But a danger greater than Russia has thrown its shadow in our path. The white race once felt assured that it was the chosen race among mankind. It met the red, brown, and black races never to its own ultimate disadvantage, and often, it was convinced, for their good. It felt a similar destiny toward the yellow races. It insisted that they open their doors to the white man's trade and took them to school in the white man's ways. Now the white race apprehensively wonders if it has made a mistake, if destiny is at last on the other side.
China is the wonder of history, both ancient and modern. Civilization after civilization has battered at its gates, taken some trifle only to lose it, and has departed. Chinese civilization has continued unharmed by its transient rivals. Each of these rivals has pondered over China's strangeness, and has failed to impress foreign ideals on its people. The Arab, Malay, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, American, German, and now the Japanese and the Russian people, have taken trifles. Of these Macao, French Cochin-China, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kiaochow, Wei-Hai-Wei, Formosa, and Tibet are modern examples. How long it will be before these land-takings revert to the Celestial Empire remains to be seen. "The old negative, anti-foreign prejudice is giving way to a positive sentiment of national ambition. With a population--according to the last census--of over 430,000,000 of the cheapest and most industrious workers in the world, China is bound sooner or later to dominate the East, unless she becomes divided { 141} against herself. And this the pressure from the greedy competition of foreign powers seems certain to prevent."[141-1]
To-day China is perhaps to become definitely a republic. No one knows what China can or will do. The white race realizes that its problem now is no longer how to distribute among its nations the lands of the yellow races, but how to prevent the yellow races from distributing its lands among themselves. Men who can endure arctic cold and tropical heat with like fortitude and profit, may soon become a factor in the defensive problem of the Pan-Angles.
"The history of China, ancient and modern, is an eternal series of paroxysms; its keynote is bloodshed and famine, with periods of peace and prosperity purchased by the slaughter of countless innocents. Its splendid civilization, based on an unassailable moral philosophy and the canons of the Sages, has ever proved powerless against the inexorable laws of nature, the pitiless cruelty of the struggle for life. . . ."[141-2] It seems not impossible that the Chinese may seek to ameliorate their condition, to lessen "the pitiless cruelty of the struggle for life" by overflowing into the lands now held by the Pan-Angles. By what means could we save ourselves from being crushed before the advance of a people our superiors in thrift and industry and in ability to render the soil productive, and who are three times our number?