sleep to death, they will not experience the fear and agony of approaching death. But you people start shouting; you rouse the few who are not sound asleep, only to make them suffer the agony of death. Do you think you are doing them a kindness?"
"But if a few should wake up [Ch'ien replied], you cannot say there is absolutely no hope of breaking down the iron chamber."
He was right. Although I had my own ideas about the prospects of the future, I had no right to dash to pieces the hopes of more sanguine spirits. I must not try to convince them that they were wrong, since they were happier in thinking they were right. Therefore, I ended by promising to write something for them.
The first piece he wrote for the New Youth was "The Diary of a Madman" which may be regarded as the overture and finale of all his writings. In it he branded the whole of Chinese history as a record of man-eating though it is apparently and ostensibly a history of the triumph of "benevolence and righteousness." He pronounced his everlasting curse upon man-eating men and insisted that the fact that "it has always been so" does not mean that "it is as it should be." He would not resign himself to the various forms of man-eating and accept them as "necessary evils" inherent in "human nature" (the most damnable admission of our impotence and defeatism). He refused to change the subject, as the wiser men in China and everywhere do, and talk about more pleasant things, such "eternal values" or the "moonlight and breezes" of traditional Chinese literature.
But Lusin was neither a reformer with pet schemes nor an opportunist leader riding the "wave" of his time. He had too much intellectual honesty for the one and too much moral integrity for the other. He was primarily a humanitarian to whom everything seems pale and unimportant in the face of hunger and starvation, and all talk about first principles and eternal values idle and heartless in the face of man's inhu-
