benighted representatives of Western Europe—the German Emperor—not in the sense that China would become dangerous to Europe, but in the sense that China would cease to be the mainstay of your true practical national wisdom consisting in living that peaceful agricultural life which is natural to all rational men, and to which those nations who have abandoned this life are bound sooner or later consciously to return.
III.
I think that in our time a great revulsion is taking place in the life of humanity, and that in this revulsion China, at the head of the Eastern nations, must play a grand part.
Methinks the vocation of the Eastern nations, China, Persia, Turkey, India, Russia and perhaps Japan, if she is not yet completely enmeshed in the net of depraved European civilisation,—consists in indicating to all nations that true way towards freedom to which, as you say in your book, there is in the Chinese language no other word than Tao,—the Way,—i.e., an activity in conformity with the eternal and fundamental law of human life.
Freedom according to the teaching of Jesus is realised in this same way. “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" is said in that teaching. And it is this freedom, which Western nations have almost irrevocably lost, that the Eastern nations are methinks called to realise.
My idea is this:
From the most ancient times it has been the case that out of the midst of peaceful and laborious people there arose savage men who preferred violence to labour, and these savage and idle men attacked and compelled the peaceful ones to work for them. So it has been both in the West and in the East amongst all nations who lived the state life, and so it continued for ages and continues yet. But in olden times, when conquerors seized vast populated spaces they could not do much harm to the subdued: the small number of rulers and great number of ruled, especially when the ways of
