in the world for a long time. But the moment they come in contact with peoples not become degenerate through the sustention of the unfit at the expense of the fit, they will repeat the history of the conflict between the Spaniards on the one hand and the Mexicans and Peruvians on the other, and, like a house of cards, collapse almost without a struggle. Had Mr. Spencer postponed the writing of the chapter in which this prophecy appears, he could have cited as a fulfillment the cowardly and contemptible submission of the Chinese to the militant barbarians from Europe. Enervated by institutions that grew out of militant pursuits, they find themselves unable to resist their more vigorous and progressive assailants.
It is but a commonplace to say that China has the most powerful, conservative, and corrupt bureaucratic system in the world. As may be easily shown, this system, like all other bureaucratic systems, is the natural and invariable product of militant activities. Although it has outlived them many centuries, it has not ceased in any considerable degree, if at all, to exert the restraining and paralyzing influences that come from a crystallization of society. To it is due very largely the extraordinary difficulty now experienced in introducing into China new ideas and new industrial methods. An abandonment of old ideas and old methods would mean a disturbance of its privileges, and a disturbance of its privileges would mean a diminution or abolition of the sources of plunder that it has enjoyed time out of mind. Hence it has opposed the introduction of Western culture. Western modes of production and Western means of communication and transportation. Hence China is what she is to-day—a great, unwieldy mass of ignorance and superstition, destitute of the power of initiative and incapable of lifting a hand against the unscrupulous greed that has all at once encompassed her on every side.
Not less grossly inaccurate than the prevalent theory of China's helplessness is the theory advanced to account for the sudden desire of her assailants to appropriate her territory. It is supposed that the inhabitants of France and Germany, crowded to suffocation at home, are anxious to find an outlet for their energies, and, like the emigrants that have poured out of the harbors of Great Britain during the last three centuries, wish to establish another patrie or fatherland beyond the seas. But there is not the slightest foundation for this enchanting supposition. One of the most melancholy complaints heard in France for many years is that the births do not equal the deaths. Another complaint is that the French people show no desire to leave their country and take up with the life of a pioneer in the new territory acquired in northern and central Africa and in southern China. They prefer to remain at home and live upon the slender incomes they get from a government office in the city or some strip of land in the country. The same is more or less true of the Germans. Although they emigrate in larger numbers than the French, they do not leave their country to establish another fatherland in the colonial empire that German statesmen have attempted to establish in the wilds of Africa. Anxious to escape the intolerable despotism of their own Government, they go to new countries already peopled, chiefly the Argentine Republic and the United States, to swear allegiance to another flag than the one they have lived under all their lives.
What, then, is the explanation of
