From the examples given of some of the questions that come up for decision in the courts of Weihaiwei it may be seen that in this outlying part of the British Empire, no less than in India and the rest of our Asiatic possessions, the chief qualifications necessary for a judge or magistrate are not so much a knowledge of law and legal procedure as a ready acquaintance with the language, customs, religious ideas and ordinary mode of life of the people and an ability to sympathise with or at least to understand their prejudices and points of view. Perhaps no Englishman, no European or American, can hope to administer justice or exercise executive functions among Asiatics in a manner that will win universal approval. If he becomes too fond of the natives he runs the risk of becoming de-occidentalised. Morally and intellectually he becomes a Eurasian. He is distrusted by his own countrymen, he is not respected--perhaps regarded as rather a bore--by the natives over whom he is placed. But let the European who applies to another the epithet of "pro-native" enquire rigorously of himself whether his real ground of complaint is not this: that the person whom he criticises does not in all cases support the European against the Asiatic when the interests of the two are at variance, that he does not necessarily accept the European point of view as the only possible or the only just one.
"How is it that you Government officials, as soon as you have learned the language and studied the customs of the country, become either mad or hopelessly pro-Chinese?" This is a question which in one form or another is frequently asked by unofficial European residents in China. It may be that there is something in the nature of Chinese studies that makes men mad, and indeed I have heard this soberly maintained by persons who themselves are careful to avoid all risk of contagion. But it never seems to occur to such questioners that there may be some solid reasons for the apparently pro-Chinese tendencies (they are generally only apparent) of their official friends: reasons based on the fact that the latter have discovered--perhaps much to their own astonishment--how much there is truly admirable and worthy of preservation not only in Chinese art and literature and even religion, but also in the social organisation of the Chinese people. If there is one statement about China that can be made with perfect assurance it is this: that if in the long process of reform she learns to despise and throw aside all the supports she has leaned upon for thousands of years, if she exchanges for Western substitutes all her ideals, her philosophy of life, her ethics, her social system, she may indeed become rich, progressive, powerful in peace and war, perhaps a terror to the nations, but she will have left behind her very much that was good and great, she will have parted with much that was essential to her happiness and even to her self-respect, she will be a stranger to herself. And what will be the outward aspect of the China of those days? Great industrial cities there may be; harbours thronged with ocean-liners and with great battleships flying the Dragon flag; miles of factories, barracks, arsenals and shipping-yards; railway trains, motor-cars and airships coming and going incessantly from province to province; warehouses, banks and stock-exchanges full of myriads of buyers and sellers, each straining every nerve to excel his neighbour in the race for wealth. And where, in this picture of China's possible future, are the thousands of ancestral temples where to-day the members of every family meet to do homage to their honoured dead and to renew the bonds of kinship one with another? They are to be seen no more. In their place stand thousands of village police-stations.