees nearby along the tracks, or track it is

single, so far, across most of Siberia march by like black

shadows. Six more days to Moscow, and I'll be glad when
we're there. We set the clock back an hour a day now, Moscow

being six hours behind Chita.

MONDAY, Sept. 23:

Uneventful weekend, with our trip more than half over.
Improving my Russian the while, if any, with an ex-Colonel of
the Czar's army, a somewhat attractive and very blonde ballet
dancer from Leningrad, and a Russian- Jew who speaks German
258 THE DRAGON STIRS
and acts as interpreter for me. Learned ROM Marie in Russian,

which is no small feat, everything considered. We pass a number

of villages and some sizeable cities now and Take exercise then.

at every stop, and buy cheese, sour cream and butter; some roast

chickens, too. The Admiral is an indefatiguable investigator of

the station restaurants and invariably comes back laden with loot
the produce of the hamlet. We get to Moscow on Thursday.

Happy thought: a bath!

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 25:

Through the Urals last night and into Europe today. Moscow
tomorrow morning. Sent Duranty a wire asking him to get
reservations for me and the Bristols at the Grand Hotel there in
Moscow . . . there's always a Grand Hotel in every town, it

seems! Bought a couple of trinkets . . .

semi-precious stones
and the a town called Sverdlovsk
like, at Today got last night.

a wooden cigarette case at another station in a district famous

for its woodwork. Can't realize tonight's last night on train.
The countryside now is really beautiful . . . well kept up and
cultivated . . . not like the wild steppes of Siberia's plains . . .

millions of fir trees. The world is still safe for Santa Claus!
The trip across has been delightful all the ten days ... got into
a routine, with tiffin daily at three p.m. The
nights came on
amazingly fast . . . the days fled by in no time. Moscow . . .

in the morning, with pleasure been a quick and enjoy 1 but it's

able trip to Europe from the Far East. In a way, I'm sorry it's

ending.

THURSDAY, Sept. 26:

We got to Moscow
about ten thirty this morning and if it
hadn't been for Eugene Lyons of the U. P. we'd be at the station
yet! He was there and fixed everything about luggage, etc.
Left my trunksat the station, and with Mrs. B. and lots of
bags
(they were wise and took no trunks) took a taxi to the hotel.
I've not too bad a room, though with no bath attached, for ten

rubles a day. Mrs. Buergin, wife of the General Motors chief

at Paris, en route there, couldn't get a room, not having wired
ahead as we did, and as she wanted to take a bath I let her use

my room while I bathed in the rooms of Carroll Binder, of the

 PERSONAL PUBLICITY 259

Chicago Daily News, who combines his office and rooms at the
hotel in one suite. And while the trip was not bad, after that
bath I felt like a new man again! The day was clear, but cold
as hell, at least after Shanghai's mild climate near the tropics.
Had tiffin with Binder, Deuss of I. N. S., and others. Planned
to tour about town with the B's after tiffin, but missed them
while trying to help Mrs. Buergin buy a ticket from the border
to Paris. Tonight to the Moscow opera with the Bristols and
Binder. Began at seven thirty and lasted until twelve thirty a.m. !

Got our money's worth there. Opera House is a massive build-

ing .
opera singing excellent, especially choruses.
. . Saw . . .

"Boris Godunov," Moussorgsky's opera of old Russian court in-

trigue. The B's and I had supper at one a.m., and after a dance
with "Ma" Bristol, to bed late and very tired. Duranty was
. . .

in Berlin, returning from Paris. Back on Sunday. The B's go

toLeningrad Saturday p.m. I've decided to go on to Germany
on Sunday evening.

SATURDAY, Sept. 28:

This is a fascinating but fearfully depressing spot. This week
end we have been seeing the sights in more or less tourist fashion,
except we have not had time to go into the museums, churches,
factories, and the rest on the beaten tourist track. We've driven
about town, however, and seen these places at, so to speak, arm's

length. The Kremlin off the Red Square we "did" in about two
hours, or a little under This is far from the record, which the
tourists are cutting down all the time. Soon they'll be running
sight-seeing buses through it in ten minutes One must have a f

pass to get in here for the Kremlin is the seat of government.

In here one may view the windows of Lenin's study in the
Government building on the left, while "on your right, ladies
and gentlemen, is an old cannon," the chill voice of the pro-
fessional guide drones on while an all-American party of at least

thirty rather bored citizens gazes about the campus-like square

formed by ancient buildings, churches, Peter the Great's play-
house,etc., and yawns. The Kremlin, while not so hot, must
have been really magnificent in its day: it still is a massively
impressive place, with its gold-covered, mosque-like church
260 THE DRAGON STIRS
towers, the square where the emperors of old were christened
when Moscow was the capital, the place where the Czars were
crowned, ruled and lay buried now guarded by Red Soviet

troops and machine guns. . . .

MONDAY, Sept. 30:

Out of Soviet Russia at last. We crossed the border into

Poland at Stolpce at ten a.m.

Met Duranty a moment on his return from "outside," as the

correspondents or anyone else stationed in Moscow terms a visit
to any country in the rest of Europe. Then I had to dash for

my train to Berlin, going via Warsaw for a brief halt between

trains there, where I had a glimpse of their Unknown Soldier's

tomb with its unquenched flame and the inevitable

perennial
wreath of honor. My one an Englishman and
train companions,

the other a young American engineer, agreed that it was great

not to have to talk in whispers any more, now that we were out
of Russia. It is. And to see men and women with smiling faces
and stockings after the cotton-clothed, cheerless appearing
silk

Russian girls so drear in their native setting.

Here I shall skip my diary's lengthy account of my doings in

Berlin and my unexpected trip down to Paris when I had planned to
stay longer in Germany and perhaps write something then about the
Orient and its affairs. I planned to sail from Bremerhaven on the
North German Lloyd liner Stuttgart for a leisurely crossing to New
York, but events which I did not controlnor cared to particularly
after a five-year sojourn out East away from life as we know it in the
Occident caused me to spend three weeks in Paris. They were
delightful weeks, but I sailed at last from Boulogne for home, and
wrote:

FRIDAY, November 8:

ABOARD THE S.S. STUTTGART, At

Sea: We're two
days from New
York, being due on Sunday, the 10th, Saw all
I care to of Europe for now in the
past three weeks in Paris,
and after a week on board this slow packet I shall be ready to
get back home. Met an German- American chap on
interesting
board named H. P. ("Heinie") Lohmann, formerly with the
 PERSONAL PUBLICITY 261

Standard Oil in Shanghai, a stock broker in San Francisco.

Knew many of my friends in China, and we talked of old times
out East. Weather so far excellent on the North Atlantic for
this time of year. . . . Not a day of sea-sickness for me ...
but we've rolled quite a bit several times . . . must be a better
or wiser sailor.
On board the S. S. Stuttgart are a Mr. Lukes and his two
young daughters, Sarah and Susan, of Quincy, 111. These . . .

girls were at Christian College in Missouri when I went to the

State University at Columbia there years ago they knew . . .

"Tige" Brown, "Unc" Benson, etc., very well. ... We also

had considerable to chat about from those days very distant to
us all ... funny coincidence. . . .

My diary ends abruptly with that remark, "funny coincidence."

We docked in New York a day or so later on November 10, 1929.
 22 THE "BOY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN

f
|
*HE Japanese seized Manchuria's peaceful Three Eastern Prov-
I inces of China in thefall and winter of 1931-32 and restored the

"Boy Emperor" Manchu ancestors on March

to the throne of his
1 an marking the Manchu invasion of China below
historical date in
the Great Wall. It was on this date in 1644 that they began their

"Ching Dynasty" or "Pure" rule in Peking.

The "Boy Emperor" had been living in peaceful seclusion as a
"guest" of the Japanese in their Concession at Tientsin for several
years, since his precipitous flight from Peking's uncertainties. He was
in bodily danger there even before the Kuomintang Revolution, and
with the aid of the Japanese he got away. Still, it was something of
a case of out of the frying-pan and into the fire for he has never
been free since.
He was a virtual prisoner at Tientsin.Then when Japan "pacified"
Manchuria and became deadly serious in her plan there, he was
really
enthroned at Chang-chung, now called Hsinking, the new capital in
northeastern Asia.
The "Boy Emperor" had no more to say about his being whisked
away from the calm of Tientsin to the maelstrom of Manchuria in
1932 than you did. It was for "the state," an Oriental conception of
pure patriotism, that the youth, who had been known for a time before
his overthrow in the original revolt against his Dragon Throne as

Emperor Hsuan T'ing, became Emperor Kang-Teh. Himself, he

preferred to be known as plain Mr Henry Pu-yi, and during his
"retirement" in Peking and later in Tientsin that was the cognomen
he used. But one born as the "Son of Heaven," cannot be plain Mr.
anything for very long. The Orientals are funny that way. If you
are the Son of Heaven, you've got to be the Son of Heaven so that
the common people may have something to kow-tow to down here on
earth.

262
 THE "BOY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 263

That is the chief reason there was no major complaint voiced by

the Manchus or the Chinese peoples when "Henry" became their new
"ruler." They liked it. The Emperor in the Orient is worshipped
as well as revered. The Japanese have the same conception in their
devout bowing to the Emperor Hirohito, whom they believe a direct
descendant of the Sun Goddess. The Occidental races have an af-
filiated religious belief often expressed in the "divine right of kings."
In the "restoration" in Manchuria March 1, 1932, Japan grabbed
Manchuria as she had so long carefully planned to do. About that

time, I was just getting settled in Washington. The trouble had

started before I got there. Japan reported the now historic "Mukden
Incident," when her South Manchuria Railway track on the border
of that city was said to have been torn up by Chinese. Troops were
rushed to the spot from all quarters, reaching there in a surprisingly
short time from the chief Manchurian base at Dairen.

The "incident" occurred on September 18, 1931. In a few hours

the Japanese seized control of Mukden with her railway guards sta-

tioned there and reinforcements. There was heavy fighting all that

falland far into the winter, but by spring the Japanese had everything
under control. Their Ambassador to the United States, Mr. Ken-
kichi Debuchi, daily assured our Secretary of State they had "no
intention of annexing Manchuria." Colonel Henry L Stimson pro-
fessed to believe his bland, ever-smiling assurances
In a way, the Honorable Mr. Debuchi short, rotund, smiling, and
a "good scout" was right. The men at Tokyo did not annex
Manchuria in so many words. They simply saw to it that the
people in Manchuria "wanted independence" from China a phrase
even the average American could understand. We wanted our inde-
pendence once not so long ago, too, and got it. Thus we find that
4

people" changed the name to Manchukuo and themselves pro-

'the

claimed their new "independent State" the day that the "Boy Emperor"
ascended his new throne in Hsinking. Tokyo had nothing to do
with it officially. But "unofficially" well, what do you think?
That day they (the people) , with Japanese "advisers," gave young
Mr. Henry Pu-yi an Imperial announcement, or "Rescript," to read
while he prepared to sit down on his new throne. It read that he
("we") was ascending the throne "in conformity with the wishes of
the people, and complying with the will of Heaven." And the new
264 THE DRAGON STIRS
State was born, Japan extended de jure recognition officially several
months later, in the Protocol of September 15, 1932, just a year after
the "Mukden incident" which was rather fast moving in such a
game of politics.

Early in January of 1932, the Japanese got into trouble down in

Shanghai. This first "Shanghai War" caused weeks of startling
news again took Japan's troops rather longer than they had
and it

anticipated to quell the stubborn Chinese resistance led by the now

famous Nineteenth Route Army at the mouth of the Yangtze River
near Shanghai. That outbreak began when a Chinese mob on
January 18, 1932, attacked five Japanese in Shanghai, including two
Buddhist priests. The Japanese sent a Marine patrol ashore to

"pacify" the situation, and the "war" was on. Correspondents from
all over the world flocked there again, including Will Rogers, Floyd
Gibbons and scores of others. And I was recalled from Washington
to handle the tremendous volume of cabled dispatches pouring in from
the correspondents out there for The United Press Associations.

They kept me swamped day

in, day out during that "show" in

January and February of 1932. The news poured in at all hours of

the day and night. On January 20, the Shanghai Municipal Council
in the International Settlement proclaimed a "state of emergency" in

the foreign area. Most of the fighting occurred in Chapei, the native

Chinese city toward Woosung and the Pacific. The League of Na-
tionswas informed of the "virtual state of war" then existing. There
was nothing "virtual" about it to the men in the firing lines! The
Woosung-Chapei battle outside the Settlement lasted from February
20 to March 1, but the armistice ending that bloody affair was not
signed until May 5, 1932.

The fighting had long been over by that time, however, and I
went back to the White House in Washington, D. g, the March
previous to the Shanghai armistice. (I had joined the United Press
on my return to America, and in 1931 was assigned to the White
House to "cover" the Hoover Administration.) The "restoration"
drama of the "Boy Emperor" in Manchuria intrigued me, and what
it meant to China and the future of the Orient. It still is a strange

piece in the tangled pattern of our times, and I want to go into the
life story here of this hapless pawn in the shifting panorama of the
 THE "BOY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 265

Far East ... the unbelievable history of the man who'd not be king,
if he could help it.

This slender,frail youth, his yellow face thin and pale behind

spectacles, stood in the Throne Room of his Manchu ancestors at

historicChang-chung, ancient capital of Manchuria, that spring day in
1932, and took the oath of office as nominal ruler of another shadowy
realm. This was the new and synthetic Manchurian-Mongolian state
of what was first called Ankuo, "Land of Peace"
for a brief time

sponsored by Japan, vigorously rejected by China, and not recognized

diplomatically by the rest of the world.
Gongs sounded through the palace at one time gay with pageantry
of another and more colorful day. Their sonorous, deep booming
welled through the wintry streets of Chang-chung in the heart of

Manchuria, calling on all to witness that a new ruler had been pro-
claimed. The date was March 9, 1932. This youth, the last to sit

on the Dragon Throne of China in Peking, was recently returned

under Japanese guard to the fertile provinces of Manchuria and in-
augurated by the Japanese as ruler of that land of his fathers.
Prisoner to all intents and purposes these past two decades in the
hands of the Japanese, Henry is now their unwilling puppet in Man-
churia, forced to a position of nominal power, to which he never

aspired.
The Japanese by a bold military adventure had ejected one young
man as a ruler of Manchuria and placed another in his stead. By a

paradox of fortune, the youth who was eliminated is the son of the
man who, at the beginning of this century, played a major role in the

overthrow of the Manchus who now reign again. It was poetic justice
that the Japanese returned Henry Pu-yi to a semblance of power.

Thus, fantastically, at the turn of the wheel which put them there,
Henry arid his wife, Elizabeth (bizarre names which the Son of
Heaven chose for himself and his bride) now play at ruling in the
Manchurian provinces, much, be it repeated, against their will. Their
realnames are Hsuan T'ing, the "Boy Emperor," and his Number
One wife, the former Princess Kuo Chia Si, daughter of a major-

general under the old regime in Peiping. He selected her, oddly

enough and little in his life is not odd through a beauty contest.
But more of that later.

Both Henry and his pretty wife would far rather go abroad,
266 THE DRAGON STIRS
preferably to the United States, to live quietly as students than rule
the Manchus under the thumb of the Japanese. Henry is thirty-seven ;

his tiny, beautifully aristocratic consort is hardly more than thirty.

They are modernized rulers of the Orient, speak English, go to

the movies, and have as their first wish in lifea desire to be left
alone. They have found once more, however, that life for a man
unfortunate enough to have been ruler of the ancient Celestial Empire
of China is not that simple. And the palace at Chang-chung is now
the presidential abode of Henry and Elizabeth the White House of
a new state, however unstable. Its courtyards are unkempt compared
with their pomp and ceremony of yesterday. There is little to recall

the splendor of brighter days before the Manchus marched southward,

swarmed over the Great Wall and conquered China only to be
absorbed themselves.
The "throne room" of their new residence was the scene of the

inauguration. Two great golden seals were presented to Henry the

seal of State and the Regent's seal. A
small group of Chinese and
a few Mongolian princes gathered for the unreal ceremonies. These

men, with the "aid" of Japanese advisers, also present, were respon-
sible for the whole show. The ceremony was brief. The youth
greeted the audience and spoke a few words prepared for him. He
swore to uphold the new State. The Son of Heaven had become
(again oddly enough to stir his honorable ancestors in their ancient
tombs) head of a democracy of sorts a dictatorship, actually, held

together by bayonets but based on the theory of eventually making

Ankuo a democracy.
All his life, Henry Pu-yi has been flitting from throne to solitude
and back again. Events of great moment occurred to him when he
was too young to understand what it was all about. He was only
three years old when he ascended
the Dragon Throne in
Peking. He
was born merely the one of China's principalities but was
heir to

chosen by the old Dowager Empress to succeed her nephew, the Em-

peror Kuang Hsu. The three-year old infant knew nothing of the
great pageants and the acclaim that was accorded him and little of
the rest of the ceremony which was a picturesque part of his coro-
nation as an Oriental potentate.
He was still a very small boy when he was first removed from the
tottering Dragon Throne. The revolt against the Manchus succeeded
 THE "BOY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 267
in 1911, and only four years after his enthronement the "Boy Em-

peror" resigned. His abdication meant nothing to him at the time,

and he could have known nothing at the age of seven of the significance
that his signingaway an empire had in the march of world affairs.

Upon abdication, Hsuan T'mg became plain Henry Pu-yi and retired
into the moated Forbidden City, There in the heart of the Tartar
City of old Peking, surrounded by gleaming yellow roofs, marble
terraces and stately palaces with their solemn Ming dynasty masonry,
he studied and carried on.
Meanwhile the wife of Kuang Hsu, the uncle whom Henry suc-
ceeded as emperor, had come into the title of Dowager Empress. She
held this post at the time of the abdication, but shortly thereafter
died. At her death, crafty Chin Fei, Kuang Hsu's "golden concubine/'
was left as head of the women in the Imperial household. She was
virtually supreme in deciding the life of the youth during the years
he lived in the Forbidden City, where even his own father and mother,
the Prince and Princess Chun, were not permitted. The influence of
this concubine colored his early days and formed another part of the

weird pattern of his life.

The terms of Henry's abdication were not entirely unpleasant.
He retained his Emperor and was guaranteed by the Republic
title of

the same respect as was due a foreign sovereign. He was to receive

$4,000,000 (silver) a year, which at the time was approximately

$2,000,000 in United States currency, as compensation from the Re-
public for confiscating his rights and crown. But he rarely if ever

got anything from the shifting cabinets at Peking, and had a difficult
time financially.

Henry also retained his private property under the abdication

terms. This kept his court in the Forbidden City going. He had to
sella great deal of the timber and other valuable things to continue.
The throne also received gifts from loyalists, and he managed to sub-
sist. There was even a somewhat pathetic attempt at recapturing the

splendor of the old court life but the lamp of his fortunes flickered
and went out.

The boy lived quietly in the Forbidden City for some years,
knowing nothing whatever of the sinister intrigue going on all about
him after the revolution. It approached the surface innumerable

times, and the outbreak in 1917 which restored him to the throne on
268 THE DRAGON STIRS
the brief crest of its tide was inevitable but, to him, a complete
surprise.
The monarchy was reestablished for a fleeting moment, and Presi-
dent Feng Kuo-chang had to run for his life. He chose the Dutch

Legation as a refuge. His insecurity was short. The troops of the

new Republic routed the Imperial forces three days later and the "Boy
Emperor" was again relegated forthwith to the inner confines of the
Forbidden City. Little did he think, perhaps, how forbidden that city
was some day to be to him. He was only thirteen years old then, and
doubtless unfettered by fancies of grandeur.
From 1917 until the fall Henry lived in an atmosphere
of 1924,

him was apparently calm. During these

of high intrigue, yet all about
seven years he never left the Forbidden City so far as is known, but

spent his days in study and in exercise of the sort possible inside the
palace grounds. The pretense of his court was maintained and he
was fawned upon by the courtiers. Now and again he rode horse-
back, reports from within said. Other reports said the extent of this

exercise consisted of the boy's being set on a small Mongolian pony

which was then led slowly through the stone-flagged grounds by two
careful attendants.
With his modern tendencies, Henry must have become more than
"fed up" with his sequestered life. But it was essential and part of
his fate, for it must be remembered that within the ornate walls of

the Forbidden City he was still to all intents and purposes the occu-

pant of the Dragon Throne and ruler of the Celestial Empire. The
loyal attendants, the ladies and gentlemen of the phantom court, the
eunuchs and the maidens could not bring themselves to think of him
otherwise.

Intrigue, some petty and some sincere, was their life blood. There
was, for example, a tremendous argument over whether the youth
should wear spectacles. One faction in his court held that spectacles
had never been worn by any other emperor of the dynasty and that
the device certainly could not be necessary at this late date. The
former Dowager Empress was most strenuous in her opposition to
the innovation. But Henry, never strong, had become a constant
student. He used his eyes day and night, reading. court physicianA
ruled that if the boy's sight were to be saved Henry had to use

spectacles whenever reading. The physician settled the controversy,

 THE "BOY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 269

but his decision caused no hard feeling in the Imperial household.

little

It was their biggest problem in months.

Thus, drama, tragedy and tragic-comedy filled the life of Henry
Pu-yi, all without the slightest volition on his part. He has never
willed himself into a dramatic, tragic or comic situation. He would
run far from one or all three. Yet always this youth has paid the
penalty of being the last Son of Heaven.
One touch of tragedy which he remembers occurred in October
1921. An official court statement reported the sudden death of
Princess Chun, his young and still pretty mother. She died of opium

poisoning. The Princess, the brief report set forth, had committed
suicide. However that may be, her death came as a result of a quarrel
with Chin Fei, the "golden concubine" and, as I have said, virtual

Empress Dowager. The reports of the quarrel were not clear as they
seeped from the jealously masked lives of the "court" in the heart of
the Forbidden City.
The trouble, it appeared, was over the selection of a bride. Chin
Fei looked with favor upon a matrimonial alliance between Henry and
a daughter of the new President of China, certainly a strange com-
bination to most ways of thinking. The youth's mother, however,
preferred her son to wed the daughter of Yun Liang, her nephew.
The boy himself, appears, also had ideas about his marriage.
it He
wanted to wed his own mother's younger sister, in other words, his
aunt. Still, being a patient youth, he said he would abide by his

mother's choice.
Chin Fei was not a little incensed at the turn of events which in
the end upset her schemes. Bitter words followed. Prince and Prin-
cess Chun stood by their son. The quarrel continued for three livid
days. Then Princess Chun died suddenly. They said she had com-
mitted suicide. The "Boy Emperor" left his seclusion for the first
time to attend his mother's funeral on October 31, 1921. He was
very pale that day and seemed frail and scarcely ten years old instead
of sixteen. As the catafalque of his mother was lifted, he knelt on a

rug of lambskin and bowed thrice toward the coffin. He was fright-
ened, but maintained an air of utmost dignity.
Time passed and before long Henry Pu-yi was again searching for
a wife. He had his way this time. There was no meeting with the
girl, no courtship such as is known in the Western World. But a
270 THE DRAGON STIRS
departure that was even more startling was made in his selection of

a bride.

Henry held a beauty contest! He ordered the twelve most beau-

tifulManchu princesses in China to have their photographs taken and
sent to him. The youth, Imperial judge of this remarkable array of
Oriental pulchritude, at last ended the suspense by choosing Princess
Kuo Chia-si. Her family was obscure but of princely Manchu blood.
The match was regarded as a love affair. Descriptions of the Princess
said she was the most beautiful Manchu girl in the world. She is

small and slender. Being a Manchu she does not bind her feet which,
however, are naturally small. The "Girl Empress," is
quite modern
in one respect for (and this is also because she is a Manchu) she
uses cosmetics, including rouge, freely.
The law of the Ching dynasty rules that only a Manchu may
become the wife of an Emperor.
The Empress has hair of the jet-black sort so prized in the Orient.
It islong and luxuriant, reaching to her knees. It is doubtful that
she would bob it even were she to come to America some day, as she
wants to do. Her features are well formed, the nose being almost

aquiline. Her eyes are large and brown, gazing out from beneath
sheltering heavy lashes. They are not slanting, at least not on the

exaggerated angle common to Orientals. Her face is oval, with softly

rounded chin. She would be charming anywhere, and judged by
Oriental standards is more than beautiful.

In the early hours before dawn of December 1, 1922, they were

married. Such pomp and splendor are seldom seen anywhere. The
princess came to her lover carried over the yellow-sanded, narrow

streets of Peking through the Great East Gate into the Forbidden
City. Yellow lanterns flickered in the darkness and a yellow moon
on the wane peered down with half an eye at the exotic proceedings.
From atop the dragon chair of yellow silk in which she rode a Golden
Phoenix, symbol of the Empress of China, spread its great wings.
She sat behind drawn curtains that her face might be veiled demurely
from the public gaze.
Thirty-two sturdy men carried her from her father's house to the

Imperial palace. Golden sand along the way, yellow silk everywhere
yellow is the "royal purple" of China an event of such
magnificence
could take place only in ancient Peking. A few blocks away, the
 THE "BOY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 271

foreign colony still reveled to the strains of a modern dance orchestra

in observance of the St. Andrew's ball.

The marriage rites themselves were simple. The Princess and her

"Boy Emperor" sat side

by on the Dragon Bed, he on the left
side

and she on the right. They exchanged golden cups containing wine
and pieces of soft wheat bread. The ritual is symbolic of long life and
a blessing on posterity. Their honeymoon was spent in the confines
of the Forbidden City, the extent then of his lost empire.

Henry Pu-yi is the name he took as a result of his study of

English history. He had a British tutor, and one day on impulse
Henry decreed name should no longer be Hsuan T'ing. He
that his
took the name of Henry after one of his favorite English kings. He
gave his wife the name of Elizabeth and Henry and Elizabeth,

strangely enough, ruled in the Forbidden City as long as the leaders

of the Republic permitted.

"Henry" seems to suit this diffident youth much better than his
Imperial name and title, He is a serious young man, rather nice

looking, always shy with strangers; he has his hair cut western style,
brushed back in a stiff pompadour, and has an air of always striving

to be extremely friendly with everyone Henry and his bride lived

happily for nearly two years before the tangled skein of their queer
lives caught them up again and whisked them off on new adveniures.

It was in the autumn o 1924 that Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang, the

so-called "Christian General," turned on his own chieftain and with
characteristic gesture captured Peking. In his rigorous philosophy
there was no place for emperors of any sort. Himself a peasant pulled
up by his own bootstraps, Marshal Feng set out to eliminate the
"Boy
Emperor" and his bride once and for all Henry and Elizabeth fled
into the Japanese Legation. Even this asylum was none too secure.
The Japanese, however, by that time saw in Henry a valuable

pawn for their own maneuverings in the political intrigue in the East.

They decided to get him out of Peking,

The shifting of the pawn began when the Japanese spirited Henry
out of the Legation Quarter in Peking on February 24, 1925, and
hurried him before dawn on the road to Tientsin, It was dark when

they started. Peking slept. A

light flickered and was gone as a man
in uniform snuffed his tiny lantern and slipped cautiously across the
terrace to a waiting motor car. "All ready," he whispered in Japa-
272 THE DRAGON STIRS
nese. The man at the wheel nodded. The other retraced his steps

and, opening the door whence he had come, spoke in low tones to
someone inside.

A moment later a group of three or four filed silently out and

followed their guide to the machine. Through the gateway and down
the street, the car proceeded slowly through the Legation Quarter, on

through the black night which seems blacker just before dawn. They
gathered speed as they fled in that early morning solitude, hurtling on
through the Tartar City and, more slowly now, on until the gates of
Peking were reached.
They had no trouble there. The gates opened for the day they
are locked every night, even now and the machine fled past and on
to the open highway. An uneventful trip over some eighty miles of
wretched roads, and the "Boy Emperor" had arrived at Tientsin and
safety.
The "Boy Emperor" was guarded closely and his life kept a deep
secret at Tientsin. It was even somewhat presumptuous to insist that

he actually was there. Some doubted it, and he was a phantom figure
after his mysterious flight from the old capital Even persons who
were living in Tientsin then seemed not to have any clear notion as
to just where he was. An American army captain, now back in the
United States, who had been on duty in Tientsin with the 15th In-
fantry, represented the typical foreigners' attitude toward Henry Pu-yi.
An American transport in the Oriental service had just reached
Nagasaki, in southern Japan, and the officer was one of two in charge
of the shore-leave watch. Some of the men might get lost in Naga-
saki. It is a beguiling city, although nearly deserted now as far as

foreigners are concerned. I was there on a holiday at the time.

At the Nagasaki Club, essentially British, we were guests of the

United States army quartermaster stationed there. The officers were

using thd Club as their headquarters.
"How is the Boy Emperor?" I asked.
The captain had heard of Henry. He was quite sure the youth
was in good health. But then, nobody ever saw him much. He drove
about the city, that the foreign concessions, but the officer really
is in

did not know just what part of town the deposed ruler lived in.
British Concession, he thought. But after all, nobody paid much
attention to Henry.
 THE "BOY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 273

"He doesn't amount to much," the Captain commented, and he

appeared bored with the subject.
Well, there was little to say further about that. Henry at the

on the ominously calm surface of things, did not appear

time, at least
"
to "amount to much The king was dead, it seemed. Yet very much
alive, asdevelopments showed. The Japanese wanted him for high
schemes and he was swept along toward his strange destiny.
It was about this time that leaders in the new regime at Peking

demanded Henry's execution as a menace to the new State. It seemed

strange that they should fear this studious youth and see in him a
powerful enemy; yet they may have had inklings of the dreams of the
monarchists which centered around his frail figure. The Republic's
orators denounced Henry as a schemer and a traitor and demanded
his surrender. Henry, for his small part, reiterated that he never
wanted to be emperor again. But the radicals declared that he was an
ingrate and that he had attempted to assume the throne. It hardly
seemed plausible, this avowed fear of his potential power. Yet here is

the telegram circulated by the Peking government at the time, in the

spring of 1926:

"WHEREAS PU-YI, DISSATISFIED WITH THE ESPECIALLY LENIENT

TREATMENT METED OUT TO HIM BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT, DID
ONCE ATTEMPT TO RESTORE THE IMPERIAL REGIME AND IS NOW TRYING
TO ATTAIN HIS AIM AS IS SHOWN BY HIS SECRET DEPARTURE FROM
PEKING AND BY nis ASSUMPTION OF THE TITLE OF 'EMPEROR/ AND
"IN VIEW OF ALL THE EVIDENCE THAT HE IS CONSPIRING AGAINST
THE EXISTING REGIME,
"THEREFORE, THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD TAKE STEPS FOR THE
IMMEDIATE CANCELLATION OF HIS ESPECIALLY FAVORABLE TREATMENT
AND, IN ORDER TO NIP IMPERIALISTIC INTRIGUE IN THE BUD, DEMAND
THE SURRENDER OF THE 'EMPEROR' WITH A VIEW TO HIS EXECUTION,
TOGETHER WITH THAT OF HIS FOLLOWING, ON THE CHARGE OF HIGH
TREASON."

There was some truth in the charges in the telegram. The "Boy
Emperor," as I have said, was actually returned to the Dragon Throne
in 1917, but only for three days. And he had nothing to do with that
Furthermore, he actually is called "Emperor," as in this article. It

is doubtful, however, that he thinks of himself in that way. It merely

274 THE DRAGON STIRS
is a term, rather than a title, which presents itself most readily when
describing him, but otherwise is meaningless.

Meanwhile, the Japanese held him practically incommunicado. I

tried to see him in Tientsin in the summer of 1928. A secretary at the

old red brick, western-style house in which he was living insisted

politely but firmly that it was not possible. Henry lived a secluded

life, protected jealously from all outsiders by his new masters.

The years dragged on while Henry and Elizabeth built air-castles

by the sea and hoped for a chance to go abroad. Their money

dwindled. Gifts from loyal Manchus and others once affluent at the

pompous court of ancient Cathay were far smaller and less frequent.

The courtiers themselves found the new order hard and faced personal

privation. In the end, these gifts practically ceased and Henry was
all but dependent on an alien host when moved to Manchuria. The
gilt wore off his cage with the passing years.
The Japanese bided their time. Some felt that Henry was be-

coming too much of a burden. They continued, nevertheless, to hold

him prisoner. They treated him well, but their respect for him ebbed
rapidly. The Oriental spits on a fallen idol. They remained cordial
but not too polite to their fallen Imperial hostage.

A
few years ago, for example, Henry let it be known that he in-
tended to visit Japan. Notice was promptly given that he would be
received only as an ordinary citizen, and that he would have to stop at
hotels wherever he went. Henry had expected better treatment with
at least some pretense in Japan that he was a person of royal lineage.
Or if he personally did not feel so strongly on the point, persons close
to him did. Tokyo, however, was at peace with the new Peiping
regime and Henry cancelled the trip.

Civil war swirled around about him in the last few years while he
looked on, helpless, as usual. Chinese war lords, men of the race he
and his Manchu ancestors had ruled, tore at each other's throats.
Their armies battled up and down China. These men, some of them
patriotic in a sense but the majority of them out for loot and glory,
are the sanguine aftermath of the generation that overthrew the Dragon
Throne. They disrupted a form government and sent the "Boy
of
1'

Emperor scuttling for cover. They came into power before they had

a man or a system sufficiently strong to replace the Son of Heaven

 THE "BOY EMPEROR" RULES AGAIN 275

an infant, yet a symbol, even a religion that held the vast, loosely
knit Celestial Empire together with some semblance of unity.
Henry fled for his life. The Japanese saved him, held him until
they were ready, and now have placed him at the head of the new
state inManchuria which Tokyo controls. And not once in these

amazing years has Henry had a word to say about it.

What of the future? The ancient glory of Peiping falls rapidly
into decay. The bustling commercial port of Shanghai lies wasted by
war. China is a bankrupt nation in more ways than one. The factions

halted in their mad clutching for power long enough to present a semi-

united front toward the Japanese at Shanghai but their bitter enmities
still smoulder, ready as this is written to burst again into flame and
set Chinese armies once more on the march.
The Chinese peoples are tiring of the ineffectual attempts year after
year to be ruled by Western civilization's conception of equality and a
republican form of government. They are beginning to feel that it is
like many other novelties invented by the "foreign barbarians" outside
the Great Wall. None can foretell what they will do, these Chinese.
Nevertheless, it is as certain as Kismet that they are going to settle
this business one way or another one day.
The Chinese wait a long time. They suffer untold miseries. But
in the end they usually separate the wheat from the chaff rather well.
The Chinese, pacific peoples really, want peace. They had centuries
of peace until the revolution of 1911 overthrew the Manchus. And
that a thought which comes to the countless millions now crushed
is

under the painful and costly heel of militarism.

The Japanese seized advantage of this rising tide of hatred for
the war lord type of ruler of China. The move in Manchuria was but
the forerunner of a greater plan. Japan has puppets in erstwhile pop-
ular factions among the Chinese to build a stable government once more
below the Great Wall of China. The monarchists also are active again.

They and the Japanese, vague rumors of intrigue relate, may join
forces to place Henry Pu-yi once more on the Dragon Throne in

Peiping. Tum-ta-ta-tum-tum, tum-ta-ta-tum beat the drums of his

curious destiny. Yet none now can answer the query :

Will the twisted impulses of the East restore the "Boy Emperor"
to his Peking throne as a man?
 23 THE ROAD AHEAD

sturdy little men of Japan, since their comparatively

easy

THE seizure of Manchuria proceeded with ever increasing

in 1931-32,

speed and amazing success toward achieving their age-old am-

bition to conquer and maintain complete control over all China. The
campaign was planned in Tokyo for years.
There was nothing new, then, when the second "undeclared war"
in the Shanghai area broke out in the summer of 1937, and Japan
moved in. The only thing really unexpected was the actual date
for the Chinese leaders at Nanking and elsewhere had long expected
the Japanese to attack in their next move of aggression on the con-
tinent of Asia. None, of course, knew just when or where the attack
would occur. Nor did the Japanese themselves know these specific
details while they were playing their wily waiting game. I must, how-
ever, grant in all fairness, that the ambition of the
Japanese only is

human Admitted, the details of their armed action are

too human.
too often more inhuman and horrible than otherwise but armed men
commit excesses on any part of this globe's surface, and the Japanese
are no exception. A man in battle is literally mad regardless of race.
Naturally, I do not contend that the "undeclared war" is fair to
China. In fact, ever since I first set foot on Chinese soil more than
a decade ago I have been considered pro-Chinese. I am hardly that,
either. I am plead guilty only to being a realist.
"pro-" nothing. I

From this purely objective point of view, I must admit that the
Chinese themselves are largely to blame for their own plight. They
simply cannot seem to become united and stay that way. At the
moment, yes, they are united. But only against a common foe, Japan,
the despised little island neighbor off their long and rich coastline
there in the Pacific. They fight shoulder-to-shoulder against this in-
vader, who mows down the stubborn soldiers of "Free China" and
has set up a puppet regime controlled from Tokyo. This regime would,
276
 THE ROAD AHEAD 277

the Japanese insist, enforce peace in the Orient, with Japan as chief-

of-police.
But let Japan be defeated, let Japan for any reason on earth with-
draw her persistent and fanatic soldiery from China, and the Chinese
in less time than it takes to get this into print, will be at each other's
throats again with an even more bitter vengeance than they have

fought the troops from Dai Nippon, My Chinese friends and they
are legion here and abroad will say that in this view I am unfair,

biased, possibly even pro-Japanese. When one is not entirely on one

side or the other, he is likely to find himself suddenly regarded as

"pro-" the other side in any cause, politics or war, love or hate you
name it
simply state again that
! I I am a friend of China, seeing her
faults as well as her virtues.

I myself want China to be united. I want, for that matter, the

whole of our unsettled world to be united but as long as human
nature is constituted as is, heaven help us
it if we don't have police in
our cities to check crime, and soldiers on all frontiers to avert in-
vasion.
The second "undeclared war" on the Shanghai front began August
9, 1937.The Japanese were not looking for it at that moment, but
they were ready. What Japan wanted most at that time was peace
below the Yellow River, in North-Central China, to permit her to get
on with her program of setting up yet another "independent" and
"autonomous" state in the five provinces extending below the Great
Wall Shantung, Hopei, Shansi, Suiyuan and Chahar. But another
"incident" occurred in the Shanghai area and the second battle of

Shanghai, the showdown, was under way. Shanghai war was

The first

won by Japan and settled by a truce in 1932, when the Nineteenth

Route Army was finally routed by the Japanese and fled south. In-
cidentally, these brave Chinese fighters who were hailed for a time as
the "saviors of Shanghai," a year later were themselves threatening
to start a civil war against the Central Government at Nanking. Only
hurried conferences and probably the use of "silver bullets" (money),
as is customary there, prevented that little brotherly quarrel from be-
coming critical within China's vast domain.

Japan seems now to have gone far toward permanently achieving

her goal the control of all China, with the destruction of Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek, founder of the Central Government at Nanking in
278 THE DRAGON STIRS
1927. General Chiang was all along for conciliation, no matter how
far Tokyo went in her demands, and therefore was denounced as a
spineless puppet of Tokyo, a traitor to his trust as leader of the New
China.
General Chiang merely knew that China could not fight a winning

equipped and better trained Japanese troops on

fight against the better
land and sea and in the air. The General favored letting them take
the five northern provinces, leaving Nanking and Shanghai untouched.
I believe he felt that in a comparatively few years there might be a
chance to a revolution in the north against the Japanese and win
start

back China's lost territories. But his hotheaded underlings wanted to

fight.
The Japanese accommodated them and the result was as the
General predicted, heavy losses for China. Japan crossed many
foreign interests in Shanghai and elsewhere. As a result, the Japanese
are not popular now. They are the bete noir of the present.
Let me make
one prediction: I do not think the United States,
or any other power on earth is going to go to war to stop Japan
in her march on the Chinese, at home or anywhere else. There will
be boycotts and more boycotts, yes. There will be high indignation,

ill-feeling, sentimental uprisings of an outraged Western world here

and there. But Uncle Sam is not going to send young men into the
Far East to die for the temporary protection of our commercial
interests out there.

Of course, Rome and Berlin were in sympathy with Tokyo from

the beginning in the Second War. They regarded Japan as the

stronghold in the Far East of the tenets of Fascism a bulwark

against Communism in the Orient, as they themselves are in Europe.

The Chinese, then, had a lost cause as far as world action was con-
cerned. The League of Nations was impotent. It lost prestige in
the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, before that, when Japan annexed
Manchuria. In fact, it was the League's failure to back up China
then that gave Premier Mussolini much of his feeling of
security when
he decided to acquire Ethiopia.
World sentiment is another story. In the United States, for ex-

ample, sentiment was all for the Chinese. Sentiment in America is

ordinarily for the under-dog, and it was even more so than usual in
the Japan-China war. But world action nil.
 THE ROAD AHEAD 279

Japan was "very sorry" for stepping on foreign toes, including

Uncle Sam's, around Shanghai. But nothing was done, aside from
Japan's paying a small indemnity for foreigners killed in the war zone.
Japan began her long-conceived program of aggression at the
expense of China toward the end of the last century. The first war
between Japan and China occurred in 1894-95. Japan took over the
island of Formosa (called Taiwan, in Japanese, now). It is a semi-

below Japan, toward the Philippines and was inhabited

tropical isle

largely by savage headhunters in the interior. Then Tokyo forced

the Chinese to make Korea a temporarily autonomous nation which

Japan took over ten years or so later, naming a Japanese governor-

general at the Korean capital of Seoul. The next step was the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904-05, which Japan also won again probably by
the lavish use of "silver bullets" among the Russian troops of the old
Czarist regime, fighting on the Manchurian plains far from Olga and
home. Japan seized control of South Manchuria and took its Railway
Zone north as far as the halfway mark at Chang-chung, now known
as Hsinking, and made capital of Manchukuo in 1932.
Ten years after that Russo-Japanese War ended, while the world
was busy with the Great War in Europe, Tokyo made her now
notorious Twenty-one Demands on a supine China, powerless to resist.
The "demands'' were discovered by an alert United States press service
correspondent in Peking, Frederick Moore. He gave their text to the
astounded world. The uproar was so terrific even during the European
war that Japan backed down and bided her time.
She even signed the Nine-Power Treaty in 1921-22 at the Wash-
ington Conference called by Charles Evans Hughes, then Secretary of
State. The pact "guaranteed" the territorial integrity of China and
the famous "Open Door" policy of equal economic opportunity there.
Japan withdrew her forces from Shantung Province, occupied as her
spoils of war when she stepped into the German-controlled port of
Tsingtao. But not for long. Japan went back into Shantung again
when the Kuomintang Revolution led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-
shek and inspired by the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen, swept north across
China from Canton in 1927-28. General Chiang once told me that

Japan's occupation in 1927 of Tsinan-fu, capital of Shantung Province,

had held back the Chinese revolutionary armies and delayed their
capture of Peking for a year. The Japanese subsequently withdrew
280 THE DRAGON STIRS
again but in the present war to a finish she renewed her campaign in

Shantung, especially at Tsingtao and Tsinan-fu.

But China herself, after the Kuomintang (People's Party) Revolu-
tion had captured Peking from the northern war lords, was soon
divided among her own factions again, as always. There were re-
current insurrections within the Party, beginning with the Wuhan
Rebellion up the Yangtze River shortly after the fall of Peking in 1928.

The revolt was

quelled, only for Nanking to find
other factions

springing up and taking arms against the newly formed Central

Government there. The Chinese Communists continued a thorn in
the side of Chiang Kai-shek, as well, even to the present. Unity was
far from achieved.
The Japanese took cognizance of this and of the world economic

depression spreading among the western nations and in the fall of

1931 began the seizure of Manchuria. She "restored" the "Boy Em-
peror" to the throne of his ancestors at Hsinking in the Spring of
1932, and crowned him Emperor Kang-Teh there on March 1, 1934.

Then, on one pretext or another, she moved into Jehol Province, north
of the Great Wall. The conquest there was equally simple, with little

or no opposition by the Chinese. Jehol was added to Manchukuo as

another province in that new buffer State.

Japan's next move was to set up the Hopei-Chahar autonomous

regime in these two provinces overlapping the Great Wall into Inner
Mongolia, in 1935. This area was demilitarized, China keeping a so-
called Peace Preservation Corps of soldier-police in the vicinity; and
Japan had the makings of yet another "independent" State in North
China adjacent to her puppet state of Manchukuo, a buffer against
possible attack from Soviet Russia. Japan feared Moscow more than
the Chinese, and does now.
The Tokyo campaign in 1935 and until the start of
fighting near
Peiping- to use the revised spelling of the ancient capital was made
to get control of an "autonomous State" composed of the five provinces
down to the Yellow River. An "incident" was the immediate cause
of the outbreak of fighting.
Causing "incidents" has been one of
Japan's most frequent methods of providing a pretext for warfare in
Asia. The "incident" occurred on July 7, 1937, during and after night
maneuvers by Japanese troops in the demilitarized zone in Hopei.
They clashed with Chinese in the Peace Preservation Corps in the
 THE ROAD AHEAD 281

vicinity of the Marco Polo Bridge about nine miles outside the walls
of Peiping and the war was on, though not "declared."
Japan wanted to keep the fighting localized in North China and

achieve her new "independent State" there but another this time I
believe unexpected "incident" occurred in the Shanghai zone about
a month later, and the second Battle of Shanghai began August 9,

1937. AJapanese naval officer in their Yangtze Patrol led a landing

party near the International Settlement, ostensibly searching for a

missing Japanese. The landing party tried to force an entrance into

Hungjao Military Airdrome outside Shanghai. A clash occurred with

Chinese defense troops there, the officer of Japan was killed, and other

troops wounded. And the second Shanghai war began.

The fighting in North China in the Peiping-Tientsin area was soon
overshadowed by the Shanghai warfare. Foreigners, including hun-
dreds of American women and children, were evacuated from Shanghai.
Some were killed, many suffered wounds in the air raids and bombard-
ments by both sides at the start of the clash. The American steamship
President Hoover was bombarded, but not badly damaged, in the
fighting. (She later went on the rocks off Formosa, when American
mercantile shipping began a voluntary boycott of Shanghai as a port
of call during the height of the fighting, and was pounded to pieces.

Her passengers and crew were saved.) The Japanese rushed rein-
forcements to their naval and army forces already at Shanghai. After
weeks of severe artillery bombardment and air attacks on the city,

including the International Settlement and the French Concession, the

Chinese troops withdrew. Shanghai was a prize of war for the Japa-
nese her greatest victory in the generation-old campaign in China.
The Japanese immediately marched westward up the Yangtze River
toward Nanking and, after little or no opposition at Soochow on the

way, captured the Capital. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fled in an

airplane with his wife, the former Mei-ling Soong beautiful and most
influential woman in China. The Government which Chiang had
formed in April of 1927 had already evacuated Nanking, scattering to
the west. A field-headquarters type of wartime Government was set

up temporarily at Hankow, 600 miles up the Yangtze in the interior of

China with the more permanent capital established at Chungking,
in Szechuan Province, on the border of Tibet.

Japan continued her ruthless campaign to subjugate all China.

282 THE DRAGON STIRS
Troops seized Canton far to the south. In Shantung, they captured

Tsingtao, chief port of their old stronghold there, and Tsinan-fu, the
capital. A "mopping-up" drive followed, with Hankow one major
objective. The United States Embassy at Nanking, headed by Ambas-
sador Nelson T. Johnson, moved to Hankow and then to Chungking
with the Central Government,
In Shanghai, fighting ceased and the city began to look to repairing
the incredible damage done by weeks of artillery and aerial bombard-
ments. The loss of lives and property was tremendous.
The doom of the white man as a little tin god in the Far East
was sounded by the Japanese action in China. The prestige of the
men from the Occidental world had long been fading. The victory of
Japan in and around Shanghai was the finishing touch a new mile-
stone in their advance upon the long-sought objective: "Asia for the
Asiatics!" At the height of the Shanghai conflict one Government
member in Tokyo voiced the general feeling among leaders of Dai
Nippon. He was the Home Minister, Admiral Nobumasa Suyetsugu.
He frankly asserted in a public statement in the press of Japan that
the "white races should not carry on trade in the Orient based solely
on their own self-interest." He insisted that world peace depended
upon what he called "the liberation" of the colored races of the earth

from white supremacy.

In Shanghai, one of the first practical applications of this attempt
to eradicate the white man's influence in the Orient was the immediate
demand that Japan be granted control of the Municipal Council ruling
the International Settlement there. The Council had been controlled
since its inception in the past century, by the British with American
and Japanese members; and, in the last decade, with Chinese at last
admitted to sit as regular voting members of this body. The Japanese
maintained, in pressing these demands, that apparently the Council
either was not serious in its desire to protect Japanese lives and
property within the International Settlement from "acts of outrage"
by the Chinese, was unable to give adequate protection to the Japanese
residents, numbering thousands there.

Cornell S. Franklin, an American, was Chairman of the Council

during the troubled years of 1937-38. He sought to mediate, taking

the Japanese demands for control under consideration.
The peace terms which Tokyo will lay down after the "undeclared
 THEROADAHEAD 283

war" in China are still nebulous. They will doubtless be known soon
enough. One widely circulated report said the terms would be "such
as would make China completely subservient to Japan without tech-
nically violating the Japanese official assertion that Japan has NO
territorial ambitions in China." Another current report at the height
of the fighting said the Japanese "extremists" demanded:

1 Recognition ofManchukuo and formation of an economic

bloc among China, Japan and Manchukuo.
2
Formation of autonomous, anti-Communist administrations
in North China and Inner Mongolia, both under Japanese "pro-

tection" but controlling all their own taxes and customs revenues.
3 Appointment of a Japanese Inspector-General of Customs
in China, and of Japanese advisers in all national and provincial
departments; and revision of Chinese tariffs to promote an ex-
change of Japanese manfactures against Chinese raw materials,
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to step aside for a pro-
4

Japanese President of China, and China to join the anti-

Communist bloc comprising Japan, Germany and Italy.
5 China from possessing an army or air force of
to refrain

warplanes; a special Peace Preservation Corps to be formed for

internal police functions; and all commercial air services to be

managed by Japan, the Chinese airlines to get their planes from

Japanese plants.

Some of these five points sound strangely like those included in the

original Twenty-one Demands mentioned above. Aquiescence by China

certainly would give Tokyo complete control of that country, as the

Japanese have long desired. And the Open Door of equal economic
opportunity, long a major plank in the United States policy toward the
Orient, would swing shut with a bang.
The United States became involved in the Shanghai warfare when
the Japanese sunk the U. S. S. Panay, a gunboat on our Yangtze River

patrol. She was evacuating men, women and children from Nanking
on Sunday, December 12, 1937. Japanese warplanes repeatedly
dropped aerial bombs on the doomed warship, and she went to the
bottom. At least three people were killed in that "incident" two
Americans and oneItalian. Three Standard Oil tankers nearby like-
wise were bombed in the air raid and sunk in the deep Yangtze.
284 THE DRAGON STIRS
The Japanese planes attacked while the Panay and the oil tankers
were sailing away from the war zone at Nanking. All were plainly
marked with American flags. The Panay of course flew her United
States flag from her mast. In addition, she had others stretched on
her deck awnings plainly visible to the Japanese military airmen.
President Roosevelt, through Secretary of State Hull at Wash-

ington, insisted on a full explanation and assurances against a repe-

tition of this tragedy. Japan's assurances have proved of little value.

British gunboats likewise were bombarded by the Japanese and,

like the ill-fated Panay, subjected tomachine-gun fire after the raids.
These included the H M. S. Ladybird and H. M. S. Bee, of the
British patrol. One British sailor at least was killed and others
were wounded. On shore, British soldiers were killed in the Battle

of Shanghai by shells landing in their sector in the International

Settlement. But nothing happened They got nice funerals.
What happens next is unknown just now, even probably to the
Japanese high command. Certainly, to pleasant Emperor Hirohito
in Tokyo. He is a man of peace, I think but his ambitious, or
if you insist, leaders in the military clique see in the
patriotic, present
hour the time for Japan to emerge as the greatest power of the
twentieth century, if not all history. And they are out to see it

through to the bitter end, regardless of cost in money, men or friend-

ship the once feared and long admired Western world.

in One
omnipresent enemy to Japan is Soviet Russia. Japan wanted Man-
churia in 1931-32 almost as much for a buffer state against Russia
as for the natural resources and the controlled market of thirty
million potential purchasers which that swift conquest offered And
7

Tokyo wants another "independent* puppet State surrounding or

bordering on Manchukuo, one which she can control and which will
be another buffer against the Soviet Union, if and when the clash
comes.
There also remains Outer Mongolia. This sparsely settled area
adjacent to China, Inner Mongolia and Siberia, has long- been a
Soviet Republic virtually under Moscow's control The Mongol
leaders from time to time avow their independence and even their
occasional adherence to China but the influence of Moscow remains
strong.
The Japanese military leaders would like to stop Communism
 THE ROAD AHEAD 285

from filtering into China, and thence across the bay to their island
empire founded, they say, by the Sun Goddess herself. For there
has long been unrest within the boundaries of Nippon. The labor
movement, as yet almost inarticulate, is nonetheless there, The in-
dustrial revolution in Japan has been too recent for labor to get well

organized. But the military chieftains, fearing just such an awak-

ening and possible eventual spread of Communist doctrines at home
and internal revolution, fight the Soviet Union and its principles
with their backs to the Great Wall of China.

Crystal-gazing down the twisting avenue of the years to come in

an addled world is dangerous business at best, particularly if we

seek to penetrate along that lane which is devoted to things of the
Orient. Whether the "Boy Emperor" will be restored to his Dragon
Throne naturally is
conjectural at this writing. It is doubtful
whether the Japanese who are still pulling the puppet-strings in

that show m their section of the world's surface themselves know.

It is my conviction that such a move is not far down the political

horizon in North China. The move appears logical when the pattern

to date is traced accurately and the motives behind Japan's desire

for supremacy on the mainland of Asia inevitably at China's expense

first, and at Soviet Russia's second are comprehended. In this

volume, I have tried to present them in clear focus with an unbiased

perspective. And in completing this intimately told tale of how it

happened out there, I believe I shall say here now that the "Boy
Emperor" is "going to town" on the backs of the sturdy, implacable
little men from Dai Nippon and the town to which he is going is
1
'eking. The date? Some March 1 before too long an historic day
in the lives of the Manchu emperors, as we now know.
There are Chinese also who feel that their land could do worse
than return to the ways of their ancestors and try again to rule all

China from a strong central government at Peking. The democratic

way of life so far has failed in the Orient. It will need more time
before its ultimate victory there, and everywhere else in our world.
'Jhis victory is inevitable. It is an immutable fact in the painful

progress of mankind.
 INDEX

BEND, Hallett 192 Bolshevik 22, 79, 92

dams, John Quincy 55 Bonneyille, Richard W. 219
glen, Sir Francis 217 Borodin, Madame M. 75
Vgrarian Revolution" 125 Borodin, Mikal 19, 66, 90, 96-100,
Hied Army of Defense 21,23 115, 119, 122-129, 131, 144, 150, 151,
merica, American 20, 22, 23, 25, 159, 241
28-30, 34, 35, 37-47, 49-52, 54-59, Boston 54, 77
61-64, 66, 68-70, 72-75, 79, 80, 84, Boston University -209
88-91,94-96, 98-101, 104-107, 109, 110, Bowen, Dr. A. J. 45, 46
113, 118, 121, 127-130, 135, 138, 141, "Boxer" Rebellion 58, 216
145, 160, 167, 168, 170, 178-180, 182, "Boy Emperor" 20, 239, 240, 262-265,
184, 187, 189, 191, 192, 197, 204, 205, 267, 268, 271-275, 280, 285
208, 213, 215, 218-223, 225, 227, 228- Breitenstein, Richard 190, 192, 205
238, 240, 241, 245, 249, 255, 259, 260, Bristol, Aclm Mark L. 62, 220-225,
263, 264, 270, 272, 278, 281-284 254-256, 258, 259
merican Church Mission 176, 177 Bristol, Mrs Mark L 225, 256, 258,
merican Club 18, 19, 22, 61, 121, 222, 259
250, 257 Britain, British 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 31,
merican Northern Preshylerian Mis- 33, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 56, 58,
sion 36 59, 61-63, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75-81,
merican University Club 170 84, 88, 94, 96, 99-101, 128, 145, 167,
moy 56 170, 179, 183, 187-189, 191, 208, 216,
nhwei 147 218, 225, 229, 231, 252, 271, 272,
nnapolis 216 282, 284
rabs 16 British and American Tobacco Com-
rizona 82 pany 76, 136
mold, Julean -104-106, 225, 226 Brooklyn Eagle >134
sia 12, 14, 15, 33, 52, 54, 67, 96, Bryan, William Jennings 179
144, 159, 160, 166, 174, 175, 177, 184, Buddha, Buddhism 112, 134, 174, 178,
186, 192, 209, 212, 221, 222, 224, 181, 264
227-230, 237, 238, 262, 276, 280, 282, Buffalo University 219
285 Burma 84, 129, 211, 227
ssociated Press 251 Butler, Brig.-Gcn. Smedley D. 63, 64,
tlantic Ocean250, 261 188
uslraha, Australian 27, 28
CALIFORNIA 140, 229
ALTIMORE 55 Camm, J. 79
aptist Church 135, 136, 176, 183, 184 Canada 184
erg (see also Borodin, Mikal) 97 Canton, Cantonese 13, 17-26, 32, 47,
erlm 136, 257, 259, 260, 278 49, 52, 54, 57-59, 67, 69, 70, 77, 78,
inder, Carroll 258, 259 80, 82, 84, 96, 98, 116, 125, 135,
ingham, Senator Hiram 104, 106, 166-173, 186, 190, 212; 225, 226, 232-
127, 128 234, 239-241, 245, 279, 282
ingham, Woodbridge 104, 106 Canton Christian College 176
inghampton, Y. 72N Castleman, Capt. Kenneth 223
lakely, Rear-Adm J. R Y.-^63, 189 Catholic 176, 185
287
288 THE DRAGON STIRS

Central America 99 Christian, Christianity 1 14, 116, 157,

Chang Cheng-yi, Rev 183 174-180, 182-185
Chang-chung 239, 262, 265, 266, 279 Christ of the Indian Road 174
Chang Chung-chang, Marshal 71, 83, Chungking 14, 33, 211, 212, 281, 282
147, 154, 191, 196, 199 Chu, Paul 109
Chang Fa-kwei, Gen. 168, 169 Cleveland, Dr. Frederick A 219
Chang Hsueh-hang, Gen 195-199, 211 Communist, Communism 33, 34, 77,
Chang Hui-chang, Capt 232, 233 81-85, 91, 95, 98, 100, 111, 116, 119,
Chang sha 189 123, 125, 129, 131, 144, 146, 148-156,
Chang Shen-tse, Gen 85 158, 159, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 178,
Chang Tso-lm 59, 83, 84, 93, 98, 111, 189, 256, 278, 280, 283-285
132, 143, 186, 187, 191, 192, 195-197, Confucius, Confucianism 114, 174, 178
199, 207, 217 Congregational Church 182, 184
Chapei 264 Constantini, Archbishop 184
thekiang Provmc<^-83, 131, 132, 147 Converse, Carolyn 250
Chen, Eugene-30, 31, 35, 42, 49, 85, Coolidgc, Calvin 189
90, 92-96, 109, 127-129, 145 Cornell University 219
Cheng Chien, Gen -41-43, 48, 85 Cunningham, Edwin S 188
Chengchow-27, 28, 123-125, 129-131, Cutting, Suydam 227
188
Chengtu 227, 230 DAIREN 187, 192, 193, 195, 196, 203-
Chiang Chmg-pang 141 205, 207, 263
Chiang Kai-shek 14, 23, 28, 30, 33, Davis, Dwight F 249
48, 59, 65, 78, 79, 81-85, 93, 94, 96, Davis, Col H. C
60, 61
98, 103, 106-108, 110-119, 123, 125- Davis, JohnK 34, 35, 51
128, 131-141, 144-146, 152, 154, 157- Debuchi, Kenkichi 263
160, 167-169, 171, 176, 184, 194, 207, Detroit 90, 230-232
210, 222, 242, 248, 277-281, 283 Disraeli 16
Chicago 97, 130 Duncan, Maj.-Gen. Sir John 61, 62,
Chicago Daily News 259 187, 225
Chicago Tribunc-~23, 104, 121 Duranty, Walter 66, 251, 255, 256,
Chicago, University of 130 258-360
Chief enchow 194
Chien Tsu-min 85 EDDY, William 122
Chihli 190 Edwardes, A H. K
216, 217
Chihli-Shantung Army 36, 42 Ethiopia 278
Chi-ko 132-134, 138 Europe, European 54, 55, 59-61, 85,
China, Chinese-11-16, 18-22, 24-35, 104, 113, 136, 141, 166, 212, 213, 224,
37, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 49, 52-72, 74, 233, 235, 238, 240, 243, 246, 249-251,
77-88, 91-101, 103-107, 109-114, 116- 253, 257, 258, 260, 278, 279
119, 122-127, 129-139, ,142, 144-153, Extra-Tcrritoriality, Doctrine of 56,
155-189, 192-198, 200, 202-213, 215, 58, 96, 145
216, 218-240, 242-246, 248-252, 254,
255, 257, 261-266, 270, 273-285 FASCISM 278
China Press 232 Edward F. 219
Feely,
Chinese Central Government 14, 59, Fenghwa 133, 134
280, 282 Fenghwa River 136
Chinese Eastern Railway 187, 249 Fengjun 194
Chinese National Aviaton Corporation Feng Kuo-chang 268
234-237 Fengtien Province 131, 195, 196, 199,
Chinese Republic 58, 147, 156, 267, 200, 203
268, 271, 273 Feng Yu-hsiang 28, 59, 83, 93, 103,
Chinese Turkestan 166 107, 111, 114-117, 119, 123, 125, 126,
Chin Fei 267, 268 128-130, 159-166, 188, 189, 194, 199,
Chmkiang 72-75 207, 248, 271
 INDEX 289

Fetter, Dr Frank W 219 Hill,Col Charles Sanderson 215, 216

Field Museum 227 Hirohito-16, 263, 284
"Forbidden City" 11, 240, 267-271 Hobart, E. T -34, 37, 44, 49
Fong Sec, Dr. 135 Hollander, T J. 177
Formosa 279, 281 Honan Province-^, 83, 93, 123, 124,
Foochow 56 128, 129, 168
161, 163-165,
France, French 20, 22, 23, 30, 40, 58, Hongkong 169, 213, 229-231
63, 66, 88, 90, 94, 100, 101, 115, 135, Honolulu 97, 122, 192
157, 188, 191, 215, 216, 218, 251, 281 Hoover, Herbert^264
Franklin, Cornell S 282 Hopei 190, 277, 280
Fuad Bey 119 Hough, Rear-Adm. R H -48; 89
Fukien 82, 147, 153 Hsiakwan 38, 48, 74
Fu Li Chi 112 Hsmking 239, 262, 263, 279, 280
Fu Tso-yi, Gen 191 Hsuan T'mg 239, 262, 265, 267, 271
Hsu-chien, George 85
GAUSS, Clarence 188
H&uchow-fu 28, 103, 107, 109-113,
Genghis Khan 209
115, 117, 118, 123-125, 140
Germany, German 22, 28, 58, 69, 78,
Hughes, Charles Evans 279
88, 90, 97, 100, 115, 135, 191, 192, 284
Hull, Cordell
224, 233, 256, 259, 260, 279, 283 Hunan 85, 95, 96, 114, 147, 148, 153,
Gibbons, Floyd 264 178
Ginling College for Women -36, 43,
Hupeh 147, 148, 153
246
44, 105, Hu Yao-tau 41
Gladstone 16
Goodrich, Ernest P 244, 245
1NJDIA-46, 21, 174
Gort, Viscount 187 Indiana 97
Great Wall of Chma-11, 27, 52, 186, International News Service 259
191, 193, 194, 202, 209, 239, 262, 266, International Settlement 20, 22, 23, 25,
275, 277, 280, 285 26, 30, 263, 281, 282, 284
Guam 64, 230
Italy, Italian-40, 63, 278, 283
HABAROVSK 255-257
JAPAN, Japanese 11, 13, 16-23, 40,
Hai-ho River 190
44, 48, 60, 62, 75, 80, 84, 88, 100,
Hailunkiang 199 104, 111, 113, 118, 132, 133, 136, 140,
Hang chow 153 157, 162, 167, 174, 180, 186-190, 192-
Hankow-12, 23, 28, 31, 33, 35, 65, 66,
198, 200-205, 207, 209, 211, 218, 231,
68, 69, 75, 77-83, 85, 87-97, 99-101,
232, 239, 240, 248-251, 255, 256, 262-
103, 104, 116, 119-131, 138, 141, 144,
266, 271-285
145, 150, 166, 169, 176, 178, 188, 189,
Jehol 194, 280
196, 207, 208, 211, 223, 230, 232,
Jerusalem 179
234, 248, 281, 282
Johnson, Ambassador Nelson T, 282
Hankow Club 90, 100
Jones, Elsie Martin 251
Hankow Uerdd-W, 100
Jones, Lieut. Stanley A. 53, 60
Hankow Race Club 90, 100
Han River 87 KALTENBORN, H. V.-134, 137-139
Hansen, Irwm 253 Kang-Teh 262, 280
Hanyang 88 Kansas 112
Harbin 22, 199, 200, 205, 249 Kansu-163, 166, 197, 212
Harding, Warren G. 240 Kashmir 227
Harris, Morris 251 Keen, Victor 250
Harvard University 219 Kemmerer, Prof. Edwin Walter 218,
Hawaii 230, 239 219
Hay, Lady Hay Drummond 241 Kiangkow 137, 141
Henry Pu-yi (see also Hsuan-Ting Kiangsi-49, 147
and the "Boy Emperor") 20, 262, Kiangsu 103, 107, 163
263, 265-275 Kilgore, Lieut-Col. F. D. 215
290 THE DRAGON STIRS
Km-han Railway 33, 132, 157 Lyons, Eugene 258
Kinkiang 80, 81
Kinney, H. W. 192 MACAO 229
Kipling, Rudyard 17 MacMurray, John Van A. 208, 219,
Kirin-199, 203 220
Koo, Dr. Wellington 59 Ma Ho-chow, Maj.-Gen 112
Korea 180, 251, 279 Manchu 11, 20, 58, 145, 186, 188, 203,
Koslovsky, B. 169 221, 239, 262, 263, 265, 266, 270,
Kremlin 259 274, 275, 285
Kuang Hsu 266, 267 Manchukuo 20, 186, 203, 239, 240,
Kung, Dr. H. H. 162, 169, 219 263, 279, 280, 283, 284
Kung, Mme H
H 157, 243 Manchuria 20, 22, 59, 93, 111, 131, 162,
Kung-hsien 188 186, 187, 191-203, 205-207, 209, 211,
Kuo Chia Si 265, 270 232, 248-250, 255, 262-265, 274-276,
Kuominchun 145 278-280, 284
Kuormntang17, 18, 20, 30-33, 52, 53, Mandarin 12, 49, 67, 144, 212, 213
66, 79-82, 90, 92, 95, 96, 99, 101, 103, Manila-64, 172, 229, 230, 237, 249
110, 114-116, 119, 124, 130, 132, 133, Marco Polo 132
140, 144-159, 161, 162, 167, 169, 170, Matsuoka, Yosuke 192-195, 200
186-192, 194, 203, 207, 208, 210, 211, Maze, Sir Frederick 216, 217
229, 233, 239-243, 248, 262, 279, 280 Mecklenburgh, H. L 79
Kuo Sung-lin 111 Methodist Episcopal Church 157, 176,
Kwangsi-132, 194, 207, 225, 226, 248 180, 183, 184
Kwangtung-^1, 82, 225 Mexico, Mexican 90-92, 99, 192, 254
Kwantung 153, 168 Miami, Fla. 185
Kweichow 82, 85, 147 Michigan-<82, 122, 230
"Middle Kingdom"-! 1, 27
LAVOY, Merle 112, 113 Midway Island 230
League of Nations 129, 193, 200, 264, Mississippi River 66, 70, 87, 88
278 Missouri 261
Legendre, Dr. A. F. 251 Missouri, University of 261
Lenin 259 Modern Chinese Civilization 251
Leningrad 259 Mongolia 96, 123, 209-211, 265, 266,
Li Chung-jen, Gen 112, 207 268, 280, 283, 284
Lieu, Y
Z -80-83, 85 Moore, Frederick F.-66, 279
Lincoln, Abraham 240 Moscow 20, 28, 33, 66, 91, 92, 96, 97,
Lindbergh, Charles 232 99, 103, 111, 119, 123, 125, 144, 145,
Lin Sen~-33
167, 169-171, 208, 240, 249-252, 254-
Linyang 190 260, 280, 284
Lisbon 229 Moussorgsky 259
Littell, John 177 Br. BritUng Sees It Through 2$2
Lockhart, Col R
P. 86, 89, 129, 176 Mukden 83, 111, 186, 187, 192-196,
Lockhart, Dr. 0. 219 C 199, 200, 202-204, 207, 211, 232, 233,
Loh, Maj.-Gen David 116, 117 263, 264
Lohmann, H. P. 260 Mussolini 278
Lola 227, 228
London 70, 170 NANCE, Dr. Walter Buckner 180-
London, Jack 192 182
London Times 28, 121 Nance, Mrs. Walter Buckner .181, 182
Lo Pa Hong 185 Nanking-14, 23, 25, 29, 30, 32-35, 42,
Loyang 189 45, 46, 48-50, 62, 65, 68, 71-76, 78, 79,
Lukes, Sarah 261 83, 85, 93-96, 98, 101, 103-107, 110,
Lukes, Susan 261 116-119, 123, 124, 126-129, 134, 144-
Lunghai Railway 111, 166 147, 151, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165-167,
Lutheran Church 122, 176 169-171, 178, 180, 182, 184, 188, 193,
Lynch, F. B. 219 194, 198, 200, 201, 208-212, 216, 217,
 INDEX 291

219, 220, 222, 226, 232-237, 241- Pennsylvania, University of 119

249, 276-278, 280-284 People's Tribune, T/t<? 97, 100, 123
"Nanking Incident" 29, 31-35, 42, 51, Peter the Great 259
62, 63, 92, 95, 105, 127, 129, 188 Philadelphia 216
Nanking Theological Seminary 38 Philippine Islands-3, 172, 216, 220,
Nanking, Treaty of 56 248, 249, 279
Nanking University 32, 35, 36, 45, 47, Pickens, Robert S. 104, 105, 107, 110,
49, 105, 106 113, 118, 119, 121
National City Bank 219 Ping-kiang 190
National Christian Council 179 Poland 260
Nationalist 20, 23, 24, 27, 30, 34-50, Poland, W. B-219
63, 71-73, 75, 77, 79-81, 83, 87, 90, Pope Pius XI 184, 185
92-94, 96, 98, 100, 104, 106, 107, 113, Port Arthur 187
114, 116, 117, 124, 135, 140, 146, Portugal 229
151, 155, 156, 162, 167, 169, 177, 178, Powell, J. B.-23
182, 193, 198-200, 209, 210, 221, 242 Presbyterian Church 176, 182-184
Nationalist News Agency 97 Princeton University 218, 219
New York-19, 21, 29, 54, 66, 68, 90, Prohme, Rayna 97, 123, 130
95, 219, 231, 235, 238, 244, 249, 250, Prohme, William 97
260, 261 Protestant 176, 183, 185
New York Herald Tribune--250 Puchen-43
New York 7w~66, 74, 105, 135,
Pukow 38, 43, 72, 75, 108, 110, 112,
192, 198, 241, 248, 249, 253 118, 119, 127, 196
Nicaragua -99, 216
Nielsen, Dr. Aage Kaarup 104, 107 QUEZON, Manuel 249
Nine-Power Treaty 279 Quincy, III 261
Ningpo-56, 132, 134-139, 142 Quo Tai-chi 170
Northern Army 19, 21, 24-26, 43, 44,
66, 71, 72, 75-77, 93, 96, 98, 113, 114, RADIO Corporation of America 237
117, 125, 147, 188-190, 196, 207 Rangoon 27
Red Banner, The -256
OLONGAPO-64 Red Swastika Society-41, 48
Open Door Policy 279, 283 Reisner, John 106
Outer Mongolia 123, 209, 211, 284 Richardson, Dr. Donald W. 45
Riley, Frank-28, 121, 122, 129, 130
PACIFIC Ocean-i54, 104, 213, 216, Rio de Janeiro 251
224, 225, 229, 232, 233, 264, 276 Roberts, Rev. W. P.-47
Pang Tsien-tsai, Gen 112-114
Robertson, Maj. William B. 234, 235
Paris 136, 258-260 Rocky Mountains 82
Pearl River 170, 186, 241 Rogers, Will 264
Peichihli Bay 187, 192, 203 Rome 252, 278
Roosevelt, Franklin D
Pei Chung-hsi, Gen. 112, 113, 194, 284
232 Roosevelt, Kermit 227, 228
Peiping (see also Peking) 11, 20, 144, Roosevelt, Theodore 227
160, 176, 225, 229, 230,
234, 241, Roots, Bishop L. H 176-178
246, 265, 274, 275, 280, 281, 285 Rowe, Dr. Harry F 45
Peking (see also Peiping) 11, 32, 33, Russia, Russian 19, 20, 22, 23, 28, 47,
57-59, 66, 83, 93, 94, 107, 109, 111, 58-60, 66, 69, 70, 75, 81, 84, 88, 91,
113, 123, 125-128, 132, 133, 144, 145, 96-98, 119, 123, 125, 126, 128, 131,
150, 157, 160, 164, 166, 186-196, 199, 135, 144, 145, 151, 167, 169-172, 191,
203, 205, 207-210, 216, 217, 220-222, 197, 203, 204, 209, 212, 240, 248-252,
232, 239-241, 243, 262, 265-267, 270- 254-260, 279, 280, 284, 285
273, 275, 279, 280, 285 Russo-Japanese War 193
Peking-Mukden Railway 111, 194, 196
Felling, H. C.-70-72, 77 SAIGON 227
Pengpu 68, 72 St. Louis 87, 249
292 THE DRAGON STIRS
San Diego 63, 64, 216 Stimson, Col. Henry L. 172, 219, 220,
San Francisco 135, 261 249, 263
Stownw 146-153, 155, 156 Stimson, Mrs Henry L 219
Schwartz, Bruno 90, 91, 100, 250 Strother, Rev. E. E 179
Shanghai 12, 17-26, 29-33, 48, 53, 56, Suiyuan 277
57, 59-64, 66-68, 71, 72, 77, 82, 83, Sun Chuan-fang, Marshal 73, 83, 147,
85, 93-95, 97, 98, 100-102, 104-106, 196, 199
109, 112, 116, 119, 126, 128, 131, Sun Fo-218, 234, 235, 237, 242, 243,
132, 134, 135, 139, 140, 142-147, 153, 245
157, 160, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, Sun Yat-sen, Dr 57, 58, 79, 82, 97,
176, 178-180, 182, 185, 187-190, 192, 110, 111, 124, 125, 133, 140, 145, 147,
194, 208, 212, 213, 215-217, 219-223, 150-152, 156, 207, 208, 239-244, 248,
225-227, 230, 231, 233-235, 237, 238, 279
249, 250, 257, 259, 261, 264, 275-279, Sun Vat-sen, Mmc 157, 242, 243
281-284 Suyetsugu, Nobumasa
282
Shanghai Club 22 Sweden, Swedish 122, 257
Shanghai Labor Union Corps 154 Syracuse University 219
Shanghai Times 179, 231 Szechuan 147, 184, 211, 227, 228, 230,
Shanhaikwan 193, 194, 196 281
Shansi 107, 111, 191, 194, 207, 232,
277 TAIPING Rebellion 57, 181
Shantung 27, 28, 71, 83, 103, 107, 111- Taiwan 279
113, 132, 157, 184, 188, 189, 191, 199, Tanaka, Baron 193, 202
277, 279, 280, 282 Tangku 190
Shaowangmiao 137 Tang Shen-tse, Gen 82, 125, 178
Sheean, Vincent 130 Taoist 174
Shensi 83, 123, 147, 163, 166 Tartar 11, 267, 272
Shintoism 174 Tass Agency 251
Siam 16 Taylor, A. A 38
Siberia 22, 66, 96, 110, 123, 129, 166, Tcng Yen-tah, Gen. 82, 85
209, 246, 249, 250, 254, 256-258, 284 Tennessee 180
Singtan 189 Terranova, Francis 55, 56
Sinkiang 212 Thomas, Dr 135, 136
Smith, Lieut-Comm. Roy C 29, 30, Tibet 16, 66, 123, 209-211, 227, 281
62 Tientsin 43, 64, 68, 72, 186-192, 194,
Smith, B M. 72, 73 196, 199, 203-207, 232, 240, 245, 202,
Smith, Mrs B, M. 72 271, 272, 274, 281
"Socony House" 75 Ting Tuan-saio 111
Soochow 180-182, 281 Tokyo 14, 111, 118, 119, 132, 192-
Soochow University 180, 182 194, 198, 200, 202, 231, 250, 251, 263,
"Soong Dynasty" 157 274-276, 278-280, 282-285
Soong, Mei-lmg 136, 157, 243, 281 Trinidad 94
Soong, T. V.-138, 139, 141, 157, 169, Tsinan 140
217, 218 Tsingtao 189, 279, 280, 282
Southern Army 19, 21, 27, 29, 49, 72, Tungcbow 194
75, 186, 189, 193, 194, 221 Turkey 16, 62, 220, 221, 224
Southern Presbyterian Mission 179 "Twenty-one Demands"- 279, 283
South Manchuria Railway 192, 197,
263, 279 UNITED Press-18, 19, 66, 250, 258,

Speers, Dr. James M. 45, 46 264

Standard Oil Company 29, 34, 38, 44, United States 13, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29,

46, 49, 72, 73, 79, 90, 105, 190, 261 30, 33, 34, 52, 53, 55-60, 63, 75, 86,
283 87, 90, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 104, 121,
Staude, Lieut Ben 29, 30 127, 146, 157, 170, 182-184, 187, 188,
Stevens, Herbert 227 190, 192, 193, 203, 204, 206, 208, 215,
 INDEX 293

216, 219, 226, 237, 238, 251, 266, 267, Williams, Dr. J. E-32, 33, 35, 36, 43,
272, 278, 279, 282-284 106
Williams, Rev Walter R 45, 47
VATICAN City 185
Woosung 143, 264
Vautrin, Minnie 36, 43, 44 World War 96, 99, 113, 216, 221, 224,
Vernou, Capt. Wallace 29 240, 252, 256, 279
Virginia 165
Wortley, C, B, 79
Vladivostok 110, 249-253, 255
Wu, Dr. C C. 104, 119, 169, 173, 222

WAKEFIELD, Dr. Paul 177 Wuchang 87

Wake Island 230 Wuhan-87, 122, 125, 126, 151, 194, 280
Wuhu 68, 76-80, 122
Wallace, Dr. Benjamin B 219
Wan Chi-hsing 169 Wu Pei-fu, Marshal 59, 83, 115, 147

Wang Ching-wei 123, 168 i

Wang, Dr. C. T 219, 220, 222 YANG, Prof. Y. C 182

Wanghai, Treaty of 56, 57 Yangtze-kiang-^20, 23, 27-32, 34, 57,
Wang Tien-pei, Gen. 114-116 62, 65-68, 70-72, 74, 76-80, 83, 87-89,
Ward, Commander 69 92, 98, 100-102, 105, 108, 119, 121,
Warsaw 260 122, 131, 135, 149, 177, 178, 187,
Washington, D. C. 99, 127, 128, 189, 209, 221, 223, 227, 230, 241, 242,
211, 219, 220, 222, 237, 240, 263, 244-246, 264, 280, 281, 283
264, 279, 284 Yenching University 176, 246
Watson, William 219 Yen Hsi-san, Marshal 107, 111, 191,
von Weigand, Karl 241 194, 199, 207, 232
Wei-Hai-Wei 187 Yiyang 190
Wells, H. G. 252 Young, Dr Arthur Nichols 219
West Point 216, 219 Yuan Shi-kai 58
Whangpoo River 20, 22, 60 Yun Liang 269
White, Rev. Dr. Hugh W 179 Yunnan~S4, 129, 147, 211, 225, 227
White Russian 26, 47, 70 Yutien 194
Williams, Admiral C. S 221 Yu-yao River 136, 137
A STUDY"
HISTORY
The Royal Institute* of IrftSr national si fain is
an t4tioftiHa& and non-potitical body, founded in
rp^o./x? tf&epterage and facilitate the scientific
study of international questions*
The Institute, us such, ts precluded by */
rules from eseprcssitqr fin opinion on
<my aspect of
international affairs; opinion? expressed in this
hook are, therefore, purely
A STUDf 6F
HIST OR Y
BY
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE
Director of Studies in the Royal Institute
of International Affairs
Research Professor of International History
in the University of London
(both on the Sir Daniel Stevenson Foundation)

'Work . . . while it is day . . .'

JOHN ix. 4
*
Nox ruit, Aenca . . .
'

AENEID VI, 539

*
Thought shall be the harder,
Heart the keener,
Mood shall be the more,
As our might lessens.'
THE LAY OF THE BATTLE OF MALDON

VOLUME II

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD
:

Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute

of International Affairs

*934
"
:
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMKN HOUSE, K.C T 4
I-oncion Kdmburtfh Glasgow
Leipzig New York Toronto
Melbourne Capetown liombay
Calcutta Madras Shanghai
HUMPHREY MILKOKD
PUDLISXIFU TO THK
UNIVJ KSITY
 CONTENTS
VOLUME II
II.

I.
D.
KoAa
Xa\errd rd
The Return of Nature
....
THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
....
. i

i
i

In Central America
... . .

...-9 3
In Ceylon

On
In
On
Easter Island
New
the
England
.....
.....
In the North Arabian Desert

Roman Campagna .
.

. . , . .16
5

12
15

Perfida Capua . . . . . . .18

The Temptations of Odysseus . . . .22
The Flesh Pots of Egypt . . . . .
24
The Doasyoulikes . . . . . .
.25
II. WIE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES . . .
31
A Plan of Operations . . . . .
31
The Yellow River and the Yangtse . . . .
31
Chimu and Valparaiso . . . . .
-33
Lowlands and Highlands in Guatemala . . .
34
The Aegean Coasts and their Continental Hinterlands .
-36
Attica and Boeotia . . * . .
-37
ChalcidicS and Boeotia . . . . .
.42
Byzantium and Calchedon . . -43
Aegina and Argos . . . . .
.48
Israelites, Phoenicians, and Philistines . . . -
49
Lebanon and Jabal Ansariyah . . -55
Brandenburg and the Rhineland . . .
-57
Austria and Lombardy . 58
*The Black Country' and 'The Home Counties' . . 60
The Struggle for North America . . . .
-65
IH. THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND . . - -
-73
The Testimony of Philosophy, Mythology, and Religion .
73
The Testimony of the 'Related* Civilizations . . -74
The Special Stimulus of Migration Overseas . .
.84
IV. THE STIMULUS OF BLOWS . , . - - . IOO

V. THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES . - - .112

'Marches' and 'Interiors
1
.. . - .-112
In the Egyptiac World . . '. . . .112
In the Sinic World . . . . "S
In the Far Eastern World . . - .119
In the Hindu World . . . . . x7
In the Sumeric and Babylonic Worlds . . . *33
In the Syriac World .. . . . -
*37
vi CONTENTS
In the Iranic World over against Eurasia .
144
In the Iranic World over against Orthodox Christendom

....
1 50

In Russian Orthodox Christendom .

. . .
154
In Japan .
158
In the Minoan and Hellenic Worlds . .
159
In the Western World over against the Continental European
Barbarians . . . 166
In the Western World over against Muscovy . . .
174
In the Western World over against the Ottoman Empire ,
177
In the Western World over against the Far Western Christendom i go

Peninsula .....
In the Western World over against Scandinavia . .

In the Western World over against the Syriae World in the Ihcnan
*94

202

VI. .....
In the Andean and Central American Worlds
THE STIMULUS OF PENALIZATIONS
. .
206
2o8
The Nature
Migration
Slavery
Caste
......
.
of the Stimulus

........
......
Religious Discrimination
, .
.

.
.

.
.

.
.

.
.208
.212
.
213
216
220
The Phanariots
TheQazfinlis
The Levantines .......
,

.
.

.
.

.
.

.
.

. .
v

.228
222

230

Nabobs and Sahibs

Emancipated Nonconformists
Emancipated Ra'lyeh
......
The Jews, Parsees, Nestonans, Monophysites, and Monoihelctes

.....
The Ashkenazim, Scphardim, Dtfnme, and Mnrranos

. . . , . .251
.

.
234
240
248
250

Assimilationists and Zionists . . . .

.252
Isma'ilis and Imamls . . . . .
.254
Fossils in Fastnesses . . . . , -255
VII. TIIE GOLDEN MEAN . . . . *
259
The Law of Compensations . . . .
259
How is a Challenge proved Excessive ? . .
274
Comparisons in Three Terms . . . . .200
Norway Iceland Greenland
Dixie
Brazil
The
Massachusetts
La
Pacific
Plata
Maine
Patagonia
Seaboard of South America
.....
.

.
.

.
.

,
.

,
,

.
291
293
296
297
Votyaks Magyars Lapps . * . . .
300
Reactions to Changes of Climate , . . , ,
30*
Scotland Ulster Appalachia . . . . ,
309
Reactions to the Ravages of War . . . . ,
313
Chinese Reactions to the Challenge of Emigration . , .
3x5
Slavs Achaeans Teutons Celts . . . .
315
The Abortive Far Western Christian Civilization . . * 322
The Abortive Scandinavian Civilization . . ,
.340
The Impact of Islam upon the Christendoms , . .
360
The Abortive Far Eastern Christian Civilization . . * 369
Miscarriages and Births of Civilizations in Syria . .
-3^5
 CONTENTS vii

II. D ill Annex: Is 'Old Ground* less fertile than 'New Ground'
Intrinsically or by Accident? . . .
395
v Annex:
vi Annex; Jews
vn Annex I: Dr.
in Fastnesses .....
Historic Sieges and their After-effects

Ellsworth Huntington's Application of his

. .
400
402

Chmate-and-Civihzation Theory to the Histories

of the Mayan and Yucatec Civilizations in Central
America, and to the History of the Synac Civiliza-
tion in the Oases of the North Arabian Steppe .
413
Annex II: The Three-Cornered Relation between the Roman

......
Church, England, and Ireland .
.421
.

Annex III: The Extinction of the Far Western Christian Culture

in Ireland
Annex IV: The
....
Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Far Western
Christian Civilization
Annex V: The Resemblance between the Abortive Scandinavian
424

427

Civilization and the Hellenic Civilization . .

434
Annex VI: The Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Scandinavian
Civilization

......
Annex VII: The Lost Opportunities
'Osmanlis
Annex VIII: The Forfeited
. . . .

of the Scandinavians and the

Birthright of the Abortive Far Eastern

.438

444

Christian Civilization *
446
 D. THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
I. XAAEHA TA KAAA
The Return of Nature

WE have now studied the action of Challenge-and-Response

and have attempted to survey the role which challenges and
responses have played in the geneses of civilizations. In embarking
upon this survey, we have implicitly rejected the view that civiliza-
tions are apt to be generated in environments physical or human
which offer unusually easy conditions of life to Man. This view
is popularly held, or at any rate widely aired, in the modern
Western World, though it is contradicted by the theory of our
modern Western Physical Science as well as by the deeper intuition
of Mankind which has found expression in the Mythology of various
societies in various ages.
1
In the course of the survey which we
have just concluded, we have ignored this false view; but we may
find that, besides implicitly rejecting it, we have also indirectly
refuted it by exposing the fallacy on which it is founded.
This fallacy springs from a failure to conceive the genesis of a
civilization as 'an act of creation involving a process of change in
Time. The appearance of the scene, as it looks when the
final
drama of genesis has been played to the finish, is thoughtlessly
equated with the primitive appearance of the same scene in the
prehistoric age before the site was taken in hand by Man to serve
as the stage for a great human action. For example,

'we are accustomed to regard Egypt as a paradise, as the most fertile

country in the World, where, if we but scratch the soil and scatter seed,
we have only to await and gather the harvest. The Greeks spoke of
Egypt as the most fit
place for the first generations of men, for there,

they said, food was always ready at hand, and it took no labour to secure
an abundant supply. *\

The fallacy of this view is pointed out by the distinguished archaeo-

logist who has formulated it in these sentences in order to
refute it.
His refutation is presented in the latter part of a passage which has
at
already been quoted, in the preceding chapter of this Study,
greater length.
'There can be no doubt', he goes on to say, 'that the Egypt of to-day
is a very different place from the Egypt of pre-agricultural times. . . .

* For this contrary scientific and mythological Weltanschauung^ see above, IL C (u) (b)
i, vol. i, passim,
*
Newberry, op, cit. in II. C (ii) (b) 2, above, vol. i, p. 306.

II B
2 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
The agricultural Egypt of modern times is as much a gift of Man as it is
of the Nile.' 1

In fact, the fallacious popular view entirely overlooks the stupendous

human effort involved, not only in once transforming the prehistoric
jungle-swamp of the Lower Nile Valley into the historical Land of
Egypt, but also in perpetually preventing this magnificent but
precarious work of men's hands from reverting to its primeval
state of Nature,
What this state of Nature was, we have indicated, in the two
2
instances of the Land of Egypt and the Land of Shinar, by citing
first-hand descriptions of the present state of certain other sections
of the Nile Valley and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley which have
remained, down to this day, in the primitive condition out of which
Egypt was conjured up in the Lower Nile Valley by the fathers of
the Egyptiac Civilization and Shinar by the fathers of the Sumeric
Civilization in what used to be the Lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley
f
before the present provinces of Basrah and Arabistan were built
out into the Persian Gulf by the progressive deposit of alluvium
during the last five or six thousand years. The present state of the
Bahr-al-Jabal section of the Nile Valley and of the 'Amarah-
3

4
Nasiriyah-Basrah triangle in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley testifies
to the feat which was performed by the pioneers who, some five or
six thousand years ago, succeeded in transforming similar tracts of

inhospitable jungle-swamp, out of all recognition, into an ordered

network of dykes and fields, where soil and water arc subject to
human control for the service of human purposes. The view that
civilizations are begotten in environments where the conditions are

unusually easy is clearly shown to be untenable when we compare

those howling wildernesses, which reproduce, in their virgin state
to-day, the primeval state of Egypt and Shinar, with the actual
state of Egypt and Shinar as we see it
to-day side by side with
the Bahr-al-Jabal and with the swamps in which the Tigris and
Euphrates lose themselves below 'Amarah and Nasiriyah. At the
same time, just because the works of Man which have effaced the
primeval state of Nature in the Lower Nile Valley and in the Lower
Tigris-Euphrates Valley are still 'going concerns', we cannot
observe the primeval state of Nature here directly. have to be We
content with the reflections of it which we can discern in the
c

watery mirrors of the Bahr-al-Jabal and the Amarah~Nasiriyah~

Basrah triangle ; and though the scientific student
may feel morally
*
Newberry, op. cit., quoted in vol. i, pp. 306 and 308, above. For the celebrated
aphorism of Herodotus, to which Professor Newberry takes exception in the second
sentence here quoted, see footnote 2 on p. 252 in II. C (ii) (a) 2, in vol. i, above,
z In II. C
(u) (6) 2, vol. i, pp. 309-12 and 316-18, above.
3 See vol. 4 See vol.
j, pp. 309-12, above.
i, pp. 316-18, above.
 XAAEHA TA KAAA 3
certain, in his own mind, that these surviving reflections give a fair
picture of the long-obliterated originals, he must be prepared to
find the layman declaring, like doubting Thomas, that direct
only
observation will convince him.
Are there theatres of civilization, other than Egypt and Shinar,
which can provide the layman with the direct evidence which he
demands and which Egypt and Shinar cannot give him ? Yes, there
are, for the human feat of maintaining Egypt and Shinar as 'going
concerns' a feat only less remarkable than the original feat of
creating them is something exceptional. In general it is true that
'naturam expcllas furca, tamen usque recurret'. 1 At various times
and places, recalcitrant Nature, once broken in by human heroism,
has broken loose again because later generations have ceased for
some reason to keep up the constant exertions required of them in
order to maintain the mastery which had been won for them and
transmitted to them by the pioneers. In such cases of reversion,
the primeval state of Nature, as it was before Man ever took it in
hand, can be seen to-day not merely in the mirror of some similar
piece of Nature which has happened to remain in its virgin state
but by direct observation on the very spot which has temporarily
been the scene of a signal human achievement. Such spectacles, in
which the primeval state of Nature and the subsequent works of
Man and the eventual reversion of Nature to her primeval state
are displayed together on one spot like geological strata, are
all

certainly more striking, as visual demonstrations, than the spectacle

striking though this is of the contrast between the present state
of Egypt and the present state of the Bahr-al-Jabal, in which the
two objects that have to be brought into simultaneous focus lie
a thousand miles apart. Where Nature has actually reasserted her
ascendancy over some spot that has once been the birth-place of a
civilization or the scene of some other signal human achievement,
it is
impossible to behold Nature flaunting her ultimate triumph
over these works of Man and still to doubt that here, at any rate,
the conditions in which those human works were performed were
not unusually easy but unusually difficult. We
will therefore try-
to clinch our argument by passing a few instances of such reversions
under review.

In Central America
One remarkable instance is the present state of the birth-place of
theMayan Civilization. Far different from the dykes and fields of
Egypt and Shinar, which are still being kept in order by Man and
*
Horace, Epistles, Book I, Ep. x, 1. 24.
 4 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
duly serving his purpose in yielding him
still a livelihood, the
works of the Mayas are no longer 'going concerns' to-day. Their
sole surviving monuments are the ruins of the immense and

magnificently decorated public buildings

which now stand, faraway
from any present human habitations, in the depths of the tropical
forest. The forest, like some sylvan boa-constrictor, has literally
swallowed them up, and now it is dismembering them at its
leisure: prising their fine-hewn, close-laid stones apart with its

writhing roots and tendrils. The contrast between the present

aspect of the country and the aspect which it must
have worn when
the Mayan Civilization was in being is so great that it is almost
beyond imagination. There must have been a time when these
1

immense public buildings stood in the heart of large and populous

cities, and when those cities lay in the midst of vast stretches of
cultivated land which furnished them with their food-supplies.
The masterpieces of Mayan architecture which are now being
strangled by the forest must have been built as works of super-
erogation with the surplus of an energy which, for leagues around,
had already transformed the forest into fruitful fields. They were
trophies of Man's victory over Nature; and, at the moment when
they were raised, the retreating fringe of the vanquished and routed
sylvan enemy was perhaps barely visible on the horizon, even from
the highest platforms of the palaces or from the summits of the
temple-pyramids. To the human beings who looked out over the
World from those vantage-points then, the victory of Man over
Nature must have seemed utterly secure and the transitorincss of
;

human achievements and the vanity of human wishes are poignantly

exposed by the ultimate return of the forest, engulfing first the
fields and then the houses, and
finally the palaces and the temples
themselves. Yet that is not the most significant or even the most
obvious lesson to be learnt from the present state of
Copan or
Tikal or Palenque. The ruins speak still more eloquently of the
intensity of the struggle with the physical environment which the
creators of the Mayan Civilization must have
waged victoriously in
their day. In her very revenge, which reveals her in all her
grue-
some power, Tropical Nature testifies
unwillingly to the courage
and the vigour of the men who once, if only for a season, succeeded
in putting her to flight and
keeping her at bay.*

Mr, Rudyard Kipling in his description of 'the Cold Lairs' : a fictitious Hindu
city which
the Indian Jungle has swallowed up. (Read the
story called 'Kaa's Hunting* in The
Jungle Book.)
* r - Ellsworth Huntington
,P suggests that the Nature whom the fathers of the Mayan
Civilization once
put to flight was a different (and less formidable) antagonist from the
Nature who has since got the better of these men's descendants in the selfsame
region,
For Dr. Huntington's hypothesis of a periodic D
shifting of climatic zones, see II. (vii),
Annex i, below*
 XAAEIIA TA KAAA 5
In Ceylon
With the same dumb eloquence, the creeper-covered ruins of
Angkor Wat testify to the prowess of the men who once propagated
the Hindu Civilization on soil conquered from the
tropical forest of
Cambodia; and the equally arduous feat of conquering the parched
plains of Ceylon for agriculture is commemorated in the breached
bunds and overgrown floors of the tanks which were once con-
structed on the wet side of the hill-country, on a colossal scale,
by
the Sinhalese converts to the Indie religion of the
Hinayana.
*To realise how such tanks came into being one must know something
of the history of Lanka. The idea underlying the system was
simple but
very great. It was intended by the tank-building kings that none of the
rain which fell in such abundance in the mountains should reach the
sea without paying tribute to Man on the way.
'In the middle of the southern half of Ceylon is a wide mountain
ssone, but to the east and north dry plains cover thousands of square
miles, and at present are very sparsely populated. In the height of the
monsoon, when armies of storm-swept clouds rush on day after day to
match their strength against the hills, there is a line drawn by Nature
that the rains are unable to pass. . There are .
points where the line of
,

demarcation of the two zones, the wet and the dry, is so narrow that
within a mile one seems to pass into a new country; for the whole
character of the forest alters, and in size and kind and distribution the
trees differ completely from those one can still see behind one. The wild
flowers take new forms and colours; different birds sing in the bushes;
cultivation changes abruptly; and wealth ends. The line curves from
sea to sea and appears to be stable and unaffected by the operations of
1
Man, such as felling forests/
Yet the missionaries of the Indie Civilization in Ceylon once
achieved the tour deforce of compelling the monsoon-smitten high-
lands where 'rain pours down at a higher rate for the month than
the rainfall of London for the whole of a very wet year' 2 to give
water and life and wealth to the plains which Nature had con-
demned to lie parched and desolate.

'Hill streams were tapped and their water guided into the giant

storage-tanks below, some of them four thousand acres in extent and, ;

from those, channels ran on to other large tanks farther from the hills,
and from them to others still more remote. And below each great tank
and each great channel were hundreds of little tanks, each the nucleus
of a village; all, in the long-run, fed from the wet mountain-zone. So
gradually the ancient Sinhalese conquered all, or nearly all, of the
plains that are now so empty of men.' 3
The arduousness of the labour of first conquering and then
*
Still, John: The Jungle Tide (Edinburgh 1930, Blackwood), pp. 74-$.
* 3
Still, op. cit., p. 74- Still > P- clt -
PP'
 6 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
holding for a man-made civilization these naturally barren and deso-
late plains is demonstrated by the two outstanding features in the

landscape of Ceylon at the present day. The first feature is the

relapse of that once irrigated and cultivated and populated country-
side into its primeval barrenness and desolation upon the stoppage
of the continuous human exertions which had been required in
order to produce and maintain this miraculous transformation of
the face of Nature. 1 The second feature is the avoidance of these
derelict plains, which were once the seat of a civilization, by our
modern Western coffee and tea and rubber planters who have
come to Ceylon to make their fortunes there in these latter days.
On the first of these two points, the following testimony is
borne by the modern Western eyewitness whom we have quoted
already:
*The tank age endured for more than fifteen centuries, and then the
jungle tide rose over it and all signs or memory of it became lost. ... In
the forest which covers the ancient kingdom, far from the sounds of men ,
one comes upon the bunds of tanks, now utterly forgotten, where the
banks have given way and the beds become like natural glades for deer
to graze in, ...
'I know
[a] city [which] lies below the bund of an enormous tank
. . .

whose area may well have been thousands of acres, for the bund is miles
long. But now the very name of the tank is lost, for the bund burst
hundreds of years ago and its bed is but a low-lying region in the
unbroken forest, a deeper area amid the sea of trees. The only name it
now bears is a Tamil one meaning Tank of the Great Breach. At a
waterhole in a rock in the bed of that tank I saw a bear
stoop and drink,
and it was curious to think how he sought for that small hole of
stagnant
water, as for a rare treasure, in a place that for many centuries was at
the bottom of an inland sea where waves broke and
pelicans sailed in
fleets. More than
anything else, it brought home to me most vividly
how brief had been the age of tanks in the long history of the jungle.
For a million years animals drank from that narrow
hole; then, for a
thousand years, the rock, hole and all, was underneath the
waves; and
now the jungle drinks again where animals drank when Man used stone
arrowheads, and before he invented them, and before Nature invented
him.' 2

The second feature in the present landscape of

Ceylon which
demonstrates the arduousness of the feat which the ancient
* The
cause of the breakdown of the ancient Sinhalese
irrigation system was an inceftR-
18 wa d dl n mercenaries from Southern India. These
^JTi -y^T^VT
mercenaries deliberately cut the canals*? 5
and breached the bunds as a short cut to military
decisions; and eventually this will to destroy overcame the will to repair. Therewith the
plains not only went:out:of
cultivationthroughthestoppageof the water-supply, but hey
became hot-beds of malaria when the running waters dwindled into stagnant pooln
^so were too shallow to harbour
which the fish that live by

OP- cit., pp. 77 and 79 and 1 11-13.

 XAAEHA TA KAAA 7
Sinhalese bund-builders temporarily accomplished is the avoidance
of the derelict plains by our modern Western
planters who have
interested themselves in Ceylon not in order to
propagate a civiliza-
tion there but in order to get rich quick.
'It is a curious fact that ... the bulk of the
population and most of the
wealth have been found on the wet side of the line during the four
centuries of European rule* ... To make money, one stays as a rule on
the wet side, but to see the ruins of temples or monasteries, of
palaces or
engineering works, one must go to the dry side of the line. . . . For the
1

hills where we grow tea and rubber

[the ancient Sinhalese] did not care.
Few ancient remains are to be found among them, and the forests we
found there, and destroyed, were of immense age and probably of true
. Must one be ranked as
virgin growth. . .
opposed to civilization if one
prefers the dry and thinly populated side of the monsoon's frontier to
the prosperous and wet one? That is a question I find it impossible to
answer without first settling what the word "civilization" means.' 2
The irrefutable testimony of the return of Nature is repeated
even where there are no stupendous ruins to work upon our
imagination. We may perceive it in the last agonies of the poor
village in the jungle as witness the following passage from a
modern Western work of fiction in which the scene of action is
likewise Ceylon:
*Thc years had brought more evil, death and decay upon the village.
. . Disease and hunger visited it year after year. It seemed, as the
.

headman said, to have been forgotten by gods and men. Year after year,
the rains from the north-east passed it by; only the sun beat down more
pitilessly, and the wind roared over it across the jungle the little patches
;

of chena crop which the villagers tried to cultivate withered as soon as

the young shoots showed above the ground. No man, traveller or
headman or trader, ever came to the village now. No one troubled any
longer to clear the track which led to it the jungle covered it and cut the
;

village off. . . .

'They struggled hard against the fate that hung over them, clinging
to the place where they had been born and lived, the compound they
knew, and the sterile chenas which they had sown. No children were
born to them now in their hut, their women were as sterile as the earth ;
the children that had been born to them died of want and fever. At last
* This
geographical segregation of the fields of the ancient indigenous and the modern
European enterprise in Ceylon has its analogue in Central America, where the modern
Spanish colonists have similarly kept clear of the plains which were once the seat of
the Mayan culture, and have established themselves in the highlands which were left
unoccupied by both the fathers and the children of the Mayan Civilization. (See
IL C (ii) (a) 2, vol. i, p. 367, above, and II. D (u), pp. 34-^6, below.) In this connexion,
it is immaterial that, in contrast to the climatic conditions in Ceylon, the Central
American plains are relatively wet and the Central American highlands relatively dry;
for whereas, in Ceylon, an abundance of rain affords economic ease while a scarcity
demands economic effort, in Central America the relations of economic effect to climatic
cause are just the inverse, owing to the inverse correlation between climate and
landscape. A.I.T.
*
Still, op. at., pp. 75-6 and 77 and 92,
 8 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
they yielded to the jungle. They packed up their few possessions and
left the village for ever. . . .

'They tried to induce Punchi Menika to go with them, but she refused.
. .The only thing left to her was the compound and the jungle which
.

she knew. She clung to it passionately, blindly. . . .

'The jungle surged forward over and blotted out the village up to the
very walls of her hut. She no longer cleared the compound or mended
the fence, the jungle closed over them as it had closed over the other
huts and compounds, over the paths and tracks. Its breath was hot and
heavy in the hut itself, which it imprisoned in its wall, stretching away
unbroken for miles. Everything except the little hut with rotting walls
and broken tattered roof had gone down before it. It closed with its
shrubs and bushes and trees, with the impenetrable disorder of its thorns
and creepers, over the rice-fields and the tanks. Only a little hollowing
of the ground where the trees stood in water when rain fell, and a
long
little mound which the rains washed out and the
elephants trampled
down, marked the place where before had lain the tank and its land.
The village was forgotten, it disappeared into the jungle from which it
had sprung, and with it she was cut off, forgotten. It was as if she was
the last person left in the World, a world of
unending trees above which
the wind roared always and the Sun blazed. . . .

'But life is very short in the jungle. Punchi Menika was a

very old
woman before she was forty. She no longer sowed grain, she lived
only
on the roots and leaves that she gathered. The
perpetual hunger wasted
her slowly, and when the rains came she
lay shivering with fever in the
hut. At last the time came when her
strength failed her; she lay in the
hut unable to drag herself out to search for food. The fire in the corner
that had smouldered so
long between the three great stones was out.
In the day the hot air eddied
through the hut, hot with the breath of the
wind blowing over the vast parched jungle ; at
night she shivered in the
chill dew. She was
dying, and the jungle knew it; it is always waiting;
can scarcely wait for death. When the end was close
upon her a great
shadow; glided into the doorway. Two
black
eyes twinkled at her
little
steadily, two immense white tusks curled up gleaming against the dark-
ness. She sat up, fear came
upon her, the fear of the jungle, blind agonis-
ft
ing fear.
"Appochchi, Appochchi!" she screamed. "He has come, the devil
from the bush. He has come for me as
you said. Aiyo! save me, save me!
Appochchi!"
'As she feU back, the
great boar grunted softly, and glided like a
shadow towards her into the hut. ?I

As the reader closes the book, he

speculates on the meaning of
the tale which has this
ending. Throughout the story, the writer
has drawn in for us, stroke
by stroke, his picture of the jungle as
a sinister beast of
prey which only lives its own life in order to
' S ' : The Villa8e in ** ^ngU (London '"3. Bdward
 XAAEUA TA KAAA 9
bring human life to destruction a sylvan counterpart to the
animated skeleton which is our image of Death.
Haud igitur leti praeclusa est iamia caelo
nee soli
terraeque neque altis aequoris undis,
sed patet immane et vasto respectat hiatu. 1
Under the shadow of this inhuman monster, ever watching and
waiting with a leer on its obscene countenance till it finds its
opportunity to close in upon its victim, the human life of the poor
villagers seems unbearably wretched. The odds against them are
.

so heavy the pressure upon them is so grinding would it not have

; ;

been better for them never to have been born ? And yet the story of
their lives, as it is told by the author in this painful setting, is
undoubtedly worth the telling. We read the tale to the end and
feel that these lives have not been lived for
nothing, even though
at last the jungle overwhelms them. What is the
significance and
the interest of them? Perhaps it is that the cruel and unceasing
struggle with the jungle, which at first sight seems almost to divest
them of their humanity to degrade them to the level of the beasts
that perish 2 or of the creeping things that creep upon the earth 3
subtly reveals them in another light to the inward eye. If the jungle
is a malevolent beast of prey, then the villagers who have fought it
with their bare hands are heroes whose story is an epic. Without
the jungle the village could hardly have risen to be a theme for
literature. And when the jungle swallows the village up, we realize
in retrospect that we have been reading a tale of human prowess
which surpasses the tale told by the ruins of Angkor Wat.

In the North Arabian Desert

A celebrated and indeed almost hackneyed illustration of our
theme is the present state of Petra and Palmyra a spectacle which
has inspired a whole series of modern Western essays in the
philosophy of history, from Les Ruines* onwards. To-day, these
former homes of the Syriac Civilization are in the same state as the
former homes of the Mayan Civilization at Copan and Tikal, and
their monuments astonish and confound the spectator for the same
reason. The parallel is indeed exact, except that hostile Nature is

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book V, 11. 373-5. xlix, w. 12 and 20.

* * Psalm
3 Leviticus xi. 29.
4 Volney, C. F., Comte de: Les Ridnes, ou Meditation sur les Revolutions des Empires
(xst edition, Paris 1791). For an attractive general acount of the caravan cities which
is based upon first-hand and recent archaeological research, especially at Dura, see
Rostovtzett, M.: Caravan^Cittes^ (Oxford 1932, Clarendon Press). For^ Petra see also

almyre
(Paris Vrin) and Partsch, J.: P<
1931,
Sitzungsbenchte Ak. Leipzig, bodv (1922).
 10 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
represented here by the Afrasian Steppe instead of the tropical
Here, too, we see the ruins of huge and splendid public
1
forest.

buildings which are likewise desolate and likewise isolated from the
nearest present human habitations by many leagues of surrounding
wilderness the Afrasian wilderness of dry rock and gravel and
sand which is not less forbidding than the tropical wilderness of
sodden and matted vegetation. The desert has swallowed up Petra
and Palmyra, as the forest has swallowed up Tikal and Copan and ;

here, again, the ruins survive to point a contrast between present

and past which is so great as to be almost unimaginable.
The ruins tell us that these elaborate temples and porticoes and
tombs, at the time when they stood intact, must have been orna-
ments of cities which rivalled the Mayan cities in wealth and
population and here the deductions from the evidence of Archaeo-
;

logy, which are our sole means of composing a picture of the

Mayan Civilization, are reinforced by the written testimony of
historical records. The economic foundations on which the wealth
and population of Petra and Palmyra were supported arc not
matters of conjecture. We
know that the historical pioneers of the
Syriac Civilization who conjured these cities up out of the desert
were masters of the magic which the Syriac Mythology attributes
to Moses.
These magicians knew how to bring water out of the dry rock and
how to find their way across the untrodden wilderness. In their
prime, Petra and Palmyra stood in the midst of irrigated gardens
like those which still surround Damascus
to-day or those which the
Prophet Muhammad depicts in the Qur'an whenever he wishes to
evoke in the minds of the faithful an
image of Paradise but Petra ;
and Palmyra did not live then, any more than Damascus lives
to-day, exclusively or even principally on the fruits of their narrow-
2
verged oases. Their rich men were not their market-gardeners but
their merchants, who
kept oasis in communion with oasis, and
continent with continent, by a busy caravan-traffic from
point to
point across the intervening tracts of steppe and desert gravelly :

hamad and sandy nafud. The Nabataeans of Petra,

operating the
trans-desert route from the Mediterranean
ports of Syria to the
Ocean ports of the Yaman, competed with the Greek seamen of
Alexandria for the trade between the Roman
Empire and India; 5

Hli 2* 55??* ^iS 8*011 seeks to explain the rise and fall of Petra and Palmyra.
*" 7
il^jv zones. i
chmatic For ^
f-
"^r
his application ^' by ,his ^thesis of a periodic shifting oi'
of the hypothesis to the case of
Palmyra, sec Palatine
Dr w 1^^^ afto " tondon
1
Constable), ch. xv. For a general disciwuion of
n /9ii, hyP oth ** *> the histories of
civilizations, ace
Bf'D^S^SS
2 The same
I?So^
is made
point apropos of Jerash (Gerasa) by RostovtzcfF in op. eit on
pp> 67~8 ' 3 See
Rostovtzeff, op. dt, pp. $6-7.
 XAAET1A TA KAAA n
the Palmyrcnes, operating the trans-desert route from
Syria to
'Iraq, virtually monopolized the trade between the Roman Empire
and those regions lying east of it which were ruled
successively
by the Arsacids and the Sasanids. The economic control of trade-
1

routes brought political power in its train; and the Nabataean

Kingdom, extending from Sinai to Damascus and from Tayma to
Beersheba, ranked as one of the principal client-states of Rome
before its annexation by Trajan. 2 As for 3
Palmyra, during those
decades of the third century of the Christian Era when the Roman
Empire was prostrated by a paralytic stroke premonitory of its
coming dissolution, Queen Zenobia succeeded momentarily, before
Aurelian carried her captive, in ruling from the Palmyrene oasis
a premature and abortive 'successor-state' which
anticipated, by
four centuries, the principality of the Caliph 4
Mu'awlyah.
Such were the achievements of the Syriac Civilization under the
stimulus of the desert. And the ruins of Petra and Palmyra, in
testifying, as they stand, to the final victory of the desert over Man,
also testify, by the selfsame posture, to the
previous victory of
Man over the desert. Since the day when the Syriac Society
overcome by the pressure of the human environment in the shape
of the Roman Empire 5 relaxed its grip upon the physical environ-
ment at these two points and allowed the desert to have its way
with Petra and Palmyra again, no other society has ever attempted
to repeat the achievement of the Syriac pioneers by recalling either
of these dead cities to life. The attempt has not even been made up
to the present by Western enterprise, though in our day we dispose

* Sec RostovtscfF, op. cit,, pp. 102-4.

'
a The Nabataean regime in this region lasted altogether for nearly three centuries,
beginning circa
164 B.C.
(Rostoytzeff, op. cit., p. 50).
3
Palmyra is rust heard of in 41 B.C. (RostovtzefT, op. cit., p. 121). The earliest
extant Palmyrcnc inscription was cut in 8 B c. (FeVrier, op. cit., p. 6).
+ Sec vol. It may be noted that while the Nabataean
i, p. 74, above, footnote 4.
client-slate of the Roman Empire was based on the single oasis of Petra and Zenobia' s
aboitivc 'successor-state' on the single oasis of Palmyra, the successiul 'successor-state'
which was established or usurped by Mu'awiyah was based on a pair of oases: those
of Medina and Mecca. The political union of these two oases was the supreme political
achievement of Muhammad. In achieving it, he laid the foundations of a state which
grew, first into a 'successor-state' of the Roman Empire in its Syriac provinces, and then
mto a reintcgration or resumption of the Syriac universal state which had been built
by the Achaemenids and overthrown by Alexander the Great. (See I. C (i) (6), vol. i,
pp. 73-7, above.)
5 Petra and
Palmyra each rose in turn to greatness by finding places for themselves
in the interstices between the dominions of mutually hostile Great Powers whose
hostility was too great to admit of their coming to a direct understanding with each
other, while it was not great enough to drive them into forgoing the advantage of doing
business with one another indirectly through the agency of commercial go-betweens
who would also serve as political buffers. Petra rose in this way in an interstice between
the Selcucid and the Ptolemaic 'successor-state* of the Achaemenian Empire; Palmyra
rose in an interstice between the Roman Empire and the Arsacid Power. Petra was
doomed when the Roman Empire supplanted both the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic Power
alike; Palmyra was doomed when the decay of the Arsacidae left Rome momentarily
without a rival in this quarter likewise pending the rise of the Sasanidae. (See further
Rostovtzeff, op. cit., pp. 26-35.)
 12 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
of technical facilities which the Nabataeans and the Aramaeans
never dreamed of: artesian wells that can tap subterranean water-
supplies quite beyond the reach of picks or
the ken of divining-rods ;

and petrol-driven six-wheeled motor-cars which can traverse in a

day a tract of desert which is a week's journey for a camel. Thus
1

the ruined monuments and the dried-up oases and the abandoned
caravan-routes of Petra and Palmyra declare unmistakably, to the
observer who considers them to-day, a fact which is not revealed in
those lovely gardens that are still watered by the rivers of Damas-
cus the fact that the physical environment in which the Syriac
:

Civilization came to birth was not unusually easy but, on the

contrary, was unusually difficult for Man to master.

On Easter Island
In a different environment again, we may draw a corresponding
conclusion concerning the origins of the Polynesian Civilization 2
from the present state of Easter Island. 3 At the time of its discovery
by modern Western explorers, Easter Island was inhabited by two
races : a race of flesh-and-blood and a race of stone an apparently ;

primitive human
population of Polynesian physique, and a highly
accomplished population of statues. The living inhabitants in that
generation possessed neither the art of carving statues such as these
nor the science of navigating the thousand miles of open sea that
separate Easter Island from the nearest sister-island of the Poly-
nesian Archipelago. Before its discovery by the seamen of the West,
Easter Island had been isolated from the rest of the World for an
unknown length of time. Yet its dual population of flesh and stone
testifies, just as clearly as the ruins of Palmyra or Copan, to a
vanished past which must have been
utterly different from the
visible present.
Those human beings must have been begotten, and those figures
must have been carved, by Polynesian
navigators who once found
their way across the Pacific to Easter Island in
flimsy open canoes,
1 In the year 1930 of the Christian Era, the motor-car and the artcawm well were
being
used by one great man who was not a Westerner but an Arab
KinK 'Abd-al-'Azfc AI
ba ud of the Najd-Hijazin order to reassert Man's
ascendancy over Nature in one of
forblddl toe** of the Afrasian Steppe, namely Central Arabia. With the
^rr
A ol
aid ?S
Western technique, Ibn Sa ud was evoking, in a region which had
previously been
utilized for nothing better than the
ranges of pastoral Nomads, a new world of irrigated
oases, linked together by trans-desert routes which served the dual
and government. The empire ruled by the Wahhabi purpoac of commerce
King from Riyad promised, if it
endured, to reproduce at last, in the twentieth century of the Chmtian Era, an
the empures which had once been ruled image of
by King ftarith from Petra and by Queen
Zenobia from Palmyra. (See Rihani Ameen: Ibn Sa'oud of Arabia: Hit
Land (London 1928 Peopf* and hit
Phllby, H. St. J. B.: Arabia of the Wahhabi* (London
1928, Constable), andConstable);
Arabia (London 1930, Benn).)
f $ ^
P ol
r e 8ted
^Th M
e sian Civilization, see
further Part III. A, below.
3
*nH T^
and Brown,? 1

J.
86 ' S
,V
Macmillan: ^ &^ *f E*t*r Island (London
L

The Riddle of the Pacific (London

I 9 *9,
Pracd);
1924, Fiaher Unwin),
Sifton
 XAAEHA TA KAAA 13
without chart or compass and with no other motor-power than the
wind behind their tiny sails and the human muscular force that
plied their paddles. And this voyage can hardly have been an
isolated adventure which brought one boat-load of
Polynesian
pioneers to Easter Island by a stroke of luck that was not repeated;
for on that supposition it would really be
impossible to account
both for the presence of the population of statues and for the
inability of the latter-day population of human beings to carve
them. The art of sculpture must have been brought to Easter
Jsland by the pioneers, and lost on Easter Island by their descen-
dants, together with the art of navigation. The relapse of these
distant colonists from the cultural level of the Polynesian
Society
elsewhere must have been due to the breaking of their contact with
the rest of Polynesia. On the other hand, the population of statues
is so numerous that it must have taken
many generations to pro-
duce; and during those generations the art of sculpture, which has
been lost in this latter-day age of isolation, must have been kept
alive on Easter Island by continual transmarine intercourse. Taken

together, these considerations point to a previous state of affairs in

which the navigation across those thousand miles of open sea was
carried on regularly over a long period of time. Eventually, for
some reason which still remains a mystery to us, the sea, once
traversed victoriously by Man, closed in round Easter Island, as the
desert closed in round Palmyra and the forest round Copan. Yet,
here again, Nature's reassertion of her power bears testimony to the
prowess of Man in once overcoming her and thus indicates that
there were certain features of unusual difficulty in the physical
environment in which the Polynesian Civilization came to birth.
The truth thus proclaimed in unison by Past and Present on
Easter Island is, of course, in flat contradiction to the popular
Western view that the South Sea Islands are an earthly paradise
and their inhabitants children of Nature in the legendary state of
Adam and Eve before the Fall. Perhaps this view arises from a
mistaken assumption that one portion of the Polynesian environ-
ment constitutes the whole of it. The physical environment of the
Polynesian Society consists, in reality, of water as well as land:
water which presents a formidable challenge to any human beings
who propose to cross it without possessing any better means of
navigation than those, described above, which were actually the
only means at the Polynesian navigators' command. It was by
responding boldly and successfully to this challenge of the estrang-
ing sea by achieving, with their rudimentary means of navigation,
the tour de force of establishing a regular maritime traffic across
the open waters between island and island that the Polynesian
 i 4 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
pioneers won their footing on the specks of dry land which are
scattered through the vast watery wilderness of the Pacific Ocean
almost as rarely as the stars are scattered through the depths of
which constitute
Space. Even granting that these beaching-places
such an infinitesimally small fraction of the Polynesian environ-
ment do an earthly paradise to any human beings who may
offer
succeed in reaching them, it must be borne in mind that the
Polynesians reached them by their own exertions,
after hazarding
their lives upon the waters, whereas the Adam and Eve of the
of Eden by the act
Syriac Mythology were placed in the Garden
of their creator, and did not begin either to exert their minds and
bodies or to hazard their lives until they had been driven out of the
1
Garden, and kept out of it, by the angel with the flaming sword.
It is possible that, in the environment where the Polynesian
Civilization came to birth, there was an untoward degree of sharp-
ness in the contrast between the difficulty of the first ordeal which
had to be passed and the ease of the conditions of life with which the
successful response to this first challenge was rewarded. The toils
and dangers of Polynesian navigation on the Pacific were so for-
midable and the sweets of repose on the islands were so alluring
that the children may well have been tempted to abandon that
great Oceanic world of land and water which their fathers had
opened up for them, in order to sink back each on the island
which he had inherited in virtue of his father's efforts into a life
of primitive ease and isolation. That seems to have been the
history of the decline and fall of the Polynesian Civilization on
Easter Island the island which had to be won and held at the price
:

of the longest sea-passage of all. The colonists of Easter Island

must have been the flower of the Polynesian pioneers and the ;

virtue that was in them not only carried them across a thousand
miles of open sea 2 but availed them before it went out of them
to commemorate their achievement for ever
by creating, at their
distant journey's end, some
of the finest masterpieces ever pro-
duced by Polynesian art. The history of the Polynesian Civilization
on Easter Island may supply the clue to the history of the Poly-
nesian Civilization as a whole. That is a problem which will
demand our notice again hereafter. 3 In this place we are
simply
concerned to point out that the popular Western view of the
Poly-
* For the significance of this myth of the Garden and the FaM, sec above, II, C (ii) ()
i, vol.i,pp 290-3.
2
The nearest land to Easter now inhabited, with the exception of Pitcairn Inland,
_

is in the Gambia Islands, about

1,200 miles to the westward; the little coral patch of
Ducie Island, which lies between the two, is nearly 900 miles from Easter, and hn no
dwellers.' (Routledge, S.: The Mystery of Easter Island (London 1919, Sifton Praed),
p. 292.)
s It is touched upon again in Part III. A, vol. iu, below.
 XAAEIIA TA KAAA 15
nesian environment is mistaken and to explain how it has arisen ;

and the explanation turns out to be very simple. The Western

observers who have given it currency have only had eyes for the
land and have ignored the sea which covers all but a fraction of the
area over which the Polynesian Civilization once ranged. Pre-
sumably they would not have ignored it if they had had to traverse
itthemselves in the craft of the Polynesian navigators, instead of
travelling, as they have done, as passengers in modern Western
ocean-going liners, leaving the responsibility of navigation to be
borne by professional Western navigators with the assistance of
compass and chart.

In New England
Before closing this review of reversions to a state of Nature, the
writer may permit himself to cite two instances one somewhat
out of the way and the other exceedingly obvious which happen
to have come within his own personal observation.
I was once travelling in a rural part of the State of Connecticut
in New England, when I came across a deserted village a not
uncommon spectacle, so I was told, in this section of the United
States, yet a spectacle, nevertheless, which is inevitably surprising
and even disconcerting to a European in America. This particular
village it was called Town Hill had evidently been laid out much
like other New England villages, still inhabited, in some of the more
fertile districts of the same state through which I had already passed
on my journey that very day. For some two centuries, perhaps,
Town Hill had stood with its plank-built Georgian Church in the
middle of the village green, and with the houses round the church,
and with the orchards beyond the houses, and with the corn-fields ,

stretching away beyond the fruit-trees. In 1925 the church still

stood (it was being kept in repair by the State Archaeological
Society as an ancient monument) the houses
;
had vanished (though
their former positions could still be traced by the remnants of their
foundations) the fruit-trees had gone wild and
;
had been swallowed
up in the resurgent undergrowth. As for the fields, they had faded
into the rocks and scrub of the barren hill-side.
away altogether
to play about
Lingering on the spot and allowing my thoughts
the strange sights here presented to me, I marvelled first at an
in this year
apparent paradox. Within the hundred years ending
1925, those vanished New Englanders had wrested from Nature the
whole breadth of a continent. In these few generations they had
on the Atlantic slope,
spread from the spot where I was standing,
to the shores of the Pacific. Yet at the same time they had suffered
Nature to recapture from them this village in the heart of their
 16 THE RANGE OF "CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
homeland a village which their forefathers had founded almost as
soon as they had set foot on American soil a village where, for
;

'the Winning of the West', the

perhaps two hundred years before
ascendancy of Man over Nature had seemed to be established as
securely as in any village in Europe. These were my first thoughts ;

but on second thoughts I began to understand the significance of

what I was looking at. The rapidity, the thoroughness, the abandon
with which Nature had reasserted her dominion over the site of
Town Hill as soon as Man had relaxed his grip, surely gave the
measure of the exertions which Man had formerly made, first to
to hold it. Those
capture this position from Nature and then
exertions must have been extreme ; and,
when one came to think of
it, only an energy as intense as the energy which the breaking-in of
New England had called into play could have been sufficient for
the Herculean labour of breaking-in a whole continent. Thus, so
far from 'the Winning of the West' making the loss of Town Hill

inexplicable, the truth was that, in the loss of Town Hill, the secret
of 'the Winning of the West* was laid bare. The portent of this
village in Connecticut, deserted to-day, explained the miracle
of
those great cities in Ohio and Illinois and Colorado and California
which had sprung into existence overnight. In this hard environ-
ment of New England, an apprenticeship had been served for the
hard task of building the United States. When the apprentice
had felt himself fully trained in nerve and muscle and skill, he had
simply left the place which had been his training-ground and had
gone to the place where he was to do his work in life. The desertion
of Town Hill was not a paradox after all it was of one piece with
;

the great human enterprise which had founded and peopled Cin-
cinnati and Chicago and Denver and San Francisco.

On the Roman Campagna

Similar considerations resolve the apparent paradox in the
present state of the Roman Campagna. It is beside the point to
marvel, with Livy, that an innumerable multitude of yeoman-
warriors should formerly have subsisted in a
region which in his
1
day, as in ours, was a wilderness of barren fell and feverish
gray
In 1931, when the writer of this Study revisited the Roman
*
f Campagna after an
interval of twenty years, he found that this statement n
required qualification. In xo. the
student who made the pilgrimage of the Via Appia Antica found himself
walking through
a wilderness almost from the moment when he the
passed beyond City walls through
the Porta San Sebastiano till the moment when he
approached the outflkirta of Albino.
When he repeated the pilgrimage in 1931, he found that, in the interval, Man had bmi
busily reasserting his mastery over the whole stretch of country that lies between Rome
and the CasteUi Romani. The Via Appia Antica itself was
unchanged (being carefully
preserved, like the church at Town Hill, by archaeological piety) ; but there wae now no
point along its course where the wayfarer was out of sight of modern motor-roadH,
aerodromes, wireless-masts and more impressive than all thesenewly cultivated
nelds. The tension of human energy on the Roman
Campagna is now beginning to n*e
 XAAEHA TA KAAA 17
green swamp where the only surviving vestiges of human habita-
tion were the frail straw huts of a few miserable 1
shepherds. It is
more apposite to reflect that this latter-day wilderness has
repro-
duced the pristine state of the forbidding landscape which was once
transformed by Latin or Volscian pioneers into a cultivated and
populous countryside and that the energy generated in the process
;

of breaking-in this narrow plot of dour Italian soil was the

energy
which afterwards conquered the World in a radius extending from
the Campagna to Britain and Egypt, and from the Alban Hills to
the Atlas and the Caucasus. 2 If an energy which sufficed, in its
diffusion, to build the Roman Empire was first generated and con-
centrated within the limits of the Campagna, this indicates the
degree of human effort involved in first conquering the Campagna
from the wilderness and then maintaining it against reversion. Is
it any wonder that the cradle of the Roman Commonwealth did

revert to its pristine state when the body politic which this cradle
had nurtured eventually turned its energies outwards over all the
kingdoms of the Earth ? Surely it would have been more surprising
if the Campagna had still continued to yield increase to the Roman
husbandman and recruits to the Roman drill-sergeant in those
latter days when the Roman Army was
guarding the frontiers of the
Empire, and tilling theprala legionum, far away on the fringe of the
Afrasian Steppe and on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube ?
We have now passed under review a number of sites in the
American and Asiatic Tropics, in the Afrasian Steppe, in the
Pacific Archipelago, in North America, in the Mediterranean
which have reverted to their pristine state of Nature after having
been the scene of signal human achievements that are now com-
memorated by deserted ruins. In this array, there is the utmost
diversity both in the character of the local physical environment
and in the shape of the yoke which Man has once laid upon it; yet
all these sites agree in bearing unanimous witness to one essential
condition of successful human activity :

Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben

Der taglich sie erobern muss.
3

Even when the efforts of the pioneers have succeeded in conquer-

ing some position from Nature, the conquered ground has to be
the War of
again for the first time since the end of the third century B.C., when, during
Hannibal, it began its great decline towards the zero point at which it has stood through-
out the first nineteen centuries of the Christian Era.
* 'Innumerabilem multitudinem liberorum
capitum in eis fuisse locis quae mine, vix
seminario militum exiguo rehcto, servitia Romana ab solitudine vindicant* (Livy,
Book VI, ch. 12). Compare the allusions in Horace, Epistles, Book I, Ep. xi, 11. 7-8 and 30.
a This is the theme of Professor Tenney Frank in The Economic JERstory of the Roman

Republic (and edition, Baltimore 1927, Johns Hopkins University Press).

3
Faust, 11. 11575-6, quoted above in vol. i on p. 277.
II C
 1 8 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
held, by unremitting efforts on the part of the pioneers' successors,
against Nature's unremitting counter-attacks.
The fields of Egypt
or the gardens of Damascus, which seem at first sight to yield their
fruits automatically to any one who scratches the soil, are really
1

only maintained as 'going concerns' by constant and strenuous

labour. How much greater, then, must have been the labour which
it cost the fathers of the Egyptiac and the Syriac Civilization

to bring the Land of Egypt and the Ghutah of Damascus into

existence out of the primeval jungle-swamp and the primeval
desert? Perhaps we may now consider that we have proved the
proposition which we first took for granted. It seems evident that
the conditions offered to Man by the environments that have been
the birth-places of civilizations have been not unusually easy but
unusually difficult.

Perfida Capua
Having studied the character of certain environments which have
actually been the scene of the geneses of civilizations or of other
signal human achievements, and having found empirically that the
conditions which they have offered to Man have been not easy but
rather the contrary, let us pass on to a complementary study. Let
us examine certain other environments in which the conditions
offered to Man have in fact been easy, and study the effect on
human life which such environments have produced. Jn attempt-
ing this study, we must distinguish between two different situations.
The first is one in which people are introduced into an eafcy
environment after having lived in some difficult environment of one
of the kinds that we have examined above. The second situation is
that of people in an easy environment who have never, so far as
is known, been
exposed to any other environment since their
pre-human ancestors became men. In other words, we have to
distinguish between the respective effects of exposure to an easy
environment upon Mankind in process of civilization and
upon
Primitive Man. Let us deal with the two situations
separately, in
this order, and let us once more follow the
empirical method of
inquiry which we have employed so far.
Let us begin with a classic
example of an easy environment
which is suggested by the last
example of a difficult environment
that has occupied our attention. In Classical
Italy, Rome found her
antithesis in Capua another great and famous city whose destinies
were as different from those of Rome as her The
surroundings.
i
This seems to be the philosophy of Brazil, to
judge by the following amiable saying
which is reported to be current among the Brazilians 'For
: twelve hours in the day we do
our worst with the country; but for the other twelve hours we
sleep, and then God and
the country put things right again!'
 XAAEHA TA KAAA 19
Capuan Campagna was as kindly to Man as the Roman Campagna
was dour x and while the Romans went forth from their forbidding
;

country to conquer one neighbour after another, the Campanians

sat in their smiling country and allowed one neighbour after
another to conquer them. From her last conquerors, the Samnites
of the Abruzzi, Capua was delivered, at her own invitation, by the
intervention of Rome herself; and then, at the most critical moment
of the most critical war in Roman history, on the morrow of the
Battle of Cannae, Capua repaid Rome by opening her gates to
Hannibal, in the hope of recovering her freedom by exchanging one
z
patron for another, As far as Capua was concerned, the futility of
this hope was written large in her previous history but for Hanni- ;

bal, in his war against the first city of Italy, the defection of the
second city of Italy from Rome's side to his looked like a gain which
was quite beyond question. In fact, Hannibal and his Roman
opponents were of one mind in regarding Capua's change of sides
as being the principal immediate consequence of the Battle of
Cannae and perhaps the decisive event in the war. Hannibal
responded to the Campanians' overtures by repairing to Capua and
taking up his winter-quarters there whereupon something hap-
pened which falsified everybody's expectations. A winter spent in
Capua demoralized the troops who had just annihilated the greatest
Roman army that had ever taken the field.
'The Carthaginian army, which [Hannibal] kept under cover there [in
Capua] for the greater part of the winter, had been long and thoroughly
hardened against all the ills that can afflict Mankind but when it came
;

to the good things of this life, the troops lacked both familiarity and
experience. Accordingly these heroes who had resisted the utmost
assaults of adversity were undone by an excess of prosperity and enjoy-
ment; and they fell headlong, because their long abstinence made them
plunge in head-over-ears. The round of sleeping, drinking, eating,
whoring, bathing and taking their ease became sweeter to them as each
passing day confirmed the habit, until they became so enervated by it,
body and soul, that their safety came to rest in the prestige of their past
victories rather than in the present strength of their right arms. It was

1 The name
Campagna, which clings to-day to the cradle of the Roman Common-
wealth in the lowlands between the left bank of the Tiber and the Alban Hills, originally
belonged (in its Latin spelling 'Campania') to the lowlands surrounding Capua, through
which the Volturnus flows on its way from the Abruzzi to the sea, just north of Naples.
The name was extended from the gates of Naples to the gates of Rome by Augustus, to
designate one of the 'regions* into which he re-mapped Roman Italy;
and the name has
persisted in a territory to which it was thus artificially applied, after having died out in
the territory where it was indigenous.
2 It is
noteworthy that while Capua, after Cannae, betrayed Rome who had fought
the Samnites on her account, the Samnites, who had been fought and conquered by
Rome on account of Capua, remained loyal to Rome, with the single exception of the
south-easternmost canton of the former Samnite Confederation, the Hirpini. The
loyalty of the Samnites to the Romans during the Hannibalic War was as remarkable as
that of the Sikhs to the British during the Indian Mutiny.
20 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
the opinion of military experts that, in allowing them to come to this
pass, their commander
committed a still greater fault than in failing to
march on Rome immediately after the Battle of Cannae. It might be
argued that his dilatoriness after
Cannae had merely postponed the hour
of final whereas his error at Capua had deprived him of the
victory,
1
strength to win the war at all.'

Hannibal's fatal error was never committed by the Roman

Government to the end of its days. When Rome gave up the con-
script army
exercised by the laborious husbandry of her Cam-
with which she had conquered the World, in order to
pagna
her conquests under the guard of an army of professionals,
place
she did not make the mistake of stationing this new model army in
2
Capua or even in any of those delectable places along the Riviera
where the spoilt children of our modern Western Society take up
their winter-quarters nowadays. She took care that the soldiers of
the Empire should be tempered by an environment which was not
less severe than that which had produced the redoubtable soldiers
of the Republic. The legionaries who were no longer to be exercised
as yeomen in the Campagna by keeping its marshes in drainage and
its fells under the plough were now stationed along the Rhine and

the Danube among the Transalpine forests and rains and frosts,
to be exercised by this new challenge from Physical Nature for
their border warfare with the North-European barbarians. The
avoidance of Hannibal's error by Augustus prolonged the life of the
Roman Empire by some four hundred years. 3
Augustus clearly divined the incompatibility between military
efficiency and an easy environment, and he set himself to reform
the spoilt and insubordinate soldiery which he inherited from the
civil wars by banishing it to guard the frontiers on the bleaker side
of the Alps. While the great Roman statesman was carrying this
difficult policy through,, was
he ever confirmed in his resolution by
any reminiscences of the Greek literature in which he had been
educated?
The principle which governed the military policy of Augustus
had been made the subject of a fable by the Greek historian Hero-
dotus four centuries earlier. The fable was celebrated, since the
great Greek writer had given it prominence by telling it as the tail-
4
piece of his work; and the fable was also apt, since it was told by
i
Livy, Book XXIII, ch. 18.
a The Rivieraconstituting, as it did at the time, the principal overland route
between and Transalpine Europe would have offered * convenient station for
Italy
the Imperial forces from a purely
geographico-stratcgical point of view.
3 Of course even toe
statesmanship of an Augustus was only able to delay the doom
of Rome without being able permanently to avert it. For the eventual transference
of the
military and political power in the Roman Empire from the hands of the Romans them-
selves to the hands of the Transalpine
4
barbarians, see IL D
(v), pp. 164-5, below.
Herodotus, Book IX, ch. 122.
 XAAEIIA TA KAAA zi
Herodotus of the Persians a military people who once upon a time
had performed a feat which had afterwards proved to be beyond
the genius of Hannibal and had barely been achieved by the staying-
power of the Romans the : feat of establishing, by force of arms, a
universal state. 1
As Herodotus tells the story, it was a Persian grandee named

Artembares, in the generation of the conquest,

c
who first suggested to his Persian fellow-countrymen the proposition
which they adopted and laid before Cyrus, to the following effect:
"Now that Zeus has put down Astyages from his seat and has given
'

the dominion to the Persians as a nation and to you, Sire, as an individual,

why should we not emigrate from the confined and rocky territory which
we at present possess, and occupy a better? There are many near at
hand and many more at a distance, of which we have only to take our
choice in order to make a greater impression on the World than we make
as it is. This is a natural policy for an imperial people, and we shall
never have a finer opportunity of realising it than now, when our Empire
is established over vast populations and over the entire continent of
Asia/'
'Cyrus, who had
listened and had not been impressed, told his
petitioners to do as they wished, but he qualified his advice by telling
them in the same breath to prepare their minds for exchanging positions
with their present subjects. Soft countries, he informed them, invariably
breed soft men, and it is impossible for one and the same country to
produce splendid crops and good soldiers. The Persians capitulated
to
the superior intelligence of Cyrus, confessed their error, abandoned
their proposition, and elected to live as an imperial people in a rough
country rather than to cultivate the lowlands as some other
nation 's
slaves.' 2

* The
Symc universal state had taken the form of a Persian Empire. Whether thea
coming Hellenic universal state should take the form of a Carthaginian Empire or
Roman Empire was the real issue of the Hannibalic War,
omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
horrida contrcmuere sub altis aethens oris,
in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum
omnibus humams esset terraque marique.
(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book III, 11. 834-7.)
a Whatever the historical value of this fable may be, it is certainly an historical fact
that the rough country of Persis the modern province of Pars and the ancient homeland
of 'the Persians' in the original narrower sense of a name which was afterwards extended
to cover all the kindred peoples of Iran continued, unlike Latium, to be a breeding-
ground for soldiers not only so long as its empire lasted but even after its fall.
More than
Sve centuries after the overthrow of the Empire of the Achaemenidae by Alexander the
in the Empire ot
Great, the country which had bred the armies of Cyrus produced,
the Sasanidae. a new military power which contended on equal terms with Rome
and
almost anticipated the Arabs in expelling an intrusive Hellenism from its last footholds
in
in the Syriac World (see I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 75-6, above). Thus.the Persians
their day, did better than either the Romans or the New Englanders. They managed
to
make use of their high energies in a great feat of expansion without at the same time
losing their grip upon the rough country within
whose confines those high energies had
been generated. Though the Persian soldiers of the Great King served their time, m the
as Egypt and Anatolia, their home-
garrisons of the Achaememan Empire, as far afield
steads in the highlands of Pars did not go the way of Town Hill, Connecticut,
or of Latin
Ulubrae (Juvenal, Satires, x, 1. 102). And so it was in vain that Alexander smirched His
 22 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
The Temptations of Odysseus
This fable of the Persians' Choice, like the true story of Hanni-
bal's at
Army Capua, signifies that when human beings who have
been living under pressure are set at ease, their energies are not
released but are rather relaxed by this pleasurable change in their
conditions of life. The same conception appears in a work of
classical literature that is older and more famous than the histories
of Herodotus and Livy. It is the theme of those four books of the
Odyssey in which the hero tells Alcinous the story of his wanderings
1

from the day when he sailed with his companions from Troy to
the day when he was washed up, the sole survivor, on the shores of
Calypso's island.
In that long series of adventures, it is not when he is encounter-
ing his difficulties and dangers running the gauntlet of the
Laestrygons or confronting the Cyclops or making the passage
between Scylla and Charybdis that Odysseus comes nearest to
failure in his struggle to make his way home to Ithaca. Rather,
these ordeals speed him on towards the goal of his
his course
endeavours by calling his faculties of audacity and nimblcncss of
wit and endurance and ingenuity into action. 2 He comes nearest to
failure when the resolution to persevere on the difficult and danger-
ous course towards the journey's end has to compete with the
attractions of an assured and immediate ease.
Thus, when the three companions whom he sent out on a recon-
naissance into the land of the lotus-eaters fell in with the inhabitants,

'the lotus-eaters did not bethink them to do our

companions to death,
but gave them of the lotus to taste. And which soever of them did eat
that honey-sweet fruit, he no longer had the will to bring back tidings
nor in any wise to return; but their will was to remain there with the
lotus-eaters, feeding on lotus, and to think no more of the homeward
voyage. So I took them to the ships weeping, under duress, and in the
hollow ships I dragged them under the benches and bound them there.
And then I bade the rest of my companions come aboard the swift ships

glory by burning the Great King's palace at Persepolis. The atony fields and bleak
pastures amid which the ruined palace stood (and stands to-day) did not eeane to breed
warriors. Alexander himself was so deeply impressed
by the military virtue* of the
Imperial People whom he had just overthrown that he enlisted the defeated I 'cmanii in
his own army on equal terms with his victorious Macedonians, I lad I lorodotiM lived
a century later than he did, and carried his narrative of the secular conflict between the
Synac and Hellenic worlds down to the close of Alexander's dramatic contribution to
the story, he might have capped his fable with a
prophecy (in hia ironic vein) that the
rough country which had bred soldiers for Cyrus and soldiers for Alexander would
continue to bear these formidable crops so
long as the Persian peasant remained on hi*
homestead to sow the dragon's-tooth seed,
*
Odyssey Books IX-XII.
3 k
*EvQa> St Trora) i ,

0awroto, </>&ovs oMvavres ratpov$.

(Odyssey, IX, 11, 62-3 and 565-6.)
 XAAEIJA TA KAAA 23
with all
speed, lest any man should lose thought of the voyage home by
1
eating of the lotus.'

Again, when half his ship's company accepted Circe's invitation

to come into her parlour,
'she led them in and gave them benches and chairs to sit on and mixed
for them cheese and barley and yellow honey in Pramnean wine; and
among the food she sprinkled baneful drugs, to make them utterly
forget their native land. And then when she had given it to them and
they had drunk it up, straightway she smote them with her staff and
penned them in pig-styes. And, lo, they had the heads of swine and the
voice and the bristles, yea and the body thereof, 2 albeit their under-
standing was steadfast as aforetime.'
3

It needed not only Odysseus's human sword but Hermes' divine

herb to rescue the poor fools from Circe's black magic.
Thereafter, Odysseus himself would have gone deliberately to
his death, in the Sirens' clutches, when the enchantment of their
singing fell upon his ears, had he not beforehand stopped his com-
panions' ears with wax and made them bind him hand and foot to
the mast and enjoined upon them only to multiply his bonds if he
4
besought them to release him.
Perhaps the hero is least heroic when, shipwrecked and alone,
he is washed up on Calypso's island and is kindly entreated by the
Goddess 5 a fairer than Penelope 6 who takes him to dwell with
her in her earthly paradise 7 and promises him an immortality of per-
petual youth. He finds salvation when the nymph ceases to please
8

him when he begins to pass his nights as an unwilling lover in her

willing arms and his days sitting on the sea-shore (as he is shown
at his first appearance in the poem) with his eyes never dry of tears
and his life ebbing away in his longing for home. 9 This revolt, in
the eighth year of a passive captivity, 10 against a state of melancholy
ease in which he might have continued for evermore, is the inward
release which has its external counterpart in the intercession of
Athene before the throne of Zeus and in the liberating mission
of Hermes. 11 When Calypso pleads with him, at the last moment,
to remain, Odysseus answers :

"Lady Goddess, be not wroth with me for this. I, even I, know it all
1
:

I know that the prudent Penelope is not to be compared with thee, in

r Od. IX, 11. 92-102. An historical analogue to this legendary incident is the soporific
effect upon the Polynesian navigators of the sweets of repose on the South Sea Islands.
(See pp. 13-15, above)
*
Compare Plato's description of 'the City of Swine* m
The Republic, 3693-3720,
which iscited above m
Part II. B, vol. i, p. 193, footnote i.
3 Od. X. U. 233-40. < Od. XII, 11. 39-54 and 153-200.
* Od. Vh, 11. 255-7. * Od. V, 11. 211-18.
7 See the beautiful description of it, as Hermes saw it, in Od. V, 11.63-74,
8 Od. V, 1. 209, and VII, 1. 257. Od. V, 11. 151-8.
10 Od. VII, 11. 259-61. Od. V, U. 1-148.
24 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
face to face. She is a mortal woman, while thou art
figure nor in stature,
deathless and ageless. Yet none the less I long and pray daily to reach
if some God
my home and to behold the day of my returning. Yea,it.andFor I have in
shall wreck me in the wine-faced sea, I will endure
a well schooled in enduring sorrows. Already have I
my breast spirit
suffered full many, and have borne the bufferings of wave and war.
>x
I care not if this other blow be added unto those."

WhenOdysseus speaks these words, he is his clear-sighted

and
indomitable self again; and nothing not even Poseidon's final

stroke of malice, which the hero foresees can prevent him from
as he knows already from the
reaching Ithaca now. Moreover,
mouth of Teiresias' ghost, he will not rest on his oars, even when
he has regained his home and slain Penelope's suitors. Another
bear his oar on his shoulder
journey awaits him, in which he must
and exchange the toils and perils of the sea for those of the land. 2

The Flesh Pots of Egypt

This motif"in the Hellenic story of Odysseus' return from Troy to
Ithaca appears, in a variant form, in the Syriac story of the Chosen
People's exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land. The attraction
which undermines the resolution of the Israelites during their
wanderings in the wilderness is not the present delight of a Lotus
Land or a Calypso's Isle, but a hankering after the flesh pots of
Egypt, which may perhaps be theirs again to-morrow if only they
3

turn back now. They have no sooner crossed the sea dry-shod, and
seen Pharaoh and his host perish in the returning waters, than they
begin to murmur in the wilderness against Moses and Aaron :
'Would to God we had
died by the hand of the Lord in the Land of
Egypt, when we sat flesh pots and when we did cat bread to the
by the
full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness to kill this whole
4
assembly with hunger. . . .

'Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill

us and our children and our cattle with thirst? 5. ,.

'Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish which we did
eat in Egypt freely the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the
onions and the garlic but now our soul is dried away: there is nothing
at all beside this manna before our eyes.' 6

Even when they have crossed the wilderness as sSafely as they had
crossed the sea, and stand at last on the threshold of Canaan, their
 XAAEHA TA KAAA 25
thoughts fly back to Egypt as they listen to the evil report of their
spies their sight of the Sons of Anak, the children of the giants,
in whose presence the spies had seemed and felt like
grasshoppers.
'And all the congregation lifted up their voice and cried; and the
people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured
against Moses and against Aaron, and the whole congregation said unto
them: "Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would
God we had died in this wilderness! And wherefore hath the Lord
brought us unto this land, to fall by the sword, that our wives and our
children should be a prey? Were it not better for us to return into
Egypt?" And they said one to another: "Let us make a captain and
let us return into Egypt." J1

The Chosen People are unable to enter into their inheritance until
thishaunting and enervating recollection of the flesh pots has been
effaced; and it is not effaced until forty years of purgatory spent
in wandering over the face of the wilderness which they have just
put behind them in one straight and rapid trek have brought
the older generation to the grave and the younger generation to
manhood. 2
The Doasyoulikes
These passages from myth and history surely demonstrate,
between them, that when people are translated whether in 'real
life* or in imagination from conditions of pressure into conditions
of ease, the effect upon their behaviour is demoralizing. It may
perhaps be retorted that this is a truism, and that we might have
spared ourselves the trouble of demonstrating the fact and not
have overlooked the obvious explanation. The ill effect, it may
be argued, is a consequence of the process of transition and not a
consequence of the condition in which the transition results, 'You
infer, from the illustrations which you have put before us, that
conditions of ease are inimical to civilization in themselves. You
might as well argue that a full stomach is inimical to health on the
ground that a heavy meal has been known to prove fatal to a
starving man. You know very well that the proper treatment for
starvation is neither to fill the patient's empty stomach at one
sitting nor to keep him at starvation point in perpetuity,
but to
re-accustom him to taking a normal amount of nourishment by
increasing his ration gradually. The disastrous effect of the heavy
meal upon the health of the starving man was due not to any inherent
fault in the quantity of the full ration, but solely to the rash abrupt-
ness with which it was administered.' In order to meet this

* Numbers xvi. 1-4.

* Numbers xiv. a6-3S- On this point, see also II. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. i, pp. 334-5i
above.
26 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND -RESPONSE
criticism, turn to the second of the two situations which
we must
we have of people in an easy
distinguished above the situation
environment who have never, so far as is known, been exposed to
ancestors became
any other environment since their pre-human
men. In this case, the factor of transition is eliminated and we are
enabled to study the effect of easy conditions in the absolute.
Here is an authentic picture of it from Nyasaland, as seen by a
Western observer, nearly half a century ago, in the early days of
'the opening-up of Africa':

'Hidden away in these endless forests, like birds' nests in a wood, in

terror of one another, and of their common foe, the slaver, are small
native villages; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells Primaeval Man,
without clothes, without civilisation, without learning, without religion
the genuine child of Nature, thoughtless, careless, and contented.
This manis apparently quite happy; he has practically no wants. One

stick, pointed, makes him a spear; two sticks rubbed together make him
a fire; fifty sticks tied together make him a house. The bark he peels
from them makes his clothes; the fruits which hang on them form his
food. It is perfectly astonishing, when one thinks of it, what Nature can
do for the animal-man, to see with what small capital after all a human
being can get through the World. I once saw an African buried. Accord-
ing to the custom of his tribe, his entire earthly possessions and he was
an average commoner were buried with him. Into the grave, after the
body, was lowered the dead man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a
mud bowl, and last his bow and arrows the bowstring cut through the
middle, a touching symbol that its work was done. That was all. Four
items, as an auctioneer would say, were the whole belongings for half a
century of this human being. No man knows what a man is till he has
seen what a man can be without, and be withal a man. That is to say, no
man knows how great Man is till he has seen how small he has been once.
'The African is often blamed for being lazy, but it is a misuse of words.
He does not need to work; with so bountiful a Nature round him it
would be gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as it is
called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and as little
blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise. The fact is, Africa is a nation of
the unemployed.
'This completeness, however, will be a sad drawback to
development.
Already it is found difficult to create new wants and when
; labour is
required, and you have already paid your man a yard of calico and a
string of beads, you have nothing in your possession to bribe him to
another hand's turn. Nothing almost that you have would be the
slightest use to him. . . .

*A fine-looking people, quiet and domestic, their

life-history from the
cradle to the grave is of the utmost
simplicity. Too ill armed to hunt,
they live all but exclusively on a vegetable diet. A small part of the year
they depend, like the monkeys, upon wild fruits and herbs; but the
staple food is a small tasteless millet-seed which they grow in gardens,
 XAAEHA TA KAAA 27
crush in a mortar, and stir with water into a thick porridge. Twice a
day, nearly all the year round, each man stuffs himself with this coarse
and tasteless dough, shovelling it into his mouth in handfuls, and con-
suming at a sitting a pile the size of an ant-heap. His one occupation is to
grow this millet, and his gardening is a curiosity. Selecting a spot in the
forest, he climbs a tree, and with a small home-made axe lops off the
branches one by one. He then wades through the litter to the next tree,
and hacks it to pieces also, leaving the trunk standing erect. Upon all
the trees within a circle of thirty or forty yards' diameter his axe works
similar havoc, till the ground stands breast-high in leaves and branches.
Next, the whole is set on fire and burnt to ashes. Then, when the first
rains moisten the hard ground and wash the fertile chemical constituents
of the ash into the soil, he attacks it with his hoe, drops in a few hand-
fuls of millet, and the year's work is over. But a few weeks off and on
are required for these operations, and he may go to sleep till the rains are
over, assured of a crop which never fails, which is never poor, and which
will last him till the rains return again.
'Between the acts he does nothing but lounge and sleep ; his wife, or
wives, are the millers and bakers; they work hard to prepare his food,
and are rewarded by having to take their own meals apart, for no African
would ever demean himself by eating with a woman. I have tried to
think of something else that these people habitually do, but their
vacuous life leaves nothing more to tell.'
1

This piece of first-hand testimony to the Sthos and behaviour of

Marx in an easy environment has been chosen for quotation here
because of the remarkable sharpness of vision and depth of insight
which the witness displays ; but of course his evidence does not
stand alone. It could be supported, if that were necessary, by other
modern Western evidence, ranging in Time over the four centuries
that have elapsed since Western Man first began to take the whole
World for his field, and ranging in Space over all parts of the
World where he has found primitive societies still surviving. 2
From the opposite extremity of Tropical Africa, we could cite
life of the Dinka and the Shilluk
similar descriptions of the a life
some specimen in 'a living museum', the
which exhibits to-day, like
circumstances in which the fathers of the Egyptiac Civilization
were living before they responded to the challenge of desiccation
and plunged into the jungle-swamp of the Lower Nile Valley. 3
*
Drummoncl, H.: Tropical Africa (London 1888, Hodder and Stoughton), pp. 55-6
and 58-9.
a jfor a
survey and classification of primitive societies that have come under the direct
observation of our modern Western explorers and anthropologists, see The Material
Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples: an essay in correlation, by Hob-
house, L. T., Wheeler, G. C.. and Ginsberg, M. (London 1915, Chapman and Hall,
reprinted in 1930), which has been cited above in I. C (m) (a\ vol. i, p. 147, footnote a
description of the social institutions of the Dinka and the Shilluk which
3 Sec the has
been quoted above in II. C (ii) (6) 2, vol. i, on p. 313, from Childe, V. G.: The Most
Ancient East (London 1928, Kegan Paul), pp. 10-1 1. For a fuller account, see Seligman,
C. G. and B. Z.: Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan (London 1932, Routledge).
28 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Again, this Tropical African evidence could be reinforced by
records of primitive tropical life in distant longitudes in Amazonia
1
:

or in Melanesia. 2 All this modern Western evidence is readily

accessible; and for this reason we will hold it in reserve and will
close our review of the effect of easy conditions in the absolute (as
distinct from the effect of easy conditions succeeding to difficult
conditions, which we have examined already) by citing a descrip-
tion of Hellenic authorship, albeit this description is only given at
second hand and has manifestly been enriched by certain legendary
touches. Here is Herodotus's account of a people called the Argip-
paei who were to be found at the farthest extremity, as it stood
in
his day, of the trade-route leading from the Greek settlements on
the north coast of the Black Sea north-eastward into the interior of
the great Eurasian Steppe 3 :

'Up to this point, the whole of the country that I have described is
plain-land with a deep soil, but from this point onwards it is broken
country and the soil is stony. If you cross this broken country and
there is a great stretch of it you come to the foothills of lofty moun-
tains and these foothills are inhabited by people who are all bald from
;

birth, men and women alike. They also have snub noses and bushy
beards, and a language of their own, though they wear Scythian clothes;
and they live off trees. The tree off which they live is called the Ponticum.
It is just about the size of a fig-tree, and it bears a fruit the size of a bean,
with a stone in it. When the fruit ripens, they bag it in cloths, and then
it exudes a thick black substance which is called
aschy. This they either
suck or drink mixed with milk, while from the thick dregs they make
cakes and use these for solid food. They have not much livestock
because there is not any good pastureland there but every man lives
;

under his tree. In the winter he covers in the tree with a tent of close
white felt; in the summer he lives under the tree in the open. These
people are not ill-treated by anybody. They are left in peace because
they are regarded as holy, and they possess no arms. Their neighbours
bring their disputes to them for arbitration, and anyone who takes
4
asylum with them is safe from injury.'
This Hellenic description of primitive life in Central Asia and
the foregoing Western description of primitive life in Central
Africa give, between them, a clear picture of how Man does live
where he has never been exposed to a challenge either from the
1 For the
absence of response to any stimulus from the environment in the Amazon
Basin (except, of course, on its Andean rim), see the allusions in Means, P. A : Ancient
Civilisations of the Andes (New York 1931, Scribner), p. 2$, qualified by Nordenskitfld'a
observations which have been cited in II. C (ii) (a) 2, vol. i, on p. 259, footnote i, above.
2 See
Malinowski, B.: Argonauts of the Pacific (London 1922, Routledge).
3 The
possibility that, a century or so before Herodotus's day, this trade-route may
have extended right across the Eurasian Steppe, from the north-eastern extremity of the
Hellenic World to the north-western extremity of the Sinic World, is examined
by
Hudson, G. F., m Europe and China: A Survey of their Relations from the Earliest Times
to 1800 (London 1931, Edward Arnold), ch. i .
'Beyond the North Wind'.
*
Herodotus, Book IV, ch. 23. See also chs. 24 and 25.
 XAAEHA TA KAAA 29
physical or from the human environment. He vegetates, quite
comfortably and happily, in a state of lethargy; and, to all appear-
ance, he might continue to vegetate in perpetuity, were he not on
the point of being exposed to a formidable challenge from the
human environment at last.
This imminent challenge is portended in the very fact that his
manner of life has come under the observation of one of those
energetic societies that are in process of civilization; for his
encounter with these importunate strangers will not end in a
mere platonic acquaintance. They observe in order to take action;
and, when once the explorer has crossed the primitive's threshold,
the trader and the missionary and the soldier are sure to follow in
quick succession at the explorer's heels. The primitive's isolation
isterminated, his peace is broken, his comfort and happiness are
replaced by a consciousness of pressure and a feeling of anxiety.
In fact, he is confronted by a challenge under which it is impossible
for his lethargy to persist. The lethargy may pass into death or it
may pass into action, but on either alternative it will pass away.
The possible alternative outcomes of collisions between primitive
societies and examined in
societies in process of civilization are
later parts of this Study. 1 In this place we are
concerned solely with
the state in which the primitive societies arefound existing at the
moment when the first contact takes place. This state makes a pro-
found impression upon the intruders because there is an extreme
contrast between the two colliding ways of life between the Sthos
of people who have been sheltered from challenges hitherto by an
easy environment and the fethos of people who have been challenged
and have responded victoriously. This impression works so power-
fully upon the intruders' emotions and imagination that it issues in
mythology.
The classic Hellenic exposition of the myth is the fable of the
Lotus Eaters, which we have quoted already apropos of the effect
of the lotus fruit upon Odysseus' companions. A classic Western
2

exposition is 'The History of the Great and Famous Nation of the

Doasyoulikes, who came away from the Country of Hardwork
because they wanted to play on the Jews' Harp all day long'. In
Charles Kingsley's fable, an improvident people who persist in
living a life of primitive ease in
an earthly paradise overshadowed
by the eruptive crater of Etna, pay the penalty by degenerating
into Tropical African gorillas. This is the complement to another
Western fable which we have dealt with in an earlier chapter: 3
general way they are examined in Part VIII; the special case of the collisions
* In a

between primitive societies and our Western Civilization is further examined in

in
j.
VTT
a See pp. 22-3, above. 3 See II, C (ii) (a) I, vol. i, pp. 216-21, above.
30 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
'The History of that Virtuous and Provident Creature Nordic
Man, who followed the retreating Ice Cap because he wanted to
harden his Moral Fibre.' In the Western version of the myth,
which these two fables convey between them, the clear vision of the
primitive ethos in an easy environment, which
we find in the verse
of Homer and the prose of Herodotus, is obscured by the mists of
self-righteousness and self-interest. Yet these blemishes are irrele-
vant to our present purpose and, if we consent for the moment to
;

ignore them, we may perceive, underlying them, the philosophic

truth which we have studied in the Syriac fable of the Garden of
Eden. The same philosophic truth is mirrored in the fable of the
1

Lotus Eaters. In fact, the objective view of the primitive ethos in

2
easy circumstances is found, when we abstract it, to be substan-

tially the same in the minds of the Western

and the Hellenic
observer. Alike, they see that the primitive environment presents
the sharpest contrast to their own; they see that there is a corre-
sponding contrast between the Sthos which has been induced in the
1 See II. C
(li) () i, vol. i, pp. 290-3, above, for a discussion of the fable of the
Garden of Eden and for the relevant quotations from Hesiod, Plato, Virgil, Origen,
Volney, Huntington, and Myres. It will be noticed that the three passages quoted from
the works of Western scholars are simply expurgated versions of the myth which the
fable of Nordic Man renders so crudely.
z In all versions of the myth, the objective view the purely intellectual perception of
the facts has to be disentangled from certain aesthetic and emotional concomitants.
The difference between the turns which these concomitants take in the Western and
Hellenic versions throws some interesting side-lights upon the difference of outlook
which distinguishes the Hellenic from our Western Civilization. In the fable of the Lotus
Eaters, the innocence and happiness of the primitive fithos in easy circumstances are
appreciated at their full aesthetic value appreciated so keenly that the Hellenic observer
feels a lively fear of being captivated by this charming way of life and succumbing to its
lethargy and so being beguiled into abandoning those practical ends on the pursuit of
which his own civilization depends. The Hellene does not want to remake the Lotus
Eater m his own image. Indeed, the idea never occurs to him. He is content to avoid
turning into a Lotus Eater himself, and even on this point he is in two minds. As he
sails away, he looks back on Lotus Land with a certain wistful regret. 'Perhaps', he
thinks, *I might have been happier as a Lotus Eater after alll' The Western observer's
attitude is amusingly different. As a rule, he is blind to the beauty of the life which he
is observing. A
Malinowski's appreciation of the artistic and ritual and social refine-
ments with which 'the Argonauts of the Pacific' occupy their vast leisure is the exception
which proves the rule. The typical Western observer dismisses such primitive occupa-
tions as child's-play and triviality and waste of time. He is quite immune from the
possibility of being captivated by thern himself, and there is no shadow of this fear on
his mind. The emotion which he feels is disgust disgust that the Doasyoulikes should
have played truant from the Country of Hardwork; disgust that the Shilluk and the
Dinka should have evaded the challenge of desiccation to which the virtuous Egyptian
has responded by becoming a fallah. In the Westerner's view, this weak-minded
malingering is so contemptible that it must bring the wretches who indulge in it to a
bad end. A
Doasyoulike, left to himself, is bound to degenerate into a gorilla. It follows
that the duty of Nordic Man to intervene,
it is m order to save the Doasyoulike, in spite
of himself, from his natural and well-deserved fate. Fortunately, and self-interest
duty;
coincide, for the Doasyoulike can only be saved by being remade in Nordic Man's
image, and the first step in this transfiguration is to make him serve an apprenticeship aa
Nordic Man's hewer of wood and drawer of water. Nordic Man can do with any amount
of cheap labour. *And we know that all things work together for good to them that love
God, to them who are the called according to His purpose* (Romans viii. 28). Fortified
in his resolution by this oracle from the Sortes Biblicae, Nordic Man takes the poor
Doasyoulike firmly in hand and in the various roles of taskmaster, salesman, and
evangelist arouses him from his lethargy, with ultimate consequences which are not yet
apparent but which may prove to be surprising.
 XAAEIIA TA KAAA 31

primitive by his easy circumstances and the ethos which has been
induced by a strenuous life in themselves ; they see that the primi-
tive will notand cannot ever join them in running the race of
civilization 1 so long as
an easy environment continues to shield
him from the necessity; and finally they see that they themselves,
if they succumb to this insidious environment, will cease to run
with patience the race that is set before them.

II. THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES

A Plan of Operations
Wehave now perhaps established decisively the truth that ease
is inimical to civilization. The results of our investigation up to
this point appear to warrant the proposition that, the greater the
ease of the environment, the weaker the stimulus towards civiliza-
tion which that environment administers to Man. Can we now
proceed one step farther? Are we warranted in formulating, in
equally simple and abstract terms, the inverse proposition that the
stimulus towards civilization grows stronger in proportion as the
environment grows more difficult? Let us put this second pro-
position to the test by our now well-tried empirical method. Let us
review first the evidence in favour of the proposition and then the
evidence against it, and see what inference emerges. Evidence
indicating that the difficulty and the stimulus of an environment are
apt to increase^ aripassu is not hard to lay hands upon. Rather, we
are likely to be embarrassed by the wealth of illustrations that leap
to the mind. Most of these illustrations present themselves in the
form of comparisons. Let us begin by sorting out our illustrations
into two groups in which the points of comparison relate to the
physical environment and to the human environment respectively;
and let us first consider the physical group. It subdivides itself into
two categories: comparisons between the respective stimulating
effects of physical environments which present different degrees of

difficulty; and comparisons between the respective stimulating

effects of old ground and new ground, apart from the intrinsic
nature of the terrain.

The Yellow River and the Yangtse

Let us compare, for example, the different degrees of difficulty

which are presented respectively by the lower valleys of the Yellow
River and the Yangtse starting in either case from the point
where the river issues from its last gorge in order to flow the rest of
its way through open country to the coast.
The primeval state of the lower section of the Yellow River
* For this metaphor, see II. C (ii) (a) r, vol. i, pp. 333~4> above.
32 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Valley vividly described in a passage from the work of a dis-
is

tinguished Sinologist which has been quoted in an earlier chapter.

1

When Man first took this watery chaos in hand, the river was not
navigable at any season; in the winter it was either frozen or
choked with floating ice ; the melting of this ice in the spring pro-
duced devastating annual floods which repeatedly changed the
river's course by carving out new channels, while the old channels
turned into jungle-covered swamps. This was the state of the
river as Man first found it and to-day, when some three or four
;

thousand years of human effort have drained the swamps and have
confined the main channel of the river between embankments, the
devastating action of the floods has not been eliminated. The
visitations have merely been reduced in frequency only to ravage
the works of Man with greater violence and over a wider range
when they do occur.
The flood-waters of the Yellow River which, in the state of
Nature, used to spread themselves annually over the plains, now in
normal years travel harmlessly between embankments from the
exit of the gorges to the sea but, like Gods restrained by human
;

impiety from satisfying their lust to destroy, these floods, in

passing, prepare for a future revenge. They pile up trouble for
Man in the literal sense by depositing the silt which they have
brought down from the mountains as they slacken speed and move
on sluggishly over the flat river-bed to which, in their lower course,
the embankments now confine them. Year by year, as the deposits
accumulate, the level of this river-bed rises above the level of the
fields on either side year by year, the people raise the height of
;

the embankments, to prevent the flood-waters from spilling over.

Yet at last there comes a point at which the level of the river-bed is
so high above the level of the surrounding country that no heighten-
ing or thickening of the embankments avails any longer to lend
them the requisite resisting power; and then, in some year of high
flood, the imprisoned river savagely bursts its banks and engulfs
a whole countryside, obliterating the fields and sweeping away the
buildings and drowning the live stock and the population. Since
the history of the region began to be recorded, these periodic
inundations have occurred innumerable times; and on several
occasions the river has changed its course completely. At the
present moment it debouches into the Gulf of Chihli near the mid-
point of its south-western coast, almost opposite the tip of the
Liaotung Peninsula; in the prehistoric age it debouched at the
north-west corner of the Gulf through the bed in which the Paiho
River flows to-day ;* but during the intervening three or four
* See II. C (a) (b) 2, vol. i, pp. 318-20, above. 2
Op. cit, loc. cit.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 33
millennia has played greater vagaries than this. Less than a
it

century ago it was not debouching into the Gulf of Chihli at all.
It was only the inundation of 1852 that diverted the river back into
the Gulf from a channel debouching, south of the
Shantung
Peninsula, direct into the Yellow Sea; and this was not the first
time on record that the Yellow River had switched its course from
one side of the Shantung Peninsula to the other.
A
remarkable contrast to this is presented by the lower valley of
the Yangtse. The Lower Yangtse drains a basin where the land is
potentially no less fertile than the northern plains and where
agriculture has not to labour, as it labours there, under the twofold
scourge of flood and drought. The Yangtse sometimes emulates his
northern brother in inundating his human neighbours' fields, 1 but
he never refuses to bear their craft upon his waters. 2
Such are the respective characters of the two great rivers, as they
were in the beginning and as they are to-day. And where did the
Sinic Civilization come to birth ? On the banks of the gracious
Yangtse Kiang or on those of the demonic Hwang Ho ? We know
that it came to birth on the banks of the Hwang Ho, and that the
Lower Yangtse Valley was not brought within the ambit of the
Sinic Society until after the Sinic Civilization had broken down
and had entered upon a Time of Troubles which was the first
phase of its decline.
Chimu and Valparaiso
Again, on what section of the Pacific Coast of South America
did the Andean Civilization come to birth ? Not on that Central
I A week after these sentences had been written in the summer of the
year 1931, the
Yangtse produced, in the region of Hankow, a flood which ; in scale and in destructive-
ness, is perhaps unsurpassed in the annals of the Yellow River itself. Nevertheless, the
writer believes that on a long view, extending back to the local beginnings of recorded
history in the middle of the last millennium B c., the contrast here drawn between the
characters displayed by the Yangtse and the Yellow River in their respective relations to
Man is borne out on the whole by the facts.
* In the
year 1926 of the Christian Era, 'the Yangtse was navigable* in *the summer
months, when the discharge of the river was augmented by the summer rainfall and by
the melting of the snows in Tibet ... as far up as Hankow (about 570 miles from its
mouth) . . for large ocean-going steamers' ; and this point had been known to be reached
.

by 'a foreign battleship of as much as 12,000 tons displacement. . . . Under the same
conditions, steamers of ordinary construction, though not of heavy tonnage, could
navigate likewise the next section of 367 nautical miles from Hankow to Ichang. The
section of 400 nautical miles above this, between Ichang and Chungking, had been
opened since 1919 to steam-navigation by specially constructed river-steamers of light
draft and with engines sufficiently powerful to mount the rapids. This achievement had
brought steam-navigation into Szechuan the most populous Chinese province (with an
estimated population of 50,000,000). For native junks, the passage of the rapids in the
Ichang-Chungking section was a slow, laborious, and dangerous operation. On the
other hand, they were able to ascend the river as far as Suifu, which was about 1,548
nautical miles from the mouth, or even as far as Pingshan, about 33 miles further,
whereas Chungking, the limit of river-steamer navigation, was about 1,337 miles from
the mouth, and Ichang, the limit of navigation for small steamers of ordinary build,
about 037.' (Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1926 (London 1928,
Milford), pp. 302-3.)
II D
34 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Chilean section which enjoys such a generous rainfall that the
Spanish explorers saluted an earthly paradise Valparaiso in the
first of these green valleys which rejoiced their eyes after their long

journey down the parched brown which they had to traverse

coast
farther north. The Andean Civilizationcame to birth on the North
Peruvian section of the coast described in a passage which has
been quoted above 1 where Man has to fight a perpetual battle
with the desert and must water his fields, which the sky will not
water for him, by his own hard labour the spade-work of digging
:

and maintaining innumerable irrigation-channels. Chile was not

brought within the ambit of the Andean Society until the Andean
Civilization had reached an advanced stage in its decline. Chile
was one of the last conquests of the Empire of the Incas the
Andean universal state and even then the Incas were content to
leave the greater part of fertile Chile beyond their southern fron-
tier, which they drew along the line of the River Maule. The Incas
were at home on the Andean Plateau, to which the coastal civiliza-
tion had spread at an early date in its growth. And on what section
of the plateau did this civilization secure its first foothold ? Neither
on the section which was nearest to its primary home in the coastal
valleys of Chimu, nor yet on the northerly section (in the territory
of the modern Latin Republic of Colombia) where the altitudes arc
comparatively low and the valleys open and the climate genial.
The ruins of Tiahuanaco testify that the first foothold of civiliza-
tion on the plateau was in the upland basin of Lake Titicaca a
region which was hardly nearer to the primary home of the Andean
Civilization in one direction than the upper basin of the Magdalena
River was in the other, while in soil and climate it was manifestly
less inviting. 2

Lowlands and Highlands in Guatemala

Again, which face of Central America was it that saw the birth
of the Mayan Civilization? Not the Pacific face, where a relatively
high altitude co-operates with a relatively low rainfall to liberate
a strip of country from the pall of tropical forest which smothers
the Atlantic lowlands. 3
1 See II. C (ii) (b) 2, vol. i, pp. 322-3, above.
2 See the description of the Titicaca Basin which has been quoted in vol. i, p. 322,
above. For the birth-places of the Andean Civilization, and the course of its expansion
during its growth, see II. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 120-3, above.
3 For the contrast in climate and
vegetation between the Pacific Highlands and the
Atlantic Lowlands of Central America, see Huntington, E.: The Climatic Factor at
illustrated in And America
(Washington 1914, Carnegie Institution of Washington,
Publication No. 192), chs. xvii and xviii. For the almost exact inversion of the relative
degrees of civilization that have been prevalent respectively in the several different
geographical zones of Central America in post-Columbian times, as contrasted with the
situationm the age in which the Mayan Civilization came to birth and grew to maturity,
see op. cit., pp. 218-19. For Dr. Huntington's hypothesis that this shift of social zones
is to be accounted for by a shift of climatic D
zones, see II. (vii), Annex I, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 35
When the Spaniards arrived, they took to these
open healthy
Central American uplands overlooking the Pacific an
earthly
paradise in the Tropics as decidedly as they took to Chilean
Valparaiso at the far extremity of their conquests in the New World.
It was here that they planted their Central American
settlements,
working their way up the Pacific coast from the point where they
bestrode the Isthmus of Panama as far as the present frontier
between Guatemala and Mexico. On the other hand, they made no
serious attempt to occupy the Atlantic coast of Central America
between their settlements on the Isthmus and their settlements in
Yucatan. The tropical forest in the hinterland deterred them,
though this coast lay almost within sight of their island possessions
in the Antilles and though the opening up of coast and hinterland
would have shortened appreciably the length of the journey between
the Spanish settlements on the Pacific face of Central America and
the mother country. In spite of that, the Spaniards abandoned
this Atlantic coast to indigenous Indians and to English J
interlopers,
and were content to leave the communications between Spain and
the Spanish settlements on the Pacific coast to follow the round-
about route across the Isthmus. The situation has not changed
substantially since the Spanish Empire in the New World has dis-
appeared. Though five out of the six republics which are its 'suc-
cessor-states' in Central America possess Atlantic seaboards, the
best-developed districts and the principal centres of population are
still to be found on the uplands overlooking the Pacific where the

Spaniards first made themselves at home. In 1933, there were still

no more than two lines of railway spanning Central America from
coast to coast between the Isthmus of Panama and the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec; and in 1927 the capital city of at least one republic
was still cut off from its Atlantic littoral by a barrier of virgin and
2
virtually impassable jungle.
The contrast between the eagerness and promptness with which
the Spaniards took to the open highlands overlooking the Pacific
coast of Central America and the almost complete failure of the
colonists and their successors, over a period of more than four
1 An unsuccessful
attempt to found a Puritan colony on the islet of Santa Catalina or
Providence, off 'the Mosquito Coast', was made in A.D. 1630 (see Newton, A. P.: The
Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven 1914, Yale University Press)),
and the British Government continued to claim a protectorate over the Mosquito Indians
till 1855. After the acquisition of Jamaica, the English secured a footing on another
section of this coast which has now become the Crown Colony of British Honduras.
z The North American
statesman, Mr. Henry cL. Stimson, when he was at Managua,
the capital of Nicaragua, in 1927, found that the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua was
distant from us much less than 200 miles as the crow flies, but it takes longer to get there
than to go from
- New" York to* San Francisco, and the only way of going was by sea
through the Panama Canal, unless one was villing to travel on foot through the .jungle
^
_
or to follow down a tropical river m a canoe*. (Stimson, H. L.: American Policy in
Nicaragua (New York 1927, Scribner), p. 47.)
 36 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND -RESPONSE
centuries, to open up the Atlantic coast with its hinterland of
some measure of the difference in the degree
tropical forest, gives
of the difficulty which these two neighbouring but very diverse
regions oppose respectively to Man when he attempts
to break
them in. Where was it, then, that the oldest indigenous civilization
of the New World came to birth? On the Central American
uplands or in the Central American forests ? We know that the
Mayan Civilization came to birth in the forests and that, even when
itspread, its line of expansion was not southwards into the adjoin-
ing uplands but northwards into the Yucatan Peninsula and on to
the Mexican Plateau. It was in those quarters, and not on the
southern uplands, that the two later civilizations which were
related to the Mayan Civilization arose in their turn. Apparently
the easily accessible Central American uplands were never occupied
by any civilization until the Spaniards came to take possession of
them from the other side of the Atlantic. The indigenous civiliza-
tions were as persistent in shunning the uplands as the intrusive
civilization has been in shunning the forests. Then were the Mayas
blind and the Spaniards sharp-sighted ? We have only to compare
the respective achievements in Central America of the Mayan
Civilization on the one hand and of the Spanish version of our
Western Civilization on the other in order to realize that the forests
in which the Mayan Civilization came to birth surpass in two
respects the uplands on which our Western Civilization has been
propagated. They not only surpass them in the degree of the
difficulty which they oppose to human efforts ; they surpass them
no less in the degree of the response which they have evoked from
human beings who have made the effort to grapple with them. 1

The Aegean Coasts and their Continental Hinterlands

Again, the unusual difficulty presented by the Aegean area, in
which the Minoan and the Hellenic Civilization successively came
to birth, becomes fully apparent only when the area is viewed in
its geographical setting, against the foil provided by the regions
round about. I can testify to this from personal experience. On
my first visit to the Aegean, I came and went by sea; and, as
always, the sea- voyage had the psychological effect of fixing a great
mental gulf between its termini. The contrast between the physical
features of Greece and those of England was of course obvious ;

but on both the journey out and the journey back the abrupt transi-
tion from the one country to the other made it
impossible to
1 This avoidance of the
former theatre of the Mayan Civilization by the
Spanish
colonists in Central America may be compared with the avoidance of the former theatre
of the Indie Civilization in Ceylon by the Scottish and English planters. (See II. D (i),
i pp. 6-7, above.) In both instances, the latter-day Western intruders chose the softer
\
and less stimulating option.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 37
appreciate this obvious matter of fact imaginatively. On my second
visit to the Aegean, I
again arrived by sea; but this time I broke
my stay in Athens by making three reconnaissances into regions
just outside the Aegean area. First I went to Smyrna and made
expeditions from there by rail up country into the interior of
Anatolia ; next I went to Constantinople and made other expedi-
tions into Anatolia from that quarter; and then, before coming
home, I went to Salonica and made an expedition from there into
the interior of Macedonia. Finally, I returned to England by the
overland route, travelling in the same railway-carriage, without a
change, from Constantinople to Calais. Thus, in the course of this
visit, I travelled overland, out of the Aegean area into the regions
round about, in four different directions ; and each time, in every
direction, I found myself travelling out of country that was bare,
barren, rocky, mountainous, and broken into fragments by the
estranging sea, into country that was greener and richer and
softer country in which mountain-ranges were replaced by
rolling hills, and sea-filled gulfs and straits by broad cultivable

river-valleys. The cumulative effect of these contrasts upon the

observer's imagination was very powerful. On this comparative
view, the Aegean area showed itself in its true colours as a region
of unusual difficulty, not only by contrast with England or with the
other Transalpine countries of Europe, but by contrast with every
region adjoining it. In this light, I realized the deep meaning of the
words which Herodotus puts into the mouth of the Spartan exile
DamarStus in a colloquy with the Great King Xerxes 'Hellas has a :

foster-sister Poverty who never leaves her; but she has brought in
a guest in the shape of Virtue, the child of Wisdom and Law; and
1
by Virtue's aid Hellas keeps Poverty at bay and Servitude likewise.'
Attica and Boeotia
Similar contrasts in the physical environment, capped by corre-
sponding contrasts in the local variety of civilization, may be
observed in the interior of the Aegean area itself. For instance, if
one travels by train from Athens along the railway which eventually
leads, through Salonica, out of the Aegean area into the heart of
a
Europe, one passes, on the first stage of the journey, through
stretch of country which gives to Central or Western European
eyes an anticipatory glimpse of familiar scenery. After
the train has
been climbing slowly for hours round the eastern flanks of Mount
Parnes through a typical Aegean landscape of stunted pines and
to find himself
jagged limestone crags, the traveller is astonished
aiei jcore
i
Herodotus, Book VII, ch. 102. The Greek text is: Tfl 'JEAAaSt Trm'ij /iev
<rtivrpo<t>6$&m, dpen) Be CTra/oro's tori, avo re oo</>fys Karepyacrpevrj /cat v6pov icrxypov* TTJ
; 1} 'EX\a$ rtfv
re Trevhjv cwra/nWrai
38 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
being rattled down into a lowland country of gently undulating
deep-soiled ploughlands. He might imagine that he had just
crossed the Austro-German frontier on the railway between Inns-
bruck and Munich; the northern aspect of Parnes and Cithaeron,
which he now views at a distance across this lowland foreground,
might be the northernmost range of the Tyrolese Alps. Of course
this landscape is a 'sport'. He will not see the like again until he
has put Nish behind him some thirty-six hours later and is
descending the Lower Valley of the Morava towards the Middle
Danube; and that makes this anticipatory patch of Bavaria-in-
Greece so much the more striking.
What was this odd piece of country called during the lifetime of
the Hellenic Civilization? It was called Boeotia; and in Hellenic
minds the word 'Boeotian' had a quite distinctive connotation. It
stood for an fethos which was rustic, stolid, unimaginative, brutal
an ethos out of harmony with the prevailing genius of the Hellenic
culture. This discord between the Boeotian thos and Hellenism
was accentuated by the fact that just behind the range of Cithaeron,
and just round the corner of Parnes where the railway winds its way
nowadays, lay Attica 'the Hellas of Hellas': the country whose
ethos was the quintessence of Hellenism lying cheek by jowl with
the country whose Sthos affected normal Hellenic sensibilities like
a jarring note. The contrast was summed up in piquant phrases :
'Boeotian Swine' and 'Attic Salt'.
The point of interest, for the purpose of our present study, is
that this cultural contrast, which impressed itself so vividly on the
ancient Hellenic consciousness, was geographically coincident with
an equally striking contrast in the physical environment which
already existed then and which still survives to-day to impress
the passing Western railway-traveller. For Attica is 'the Hellas of
Hellas' not only in her soul but in her physique. She stands to
the other countries of the Aegean as those Aegean countries stand
to the regions around. If you approach Greece by sea from the
west and enter through the avenue of the Corinthian Gulf, you may
flatter yourself that your eye has grown accustomed to the Greek

landscape beautiful and forbidding at once before the view is

shut out by the banks of the Corinth Canal. Yet when your
steamer emerges from the cutting through the Isthmus to plough
Aegean waters at last, you will still be shocked, in the Saronic Gulf,
by an austerity of landscape for which the scenery on the other
side of the Isthmus has not
fully prepared you; and this austerity
attains its climax when you round the corner of Salamis and see the
land of Attica spread out before your eyes up to the summits of
Pentelicus and Hymettus.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 39
In Attica, with her abnormally light and stony soil, the process
called denudation, which Boeotia has escaped down to this day,
was already complete in Plato's time, as witness the Attic philo-
sopher's own graphic account of it.

'Contemporary Attica may accurately be described as a mere relic of

the original country, as I shall proceed to explain. In configuration,
Attica consists entirely of a long peninsula protruding from the mass of
the continent into the sea, and the surrounding marine basin is known
to shelve steeply round the whole coastline. In consequence of the
successive violent deluges which have occurred within the past 9,000
years (the interval which separates our own times from the period with
which we are dealing), there has been a constant movement of soil away
from the high altitudes; and, owing to the shelving relief of the coast,
this soil, instead of laying down alluvium, as it does elsewhere, to any
appreciable extent, has been perpetually deposited in the deep sea
round the periphery of the country or, in other words, lost; so that
Attica has undergone the process observable in small islands, and what
remains of her substance is like the skeleton of a body emaciated by
disease, as compared with her original relief. All the rich, soft soil has
moulted away, leaving a country of skin and bones. At the period,
however, with which we are dealing, when Attica was still intact, what
are now her mountains were lofty, soil-clad hills her so-called shingle-
;

plains of the present day were full of rich soil; and her mountains were
heavily afforested a fact of which there are still visible traces. There
are mountains in Attica which can now keep nothing but bees, but which
were clothed, not so very long ago, with fine trees producing timber
suitable for roofing the largest buildings; the roofs hewn from this
timber are still in existence. There were also many lofty cultivated
trees, while the country produced boundless pasture for cattle. The
annual supply of rainfall was not lost, as it is at present, through being
allowed to flow over the denuded surface into the sea, but was received
by the country, in all its abundance, into her bosom, where she stored it
in her impervious potter's earth and so was able to discharge the drainage
of the heights into the hollows in the form of springs and rivers with an
abundant volume and a wide territorial distribution. The shrines that
survive to the present day on the sites of extinct water-supplies are
evidence for the correctness of my present hypothesis.' 1

What did the Athenians do with their poor country when she
lostthe buxomness of her Boeotian youth ? We know that they did
the things which made Athens 'the education of Hellas'. 2 When
the pastures of Attica dried up and her ploughlands wasted away,
her people turned from the common pursuits of stock-breeding and
grain-growing to devices that were all their own : olive-cultivation

*
Plato, Critias, in
A-D.
a The Athenian response to the challenge of the Attic environment has been touched
upon, by anticipation, in I. B (u), vol. i, pp. 24-5, above.
40 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
and the exploitation of the subsoil. The gracious tree of Athena
not only keeps alive but flourishes on the bare rock. Yet Man
cannot live by olive-oil alone. To make a living from his olive-
groves, the Athenian must exchange Attic oil
for Scythian grain.
To place his oil on the Scythian market, he must pack it in jars
and ship it overseas necessities which called into existence the
Attic potteries and the Attic merchant-marine, and also the Attic
1

silver-mines, since international trade demands a money economy

and thus stimulates an exploration of the subsoil for precious
metals as well as for potter's earth. Finally, all these things to-
gether exports, industries, merchant ships, and money required
the protection and defrayed the upkeep of a navy. Thus the
denudation of their soil in Attica stimulated the Athenians to
acquire the command of the sea from one end of the Aegean to the
other, and beyond ; and therewith the riches which they had lost
were recovered a hundredfold. This effect of Athenian sea-power

year 1921, the writer of this Study visited a modern Orthodox Christian
1 In the

community in the Aegean area in whose life the olive was then^playing the same part
as it had once played in Hellenic Attica. This modern Greek city-state of Ayvalyq (a
Turkish word meaning 'Quince Orchard') or Kydhonie's (the equivalent in modern
Greek) was situated on a little peninsula projecting into the Aegean from the west coast
of Anatolia opposite the Greek island of Mitylene (the ancient Lesbos). The soil of this
peninsula which was as thin and stony and rock-ribbed as the soil of Attica itself
made a striking impression of barrenness upon the traveller who came to Ayvalyq over-
land from the fertile valley of the Caicus and travelled on to Mitylene with its smiling
gardens and vineyards just across the water. From the citadel of Peigamum, which
commands the Caicus Valley, Macedonian Attalids and Turkish Qara 'Osmanoghlus
had sometimes extended their dominions over half Asia Minor. Yet ban en Ayvalyq had
acquired an empire too an overseas empire extracted from the olive. The Greek settlers
:

from all parts of the Aegean who had founded Ayvalyq during the last quarter of the
eighteenth century of the Christian Era had turned the barren soil, on which their lot was
cast, into a goodly heritage by planting it with two million phvc tices; and, & century and
a half later, these plantations were supporting a community of thirty or forty thousand
people in a high degree of civilization. At Ayvalyq, the olive was at the bottom of every-
thing. The community purchased its food supplies and other necessities of life by
exporting the produce of the olive in various foims as fruit, as oil, and as soap (which
:

they manufactured out of the oil in their own factories). The waste product of the oil-
presses skins and stones and dregs was used as fuel for driving the oil-presses and
the soap-factories in Ayvalyq town, and also for driving the steamers (owned by local
capitalists and manned by local crews) which carried the produce of the olive-groves
from Ayvalycj port as far afield as Russia and America, in order to fetch the community's
foreign requirements as return cargoes. This olive-economy enabled Ayvalyq not only
to live but to live well. This community of fruit-growers and manufacturers and mer-
chants and shippers did not neglect the things of the spirit. Its chief
glory was an
academy which was one of the first places in which the literature of ancient Hellas and
the science of the modern West had been studied and taught together in the modern
Greek tongue.
This remarkable community at Ayvalyq was both brought into existence and wiped
out of existence by the process of Westernization, as this
remorselessly worked itself
out in the Near East. After being twice destroyed and twice refounded in the struggle
for the heritage of the old Ottoman Empire a struggle which the ferment of Westerniza-
tion set on foot between the Greeks and the Turks and the other Near Eastern peoples
Greek Ayvalyq was finally evacuated, this time presumably for good, in the great Greek
exodus from Anatolia after the d&dcle of the Greek Army in igzz.
To-day, modern
Greek Ayvalyq belongs to the past no less than ancient Greek Athens. The present
writer's glimpse of the in 1921, on the eve of its extinction, has enabled him to
place
understand by analogy the part played in ancient Attic life by the miraculous tree which
was venerated and loved as the gift of Attica's tutelary Goddess.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 41
has been vividly painted by an anonymous Athenian writer of the
generation before Plato's :

'Bad harvests due to atmospheric conditions fall with crushing weight

upon even the strongest land-powers, while sea-powers surmount them
easily. Bad harvests are never of world-wide incidence, and therefore
the masters of the sea are always able to draw
upon regions in which the
harvest has been abundant. If I may venture to descend to minor details,
I may add that the command of the sea has enabled the Athenians . . .

to discover refinements of luxury through their extensive

foreign
relations. Every delicacy of Sicily, Italy, Cyprus,
Egypt, Lydia, the
Black Sea, the Peloponnese or any other country has been accumulated
on a single spot in virtue of the command of the sea. . . Moreover, the
.

Athenians are the only nation, Hellenic or non-Hellenic, that is in a

position to accumulate wealth. If a country happens to be rich in ship-
timber, what market is there for it, if it fails to conciliate the masters of
the sea? Similarly, if a country happens to be rich in iron, copper or
flax, what market is there for it, if it fails to find favour in the same
quarter? But these are precisely the raw materials out of which I con-
struct my ships timber coming from one source, iron from a second,
copper from a third, hemp from a fourth, flax from a fifth. In addition,
they will refuse to licence the export of these commodities to other
markets or those who choose to oppose our wishes shall be excluded
from the sea! Thus I, who produce not one of these commodities in my
home territory, possess them all by way of the sea, while no other
1
country possesses any two of them simultaneously.'
But these riches of the sea riches beyond the dream of the
Boeotian ploughman whose deep-soiled fields had never failed him
were merely the economic foundation for a political and artistic
and intellectual culture which made Athens 'the education of
Hellas' and 'Attic Salt' the antithesis of Boeotian animality. On
the political plane, the Athenian industrial and sea-faring popula-
tion constituted the electorate of the Athenian democracy, while
Attic trade and sea-power provided the framework for that inter-
national association of Aegean city-states which took shape in the
Delian League under Athenian auspices. On the artistic plane,
the prosperity of the Attic potteries gave the Attic vase-painter the
opportunity which he used for creating a new form of beauty; and
the extinction of the Attic forests compelled Athenian architects to
translate their work from the medium of timber into the medium
of stone and so led them on to create the Parthenon instead of
resting content with the commonplace log-house which
Man
has always built in every place where tall trees grow. 2 On the
1
Pseudo-Xenophon: AtfienaiSn Pohteia ('Athenian Institutions'), edited by Kalinka,
E. (Leipzig 1913, Teubner), ch. 2.
2 The translation of a
commonplace architecture in timber into a unprecedentedly
and unsurpassedly noble architecture in stone -was of course not an exclusively Attic
achievement. It was the general consequence of a general exhaustion of timber-supplies
42 THE RANGE OF CHAIXENGE-AND-RESPONSE
quote our anonymous Athenian
intellectual plane, to observer
once again,
'their familiarity .with every language spoken under the Sun has
. .

enabled the Athenians to select this expression from that language and
this from the other, with the result that in contrast to other Hellenes,
life and costume
who, as ageneral rule, preserve their local dialect,
the Athenians rejoice in a cosmopolitan civilization for which the entire
1
Hellenic and non-Hellenic worlds have been laid under contribution.
This Attic culture did, indeed, gather the whole of the contemporary
Hellenic culture into itself, in order to transmit it to posterity
seasoned with the 'Attic Salt' and ennobled by the Attic impress.

ChalcidicS and Boeotia

The contrast between Boeotia and Attica is not the only illustra-
tion of our theme which the Aegean area has bequeathed from the
Boeotia had another
age when it was the theatre of Hellenic history.
neighbour, Chalcis a closer neighbour
: than Athens, though divided
from Boeotia by the sea. The city of Chalcis stood on the Euboean
shore of the Straits so narrow that at times they have been spanned
by a bridge which run between the Island of Euboea and the
Boeotian mainland. In the Euboean hinterland of Chalcis City,
and within the frontiers of the Chalcidian State, lay the Lelantine
Plain. And this Chalcidian campagna was not like the 'bad lands'
of Latium or Attica. It was as good a ploughland as Boeotia itself;
but, unfortunately or fortunately for the Chalcidians, the Lelan-
tine Plain was narrow and hence, while the Boeotian farmers were
;

still finding land for the plough, enough and to spare, without

looking beyond their borders, the Chalcidian farmers brought up

short, on their island, by the precipitous flanks of the towering
peak of Dirphys were stimulated to search for fresh ploughlands
abroad. The salt waters of the Euripus Straits, which washed the
foot of their city walls, offered the Chalcidians a sea-passage for
their voyages of exploration. Sailing out into the Aegean and
beyond it, they took to the land again wherever they found another
Lelantine Plain awaiting the Chalcidian plough with a native popu-
lation incompetent to hold its own against the Chalcidian colonist.
Sailing north and east, they founded a new Chalcidicc on the
coasts of Thrace; sailing south and west, they founded another in
Sicily.
throughout the Aegean area. It was, however, on Athenian sites and in Athenian hands
that the Hellenic architecture produced its masterpieces. We
may note in passing that
the absence of building timber had a profoundly stimulating effect not only upon the
Hellenic architecture but upon the Sumenc. Here, however, the effect was of a different
kind. While the Hellenic architect, in translating from timber into stone, was stimulated
to create a new beauty, the Sumeric architect, in translating from timber into brick, was
stimulated to invent a new technique. He discovered the principles of the arch and the
vault. x
0p. cit, loc. cit.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 43
Of course, which the Chalcidians performed under the
this feat
stimulus of land-shortage in Euboea is not to be compared with the
feats to which the denudation of Attica stimulated the Athenians.
While the Athenians responded to the Attic challenge by a qualita-
tive change in their economy, the Chalcidians' response to the
Euboean challenge was quantitative. They merely added field to
field, instead of transforming fields into mines and olive-groves.
The agricultural life of the Chalcidian colonies, each set in its
arable plain a Thracian Torone or a Sicilian Leontini was a
replica of the life which had been lived in the Lelantine Plain by
the colonists' forefathers and which was still being lived there by
their cousins whose forefathers had succeeded in
staying at home.
In other words, the expansion of Chalcis differed from the expansion
of Athens in being extensive and not intensive. 1 Nevertheless,
Chalcis too, in response to a less formidable challenge, made a
mark albeit a fainter mark than the Athenian upon Hellenic
history. It was through those Chalcidian farmer-settlers overseas
that the barbarians of Macedonia and of Latium were drawn into
the orbit of the Hellenic Civilization and were given their first
tincture of the Hellenic culture. 2The Chalcidians reacted, in their
degree, to the prick of Necessity's spur, while comfortable Boeotia
cared for none of these things.

Byzantium and Calchedon

The enlargement of the area of the Hellenic World drca 725-
525 B.C., which the Chalcidians played this prominent part,
in
offers us some further Hellenic illustrations of our theme. Among
the barbarians who came within range of the movement and who
reacted to it converts to Hellenism instead of being
by becoming
supplanted by Greek the difference, in stimulating effect,
settlers,
between a hard and an easy environment is illustrated by the con-
trast between the careers of the two Italian city-states which arose

respectively in the Roman and in the Capuan campagna. This

contrast needs no more than a bare mention here, since we have
examined it in another connexion already ; 3 and we may pass on to
the celebrated illustration which is afforded by the contrast between
the two Greek colonies of Calchedon and Byzantium which were
planted respectively on the Asiatic and on the European side of the
entrance to the Bosphorus from the Sea of Marmara.
A century or so after the foundation of the two cities, the Persian

point has been noted, by anticipation, in I. B (ii), vol. pp. 24-5, above, and
1 This is
i,
taken up again in Part III. B, vol. iii, pp. 120-2, below.
2 See further III. C
(u) (6), Annex IV, vol. lii.
3 See
pp. 1 8-2 1, above.
44 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
statesman Megabazus, who had been placed in charge of the
European hinterland of the Straits by Darius,
'made a mot which won him immortal celebrity among the Hellespontine
Greeks. At Byzantium he heard that the Calchedonians had planted
had planted theirs
their city seventeen years earlier than the Byzantines ;

and he had no sooner heard it than he remarked: "Then the Calche-

donians must have been blind men all that time." He meant that they
must have been blind to choose the worse site when the better was at
their disposal.' 1

Megabazus's famous observation was epigrammatic rather than

acute; for it is not so difficult to be wise after the event, and in
Megabazus *s day the respective destinies of Calchedon and Byzan-
tium were already manifest. Calchedon was still what she had been
to begin with an ordinary Greek transmarine agricultural settle-
:

ment of the kind which Chalcis and Megara and half a dozen other
agricultural communities in Old Greece had planted by the score
round the coasts of the Mediterranean and its backwaters. Mean-
while, Byzantium was already growing into one of the busiest ports
of the Hellenic World and was fairly launched on the career which
was to culminate in her becoming the ultimate capital of a Hellenic
universal state in the last phase of Hellenic history. Thus, by
Megabazus's time, any comparison between the respective advan-
tages of the sites of Byzantium and Calchedon would naturally
turn upon their respective facilities as ports and on this test the
;

eligibility of Byzantium was no doubt incomparably greater than

that of her neighbour over the water. Byzantium not only possessed
the natural harbour of the Golden Horn which had no counterpart
on the exposed and featureless section of the opposite Asiatic
coastline where Calchedon stood. More than that, the set of the
current which comes down the Bosphorus from the Black Sea into
the Sea of Marmara is in favour of any vessel trying to make the
Golden Horn from either direction,' while it is adverse to any
vessel heading for the open beach of Calchedon. 2 Thus every ship
that plies between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean has a
double incentive for passing by on the other side from Calchedon
and making Byzantium its port of call. The founders of Calchedon
would have been blind men indeed if, in face of this obvious fact,
they had deliberately chosen Calchedon in preference to Byzantium
as the site for a port.
In of course, the founders of Calchedon made their
reality,
historic choiceon quite a different consideration. As they ap-
proached the southern entrance to the Bosphorus on their voyage
Herodotus, Book IV, ch. 144.
1

2 See the detailed account of this which is given by Polybius, Book IV, chs. 43 and 44.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 45
of exploration, they looked at the landscape and chose their site
with eyes that were not blind at all, but were simply fanners* eyes
and not mariners'; and from the farmer's standpoint their choice
was admirable. They planted their city on the Bithynian Riviera:
a sheltered strip of fertile coast which seems like an enclave of
Mediterranean scenery in a more northerly clime. On this favoured
spot, the Greek farmer-prospectors who founded Calchedon settled
down to raise the crops and plant the fruit-trees which they had
always raised and planted at home. For their purpose, they could
not have chosen better; and we may be sure that this was the
judgement of the next company of Greek explorers, in search of
fresh land for their ploughs, who came this way seventeen years
later. We may picture the founders of Byzantium cursing the
Calchedonians for their perspicacity and themselves for their
tardiness as they turned their ships' prows away from the smiling
Bithynian Riviera, now crowned by Calchedon's walls, towards the
much less inviting opposite coast of Thrace. Some Hesiodic
equivalent of the proverb that 'It is the early bird that gets the
first worm' must have often been in the Byzantines' mouths when

they tilled the soil of their little Thracian peninsula only to see
their crops carried off systematically, year after year, by the bar-
barians of the hinterland.
'The Byzantine territory is an enclave in Thrace, which marches with
the entire Byzantine land-frontier and comes down to the sea on either
side. In consequence, the Byzantines are afflicted with an interminable
and insoluble war against the Thracians. Even when they make a
military effort and get the better of the Thracians for the moment, they
can never get rid of the Thracian war owing to the multitude of the
Thracian hordes and Thracian princelings. If they overthrow one
princeling, this simply clears the way for three others more formidable
than the first. Even if the Byzantines give in and come to terms for
paying a stipulated tribute, they find themselves no better off. For any
concession which they make to one enemy has the direct effect of
bringing five new enemies down upon them. So they are in the toils of
this interminable and insoluble war, in which they are exposed to all
the danger of being at close quarters with a bad neighbour and all the
horror of warfare against a barbarian adversary. These, in a general
way, are the evils against which they have to struggle on land; and,
besides the ordinary evils attendant on war, they have to endure the
legendary punishment of Tantalus. They possess a first-rate soil; they
cultivate it intensively; they raise fine big crops and then the bar-
barians arrive on the scene to gather in and carry off the crops and
destroy what they do not take away! It is not only the loss of labour and
money and the spectacle of devastation but the fineness of the crops that
makes the business heartbreaking.' 1
*
Polybius, Book IV, ch. 45.
46 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Thus Byzantium was subject, as a matter of course, throughout
her history, to a recurrent calamity which Athens only experienced
of the Peloponnesian
during fifteen out of the twenty-eight years
War 1 and Miletus only during her eleven years' war with Lydia
2 Her
in the reigns of Kings Sadyattes and Alyattes. agriculture
was at the mercy of an invader whom she was not strong enough to
meet in the field and who therefore had a free hand to carry off or
destroy her crops. After all, then, the Greek farmer-colonists
who
founded Calchedon were not blind men when, with both shores of
the Bosphorus to choose between, they settled on the Bithynian
Riviera and shunned the inhospitable Thracian shore; nor were
the founders of Byzantium men of vision. They simply followed in
the earlier prospectors' wake and took their leavings. However, a
vindication of the Calchedonians' perspicacity is not the true moral
of this story. The true moral is that when the Byzantines found
themselves perpetually subject, on land, to a prohibitive handicap
which the Athenians and the Milesians suffered only for a few
critical years in the whole course of their respective histories, the

Byzantines were thereby stimulated, even more powerfully than

the Athenians and the Milesians were stimulated in their less
desperate circumstances, to turn their attention from the land to
the sea and to indemnify themselves for their ruinous losses as
farmers by making handsome profits as merchants and mariners.
Under this powerful stimulus, to which the prudent Calchcdonian
farmers on the opposite shore were never exposed, the Byzantines
made the most of their straits and discovered no doubt to their
own surprise as well as to their neighbours' that *the Golden
Horn' was a cornucopia. The wealth and influence which Byzan-
tium was taught by Necessity to derive from her command of the
Bosphorus are described in the second century B.C. by Polybius in
terms which recall the passage already cited 3 from an anonymous
Athenian writer of the fifth century who is describing the effects of
his own country's wider but less durable sea-power.
'The Byzantines occupy a site which, from the twin standpoints of
security and prosperity, is the most favourable of all sites in the Hellenic
World to seaward and the most unprepossessing of all to landward. To

1
During the first part of the War, the Peloponnesians invaded Attica in the years
431, 430, 428, 427, and 425 B.C. During the second part, they were in permanent
occupation of a fortified position on Attic soil, at Decelea, during the years 413-404 B.C.
inclusive.
2 See the account of this war in
Herodotus, Book I, chs. 17-22. The Lydian invaders
of Milesia practised the same form of economic warfare as the Thracian invaders of the
Byzantine territory and the Peloponnesian invaders of Attica. They destroyed or
carried off the annual crops. On the other hand, the Lydians showed less barbarity *

or at any rate more enlightened self-interest than either the Thracians or the Pelo-
ponnesians in leaving the farm-buildings, out in the countryside, intact,
3 On
pp. 41-2, above.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 47
seaward, Byzantium commands the mouth of the Black Sea so abso-
lutely that it is impossible for any merchantman to pass either in or out
against the Byzantines' will; and thus the Byzantines control all the
numerous commodities originating in the Black Sea which are in general
demand. These commodities include both necessities like the cattle
and slaves for which the hinterland of the Black Sea is notoriously a
prime source of supply, both for quantity and for quality and luxuries
like honey, wax and caviar, which the same
region provides in abun-
dance. Moreover, the Black Sea hinterland offers a market for the
surplus of our Mediterranean products, such as olive oil and wines of
every vintage grain being the medium of exchange in which the
balance of trade is adjusted periodically in either direction. The Hellenic
World would necessarily be debarred from all this trade completely, or
at any rate would lose all possibility of making a
profit on it, if the
Byzantines chose to give up "playing the game" and went into partner-
ship with the Celts (or, normally, with the Thracians), or again if
Byzantium itself were simply not on the map. The Straits are so narrow
and the adjoining hordes of barbarians so formidable that in those cir-
cumstances the Black Sea would unquestionably be closed to Hellenic
navigation. As a matter of fact, the Byzantines themselves probably
draw the greatest economic profit of all from their unique position,
which enables them to export all their surplus products, and import
all that they need, both easily and
profitably, without any exertion or
danger. At the same time, many commodities which are in general
demand reach their destination through the Byzantines' agency, as has
been observed already. To this degree, the Byzantines are benefactors
of Society who fairly deserve not only gratitude but positive military
assistance, on an international basis, from the Hellenic World against the
1
standing menace of the barbarians.'

The Byzantines were content to perform their service to Hellenic

Society without recompense so long as, on the landward side, they
2
only had to deal with their regular tormentors, the Thracians.
When, however, in the course of the third century B.C., the local
Thracians were temporarily subjugated by a migratory horde of
Celts, the Byzantines suffered heavily from this change of masters
in their hinterland. Where the Thracians had chastised them with
whips, the Celts now chastised them with scorpions. They raised
the annual ransom for the Byzantine crops to an exorbitant figure ;
and in this extremity the Byzantines met with hardly any response
when they appealed for financial assistance to the rest of the Hel-
lenic World. Accordingly, the Byzantines were driven to raise
funds fqj ransoming their fields from the Celts by levying a toll
on all ships passing through the Bosphorus; and their action so
upset the Hellenic carrying-trade that the consequence was a war
i Book IV, ch. 38. * Book IV, ch. 45-
Polybius, Polybius,
48 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
between Byzantium and Rhodes, the leading maritime community
1
in the Hellenic World of the day.
Thus the vast divergence between the destinies of Byzantium
and Calchedon is not explained by Megabazus's epigram. It was
not the blindness of the Calchedonians but the barbarity of the
Thracians and the Celts that made Byzantium's fortune. If the
actual founders of Byzantium had arrived first on the scene, they
would certainly have made the Calchedonians' choice and if the ;

actual founders of Calchedon had arrived second and had been left
no choice but to found Byzantium, they, for their part, would
inevitably have been confronted by the challenge
of an intolerable
situation on land, with the Byzantines' historic choice between
starving as landsmen or making a fortune out of the sea.

Aegina and Argos

Another illustration of our theme from Hellenic history is the
contrast between the careers of two city-states of the Argolid:
Argos herself and Aegina. The Argives, being owners of one of the
finest arable plains in the Peloponnese, had only one idea when they

began to find their Argive plain too small for them. They set out,
like the Chalcidians, to take possession of additional arable land
beyond their bordersbut, unfortunately for themselves, they did
;

not look out to sea but lifted up their eyes unto the hills and coveted
what lay beyond them. Taking up the spear before labouring at
the oar, they sought their new fields in the quarter where it was
hardest to acquire them : in the territory of their Hellenic neigh-
bours, who were spearmen too. The Chalcidians had known better
than to try conclusions with the sturdy Boeotians they had reserved ;

their steel for easy victories over ill-armed and ill-disciplined

Thracians and Sicels. The Argives were less prudent. Fighting
for the mastery of the Peloponnese, they collided with the Spartans,
who had responded to the same challenge in the same way, but had
faced the implications of their response by militarizing their life
from top to bottom. 2 For spearmen such as these, the Argives were
no match ; and this was the end of their city's career. She never
extricated herself from the role of being Sparta's discomfited rival
until Hellenic history came to an end.
Meanwhile, the little Argolic island of Aegina had been playing
an utterly different historical role, in conformity with the vastly
poorer physical endowment which she had received from Nature.
Aegina, raising her horn a bare, solitary mountain-peak above

Polybius, Book IV, chs. 46 and 47.

1

2 For Spartan militarism, see I. B (n), vol, i, pp. 24-6, above, and III, A, vol. n'i,
PP. 50-79* below.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 49
the waters of the Saronic Gulf within full view of Athens, 1 was no
doubt one of those 'small islands' which were in the Athenian
2
philosopher's mind as signal examples of denudation at its worst.
Aegina was, in fact, an Attica in miniature ; and, under a still more
severe pressure from the physical environment than that to which
the Athenians were exposed, the Aeginetans anticipated, on a small
scale, the Athenians' achievements. Aeginetan merchants were
taking the lead in the activities of the Hellenic settlement at
Naucratis in Egypt at a time when Athenian merchants were still
rare visitors there ; 3 and Aeginetan sculptors were carving statues
to stand in the pediments of the temple which Aeginetan archi-
tects had built for the local goddess Aphaia, half a century before
the Athenian Pheidias carved his masterpieces for the Parthenon.

Israelites, Phoenicians, and Philistines

If we turn now from Hellenic history to Syriac, we shall find

that the various elements of population that entered Syria, or held
their own there, at the time of the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung,
distinguished themselves relatively thereafter in close proportion to
the relative difficulty of the physical environment in the different
districts in which they happened to have made themselves at home.
In an earlier passage, 4 we have taken note of the difficulty which
an immigrant population must have found in acquiring the art of
irrigating the gardens of Damascus. Yet the Ghutah though a
hard country compared with the fabulous Garden of Eden was
the choicest prize that offered itself in Syria to the incoming bar-
barians ; and it is therefore remarkable that, in the subsequent pro-
gress of the Syriac Civilization, it was not the Aramaean occupants
of Damascus that took the lead. Nor was the lead taken by those
other Aramaeans who settled down at Hamath to irrigate the fertile
banks of the Orontes with their water-wheels ; nor again by those
tribes of Israel who halted east of Jordan in order to fatten their
cattle on the fine pasture-lands of Gilead. 5 Most remarkable of all,
the primacy in the Syriac World was not retained by those refugees
1
Aegina was execrated to an Athenian audience as AiJ/xTj Zfctpat&o; 'the eye-sore
of the Peiraeus* by the Athenian statesman Pericles when he was exhorting his country-
men to deal the maritime rival of Attica the knock-out blow at the culmination of a long
and bitter struggle for the command of a sea which was too narrow to be shared between
the barren island and the barren peninsula.
2 See the
quotation from Plato on p. 39, above.
3 In the time of
King Amasis of Egypt (regnabat circa 569-525 B.C.) the Aeginetans
were one of three Hellenic communities the other two being the Samians and the
Milesians that possessed separate religious precincts at Naucratis dedicated to their
respective tutelary Gods. The other nine Hellenic communities which had a footing at
Naucratis were content to share a common precinct: the Hellenion. At this time, Athens
not only had no settlement of her own at Naucratis, but was not even one of the nine
city-states that shared in the administration of the International Settlement. (Herodotus,
Book II, ch. 178.)
< In II. C (ii) (6) 2, on pp. 334-S* above. s Numbers, ch. :

II E
 So THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
from the Aegean who came to Syria not as barbarians but as the
heirs of the Minoan and who took possession of the
Civilization

ports and and fields

cities of the Shephelah the maritime plain :

that extends from the south-western face of Mount Carmel to

the north-eastern frontier of Egypt.
In the connotation which their name has acquired, the Philis-
tines have fared still worse than the Boeotians. In our modern
Western vocabulary, with its echoes of Syriac and Hellenic
tradition, the word 'Boeotian' signifies nothing worse than a con-
a wilful
genital obtuseness of vision, while 'Philistine* signifies
blindness and a militant hostility towards 'the Chosen People' who
see the light. Possibly, neither Philistines nor Boeotians fully
deserve their bad name- It is probable, on the whole, that they
have been misrepresented, considering that their reputation has
been at the mercy of hostile neighbours. Yet this consideration in
itself tells a tale. Why that the picture of these nations which
is it
has come down to us is a picture painted by their neighbours' hands
and not by their own? It is because these neighbours and con-
temporaries of theirs were more active, more vocal, and more
successful than they were, and hence were better able than they
were to impress their own will and their own view upon the future.
The Athenians and Chalcidians, who were the Boeotians' neigh-
bours, have occupied our attention already. have taken note We
of the feats accomplished by them which the Boeotians never
attempted. Let us look now at the neighbours of the Philistines,
and compare the Philistines' record with theirs.
The Syriac Civilization has three great feats to its credit. 1 It
invented an alphabetic system of writing it discovered the Atlantic
;

Ocean; and it arrived at a particular conception of God which is

common to Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam, but
alien alikefrom the Egyptiac, Sumeric, Indie, and Hellenic veins of
religious thought and feeling. Which were the Syriac communities
2

by whom these achievements were severally contributed? The

Philistines may prove to have been the transmitters, if not the
inventors, of the elements of the Alphabet, if the conjectured
derivation of the Alphabet from some Minoan script 3 is sub-
stantiated in the future investigations of our Western archaeologists.
Pending further archaeological research, the credit for the inven-
1 See
I. C (i) (), vol. pp. 82 and 102, above.
i,
z And equally alien, it would appear, from the Minoan and Hittltc veins, as far as
these are known to us. In this catalogue, the exception which proves the rule is the
conception of God which was attained by Ikhnaton (sec I. C (ii), vol. i, pp. 145-6,
above, and Part VII, below). The abortive solar monotheism of Ikhnaton has a dis-
tinctly Syriac touch; but this flash of illumination in the soul of a single individual, who
was repudiated by the society in which he happened to be born, can hardly be placed
to the credit of the Egyptiac Civilization.
3 See I. C
D
(i) (), vol. i, p. 102, footnote 3, above, and II. (vii), p. 386, footnote 2, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 51
tion of the Alphabet must at present be left unallocated. When we
come, however, to the other two Syriac achievements, the history
of which a matter of common knowledge, we find that the
is
Philistines have no part or lot in them.
Who were those Syriac seafarers who ventured to sail the whole
length of the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules and out
beyond? Not the Philistines, whose Minoan ancestors had been
the pioneers of long-distance seamanship in the Mediterranean. 1
In the Philistine communities of the maritime plain, the ancestral
seafaring tradition was buried, with the sowing-corn, in the furrows
of the broad ploughlands and so, when the Philistines came to feel
;

the need to expand, they took the same wrong turning as the
Argives took in the Peloponnese. Turning their backs on the sea,
the Philistines took up arms to conquer the arid lowlands of Beer-
sheba and the well- watered valleys of Esdraelon and Jezreel and ;

they met the Argives' fate when, in fighting for the mastery of
Palestine, they came into conflict with still better fighters: the
tribesmen in the hill-country of Israel and Judah. The discovery
of the Atlantic was achieved not by the Philistine Lords of the
Shephelah, but by the Phoenician tenants of the rugged middle
section of the Syrian coast.
These Phoenicians were a remnant of the Canaanites the popu-
lation which had been in occupation of Syria before the post-
Minoan Volkerwanderung descended like a human flood upon the
Country. When the neighbours and kinsmen of the Phoenicians
had been overwhelmed by the incoming Philistines and Teucrians
from the sea and Israelites and Aramaeans from the desert, the
Phoenicians had survived because their homes along the middle
section of the Syrian coast were not sufficiently inviting to attract
the invaders.
Phoenicia, which the Philistines left alone, presents a remarkable
physical contrast to the Shephelah, in which the Philistines settled.
On this section of the coast, there is no broad plain and no grada-
tion between plain and hill-country. Instead, the mountain-range
of Lebanon rises almost sheer out of the sea grudging the coast-
dwellers any plain of their own and cutting them off from the
plains of the interior. Lebanon and Mediterranean lie in such a
close embrace that they do not even leave room between them for
road or railway. 2 The Phoenicians communicated with each other
*
See I. C (i) (), vol. i, p. 102, footnote 4, above.
a In the year 1933 there was a continuousline of standard-gauge railway from Haydar
Pasha, the Asiatic railway-terminus at Constantinople, all the way to Tarabulus at the
northern end of the Phoenician section of the Syrian coast; there was also a continuous
line of standard-gauge railway from Haifa, at the southern end of this section of coast, to
Cairo; but the gap between Tarabulus and Haifa remained unbridged owing to the
expense involved in the difficult engineering feat of building a standard-gauge coastal
52 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
and with the outer world by water, coastwise and of the three ;

leading Phoenician cities Tyre, Aradus, and Sidon the two

first-mentioned were not even situated on the mainland but were
perched, like gulls' nests, on rocky off-shore islands. When the
Aramaeans drifted into Syria out of the desert, they silted up
against the eastern face of Lebanon without penetrating beyond it ;

and when the Philistine Volkerwanderung passed that way en

route from Anatolia towards Egypt, we may presume that the ships
sailed southward straight past the forbidding Phoenician coast to
the farther side of 'the Ladder of Tyre', while the ox-carts took
the inland road, to the east of Lebanon, along which the modern
railway-traveller from Turkey to Egypt finds himself transported
to-day. Even when the Philistines and Teucrians were flung back
from the frontier of Egypt, 1 they did not fall upon Phoenicia in
their recoil. They fastened upon the Shephelah and made no

permanent settlements north of Mount Carmel. Thus, thanks to

Lebanon, the Phoenicians survived the Philistines' passage; and,
again thanks to Lebanon, they actually took over from their new
neighbours that Minoan tradition of long-distance navigation which
the Philistines themselves now discarded. While the Philistines
were browsing on the Shephelah like sheep in clover and were
moving inland, at their peril, in search of pastures new, the
Phoenicians, whose maritime horizon had hitherto been restricted
to the short range of the coastwise traffic between Byblos and the
Delta of the Nile, 2 now launched out, Minoan-fashion, into the
open sea and won a second home for the Syriac Civilization in
the western basin of the Mediterranean and on the coasts of the
Ocean beyond.
Thus the maritime achievement of the Syriac Civilization was
contributed not by the Philistines but by the Phoenicians. The
physical discovery of the Atlantic, however, is surpassed, as a feat
of human prowess, by the spiritual discovery of Monotheism and ;

this achievement was contributed by a Syriac community that had

been stranded by the Volkerwanderung in a physical environment
which was still less inviting than the Phoenician coast namely, the :

railway to link Tarabulus and Haifa together. Thus the railway-traveller who, between
London and Aleppo, had only been required to change carriages twice at the Straits of
Dover and at the Bosphorus had to change four times more in order to complete his
railway-journey to Cairo. At Horns he had to leave his through-carriage, bound for
railhead at Tarabulus, in order to proceed along the branch line leading to the inland
junction of Rayaq. At Rayaq he had to change trains from the standard-gauge railway
on to a narrow-gauge railway which earned him (by rack-and-pinion over Anti-Lebanon)
to Damascus. At Damascus he had to change again on to another narrow-gauge railway.
And finally he had to change a fourth time in order to board a train running on the
standard-gauge railway between Haifa and Cairo. These details of modern railway
geography bring out, in a striking way, the difficulty of land-traffic along the Phoenician
i See I. C
(i) (&), vol. i, pp. 93 and 100-1, above.
coast.
2 See I. C
(i) (), vol. i, p. 102, footnote 4, above.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 53
hill-country of Ephraim and Judah. This country was indeed so
extremely uninviting that in spite of its position in the heart of
Syria, overlooking the high road between Egypt and Shinar it
appears to have remained (like the rift-valley of the Jordan) a
1

virgin wilderness throughout the thousand years and more during

which the rest of Syria had been incorporated successively first
in the Empire of Sumer and Akkad, which was the Sumeric
universal state, and then in the Hyksos 'successor-state* of that
empire, and then in 'the New Empire' of Egypt. Apparently, this
patch of thin-soiled, forest-covered hill-country remained literally a
no-man's-land until 'the New Empire' began to lose its grip upon
Syria and the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung set in; and then, at
last, it was populated by the adventurous vanguard of the Hebrew
Nomads who had drifted into the fringes of Syria out of the North
Arabian Steppe. 2 These Hebrews were content, for the most part,
to halt in the pasture-lands east of Jordan and south of Hebron.
The hill-country beyond was the farthest bourne of their migra-
tion and here the Israelite pioneers transformed themselves from
;

Nomadic stock-breeders into sedentary tillers of a stony ground

which they laboriously cleared of its forests 3 only to see the soil
which they had won from the trees washed away by the rains to
deepen the Philistine ploughlands on the Shephelah. The hard-
ness of the life which has to be lived by the husbandman whose
lot is cast in this hill-country of Ephraim and Judah is conveyed in
the following passages from the report of an experienced British
investigator who, in the year 1930, observed on the spot the life of
the Israelite husbandmen's modern Arab successors. 4
'The cultivated land in the Hills varies very largely both in depth and
quality of the soil. In the valleys there are stretches of fertile land, which
will grow sesame as a summer crop. On the hillsides the soil is shallow
and infertile, and the extent of land-hunger is evident from the fact that
every available plot of soil is cultivated, even when it is so small that the
plough cannot be employed. There cultivation is carried on with the
mattock and the hoe. The harvest of such plots, even in a favourable
year, is exceedingly small in general it seems doubtful whether such
1 See the quotation from Eduard Meyer in II. C (ii) (a) 2, vol. i, p. 257, above.
2 These statements likewise are made on the authority of Eduard Meyer: Geschichte
des Altertums, vol. ii (i), 2nd edition (Stuttgart and Berlin 1928,
Cptta), p. 96.
3 See
Joshua xvii. 14-18, for the mark made upon the Israelites' folk-memory by
the labour of deforesting this hill-country in order to find room for an ex-Nomadic
people that had been driven off the North Arabian Steppe yet was
deterred by its fear
of the iron chariots of the Canaanites from descending into the fertile valley of Jezreel.
4 The modern Arab peasantry of Palestine, like their Israelite predecessors, are
descended partly from Nomadic intruders off the North Arabian Steppe, who in physical
race were Afrasian 'long-heads*, and partly from 'broad-headed' denizens of the highland
zone of folded mountains (see vol. i, p. 328, above), who worked their way down to the
Palestinian highlands from the Anatolian Plateau. Anthropometric studies of the modern
population of Palestine indicate that, in the repeated mixture of two races which has here
taken place, the 'Alpine' strain has prevailed over the 'Mediterranean'.
54 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
cultivation can pay. On
the other hand, even the most rocky hillsides
of
support trees, especially olives; and, if capital were available, many
the cultivators of these exiguous and infertile plots would be able to gain
a livelihood by cultivation of fruit trees and of olives. These cultivators
have, however, no capital, and cannot afford to forgo even the meagre
crops obtained, for the four or five years which are required before
fruit-
trees render a return. In the case of the olive, the period before a return
may be expected is much longer.
"There is little irrigation in the Hill Country. Here and there are
springs which afford a supply for the irrigation of a small area; but,
taken as a whole, the country is arid and the crops depend on rain. . . .

'In the best case ... impossible that the general character of the
it is

cultivation in the Hill Country can be radically changed, except in so

far as fruit can be made to replace grain. . . . From the point of view
of agriculture, the Hill Country will always remain an unsatisfactory
. .
proposition. .

'The life of the fallah is one of great struggle and privation. . . ,

'It is a common
impression that the fallah 's cultivation is entirely
inadequate, and a good deal of ridicule has been and is poured upon the
nail-plough which he uses. In the stony country of the Hills, no other
plough would be able to do the work at all. With regard to the use of
that plough, Dr. Wilkansky [a modern Zionist agricultural expert]
writes: "The Arab plough is like the ancient Hebrew plough. ... It
performs very slowly, it is true, but very thoroughly all the functions
for which a combination of modern machines is required. . The . .

ploughing of the fallah is above reproach. His field, prepared for sowing,
is never inferior to that
prepared by the most perfect implements, and
sometimes it even surpasses all others." n
In such a country, and under such conditions, the Israelites con-
tinued to live in obscurity until the Syriac Civilization had passed
its zenith. As late as the fifth century before Christ, at a date when
all the great
prophets of Israel had already said their say, the name
of Israel was still unknown to the great Greek historian Herodotus
and the Land of Israel was still masked by the Land of the Philis-
tines in the Herodotean panorama of the Syriac World. When
Herodotus wishes to designate the peoples of Syria as a whole, he
calls them 'the Phoenicians and the Syrians in the Land of the
Philistines' 2 and 'the Land of the Philistines'
; Filastin or Palestine
is the name
by which Erez Israel has continued to be known
among the Gentiles down to this day. 3 Yet in these barren land-
locked highlands, which were not of sufficient worldly importance
to acquire even a recognized name of their own, there was immanent
1
Simpson, Sir J. H.: Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Develop-
ment (British Parliamentary Paper Cmd. 3686 of 1930: London 1930, H.M. Stationery
Office), p. 14, 65, and 66.
2
e.g. in Book II, ch. 104, and in Book VII, ch. 89.
3
TlaAaicmvTj j s the Ancient Greek and JL? the modern Arabic for Philistia.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 55
(to paraphrase Plato's language) a divine inspiration which made
1

this uninviting country a means of grace to those who came to

settle there. A
Syriac fable tells how this divinity once tested a
king of Israel with the most searching test that a God can apply to
a mortal.
'The Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God
said:"Ask what I shall give thee." And Solomon said: "... Give . . .

thy servant an understanding heart." And the speech pleased the

. . .

Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. And God said unto him:
"Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long
life;neither hast asked riches for thyself, nor hast asked the life of
thine enemies; but hast asked for thyself understanding to discern
judgment behold, I have done according to thy words lo, I have given
; :

thee a wise and an understanding heart, so that there was none like thee
before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee. And I have
also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches and honour, so
that there shall not be any among the kings like unto thee all thy days." 2
'

This fable of Solomon's Choice is a parable of the history of the

Chosen People. In the power of their spiritual understanding, the
Israelites surpassed the military prowess of the Philistines and
the maritime prowess of the Phoenicians. They had not sought
after those things which the Gentiles seek, but had sought first the
kingdom of God and therefore all those things were added unto
;

them. 3 As for the life of their enemies, the mighty men of the
Philistines were delivered into Israel's hands to be smitten with the
edge of the sword. As for riches, Jewry entered into the inheri-
tance of Tyre and Carthage to conduct transactions on a scale
beyond Phoenician dreams in continents beyond Phoenician
knowledge. As for long life, the Jews live on the same peculiar
people to-day, long ages after the Phoenicians and the Philistines
have lost their identity like all the nations. The ancient Syriac
neighbours of Israel have fallen into the melting-pot and have been
re-minted, in the fullness of time, with new images and superscrip-
tions, while Israel has proved impervious to this alchemy per-
formed by History in the crucibles of universal states and universal
churches and wanderings of the nations to which we Gentiles all
in turn succumb. 4

Lebanon and jfabal Ansartyah

The contrast between the roles of the Phoenicians and the
Philistines in the history of the Syriac Civilization is reproduced, in
1 See the
passage quoted above in II. C (ii) (a) 2, vol. i, on p 252, in footnote 2.
* i
Kings iii. 5-13. 3 Matt. vi.
31-3; Luke xii. 29-31.
4 From the Gentile standpoint, modern Jewry is the 'fossil' remnant of a society that is
extinct. For this phenomenon of 'fossilization', see I. B (ui), vol. i, p, 35, and I. C (i)
(6), pp. 90-2, above; and II. D (vi) and Part IX, below.
 56 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
the history of the affiliated Arabic Civilization, in a corresponding
contrast which can be studied in the life at the present day
between the enterprise of the Lebanese highlanders, in the hinter-
land of the former Phoenician ports of Sidon and Tyre and Byblus,
and the stagnation of the Nusayri highlanders who live on the
northern side of the Nahr-al-Kabir in the hinterland of Aradus.
In modern times the highlanders of the Lebanon have emu-
lated the historic exploits of the Phoenician islanders of Tyre and
Aradus by seeking their fortunes abroad and making a livelihood
as traders and shopkeepers far and wide in Egypt and in West
Africa and in the New World. 1 The Nusayri highlanders, on the
other hand, have been as stay-at-home as the Philistine con-
temporaries of the Phoenicians.
The extreme degree and long continuance of the Nusayris'
stagnation in their highland homes is attested by the antique aspect
of their religion. The Lebanon, in its own degree, is a museum of
religious survivals. The ex-Monothelete Maronites and the Mono-
2

physite Jacobites and the Imami Shi'Is of the Jabal 'Amil and the
Druses are so many 'fossil' remnants of different phases in the long
contact between the Syriac Civilization and the Hellenic. 3 The
Nusayris, too, have acquired some tincture of Syriac religion in
its latest phase. They have travestied the Isma'lli Shi'ism which
forced an entry into their mountain fastness in the age of the
Crusades4 by deifying the Caliph 'All abu Talib but this worship ;

of 'All is only an accretion; 5 and the core of their religion appears

to be some local worship which is more ancient than either Islam or
Christianity and is perhaps even prior to that impact of Hellenism
on the Syriac World in which both Christianity and Islam have
originated. The sharpness of the contrast, in every aspect of
social life, between the Nusayris and the Lebanese is very
striking ;

and there is also a striking contrast between the two peoples'

respective physical environments.
While the native physical environment of the Lebanese is per-
haps not quite so stimulating as the rocky islet of Tyre, which
cannot be cultivated at all, it presents a severer challenge to the
husbandman than the hill-country of Ephraim and Judah. On the
stony flanks of Lebanon there is a rigid limit to the harvests that
can be wrung out of a scanty soil, and this soil itself can only be

1
See II. D
(vi), p. 338, below.
3
.Efc-Monothelete, because the Maronites have been in full communion with the
Roman Catholic Church since A.D. 1445, though they have retained their own Syriae
liturgy and their own ecclesiastical discipline.
3 See II. D (vi), pp. 234-6, and II. D (vii), pp. 285-8, below.
4 See II. DJ (vi), p. 258, below.
(vi),p.
On jtrength of it, the French mandatory authorities have dubbed the Nusayris
the si
(Arabic plural 'Ansariyah') 'Alouites', which is a Gallicism for the Arabic 'Alawiym.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 57
conserved and kept under cultivation by laborious terracing. 1
By
contrast, the Jabal Ansanyah, though it 'has been described as a
barren region', is in reality 'an extremely agreeable and fertile
tract. Being lower and less rocky, it is
naturally much more fertile
than the Lebanon'. 2 In the light of the local precedents, it looks as
though the Lebanese had been stimulated to emulate the Phoenicians
by the barrenness of their native mountain, while the agreeable-
ness of the Jabal Ansariyah has inveigled the
Nusayris into
vegetating in a Philistine sloth.

Brandenburg and the Rhineland

When we turn from the Aegean and from Syria 3 to the scenes of
our own Western history, similar contrasts strike the eye.
Suppose, for example, that one finds oneself in the capital city of
either of the two great Central European Empires of the modern
age the Hohenzollern Empire of Brandenburg-Prussia-Germany
:

and the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy. One has only to board an

outgoing train at any railway terminus in either Berlin or Vienna in
order to receive the same impression that a traveller receives when
he goes by train from the Aegean area into the interior of Anatolia
or into the interior of Europe. 4 In whichever direction you may
happen to be travelling outwards from the nucleus of the Hohen-
zollern or of the Hapsburg Empire into its fringes and outskirts,
you find yourself passing out of an unusually difficult physical
, environment into environments where the difficulties are less
formidable.
1 Sec II. D (vi), p. 258, below.
* British
Admiralty: A Handbook of Syria (London 1920, H.M. Stationery Office),
P- 339-
3 We cannot take leave of the Syriac World without observing that, in the penultimate
phase of Syriac history, the contrast which we have brought out between Phoenicia and
Philistia was reproduced, in the Hijaz (a region which is a southward extension of
t

Syria into Arabia), in the similar contrast between the two oases of Mecca and Medina.
"The community which had settled in the valley of Mecca . cannot, when they selected
. .

this spot, have hoped to live by its produce; for that the soil is incapable of producing
anything is attested by all who know it, from the author of the Qur'an to the present
day. . . Unlike Mecca, Yathrib [Medina] lies in a fruitful plain. "Walled habitations,
.

green fields, running water, every blessing the Eastern mind can desire, are there."
And indeed the richness of the soil finds expression in the name Ta'ibah, "the pleasing".'
(Margoliouth, D. S.: Mohammed, 3rd edition (London 1905, Putnam), pp. 78 and
185.) In consequence, we find that the Yathribis, like the Philistines, were content to
cultivate their garden without turning their hands or minds to other things or betaking
themselves beyond their own borders, whereas the Meccans were stimulated by the
challenge of a barren home to take to the Steppe as the Phoenicians, in similar circum-
stances, had taken to the sea, and to earn their livings as camel-caravaners. It is signifi-
cant that Mecca, and not Medina, was the oasis in which the Hijazi Prophet Muhammad
was born and brought up. It was the stimulus of his contact with the great world in his
caravan expeditions to the Syrian desert-ports of the Roman Empire, circa A.D. 594 seqq.,
that gave Muhammad the mental stimulus which impelled him to embark upon the
career of a religious revolutionary. (For the career of Muhammad, see III. C (u) (6),
vol. iii, pp. 276-8, with Annex II, below.)
4 For this
impression, as experienced by the writer of this Study, see pp. 36-7,
above.
58 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Take the nucleus of the Hohenzollern dominions the territories
:

which Frederick the Great inherited from his father when he came
to the Prussian throne Brandenburg, Pomerania, East Prussia. As
:

the Havel
you travel through this unprepossessing country between
and the Masurian Lakes, with its starveling pine-plantations and
its sandy fields, you might fancy that you were traversing some

outlying corner of the Eurasian Steppe, where

the aggressive desert
was thrusting its dry bones up and out through the skin of the
European landscape. Then travel on westward from Brandenburg
into the Rhineland or eastward from Prussia into Lithuania or
northward from Pomerania into Scandinavia: whichever way you
go, you will experience a new sensation.
As the pastures and beech-
woods of Denmark or the black earth of Lithuania or the vineyards
of the Rhineland greet your eyes, you will breathe a sigh of relief
at your passage into a normal European landscape out of a land-

scape which was an offence to your aesthetic sensibilities. 'So this

repulsive Ostelbisches Land is, after all, something exceptional in
the European physical environment!' True enough; yet it is no
less true that the descendants of the medieval Western colonists
whose lot was cast in these 'bad lands' have played an exceptional
role in the modern history of the Western World. The legendary
'Prussian' may be as unprepossessing as his homeland. (There is
always a flicker of flame behind a screen of smoke and always a
grain of truth beneath the most hostile caricature.) Be that as it
may, he has managed to make his unpromising kingdom 'the
education of Europe' in certain matters which no good European
can affect to despise. The Prussian has taught his neighbours how
to make sand produce cereals by enriching it with artificial
manures; and he has taught us how to raise a whole population
to an unprecedented standard of social efficiency by a system of
universal compulsory state education and to an unprecedented
standard of social security by a similar system of health and
unemployment insurance. In these responses to his physical environ-
ment, the Prussian has performed a greater service to Mankind
and has established a more lasting memorial for himself than in
his more notorious achievements: the training of the Prussian
Army and the building of the German Reich.
Austria and Lombardy

Take, again, the nucleus of the Danubian Hapsburg dominions :

those Danubian territories which the Emperor Charles V inherited

from the Emperor Maximilian before the Danubian Monarchy
took shape in the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, and which
the Austrian Republic inherited again from the last Austrian
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 59
Emperor Charles when the Monarchy broke up in 1918.
the On
aesthetic scale of values, the heart of Austria and the heart of
Prussia are of course at opposite extremes. The
Alps in the Tyrol
and the Salzkammergut, and the Danube in Upper and Lower
Austria, are as beautiful as the sands and pine woods of Branden-
burg and Pomerania are ugly. Yet, if the observant traveller is not
an artist but an economist, his prosaic eye will register the same
impression when he travels outwards from Vienna as when he
travels outwards from Berlin. Whether his journey carries him out
of the Tyrolese or Styrian mountains into the plains of Bavaria or
Lombardy or Croatia or Hungary, or from the banks of the Austrian
Danube to the banks of the Bohemian Elbe, the economist, as he
observes the changes in the landscape, will ignore the transition
from variety to monotony which the artist perceives, and will take
note that he has left a lean land, flowing with nothing better than
milk and honey, and has entered fat lands where the plains are
covered with hop-fields or vineyards or wheat-fields or beet-fields,
and where the mountains are loaded with mineral ores. Yet that
lean land of Austria bred the dynasty 1 which gathered together the
fat lands round about and held them united for four centuries

against a host of enemies without and within.

The contrast between the relative poverty of the nucleus of the
Hapsburg Monarchy and the relative riches of the appended crown-
lands gives the physical explanation of the genesis of the Danubian
Monarchy.
2 A
dynasty bred in a difficult environment supplanted
the more softly nurtured dynasties round about. The same con-
trast explains the economic straits to which the City of Vienna has
been reduced since the Danubian Monarchy's dissolution. A
stranger, visiting Vienna after 1918 without any knowledge of
modern Western history and witnessing Vienna's plight to-day,
would be at a loss to understand how a magnificent city of some
two million souls could ever have come into existence in a poorly
endowed country of some six million souls all told. Actually, of
course, the present size and magnificence of Vienna are explained
by the city's ci-devant status as the capital of an empire with fifty
million inhabitants and with abundant natural resources, while the
location of Vienna is explained by the Danubian Empire's origin.
The capital of the Hapsburg Monarchy was never moved from the
1 Asa matter of strict historical accuracy, the Hapsburg Dynasty was bred in the
castle ofHapsburg, in the present Swiss Canton of Aargau, before it came to rule over
Austria. This, however, only gives additional point to our present argument; for, com-
pared with the Aargau, even Austria is a land of plenty.
* For the human
explanation, see II. D (v), pp. 177-90, below. In particular, see
p. 181, footnote I, where a distinction is drawn between the 6thos of the Tyrolese
Highlander, which once made Austria an Imperial Power, and the ethos of the Viennese
bourgeois, which reflects the demoralizing influence of an empire upon the inhabitants
of its capital city.
60 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Austrian homeland of the Hapsburg Dynasty a land which was
the most venerable but least valuable jewel in the Hapsburg Crown.

'The Black Country' and 'The Home Counties'

When we turn from Central Europe to Great Britain, the ap-
parent law of correspondence between the difficulty
and the stimulus
of a physical environment the law illustrated by the geographical
situations of Vienna and Berlin seems at first sight to be put in
question by the geographical situation of
London. While the
capitals of the ci-devant Hapsburg
and Hohenzollern Empires lie
in the leanest districts of Central Europe, the Thames Valley, in
which London lies, is one of the most well-favoured districts of the
United Kingdom. This superficial anomaly disappears, however,
as soon as we look deeper. For one thing, we shall find that,

although the so-called 'home counties' certainly were the choicest

portion of the English physical environment in the age when the
capital of England came to be established at London, it is also true
that London did not win her position without having to respond
to any challenge at all. In that very age, she responded victoriously
to a challenge from the human environment which we shall
examine further on in this Part. 1 This, however, is by the way.
For our present purpose, it is more to the point to notice that, in
the modern social geography of the United Kingdom, London has
not remained the capital of the country in every sense.
While London has retained her status in the Kingdom as the
focus of politics and finance, the economic centre of gravity
shifted, during the Industrial Revolution, from the south-east
towards the north-west, until, on the eve of the General War of
1914-18, it had come to rest on the farther side of a line drawn
diagonally across the island from the estuary of the Severn through
Coventry and Leicester to the estuary of the Humber. If we now
fix our attention upon the region north-west of this line and pick
out the districts which shared between them the industrial primacy
in 'pre-war' Great Britain, we shall see at once that they conform
to our law conspicuously. The midland manufacturing cities
Birmingham and Coventry, Leicester and Northampton which
almost bestride our dividing line are the only group situated in
good arable or grazing country; and this is the exception that
proves the rule. In each of the other industrial districts of 'pre-
war' Great Britain, the physical environment is one which, judged
by the average standard of the island, offers unusually difficult
conditions to Man. This is true alike of the valleys of South Wales ;

of Tyneside and Teesside; and of the neck of Scotland where

1
See II. D (v), p. 199, with the Annex, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 61

Clydeside now harbours, in Glasgow, the second largest city of

Great Britain after London herself. The most striking illustration
of all is the gigantic industrial zone which embraces the southern end
of the Pennines in the shape of a magnet with its tips at Preston and
Leeds and its curve skirting the upper course of the Trent a zone
which includes the Lancashire cotton-mills and the Staffordshire
potteries and collieries and the multiple industries of Nottingham
and the steel- works of Sheffield and the wool-mills of the North
Riding.
The forbidding character of the physical environment in which
this Pennine industrial zone is set was brought home to the writer
of this Study once when he had occasion to travel by road from
the rural spot in the east of Yorkshire, in which he is writing these
lines at this moment, to a place in Shropshire within sight of the
Wrekin. After traversing York a city not less reminiscent than
Canterbury of medieval England we drove on south-westwards
across a fertile plain still innocent of other products than crops and
cattle, till we reached the frontier of the industrial zone at a village
which is celebrated for a legend. The legend is that, a century ago,
a certain Anglican prelate whose diocese extended over the West
Riding used to appoint the church of this village as his trysting-
place with West Riding candidates for confirmation, because, he
declared, this was the farthest point west, towards the new terra
incognita of industrial squalor, to which any gentleman in orders
or out of them could be expected to ride! And indeed, when we
passed that prelate's legendary bourne now that the squalor beyond
it, on which he had refused ever to set eyes, had had a hundred

years longer to grow, the aesthetic side of our nature protested in

sympathy with the prelate's scandalous ultimatum to the lost souls
in his industrial cure. Beyond this village, the fertile lowlands
came to an end and at the same point the fells and the factories
began.
In their outward aspect, the 'dark satanic mills' seemed a fitting
match for the bleak grey landscape and at the same time the tour
;

deforce of these monstrous works of Man, erected in defiance of

the wilderness, had all the moral incongruity of an abomination
of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. In this
there
pullulating, throbbing, squalid life in a forbidding landscape,
was something portentously unnatural and the acme of unnatural-
;

ness was reached when we paused on the summit of the Pennine

Range itself a hand's-breadth of fell-country that had been left
still inviolate in its state of Nature and looked down, this way
and that, towards Leeds just behind us and Manchester just
ahead. When, at nightfall, we found ourselves passing through
62 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Shrewsbury such another mellow city as York in such another
pleasant countryside our glimpse of the
West Riding and South
Lancashire already began to fade into the unreality of an evil dream.
Yet this industrial tour deforce that has been accomplished in the
Pennine Zone is of course not just a hideous blemish on the land-
scape.The portent has also an import which the legendary prelate
who deplored its appearance never divined. The Pennine Zone is
indeed a magnet, not only in a fanciful geographical conceit, but in
sober economic reality. It is a magnet which has drawn to itself the
so potently that
productivity and the population of a great country
it has actually succeeded in shifting that country's economic centre
of gravity shifting it from the fertile basin of the Thames to the
barren skirts of the Pennine fells. The uncompromising prelate
himself, if he could return to life to-day, would almost be con-
strained by curiosity to ride on into his terra incognita in order to
explore the ugly wonderland into which the ugly wilderness has
been transformed. And what is the agency which has produced
these astonishing effects ? When we look into it, we find ourselves,
here again, in presence of a now familiar social phenomenon the :

stronger stimulus of a more difficult environment prevailing over

the weaker stimulus of an environment in which the difficulty
is less.
In this psychological aspect, the contrast between the rural
south-east and the industrial north-west of modern Britain since
the Industrial Revolution reproduces that contrast between Boeotia
and Attica, in ancient Greece, which struck the imagination of Hel-
lenic observers after the great Athenian statesmen and economists
a Solon and a Peisistratus and a Cleisthenes and a Themistocles
had done Middle Ages, the inhabi-
their work. In our so-called
tants of 'the home counties' of England,
south-east of our line, held
economic assets comparable to those which the Boeotians held in
the first age of Hellenic history. Indeed, they not only possessed
the best arable and pasture lands in the Kingdom, but in Surrey
and Sussex they also had command of easily workable iron ores,
with the woods of the Weald to supply fuel for their forges and with

with these rich but wasting assets, the Southerners, like the Foolish
Virgins in the parable, improvidently burnt up their fuel till it was
all consumed away. The iron railings round St. Paul's are said to
be the last substantial piece of work that was produced by the
Southern iron-masters. By the time when these railings were
forged, the Weald was bare, and thereupon the Southern iron
industry came to a dead halt. The stagnant reed-choked hammer-
ponds upon which the latter-day 'hiker' stumbles in the middle of
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 63
the Surrey heaths are no more
to-day than this dead industry's
funeral monument. 1 Meanwhile, the medieval inhabitants of the
Welsh and Scottish and Northern English 'bad lands' had been
stimulated by the poverty of their environment to exercise their
ingenuity in making the most of it. In South Wales and in Durham,
they probed the sub-soil, in the spirit of the ancient inhabitants
of Attica, to see whether Nature might
prove to be less niggardly
below than she was on the surface and their inquisitiveness was
;

rewarded by the discovery of a new kind of fuel. In the Pennine

Zone, they took to supplementing the meagre livelihood obtainable
from fell-farms by spinning and weaving and they turned to human
;

profit fell-sides that were too steep and barren for the plough by
harnessing the water-power of the falling beck. And so, under the
constant prick of Necessity, they equipped themselves,
unwittingly,
for exchanging roles with their Southern
neighbours as soon as
opportunity. When
their neighbours' improvidence gave them their
the oil in these Foolish Virgins' lamps gave out, the Wise Virgins
of the North were ready to step into their places and to astonish
the World with the mighty though sadly vulgar illumination
which they were able to produce. In the Industrial Revolution, the
Northern coal-fuel with its unheard-of potency and the Northern
mechanical processes with their unheard-of productivity replaced
and eclipsed the commonplace wood-fuel and the traditional hand-
work of the South. 2 The modern industrial Britain which arose,
like a jinn of the desert, out of the 'bad lands' beyond the Severn-
Humber line, surpassed the medieval agrarian Britain of 'the home
counties' as Solomon the king of the hill-country of Ephraim and
Judah surpassed in allhis glory the oasis-queen of Sheba. 3

* For the
history of the Southern iron industry, see Straker, E. : Wealden Iron (London
1931, Bell).
z It is
amusing to notice that the dearth of wood, which stimulated the ancient
Greeks into creating the beauties of Hellenic architecture, and the ancient Sumerians
into inventing the arch and the vault (see footnote 2 on p. 41, above), has stimulated the
modern British into burning coal.
3 The
shifting of the economic centre of gravity of Great Britain at the time of the
Industrial Revolution is sometimes attributed in large measure to the change in the flow
of international trade which followed the discovery of the New World. Since the
Western explorers who made this discovery were not natives of the British Isles, the
effect of their discovery upon the economic life of Great Britain must be regarded, from
the British standpoint, as the accidental effect of an extraneous cause. So far, therefore,
as this extraneous cause contnbuted to the shift in the economic centre of gravity of
Britain, it tells against our explanation of the shift as an incident in the internal history
of Britain and as a consequence of the different relations between Man and his physical
environment which respectively obtained, during the Middle Ages, in the South and in

the ports on the west coast and of their economic hinterlands, and to the prejudice of the
ports on the east coast. This dividing line between the eastern and the western faces of
Great Britain by no means coincides, however, with the line, running diagonally across
the country from Severn to Humber, which came eventually some two or three
centimes after the discovery of America had taken place to divide the agrarian section
64 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
In the present 'post-war' age, this glory is perhaps departing.
Since about the year 1920 there have been indications that the
economic centre of gravity of Great Britain is tending to shift back
again, south-eastward, towards its medieval locus,
J
and simultaneous
indications that the economic centre of gravity of the World is
shifting away from the British Isles,
and indeed from Europe,
altogether, and is passing over to North
America. It may be that,
if these symptoms become more sharply pronounced, the ci-devant
industrial focus of Britain, marooned among the barren Pennine
fells, will come to present as melancholy a spectacle
as the ci-
devant political capital of the Danubian Monarchy, imprisoned
within the frontiers of the little Alpine Republic of Austria. The
drama of Industrial Britain, which opened in a busy squalor and
culminated in a grim magnificence, may be transfigured in its third
2
act into an austere tragedy with a cruel end.
The economic contrast between the two sections into which
Great Britain is divided by the Severn-Humber line is not the only
illustration of our theme which the island provides. Still more
familiar is the cultural contrast between England and Scotland,
which has survived the union of the two kingdoms and which still
lends reality to a Border which has lost its political and has never
possessed any economic significance. The notorious difference of
temperament and habit between the legendary Scotchman solemn,
parsimonious, precise, persistent, cautious, conscientious, and
thoroughly well educated and the legendary Englishman frivo-
lous, extravagant, vague, spasmodic, careless, free-and-easy, and
ill-grounded in book-learning follows the same lines, and corre-
of Great Britain from the industrial. For instance, the discovery of America, as was to be
expected, brought prosperity in the sixteenth century to the seamen of Devonshire and
to the merchants of Bristol: the western maritime districts which were least distant from
'the home counties' and from London. Yet it has still to be explained why Bristol after-A-
wards lost the primacy in the American trade to Liverpool and Glasgow: west-coast
ports which were geographically handicapped, in competition with Bristol, by being
separated from the open Atlantic by a longer stretch of narrow dangerous waters. It has
also to be explained why, in the Industrial Revolution, the new life showed itself not only
in the Lancashire and Lanarkshire hinterlands of Merseyside and Clydeside but equally
in Tyneside and Teesside and in the West Riding of Yorkshire, which was served by the
port of Hull. Newcastle and Middlesbrough and Hull, like the extinct hearths of medieval
English trade and industry in East Angha, all face away from the Atlantic and from
America. If the accessibility of the American market and of the American source of
supply was really the determining factor in the shift of the economic centre of gravity of
Great Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, it would be impossible to explain
why at this very time Bristol decayed and Newcastle began to flourish. On the other hand,
the phenomena are all explicable if it is conceded that the geographical relation to America
was no more than a secondary factor and that the governing factor in the shift was the
difference, examined above, in the degree of the respective stimuli which were adminis-
tered to human activities by the two sections of the island, as demarcated by our diagonal
dividing line.
1 These
C
symptoms are discussed, in another connexion, in III. (i) (d), vol. iii, p. 207,
below.
a These were written a few weeks before the 2ist September, 1931, which, at
lines
the time of revision, seemed likely to be a momentous date in English economic and
financial history.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD
COUNTRIES 65
spends to the same contrast in the local physical environment, as
the similar difference, which has likewise been elaborated and
caricatured on both sides, between the legendary Prussian and the
legendary Bavarian. *

The Struggle for North America

The our present theme in our Western
classic illustration of
history the outcome of the competition between half a dozen
is
different groups of Western colonists for the mastery of North
America. The victors in this contest were the New Englanders;
and at an earlier point in this chapter, apropos of the reversion of
Town Hill, Connecticut, to its pristine state of Nature, we have
taken note of the unusual difficulty of the local American environ-
ment which first fell to the lot of the ultimate masters of the whole
continent. Let us now compare this New England environment, of
which the site of Town Hill is a specimen, with the earliest
American environments of the New Englanders' unsuccessful
competitors the Dutch, the French, the Spaniards, and the New
:

Englanders' own kinsmen and neighbours from England who

established themselves along the southern section of the Atlantic
seaboard.
In the middle of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era,
when all these settlers had already found their first footing on the
fringes of the North American mainland, it would have been quite
easy to predict the coming conflict between them for the possession
of the interior; but the most acute and far-sighted observer then
alive would hardly have been likely to hit the mark if he had been
asked, at the time, to designate the ultimate victor. He might con-
ceivably have had the acumen to rule out the Spaniards in spite of
their two obvious assets : their ownership, in Mexico, of the only
region in or adjoining North America which had been broken-in
and developed economically, before the European colonists' arrival,
by an indigenous civilization; and the primacy of Spain, in our
hypothetical observer's own day, among the Great Powers of the
Western World. Our observer might have discounted the high
development of Mexico in view of its outlying position cut off,
as it was, from the main body of North America by a broad belt of

inhospitable plateau and desert; and have discounted

the political
strength of Spain by reading the political signs of the times as they
were written between the lines of the Treaty of Westphalia.
'The Spanish Empire', he might have pronounced, 'is already a
carcass round which the vultures are gathering. France will
succeed to the military hegemony of Spain in Europe, Holland and
England will succeed to her naval and commercial supremacy on
n F
 66 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
the seas. The competition for North America lies now between
these three countries. Let us estimate their respective chances in
the double light of their general positions in the World and of their
local holdings in America. On a short view, Holland's chances might

appear to be the most promising. She is mistress of the seas (Eng-

land being no match for her on this element, and France not
seriously competing) and in America she holds a splendid water-
;

gate opening into the interior: the valley of the Hudson. On a

longer view, however, France seems more likely to be the winner;
for the French St. Lawrence offers still better means of access to
the interior of North America than the Dutch Hudson, while it is
in the power of the French to immobilize and exhaust the Dutch by
bringing to bear against them the overwhelming military superiority
of France on the Continent of Europe. All the same, as between
French and Dutch prospects, I hesitate' (we hear him saying) 'to
decide. The one prophecy that I make with confidence is that the
English are not in the running. Possibly the more southerly of the
English colonies, with their relatively genial soil and climate, will
manage to survive though at best they will find themselves
hemmed in between the Dutch along the Hudson in the north and
the Spaniards in Florida on the south and the Dutch or the French,
whichever it may be that cuts off their hinterland on the west by
securing the control of the Mississippi. One thing, however, is
certain. The little group of settlements in the bleak and barren

country which the colonists have christened "New England" is

bound to disappear. They are cut off from the other English
settlements by the Dutch in the Hudson Valley, while the French
in the St. Lawrence Valley press them close on the opposite flank.
The destinies of these New Englanders, at any rate, are not in
doubt!'
Let us now suppose that our hypothetical observer lives to see
the turn of the century. By the year 1701 he will be congratulating
himself on his discernment, fifty years earlier, in rating French
prospects higher than Dutch; for in the course of these last fifty
years the St. Lawrence has vanquished the Hudson. The French
explorers have pushed up the St. Lawrence on to the Great Lakes,
and over the portage into the Basin of the Mississippi, and down
these Western Waters to the delta of the great river, where they have
established the new French colony of Louisiana to match the older
French colony of Canada at the other end of the trans-continental
waterway. As for the Dutch, our observer must admit that he had
rated their prospects much too high. They might have made
themselves masters of the Great Lakes before the French arrived
there. Indeed, for the ocean-going vessels of the
century, the head
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 67
of navigation was rather less distant up the Hudson than it was
up the St. Lawrence from the shores of Lake Ontario. Yet, far
from that, the Dutch have tamely allowed the Hudson Valley itself
to be taken from them by their weaker maritime rivals the English.
Well, the Dutch are out of the running now in North America, and
the French and the English are left there tete a tSte ; but the English
can hardly be regarded as serious competitors. The events of the
last half-century assuredly do not call for any revision of forecasts
on this head notwithstanding the unlooked-for success which the
English have gained in the Hudson Valley. Certainly the New
Englanders are making the most of this windfall. Already they are
colonizing the back-country of the Dutch province and are linking
New England up with the rest of the English settlements on the
Atlantic coast. Possibly the New Englanders have been saved
from extinction but this only to share the modest prospects of
their southern kinsfolk. For the English feat of conquering the
Hudson Valley from the facile Dutch has been utterly surpassed
by the simultaneous French feat of conquering from the formidable
virgin wilderness the whole extent of the magnificent inland water-
way between Quebec and New Orleans. While the English colonies
have been consolidated, the French colonies have effectively
hemmed them in. The future of the Continent is decided! The
victors are the French!
Shall we endow our observer with superhuman length of life, in
order that he may review the situation once more in the year 1803 ?
If we do preserve him alive till then, he will be forced to confess
that his wits have not been worthy of his longevity. By the end of
1803, the French flag has actually disappeared off the political map
of North America altogether. For forty years past, Canada has
been a possession of the British Crown, while Louisiana, after
being ceded by France to Spain and retroceded again, has just been
sold on the soth December, 1803, by Napoleon to the United
States the new Great Power which has emerged out of the thir-
teen English colonies by a most extraordinary metamorphosis.
'The United States of America!' Who would have prophesied
it? Yet the ambitious title is justified by the accomplished facts.
In this year 1803, the United States have the continent in their
It only remains to
pockets, and the scope for prophecy is reduced.
forecast which section of these United States is going to pocket the
larger share of this vast estate
the breadth of a continent that
joint possession. And surely this time
has come into their there
can be no mistake ? The Southern States are the manifest masters
of the Union and residuary legatees in North America of Great
Britain and France. Look how the Southerners are leading in this
68 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
finalround of the competition in this inter-American race for the
Winning of the West. It is the backwoodsmen of Virginia who
have founded Kentucky the first new state to be established west
of those mountains which have so long conspired with the French
to keep the English-speaking settlers on the Atlantic coast from
penetrating into the interior. And take note of the key-position
which Kentucky occupies, extending right down the left bank of
the Ohio to the confluence of the Mississippi's principal tributary
with the Mississippi himself. The West is in the Southerners'
grasp, and mark how all things work together for their good. The
statesmanship of an English Chatham and a Pennsylvanian Franklin
and a Corsican Buonaparte has endowed them with an immeasurable
supply of land and, as fast as they can put this new land under
;

the hoe, the new-fangled mills of distant Lancashire are offering

them an ever-expanding market for the cotton-crop which the soil
and climate of the South enable them to raise. The Negro pro-
vides the labour and the Mississippi the means of transporting the
produce to the quays of New Orleans, where the ships from Liver-
pool are waiting to bear it away. Even the New Englander is a
useful auxiliary, as the Southerner superciliously points out.
*Our Yankee cousin', the Southerner observes in 1807, 'has just
invented a "steam-boat" which will navigate our Mississippi up-
stream ; and he has made a practical success of a machine for carding
and cleaning our cotton-bolls. Those unlovable, unfortunate
fellow-citizens of ours in that out-of-the-way corner, down east!
Their "Yankee notions" are more profitable to us than they are to
the ingenious inventors! For what are New
England's prospects?
Her prospects are no better in this year 1807 than they were a
century since. To-day, when the wide West has been thrown open
to Southern enterprise at last, it still remains closed to the New

Englander. New England is still barred in on the landward side by

the barrier of Canada, which has not ceased to be a foreign country
in passing from the French to the British Crown. So there our
poor relation in his out-of-the-way corner, cooped up on
still sits
the "bad lands" of Town
Hill; and there, presumably, he will go
on sitting till Doomsday! "Sedet, aeternumque sedebit!" '*
If our unlucky prophet takes Southern prospects on the morrow
of the Louisiana Purchase at the Southerner's own valuation, he
must indeed be in his dotage for in the last round of the two-
;

centuries-long contest for the mastery of the North American

Continent, the Southerner is destined to meet a swifter and more
crushing defeat than those that have been met heretofore by the
Spaniard and the Dutchman and the Frenchman. To witness his
*
Virgil: Aenetd, Book VI, 1. 617.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 69
discomfiture, we shall not have to wait as long as a century. We
shall see the relative positions of South and North reversed in less
than a lifetime.
In the year 1865, the situation is
already transformed, out of all

recognition,from what it was in 1807. In the Winning of the West,

the Southern pioneer had been outstripped and outflanked by his
Northern rival. After almost winning his way to the Great Lakes
through Indiana and after getting the best of the bargain in
Missouri, the Southerner has been decisively defeated in Kansas,
and he has never reached the Pacific. The descendants of the men
who mastered the difficulties of Town Hill, Connecticut, have now
become masters of the Pacific coast along the whole front from
Seattle to Los Angeles. Nor has the Southerner's command of the
Mississippi much availed him. He had counted on the network of
the Western Waters to draw the whole of the West into a Southern
system of economic and political relations; and when the Yankee
presented him with steam-boats to ply on the Western Waters, he
imagined that the Yankee had delivered the West into his hands.
But Yankee notions' have not ceased. The inventor of the steamer
'

has gone on to invent the locomotive; and the locomotive has

taken away more from the Southerner than the steamer ever gave
him for the potential function of the Hudson Valley in the human
;

geography of North America as the main gateway from the Atlantic

to the West a potentiality which the Dutch had failed to turn to
account in competition with the French has been actualized at
last in the railway age. The railway-traffic which now passes up
the valley of the Hudson and the valley of the Mohawk and then
along the lake-side to link New York with Chicago has superseded
the river-traffic on the Mississippi between New Orleans and St.
Louis. Therewith, the internal lines of communication of the
North American Continent have been turned at right angles from
south and north to east and west and the North-West has been
;

detached from the South, to be welded on to the North-East in

interest and in sentiment. Indeed, the Easterner, who once made
the South-West a present of the river-steamer, has now won the
heart of the North- West with a double gift: he has come to the
North-Western farmer with the locomotive in one hand and with
the reaper-and-binder in the other, and so has provided him with
solutions for both the problems with which the West is confronted.
In order to develop its potential economic capacities, the whole
West has need of two things transport and labour ; but the South-
:

western planter believing that his labour-problem has been solved

for ever by the institution of negro slavery has sought a solution
for his transport-problem, and for this only, from the Yankee's
 70 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
'mechanical ingenuity. The North- Western farmer is in a different
case. He disposes of no servile man-power, and his free-labour
force is recruited by the casual process of immigration from Europe
all too slowly to till his fast-expanding fields. So he finds the
machinery which is turned out by the Eastern factories
agricultural
as great a godsend as the Eastern railways. By these two 'Yankee
notions', together, the allegiance of the North- West has been
decided and thus the Civil War has been lost by the South before
;

it has been fought. In taking up arms in the hope of redressing

her economic reverses by a military counterstroke, the South has

merely precipitated and consummated a ddbdcle that was already
inevitable.
This ultimate victory of the New Englanders, in a competition
for the mastery of North America in which their Spanish, Dutch,
French, and Southern competitors were successively discomfited, is
illuminating for the study of the question with which we are con-
cerned at the moment: the question of the relative stimulating
effects of different degrees of difficulty in the physical environment
of human life. For, unusually difficult though the New Englanders'
environment was, it is manifest that the rival colonists' environ-
ments were none of them easy. To begin with, all alike had under-
gone the initial ordeal of plucking up their social roots in Europe
and crossing the Atlantic and striking fresh roots in the soil of a
New World; and, when they had succeeded in re-establishing
1

themselves, it was not only the New Englanders who found

permanent difficulties to contend with in their new American
home. The French settlers in Canada had to contend with an
almost arctic cold; and the French settlers in Louisiana had to
break in a great river. The Mississippi was as wayward in changing
his course, and as devastating in his inundations, as the Yellow
River or the Nile or the Tigris; and the levies with which the
Creoles protected their hard-won fields and villages cost no less
human effort to build and maintain than the earthen bulwarks of
the Egyptiac and the Sumeric and the Sinic Civilization. In fact,
the difficulties presented by the physical environment in Canada
and in Louisiana were only less formidable than those which the
New Englanders encountered on Town Hill itself. Thus this
North American illustration, as far as it goes, tells in favour of the
proposition that the difficulty and the stimulus of an environment
are apt to increase paripassu. It will tell the same tale if we push
it even farther.
Can we push it farther? Can we venture, in 1933, to prophesy

1 The stimulus of transmarine

colonization and migration is examined further on
pp. 84-100, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 71
in whose hands the mastery of North America will lie a century
hence ? Can we hope to come any nearer to the mark ourselves
than our imaginary prophet in 1650 and 1701 and 1803 ? Can we
do more than ring down the curtain on the present scene, in which
the offspring of the New Englanders dominates the stage ? Diffi-
cult though divination may be, there are already certain signs that
the drama is not yet played out and the final victory in the struggle
not yet decided. One small sign once came to the notice of the
author of this Study.
A few days after the occasion, mentioned above, 1 when I passed
by the deserted site of Town Hill, Connecticut, I found myself with
an hour to spend between trains in one of the small back-country
manufacturing towns of New England, on the Massachusetts side
of the Connecticut-Massachusetts state-line. Since the General
War of 1914-18, the industrial districts of New England have fared
as badly as those of the mother country. They have fallen on evil
days, and they show it in their aspect. In this town, however, on
this day, the atmosphere was not at all forlorn or lifeless. The town
was in fete, and the whole population was abroad in the streets.
Threading my way through the crowds I noticed that one person
out of every two was wearing a special badge, and I inquired what
the colours signified. I was told that they were the colours of the local
French Canadian club and I ascertained that my rough impression
;

of their frequency in the streets was borne out by statistics. In that

year 1925, in that New England manufacturing town, the French
Canadians were by far the strongest contingent in the local labomv
force. The indigenous New Englanders had left these factories, as
they had left the fields of Town Hill, to find their fortunes in the
West; but the town, unlike the village, had not been deserted. As
fast as the indigenous population had ebbed out, a tide of French
Canadian immigrants had flooded in. Conditions of work and life
which had ceased to be attractive to the descendants of the Pilgrim
Fathers seemed luxurious to these Norman peasants' children from
the sub-arctic hinterland of Quebec. Moreover, I was told, the
French Canadian immigrants were spreading from the towns of
New England on to the land, where, as peasants, they found them-
selves truly at home. On their frugal standard of living, American
rates of industrial wages left them with a surplus which quickly
mounted up to the purchase-price of a derelict New
England farm.
The immigrants were actually re-populating the deserted country-
side. Perhaps, on my next visit, I should find Town Hill itself no

longer desolate. Yet if, on that forbidding spot, the works of

Man
overcame the wilderness for the second time, it could be foreseen
1
See pp. 15-16, above.
72 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
that history would repeat itself with a difference. The fields and
orchards and even the houses might wear again in 1950 the aspect
which they had worn two centuries before; but this time the
blood in the veins of the farmers would be French and not English ,

and divine worship in the antique wooden church would be con-

ducted no longer by a Presbyterian minister but by a Catholic
priest!
Thus it seems possible that the contest between the French
Canadian and the New Englander for the mastery of North
America may not, after all, have been concluded and disposed of
finally by the outcome of the Seven Years'
War. For, when the
French flag was hauled down, the French peasant did not disappear
with the emblem of the French Government's sovereignty. Under
the tutelage of the Roman Catholic Church, this peasantry con-
tinued, undisturbed, to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the
Earth; and now in the fullness of time the French Canadian is
making a counter-offensive into the heart of his old rival's home-
land. He is conquering New England in the peasant's way by
slower but surer methods than those which Governments have at
their command. He is conducting his operations with the plough-
share and not with the sword, and he is asserting his ownership by
the positive act of colonizing the countryside and not by the
cartographical conceit of painting colours and drawing lines on a
scrap of paper. Meanwhile, law and religion and environment are
combining to assist him. The environment of a harsh countryside
keeps him exposed to a stimulus which no longer invigorates his
rival in the softer atmosphere of the distant Western cities. His

religion forbids him to restrict the size of his family by contra-

ceptive methods of birth-control. And United States legislation,
which has restricted immigration from countries overseas but not
from countries on the American Continent, has left the French
Canadian immigrant in a privileged position which is shared with
him by none but the Mexican. 1 Perhaps the present act in the
drama of North American history may end, after a century of
peaceful penetration, in a triumphal meeting between the two
resurgent Latin peasantries in the neighbourhood of the Federal
Capital of the United States! Is this the denouement that our
great-grandchildren are destined to witness in A.D. 2033 ? There

Restriction of immigration into the United States has been effected by the
1 This

Immigration (Restriction) Acts of 1921 and 1924. It should be noted that the wide door
left open for immigration into the United States across the land-frontiers is only open
for native-born inhabitants of the adjoining American countries. A European or Asiatic
who attempts to enter the United States through Canada or Mexico, without having
secured a place in the annual quota of immigrants assigned to his own country of origin,
finds himself excluded. In this matter, the United States Bureau of Immigration has
adopted the British Admiralty's doctrine of 'continuous voyage*.
 THE STIMULUS OF HARD COUNTRIES 73
have been reversals of fortune every bit as strange as this in North
American history before.

III. THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND

The Testimony of Philosophy, Mythology, and Religion
So much for comparisons between the respective stimulating
effects of physical environments which present different
degrees of
difficulty. Let us now approach the same question from a different
angle by comparing the respective stimulating effects of old ground
and new ground, apart from the intrinsic nature of the terrain.
Does the effort of breaking new ground act as a stimulus in itself ?
The question is answered in the affirmative by the critical empiri-
cism of an eighteenth-century Western philosopher as well as by the
wider spontaneous human experience which has found a cumula-
tive expression in Mythology. David Hume concludes his essay

Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences with the observa-
tion that 'the arts and sciences, like some plants, require a fresh
soil; and, however rich the land may be, and however you may
recruit it by art or care, it will never, when once exhausted, pro-
duce anything that is perfect or finished in the kind'. The same
affirmative answer is conveyed in the myth of the Expulsion from
Eden and in the myth of the Exodus from Egypt. In their removal
out of the magic garden into the workaday world, Adam and Eve
transcend the food-gathering economy of Primitive Mankind and
give birth to the fathers of an agricultural and a pastoral civiliza-
tion. 1 In their exodus from Egypt, the Children of Israel though
they hanker in the wilderness after the flesh pots of the house of
2
bondage give birth to a generation which helps to lay the
foundations of the Syriac Civilization in taking possession of
the Promised Land. 3 When we turn from myths to records, we
find these intuitions confirmed by the evidence of empirical
observation.
In the histories of religions, we find that to the consternation of
those who ask the scornful question: 'Can any good thing come
out of Nazareth ?' 4 the Messiah of Jewry does come out of that
obscure village in 'Galilee of the Gentiles': 5 an outlying piece of
new ground which had been captured for Jewry by the Macca-
6
bees rather less than a century before the date of Jesus's birth.
And when the indomitable growth of this Galilaean grain of

i See II. C (ii) (b) I, vol i, p. 290, above. 2 See

pp. 24-5, above.
3 See the passage quoted in II. B, vol. i, p 198, above.
* John 1.46. Compare John vn. 41 and 52, and Matt iv. 14-1 6, which is a reminiscence
of Isaiah ix. 1-2.
6
s Matt. iv.
15. Regnante Alexandra Jannaeo, 103-76 B.C.
74 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
mustard-seed turns the consternation of Orthodox Jewry into
active hostility, and this not only in Judaea itself but among the
Jewish diaspori, then the propagators of the new faith deliberately
turn to the Gentiles' 1 and proceed to conquer new worlds for
c

the range of
Christianity on ground which had lain wholly beyond
the strong right arm of an Alexander Jannaeus. In the history of
Buddhism it is the same story, for the decisive victories of this

Indie faith are not won on the old ground of the Indie World. The
Hinayana first finds an open road in Ceylon, which was a colonial
annex of the Indie Civilization. And the Mahayana starts its
long and roundabout journey towards its future domain
in the
Far East by capturing the Syriacized and Hellenized Indie province
of the Panjab. It is on the new ground of these alien worlds that the
highest expressions of the Indie and the Syriac religious genius
eventually bear their fruit in witness to the truth that 'a prophet
is not without honour save in his own country and in his own

house'. 2

The Testimony of the 'Related' Civilizations

A convenient empirical test of this social 'law' is offered by those

civilizations of the 'related' class that have arisen partly on ground

already occupied by the respective antecedent civilization and

partly on ground which the 'related' civilization has taken over
either from primitive societies or from other civilizations on its
own account, without the antecedent civilization having here pre-
ceded it and prepared the way. We
can test the respective stimu-
lating effects of old ground and new ground by surveying the
career of any one of these 'related' civilizations, marking the point
or points within its domain at which its achievements in any line
of social activity have been most signal, and then observing
whether the ground on which such points are located is new
ground or old.
Let us begin with the extreme case of the Babylonic Civilization,
whose original home has been found to be wholly coincident with
that of the 'apparented' civilization the Sumeric. 3 In which of its
:

three foci Babylonia, Elam, Assyria4 did the Babylonic Civiliza-

tion most distinguish itself? Undoubtedly in Assyria. Whether
we judge by prowess in arms or by constructive ability in politics
or by creative genius in art, we must pronounce that the Babylonic
Civilization reached a higher level in Assyria than in either of the
other two Babylonic countries. And was Assyria old ground or
1
Actp xin. 46.
2 Matthew xiii. 57. Compare Mark vi. 4; Luke iv. 24; John iv. 44.
3 See the table and the footnote in vol i, p. 132, above.
4 See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 116-17, above.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 75
new ? turns out, on further examination, that Assyria was the
It
one portion of the original home of the antecedent Sumeric Civili-
zation which possibly might be regarded as new ground at any
rate by comparison with Sumer and Akkad and Elam for when we ;

probe the local history of Assyria as deep as the present state of our
archaeological knowledge allows us to penetrate, we find some
reason for supposing that Assyria was not one of the original com-
munities into which the Sumeric Society articulated itself after its
birth, but was in some sense a colony albeit a colony that was
almost coeval with the mother country. Perhaps it is not altogether
fantastic to surmise that the stimulus derived from this breaking of
new ground in Assyria at some early stage in the growth of the
Sumeric Civilization may account in part for the special vigour
which was afterwards displayed by the 'affiliated' Babylonic Civili-
zation on this Assyrian ground. 1
Turning next to the Hindu Civilization, let us mark the local
sources of the new creative elements in Hindu life particularly in
religion, which has always been the central and supreme activity of
the Hindu Society. We
find these sources in the South. It was
here that all the distinctive features of Hinduism took shape 2 the :

cult of Gods represented by material objects or images and housed

in temples the emotional personal relation between the worshipper
;

and the particular God to whose worship he has devoted himself;

the metaphysical sublimation of image-worship and emotionalism
in an intellectually sophisticated theology (Sankara, the father of
Hindu Theology, was born, circa A.D. 788, in Southern Malabar). 3

All these features of Hinduism bear a Southern stamp. And was

the South of India old ground or new ? It was new ground, inasmuch
as it had not been incorporated into the domain of the 'apparented'
Indie Civilization until the time of the Maurya Empire (circa
323-185 B.C.), when the Indie Society, after having first broken
4

down and then passed through a Time of Troubles, at length

entered upon that advanced stage in the disintegration of a civiliza-
tion which we have learnt to recognize as a 'universal state'.
Let us look now at the two civilizations that are 'affiliated* to the
Syriac, namely the Arabic and the Iranic.
5

Where, during the short life of the Arabic Society, did its rather
feeble pulse beat least feebly? Assuredly in Egypt, where a ghost
c
of the Abbasid Caliphate (a ghost, that is to say, of the 'reintegrated'
of the
Syriac universal state) was evoked in the thirteenth century
* For another
explanation of Assyria's rise as a reaction to the stimulus of pressure
from the human environment, see the present volume, pp. i33~7> below.
a See
Eliot, Sir Charles: Hinduism and Buddhism (London 1921, Arnold, 3 vols.),
vol. i, Introduction, p. xli.
3 See Eliot, op. cit , vol. ii, p. 207.
* See I. C (i) (i), vol. i, pp. 86-7, above.
s See i. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 67-72, with Annex I, above.
76 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Christian Era by the Mamluks. 1 It was in Egypt that the Arabic
literature and the Arabic architecture kept themselves alive during
the quarter of a millennium that elapsed between the inauguration
of the Cairene Caliphate and the Ottoman conquest. And was
Egypt old ground or new? It was new ground inasmuch as it had
not begun to be incorporated into the domain of the Syriac Civili-
zation, to which the Arabic Civilization was 'affiliated', before the
entry of this Syriac Civilization into its universal state and even ;

then the 'dead trunk' of the indigenous Egyptiac Civilization,

which still cumbered the ground in Egypt, was only absorbed into
the tissues of the Syriac Civilization slowly and arduously.
The conquest of Egypt by the Achaemenian Empire, which was
the original Syriac universal state, 2 was a mere external annexation.
The Egyptians were simply subdued politically by force of arms
and even this only intermittently. The Achaemenian regime
made no progress whatever towards converting their souls and, ;

when the Syriac universal state was interrupted by the intrusion

of Hellenism, 'Hellenization' seemed a more likely destiny for the
residue of the Egyptiac Society than a merger with the Syriac
Society which had been submerged, quite as deeply as the
Egyptiac Society itself, under the Hellenic flood. It was not until
both the Hellenic and the Egyptiac Society were in extremis that,
in the competition for spiritual dominion over Egypt, the Hellenic
Society lost and the Syriac Society gained the upper hand. The
ultimate victory of the Syriac Civilization in Egypt was first fore-
shadowed when Egypt was captivated by Monophysitism a
version of Christianity in which the Syriac reaction against Hel-
lenism expressed itself before the dissolution of the Roman Empire
and the re-integration of the Syriac universal state in the 'Abbasid
Caliphate. The victory of the Syriac Civilization in Egypt was only
3

consummated when the population of Egypt after having suc-

cessively abandoned their ancient Egyptiac religion for Primitive
Christianity and Primitive Christianity for Monophysitism were
converted en masse from Monophysitism to Islam; and this did not
happen until the 'Abbasid Caliphate itself had dissolved into the
interregnum (circa A.D. 975-1275)* out of which the Arabic Civiliza-
tion afterwards emerged. Thus, in Egypt, the Arabic Civilization
was occupying ground which the 'apparented' Syriac civilization
had not completely made its own until the Arabic Civilization was
on the point of coming to birth. Yet it was on this new ground in
1 See i, p. 70, above.
vol. a See vol.
i, pp. 75-9, above.
3 The reaction of the Syrian Civilization against the intrusion of Hellenism, of which
this Monophysite version of Christianity was one symptom in one
phase, is discussed
D
further in II. 3D (vi), on p. 236, and II. (vn), on pp. 386-7, as well as in Pail IX, below.
* See vol.
i, pp, 67-8, above.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 77
Egypt that the Arabic Civilization displayed such vigour as it did
display before its career was prematurely closed by incorporation
into the body social of its lustier Iranic sister. This is
noteworthy,
considering that the original home of the Arabic Civilization
included not only the new ground of Egypt but also the old ground
of Syria the very region in which the 'apparented 3 Syriac Civili-
zation had taken its rise. Yet, in the history of the 'affiliated*
Arabic Civilization, Syria always played the subordinate and Egypt
the leading part.
Again, in what areas did the Iranic Civilization the sister of the
Syriac most conspicuously flourish ? Almost all the great achieve-
ments of the Iranic Civilization in the principal spheres of social
activity not only in war and in politics, but even in architecture
and in literature 1 were accomplished
one or other of the two
at
extremities of the Iranic World : one end, or
either in Hindustan, at
in Anatolia, at the other; 2 and they culminated respectively, in
these two areas, in the Mughal and in the Ottoman Empire. Were
these two Iranic empires erected on old ground or on new ground ?
The ground was new in both cases. The Ottoman Empire was
erected on the domain of the Orthodox Christian Civilization; and
indeed it occupied this domain so effectively that it actually per-
formed, for the main body of Orthodox Christendom, the function
of a universal state. 3 Similarly, the Mughal Empire was erected on
the domain of the Hindu Civilization and performed the function of
a universal state in the Hindu World. 4 Thus the Iranic Civilization
1 Persian literature which in the early age of Iranic history continued to flourish, and
this in the heart of the Iranic World, in Iran itself is a conspicuous apparent exception
to the general rule here formulated. This Persian literature, however, is to be regarded
as a creation not of the Iranic but of the 'apparented' Syriac Civilization (as Latin
literature is a creation of the Hellenic Civilization and not of the 'affiliated* Western or
Latin Christendom). The genesis of Persian literature was an event of the 'Abbasid age,
when the Syriac Civilization was enjoying a kind of 'Indian Summer* after the reintegra-
lion of its universal state. It is to this age of the Syriac Civilization that Persian literature
genetically belongs, although chronologically the lifetime of one of its great masters,
Sa*di of Shiraz (vivebat area A D. 1 184-129x5, falls within the post-Synac interregnum,
and the lifetimes of two others Hafiz of Shiraz and Jam! of Khurasan fall respectively
within the fourteenth and the fifteenth century of the Christian Era: that is to say,
within a time when the Iranic Civilization had already emerged Hafiz and the other
Persian poets of his generation flourished under social conditions curiously resembling
those which produced both the Scandinavian skalds and the Ionian Homendae. *It
would seem that the existence of numerous small courts, rivals to one another, and each
striving to outshine the others, was singularly favourable to the encouragement of poets
and other men of letters, who, if disappointed or slighted in one city, could generally
find in another a more favourable reception.' (Browne, E G.: A Literary History of
Persia, vol. m (Cambridge 1928, University Press), pp 160-1 ) Thereafter, however,
from the beginning of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, Persian literature
wilted in Iian under the regime of the Safawis. (For a discussion of this last-mentioned
phenomenon, see Browne, E, G A :
Literary History of Persia, vol iv (Cambridge 1928,
University Press), pp. 24-31; and the present Study, I. C (i) (6), Annex I, in vol i,

above.)
a For the area covered by the original domain of the Iranic Civilization, see I. C (i)
(6), vol. i, pp. 68-9, above.
3 For this role of the Ottoman
Empire, see further Part III. A, vol. iii, pp. 26-7, and
Part VI, below. 4 See Part VI, below.
78 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
displayed, at two points which were remote from one another, the
identical idiosyncrasy of flourishing best on foreign soil. More-
over, it is to be noted that, in both cases, the acquisition of this
foreign soil had not started until after the beginning of the inter-
(circa A.D. 975-1275) into which
regnum the universal state of the
'apparented' Syriac Civilization dissolved and out of which the
'affiliated' Iranic Civilization itself emerged. The first permanent

conquests of Hindu territory in the Kabul Valley and in the Panjab

were made (circa A.D. 975-I025)
1
by Sebuktegin and his more
celebrated successor Mahmud of Ghaznah; the first permanent
conquests of Orthodox Christian territory were made (circa A.D.
1070-5) by the Saljuqs.
Accordingly, it was on sites acquired piecemeal from alien
civilizations at recent dates that the Iranic Civilization eventually
erected its most imposing monuments. On the other hand, the
second home which the 'apparented' Syriac Civilization had once
found on the Iranian Plateau and in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin 2
never became the most active focus of the 'affiliated' Iranic Civili-
zation, in spite of the fact that these two regions lay in the heart
of the zone in which the Iranic Civilization originally emerged.
During the age when, in the new territories conquered from
Orthodox Christendom and Hinduism, the Iranic Civilization was
going from strength to strength, it succumbed in Iran and in
Transoxania to a series of local misdevelopments. 3 In the first
place, during the post-Syriac interregnum, these regions bore the
brunt of the Mongol invasion the last and most destructive
avalanche of the post-Syriac Volkerwanderung. Thereafter, they
lay torpid under the dead weight of the two local Mongol 'successor-
states' of the 'Abbasid Caliphate the appanage of the Il-Khans and
the appanage of the House of Chaghatay and these disorderly and
;

sluggish regimes only disappeared to make way for the devouring

militarism of Timur. The final blows, by which the two regions
were prostrated simultaneously at the beginning of the sixteenth
century of the Christian Era, were the establishment of the Shi'i
Power in Iran and the conquest of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin by the
Uzbeg barbarians off the Eurasian Steppe two violent political :

transformations which had the identic effect of fixing a great

religious and cultural gulf between the geographical heart of the

1
Sebuktegin established his suzerainty over the Kabul Valley in A.D. 075; and
Mahmud conquered it and forcibly converted the population to Islam in A.D. 1021,
(Vaidya, C. V.- A History of Mediaeval India (Poona 1921-4, Oriental Book-Supplying
Agency, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 193 ) Sebuktegm's raids on the Panjab began in A.D. 986-7;
Mahmud raided Kanauj in A.D. 1019 (Smith, V.: The Early History of India, 3rd edition
2 See I. C
(Oxford 1914, Clarendon Press), p. 382). (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 80-2, above.
(i) (6), Annex I, in vol. i, II. D (v), pp. 144-8 of the present volume
a See I. C
: and
Part IV.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 79
Iranic World and either of its extremities. Thus it was in the
extremities and not at the heart of the Iranic body social that the
blood pulsated most vigorously; or, in terms of our original meta-
phor, it was on new ground and not on old ground that the seed of
the Iranic culture produced its finest harvests.
In what regions has the greatest vigour been displayed by the
Orthodox Christian Civilization? A glance at its history shows
that its social centre of gravity has lain in different regions at
different times. In the first age after its emergence out of the post-
Hellenic interregnum, the life of Orthodox Christendom was most
vigorous on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles
in the central and north-eastern parts of the Anatolian Plateau
or, in the administrative terminology of the day, in the Anatolic
and Armeniac army corps districts (themata) of the East Roman
Empire. Thereafter, in the course of the two centuries which
elapsed between the conversion of Bulgaria to Orthodox Christi-
anity in A.D. 865-70 and the occupation of the interior of Anatolia
by the Saljuq Turkish converts to Islam in A.D. 1070-5, the centre
of gravity of Orthodox Christendom shifted from the Asiatic to the
European side of the Straits; and, as far as the main body of
Orthodox Christian Society is concerned, it has remained in the
Balkan Peninsula ever since. In modern times, however, that
portion of Orthodox Christendom which constitutes the main body
of the society from an historical standpoint has been far outstripped
in growth and overshadowed in importance by the mighty offshoot
of Orthodox Christendom in Russia. 1
Are these three areas in which the Orthodox Christian Civiliza-
tion has successively raised its head to be regarded as old ground
or as new ? Central and North-Eastern Anatolia was certainly new
ground as far as the Orthodox Christian Civilization was concerned.
It was the former domain of the Hittite Civilization; and although
the Hittite Civilization had died a premature death by violence
during the Volkerwanderung in which the Hellenic Civilization
was brought to birth, 2 its Anatolian homeland was not penetrated
by Hellenism until after the destruction of the Achaemenian
Empire by Alexander the Great. Even then, this region remained
unhellenized much longer than many places that were far more
distant from the Aegean. The process did not set in vigorously
here until after the last of the local 'successor-states' of the
Achaemenian Empire had been converted into Roman provinces;
and the first positive local contributions to the Hellenic culture
* An offshoot which has neither lost its
importance nor ceased to be recognizable
through being draped twice over first by Peter the Great and then by Lenin m an
exotic fancy dress of the momentarily fashionable Western cut.
2 See I. C
(i) (6), vol. i, pp. 93 and 100-1,
above.
8o THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
were made as late as the fourth century of the Christian Era by the
Cappadocian Fathers of the Church. Thus the earliest centre of
gravity of the Orthodox Christian Civilization in the interior of
Anatolia lay in a region which had not been completely incorporated
into the domain of the 'apparented' Hellenic Civilization until
Hellenism was in articulo mortis.
The second centre of gravity in the interior of the Balkan
Peninsula was established on new ground likewise. For the veneer
of Hellenic Civilization in a Latin medium, with which this region
had been thinly overlaid, in the lifetime of the Roman Empire,
during a span of some five centuries, had been destroyed without
leaving a trace during the interregnum into which the Empire had
1

eventually dissolved. The destruction was more thoroughgoing

here than it was in any of the western provinces with the single

exception of Britain. In the Balkan Peninsula, as in Britain, the

superficial change of regime was accompanied by a radical change
of population and religion. The Christian Roman provincials were
not simply conquered but were practically exterminated by the
pagan barbarian invaders; and these barbarians eradicated all
elements of local culture so effectively that when their descendants
repented of the evil which their fathers had done they had to obtain
fresh seed from outside in order to start cultivation again. By the
time when Orthodox Christianity was re-sown in the Balkan
Peninsula in the ninth century of the Christian Era, the soil had
been lying fallow for more than three centuries that is to say, for
:

about twice as long as the soil of Britain had been lying fallow at
the time when Augustine was sent on his mission by Gregory the
Great. Thus the region in which the Orthodox Christian Civiliza-
tion established its second centre of gravity was ground which had
recently been reclaimed de novo from the wilderness.
As for the third centre of gravity in Russia, there is no need to
labour the point. The offshoot of Orthodox Christendom which
was transplanted to Russia in the tenth century of the Christian
Era was propagated there in virgin soil on which no civilization had
ever grown before; and this new Russian offshoot of Orthodox
Christendom was separated from the main body by a double
barrier of sea and steppe. 2 Russia was new ground with a
1 The
survival of a Romance language among the mountains of South-Eastern
Europe, from the Carpathians to the Pindus, cannot properly be regarded as a trace of the
Latin version of the Hellenic Civilizationm the Balkan Peninsula; for the survival of the
language did not carry with it any survival of the culture of which this language had once
been the vehicle. The still Latin-speaking and still nominally Christian Vlachs and
Rumans had to be converted, in 'the Middle Ages', to the Orthodox Christian Civiliza-
tion de novo, just like the contemporary Bulgars and Jugoslavs, who were
pagan bar-
barians speaking outlandish tongues.
2 At the
present time, the domain of Orthodox Christendom in Russia and its domain
in the Balkan Peninsula are geographically isolated from one another no
longer. The
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 81

vengeance; and it is noteworthy Orthodox

that, in Russia, the
Christian Civilization has flourished with an exuberance which
stands out in contrast to its strained and stunted growth else-
where.
more remarkable to observe that while the centre of
It is still

gravity of the Orthodox Christian Civilization has shifted twice in

the course of Orthodox Christian history, it has never lain in the
homeland of the 'apparented' Hellenic Civilization in the Aegean
area, although this area has been included in the domain of Ortho-
dox Christendom from first to last. In the early age of the Orthodox
Christian Civilization, when its centre of gravity lay on the
Anatolian Plateau, the Aegean frontage of Anatolia, which had
played a leading role in the early age of the Hellenic Civilization,
was perhaps the least important district in the Asiatic peninsula. 1
Again, since the centre of gravity of the main body of Orthodox
Christendom has shifted to the European side of the Straits, it has
normally lain on the landward and not on the seaward side of
Salonica. In fact, peninsular Greece, which was the hub of the
Hellenic universe after the primacy had once passed from Ionia, has
never played a prominent part in Orthodox Christian history except
on two occasions one in the 'medieval' and the other in the
'modern' age of Western history when Greece has served as a

Rumanian Orthodox Christians of the Balkan area now march with their Ukrainian co-
religionists of the Russian area along a line extending from the Central Carpathians
through the Bukovina and Bessarabia to the Black Sea coast. This geographical con-
tinuity between the Russian and the Balkan domains of Orthodox Christendom does not,
however, date back farther than the eighteenth century. The two domains were separated
from one another by an outlying strip of the Eurasian Steppe until after the Russo-
Turkish War of A.D. 1768-74 It was only in the sequel to this war, when the north
coast of the Black Sea and its whole hinterland were annexed to the Russian Empire,
that this insulating strip of steppe was cleared of the last of its Nomadic pastoral tenants
and was colonized with an agricultural population of Orthodox Christian peasants.
This was the final stage in a gradual converging encroachment of the Orthodox Christian
peasant's ploughland upon the Muslim or pagan herdsman's cattle-range which had
been in progress since the Ruman pioneers had descended in the fourteenth century
from the Transylvanian highlands into the plains of Wallachia and Moldavia, and since
the Zaporogian Cossacks had established themselves as they did at about the same date
on their island-fortress in the River Dmepr. (See II. D (v), pp. 154-7, below.) In
the tenth century, however, this encroachment had not yet begun. At that time, the
pagan Turkish Pechenegs were pasturing their flocks on virgin steppe-land from the
banks of the Don to the Iron Gates of the Danube without interruption The Orthodox
Christian missionaries who carried the seeds of their civilization to Russia could only
icach this new field by facing the perils of sea and steppe in succession. They had first to
travel by ship from Constantinople to the Crimea, and thence to pick their way across
the open prairie, where they were at the mercy of the Pechenegs until they found safety
at last in the southern outskirts of the Russian forests.
* When the East Roman
Army was concentrated in Anatolia during the military crisis
produced by the Peisian and Arab invasions in the seventh century of the Christian
Era, this district was assigned to the Thracensian Army Corps, which was permanently
withdrawn from the European district from which it derived its name and was stationed
here in Western Anatolia in order to support the Anatolic Army Corps, which had been
withdrawn from Syria on to the Anatolian Plateau. The Anatolici were the front-line
troops; the Thracenses were mere reserves. Accordingly, the Thracensian district was
httle accounted of, whereas the Anatolic district, in conjunction with the Armeniac,
swayed the destinies of the East Roman Empire.
II G
82 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Watergate through which Western influence has forced an entry
into the Orthodox Christian World. 1
Turning now to Hellenic history, let us ask our question apropos
of the two regions which (as we have just observed in passing)
successively held the primacy in the Hellenic World. When the
Hellenic Civilization flowered on the Anatolian coast of the Aegean
and afterwards on the European Greek peninsula, was it on new
ground or on old ground that this flowering took place ? It was on
new ground, here again for neither of these regions had lain within
;

the original home of the antecedent Minoan Civilization, to which

the Hellenic Civilization was related. On the European Greek
peninsula, the Minoan Civilization, even at its widest extension in
its latest age, had held no more than a chain of fortified positions

along the southern and eastern coast-lines. On the Anatolian coast

3

of the Aegean, the failure of our modern Western archaeologists

to find traces of the presence, or even influence, of the Minoan
Civilization has been so signal that it can hardly be attributed to
chance, but seems rather to indicate that for some reason this
coast actually did not come within the Minoans' range. 3 As far as
we know, the first settlers from the Aegean to occupy the west
coast of Anatolia effectively were those refugees of Minoan culture
and Greek speech who were driven thither, as late as the twelfth
century B.C., in the same final convulsion of the post-Minoan
Volkerwanderung that drove the Philistines on to the coast of
4 These were the founders of Aeolis and
Syria. Ionia; and thus
Hellenism flowered first on soil which the antecedent civilization
had never seriously cultivated. Moreover, when the seeds were
scattered abroad from Ionia into other parts of the Hellenic World,
the Ionic soil on which they flowered next was the stony ground of
Attica on the opposite side of the Aegean. They did not germinate
in the Cyclades : the Ionic islands which stood, like stepping-stones,
between the Ionic mainlands in Asia and in Europe. Through the
whole course of Hellenic history the Cycladic islanders played a
subordinate role as humble servants of the successive masters of the
sea. This is remarkable, since the Cyclades had been one of the
two foci of the antecedent Minoan Civilization. The other Minoan
focus, of course, was Crete; and the role played in Hellenic history
by Crete is even more surprising.
* The first of these two forcible entries
was the military conquest of peninsular Greece
by the Latins, during and after the so-called 'Fourth Crusade'. The second was the
infiltration of modern Western ideas which began towards the end of the seventeenth
century and came to a head politically, some hundred and fifty years later, in the Greek
War of Independence which broke out in A.D. 1821.
a See I. C (i) (), Annex II, vol i,above.
3 On this point, see I. C (i) (b), vol. i, p. 95, above.
* See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 100-2, above.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 83
Crete might have been expected to retain its social importance
not only for historical reasons, as the place in which the Minoan
Civilization had attained its culmination, but for
geographical
reasons as well. Crete was by far the largest island in the Aegean
Archipelago, and it lay athwart two of the most important sea-
routes in the Hellenic World. Every ship that sailed from the
Peiraeus for Sicily had to pass between the western end of Crete
and Laconia; every ship that sailed from the Peiraeus for Egypt
had to pass between the eastern end of Crete and Rhodes. Yet,
whereas Laconia and Rhodes each played a leading part in Hellenic
history, Crete remained aloof, obscure and benighted from first
to last. While Hellas all around was giving birth to statesmen
and poets and artists and philosophers, the island which had once
been the home of the Minoan Civilization now bred nothing more
reputable than medicine-men and mercenaries and pirates; and
though the greatness of Minoan Crete had left its impress upon the
Hellenic Mythology in the fables of Minos the thalassocrat and his
brother Rhadamanthys, the judge of the dead, this did not save the
latter-day Cretan scapegrace from becoming a Hellenic byword.
Indeed, he has passed judgement on himself in the song of Hybrias 1
and in a hexameter which has been embedded, like a fly in amber,
in the canon of Christian Scripture. 'One of themselves, even a
prophet of their own, said: "The Cretians are always liars, evil
beasts, slow bellies."
>2
Thus even the Apostle of the Gentiles
excepted the Hellenes of Crete from the charity which he bestowed
upon Hellenes in general.
3

Let us ask our question once again this time in regard to the
Far Eastern Civilization which is 'affiliated' to the Sinic Civilization.
At what points in its domain has this Far Eastern Civilization
shown the greatest vigour ? The Japanese and the Cantonese stand
out unmistakably as its most vigorous representatives to-day; and
both these peoples have sprung from soil which is new ground and
not old ground from the standpoint of Far Eastern history. As
regards the south-eastern seaboard of China, we have noticed in an
earlier chapter* that it was not incorporated into the domain of the
* An English translation of the Song of Hybrias, by Gilbert Murray, will be found
below m Part III. A, vol. in, on p 87, footnote i.
The Epistle of Paul to Titus, ch. i, v. 12. The hexameter here quoted runs in
2 Greek :

Kp-fjres act 0c?ar<u, KCLKO. Bypla,, yaarepes apyot.

For the original context of this verse in the poem called 'Minos' which was attributed
to the Cretan 'prophet' Epimenides, see I C (i) (), vol. i, p 99, footnote 2.
3 The Cretans have not
forgiven St. Paul for immortalizing their ill repute, and they
have racked their brains to turn the passage of Scripture in which they are pilloried to the
Apostle's own discredit. When the present writer was travelling in Crete in the year
1912, a Cretan peasant adjured him in all seriousness to discount Paul's testimony on the
ground that Paul was a biased witness. On being asked
what had given Paul his anti-
Cretan bias, the peasant explained that a Cietan had once got the better of Paul in a
business transaction! + In I. C (i) (5), vol. i, p. 90, footnote 2.
84 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
'apparentecT Sinic Society until the last phase of Sinic history, and
even then only on the superficial plane of politics, as a frontier
province of the Empire of the Han, which was the Sinic universal
state. Its inhabitants remained barbarians; and their successors
in the four modern Chinese provinces of Kwangtung, Kwangsi,
Fukien, and Chekiang testify, in the nomenclature which they
employ, that they claim no part or lot in the chapter of history
which the Han Dynasty brought to a close. They resign the
glorious name of 'Han people' to their neighbours in the basins of
the Yangtse and the Yellow River, and use the name of 'T'ang
people' to designate themselves. In this designation they signify
that their own history did not begin until the Far Eastern Civiliza-
tion had already emerged from the post-Sinic interregnum for the ;

lineaments of the Far Eastern Civilization had taken shape before

the close of the fifth century of the Christian Era, whereas the T'ang
Dynasty was not founded until A.D. 618. Thus the four provinces
of China Proper which are now the most vigorous and progressive
are the four in which the Far Eastern Civilization has broken new
ground. As for the Japanese Archipelago, the offshoot of the Far
Eastern Civilization which was transplanted thither, by way of
Korea, in the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian Era was
propagated there on ground where there was no trace of any pre-
vious culture. The strong growth of this offshoot of the Far Eastern
Civilization on the virgin soil of Japan is comparable to the growth
of the offshoot of the Orthodox Christian Civilization which was
transplanted from the Anatolian Plateau to the virgin soil of Russia.
1

The Special Stimulus of Migration Overseas

This survey of the relative fertility of old ground and new
ground, as exemplified in the histories of seven 'related' civiliza-
2
tions, has given us a certain empirical support for the doctrine
which is implicit in the myths of the Exodus and the Expulsion :

the doctrine that the ordeal of breaking new ground has an intrinsic
stimulating effect. Before passing on from the physical to the
human environment, let us pause to glance at certain illustrations
by which the foregoing empirical evidence may be reinforced.
These additional illustrations confirm the view which is sug-
gested by the unusual vitality of the Orthodox Christian Civiliza-
tion in Russia and of the Far Eastern Civilization in
Japan that
the stimulating effect of breaking new ground is greatest of all when
the new ground can only be reached by crossing the sea.
The special stimulus inherent in transmarine colonization appears
1 See pp. 8o-r, above.
z For a defence of this empirical evidence against a possible criticism, see II. D (m),
Annex, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 85
very clearly in the history of the Mediterranean during the first half
of the last millennium B.C. , when the Western Basin of the Mediter-
ranean was being colonized competitively by maritime
pioneers
representing three different civilizations in the Levant. It appears,
for instance, in the degree to which the two
greatest of these
colonial foundations Syriac Carthage and Hellenic Syracuse-
each outstripped its parent-city. 1 Carthage dwarfed Tyre in the
volume and value of her commerce, and on this economic basis she
built up a political empire to which the parent-city did not and
could not aspire. Syracuse likewise dwarfed her parent Corinth in
political power, and perhaps even more signally in the contribution
which she made to Hellenic culture. Again, the Achaean colonies
in Magna Graecia became busy seats of Hellenic commerce and

industry, and brilliant centres of Hellenic thought, as early as the

sixth century B.C., whereas the parent Achaean communities
along
the northern coast of the Peloponnese remained in a backwater
outside the main stream of Hellenic history for three more
centuries, and only emerged from this long obscurity after the
Hellenic Civilization had passed its zenith. As for the Locrians,
who were the Achaeans' neighbours on both sides of the Ionian
Sea, it was only the Epizephyrian Locrians, in their transmarine
settlement in Italy, who ever distinguished themselves at all. The
Locrians of Continental Greece remained obscure from first to last.
The most striking case of all is that of the Etruscans, 2 who were
the third party competing with the Greeks and the Phoenicians
for the colonization of the Western Mediterranean. In this competi-
tion, the Etruscans effectively held their own. Their colonies on
the west coast of Italy were comparable, in size and number, to the
Greek colonies in Magna Graecia and Sicily and to the Phoenician
colonies in Africa and Spain; and the Etruscan colonists, unlike
either the Phoenicians or the Greeks, were not content to remain
within sight of the sea across which they had come. They pushed
forward from the west coast of Italy into the interior with an dlan
which carried them on across the Appennines and across the Po,
until their outposts halted at last at the foot of the Alps. At the
same time, these colonial Etruscans remained in close contact with
their Greek and Phoenician rivals and though this contact gradu-
;

allydrew them into the ambit of the Hellenic Society and eventually
resulted in their being incorporated into the Hellenic body social,
this cultural 'conversion' increased rather than diminished the
importance of their position in the Mediterranean World. Thus
1
As, in the modern European colonization of North America, Boston in Massachu-
parent-town in Lincolnshire, and New York and New Orleans
setts has outstripped its
have outstripped the two cities in England and France after which they are respectively
named, a See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 114, footnote 3, with Annex II, above.
86 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
the Etruscan colonies in Italy are illuminated by the full light of
history; and we are also not without evidence of an abortive
Etruscan colonial enterprise in another quarter a daring but unsuc- :

cessful attempt to compete with the Greeks, in Greek home waters,

for the mastery of the Dardanelles and for the command of the
Black Sea. 1 It is the more remarkable that the Etruscan homeland
in the Levant, which sent out overseas the Etruscan colonists of
Italy and the Etruscan colonists of Lemnos, should be an historical
terra incognita. No historical record of its exact location survives ;

and nothing can be built on the Hellenic legend that the Etruscans
came from Lydia. 2 We
have to be content with the knowledge,
supplied by the records of 'the New Empire' of Egypt, that the
ancestors of the Etruscans, like the ancestors of the Achaeans, took
part in the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung and in the presumption ;

that the ports from which the descendants of those older Etruscan
sea-raiders afterwards set sail to make their fortunes in the west lay
somewhere on the Asiatic coast of the Levant in the no-man's-land
between Greek Side and Phoenician Aradus. This surprising gap
in the historical record can only mean one thing: 3 namely, that the
Etruscans who stayed at home never did anything worth recording.
The astonishing contrast between the nonentity of the Etruscans at
home and their eminence overseas gives the measure of the stimulus
which they must have received in the process of transmarine
colonization.
The stimulating effect of crossing the sea is perhaps greatest of
all in a transmarine migration which occurs in the course of a
Volkerwanderung.
Such occurrences seem to be uncommon. The only instances
which the writer of this Study can call to mind are the migration of
the Teucrians, Aeolians, lonians, and Dorians across the Aegean to
the west coast of Anatolia and the migration of the Teucrians and
Philistines round the eastern end of the Mediterranean to the coast
of Syria in the course of the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung; the
migration of the Angles and Jutes across the North Sea to Britain in
the course of the post-Hellenic Volkerwanderung the consequent ;

migration of the Cornavii and other Britons across the Channel to

the Armorican Peninsula of Gaul the contemporary migration of ;

the Irish Scots across the North Channel to the corner of North
Britain that is now called Argyll; 4 and the migrations of the
1
See I. C (i) (), Annex II, in vol i, above.
* This legend may have no better basis than the not very close resemblance between
two proper names Tyrrhenoi and Torrheboi.
:

3 Pace those modern Western scholars who take

this to mean that the Etruscans of
* *
Italy were either autochthonous Italians or else immigrants, by an overland route,
from the interior of the European Continent.
4 See II. D
(v), p 194, and II. D (vii), pp. 323-4, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 87
Scandinavians in the course of the Volkerwanderung which followed
the abortive evocation of a ghost of the Roman Empire by the
Carolingians.
1
This Scandinavian Volkerwanderung took place
almost entirely by sea, and this in several directions from Norway :

across the North Atlantic to the Shetlands and Orkneys and thence
by way of the Hebrides to Ireland and by way of the Faroes to
Iceland; from Denmark across the North Sea to England; from
eitherNorway or Denmark down the English Channel to Nor-
mandy; and from Sweden across the Baltic to Russia.
The Philistine migration, as we have observed at an earlier point
in this chapter, 2
came to a standstill in an easy environment which
produced a soporific effect upon the immigrants after they had
settled down and this sequel would appear to have neutralized any
;

stimulating effect that may have been produced by the previous

sea-passage.
3 The British migration, likewise, appears to have
produced no appreciable stimulating effect to judge by the rather

undistinguished subsequent history of the Bretons and this in

spite of the facts that the new Continental Brittany was decidedly
a hard country, and that the new-comers from overseas did not
establish their footing there without having to encounter and over-
come a considerable resistance, both from the Roman Church and
from the Prankish 'successor-state* of the Roman Empire.4 In the
other four instances, however that is to say, in the transmarine
migrations of the lonians, the Angles, the Scots, and the Scandi-
navians we can discern certain striking phenomena which have an
inner connexion with one another and which appear in conjunc-
tion, in each instance, with singular uniformity, while they are not
to be found in the far more numerous instances of migration over-
land. Considering that the four migrations in question have
occurred quite independently of one another at wide intervals of
time and place, 5 we may venture, perhaps, to generalize from them
* For the abortive Scandinavian Civilization, see II D (vii), pp. 340-60, below. For
the Scandinavian Heroic Age, out of which the abortive Scandinavian Civilization failed
to come to birth, see Part VIII, below. For the abortive Carolmgian ghost of the Roman
Empire, see Part X, below.
* See
pp. 49-51, above.
3
Moreover, the Philistine migration was only maritime in part The flotilla which
skirted the Asiatic coast was accompanied by a train of ox-carts in which the women and
children and goods of the migrant horde were transported overland.
4 The failure of the Bretons to distinguish themselves is the more remarkable when
we consider that their migration across the Channel in the post-Hellenic Volker-
wandcrung is the exact analogue of the migration of the Aeohans and lonians across the
Aegean in the post-Minoan Volkci wanderung. The Continental Bretons, like the Asiatic
Acolians and lonians, are the overseas descendants of refugee representatives of the
antecedent civilization who have been dislodged by the incoming barbarians. They are
not the overseas descendants of the barbarians themselves, like the Angles and the
Dorians. In the history of the Aeohans and lonians, the combination of the stimulus of
transmarine migration with the asset of an inherited culture has, of course, shown itself
particularly potent
s With the exception of the English and the Scottish migrations, which were con-
temporary in date though geographically isolated from one another.
 88 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
to the extent of regarding those phenomena which are common to
allfour as being inherent features of a Volkerwanderung when this
takes place not in the usual fashion overland but in this exceptional
fashion over the water.
The distinctiveness of these phenomena and their inner con-
nexion with one another are both explained by one and the same
simple fact : In transmarine migration, the social apparatus of the
migrants has to be packed on board ship before they can leave
the shores of the old country and then unpacked again at the end of
the voyage before they can make themselves at home on new ground.
All kinds of apparatus persons and property, techniques and
institutionsand ideas are equally subject to this law. Anything
that cannot stand the sea voyage at all has simply to be left behind ;
and many things and these not only material objects which the
migrants do manage to take with them can only be shipped after
they have been taken to pieces never, perhaps, to be reassembled
in their original form.
This law governs all transmarine movements whatsoever. It has
governed, for example, the ancient Greek and Phoenician and
Etruscan colonization of the Western Basin of the Mediterranean
and the modern European colonization of America; and the chal-
lenge which, in virtue of this law, is inherent in a sea-passage
accounts for the intrinsic stimulus of crossing the sea which we have
observed already in these two cases. In these particular cases,
however, the colonists happen to have belonged to societies which
were already in process of civilization at the time when the sea was
crossed. Whena transmarine migration occurs in the course of
a Volkerwanderung, the challenge is much more formidable and
the stimulus proportionately more intense because the
impact here
falls upon a society which is not
socially progressive at the time but
is overtaken
by the challenge while it is still in that static condition
which is the last state of Primitive Man. 1 The transition, in the
Volkerwanderung, from this passivity to a sudden paroxysm of
storm and stress produces a dynamic effect
upon the life of any
community which undergoes the experience; 2 but this effect is
naturally more intense when the migrants take ship than when they
*

keep their feet on solid ground throughout their trek. The driver
of an ox-cart has a greater command than the master of a
ship over
the circumstances of his journey. He can maintain an unbroken
1
For the Ym-state in which we find Primitive Man as we know
him, see T C (m) (e),
vol. i, pp 179-80, and II. B, vol. i, pp. 192-5. In essentials, every society which takes
part m a Vplkerwandeiung is still m that static condition even though, ex hypothesi
it has been irradiated
by certain elements of the civilization into whose ambit it has been
attracted and in whose 'external proletariat' it has been enrolled and
whose former
domain it is now invading. (See Part II. A, vol. i, pp. 187-8,
above, and Part VIII '
below -) 2 See further Part
VIII, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 89
contact with his base of operations he can pitch camp and strike
;

camp where and when he chooses; he can set his own pace; and
in these circumstances he can carry with him much of the social
apparatus which has to be discarded by his seafaring comrade.
Thus we can measure the stimulating effect of transmarine migra-
tion in the course of a Volkerwanderung by comparing the pheno-
mena with the effect of migration overland, and a fortiori with the
effect of staying at home and letting the paroxysm pass without

being moved to follow either the swan-path or the cart-track.

When the Scandinavians went beyond the sea, their migration meant
*

more than a change of place. At home, the World, large as it was, could
be surveyed from the homestead with the eyes of the mind but, as one ;

horizon burst on the view and another closed in ... the ancient Middle-
garth lost its definiteness and made way for something more akin to our
Universe. This change of outlook gave birth to a new conception of gods
and men. The whose power was coextensive with the
local deities
territory of their worshippers were replaced by a corporate body of gods
ruling the World. The holy place with its blot-house which had formed
the centre of Middlegarth was raised on high and turned into a divine
mansion. Time-honoured myths setting forth the doings of mutually
independent deities were worked up into a poetical mythology, a divine
saga, on the same lines that had been followed by an earlier race of
Vikings, the Homeric Greeks. This religion brought a new god to birth :

1
Odin, the leader of men, the lord of the battlefield.'
In somewhat similar fashion, the overseas migration of the Scots
from Ireland to North Britain prepared the way for the entry of
a new religion. It is no accident that the transmarine Dalriada
became the head-quarters of St. Columba's missionary movement
which not only achieved the conversion of the Picts and the
Northumbrians but also exercised a profound retroactive influence
upon Christianity in Ireland itself through the Familia Columbae :

a cluster of federated monasteries, mostly situated on Irish soil,

which all recognized the supremacy of lona. 2
One distinctive phenomenon of transmarine migration is the
intermingling and interbreeding of diverse racial strains; for the
first piece of social apparatus that has to be abandoned is the primi-
tive tribe or horde. No more than one ship's
ship will hold
company, and the primitive ship is At the same time, the
small.
primitive ship is relatively mobile compared with the ox-cart or
other primitive means of transport on land. Moreover, in trans-
marine migration, no less than in overland migration, there is
safety in numbers. For these reasons, a new community founded
1
Grbnbech, V. : The Culture of the Teutons (London 1931, Milford, 3 parts in 2 vols.),
irt II, pp. 306-7.
a For the Familia Columbae, see further II. D (vn), p. 325, below.
90 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
by migrants across the sea is apt to be established by the concerted
efforts of a number of crews which have joined forces from different

quarters in contrast to the ordinary process of migration overland,

in which a whole tribe is apt to pack its women and children and
seed-corn and household gods and household utensils into its ox-
carts and move off en masse, at a foot's pace, over the face of the
Earth. We catch a glimpse of this phenomenon of maritime race-
mixture in the foundation-legends of Hellenic Aeolis and Ionia
whatever these legends may be worth in the form in which they
have been transmitted by Herodotus and Pausanias. In almost
every Greek city-state along the west coast of Anatolia, the latter-
day inhabitants traced their ancestry back to more places than one
in the European Greek peninsula not to speak of the strains
introduced by intermarriage with the native women whom the
pioneers took captive. We are on surer ground when we turn from
the case of Ionia to that of Iceland, where an exact and detailed oral
record survived to be perpetuated in the Landnamabok.

'Among the peculiarly favourable conditions for mental development

in Iceland, the most important was the selection of the human stock that
settled the island. It included all those families of petty kings and

peasant chieftains from Western Norway who refused to yield to the

autocratic rule of Harold Fairhair, preferring to seek a new home on the
distant island which had recently been discovered. At the same time it
was impossible for the society of Iceland to become a mere repetition of
the old Norwegian community; the racial mixture was too pronounced
for that. There came Norwegians from various parts of the country,
stragglers from Sweden, vikings from the West, including even some
semi-Celtic elements.' 1

This distinctive phenomenon of unusually far-going racial mix-

ture is closely connected with another: the unusually rapid dis-

integration of the kin-group which is the basis of social organization

in a primitive society. The comparative efficacy of transmarine
migration and of overland migration as solvents of the kin-group is
appraised as follows, at the conclusion of an exhaustive inquiry, by
a distinguished modern student of Scandinavian antiquities :
'The analogy of the Icelandic settlers will incline us to accept the idea
that a migration involving transport by sea was especially liable to impair
the sense of kin-solidarity among those who venture on it, though the
organization of those who remained behind might not be appreciably
affected. It is extremely unlikely that each group of kindred would build
a vessel and man it exclusively, or even mainly, with their own kinsmen ;
on the contrary, all analogies show us that any individuals wishing to
join an expedition would rally to the first ship that was sailing and
1
Olrik, A.: Viking Civilisation (English translation- London 1930, Allen and Unwin),
pp, 175-6. Cp. p. 112.
 THE STIMULUS1OF NEW GROUND 91

probably remain permanently associated with its crew in the new

country
4
A classic example is afforded by the sons of Earl Hrollaug of Norway,
one of whom, Gongu-Hrolf, is declared by Snorri to have founded the
Duchy of Normandy; one lost his life in the Western Isles of Scotland
on an expedition with Harald Hairfair; another became Earl of the
Orkneys, while yet another settled in Iceland. It seems more than
probable that the peoples of Schleswig-Holstein lived under similar
conditions in the 5th century, with viking expeditions, and finally the
permanent conquest of England, as the result. The settlers in England
might therefore be almost as lacking in full kindreds as the settlers in
Iceland a few centuries later. Before we make certain that the invaders
must have come over en masse, in full kindreds, in order to achieve such
a vast result as the conquest of England, we shall do well to remind
ourselves that the feat was all but paralleled, in a much shorter time and
in the teeth of a resistance at least equally obstinate, by the vikings of a
later period; yet that no one thinks it necessary to assume a wholesale
emigration of kindreds in this case, or to postulate that the organization
of the Vikings, when they arrived in England, was on a basis of kindreds.
'If we are to adopt the Danish theory that the Normans are mainly of
Danish and not Norwegian origin, we can point to Normandy also as
affording corroborative evidence for the disintegrating influence on
the
kindred of a settlement by sea. According to this theory the invaders of
Normandy came from the highly cohesive kindreds of Denmark. Yet
the traces of kinship-solidarity in thirteenth-century Normandy are far
fainter than in other districts of Northern France, which the Teutons
reached by land.
'So far as it goes, too, the evidence available for the easternmost and
westernmost of Teutonic settlements bears out our contention. The
laws of the Swedish kingdom in Russia, won by naval expeditions, show
but a feeble conception of kinship: the slayer alone pays for his deed,
and the right of vengeance is limited to brother, father, son and nephew.
On the other hand, West Gothic custumals in Spain show division of
wergild between kinsmen, definitely organized blood-feuds between
kindreds, and oath-helpers of the kindred The West Goths travelled
a long way, but they travelled by land.
'Thus we are driven to the conclusion that the main disintegrating
factor in the case of the Teutonic kindreds was migration, and especially
of the
migration by sea. Denmark and Schleswig are the strongholds
kindreds: those of Friesland, the Netherlands and Northern France
had vitality enough to withstand centuries of highly adverse influences,
whereas the Icelander stood alone from the moment he set foot on
Icelandic soil; and it may be questioned whether the Anglo-Saxon

settler wasmuch better case in this respect. Here, too, we should find
in
an explanation of the weakness of the kindreds in Norway, for much of
the settlement of that country must have been accomplished by sea, and
1
at a very late period.*

i
Phillpotts, B. S. : Kindred and Clan (Cambridge 1913, University Press), pp, 257-65.
92 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Another distinctive of transmarine migration is the
phenomenon
atrophy of a primitive institution which
is perhaps the supreme

expression of undifferentiated social life before this is refracted,

by a social consciousness, on to the separate planes of
clarifying
economics and politics and religion and art the institution of the
:

wavro$ Satjitcov and his cycle. 1 On this point we may quote another
work by the same authority :

'In Iceland the May Day game, the ritual wedding, and the wooing
scene seem hardly to have survived the settlement, partly, no doubt,
because the settlers were mainly of a travelled and enlightened class, and
partly because these rural observances are connected with agriculture,
which could not be an important branch of activity in Iceland.' 2
If we wish to see the ritual of the eviauros Safacw in its glory in
the Scandinavian World, we must study its development among
Scandinavian peoples who did not leave their homes :

seems that at Lejre and Salhaugar in Sjaelland, at Upsala in

'It

Sweden, and possibly at the old Skiringssal in South Norway, the

fertility-drama was presented in ancient sanctuaries consecrated by the
tombs of kings or gods. There is some reason for believing that it was
the central rite of a religious confederacy. This drama was apparently
performed only once every nine years, by actors of royal birth, and there
was a tradition of an actual slaying. Such stately drama as this was
bound by immemorial tradition to one locality. The sanctuary, the
goddess, the priest-king could not migrate with the members of the
3

confederate tribes. There is therefore no trace of what we may call

literary drama, or of such highly developed tragic drama, outside
Southern Scandinavia, where Teutonic peoples had been settled for
several thousand years.' 4

The work from which these two last passages are

thesis of the
quoted that the Scandinavian poems which have been preserved
is

by Icelandic tradition and committed to writing in the Icelandic

compilation called the Elder Edda are derived from the spoken
words of the primitive Scandinavian fertility-drama the only
element in the traditional ritual which the migrants were able to
cut away from its deeply-embedded local roots and to take on
board ship with them. According to this theory, the development
of a primitive ritual into a Scandinavian drama was arrested among
1
See Part II. B, vol. i, p. 189. The undifferentiated unity of Art and Religion and
Life itself in a primitive human society is pointed out, apropos of the Scandinavian case,
by Gronbech, V.: The Culture of the Teutons (London 1931, Milford, 3 parts in 2 vols.),
Part II, pp. 239-41 and 269.
2
Phillpotts, B. S.: The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama (Cambridge
1920, University Press), p. 204. On the same subject, see further Grbnbech, V. The :

the migrations of the Franks did not last long and affected their customs very little.'
4
Phillpotts, op. cit., p. 207.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 93
those Scandinavians who migrated across the sea and the theory is
;

supported by an analogy from Hellenic history. For it is a well-

established fact that, although the Hellenic Civilization came to
flower in transmarine Ionia first, the Hellenic drama, which was
'

one of the highest creations of Hellenic culture, sprang from the

continental soil of the European Greek peninsula. The counter-
part, in Hellas, of the sanctuary at Upsala was the theatre of
Dionysus at Athens. Neither Ionia nor Iceland could show the like.
The distinctive phenomena of transmarine migration which we
have noticed so far are all
negative ;
but the challenge implicit in
these negative phenomena has evoked a remarkable positive re-
sponse which must now engage our attention.
At an earlier point in this Study we have found reason to believe
that race-mixture, by setting up a physical disturbance, administers
a stimulus to the psyche which is conducive to the genesis of a -

civilization so much so, that the geneses of civilizations may

'
actually prove to require contributions from more races than one.
1

This indirect physical stimulus may be assumed to reinforce the

direct psychic stimulus which is administered by 'a sea change* ;
and the two factors in combination shatter the 'cake of custom'
in which primitive societies, as we know them, are fast bound. 2 *-

Thereupon, in long-imprisoned and suddenly liberated souls there

emerges a rudimentary social consciousness which reveals itself in
two closely connected forms: an awareness of strong individual -

personalities and an awareness of momentous public events. The

circumstances and spirit of this mental awakening are forcibly con-
veyed in the following description of it, as it came to pass in
Iceland, from the pen of one of the three modern Western scholars
whom we have quoted already.
'The largest part of the population came from the districts of Horda-
land and Rogaland in Western Norway, [and] it was these regions that
had contributed most to the great Viking Age and the period of dis-
coveries. Many families had spent years in the western colonies. They
had acquired a wide horizon and an insight into political conditions in
near and distant places; for all these scattered habitations were closely
connected with each other by family ties and common enterprises. The
numerous merchant-ships constantly brought news, which was received,
scrutinised and judged. The experiences of contemporaries naturally
became transformed into sagas.
'These aristocratic and talented persons settled in Iceland under more
severe conditions of life than they had formerly known. Instead of being
a petty king, the peasant had at most a very limited chieftain authority
as thsgodi (sacrificial priest and thing leader) of his district; many a man
*
* See II.C (ii) (a) i, vol. i, pp. 239-243, and II. C (ii) (6) i, vol. i, p. 278, above.
2 For this 'cake of custom' see Part II. B, vol. i, p. 192, above.
94 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND -RESPONSE
of noble origin had to settle as a peasant in the godord (godi district) of
another man. Instead of proud raftered halls, they built houses with
walls of earth several yards thick, a continuous row or group of such
houses constituting the farm buildings. Cattle-breeding, bird-hunting,
if they were to yield
fishing required an extreme degree of attention
foodstuffs for all the housecarls and servants; a man who once had
traded in the most precious commodities of foreign countries had now
only the home-woven frieze to export. The external
circumstances of
life were narrowing down. The only earmark of nobility that was still
retained from the forefathers was the mental culture, the ability to pass in
1
review a succession of events, to form a judicious estimate of situations.'
In the strenuous and stimulating mental atmosphere here described,
the void resulting from the absence of the primitive social apparatus
that has been left behind in crossing the sea is filled by new acts of
social creation. The energies released by the breaking of the 'cake
of custom' crystallize, in the new transmarine environment, into
new activities which are definite in their forms and are limited in
their scope, in each case, to some single plane of social life. In the
field left clear by the atrophy of the fertility-ritual there arises a
narrative form of literary art: the Saga or the Epic. In the field
left clear by the disintegration of the kin-group there arises a

polity in the likeness of a ship's company on an enlarged scale and

on a permanent basis: a commonwealth in which the binding
element is not community of blood but that common obedience to
a freely chosen leader and common respect for a freely accepted
law which has been called 'the social contract' in the figurative
language of our modern Western Political Mythology.
The Saga and the Epic both alike arise in response to the same
new mental need. In both, the new awareness of strong individual
personalities and of momentous public events, which the storm
and stress of the Volkerwanderung has brought into consciousness,
finds an expression through art. 2
*The Icelandic Saga grew out of reports of contemporary happen-
. . .

ings. A man who had recently returned home would sit at the Althing
1
Olrik, op. cit , pp. 176-7
2 The difference between the Saga and the Epic lies not in the nature of the stimulus
by which they are evoked nor in the nature of the interests and feelings and ideas which
are expressed in them, but merely in the method and origin of their respective techniques.
In the Icelandic Saga, the new interest in personalities and events finds expression in a
technique which is new likewise. The form and matter of the dialogues and soliloquies
that grew out of the continental Scandinavian fertility-ritual are religiously preserved in
the Elder Edda; but, having once been torn away from their roots in Older to he trans-
ported across the sea, they are not put to new uses in the new country nor developed any
further. They are preserved, as it were, as fossils; and when the Icelanders fashion 'the
Saga, the true Icelandic counterpart of the Epic, out of the stories current in the country-
side', they create, to convey it, 'a new prose form* in which they are 'hampered by no
fossilised tradition* (Phillpotts- The Elder Edda, p 205). The sagas only indirectly
reveal the existence of an older dramatic technique in a certain dramatic sense and
dramatic detachment which are characteristic of their style (op. cit,, loc. cit.) On the
other hand, the makers of the Epic in Ionia or in England solve the same problem of
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 95
and tell his story a connected account of all that had taken place
during the year at well-known scenes of action Probably many a saga
originated in this way. The story was related to an attentively listening
circle of hearers by one who had himself been taking part in the events;
and while the first scene is being thus reported, Life itself continues the
destinies of the acting persons.' 1

Thus, one day at the Althing, Thormod listens to a saga that is

being told by Thorgrim and slays the teller after the tale is done
because an incident in the story has been the slaying, by Thorgrim
himself, of Thormod's own foster-brother. Thus, likewise, during
2

the siege of Troy, when Achilles is sulking in his tent, he is there

found entertaining himself by singing *the tales of warriors' 3 such
tales as 'the wrath of Achilles' itself is destined to become in the
mouths of Homeric minstrels. Already, in the tenth year after the
fall of Troy, the tales of the siege and of the victors' homeward

voyages are ever in the mouths of the minstrel Phemius in Ithaca

and the minstrel Demodocus in the land of the Phaeacians.4
'That lay is praised of men the most which ringeth newest in
their ears.' 5 Yet there is one thing in an epic lay that is still more

highly prized than its novelty by the hearers, and that is the
intrinsic human
interest of the story. The interest in the present

predominates just so long as the storm and stress of the Heroic Age
continues; but this social paroxysm is essentially transitory; and,
finding an artistic expression for the new interest in personalities and events by 'making
over* both the form and the matter of the continental fertility-ritual to fit the new
demand. Thus, in the Greek and English Epic we find the tale of Troy's fall or Achilles'
wrath or Odysseus' wanderings or Beowulf's exploits grafted on to myths in which the
stuff of primitive ritual has been reshaped and projected into heroic narrative. The
amalgamation of these two elements in the Epic is so thorough, and the artistic perfection
of the finished product is so complete, that it needs all the paraphernalia of 'the Higher
Criticism' to analyse the process which has taken place. Neveitheless, such analysis
reveals not only the presence of these two once separate elements in the Epic but also
the extreme diversity of their nature and origin. The Epic, unlike the Saga, has a ritual
root, and it shares this root with the Drama. The continental Ionic Drama of Attica and
the transmarine Ionic Epic of Ionia are two flowers of art which have sprung from a
single religious stem. By contrast, the poetry of the Elder Edda and the prose of the
Sagas are two flowers that have sprung from different stems out of roots bedded in
different soils. The Elder Edda is a flower which has wilted, before it has been able
to unfold itself mits full perfection, because its root has been cut in order to transport it
across the sea. The Saga is a flower which has blossomed because it has grown up from
new roots in the new ground.
1
Olrik, op. cit, pp. 177-8.
a This illustiation is cited at greater length in loc in the passage here
op cit., cit.,
omitted in the foiegomg quotation.
3
TQV 8* $pov <f>pva Tepiro/xevov ^op/xtyyt XtyeCfj. . . .

rn o y* dvaov ZrepTTtv, deiSe 8* apa nXea av$p>v.

(Ihad, IX, 11. 186-9.)
* Of the four lays sung by Phemius and Demodocus in the Odyssey, no less than three
are taken from the Trojan Cycle, while only one is a tale of the Gods. Phemius sings
of the homeward voyage of the Achaeans (Od. I, 11. 325-7), Demodocus of a quarrel
between Odysseus and Achilles (Od. VIII, 11. 73-82), and of the Wooden Horse (Od.
VIII, 11. 499-520).
5
r^v yap aotS^v /taAAov CTrt/ctatovcr' civQpwiroi,
n Tt? dfcot;6VT<r<ri vecuTarn du^TeAi?Tai.
(Od. 1, 11. 351-2.)
 96 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
as the storm abates, the lovers of the Epic and the Saga come to feel
that life in their time has grown tamer than it was in the time of
their heroic predecessors. Therewith, they cease to prefer new
lays to old; and the latter-day minstrel or saga-man, responding
to his hearers' change of mood, repeats, like Nestor, the tales of the
older generation. When the storm abated in Iceland, 'now that
the present moment was less eventful and exciting, attention was
fixed on the deeds of the past they were again brought forth and
;

shaped artistically into connected accounts. And only then did

. . .

the sagas in the proper sense of the term begin to take shape.' 1
When the storm abated in Ionia, the latter-day epic poet still
harped upon Phemius's and Demodocus's Trojan theme :

'Tell me, Muse, of a man a man of many shifts a man who wandered
; ;

much when he had sacked Troy's sacred fastness. O, many were the
folk whose cities he beheld and knew their thoughts beside; and many
were the sorrows that he suffered in his heart; sorrows of the sea, in
striving for his life and striving therewithal to bring his comrades
homeward.' 2
Thus the art of the Homeric Epic and the Icelandic Saga con-
tinued to live and flourish when the stimulus which had first
evoked it was no longer at work. It ultimately attained its literary
zenith in the altered circumstances of a later age. The literary
history of the English Epic as exemplified in Beowulf is the
same. Nevertheless, these mighty works of art would never have
come into being if that original stimulus had not been exerted and ;

it was
produced, as we have seen, by the ordeal of migration across
the sea. This explains why the Hellenic Epic developed in trans-
marine Ionia and not, like the Hellenic Drama, in the European
Greek peninsula the Teutonic Epic on the island of Britain and
;

not on the European Continent 3 and the Scandinavian Saga on the

;

island of Iceland and not, like the Scandinavian Drama, in Den-

mark or Sweden. This contrast between the transmarine and the
continental artistic phenomena appears with such regularity in
such widely different times and places that one of the authorities
whom we have cited formulates it as a law. Drama *

develops in . . .

the home country, Epic among migrating peoples, whether they

migrate to France or England or Germany or to Ionia, for the
analogy with Greek Drama holds good here too.'
4

i * Od.
Olrik, op. cit., p. 179. I, II. 1-5.
3 Of the Teutonic peoples who took part in the post-Hellenic Vtflkerwanderung, the
majority migrated overland on the European Continent and only the Angles and the
Jutes overseas from the Continent to Britain. Yet, of the extant epic poetry that has
sprung from the Teutonic migrations of that age, all the mature and complete specimens
are of English make, while the Continental School is represented by a handful of rather
rudimentary original fragments and some Latin versions.
4
Phillpotts, B. S.: The Elder Edda (Cambridge 1920, University Press), p. 207.
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 97
The other positive creation that emerges from the ordeal of
transmarine migration in the course of a Volkerwanderung is not
artistic, like the Epic and the Saga, but political. This new kind of
polity is a commonwealth in which the binding element is contract
and not kinship. We
have noted its nature already by anticipation,
and examples of it leap to the mind.
The most famous examples, perhaps, are those city-states which
were founded by seafaring Greek migrants in the last convulsion of
the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung along the west coast of Anatolia,
in the districts which subsequently came to be known as Aeolis and
Ionia and Doris. The scanty surviving records of Hellenic consti-
tutional history seem to indicate that the principle of
political
organization by law and locality instead of by custom and kinship
asserted itself first in these Greek settlements overseas and was
afterwards adopted in the European Greek peninsula by mimesis,
In the act of establishing their foothold on the Anatolian coast in
the face of opposition from the previous occupants of the country,
the Greek seafarers would proceed upon the new principle spon-
taneously. A number of ship's companies each hailing from a
different district and recruited from members of many different
kin-groups would join forces to conquer a new home for them-
selves overseas and to secure their common conquest by building a
common In the city-state thus founded, the 'cells' of the
citadel.
new political organization would be,not kindreds held together by
the tie of common descent, but 'tribes' 1 representing ship's com-
panies; and these ship's-companies, in taking to the land, would
still be held together
by the ties which had held them on ship-
board. Having co-operated at sea as men do co-operate when they
are 'all in the same boat' in the midst of the perils of the deep,
they would continue to feel and act in the same way ashore when
they had to hold a strip of hardly- won coast against the menace of a
hostile hinterland. On shore, as at sea, comradeship would count
for more than kin, and the orders of a chosen and trusted leader
would override the promptings of habit and custom. In fact, a bevy
of ship's-companies joining forces to conquer a new home for
themselves overseas in a strange land would turn spontaneously
into a city-state articulated into local 'tribes' and governed by an
elective magistracy.
There are no corresponding circumstances to account for the
evolution of the Hellenic city-state in European Greece and indeed ;

our scanty records indicate that the Greeks who had stayed at
home in Europe came into line politically with the Greeks who
had migrated across the sea to Asia by imitating, artificially and
1
The conventional English translation of the Greek word ^uAat.
II H
98 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
belatedly, an act which, in the settlement of Aeolis and Ionia and
Doris, had been something immediate and spontaneous. On the
coast of Anatolia, the city-state was a new creation evoked by the
stimulus of transmarine migration. In European Greece it was
the second-hand product of a deliberate 'synoecism' a revolution-
ary aggregation of village-communities into city-states, which was
accompanied or followed by the substitution of locality for kin as the
basis of political organization. There is no reason to suppose that any
such 'synoecism' would ever have been carried out or even thought
of in 'the old country' if the spontaneous generation of the city-state
in 'the new country' overseas had not provided the Hellenic Society
with a model polity a model which was commended not only by its
own obvious intrinsic merits but also by the prestige of its creators,
the Hellenes of Aeolis and Ionia, who were in the forefront of the
Hellenic Civilization in this first age of Hellenic history. 1
When we turn from the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung to the
Scandinavian, we can discern the rudiments of a similar political
development in certain new Scandinavian communities which arose
out of transmarine migrations likewise. 2 If the abortive Scandi-
navian Civilization had actually come to birth, the part once played
in Hellenic history by the city-states of Aeolis and Ionia might have
been played in Scandinavian history by the five city-states of the
Ostmen along the Irish coast 3 or by the five boroughs which were
organized by the Danes to guard the landward border of their con-
4 Even as it
quests in Mercia. was, the stimulus of transmarine

1 The
artificial character of the process of 'synoecism* in Continental Greece, as a.
deliberate imitation of an overseas pattern, is indicated by the fact that the four 'Ionic'
<f)vXai, into which the Athenian body politic was articulated before the Clcisthenic
reorganization of 508 B c., were a selection from a larger number of <j>v\ai into which we
know that the body politic was articulated at Miletus. (See Wilamowitz-MoellcndorrT,
U. von: Aristoteles und Athen (Berlin 1893, Weidmann, 2 vols.), vol. 11, pp. 138-42.) On
this analogy, we may conjecture that the three 'Doric* </>vXai likewise originated spon-
taneously in some city-state of the overseas Doris and were reproduced artificially in
some of the 'Dorian* city-states of Continental Greece (there is no evidence for their
reproduction in Sparta). So much for the overseas origin of the 'Ionic* and 'Doric' <f>y\at
in the city-states of Continental Greece. We
may attribute the same origin to the 'Dorian*,
'Ionian*, and 'Aeolian* races into which the Greek-speaking World as a whole was
conventionally articulated. The Greek transmarine settlements on the Anatolian coast
fell into three distinct geographical groups speaking three different dialects of the Greek
language. The local names of these groups were Aeolis, Ionia, and Doris; and we may
conjecture that the same names were subsequently applied to communities in other parts
of the Greek-speaking World on grounds of linguistic affinity or of accidental similarity
of name. (See Beloch, K. J. : Gnechische Geschichte, 2nd edition, vol. i (i) (Strassburg
1912, Trabner), pp. 139-42 )
2 See
Olrik, A.: Viking Civilisation (London 1930, Allen and Unwm), pp. 98-9.
3 These
city-states were Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick. (For
their history, see Kendrick, T. D.: A
History of the Vikings (London 1930, Methuen),
pp. 277 and 299.)
* These five
boroughs were Lincoln, Stamford, Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham
(see Kendrick, op. cit., p. 236). Compare the four similar boroughs which were
established, after the conclusion of the Treaty of Wedmoie, at Northampton, Hunting-
don, Cambridge, and Bedford, in order to guard the landward borders of Danish East
Anglia (Kendrick, op. cit., p. 240).
 THE STIMULUS OF NEW GROUND 99
migration produced several Scandinavian polities that did attain a
high degree of development. On the south coast of the Baltic, in
Wendland, the short-lived fraternity of the Jomsvikings developed
a standard of asceticism, discipline, and prowess which won for
Jomsborg, in its day, the same reputation in the Scandinavian
World that Sparta had once enjoyed in Hellas. 1 The older Scandi-
navian settlement of Aldeigjuborg established by vikings who had
crossed the Baltic from west to east and had pushed on up the Gulf
of Finland and up the River Neva into Lake Ladoga made an
impression of political efficiency upon the minds of the Northern
Slavs which is reflected in the foundation-legend of the Scandi-
navian empire in Russia. The legend relates that the Slavs who had
fallen under the yoke of these intruders from beyond the sea
succeeded in driving their new masters out ; but that, having once
experienced, under duress, the benefits of Scandinavian rule, they
found the reversion to their native anarchy so intolerable that
they invited the Scandinavians to return and receive their willing
obedience. This legendary 'social contract' between a primitive
Slavonic population and a Scandinavian ruling class which had
acquired its political education in crossing the sea is the traditional
explanation of the origin of the Russian State. Yet the creation of
Russia was not the greatest political feat that was achieved by
Scandinavians who migrated overseas. It was surpassed by the
creation of the Republic of Iceland a Scandinavian polity whose
foundation is not veiled in legend but is illuminated by the full light
of history. On the apparently unpromising soil of this barren
arctic island, which could only be reached from the nearest Scandi-
navian point d'appui in the Faroes by crossing some five hundred
miles of open Atlantic, the political as well as the literary genius of
the Scandinavian Civilization produced its finest flower.
As for the political consequences of the transmarine migration of
the Angles and Jutes to Britain in the course of the post-Hellenic
Volkerwanderung, it is perhaps something more than a coincidence
that an island which was occupied at the dawn of Western history
by immigrants who had shaken off the shackles of the primitive
kin-group in crossing the sea should afterwards have been the

'Jonisborg . . . was inhabited by a ... viking garrison; and legend tells that this
1

society within the fortress was governed by strict rules. There were no women at all
allowed inside, and each one of the men was a warrior of tested valour, not older than
fifty years of age nor younger than eighteen. Courage, and courage alone, won admission
to their company, and m that company a self-sacrificing loyalty to each and all one's
fellows was demanded of the Jomsvikings, slander of any kind was prohibited, and the
private retention of booty forbidden. Military efficiency was the sole object of their
organization and regulations, and though no single man might be away fron^the
fortress for more than three days without special licence, each summer the Jomsvikings
were abroad together fighting, and so widespread did their fame become that soon they
were counted as the greatest wariiors of the North/ (Kendrick, op. cit., pp. 181-2.)
 ioo THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
country in which our Western Civilization achieved some of the
most important steps in its political progress. The Danish and
Norman invaders who followed on the heels of the Angles, and who
share the credit for subsequent English political achievements,
likewise came over the element that has to be traversed by all who
set foot on the shores of an island; and the sea-passage had the
same liberating effect upon their social organization as upon that of
their seafaring predecessors. A
people thus fruitfully diversified
in its racial composition, and at the same time uniformly freed from
the encumbrance of a hampering primitive institution, offered an
unusually favourable field for political cultivation. It is not sur-
prising that our Western Civilization should
have succeeded, in
England, in creating first 'the King's Peace' and thereafter 'Parlia-
mentary Government', while, on the Continent, our Western
political development was retarded by the
survival of the kin-

group among the descendants of Franks and Lombards who had

not been relieved of that social incubus at the outset by a liberating
transit of the sea.
Finally, we may observe, in this political connexion, the curious
fact that one of the two enduring political entities that have

eventually emerged out of the struggle for existence between the

ephemeral barbarian 'successor-states' of the Roman Empire in
Britain has been the Kingdom of Scotland; 1 and that the founders
and eponyms of this Scotland in Britain were an overseas offshoot
of those original Scots of Ireland who, in their native island, are a
byword for their prolonged failure to create an effective united
Irish state even under the pressure of the most formidable
foreign aggression from the Scandinavians and thereafter from the
2
English.
IV. THE STIMULUS OF BLOWS
Having now examined the relative stimulating effects of a less
and a more difficult environment in cases in which the environ-
ments are physical, we may complete this part of our study by
surveying the field of human environments on the same compara-
tive method.
For convenience, we may divide this field into sections. We may
distinguish, first, between those human environments that are
geographically external to the societies upon which they act, and
1 For the
creation of the Kingdom of Scotland, see further II. D (v), pp. 190-2 and
194-5, below.
3 It is one of the curiosities of
history that even in these latter days, when the Irish have
to some extent retrieved their political reputation by their success in establishing an
Irish Free State, this political achievement in Ireland itself has been forestalled by the
success of the Irish emigrants across the Atlantic m playing the game of 'machine
polities' in the United States!
 THE STIMULUS OF BLOWS 101
those that are geographically intermingled with them. The former
category will cover the action of societies, peoples, states, cities, and
other social organizations that are in exclusive occupation, at any
given time, of particular portions of the habitable world, upon
neighbouring social organizations of the same kind. From the
standpoint of the organizations which play the passive role in such
social intercourse, the human environment with which they are
confronted here is 'external' or 'foreign'. The second of our two
categories will cover the action of one social 'class' upon another,
where the two 'classes' are in joint occupation of the same geo-
graphical area, and where the term 'class' is employed in its widest
meaning. From the standpoint of a 'class' which plays the passive
role, the human environment constituted by the other 'classes' that
are acting upon it is 'internal' or 'domestic'. Leaving this 'internal
human environment' for later examination, and starting with the
'external human environment', we may begin by making a further
subdivision between the impact of the 'external human environ-
3
ment when it takes the form of a sudden blow and its impact in the
form of a continuous pressure.
What is the effect of sudden blows from the external human
environment ? Does our proposition 'The greater the challenge the
greater the stimulus' hold good here ? Let us seek light, once more,
from our well-tried empirical method of inquiry.
The first test cases that naturally occur to our minds are certain
sensational instances in which a military and militant Power has
first been stimulated by successive contests with its neighbours, and
has then suddenly been prostrated in an encounter with some
adversary against whom it has never measured its strength before.
What usually happens when incipient empire-builders are thus
dramatically overthrown in mid-career? Do they usually remain
lying, like Sisera, where they have fallen, while their half-built
empire collapses like a house of cards ? Or, on the contrary, do
they rise again from their Mother Earth, like the giant Antaeus of
the Hellenic Mythology, 1 with their strength and vigour and moral
redoubled ? Do they succumb ? Or do they react to an unprece-
dentedly heavy blow by an unprecedented outburst of purposeful
energy ? The historic examples indicate that the second and not the
former alternative reaction is the normal outcome.
What, for example, was the effect of the Glades Alliensis upon the
fortunes of Rome ? The catastrophe overtook her only five years
after her victory in her long and arduous duel with Veii had placed
her, at last, in a posture to assert her hegemony over Latium. The
overthrow of the Roman Army at the Allia and the occupation of
1 For the myth of Antaeus, see further Part X, below.
102 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Rome by barbarians from the back of beyond might have
herself
been expected to wipe out, at one stroke, once and for all, the power
and prestige which Rome had won, just before, by the overthrow
and annexation of her Etruscan neighbour. Instead, Rome re-
covered from the Gallic disaster so rapidly that, within less than
half a century after the Gauls had been ignominiously bought off,
the Roman State was able to engage in a longer and more arduous
duel with a mightier neighbour than Veii for higher stakes. The
Roman State was able to fight the Samnite Confederacy for the
prize of a hegemony over all Italy, and eventually to emerge vic-
torious from a fifty-years' war which far surpassed, in scale and
severity, any previous war which Rome had ever ventured to wage.
1

What, again, was the effect on the fortunes of the 'Osmanlis

when Timur Lenk took Bayezid Yilderim captive on the field of
'

Angora ? This catastrophe overtook the Osmanlis just when they

were on the point of completing their conquest of the main body
f
of Orthodox Christendom in the Balkan Peninsula. The Osmanlis
had planted their military colonies in Thrace and Macedonia they ;

had overthrown the latest masters of the interior the Serbs on

the field of Kosovo; and they were beleaguering the last remnant
of the East Roman Empire in Constantinople. At the moment
when they were thus on the verge of consolidating the results of
fifty years' labours in Europe, they were prostrated, on the Asiatic
side of the Straits, by a thunderbolt from Transoxania. A col-
lapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans might have been
expected to follow the disaster at Angora the more so, inasmuch
as Timur, being rather more provident if not much more persevering
than Brennus, had taken steps to paralyse the Ottoman Power in
its Anatolian homeland by liberating and
re-establishing the rival
Anatolian Turkish principalities. So far from that, however,
Mehmed the Conquerer, who succeeded to the Ottoman throne
just half a century after his ancestor Bayezid had been carried away
captive to Samarqand, was able to place the coping-stone on
Bayezid's building by taking possession of Constantinople and
rounding off the Ottoman Empire until, from Trebizond to the

gates of Belgrade and from the Crimea to the Morea, it comprised

the whole domain of Orthodox Christendom except its transmarine
annex in Russia. 2
In the third place, we may take notice of the fortunes of the Incas
after their passage of arms with the Chancas towards the middle of
the fourteenth century of the Christian Era. When the Chancas
1
The traditional initial and terminal dates of the first three Romano-Sammte Wars
are 343-290 B.C. the traditional date of the Battle of the Allia is 390 B c.
;
3 Mehmed Fatih
imperdbat A.D. 1451-81; the Battle of Angora had been fought m
A.D. 1402.
 THE STIMULUS OF BLOWS 103
marched on Cuzco and the reigning Inca Yahuar Huaccac evacuated
his capital in a panic, it looked as though the Incas had lost the
empire which had been founded a hundred years before when their
ancestors had conquered the Collao and Nazca. The battle on the1

plain of Sacsahuana, in which Prince Hatun Tupac the future

Inca Viracocha just succeeded in staying the Chancas' onslaught
and saving Cuzco from fire and sword, was the hardest battle that
the Incas had yet had to fight. Nevertheless, the great work of
expanding and elevating the Empire into an Andean universal
state was taken up and completed by Viracocha *s son and successor
the Inca Pachacutec, who came to the throne at Cuzco some fifty
2
years after the Battle of Sacsahuana had been fought.
Other illustrations of the same 'law' the stronger stimulus of
the heavier blow will meet our eyes if we reopen the book of
Roman history at a later page and study the course of those wars
between Rome and the rival Great Powers of the Hellenic World
which cleared the ground for the eventual conversion of the Roman
Empire into a Hellenic universal state. In this phase of Roman and
Hellenic history which began with the outbreak of the first
Romano-Punic War in 264 B.C. and ended with the simultaneous
destruction of Carthage and annexation of Macedonia in the year
146 Rome had to fight three rounds with Carthage and four with
Macedonia before she was able to deliver two 'knock-out blows'
which brought the titanic struggle to a close. No doubt, the poet
Virgil had these two series of wars in mind when he bade his
countrymen ever remember 'to battle down the stiff-necked':
debellare superbos. 3 Yet the historical facts surely indicate that the
method of attrition was not a masterly choice but a costly and
dangerous necessity; for, though the Romans managed to beat the
Carthaginians and the Macedonians in every war that they fought
with either Power, nevertheless, at each successive renewal of the
combat, the prowess displayed by the vanquished and the exertions
required of the victors were both conspicuously greater than they
had been each time before.
The defeat of Carthage in the first Romano-Punic War stimu-
lated Hamilcar Barca to conquer for his country an empire in Spain
which far surpassed her lost empire in Sicily, and Hamilcar's son
Hannibal to strike at the heart of the Roman Power in Italy. Even
after the Hannibalic War had ended in the defeat of Hannibal's

1 For the foundation of the^Inca Empire, see I. C (i) (6), vol i, pp. 121-2, above.
2 The elevation of the Empire of the Incas into an Andean universal state may be said
to have been accomplished through the incorporation of the states along the seaboard of
the Pacific, from lea to Chimu inclusive, which covered, between them, the original
home of the Andean Society. The Inca Pachacutec, who achieved this, imperabat circa
A.D. 1400-48; the Battle of Sacsahuana had been fought circa A.D. 1347.
3
Aeneid> Book VI, 1. 853.
104 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
last army at Zama, in the home territory of Carthage, the Car-
thaginians twice astonished the World during the half century that
was still to run before their name was blotted out of the Book of
Life. Under the stimulus of this appalling situation, when they lay
at the mercy of an implacable enemy, with their impending doom
ever present to their minds, they displayed an energy and a forti-
tude which had not distinguished them in the days of their power
and their security. They showed their mettle first in the rapidity
with which they paid off their war indemnity to Rome and re-
covered their commercial prosperity; 1 and they showed it again in
the heroism with which the whole population of the doomed city
men, women, and children fought and died in the last struggle,
when the Romans were avowedly bent upon destroying them
utterly, and when it was certain that nothing now could save them
from their fate.
Again, King Philip V of Macedon had been content during the
Hannibalic War, when he might have saved his country by joining
forces with Hannibal himself in Italy, to engage in desultory and
ineffective 'side-shows' on his own side of the Adriatic. It was the
blow of Cynoscephalae, which cost him his hegemony in Greece,
that stimulated him to show that 'his last sun had not yet set' 2 and
to transform Macedonia into so formidable a power that, a quarter
of a century after Cynoscephalae had been fought, Philip's son
Perseus was able to challenge Rome single-handed and almost to
defeat her utmost efforts to overcome him. Even when Perseus'
stubborn resistance was finally broken at Pydna, the Macedonian
people were so far from losing their spirit that, some twenty years
later, it only needed the appearance of an adventurer impersonating
Perseus' son Philip to make the nation rise in arms again in a last
struggle for liberty which was a forlorn hope from the start.
In our own Western history, similar reactions were evoked by
Napoleon I's premature and abortive attempt, during the General
War of 1792-1815, to establish a Western universal state in the
form of a French Empire. 3
For example, the Austrians, who had allowed themselves in
1792 to be turned back by a cannonade at Valmy from an invasion
1 As
early as 191 B.C., only ten years after the restoration of peace, the Carthaginians
offered to pay off the whole outstanding amount of the indemnity forthwith in a single
lump sum, in anticipation of the stipulated succession of instalments. This offer was
not accepted by the Romans. (Livy, Book XXXVI, ch. 4.)
2 See the account
given by Livy (Book XXXIX, ch. 26) of an interview in the year
185 B c. (the eleventh year after Cynoscephalae) between Philip and a Roman com-
missioner. After stating his case, Philip 'elatus demde ira adiecit nondum omnium
dierum solem occidisse'.
^The Macedonian king's outburst was a reminiscence of a line
of Theocritus: "HSij y&p fodafyi irdvd* oAtov appi SeSwcetv; (Theocritus: Thyrsts.
1. 102)
3 This aspect of the Napoleonic Empire is examined further in Part VI, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF BLOWS 105
of France which might have nipped the Revolution in the bud, and
had allowed themselves thereafter to be ejected by the French
twice over from Italy, were aroused at last by the blow of 1805,
when in a single campaign Napoleon captured half the Austrian
Army at Ulm and occupied Vienna and destroyed the rest of the
Austrian Army at Austerlitz. Austria after Austerlitz prepared for
a renewal of the contest with the same grim energy that Macedonia
had displayed after Cynoscephalae and in 1809, when she tried
;

conclusions with the conqueror again, and this time single-handed,

without an ally, she made him pay as much more dearly for a
second victory as Macedonia made the Romans pay in 171-168 B.C.
If Austerlitz was Austria's Cynoscephalae, Wagram was her Pydna.
Moreover, the Austrians, like the Macedonians, still had the spirit,
after suffering two signal defeats, to take up arms once again; and,
more fortunate than the Macedonians, they marched this time to
victory. The intervention of Austria on the side of Russia and
Prussia in 1813 was the decisive act which made the overthrow of
Napoleon inevitable and brought his ephemeral empire to the
ground.
Again, the Prussians played the same ineffective part in 1805 as
the Macedonians played during the Hannibalic War, and they paid
the penalty by meeting their Cynoscephalae at Jena; but the effects
of Jena upon Prussia were dynamic. The remnant of the Prussian
Army which had marched out so ingloriously in the autumn to an
ignominious defeat had the hardihood to fight a winter campaign
and to exact a Pyrrhic victory from Napoleon at Eylau and after that
to go on fighting still, in the farthest corner of Prussian territory
beyond the Memel. In the year after Jena, the Prussians only
accepted the French conqueror's terms because they were virtually
coerced into surrender by their own Russian allies and the severity
;

of the terms only added to the stimulus which the shock of Jena
had first administered. The energy evoked in Prussia by this
stimulus was extraordinary. It not only regenerated the Prussian
Army (and this through the instrumentality of the very restric-
tions which Napoleon had imposed upon the Prussian Army in
order to reduce it to impotence) it regenerated, into the bargain,
;

the Prussian Administrative Service and the Prussian Education

System. In fact, this new-found energy transformed the Prussian
State into a chosen vessel for holding the new wine of German
Nationalism and simultaneously it performed the miracle of con-
;

juring this strong German wine out of a watery cosmopolitanism.

The first-fruits of this titanic Prussian response to the challenge of
Jena were the acts of faith which decided the issue of the Befrei-
ungskrieg; the final harvest was gathered in by Bismarck in that
io6 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
calculated combination of diplomacy and war which produced its
intended result in the establishment of a new polity: Prussia-
Germany.
As for the role of the Russians in the General War of 1792-1815,
it isnotorious that they fought indifferently so long as they were
fighting the French on foreign ground. In 1812 the national
energies of the Russian people were evoked, in successively higher
degrees, as the French invaders crossed the political frontier and
as they passed, at Smolensk, out of the insensitive fringe of alien
territories, recently incorporated in the Russian Empire, into the
quick of Holy Russia. At last, in the burning of Moscow, Russia
found herself; and then she turned upon her invader in a counter-
attack that did not come to a standstill until the tide of war had
ebbed back right across the Continent from Moscow to Paris.
When we turn to the next chapter of Western history, in which
the roles of France and Germany are reversed, exactly the same
phenomena present themselves mutatis mutandis. In 1 870, when the
French, in their turn, played the vainglorious and ignominious
role of the Prussians in 1806, the Prussian General Staff, who this
time had calculated and provided for everything down to the
last button, were half-surprised at the ease with which they were
able to invade France and destroy the French armies in the field
and lay siege to Paris. 1 On the other hand, in 1914 the Prussian
General Staff of the day, who were obsessed by the memory of
what had happened forty-four years before, were astonished at
what happened this time when they repeated the invasion of
France with apparently greater odds in their favour than their
predecessors had been able to count upon in 1870. In 1914 the
Germans encountered a French resistance for which the campaign
of 1870 offered no precedent; and their under-estimate of French
moral in 1914 was one of several psychological miscalculations
which, cumulatively, were responsible in large measure for Ger-
many's final defeat in the War of 1914-18. The Germans fell into
this particular error of judgement because they neglected to take
into account themomentous effect of the stimulus which their own
fathershad administered to France in dealing her the blow of
1870. This stimulus had revealed itself already, before the War of
1870 was over, in the contrast between the ddbdcks at Sedan and
1 It was the
glamour of Napoleon I's victories that blinded the French to realities in
1870, just as, in 1806, the Prussians had been blinded to realities by the glamour of the
victories of Frederick the Great. Among neutral spectators, the expectation of a French
victory in 1870 was widespread when war broke out. The wnter of this Study possesses
a map, published at that moment by The Illustrated London News, in which the section
covered by the German Rhineland is printed in red in order to pick it out on the assump-
tion that it is destined to be the war-zone The French Army itself is said to have been
supplied with maps of Germany but not with maps of France
 THE STIMULUS OF BLOWS 107
Metz and the stubborn resistance of the
people of Paris in a siege
from which they had no hope of being delivered. The same stimu-
lus revealed itself again at a later date and in a sublimated form in
the Affaire Dreyfus, when a moral issue stirred the whole French
nation to the depths. For those who had eyes to see, it was evident
that this was the turning-point at which the shock of defeat, still
working in French souls, had translated itself into the stirrings of
regeneration and so, to properly instructed observers, the extreme
;

difference between the successive French reactions to successive

German invasions in 1870 and in 1914 did not come altogether as
a surprise.
The tenacity of the French resistance during the War of 1914-
18 a tenacity which was symbolized by the defence of Verdun
was one of the principal factors in the victory of the Allied and
Associated Powers. Perhaps the most impressive feature in the
behaviour of the French during those war-years was the fortitude
with which they endured the devastation of some of the wealthiest
and most valuable parts of their national territory and the sequel is
;

still more remarkable. A sympathetic and admiring witness of

French national heroism during this war might have imagined, at
the time, that he was witnessing the death of a nation on the field of
honour. 'France', he might have prophesied, 'may possibly emerge
victorious, but her victory will certainly be the death of her. This
long-drawn-out devastation of the war-zone must have inflicted a
mortal wound upon the French national economy. These terrible
casualties must have doomed the population of France to an
irretrievable decline. A magnificent euthanasia! Yet death is still
death of the body, even when it has been robbed of its spiritual
sting.' Such prophets never dreamed that the ghastly wound
which was being inflicted on France would actually rejuvenate her.
Yet so it has turned out. In the reconstruction of the devastated
areas, the whole material apparatus of life has had to be renewed.
The debris of the old equipment has naturally been replaced by
new equipment of the latest pattern and, as the work of renovation
;

has proceeded, the French have come to congratulate themselves

on the accident which they lamented so bitterly while the devasta-
tion was taking place that the war-zone happened to include the
majority of their industrial districts. Whether the cost of recon-
struction actually has been, or ever will be, defrayed by German
Reparations payments is a secondary question. In the fifteenth
year after the Armistice, it is already evident that it has profited
France handsomely to have had her hand forced by devastation,
even if the consequent reconstruction has had to be carried out
almost entirely at French expense. In this compulsory renovation
 io8 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
of her industrial plant, France has been compelled to make an
inestimably valuable capital investment. Moreover, her gain is not
to be measured in crude terms of iron and steel and bricks and
mortar. A
new apparatus involves a new technique; and a new
technique involves a new spirit. It is no paradox to say that, in
the reconstruction of the devastated areas, France herself has
renewed her youth. 1
As for Germany, the miracle which a military devastation has
accomplished in one fashion for victorious France has been
accomplished in another fashion for the defeated rival of France by
a financial inflation. It is already evident that the blows which have
been rained upon Germany since the Armistice of 1918 are having
the same stimulating effect as the blows inflicted on Prussia a
2 In
century ago in 1 806-7 .
fact, the unfriendly service which the
Germans did to the French before the Armistice has been done by
the French to the Germans during these post-war years so that an ;

observer who perceived only the outward actions and their effects,
without being aware of the motives behind them or the temper
informing them, might almost imagine that France and Germany
were two flagellants who had gone into a partnership in asceticism
under a mutual vow to wield the lash for one another in turn.
'These are they which came out of great tribulation'; 3 and cer-
tainly, in the autumn of 1931, when the first draft of this chapter
was written, both France and Germany seemed to be less far from
salvation than Great Britain: the one Great Power in Europe
which had succeeded for more than seventeen years after the out-
break of the Great War in turning the blows of Fortune aside and
avoiding both the two calamities of invasion and inflation. An
Englishman, communing with his own soul in the autumn of the
year 1931 after the collapse of the Pound Sterling on the 2ist
September, might well ask himself whether this British tour de
force had not really been a perverse evasion of 'things that accom-
4 a perversity whereby Great Britain had simply
pany salvation'
condemned herself to 'work out' her 'own salvation' belatedly 'with
1 In the
autumn of 1931, some thirteen years after the Armistice, on the morrow of
the fall of the Pound Sterling from the Gold Standard, France momentarily found
herself an a positionm the World which, even at the time of the Peace Conference, it had
seemed inconceivable that she should ever occupy again. At that moment, she possessed
and exercised an effective military supremacy and political hegemony on the European
Continent, she was predominant over the whole ot Europe in the air; she was second
only to the United States in her holding of gold, and she was in a conspicuously better
economic position than any other great country in the World in virtue ot her relative
immunity, for the time being, from the incidence of the world-wide economic depression.
It was as if, when Zeus hurled the thunder-bolt which was to annihilate Semele, his
defenceless victim had been transfigured, at the stroke, into Athene radiant in her
shining armour.
2 This
passage was written in the summer of 1931, and it still holds good at the
moment of revision in the spring of 1933
3 Revelation vii. 4 Hebrews vi.
14. 9.
 THE STIMULUS OF BLOWS 109
fear and trembling', 1 instead of having salvation thrust upon her
betimes. 'For whosoever will save his life shall lose it.' 2
The classic example of the stimulating effect of a blow is the
reaction of Hellas in general, and Athens in particular, to the
onslaught of the Achaemenian Power the Syriac universal state
in 480-479 B.C.
'The vastness of the forces employed in the expedition of Xerxes King
of Persia against Hellas cast the shadow of a terrible danger over the
Hellenic Society. The stakes for which the Hellenes were called upon to
fight were slavery or freedom, while the fact that the Hellenic com-
munities in Asia had already been enslaved created a presumption in
every mind that the communities in Hellas itself would experience the
same fate. When, however, the war resulted, contrary to expectation,
in its amazing issue, the inhabitants of Hellas found themselves not only
relieved from the dangers which had threatened them but possessed, in
addition, of honour and glory, while every Hellenic community was
filled with such affluence that the whole World was astonished at the

completeness with which the situation had been reversed.

'

During the half century that followed this epoch, Hellas made vast
strides in prosperity. During this period, the effects of the new affluence
showed themselves in the progress of the arts ; and artists as great as any
recorded in history, including the sculptor Pheidias, flourished at the
time. There was an equally signal advance in the intellectual field, in
which philosophy and public-speaking were singled out for special
honour throughout the Hellenic World and particularly at Athens. In
philosophy there was the school of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; in
public-speaking there were such figures as Pericles, Isocrates and Iso-
crates* pupils; and these were balanced by men of action with great
military reputations like Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon,
Myronides and a long array of other names too numerous to mention.
'In the forefront of all, Athens achieved such triumphs of glory and
prowess that her name won almost world-wide renown. She increased
her ascendancy to such a point that, with her own resources, unsup-
ported by the Lacedaemonians and Peloponnesians, she broke the
resistance of powerful Persian forces on land and sea and so humbled
the pride of the famous Persian Empire that she compelled it to liberate
by treaty all the Hellenic communities in Asia.' 3

The pre-eminence of Athenian vitality in this outburst of Hel-

lenic life which followed the repulse of Xerxes' onslaught is com-
parable with the rejuvenation of France after the War
of 1914-18 ;
for Athens on that occasion, like France on this, bore the brunt of
the stimulating blow. While the fertile fields of Boeotia were saved
from devastation by the treachery of their owners to the Hellenic
cause, and the fertile fields of Lacedaemon by the presence and the
1 2 Matthew xvi.
Phihppians 11. 12. 25.
3 Diodorus of Agynum: A Library of Universal History, Book XII, chs. i-a 1 .
 no THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
prowess of the Athenian fleet at Salamis, the poor land of Attica
was devastated systematically by the invaders in two successive
seasons. Indeed, Attica suffered more in 480-479 B.C. than France
in A J>. 1914-18 for the Germans only succeeded in occupying a
;

fraction, albeit an especially valuable fraction, of the French

national territory, whereas the Persians occupied and devastated
the whole of Attica, including Athens itself and the Acropolis and
the temple of Athene, on the summit of the rock, which was the
Attic holy of holies. The whole population of Attica men,
women, and children had to evacuate the country and cross the
sea to the Peloponnese as refugees and it was in this situation that
;

the Athenian fleet fought and won the Battle of Salamis, within
sight of the victors' abandoned fields and ruined homes and altars.
It is no wonder that a blow which aroused this indomitable spirit
in the Athenian people should have been the prelude to achieve-
ments which are perhaps unique in the history of Mankind for
their brilliance and multitude and variety. In the material recon-
struction of Attica, the new equipment of the farmsteads surpassed
the old as conspicuously as the new equipment of the French
factories has surpassed the plant destroyed by German shell-fire.
Half a century later, this new apparatus of agriculture in Attica was
still so far superior to anything that was to be found in other parts

of Hellas that when Athens betrayed into folly by excess of good

fortune at last conjured up against herself an overwhelming
counter-coalition of other Powers, the Boeotian contingent in the
Allied and Associated Armies found it worth while to carry off the
woodwork of the Attic farm-buildings bodily across the moun-
tains. 1 Yet, in the reconstruction of Attica, this imposing re-

equipment of the farmsteads was nothing accounted of. The work

which was regarded as truly symbolic of the country's glorious
'

resurrection was the rebuilding of the temples and in this work ;

Periclean Athens displayed a vitality far superior to that of post-war

France. When the French recovered the battered shell of Rhcims
Cathedral, they performed a pious restoration of each shattered
stone and splintered statue. When the Athenians found the Heka-
1 This fact is recorded in the fragment of a history of Hellenic affairs, of unknown
authorship, which has come to light on the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus. The relevant passage
runs as follows :
'Thebes had enjoyed a great increase in general prosperity as an immediate result of
the outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War she prospered still more after the
. .

joint Thebano-Lacedaemonian occupation of Decelea. While the occupation lasted,

the Thebans bought up cheap the slaves and other prize of war; and the tact that they
were the Athenians' next-door neighbours enabled them to transpoit to the Thebaid
all the
capital equipment of Attica, including the very timber and tiling of the buildings.
At that time the Attic countryside was more lavishly equipped than any other in Hellas.
It had suffered very little in the previous Lacedaemonian invasions, and an immense
amount of skill and labour had been invested in it by the Athenians. . .' (Hellcnica
Oxyrhynchia (Oxford 1909, University Press), xii. 3-4.)
 THE STIMULUS OF BLOWS in
tompedon burnt down to the foundations, they let the foundations
lieand proceeded, on a new site, to create the Parthenon.
As for Sparta, she had to wait for the stimulus which she had
been spared or denied by Destiny in 480-479 B.C. until it was
accorded to her some fifteen years later by an act of God. It was
the great earthquake of 464 B.C. a catastrophe which laid the City
of Sparta in ruins and raised all the Helots of Laconia in revolt
against their stricken masters that put the Spartans on their mettle
again and nerved them first to check the expansion of the Athenian
Empire and later to put an end to its existence. As for Thebes, she
did not completely recover from the demoralization of her 'Medism'
in 480 B.C., nor wholly efface its stigma, until almost a century later
when, in the year 382, the Gods at last had mercy on her and
inspired the Spartans to seize by fraud and hold by force the Theban
citadel, the Cadmea. Under the stimulus of this heaven-sent blow,
Thebes achieved, for a season, the miracle of adding a cubit to her
stature. The liberation of the Cadmea in 378 B.C. was followed by
the victory of Leuctra in 371 and the invasion of Laconia in 370.
Thebes had not only fulfilled her ancient ambition of establishing
an undisputed authority over the other city-states of Boeotia she ;

had actually defeated the invincible Spartans and raided their

inviolable territory and wrested from them the hegemony of the
Hellenic World.
In this series of examples from the military and political histories
of sovereign states, the stimulus of blows is manifest. Yet if these
examples warrant the inference that 'the heavier the blow the
stronger the stimulus' is a genuine social law, we must beware of
making the further inference that Militarism in itself is a source of
creative energy ; for the historic examples of our present law are
not confined to the battle-field, 1 and there are other mediums
besides those of war and politics in which these stimulating blows
are dealt and received.
The example, which we have reserved until the end of
classic
this chapter, presented on the field of religion in the Acts of the
is

Apostles. These dynamic acts, which were to win the whole

Hellenic World for Christianity as they worked themselves out in
the fullness of time, were conceived at the moment when the
Apostles were looking steadfastly toward Heaven as their Lord went
i One of the notorious deeds of Militarism m recent Western history the burning
of the city of Atlanta, Georgia, by General Sherman in A D. 1864 has stimulated the
stricken city to raise herself to an eminence in the arts of peace which she had never
attained in her ante-bellum infancy Sherman challenged Atlanta to show her destroyer
that she was not a Persepolis but a phoenix ; and he taught her the way by opening^her
eyes to the indestructible importance of her geographical position as a railway junction.
On the morrow of her disaster, Atlanta took for her civic motto the Latin word Resurgens,
and turned her strategic position to commercial account by making herself into a distri-
buting centre for the whole of the south-eastern United States,
us THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
up out of their sight. At the moment, it was a crushing blow for
1

them to lose again the personal presence of a Master who had so lately
returned to them from the dead. Yet the very heaviness of the blow
evoked, in their souls, a proportionately powerful psychological
reaction which is conveyed mythologically in the message of the
two men in white apparel 2 and in the descent of the Pentecostal
3
tongues of fire. In the power of the Holy Ghost, they preached
the divinity of the crucified and vanished Jesus not only to the
Jewish populace but to the Sanhedrin 4 and, within three centuries,
;

the Roman Government itself capitulated to the Church which the

Apostles had founded at a moment of extreme spiritual prostration.

V. THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES

'Marches' and 'Interiors'
So much for the stimulus of the human environment when its

impact takes the form of a sudden external blow. have next to We

examine the cases in which the impact takes the different form of a
continuous external pressure.
In terms of political geography, the peoples, states, or cities
which are exposed to such pressure fall, for the most part, within
the general category of 'marches' and the best way to study the
;

effects of this particular kind of pressure empirically is to make

some survey of the parts played by marches, in the histories of the
societies or communities to which they belong, in comparison with
the parts played by other territories that belong respectively to the
same societies or communities but are situated geographically in
their 'interiors'. 5

In the Egyptiac World

In the history of the Egyptiac Civilization, for example, we have
noticed already, in another connexion, 6 that, on no less than three
momentous occasions, the course of Egyptiac history was directed
by Powers originating in the south of Upper Egypt. The founda-
tion of the United Kingdom circa 3200 B.C., the foundation of
the universal state circa 2070/2060 B.C., and the restoration of the
universal state circa 1580 B.C., were all accomplished by Powers
that originated within this narrowly circumscribed district. may We
observe now, apropos of our present inquiry, that this district is
1 Acts i. 9-10. * Acts i. lo-ii. 3 Acts ii. 4 Acts ii-v.
1-4.
5 In Part
IV, below, we shall have occasion to recur to this survey of the parts played
by marches, apropos of the pathological phenomenon of an excessive concentration of
energy upon certain particular activities which aie the responses to particular challenges.
An example of this phenomenon which is conspicuous in the histories of marches is the
social malady called Militarism
6 See I. C
(n), vol. i, p. 140, footnote 2, above, following Meyer, E. Geschuhte fas
.

Altertums, vol. 11 (i), 2nd edition, pp. 60-1.

 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 113
coincident with the Southern March of the Egyptiac World which
was exposed to pressure from the barbarians of Nubia. And if we
look further into Egyptiac history from our
present angle of vision,
we shall find other marches playing equivalent parts in reaction to
pressures from barbarians or from alien civilizations which im-
pinged upon the Egyptiac World from other quarters. In particu-
lar, a pressure from North- Western Africa or from South-Western
Asia was apt to call into existence, in the Egyptiac World, a
paramount Power with its seat in the corresponding marches on
this or that fringe of the Delta. 1
The polarization of political power at the two extremities of the
Egyptiac domain was an early as well as a persistent phenomenon
of Egyptiac history. A
consolidation of the twenty or thirty once
independent local states of the Lower Nile Valley2 into two empires
with the Northern and the Southern March as their respective
nuclei was the prelude to the foundation of the United Kingdom;
and after this dualism had been converted into unity through the
triumph of the Southern over the Northern Power, the memory of
it was still
kept alive in the symbolism of the Double Crown, until
at last, after the passage of some two thousand years, the Northern
March succeeded in capturing in its turn, and thenceforth retaining,
the primacy. In the thirteenth century B.C., new pressures from
the Hittite Power on the Asiatic mainland and from the post-
Minoan Volkerwanderung in the Levant caused the sceptre to pass
from Thebes, the historic metropolis of the Southern March, to
the City of Ramses the new frontier-fortress on the eastern fringe
:

of the Delta which now guarded this exposed extremity of the

Egyptiac World as Thebes had guarded the frontier over against
Nubia. 3 Thereafter, during the sixteen centuries of twilight which
elapsed between the decline of 'the New Empire' and the ultimate
extinction of the Egyptiac Society in the fifth century of the
Christian Era, political power reverted to the Delta as persistently
as it had been apt to revert to the Southern March during the pre-
ceding two thousand years. After being governed in the thirteenth
and twelfth centuries B.C. from Deltaic Ramses, the Egyptiac
1 e g. at the City of Ramses and at Tanis and at Bubastis on the eastern fringe of the
Delta; at Sais on the western fringe (see below).
2 The historical
'nomes', i.e. provinces, as they were called after their *mediatization'.
3 For this transfer of the
capital from Thebes to the City of Ramses, see Meyer, E. :
Geschichte des Altertums, vol. ii (i), 2nd edition, pp. 453-4, 487-8, and 494-5. The City
of Ramses was the first Deltaic capital of an oecumenical Egyptiac State with the exception
of Avans ; and Avans is the exception which proves the rule ; for Avaris was the capital of
the Hyksos and the Hyksos were alien interlopers in the Egyptiac World who never
;

felt themselves at home there. For this reason, the Hyksos did not attempt to establish
themselves an the interior, but remained encamped at Avans, on the edge of their Egyptian
dominions, in order to keep open their line of retreat to their original settlements in Syria.
Thus Avaris, under the Hyksos regime, was not really the capital of an Egyptiac State
but rather the head-quarters of an alien military occupation.
II I
ii4 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
World was governed in the eleventh century from Deltaic Tanis
and in the tenth and ninth centuries from Deltaic Bubastis and ;

the classic instance of Deltaic paramountcy is the rise of the

Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, which originated in the Delta in response
to the challenge of the Assyrian occupation in the seventh century
B.C. and came, after supplanting the intruders, to rule all Egypt,
as far south as Elephantine, from Sais. The Saite Power, thus
founded, endured until it failed to respond to another challenge
from Asia in failing to save Egypt from political incorporation into
the Achaemenian Empire. The subsequent successive attempts
some abortive and others temporarily successful to throw off the
Achaemenian yoke all emanated from the Delta likewise. During
these centuries when the Delta was politically in the ascendant, the
Thebaid was politically in eclipse. The position of post-Imperial
Thebes in the latter-day Egyptiac World resembled that of post-
Imperial Rome during the post-Hellenic interregnum and the
early age of Western Christendom. The ci-devant Imperial City
was perfunctorily compensated and consoled for the loss of its
political power by the enjoyment of an ecclesiastical primacy
which was a legacy from its previous greatness and a tribute to its
1
enduring prestige.
Can we why it was that, in the competition for political
discern
paramountcy between the Thebaid and the Delta, the Thebaid
had the upper hand from the foundation of the United Kingdom
until the decline of 'the New Empire', while the Delta had the
upper hand thereafter ? This permanent change in the balance of
power is to be explained by certain permanent changes in the
incidence of external pressure upon the Egyptiac World. From the
fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. onwards, the pressures
from North-Western Africa and from South-Western Asia decidedly
outweighed the pressures from other quarters; and accordingly,
during these latter days, the stimulus derived from external pres-
sure was felt in greatest measure by the Northern Marches in the
Delta. Concurrently, the pressure from the Upper Nile Valley
relaxed; and the classic Southern March, in the section of the
valley immediately below the First Cataract, was relegated to the
interior of the Egyptiac World by an extension of the Egyptiac
domain up-river.
The Southern March was only a march so long as the
classic
First Cataractmarked a sharp line of cultural division between the
Egyptiac Civilization and a Nubian barbarism and this condition
;

1
See Meyer, E. : Gottesstaat, Militarherrschaft und Stdndewesen in Aegypten =
Berichten Berl. Akad. 1928, pp. 495 seqq.; eundem: GescTnchtedesAltertums, vol. ii (ii),
and edition (Stuttgart and Berlin 1931, Gotta), pp. 6-60.
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 115
did not prevail either in the evening or at the dawn of
Egyptiac
history. In the so-called pre-dynastic age, there had been no
substantial difference in culture between the sections of the Nile
Valley below the First Cataract and above it. The differentiation of
a dynamic civilization in Egypt from a static
primitive culture in
Nubia declared itself on the eve of the foundation of the United
Kingdom; and the stimulus of barbarian pressure upon the
Egyptiac frontiersmen at the new dividing line perhaps accounts
for the foundation of the United Kingdom by a dynasty whose seat
was at Al Kab. The new difference in cultural level between Egypt
and Nubia was accentuated during the regime of the Egyptiac
United Kingdom, as the Egyptiac Civilization soared to its zenith;
and this cultural gulf remained fixed during the subsequent 'Time
of Troubles' when Nubia appears to have been occupied by
Afrasian Nomads from the North- West and also during the
regime of the Egyptiac universal state, which was founded and
maintained by the Theban emperors of the Eleventh and Twelfth
Dynasties. Though Nubia was annexed to the Egyptiac universal
state politically, its incorporation into the Egyptiac World remained

superficial, like the incorporation of the southern seaboard of

China into the Sinic World under the Han. 1 The Egyptiac Civiliza-
tion was still exotic in Nubia; and such local interaction between
the two cultures as took place in that age resulted in the barbarizing
of the Egyptian garrison and not in the civilizing of the Nubian
proletariat. On the other hand, Nubia was not only politically
annexed but was also culturally assimilated by the restored Egyptiac
universal state 'the New Empire' and after the organization of
the new dominion by Thothmes I (imperabat circa 1557-1505 B.C.)
the southern boundary of the Egyptiac World stood near the foot
of the Fourth Cataract, at the new frontier-fortress of Napata,
instead of standing at the head of the First Cataract at the old
frontier-fortress of Elephantine. In thus definitively incorporating
Nubia into the Egyptiac World, the Theban emperors of the
Eighteenth Dynasty cut the roots of their own country's greatness.
They transferred from the Thebaid to Napata the military bur-
den, and with it the political stimulus, of serving as the Southern
March; and on the one occasion, during the last sixteen centuries
of Egyptiac history, on which the now prevalent political para-
mountcy of the Northern Marches was contested by the South, the
Southern Power which aspired to oecumenical authority had its
roots in the new Southern March of Napata and not in the ci-
devant Southern March of the Thebaid.
When the break-up of 'the New Empire' into successor-states,
1 See pp. 83-4, above.
n6 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
under the rule of local princelings descended from Libyan mer-
cenaries, was followed by a re-polarization of political power at the
two extremities of the Egyptiac World, the two poles in the new
tension were not both coincident with those at which power had
been concentrated on the eve of the foundation of the United
Kingdom, some two thousand five hundred years earlier. In the
post-Imperial age, the capital of the Northern Power was duly
planted in the Delta, this time at Bubastis, by the Libyan princes of
Heracleopolis ; while these latter-day Libyan Heracleopolites' Napa-
tan kinsmen 1 and contemporaries, who established the Southern
Power, retained their capital at Napata, which was now the Southern
point of pressure and stimulus, and did not transfer it either to the
Thebaid or to any other point in the interior. In the fullness of
time, this Napatan Power attempted to emulate the thrice-repeated
feat of the Thebaid: the political unification of the whole Egyptiac
World under a single sovereignty. The new Southern March,
however, now failed to accomplish what the old Southern March
had achieved thrice over. The Napatan attempt to gain oecumeni-
cal power, which was initiated by Kashta when he annexed the
Thebaid circa 750 B.C. and was almost carried to completion by
Piankhi when he made his expedition down-Nile into the Delta circa
725, was frustrated first by the alien Assyrian invaders and finally
by the indigenous Deltaic Power of the Saites, who began as the
Assyrians' creatures and endedastheir local residuary legatees. Circa
661-655 B.C., the frontier between the Saite and the Napatan Power
came to rest at Elephantine; and thereafter this obsolete boundary
between an Egyptiac Civilization and a Nubian barbarism acquired
a new function as the internal line of demarcation between the two
political units into which the enlarged Egyptiac World was thence-
forth permanently divided.
Thus, in the post-Imperial age, the old Northern and the new
Southern March both failed to attain oecumenical power in the end ;

and the resultant political dualism persisted during the remainder

of Egyptiac history. Yet though Napata fell short, in achievement,
of Al Kab and Thebes, she was not altogether unresponsive to the
stimulus of external pressure to which, as the latter-day Southern
March of the Egyptiac World, she had come to be exposed in her
turn. The former frontier-fortress of 'the New Empire' on the
Upper Nile became the capital of a 'successor-state' which embraced
half, albeit the more backward half, of the latter-day expanded
Egyptiac World and, unlike the Saites and their successors in the
;

1
Reisner's view that these princes of Napata were Libyans is not accepted by Eduard
Meyer, who suggests that they were descended from Hnhor, the High Priest of Amon
who established the Theban theocracy ctrca 1075 B.C. (Geschichte des Altertums, vol. ii (ii),
and edition, p. 52).
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 117
Delta, the Napatans did not succumb to alien conquerors. During
the long centuries when Egypt north of
Elephantine was suc-
cessively subject to the Achaemenids and the Ptolemies and the
Romans, Ethiopia south of Elephantine remained an independent
Egyptiac Power. Indeed, during these centuries the domain of the
Egyptiac Culture was extended still farther up-river under this
Ethiopian regime, until Napata herself, who had started her career
as a frontier-fortress, was relegated to the interior as Thebes had
been before her. Thereafter, circa 300 B.C., Napata was supplanted,
as the capital of the Ethiopian state,
by Meroe at the foot of the
Sixth Cataract, midway between the junctions of the Atbaraand the
Blue Nile with the main river; and this Meroitic Power lived on,
as a politically independent embodiment of the
Egyptiac Society,
until the third century of the Christian Era, when the
Egyptiac
Culture suffered a violent death in Ethiopia at the hands of bar-
barian invaders, some two centuries before it died peacefully in
its sleep in Egypt itself.
Thus the political history of the Egyptiac World, from beginning
to end, may be
read as a tension between two poles of political
power which, in every age, were located respectively in the
Southern and in the Northern March of the day. One or other
of these marches was the cradle of every successful or abortive
oecumenical dynasty. On the other hand, there are no examples of
oecumenical dynasties which originated at points in the interior of
the Egyptiac World. The political creations of the interior were
seldom more than parochial and even when oecumenical dynasties
;

whose roots lay in one of the marches in the Delta or in the

Thebaid transferred their capitals to places in Middle Egypt for
administrative convenience, political power was apt to ebb back to
the marches as soon as times once more became critical. For
instance, after the foundation of the United Kingdom, the capital
was transferred from Al Kab, in the Southern March, which had
been the original seat of the founders, to Memphis on the border-
line between the two lands of the Double Crown yet the new task ;

of founding the Egyptiac universal state after a time of troubles

was accomplished by a dynasty from Thebes. Again, after the
foundation of the universal state, the capital was transferred once
more, this time from Thebes to a new central site just above Mem-
yet the new task of restoring the universal state after the
J
phis ;

intrusion of the Hyksos was accomplished by a dynasty from

Thebes, who thus asserted her political potency for the second
1 This new central
site, to which the capital was transferred by Amenemhat I from
Thebes, was called Iz-Taui, which meant 'Conqueror of both Lands' (Meyer, E..
Geschichte des Altertums^ vol. i (11), 3rd edition, p. 267).
n8 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND -RESPONSE
time. Finally, after the restoration of the universal state, the
capital was transferred from Thebes by Ikhnaton to his
new imperial
city at Tell-el-Amarna, mid-way between Thebes and Memphis ;
yet this transfer was as ephemeral as the religious and artistic
innovations with which it was bound up. 1 Upon the death of the
imperial revolutionary, the capital reverted to Thebes and remained
there until the Thebaid paid the inevitable penalty for having
ceased to be a march by forfeiting, once for all, its ancient and
long-enduring political paramountcy. Even then, the political
heritage of the Thebaid did not fall to any district in the interior,
but was divided, as we have seen, between the old Northern March
in the Delta and the new Southern March of Nubian Napata.

In the Sinic World

The part played in the classical period of Egyptiac history by the
Thebaid the march which relieved the interior of the Egyptiac
World from the pressure of the barbarians of Nubia was played
in Sinic history by the valleys of the Wei-ho and the Fen-ho, which
were the marches of the Sinic World against the barbarian high-
landers of Shensi and Shansi. The Chou Dynasty, which founded
the Sinic equivalent of the Egyptiac United Kingdom towards the
close of the second millennium B.C., and the Ts'in Dynasty, which
founded the Sinic universal state in the year 221 B.C., both originated
in the Wei Valley, while the Fen Valley was the seat of the Tsin
Dynasty, which was the rival of the Ts'in during the first phase
of the Sinic Time of Troubles. In Sinic, as in Egyptiac, history,
there was a tendency for Powers which originated in the marches
and afterwards attained an oecumenical dominion to transfer their
capitals from the periphery to the interior. The site in the Sinic
World which corresponded to the Egyptiac Memphis was Loyang
(the modern Honan-fu). It lay on the borderline between the
western valleys and the eastern plain, 2 traversed by the Yellow
River in its lower course, which was the geographical heart of the
Sinic World. 3 The capital of the Ch6u was transferred to the
neighbourhood of Loyang from the Wei Valley after the dynasty
1
For a discussion of Ikhnaton's role in Egyptiac history, see I. C (ii), vol i, pp. 145-6,
above.
2 The
exact location of Loyang was in the valley of the Lo-ho, a minor right-bank
tributary of the Yellow River which debouches into the mamstream just below the
Yellow River's exit from the gorges that intervene between its Lower Basin in the eastern
plain and its Upper Basin in the highlands where it receives the waters of the Wei and
the Fen.
3 The title of 'Middle
Kingdom* (Chung Kwo), which was eventually taken over by the
Sinic universal state as an alternative to 'All that is under Heaven* (T'ien-hta)> appears
to have been borne originally by the little principality of Chu, in the middle of the
eastern plain, on the borderline between the modern provinces of Honan and Shantung.
(See Cordier, H. Histohe G6n6rale de la Chine (Pans 1920-1, Geuthner, 4 vols.), vol. i,
:

p. 314)
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 119
had fallen into and in a later age the capital of the
decadence ;

Sinic universal state, which had been located originally at

Ch'ang
Ngan in the Wei Valley under the Prior Han, was transferred like-
wise to Loyang when
the Posterior Han gave the Sinic universal
state a second lease of
life. It is the more
significant that, not-
withstanding this repeated attraction of the capital of the Sinic
World from the periphery into the interior, the two Powers which
made Sinic history both originated in the Western March. The
only Power that is credited with an original seat in the eastern plain
is the
semi-legendary Yin or Shang Dynasty, which was tradi-
tionally supposed to have been paramount before the Chou united
the eastern plain with the Western March under their own sceptre.
In the Far Eastern World
When we turn to the history of the Far Eastern Civilization
which is to the Sinic Civilization, we find that the
'affiliated'
oscillation between a western capital and an eastern capital, which
had been characteristic of the political history of the 'apparented'
civilization, is reproduced, with a difference, in a new oscillation
between a southern capital and a northern.
In the Sinic World, there had been a tendency for oecumenical
Powers to originate in the Western March, under stimulus from
the pressure of the surrounding barbarian highlanders, and to
transfer their capitals to sites in the interior on the eastern plain.
In the Far Eastern World, the heaviest external pressure came
from a different source and a different quarter. The barbarian
highlanders of Shensi and Shansi had been subdued and assimilated
by the growing Powers of Ts'in and Tsin before the close of the
Sinic Time of Troubles; but this elimination of the barbarians of
the western highlands had merely removed a buffer which had
previously intervened between the Sinic World and the far more
formidable Nomadic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe; and the
simultaneous expansion of the two Sinic principalities of Chao and
Yen, at the northern end of the eastern plain, doubled the length of
the new front between the Sinic World and Eurasia. This front
now extended from the north-western coast of the Gulf of Liaotung
to the north-eastern escarpment of the Tibetan Plateau. The lines
of defence against Nomad inroads, which had been thrown up
piecemeal by the contending states of the Sinic World, with such
energies as they could spare from the last round in their own inter-
necine struggle, were consolidated, after the 'knock-out blow' had
been delivered and the Sinic universal state founded by Ts'in She
1
Hwang-ti, into the Great Wall of China. It was across the line of
1 See Cordier, op. vol.
cit., i, pp. 206-7.
120 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
the Wall, from north to south, that, some five centuries later,
during the interregnum (circa A.D. 175-475) which followed the
break-up of the Sinic universal state, the Eurasian Nomads came in,
as barbarian invaders, in the post-Sinic Volkerwanderung; and the
pressure from the north did not cease when the new Far Eastern
Civilization emerged. Hence, in the Far Eastern World, there was
a tendency, from the beginning, for oecumenical Powers either to
originate in the Northern Marches or to transfer their capitals to
the Northern Marches if they had originated in the southern
interior.
For instance, the Power which evoked, in the Far Eastern World,
a ghost of the Sinic universal state 1 in the first age of Far Eastern
history, originated, like the Sinic universal state itself, in the Wei
Valley; and in the new orientation of political geography the Wei
Valley constituted the western section of those Northern Marches
in which the pressure from the Eurasian Nomads was now making
itself felt. It was here that the Sui Dynasty, which re-enacted the

part of Ts'in She Hwang-ti by uniting the whole of Society under

a single rule, established a new oecumenical capital at Si Ngan (the
modern Sian-fu) in the neighbourhood of the ancient Ch'ang
2
Ngan. Si Ngan, under the Sui, drew to itself the power that had
previously resided in Nanking, the capital of the South, which the
3

Sui had annexed to their dominions and when the T'ang Dynasty
;

reaped the fruits of the Sui Dynasty's labours, as their prototypes

the Han had once entered into the heritage of Ts'in She Hwang-ti,
the T'ang kept the seat of oecumenical power at Si Ngan, where
they had found it.

Ngan, however, did not retain its primacy in perpetuity for

Si ;

the incidence of the pressure from the Eurasian Nomads tended, in

the course of Far Eastern history, to shift from the western sector
of the Northern Marches to the east, and the seat of political power
in the Far Eastern World shifted eastwards correspondingly. This
shift was approximately contemporaneous with the
momentary
breakdown of the Far Eastern Oecumenical Power during the
interval between the extinction of the T'ang Dynasty in A.D.
907
and the foundation of the Sung Dynasty in A.D. 960.
During the Sung Age, Far Eastern history consisted, for the main
body of the Far Eastern Society on the Continent, 4 in a slow and
1 See further the
comparative study, in Part X, below, of the likenesses and differences
between the evocation of the ghost of the Sinic universal state in the Far Eastern World
and the evocation of ghosts of the Hellenic universal state in the Orthodox Christian and
Western worlds.
* For
Ch'ang Ngan, the capital of the Sinic universal state under the Prior Han, see
p. u
9, above. 3 See
p. 122, footnote i, below.
* The different course taken
by the history of the offshoot of the Far Eastern Society
overseas, in Japan, is examined below in the present section, on pp. 158-9, as well as in
Parts VI and VIII.
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 121
stubborn retreat of the Far Eastern Oecumenical Power from north
to South under an ever increasing pressure from a succession of
Nomad Powers operating from Manchuria. The Khitan had
extorted the cession of sixteen districts along the northern border
circa A.D. 927-37, before the oecumenical
authority of the Sung had
been established; the Khitans* successors, the Kin, conquered
from the Sung, circa A.D. 1125-42, the whole of Northern China
down to the watershed between the Yellow River and the Yangtse;
and, when the Kin had been supplanted in their turn by the Mon-
gols, the Mongol Great Khan Qubilay (imperabat A.D. 1259-94)
completed the work of his Kin and Khitan predecessors by extin-
guishing the Sung altogether and reuniting the whole of the main
body of the Far Eastern World under a barbarian dominion. The
tide of barbarian conquest, however, had no sooner engulfed the last
remnant of the Far Eastern Society on the mainland than it began
to recede ; and the point of interest, for our present purpose, lies in
the sequel which followed the eviction of the Mongols from China
in A.D. 1 3 68 1 by a new thoroughbred Chinese Power: the Ming.
This new thoroughbred Chinese dynasty arose in the same
quarter in which their last thoroughbred predecessors, the Sung,
had held out longest, that is to say in the South; and the founder
of the Ming, Hung Wu, signalized the expulsion of the barbarians
from China and the restoration of a genuine Chinese regime by a
solemn transfer of the capital.
When the Kin had conquered Northern China, they had estab-
lished their capital on the site of the modern Peking (*the Northern
Capital'), on the borderline between the barbarian portion of their
dominions to the north of the Great Wall and the Chinese portion
to the south of it. 2 The same site commended itself, for the same
geographical reason, to Qubilay; and in his reign Peking became
3

the capital not merely of a reunited China but of a universal state

which extended from the Pacific coasts of Asia right across the
continent as far as the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates and the
Carpathians and the Baltic and thus embraced the whole circum-
ference of the Eurasian Steppe. This Kin and Mongol capital was
naturally obnoxious to the Chinese as a reminder of the barbarian
* The insurrection
against the Mongols which ended in their eviction began about
the year 1351.
*
Compare the location of the Hyksos* capital, Tanis, on the borderline^ between the
non-Egyptiac portion of their dominions in Syria and the Egyptiac portion in the Lower
Nile Valley. (See p. 113, footnote 3, above.)
3
Qubilay began to recondition Peking in AD. 1264 and transferred his capital
thither in 1267 from Qaraqorum, which was his ancestral capital in the Basin of the
Orkhon, in the heart of Eurasia. At the same time he kept a footing on the Steppe by
building himself a subsidiary residence, within easy reach of Peking, at Chung-Tu
(Coleridge's Xanadu) just outside the Great Wall.
'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree. . . .'
122 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
yoke which they had borne so long and had only just succeeded in
throwing off. Accordingly, Hung Wu had no sooner driven the
Nomads out again into their native steppes and re-established the
frontier of a liberated China along the line of the Great Wall, than
he transferred the capital from Qubilay's city to Nanking, which
had been the 'Capital of the South' at the dawn of Far Eastern
history.
1
Hung Wu laid out his new city at Nanking on a scale
commensurate with the size of the greater empire of which it was
designed to be the capital henceforward. Yet neither historical
sentiment nor cultural amour propre nor administrative con-
venience nor a lavish outlay on public buildings availed to retain
the capital of the Ming Empire on this site in the interior. For
though the Nomads had been expelled from China for the moment
by Hung Wu's prowess, he could not exorcize the danger of their
possible return On the morrow of their expulsion, as they began to
.

recover from their momentary prostration and to rally their forces

like Satan and his angels in the exordium of Paradise Lost, their

pressure became perceptible once more at the point where it had

been making itself felt for the past five centuries that is, in the
eastern sector of the Northern March and, once again, the point
which was bearing the brunt of the political pressure drew to itself
the primacy in political power. In A.D. 1421, Hung Wu's son and
second successor, Yung Lo (regnabat A.D. 1403-25), retransferred
the capital of China from his own father's chosen city of Nanking
to the very city of Peking which had first been raised to honour by
the hereditary barbarian enemy.
c

Yung Lo's reversion from the Southern Capital' in the interior

to 'the Northern Capital' in the Marches was justified by the event.
Indeed, the renewed pressure from the north became so strong
that, though the retransference of the capital to the danger-point
postponed the day of fresh disaster for China, it could not for ever
avert it. In A.D. 1619-44, rather more than two centuries after
Yung Lo's statesmanlike move, the Great Wall was broken through
and Peking captured and all China overrun by a new Power from
the north-eastern no-man's-land in the shape of the Manchus 2 and ;

1
Nanking had been continuously the capital of the South, under five successive
dynasties, from A D. 317 (the date which saw the end of the ephemeral restoration of
the Sinic universal state under the so-called 'United Tsin') down to A D. 589 (the date
which saw the evocation of a ghost of the Smic universal state by the Sui). In A D. 589
the Sui annexed the South to their own Northern dominions and thereby united the
whole Far Eastern World of the day under a single rule (See p. 120, above )
2 Unlike the
Mongols, the Manchus were not stock-breeding Nomads but primitive
hunters who were at home, not on the Eurasian Steppe, but m the highlands clad
in virgin forest which bound, on the east, the easternmost enclave of the Eurasian
Steppe in the common basin of the Rivers Liao and Sungari. The particular Manchu
community which conquered China in the seventeenth century of the Christian Era
came from the section of this highland-forest country that lies between Kirm and the
Pacific coast. These Manchu conquerors of China, being still on the primitive level at
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 123
in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era the Manchu sovereign
Ch'ien Lung ruled from Peking 1 an empire uniting all China and
half Eurasia under a common dominion which could bear com-
parison with the empire that had once been ruled from Peking
by the Mongol Great Khan Qubilay himself. From A.D. 1421
down to A.D. 1928, Peking remained the capital of China through
all vicissitudes. The attempt of the T'aip'ing insurgents, in the
middle of the nineteenth century, 2 to bring back the capital to
Nanking collapsed with the failure of their endeavour, of which it
was a part, to deal with the Manchus as the Ming had dealt with the
Mongols. In 1928, however, the Emperor Yung Lo's historic act
was reversed, at last, by President Chiang Kai-shek; and at the
time of writing Nanking is the capital of the Chinese Republic,
while Peking has been degraded to the rank of a provincial centre
under the belittling title of Peping.
Is this change likely to be permanent? And, if it is, will it
militate against the validity of our social 'law' that marches are
apt to be stimulated, by the external pressure to which they are
exposed, into developing a political power which gives them a
predominance over the interior? In the writer's belief, the recent
transfer of the Chinese capital from Peking to Nanking is likely
to be perpetuated, and this just because, so far from invalidating our
'law', it actually illustrates and confirms it.

How are we to account for the success of the Kuomintang in re-

transferring the capital of China from Peking to Nanking some
three-quarters of a century after the T'aip'ing's failure in their
attempt to do this very thing? The explanation is to be found in
certain far-reaching transformations of China's human environ-
ment which have taken place during the interval.
In 'the eighteen-fifties' of the Christian Era, the quarter from
which China was subject to the heaviest external pressure was still
the north, as it had been since the beginning of Far Eastern history.
At that moment, China was under die rule of a dynasty of north-
barbarian origin whose founder had forced his entry by breaking
through the Great Wall, in its eastern sector, from north to south;

the time of the conquest, were much more readily assimilated to the Far Eastern culture,
and absorbed into the Far Eastern body social, than their Mongol predecessors, who had
entered China as full-fledged Eurasian Nomads with a tincture of the abortive Far
Eastern Christian culture of the Nestorian Diaspora (see II. D (vi), pp. 237-8, below).
For the primitive culture of the Manchus, see Lattunore, Owen: Manchuria Cradle of
Conflict (New York 1 93 2, Macmillan), pp. 44-5 . It will be seen that the Manchu conquest
of China differed from the Mongol conquest both in nature and in outcome, and bore a
greater resemblance to the Chichimec conquest of Mexico.
1 The Manchu rulers of China followed
Qubilay's example by supplementing their
capital at Peking, on Chinese soil, with a secondary residence
a glorified hunting lodge
and summer retreat outside the Great Wall. This Manchu counterpart of Qubilay's
Xanadu* was Jehol in Eastern Inner Mongolia.
a The
T'aip'ing insurrection lasted from A.D. 1850 to A.D. 1864.
 124 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
and, according to our 'law', it was to be expected that the capital of
China would remain in the zone of pressure that is to say, at
Peking, in the eastern sector of the Northern Marches so long as
this state of affairs continued. By 1928, however, a historic situa-
tion which had been intact in 'the eighteen-fifties' had become
still

and the Chinese Political Revolution of 1911,

entirely obsolete;
which overthrew the Manchu Dynasty and put an end to the
Manchu ascendancy in China Proper, was by no means the most
revolutionary event in this radical change. The Manchu Dynasty
and the Manchu Bannermen who had transferred their residence
from Manchuria to China at the time of the conquest had been con-
verted to Chinese culture many generations before they were put
down from their seat by Chinese Nationalism. 1 The really moment-
ous change in the situation since the failure of the T'aip'ing has
been not political but economic, and has consisted in a counter-
offensive of the Chinese cultivator against the Nomad herdsman. 2
This Chinese colonization of the steppe country, which was well
under way before 1911, has been facilitated by the lapse of the
Manchu regime's migration-restrictions and has been stimulated
by the subsequent ravages of civil war and banditry and famine and
flood in the heart of China itself: a fourfold scourge which has been
driving the Chinese peasantry of Shantung and Honan and Chihli
to emigrate in their hundreds of thousands to the empty and
unharassed virgin lands of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. Thus,
to-day, the Great Wall no longer marks the boundary between
Chinese peasant and barbarian Nomad. The line across which the
Nomad invader has trespassed so many times during the last two
thousand years has been left far behind in the Chinese peasant's
peaceful but potent counter-offensive, until now a broad zone of
the steppe-land which the Mongol herdsman used to range has
1
Indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the Manchu Dynasty
and Nobility, at any rate, had been Sinified before they crossed the Great Wall in
AD. 1619. For their previous extra-mural dominions had included not only their own
original homeland in the forest-clad highlands east of Kirin but also the relatively well-
watered portion of the lowlands in the Liao River basin which had been brought under
the plough by Chinese peasant-colonists and had been shielded from Nomad incursions
by the construction of the Willow Palisade: a north-eastern prolongation of the Great
Wall which takes off from the Wall just above Shanhaikwan and runs down the eastern
escarpment of the Central Asian Plateau and then across the South Manchunan plains
until it strikes the left bank of the Upper Sungan after traversing the foot-hills of the
eastern mountains between Changchun and Kirm. By the time when the Manchus
descended from their highlands, these well-watered and colonized and cultivated and
protected lowlands had become a Chinese country; and it was at Mukden, in this
Chinese milieu, that the Manchus held their court before they crossed the Wall and
moved to Peking. This residence at Mukden Sinified the Manchu princes as effectively
the^Scottish kings were Anglicized by transferring their residence from the Highlands
as
to Edinburgh, and the Achaememdae Babylonicized by
transferring theirs from Persis
to Susa. Half the Bannermen who conquered intra-mural China for the Manchu
Dynasty were not Manchus at all, but South-Manchurian Chinese; and the so-called
Manchu conquest of China was, in effect, a Chinese civil war. (See Lattimore, op. cit.,
3 For
PP- 4S-7I-) this, see further Part III. A, vol iii, pp. 16-22, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 125
been brought under the Chinese plough. Under the counter-
attack of these ever advancing furrows, the Mongols have almost
evacuated their former pasturelands south of the Gobi Desert, while
the Manchus have become almost extinct in 'the Three Eastern
Provinces' of the Chinese Republic which are still popularly known
as Manchuria. In other words, the environs of Peking have ceased
to be a march and have become assimilated to the interior for the
first time in Far Eastern history; and it is in accordance with
our law that in these new circumstances Peking itself should for-
1
feit its long-maintained status of being the
capital of China.
But has Nanking undergone any converse change of circum-
stances which entitles it to re-acquire the status which Peking has
now lost ? If our law is to be vindicated completely, we must be
able to demonstrate that, concurrently, the environs of Nanking
have ceased to be part of the interior, as they have been hitherto
since the beginning of Far Eastern history, and have become a
march; and, as soon as we state the problem in these terms, we
perceive that, in this quarter, there has in fact been a transforma-
tion of China's human environment which is not less far-reaching
than the change in the north. While, along the northern land-
frontiers of China, the old pressure from the Nomads of the
Eurasian Steppe has gradually been reduced to vanishing point and
has latterly given place to a counter-pressure upon the Nomads
from the Chinese, China has been exposed contemporaneously to a
new pressure, of steadily increasing intensity, along her eastern
frontage, where she faces the sea. In earlier ages of Far Eastern
history, the coast-line of China was the quarter on which the
pressure upon her was least severe. Save for the desultory visits of
Arab and Persian Muslim merchant-ships in the T'ang period and
the desultory raids of Japanese pirates in the Ming period, the sea
remained, from the Chinese standpoint, 'a perfect and absolute
blank', until, some four centuries ago, it became the vehicle of the
impact of our Western Civilization upon the Far East*
This impact of a human force from the opposite side of the globe
was feeble at first and it is less than a century ago that it began to
;

acquire its present formidable momentum. At the date, for instance,

when the T'aip'ing made their unsuccessful attempt to retransfer
the capital of China to Nanking, the Western international settle-
ment of Shanghai was still in its puny infancy: an unregarded
bunch of 'godowns' planted on a mud-bank up a backwater of
the Yangtse estuary. To-day Shanghai is not only the greatest of the
treaty-ports that stud the coast of China
from Canton at one end
1
Compare the edipse of Thebes after it had been relegated to the interior of the
Egyptiac World through the incorporation of Nubia (see the present chapter, pp 14-18,
1

above).
126 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
to Tientsin at the other. She is also one of the greatest ports and
greatest cities in the World, and, to all appearance, she commands
a future that will quite eclipse her imposing present. In other
words, as China's northern landward marches have fallen into
atrophy with the cessation of pressure from the Nomads, a new
eastern maritimemarch has been brought into existence by a new
pressure from overseas which is being exerted upon China by the
Westerners. This new maritime march has taken the place of the
old landward march as the quarter from which the incidence of
external pressure upon China is heaviest; and the sector in which
it is now all is the central sector containing Shanghai.
heaviest of
Shanghai the
is point of the spear which the West is thrusting into
China's side and accordingly, in the political geography of China,
;

as it has come to be re-orientated during the last three-quarters of

a century, the province of Kiangsu, in which Shanghai is embedded,
has succeeded to the historic position of the province of Chihli,
which used to lie athwart the war-paths of Nomad invaders from
Mongolia and Manchuria.
1

Now Nanking occupies in Kiangsu a position corresponding to

1
The reader of this passage may demur to this implied relegation of Manchuna to a
secondary role; for he can point out that Manchuria has never ceased to be a zone m
which external pressure is being brought to bear upon China and that, since the i8th-
igth September, 1931, the pressure upon China from this quarter has become so intense
that^it
has come to be regarded as a matter of world-wide concern. This is quite true;
but it should also be observed that, since the last decade of the nineteenth century of the
Christian Era, the pressure which has been exerted upon China through Manchuria
has not been the pressure either of Mongol Nomadism or of Manchu Barbarism In
these latter days, the pressure through Manchuria has been exerted by Russia and
Japan; and it has been exerted by these two Powers as a consequence of the process of
Westernization which each of them has previously undergone In fact, Russia and Japan
in Manchuria are acting as representatives of the West; and, in virtue of this, the
importance of Manchuria as a channel conducting towards China the aggression of the
West is at least as great* at the present day 'as its importance in bringing the expansive
powers of China to bear on the frontier'. (Lattimore, op cit., p. 259.) Under the shadow
of the Sino-Russian conflict in Manchuria in 1929 and the more formidable Sino-
Japanese conflict in Manchuria which came to a head in 1931, an observer might be
inclined to judge that, while the personality of the aggressor in Manchuria has changed
the Japanese and the Russian having replaced the Mongol and the Manchu Manchuria
itself has not forfeited its historic role as the quarter from which the heaviest external
pressure upon China is exerted. Yet on closer inspection it will be found that, in spite of
superficial appearances, the Manchurian frontier, as a zone of entry for the Western
impact upon China, is really secondary to the maritime frontier round the estuary of the
Yangtse. This truth is borne out by the history of the Smo- Japanese conflict which broke
out in Manchuria in 1931; for the conflagration which had first flared up at Mukden
spread to Shanghai forthwith.
'There could have been no more conclusive demonstration than this of the truth that
the centre of gravity of China had indeed effectively shifted from the Province of Chihli
and the Basin of the Peiho River and the port of Tientsin and the former political capital
at Peking to the Province of Kiangsu and the basin of the Yangtse River and the
port of
Shanghai and the new political capital at Nanking In effect, the new centre of energy
with which Western enterprise had endowed or encumbered China at Shanghai had
become so potent that, by the years 1931-2, it was virtually impossible foi anything of
major importance to happen to China at large without Shanghai becoming the principal
scene of action. In this phase of Chinese history, Shanghai was a dominant magnetic
point; and the magnetic power of this Western-made focus of modern Chinese economic
life proved stronger than Japanese military
dispositions/ (Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of
International Affaiis 1931 (London 1932, Milford), p. 461.)
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 127
that of Peking in Chihli. Peking commands the Mongolian war-path
down the Nankow defile and the Manchurian war-path through
the passage of Shan-hai-kwan, where the Great Wall descends
from the mountains to the sea. Similarly, Nanking commands the
path by which Western men-o'-war penetrate into the heart of
China up the waterway of the Yangtse. A Chinese Government
established at Nanking can defend China against the most for-
midable of the external pressures to which she is subject to-day
at the point where the pressure is the most intense and, in keeping
;

the intruder under surveillance and holding him in check from this
post of vantage, the rulers of China can learn his arts as well. Fas
est et ab hoste doceri', 1 and
Nanking is only one short night's railway-
journey distant from Shanghai: the den and school of thieves
which Western enterprise has planted at China's eastern door.
'Military defeat from the seaward side, in spite of the history of the
nineteenth century, is still novel and terrifying to the consciousness of
the [Chinese] people at large. There is no buffer territory between the
sea and the heart of China; there are no non-Chinese "reservoir" tribes
to graduate the shock; and the tradition of the sea-going population
itself is one of exploiting, not of being exploited. The impact of Western

nations, the alien standards of the West, treaties dictated by the West,
have always aroused a reaction of terror and hate far greater than any
defeat in the vague buffer territories of the North. There is no under-
lying tradition to prescribe a method of dealing with aggression from
over the sea. The methods applied in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries were, generally speaking, coloured by the traditions applying
to the northern land-frontier barbarians. They did not work well; in
fact, they tended to bring on disasters. Hence a feeling, which has now
penetrated very deep, that the Western nations are incalculable, that they
are always likely to spring a fresh surprise, something quite outside of
2
experience and the "rules of the game".'
It was in order to learn the outlandish rules of the new Western
game of war and diplomacy and trade and industry and finance that
the capital of China was transferred from Peking to Nanking in
A.D. 1928. It will be seen that this transfer is a perfect illustration
of our law that the external pressure of the human environment
upon a march administers a stimulus which gives the march pre-
dominance over the interior.
In the Hindu World
If turn next from Far Eastern history to Hindu, we shall
we
recognize certain corresponding phenomena. We shall notice,
for

instance, that in India, as in China, to-day the march which is

i
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, 1. 428.
a
Lattimore, Owen: Manchuria Cradle of Conflict (New York 1932, Macmillan),
pp. 297-8.
 128 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
subject to the heaviest pressure is the seaboard, and that the
pressure from overseas is being applied by the same Western force.
In Bombay, 'the Gate of India', we shall identify the Indian
analogue of Shanghai; and we shall observe that just as the vital
elements of the Far Eastern Society in China have been concen-
trating themselves latterly in the immediate hinterland of Shanghai,
so the vital elements of the Hindu Society in India seem to be
concentrating themselves now in the immediate hinterland of Bom-
bay. It is the Bombay Presidency, from Poona to Ahmadabad, that
is producing the foremost
politicians and industrialists and saints
and thinkers in India in our generation.
We shall notice, again, that, in India as in China, this concentra-
tion of pressure and stimulus and response in the maritime march
is of recent date ; and indeed in India it is still far from
being com-
plete. If we pass, for instance, from the intellectual and economic
indices of social vitality to the military, and inquire into the com-
parative contributions of the various subdivisions of contemporary
India to the Indian Army, we shall find that nearly 58 per cent,
of the personnel is supplied by the Panjab and by the adjoining
North-West Frontier Province, and that, on this criterion, the
Bombay Presidency is altogether outmatched by the Panjab in
vitality, even though it holds its own in the military field, as in the
1
against all other provinces of British India.
civil, Moreover, the
capital of the Indian Empire, though it was transferred to a new site
in A.D. 1912, as the capital of the Chinese Republic was transferred
in 1928, has not been transplanted to the Bombay
'Presidency. It has
been located at Delhi ; and Delhi, though not appreciably nearer than
theprevious capital, Calcutta, to Bombay, is on thefringe of the Panjab .

In fact, the special enclave containing the new imperial

capital has
been carved out of territory which previously belonged to the Panjab
as delimited in British Indian administrative
geography.
1 In the year 1930, the total combatant strength of the British Indian Regular Army
was 158,200. Of these troops, 91,600 had been recruited from the Panjab and the
North-West Frontier Province, some 35,500 from the Himalayan Highlands (Garhwal,
Kumaon, Nepal); some 31,100 from the rest of India, including the Bombay Presidency;
and 7,000 from the Bombay Presidency itself (See the Report of the Indian Statutory
Commission = British Parliamentary Paper Cmd. 3568 of 1930 (London
1930, H M.
Stationery Office), vol. i, pp. 96-8. In the figures extracted from this source in the
present footnote, the 16,500 troops recruited from the United Provinces have been
credited to the Himalayan Highlands on the assumption that the
majority of them came
from the highland districts of Garhwal and Kumaon.) The above figures include
recruitments outside as well as inside the limits of territory under British administration
or control. In the year 1930, about one-seventh of the Indian
Regular Army was
recruited from territories beyond the limits of British administration or control:
partly
among the highlanders of the North-West Frontier in districts which were not under
effective British rule though they were on the Indian side of the Frontier-
Indo-Afghan
and partly^to the strength of 19,000) among the highlanders of
Nepal: an independent
state hanging on the southern flanks of the
Himalayas. For the tendency of civiliza-
tions, when they find themselves confronting barbarians along
stationary artificial
frontiers, to recruit their frontier defence-forces from among the trans-frontier bar-
barians themselves, see Part VIII, below.
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 129
Why has the capital of India moved to Delhi and not to the
hinterland of Bombay ? And why do the Panjab and the North- West
Frontier Province supply, between them, more recruits than all the
rest of India together to the Indian Army?
The answer to the second question is, of course, that, in the Pan-
jab and in the North- West Frontier Province, in contrast to the
Maritime March and the interior alike, Indian vitality has been
stimulated to express itself in military prowess by exposure to
external military pressure. This pressure is being applied nowadays
by the warlike highlanders who still preserve their independence de
facto on the extreme edge of the Iranian Plateau, where its south-
eastern escarpment descends upon the north-western flank of the
Indus Valley. The proximity of these barbarian hill-men has the
same stimulating effect upon the frontiersmen of the Hindu World,
along the banks of 'the Five Rivers', that the proximity of similar
barbarians in the highlands of Shensi and Shansi once had upon
the frontiersmen of the Sinic World in the valleys of the Wei and
the Fen. 1 And the parallel goes further. On the northern marches
of China, the highland zone once occupied by barbarian hill-men
eventually became, as we have observed, a passage through which
2

China was invaded by the more formidable Nomadic peoples from

the Eurasian Steppe in the hinterland. Similarly, on the north-
western marches of India, the pressure which is being exerted by
the local highlanders at the present day was formerly far surpassed
in severity by a pressure from the Nomads of the Eurasian Steppe,
who found a passage into India across the highlands of Afghanistan,
as their counterparts found a passage into China across the high-
lands of Shensi and Shansi and Jehol.
In Hindu history, as in Far Eastern, it is this pressure from
Eurasian Nomads across an inland frontier that has been the
heaviest external pressure until recently, and this ever since the
time when Hindu history began. The Nomads' pressure was felt
in full force during the interregnum, following the disintegration
of the 'apparented' Indie Civilization, out of which the Hindu
Civilization originally emerged In the post-Indie Volkerwanderung
.

after the break-up of the Gupta Empire the Indie Power that had
resumed and fulfilled the social functions of an Indie universal
state 3 India was invaded, across this north-west frontier, by the

1 See the
present section, pp. 118-19, above, and compare the relations between the
Chinese frontiersmen and the Manchu barbarian hill-men in Manchuria, on the eve of
their joint conquest of intra-mural China. (See p. 124, footnote i, above.)
2
Seep. 119, above. .
3 For the role of the Gupta Empire in Indie history, as a resumption of the Indie
universal state which had been first embodied in the Maurya Empire and had then been
see I, C (i) (5),
interrupted prematurely by a Hellenic intrusion upon the Indie World,
vol. i, pp. 85-6, above.
II K
 130 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Nomad The invaders swamped the Indus
Gurjaras and Huns.
Valley, made themselveshome in the Indian Desert beyond it,
at
and swept on through Rajputana into the Deccan. The historic 1

issue was whether these barbarians should or should not forestall

the emergence of a new civilization, 'affiliated* to the defunct Indie
Civilization, by engulfing the Ganges Valley and this
as well;
question was decided in the negative because, along the line of the
River Jumna, a stand against their onslaughts was made with
success. In the historical geography of the Hindu World, the cross-
section of the great plain of Hindustan which contains the course
of the Jumna, from the southern foot-hills of the Himalayas to the
northern foot-hills of the Central Indian highlands, has had the
same strategic importance as the passes from Manchuria and Mon-
Chinese province of Chihli in the historical geography
golia into the
of the Far East. Here was the gap through which the Nomad
invaders must pass if they were to penetrate farther ; and here was
the point where they met with serious resistance. To this neigh-
bourhood, accordingly, the capital of India has gravitated hitherto
throughout the history of the Hindu Civilization.
Already, during the post-Indie interregnum, when Harsha
(imperabat A.D. 606-47) momentarily restored the Indie universal
state, he fixed his capital in this new north-western march at
Sthanesvara, covering the approach from the Panjab to the Jumna,
and not in the interior of Magadha the natural administrative
centre of the Ganges Basin, at the junction of the
Ganges with the
Jumna and with two other tributaries, which had been the capital
of both the Guptas and the Mauryas.
Again, some two centuries
later, when the new Hindu Civilization, which had emerged in
the meanwhile, was threatened in its infancy by
pressure from the
Arabs, who had reached the delta of the Indus from the sea and
were pushing their way inland up-river, 2 the Arabs' advance was
arrested by the rise of a Hindu Power, the Pratihara
Rajputs, who
ruled from Gujerat to the Jumna-Ganges Duab and fixed their
capital in the Duab, on the west bank of the Ganges, at Kanauj. 3
In Vincent Smith's opinion, the Chalukyas, who founded a
*
f principality in the Deccan
circa A.D. 550, were probably Gurjara invaders from Rajpulana. (Smith, Vincent: The
Early History of India, 3rd edition (Oxford 1914, Clarendon Press), p. 424 )
* For the
province of the Arab Caliphate in the Indus Valley, see I. C (i) (b), vol. i
pp. 105-6, above.
3^
The Pratiharas were Gurjara converts to Hinduism who defended the society of
their adoption against the aggression of the
Syriac universal state (now resumed, after
the Hellenic intrusion, in the Arab
Caliphate), just as, on the opposite edge of the
Syriac World, another nascent society in this case, Western Christendomwas
defended against the same Arab aggressors by the Prankish converts to
The Eurasian Nomad origin of the Pratiharas is attested by their militaryChristianity.
technique.
They were horse-archers and camel-men, not elephant-riders. (See Vaidya. C. V. : The
History of Mediaeval India (Poona 1924, Oriental Book Supplying Agency), vol. ii,
p. 105 ) The Pratiharas made themselves masters of the Jumna-Ganges Duab defini-
tively circa A.D. 810-16. It is remarkable that they fixed their capital at
Kanauj, in this
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 131
Both Kanauj and Sthanesvara, however, were to be eclipsed by a
later foundation in the same region. Delhi was built on the west
bank of the Jumna, on a site intermediate between the sites of the
two earlier capitals, in A.D. 993-4* by Hindu hands; but Delhi, like
Peking, was first raised to honour by rulers who were alien intruders.
At this very juncture, the Nomads of the Eurasian Steppe broke
their bounds again and began to make their way into India by the old
route across the north-west frontier ; but this time they appeared in a
new guise. The Hun and Gurjara invaders of the post-Indie Volker-
wanderung (circa A.D. 475-775) had come in as undifferentiated
barbarians who were not immune from conversion to Hinduism.
Their Turkish kinsmen who took the same road two centuries
later arrived in India as converts to Islam the Syriac universal
church as apostles of a new Iranic Civilization to which the
and
expiring Syriac Civilization was 'apparented'. By force of arms
these latter-day Turkish invaders carried their alien religion and
Ganges Valley, where their Gurjara predecessors
culture into the
had not secured a footing until after they had become Hindus.
The Turks broke through the Jumna March, and conquered the
Ganges Valley down to the coast of Bengal, in A.D. 1 191-1204; they
conquered the Deccan in A.D. 1294-1309; and eventually a great
Turkish statesman, Akbar the Timurid (imperdbat A.D. 1556-1605),
reunited the Hindu World under an alien rule, as the Mongol
2
Qubilay reunited the main body of the Far Eastern World, by
bringing together its motley fragments Hindu and Muslim princi-
palities alike into an all-embracing empire which performed the
functions of a Hindu universal state. For the Eurasian invaders of
India, Delhi was the natural site for a capital situated, as it was,
on the borderline between the Indus Valley and the Ganges Valley,
between the region in which Islamic religion and Iranic culture and
Eurasian blood had become predominant and the region where
Hinduism was still holding its own under an alien yoke. Accordingly,
Delhi was the normal seat of Turkish Muslim rule in India from
the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, when the 'Slave Kings'
fixed their capital there, down to the eighteenth, when the descen-
dants of Akbar, the maker of the Hindu universal state, were main-
taining a shadow court at Delhi as proteges and pensioners of
the
3
British East India Company.
newly acquired province at the extremity of their dominions, instead of retaining it^at
some site in Rajputana, the country in which they had been at home for several centuries
and which was still the geographical centre of their empire. In order to explain their
choice, we must suppose that the strategic importance of the Jumna-Ganges Duab
was
already well recognized.
i 2 See p. 121, above.
Smith, V., op. cit., p. 384
3 While Delhi was normally the capital of India during the five or six centimes
of Muslim Turkish rule, her enjoyment of this status was not uninterrupted. In the
 i32 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Moreover, Delhi, like Peking, has succeeded in recovering her
status after the downfall of the Power by which this status was first
conferred upon her. The replacement of the Mughal Raj in India
by the British Raj, like the expulsion of the Mongols from China
by the Ming, was accompanied at the moment by a transfer of
the capital from the principal landward march to a new site in the
interior where the new rulers felt themselves at home and were
sure of their authority. In the nineteenth century, Delhi had to
yield her primacy to Calcutta, as, in the fourteenth century, Peking
had to yield hers to Nanking. Yet in India, as in China, the old
capital in the march eventually won back, from the new capital in
the interior, the status which it had temporarily forfeited. In A.D.
1912, fifty-five years after the definitive extinction of the Mughal
Raj and confirmation of the British Raj in the suppression of
the Indian Mutiny, the British Government itself retransferred
the capital of India to Delhi, as the Ming Emperor Yung Lo re-
transferred the capital of China to Peking fifty-three years after the
expulsion of the Mongols from China by Yung Lo's own father
Hung Wu.
It is noteworthythat, while the capital of India has perpetually
gravitated to the environs of Delhi since the genesis of the Hindu
Civilization, it has never established itself permanently anywhere
in the Middle or Lower Ganges Valley, in Bihar or in Bengal.
Before the advent of the British, it never established itself there-
abouts at all ; and no permanent change in the political geography
of the Hindu World has been produced by the historical accident
that the British rule began in Bengal a century before it was fully
confirmed throughout India. This accident gave Bengal a double
temporary advantage over other Indian provinces she became the :

base of operations and seat of government of the new All-India raj

which was taking the place of the broken-down raj of the Mughals ;
and her people were exposed to the process of intensive Westerniza-
tion several generations earlier than their neighbours. Yet these
accidental advantages, considerable though they are, have not
availed against the permanent handicap to which Bengal is subject :
the lack of stimulus which is the penalty of her situation in the
interior. Even under the British Raj, which has its source in sea-

power, the capital of India has departed from Calcutta a port

early days of the empire of the Great Mughals, the capital was at Agra: and Akbar,
who unknowingly followed in Ikhnaton's footsteps in attempting to turn his autocratic
political authority to account for the artificial creation and imposition of a new universal
church (see Part VIII, below), likewise followed Ikhnaton in building himself a brand-
new capital city. After the founder's death, however, Fatihpur Sikri had the same fate
as Tell-el-Amarna; the capital reverted to Agra and
thence, under Shah Jahan, to Delhi;
and so, in the latter days of the Mughal Empire, the Turkish Muslim rule in India
ended at Delhi, where it had begun
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 133
accessible to ocean-going vessels and has shifted back to Delhi,
where the Eurasian horseman is at home and the Western sea-
farer is a stranger. As for the stimulus of the impact of our Western
Civilization from across the sea an impact which has given Bengal
the character of a march for the first time in Hindu history the
Bengali response to this challenge seems to lack vitality and
originality. In Bengali souls, the ferment of Westernization is apt
to deteriorate into 'the leaven of the Scribes'. 'Where there is no
x
vision, the people perish' and, in the Indian National Movement,
;

which the challenge of the West has evoked, the inspiration and the
leadership have been passing, as we have observed already, from
Bengal to the Bombay Presidency. We
may observe further that
this hinterland of Bombay, which has thus become the principal
march of India vis-a-vis the West, has not now acquired the
character of a march for the first time in Hindu history. From the
beginning, it has been exposed to external pressure of various kinds
from various quarters military pressure from Gurjaras and Arabs
:

by land; economic pressure from Arabs and Parsees by sea. 'The

greater the pressure the greater the stimulus' is a maxim which is
borne out by the phenomena of social geography in the Hindu
World, as well as in the Far Eastern World and in the Sinic and in
the Egyptiac.

In the Sumeric and Babylonic Worlds

In the Sumeric World, we find the same law illustrated in the
history of the Sumeric universal state. The Empire of Sumer and
2

Akkad was founded by Sumerian dynasty whose capital was at

a
Ur, in the heart of the homeland of the Sumeric Civilization. The
Empire was restored, after a temporary breakdown, by an Amorite
dynasty whose capital was at Babylon: 'the Gate of the Gods'
which was also the gate through which the Amorite Nomads of
the North Arabian Steppe had forced an entry into the Land of
Shinar. Thus, in the Sumeric universal state, political power passed
from the interior to the march on which the heaviest external
pressure was being exerted.
The same phenomena reappear in the history of the Babylonic
Civilization which was 'affiliated' to the Sumeric. We have seen
that, in Babylonic history, Babylonia was surpassed, in arms
and
arts alike, by Assyria; and we have attributed Assyria's superiority
to the fact that, as compared with Babylonia, she was in a certain
sense 'new ground'. 3 We shall now find a second and possibly more
potent cause of Babylonia's failure to hold her own against Assyria
1
Proverbs xxix. 18.
a See I. C (i) (), vol. i, pp. 103 and 106, above.
3 See pp. 74-5, above.
134 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
in the fact that Babylonia occupied a sheltered position in the
interior of the Babylonic World, whereas Assyria was a march
which bore the brunt of successive external pressures. In the post-
Sumeric Volkerwanderung, Babylonia had suffered and suc-
cumbed to an invasion of barbarian Kassites at the time when
Assyria was suffering and repelling an invasion of barbarian
Mitannians and thereafter the Assyrians experienced
;
and resisted
further pressuresfrom which the Babylonians were exempt.
After being liberated, in the fourteenth century B.C., from the
Mitannian pressure by the vicarious exertions of the Hittite Power, 1
Assyria was involved, throughout the eleventh and tenth centuries,
in a new struggle for existence against a more formidable adversary
than Mitanni in the shape of Aram. The Aramaeans were Nomads
who had issued out of the Arabian Peninsula, in company with the
Hebrews, during the Volkerwanderung which preceded the birth
of the Syriac Civilization and while the Hebrews had drifted into
;

Southern Syria, the Ajramaeans had drifted northwards in the

ancient track of the Amorites. One wing of the migrant Aramaean
horde had settled in the oases of east-central Syria, from Damascus
to Hamah; another wing had lapped over the Middle Euphrates
and had occupied the pasture-lands of Northern Mesopotamia;
and it was this eastern wing that came into collision with Assyria.
The situation, however, was not in all respects the same as when
the Aramaeans' Amorite predecessors had forced an entry into the
Sumeric World along this very track some twelve hundred years
before.
The Amorites when they entered Akkad, like the Huns and
Gurjaras when they entered India, had come in as undifferentiated
barbarians and, as such, they had been converted easily and rapidly
to the culture which they found in occupation of the ground on
which they were trespassing. On the other hand, the Aramaeans,
when they began to encroach upon the western borders of Assyria,
had already come within the ambit of the nascent Syriac Civiliza-
tion, just as the Turks who invaded India in the footsteps of the
Huns had previously come within the ambit of the nascent Iranic
Civilization and had been rendered immune to Hinduism
by an
anticipatory inoculation with Islam. Thus the Aramaean Syriac
pressure upon the Babylonic World was as formidable a danger to
the existence of the threatened civilization as the Turkish Muslim
pressure upon the Hindu World; but, whereas the Rajputs failed
to save India from being overrun by the Turks, the
Assyrians not
only checked the Aramaeans' eastward advance in two centuries of
defensive warfare but passed over thereafter, in the ninth
century
* See I. C (i) (6), vol. i, p. 113, above.
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 135
B.C., intoa counter-offensive which carried the Assyrian arms to
the shores of the Mediterranean and ground all Syria under the
Assyrian heel. Thus, in this first round of the long and arduous
struggle between the Syriac and Babylonic civilizations, Assyria
bore the brunt and gained the victory for the Babylonic World. In
the meantime Babylonia had the easy task of assimilating the Chal-
daeans a Nomadic people who had issued out of the Arabian
Peninsula simultaneously with the Aramaeans and the Hebrews,
but whose line of migration lay so far to the south-east that the
influence of the nascent Syriac Civilization did not reach them.
Thus the Chaldaeans like the Amorites and unlike the Aramaeans
came in as undifferentiated barbarians who were open to assimi-
lation; and their infiltration into Babylonia, during the centuries
when Assyria was fighting the Aramaeans for her life, was a peace-
ful penetration instead of being a formidable ordeal.
Moreover, the Aramaean front was only one of the fronts on
which Assyria had to fight. While she was resisting the pressure
from the Syriac Civilization on the south-west, she had to defend
her rear against the highlanders of the Iranian and Anatolian
plateaux on the east and the north. In this quarter, again, Assyria
performed the function of a march covering the interior of the
Babylonic World ; and, while she eventually gained the upper hand
over her Syriac adversaries, the highlanders kept her perpetually on
the defensive. Indeed, when, through this warlike intercourse, the
highland principality of Urartu, in the basin of Lake Van, even-
tually became converted to the Babylonic Civilization, the struggle
only became the more intense like the struggle between the East
Roman Empire and Bulgaria after the conversion of the Bulgarians
to Orthodox Christianity.
Nevertheless Assyria, under this perpetual pressure from every
quarter, developed a vitality which Babylonia could not match so
long as Assyria's prowess gave her shelter. On the other hand, the
positions were reversed when Assyria turned her arms against the
interior of the Babylonic World and ceased to defend its frontiers.
1

During the seventh century B.C. she applied to her sister-country

Babylonia the grinding pressure which she had applied in the ninth
and eighth centuries to alien Syria and this fearful challenge stimu-
;

lated the Babylonians as potently as it stimulated the Syrians, though

in a different way. In Syrian souls, it evoked the religious inspira-
tion which found expression through the mouths of the Prophets
of Israel; in Babylonian souls it evoked a dogged nationalism

1 This
change in the direction of Assyrian energies is examined further in Part IV,
below, apropos of the pathological phenomenon of Militarism as a specific malady of
the marches.
i 36 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
which proved more than a match for the furor Assyriacus. The
Babylonians fortified by Chaldaean infusions and steeled by
Assyrian atrocities were in at the death when, at the close of the
seventh century B.C., the highlanders of the Iranian Plateau over-
whelmed Assyria at last and these Median allies of Babylon in the
;

war of annihilation against Assyria were able now to achieve the

destruction of the Power which had successfully resisted the pres-
sure of Urartu and the earlier pressure of Mitanni because Assyria,
by the time when she had to deal with the Medes, had ceased to
perform her historic function as a march.
In the seventh century B.C., a wave of Eurasian Nomads the
Cimmerians and the Scyths broke over the north-western ex-
tremity of the Iranian Plateau and descended upon the Babylonic
and Syriac worlds, as the Huns and Gurjaras broke over the north-
eastern extremity of the same plateau and descended upon the
Indie World in the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian Era.
Therewith, the challenge of Nomadic invasion was presented in
South-Western Asia for the first time since the occasion when,
more than a thousand years earlier, during the post-SumericVolker-
wanderung, the Hyksos had broken out of the Eurasian Steppe and
had swept across the derelict domain of the Empire of Sumer and
Akkad to settle in Syria, 1 This time, Assyria was the South- West
Asian Power whose proper task it was to take the Eurasian Nomads'
challenge up but, this time, Assyria failed to rise to the occasion
;

for the first time in her history. Whether from impotence or from
impolicy, she allowed the Nomads to raid South- Western Asia
unchastised; and she even enlisted their services as mercenaries
to fight for her in her Median and Babylonian wars. Thereby, she
repudiated the function which she had made her own for the last
five centuries ; and the Medes seized the opportunity thus offered
to them. They stepped into the breach; occupied the vacant post
of danger and honour; exterminated or subdued or expelled the
Scythian intruders; and inherited, as their reward, the hegemony
2
previously exercised by Assyria over South- Western Asia, For
1 See I. C
(i) (6), vol. i, pp. 104-5, above. In the seventh century B.C., the Scythians
penetrated to Syria, like the Hyksos before them and the Turks after them; and the
name Scythopohs, by which the Greeks afterwards knew the Biblical city of Bethshean
(the modern Baisan) in the Valley of Jezreel, attests that at least one Scythian war-band
made a permanent settlement in Palestine.
2
Except in the western extremity; of the Anatolian Peninsula, beyond the River Halys,
where the local task of exterminating or subduing or expelling the intrusive Nomads
was taken in hand, not by the Medes, but by the Lydians: a local people who were
under the influence of the Hellenic and not the Babylonic or the Syriac Civilization.
The local response of Lydia to the challenge from the Nomads won her a double reward.
On the landward side, she shared with Media, Babylonia, and Egypt the dominion
previously exercised by Assyria over South- Western Asia. On the seaward side, towards
the Aegean, she imposed her suzerainty upon the Greek city-states along the
seaboard,
who had failed to save themselves from the Nomads and theiefore forfeited their
political independence to the Power in the hinterland which had performed the work of
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 137
Assyria was a march or nothing. As soon as she failed to respond
to the challenge of external pressure from the human environment,
she fell; and Media, who had taken up the Scythian challenge, was
the Power that dealt Assyria her death-blow.

In the Syriac World

While the immediate consequence of the presentation of the
Scythian challenge was the replacement of Assyria by Media, an
ultimate consequence which was of much greater historical im-
portance was the eventual victory of the Syriac Civilization in its
long duel with the Babylonic the duel which had begun in the
eleventh century B.C. with the collision between Assyria and Aram.
After the first round had been decided in favour of the Babylonic
Civilization by the victorious Assyrian counter-offensive against
Syria in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., the struggle had shifted
from the military to the cultural plane and had resolved itself into a
competition between the two rival civilizations for the conversion
of the highlanders on the Anatolian and Iranian plateaux. In this
competition, the Babylonic Civilization gained an initial success,
which has been mentioned above, in the conversion of Urartu but ;

this cultural 'Babylonicization* of one highland country on the

north which did not succumb to Assyrian arms was counter-
balanced by the 'Syriacization' of another highland country on the
east which the Assyrians temporarily succeeded in subjugating;
and here, in Media, the Assyrians in applying their ruthless
policy of breaking their victims' spirit by uprooting them from
their homes and carrying them away captive actually served as
'carriers' for the Syriac Civilization which they had trampled
under foot.
When the Assyrians finally broke the resistance of the Syriac
peoples in the latter half of the eighth century B.C., they deported
part of the conquered population to 'the cities of the Medes' ;* but
this extreme application of the maxim 'Divide and rule* had an
unintended consequence. By the forcible introduction of Syriac
deportees, the Medes were inoculated with the germs of the
Syriac Civilization before they were stimulated, by the challenge
of Scythian pressure, to step into Assyria's place. At the same
time, the Scythian challenge, which called out this 'Syriacized'
Media's energies, broke the 'Babylonicized' Urartu's back; and
thus the fivefold interaction between Syria and Assyria and Media
and the Scyths and Urartu worked together for the Syriac Civiliza-
salvation for them. The political subjection of the Asiatic Greeks to Lydia naturally
expedited the cultural conversion of the Lydians to Hellenism. Indeed, this was perhaps
the first of many instances in which 'Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit*. (Horace:
Epistolae, Book II, Ep. i, 1. 156.)
* 2
Kings xvn. 6 and xvui. n.
 138 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
tion's good. After the fall of Assyria, theremnant of the Babylonic
World now gathered together into 'the Neo-Babylonian Empire'
of Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar found itself hemmed in
and pressed upon by the Syriac World on both flanks: not only
from the rival civilization's homeland in Syria itself but from the
great new domain which the Syriac Civilization
had now acquired
for itself in Iran. From this encircling movement, the Babylonic
Civilization had no more chance of escape than an antelope has
from the toils of a boa-constrictor. The constriction and mastica-
tion of the Babylonic Civilization by its victorious rival was only a
matter of time and the process was completed before the beginning
;

of the Christian Era. 1

If we now turn our attention to the subsequent history of the

Syriac Civilization, we shall find our law illustrated here again.

The enlarged Syriac World which had been brought into existence
by the 'Syriacization' of Iran remained, from the seventh century
B.C. onwards, in direct contact with the Eurasian Steppe; and it
was from the Eurasian Nomads that it continued to receive the
heaviest external pressure. In consonance with this, we find that,
thenceforward, the primacy in the Syriac World passed, in suc-
cession, to the peoples who successively took over the burden of
keeping the Eurasian Nomads at bay, and to the regions which
successively served as anti-Nomad marches. The Median hege-
mony, for example, lasted just so long as the Medes held the front
line in the defensive warfare against Nomad aggression. The hege-

mony was forfeited by the Medes to the Persians because the princes
of Persis had succeeded in snatching from their Median neighbours
the wardenship of the Eurasian Marches and thereby relegating
Media to an unexposed and unstimulating position in the interior
of the Syriac World. The Medes had been content to bar the
passage of the Nomads at its narrowest point, where the Elbruz
Range on one side and the Central Desert of Iran on the other
side barely leave open, between them, "the Caspian Gates'. The
Achaemenidae masked this Median front line, and redeemed from
Nomad occupation a vast additional zone of Iranian territory, by
extending their own dominions north-eastwards from their home
territory of Persis right up to the line of the Oxus ; and it was their
expansion in this direction that made their fortune by putting
them in a position to supersede the Medes as the Medes had super-
seded the Assyrians. 2
* For the attraction of
Iran into the orbit of the Syriac Civilization, and the absorp-
tion of the dead body of the Babylonic Civilization into the Synac Civilization's
living
tissues, see I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 79-81, above.
2 It
may be noted that the Lydians as well as the Medes succumbed to the Achaemeni-
dae, and that Lydia, like Media, had previously been 'relegated to the interior' by the
Achaememds* assumption of the wardenship of the Eurasian marches.
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 139
This Achaemenian enterprise in the north-east, which was the
preliminary to the overthrow of the Median Astyages and to the
foundation of a Syriac universal state in the form of an Achaemenian
Empire, went almost unmarked among Hellenic observers, whose
vision did not yet extend to such distant horizons. Yet the
acquisi-
tion of Bactria was a more
important step in the rise of the Achae-
menian Power than the acquisition of Elam; and it was not for
nothing that Cyrus met his death in fighting the Nomad Massagetae
beyond the Jaxartes. Under Cyrus's successors, the Achaemenian
1

Empire held against the Nomads, with a strong hand, every oasis
that could be created by irrigation along the courses of those rivers
Heri Rud and Murghab, Oxus and Jaxartes which flow out
from the northern foot of the Iranian Plateau and from the western
foot of the Pamirs to reach the Caspian or the Sea of Aral or else
to lose themselves in the desert. We
may conjecture that the
pressure of the Eurasian Nomads upon this North-Eastern March
of the Syriac universal state always weighed more heavily on the
minds of Achaemenian statesmen than the pressure of the Hellenes
upon the opposite extremity of their dominions and this even
during the Athenian counter-offensive that was kept up inter-
mittently for thirty years after the failure of Xerxes' expedition
against Greece. It was assuredly not until Alexander had crossed
the Dardanelles, and perhaps not until he had crossed the Euphrates,
that the Hellenic peril became a greater anxiety than the Nomad
peril to the last Darius.
Moreover, Alexander's own experience in the process of conquer-
ing the Achaemenian Empire indicates that, here as elsewhere, the
march which was exposed to the heaviest external pressure had
been stimulated into a greater vitality than any other region. It
took Alexander not more than five years to conquer outright, with-
out parley or compromise, the vast mass of the Achaemenian
dominions, from the Dardanelles and the Libyan oases up to 'the
Caspian Gates', where the Medes had halted in their pursuit of the
routed Scyths and where Alexander overtook the dying Darius.
Persis itself the home territory of the imperial dynasty and the
native land of the imperial people quietly accepted the verdict
of the Battle of Arbela, notwithstanding the stimulus which the
Persians having 'elected to live as an imperial people in a rough
country rather than to cultivate the lowlands as some other nation's
1 See the
picturesque account of Cyrus's last campaign in Herodotus, Book I, chs.
202-15. Herodotus's accurate knowledge of geography did not extend much farther
eastwards than a line drawn from Trebizond to Susa (i.e. a line roughly coincident with
the present eastern frontiers of Turkey and 'Iraq); and his 'River Araxes* on the
crossing of which his story turns appears to be a conflation of the actual river, still
bearing that name, which flows from Armenia through Azerbaijan into the Caspian,
with the actual Oxus and Jaxartes, into a single mighty and fabulous stream.
140 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
slaves' 1 had never ceased to derive from their physical environ-
ment. Nevertheless, in this instance, the physical stimulus of a
rough country upon the Persians showed itself less potent than the
human stimulus of Nomad pressure upon their kinsmen in the
north-eastern marches; for, whereas it had taken Alexander no
more than five years to conquer the interior of the Achaemenian
Empire up to 'the Caspian Gates', it took him two whole years
more to complete his task by conquering the marches in the Oxus-
Jaxartes Basin.
As soon as Alexander passed beyond the Caspian Gates, he
experienced an entire change in the nature of the resistance which
he encountered. Up to that point, he had secured the submission
of vast provinces at the price of a few pitched battles against
heterogeneous imperial field armies which showed little enthusiasm
for defending territories where they felt themselves hardly more at
home than the invader. Upon setting foot, however, in the Oxus-
Jaxartes Basin after the last of the Achaemenian armies had been
scattered to the winds, the Macedonian conqueror met with a spon-
taneous resistance from a feudal aristocracy with local roots. The
border barons of Bactria and Sogdiana defended themselves against
the Macedonians as they were accustomed to defend themselves
against the Massagetae. Their resistance was not only spontaneous
but energetic and protracted. Every castle stood a siege; and even
when a baron had been brought to his knees he rose in revolt again
the moment the conqueror's back was turned. At the end of two
strenuous campaigns, Alexander had to win the allegiance which
force could not exact by a policy of conciliation.
Thus, during the two centuries that had elapsed between the day
when Cyrus met his death at the hands of the Massagetae on the far
side of the Jaxartes and the day when Alexander gave the Nomads
a lesson by bombarding them with his catapults without crossing
the frontier river, the vitality of the Syriac universal state which
was embodied in the Achaemenian Empire had come to be concen-
trated in these north-eastern marches, where the Syriac World
was exposed to the severest external pressure. It is remarkable to
find this phenomenon reappearing when the Syriac universal state,
which had been prematurely cut short by the destruction of the
Achaemenian Empire through Alexander's action, was reintegrated
and resumed, after a Hellenic intrusion which had lasted a thousand
2
years, in the 'Abbasid Caliphate.
c

Though the Abbasid capital was fixed, on considerations of geo-

1 See the passage quoted from Herodotus in II. D fi), on p. 31, above.
2 For the historical relation between the 'Abbasid Caliphate and the Achaemenian
Empire, see I. C (i) (6), vol. i, pp. 73-8, above.
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 141
graphical and administrative convenience, at Baghdad, in the
1

ancient homeland of the Babylonic Civilization which had long

since been absorbed into the Syriac World, the and militarypolitical
movement which completed the re-establishment of the Syriac
universal state by setting up the 'Abbasids in the place of the
Umayyads originated in Khurasan: the province lying between
'the Caspian Gates' and the Murghab, which was the north-eastern
march of the Syriac World in that age. 2 The stimulus which
nerved Abu Muslim and his Khurasanis to overthrow the Umay-
yads was the selfsame stimulus that, in earlier ages of Syriac
history, had nerved Cyrus and his Farsis to overthrow Astyages and
the Medes, and had nerved the dihkans of Balkh and Sughd to
measure themselves against the invincible Iskandar Dhu'l-Qarnayn.
The challenge of pressure from the Nomads of the Eurasian Steppe
was as stimulating to the latter-day Syriac frontiersmen who were
confronted by the Ephthalites and the Turks and the Tiirgesh as
it had been to their predecessors who had had to deal with the
Scyths and the Massagetae; and the Khurasanis' historic feat of
re-establishing the Syriac universal state in A.D. 751 was led up to,
during the years 705-41, by the more arduous, if less momentous,
feat of reincorporating the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin into the Syriac
World after a separation that had lasted some eight or nine
centuries. 3
1 The 'Abbasids fixed their
capital at Baghdad on the same considerations that had
once led the Achaemenids to hold their court at Babylon for four months in the year
(Herodotus, Book I, ch. 192). It lay in the most remunerative province in their dominions
and at the mid-point between the Syrian and the Iranian half of the Empire.
z The destruction of the Achaememan
Empire had been followed, within two cen-
turies, by the submergence of the former Norm-Eastern Marches in the Oxus-Jaxartes
Basin under a flood of Nomad invasion; for the Seleucid Empire, which was the Hellenic
'successor-state* of the Achaemenian Empire in Asia, was too exactingly preoccupied
by the task of holding its own against rival Hellenic Powers in the Levant to discharge
efficiently those responsibilities on the distant borders of the Eurasian Steppe which it
had inherited from its Achaemenian predecessor. (See pp. 1434, below.) Thus, from
the latter part of the second century B.C. to the beginning of the eighth century of the
Christian Era, the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin had been lost to the Syriac World and had been
living a separate life of its own under the dominion of successive Nomad intruders
Massagetae (= Sakas) and Yuechi and Ephthahtes and Turks. Under this dispensation,
the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin had often been in closer relations with India than with. Iran;
and in these conditions it had developed symptoms of a distinctive social individuality
which promised, for a time, to take definite shape in the genesis of a new 'Far Eastern
Christian* Civilization.
. .v- &
(See II.-D (vii), pp. * . * below.)
369-85,.. -
and estrangement of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin from the Syriac
During this long secession
iac World, the
' "
T role of anti-
Nomad march devolved upon the province of Khurasan, which was saved for the Syriac
World by the Arsacid pnnce Mithradates the Great (regnabat 123-88 B.C.) after a struggle
between the Arsacid Power and the invading Sakas or Massagetae which had lasted for
nearly half a century.
3 Khurasan the frontier province over against the Eurasian Nomads which the
Umayyads took over from the Sasaman successors of the Arsacidae was the base of
operations from which, under the Umayyad regime, the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin was
eventually reincorporated into the Syriac World, by force of arms, in A.D. 705-41. (See
Gibb, H. A. R.: The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (London 1923, Royal Asiatic
Society).) The work was accomplished by the combined efforts of Arab garrisons which
had been cantoned in Khurasan after the Arab conquest of the Sasaman Empire, half
a century before, and local levies which were raised, by the Arab authorities, from the
142 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
Thereby, the North-Eastern Marches of the Syriac World, over
against the Nomads of Eurasia, were restored, on the eve of the
c

reintegration of the Syriac universal state under the Abbasids, to

the limits up to which they had been carried originally on the eve
of the first establishment of the universal state under the Achae-
menids. And thereafter history repeated itself yet again for under ;

the 'Abbasid, as under the Achaemenid, regime the vitality of the

Empire concentrated itself in the North-Eastern Marches as it
ebbed away from the interior. This became apparent at the break-
up of the 'Abbasid Caliphate, as it had become apparent, once
before, at the destruction of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander ;
for the most powerful and effective and socially beneficent of the
Caliphate's 'successor-states' arose one after another in this region.
The Samanid regime at Balkh and Bukhara (A.D. 819-999) fostered
Persian literature in its infancy and accomplished something which
the Caliphate had never achieved in propagating Islam among the
Nomads of the Steppe ;* and it was only as converts that it suffered
them at last to trespass from the desert on to the sown. Thereafter,
one horde of these trespassers, the Saljuqs, when they had pene-
trated to Baghdad in order to rescue the 'Abbasid Caliphs from the
tyranny of the sectarian Buwayhids, turned back to supplant their
fellow-converts, the Ilek Khans, as wardens of the North-Eastern
Marches against their unconverted Nomadic kinsmen who still
remained on the Steppe. Under this Saljuq regime at Merv (A.D.
1089-1141) the frontier of Dar-al-Islam was once more guarded as
faithfully as it had been guarded by the Samanids ; and even the
Shahs of Khwarizm, who first rose to power by betraying their
religion and allegiance when they joined forces (in A.D. 1141) with
the pagan Nomad Qara Qitays in order to expel the Saljuq Sultan
Sanjar from the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, eventually redeemed their
honour when (from A.D. 1220 to 1231) they bore the brunt of the
Mongol avalanche which finally overwhelmed Dar-al-Islam in the
last convulsion of the post-Syriac Volkerwanderung. 2

indigenous Iranian Khurasanis. It is noteworthy that it was here, in the North-Eastern

Marches, under the formative influence of a common pressure from beyond the frontier,
that the vanquished Iranians and the victorious Arabs first fraternized with one another.
And it was this Arab-Iranian frontier-force that completed the re-establishment of the
Syriac universal state, by putting down the Umayyads and setting up the Abbasids, ten
c

years after it had proved its mettle and acquired its esprit de corps by completing the
re-conquest of Transoxania on the Syriac Society's account.
Saljuqs, who at that time were ranging over the steppe-country in the Oxus-
1 The

Jaxartes Basin, were converted about A.D. 956; the followers of the Ilek Khans, who
were ranging over the steppes adjoining the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin on the north-east, in
the gap between the Tien Shan and the Altai Mountains (in the fourteenth-century
'Mughalistan' and the modern 'Zungaria'), were converted about A.D 960.
2 In A.D.
1209/1210, ten years before the Mongol avalanche descended upon them,
the Khwarizm Shahs had partially counteracted the effects of their original act of
treachery against the Saljuqs by similarly betraying the Qara Qitays. They partitioned
the dominions of the Qara Qitays in conjunction with Gushluk the Naiman, another
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 143
Thus, over the course of some nineteen centuries of Syriac his-
tory, from the seventh century B.C. to the thirteenth century of the
Christian Era, we can observe one constant phenomenon. We find
the pressure from the Eurasian Nomads
normally exceeding in
severity the pressures from other neighbours of the Syriac World,
and concurrently we find the North-Eastern Marches, upon which
the brunt of this pressure fell, normally surpassing in
vitality all
the other marches as well as the interior.
The exception which proves the rule is the situation which pre-
vailed, for some two centuries out of these nineteen, under the
Seleucid Empire, which was the Achaemenian Empire's Hellenic
'successor-state' in Asia. 1 Under the Seleucid
c
regime, as under
the Achaemenid and the Abbasid, vitality and power tended to
pass from the interior of the Empire to the periphery ; but whereas
they passed under the Achaemenids from Persepolis and Susa and
Babylon and Ecbatana to Bactria and Sogdiana, and under the
'Abbasids from Baghdad to Khurasan and to Transoxania, they
flowed out, under the Seleucids, in the diametrically opposite
direction : that is, from Seleucia-on-Tigris not to 'Alexandria on
the Verge' of the Eurasian Steppe but to Antioch-on-Orontes.
This gravitation of the Seleucid capital to a site which lay almost in
view of the Mediterranean indicated that the Seleucid statesmen,
unlike their Achaemenid predecessors, felt the pressure from the
Hellenic World more acutely than the pressure from the Eurasian
Nomads. The outcome, however, was to prove that the Seleucids'
policy was ill-advised and the site of Antioch eccentric for, not- ;

withstanding the clever location of Antioch athwart the shortest

portage between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, the trans-
fer of the capital from Seleucia to Antioch cost the Seleucidae their
Empire and the Syriac World its North-Eastern Marches. The
first consequence was that the Greek garrisons in the Oxus-Jaxartes

Basin, finding themselves left to their own resources, seceded from

the Seleucid Empire and constituted themselves into an indepen-
dent Power: the Hellenic Kingdom of Bactria. The second conse-
quence was that this Hellenic Bactria, which had responded with
such spirit to the challenge of desertion by resorting to self-help,
found herself unequal in the long run to the task of holding the
pagan Nomad Power, who took the Qara Qitays in the rear. In this unheroic manner,
the whole of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin was momentarily recovered again for Dar-al-
Islam; but retribution quickly overtook the spoilers. The Naiman and the Khwarizm
Shah were overwhelmed in turn by the Mongol Chingis Khan; and it was in response
to this terrific Mongol challenge that the last of the Khwarizm Shahs, Jalal-ad-Din
MankobirnI, redeemed the treacheries of his ancestors by the heroic rear-guard action
in which he covered the interior of Dar-al-Islam from Mongol assault and battery for a
whole decade after the Mongols had overrun his own home-territories on the banks of
the Lower Oxus.
1 See the second footnote on
p. 141, above, and, further, Part VI, below.
144 THE RANGE OF CHALLENGE-AND-RESPONSE
North-Eastern Marches against the Nomads without support from
the interior. In the second century B.C., Bactria succumbed to a
Nomad invasion ;* and the ground then lost to the Nomads by the
Greeks was only recovered from the Nomads by the Arabs some
2
eight or nine centuries later.

In the Ironic World over against Eurasia

The North-Eastern Marches over against the Eurasian Nomads,
which were thus reincorporated into the Syriac World on the eve of
the reintegration of the Syriac universal state, and which played a
c
3
part of steadily increasing importance under the Abbasid regime,
produced their historic social effect once more in the first age of
the Iranic Civilization, 'affiliated' to the Syriac Civilization, which
emerged, after the interregnum following the break-up of the 'Ab-
basid Caliphate, when the waters of the Mongol cataclysm began
to subside.
We can discern this effect in the diversity between the respective
historical roles of the two Mongol 'successor-states' which were
deposited here one in the borderland and the other in the interior.
As between these two appanages of the Mongol Empire in Dar-al-
Islam, nothing came of the principality of the House of Hulagu,
the so-called Il-Khans, in Iran and Iraq. 'The lines' were 'fallen
unto' these barbarians 'in pleasant places yea', they had 'a goodly
;

heritage'. And yet, 'as the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away',
4

so the Il-Khans went down to the grave and came up no more. 5

On the other hand, out of the principality of the House of Chagha-
tay, which bestrode the borderline between the desert and the
sown, there came forth two Powers which made their mark, for
good or evil, on history: the Empire of Timur Lenk ('Tamerlane')
in Central Asia and the later Empire of the Timurids in India,
where Timur's great-great-great-grandson Babur played the part
of David and Babur's grandson Akbar the part of Solomon.
A glance at the careers of Timur and Babur shows that both
were frontiersmen who were confronted by a challenge from
the Eurasian Nomads of their time, and that both rose to great-
ness by responding to this challenge successfully each in his
own way.
Timur (imperabat A.D. 1369-1405) started life as a feudal baron
in the district of Kish in Transoxania that is to say, in the sedentary
:

as opposed to the Nomad section of the Chaghatay dominions.

The Chaghatay principality had been compacted of two component
1 See the second footnote on p. 141, above.
2 See the third footnote on p. 141, above.
3 See p. 143, above. 4 Psalm s
xvi. 6. Job vu. 9.
 THE STIMULUS OF PRESSURES 145
parts: the oases of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, where this pagan
1

Mongol dynasty bore rule over a sedentary Muslim population;

and the steppes of Zungaria, adjoining the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin on
the' north-east, where the Chaghatay Khans were the leaders of
pagan Nomads who were made in their own image. In A.D. 1321,
however, a century after the Mongol conquest of the Oxus-Jaxartes
Basin and forty years before the beginning of Timur's career, the
two ill-assorted sections of the Chaghatay principality had been
separated from one another politically through the partition of
Chaghatay's appanage between two different branches of the
eponym's descendants ; and the prelude to Timur's career opened
with this event. The political separation enabled the sedentary
population in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin to assert itself culturally
against the Nomadic element after a century of subjection; and
the first consequence was that here, as in contemporary Iran and
Hindustan and Anatolia, the nascent Iranic Civilization began to
make headway.
The partition was accompanied by, and was perhaps causally
connected with, the conversion of the western branch of the
Chaghatayids, who obtained the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin for their
portion, from their primitive Mongol paganism to the Islamic
faith of their subjects while even the eastern branch of the House,
;

whose portion was the Zungarian Steppe (now styled, par excel-
lence, 'Mughalistan'), seem to have been converted likewise a
generation later. The next consequence was a reaction of the
Nomads against the rising power of the new sedentary civilization
on their borders. In A.D. 1360 Tughluq Timur, the newly con-
verted Eastern Chaghatay Khan of 'Mughalistan', presented him-
self in the Oxus-Jaxartes country perhaps at the instigation of the
Nomad element there, who felt their old ascendancy slipping out of
their hands and claimed dominion over the western as well as the
eastern portion of his ancestral appanage. By this time, the settled
population of the oases, having enjoyed for some forty years the
benefits of a milder and less barbarous regime, had come to regard
the untamed Nomads of 'Mughalistan* as odious marauders 2 who
whether converted or not were definitely beyond the pale of
*
Excluding the oases along the lower course of the Oxus, in Khwarizm, which were
included, not in Chaghatay's appanage, but in his brother Juji's. (See further p. 14?*
below.)
2 The
mysterious word 'jatah', which the Turkl-speaking sedentary population of the
Oxus-Jaxartes oases in Timur's day applied to the Nomads of 'Mughalistan'^as a term
of abuse, is perhaps identical with the Ottoman Turkish word 'cheteh', which means
something between a brigand and a guerrilla. Is it perhaps derived from the tribal name
of the Getae (Massagetae and Thyssagetae) or Jats, who were the nearest Nomadic
neighbours of the Oxus-Jaxartes oases in the Achaemenian Age, before they erupted
out of the Steppe and poured over the Hindu Kush into the Panjab in the second
century B.C. ?

II L