Further, the Chinese will probably move far more slowly on any path of aggression than did the Japanese, for they are intensely pacific. For many generations they have been taught to regard the soldier as contemptible, the recluse scholar as admirable. Ideas of overseas Empire on their part are tempered by the fanatic wish of every Chinaman that his bones should rest in his native land. It will only be in response to enormous pressure that China will undertake a policy of adventure.
That pressure is now being engendered from within and without. From without it is being engendered by insolent robberies of territory and other outrages on the part of foreign Powers. More particularly of late has the modern arrogance of Japan impressed upon the old-fashioned arrogance of China the fact that the grave scholar, skilled in all the lore of Confucius, is a worthless atom beside a drilled coolie who can shoot straight. From within the pressure is being engendered by the great growth of population. For some time past infanticide has been common in China as a Malthusian check. Now European missionaries seek to discourage that. European medicine further sets itself to teach the Yellow Man to cope with plague, smallpox, and cholera, while European engineering abates the terrors of flood and of crop failure.
Machiavelli would have found prompting for some grim aphorism in this curious eagerness of Europe to teach the teeming millions of Asia to rid themselves of checks on their greater growth, and thus to increase the pressure of the Asiatic surplus seeking an outlet at the expense of Europe. It is in respect to the urgent demand for room for an overcrowding population that there exists alike to China and Japan the strongest stimulus to warlike action in the Pacific. China in particular wants colonies, even if they be only such colonies as provide opportunities for her coolies to amass enough wealth to return in old age to China. From the fertile basin of China there have been overflow waves of humanity ever since there has been any record of history. Before the era of White settlement in the Pacific the Chinese population had pushed down the coast of Asia and penetrated through a great part of the Malay Archipelago, an expansion not without its difficulties, for the fierce Malay objected to the patient Chinaman and often the Chinaman remained to fertilise but not to colonise the alien soil. By some Providential chance neither the Chinaman nor the Japanese ever reached to Australia in the early days of the Pacific, though there are records of Japanese fishermen getting as far as the Hawaiian Group, a much more hazardous journey. If the Asiatics had reached Australia the great island would doubtless have become the southern province of Asia, for its native population could have offered no resistance to the feeblest invader.