the one avenue to political preferment or social eminence, and no village is too small or obscure to have its school, no boy too humble to be eligible to its advantages. If their studies are confined to the ancient classics, as were those of the European scholar not many generations ago, the defect is in part compensated by the absolute thoroughness required to enable a candidate to pass the examinations; and whatever the practical value of the learning, the mental discipline is of the most severe. It has produced a race of students; has developed an intellectual capacity which, when a young Chinaman enters a western university, makes him the peer of the best of his white fellows.
It is true that the Chinese are ignorant of the outside world and its arts, and their ignorance is only surpassed by their indifference; but their hostility to them is not traditional. In medieval times there was a considerable and friendly intercourse with the nations of the west, and christian envoys, priests and traders were welcomed, with whatever knowledge or commodities they could bring. From the seventh to the tenth century the Nestorian Church made many converts, and later the Dominican and Franciscan Orders established missions without opposition. In the fourteenth century Catholic churches were so numerous that the Papal See made China an archbishopric under John of Monte Corvino. For that remote period commerce with Europe was important, and flourished until overland communication was cut off by the rise of Islam, leaving China for two hundred years forgotten of the world.
The attitude of the Chinese toward systems of faith other than their own has never been one of antagonism. In the first century an envoy sent out by the emperor to bring back the religion of the west returned with Buddhism, which was accepted as superior to the indigenous form of belief, and has now a more numerous following than either Taoism or the philosophy of Confucius. Twelve hundred years later the Venetian travelers, the Polos, were sent as emissaries from Kublai Khan to the Pope with the request for instructors in Christianity. So far as religious belief is concerned the Chinaman is as tolerant today as he was then. He has no enmity for Christianity per se, and objects to it only because he fancies its purpose and effect are to alienate the Chinese convert—to make him, in his sympathies, a "foreign devil." This suspicion is sufficient to rouse his hostility and provoke his violence. He hates the christian because he is a foreigner; not the foreigner because he is a christian. He is far too well-balanced and temperate to be a religious fanatic, and is possibly more liberal in his views of questions of faith and worship than are we. Taoism, the boundaries of the empire, side by side with the agnosticism and atheism of the Confucianists, and there is no record of religious wars or persecution, no history of an inquisition, no massacre of St. Bartholomew, no ostracisms because of faith or the want of it. The
