ure by the Chinese to make this turn toward discriminating selection would have meant that China would go rapidly down the hill of progressive disorganization and chaos, eventually to disappear in the morass of complete national futility. The turn has been made, and the world therefore can look forward to the time when China again will be great and orderly, with a splendid civilization produced by the Chinese themselves out of materials taken from their own past and from the West.

22

The years 1915-17 can properly be taken as marking the beginning of the present period of Chinese development, for in those years the first steps were taken toward getting not a new political system but a new culture. Tsai Yuan-pei turned his attention definitely to education and away from politics. Liang Chi-chao left politics for teaching, and began a series of lay sermons in Shanghai. And, in 1917, Hu Shih, then a student in the United States, fired the opening gun in what has come to be called the literary renaissance.

Inspired by their desire to see China great, realizing the superficiality of political or other reforms which had no solid foundation in an awakened and intelligent people, and with conscious deliberation taking their cue from what had been done by the prime movers of the renaissance in Europe, Dr. Hu and a group of young men-most of them most of them either in school in the United States or recently returned to China-set out to make the spoken language of the people a respectable and rejuve nating vehicle of literary expression.

In the last ten years they have

succeeded in this attempt to do for the common tongue of China what Dante did for the Tuscan dialect and Wyclif and Chaucer did for Midland English. They have demonstrated that the despised pei hua, or vulgate, could be used effectively not only for all forms of purely literary expression-as it had been by the people, though not the scholars, for a thousand years but also for the most varied sorts of writing whether on abstruse philosophical questions or for political propaganda. They have made this tongue of the common people respectable, so that now all the text-books in the lower schools of China are written in it. They have created a written foundation for a real and living national language to take the place of the old classical language, which, as Dr. Hu Shih has pointed out, had passed beyond the comprehension of the ordinary man more than two thousand years ago.

In the years since 1917 other vital changes also have been wrought; changes which, like this in the language, are the result of deliberate application of Western methods and ideas to China's needs.

In the course of his work with the Chinese coolies in France, for example, Mr. James Y. C. Yen realized the need for a simpler method than the old one of teaching the children and the illiterate adults enough of the characters, or ideograms, so that they could read and write sufficiently for their ordinary purposes. Applying Western statistical methods, he found which characters were most frequently used. Drawing on the results of Western studies in the psychology of learning, and using Western lantern-slides, he worked out a

method by which adults of ordinary capacity but entirely illiterate could be made literate enough for ordinary purposes in a total study time of an hour a day (after their regular work) for four months. He started his work on this "mass education movement" less than five years ago. The methods he developed have proved so successful, and the movement has spread so rapidly, however, that more than a million adults who otherwise would have remained illiterate have learned to read and write through this means alone-a means developed as the result of a deliberate and conscious use of certain ideas and methods from the West in the solution in terms of Chinese life of one of China's greatest problems.

Similarly, the bankers have in the last few years been hard at work creating a new banking system throughout the country, building the new structure out of elements borrowed from both old China and the new West.

The West also has been drawn on heavily in the development of industry in China. Chinese capitalists have brought in Western machines, and of late have been studying the problem of redesigning these machines to make them more suitable for use in China. To save China if possible from the horrors which the West and Japan knew in the early stages of modern industrialization, the Chinese have borrowed the idea of labor-unions from the West, and are working out these organizations in forms adapted to the needs of China's factory workers.

A good deal of study is now also being put into the question of a new

form of political organization which will be suited to China's needs. The Nationalist party borrowed both from the forms of the old Chinese societies and from Soviet Russia when it reorganized itself in 1924. When China gets a new constitution, it probably will embody the Western idea of representation in a parliament, but the representation is likely to be on an occupational rather than a geographical basis, because such representation corresponds closely with the old Chinese social system. So it goes: new political forms are being worked out in China, but they will not be a mere jumble of discordant parts; they will be coherent wholes in which the various elements taken from both the West and old China will be fused into a real unity.

The list of illustrations of the new form which the reaction to the impact of Western civilization is taking might be made almost endless. Everything in the life of the people, from their clothes, their toys, and their food to their most fundamental ethical and religious conceptions, is being touched by this new spirit. One sees Worcestershire sauce being used to flavor the most time-honored Chinese delicacies. Chinese gowns are worn because they suit the climate; but under them will be Western trousers with their convenient pockets, and the wearer's feet will be shod with Western-style leather shoes because they wear and keep out the damp better than Chinese-style cloth slippers. The old family and marriage system is being discarded by the younger generation, but in its place the Western ideal of marriage as a union of equals is being adopted.

Christianity has come in for much criticism; but so have Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.

22

The impact of Western civilization on China in the last century and a quarter has shaken the stupendous age-old structure of Chinese civilization to its foundations. Part of the structure has fallen. Cracks have appeared in other parts. There was a scramble to get away from the wreckage, and many thought a satisfactory new house could be built from bits of material borrowed from the West.

The main timbers of the old structure withstood the shock. The patriotic panic of the young men subsided. Now a small but steadily growing number are hard at work making a new Chinese civilization, tearing away useless parts of the old and building a new structure around the ancient timbers from materials taken both from old China and from the new West.

At the moment the dust of the wreckage and of its clearing awaythe breakdown of old standards, the ill judged and ill guided enthusiasms of some of the young men and women in China, the disturbing and sometimes violent criticism of foreigners

and things foreign, the collapse of organized government-are sometimes more apparent than the reconstruction work which has been started.

It should be remembered, however, that the tearing-down process has been going on for a century and a quarter, while scarcely even a start toward definite and fundamentally conceived rebuilding was made until about a decade ago. It should be remembered by Westerners, too, that through sending to China its missionaries, its teachers, its traders, its books, and through welcoming to itself thousands of young Chinese, the West for many decades has been doing its best to teach the Chinese many of the ideas which they now are proclaiming so vehemently.

These ideas brought turmoil and broke down the old standards in the West when the West itself first conceived them. They are bringing the same results in China. The really significant developments in China in recent years, however, show that there is every reason to believe that the fruit which springs from these ideas in that country, though the fruition may be in a different form, will be fully as fine as it has been in the West.

I

T WAS a fine morning and Mrs. Mather had a great deal to do. First she must make the rounds of certain pay-telephone stations where no attendants or other tiresome people were likely to be near, and slip a quick finger into each coinreturn box. Sometimes, indeed, far more often than you'd think, hurried folk made a call, didn't get their party, and didn't wait for their money back. One day Mrs. Mather had found thirty cents, but that was a gala event. Generally a nickel or a dime was all her booty, but these were frequent enough to be worth while.

By the time Mrs. Mather had finished with the pay-telephones the grocer and butcher boys would be making their rounds in the residence streets, and, as the stupidest person knows, many such boys have carts filled with the orders for delivery, each in a box or a package. Now, Now, while such a boy is taking an order into a house, the cart stands unattended, and if you are casual in manner and careful in action you can usually pick up something, an orange, an apple, a couple of bananas-Mrs. Mather was fond of fruit -an onion and a few potatoes or tomatoes, a dinner roll, even a chop or a link of sausage sometimes. Never take large unruly articles, such as bunches of celery, or a steak,

or a roast, however much your mouth may water for such delicacies, because if you do inquiry will be made at the store, and the cop on the beat will be notified. Little pilferings are not missed; most cooks do not check up their orders, and if there should be a bit of a shortage it is set down to carelessness on the part of the order-clerk.

In Mrs. Mather's decent black skirt, made long and full as befitted her age and respectable expression, there was a slit which effected entrance to a pouch pocket as big as a flour-sack. This slit was strategically placed to come under Mrs. Mather's decent black shawl. There were few days indeed in Mrs. Mather's life when her pouch pocket came home empty, though the shameful practice of many grocers and butchers of putting strong iron network over their delivery-carts was not helpful to filling it. Trust and honor, and belief in one's fellowcreatures, reflected Mrs. Mather, observing these safeguards, are rapidly leaving this world. Happily, the carelessness of delivery-boys admits of no known remedy, and just as often as not, perhaps oftener than not, they left the iron network tilted open when they ran into the back doors of the big apartmenthouses, or the basements of fine residences.

Mrs. Mather did not know whether to be sorry for the passing of the fine residences and the building of big apartments or not. There was a decided pro and con to it, as she saw it. Apartment-house dwellers bought small orders from small markets whose owners were far more likely to use hand-carts than motors for delivery. That was pro. But the old residences had a grand manner, an aristocratic feeling of conservatism, long established, invulnerable. Mrs. Mather was a conservative, and in her way, an aristocrat, so that she felt at one with the owners of these haughty old brownstone fronts. That was con. Besides, the servants in these old houses were liberal and kind when an old white-haired woman rang the basement bell and quaveringly asked for a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and may the God of the starving reward ye fer y'r ginerosity. That was con too. Many a savory half-chicken or hunk of ham, leftovers of pies and puddings and cakes, many a dish of elegant soup and grand coffee had been acquired by Mrs. Mather in this way. Coffee! The only thing she whole-heartedly envied the rich was their coffee.

In her meditations on this world Mrs. Mather included many concerning the rich. She was intensely curious about them. Their houses had so many rooms, the ceilings were so high, the curtains so fine. Looking into basement windows she could see many maids at work, maids who wore dresses quite good enough for church, who washed and ironed with machinery, or who mixed rich complicated foods on clean white tables, and later cooked them on stoves eight feet long. The kitchens, the

laundries, the servants' dining-rooms

into all these Mrs. Mather peered, at dusk when lights were lit and carelessness had forgotten the curtains. And all this cleanliness and order and paraphernalia, which were seemingly concerned only with the (to Mrs. Mather) exceedingly primitive arts of washing and eating, fired her with wonder as to the beings for whose ultimate good it must be intended. What shiny tables and chairs and chests they must have, and painted pictures in gold frames, maybe solid gold, and china plates with flowers on, and carpets to sink your tired old feet into, and soft beds, too, with blankets white as the foam on a tub of suds, silver spoons for supping up their coffee-and plenty of servants to order round, quick and sharp to do this and do that. A splendid life. Only, somehow, it seemed to have no bite in it! No tang of matching wits, no savor of artful conniving and clever apt pulling the wool over people's eyes to charm the pence from their pockets. Mrs. Mather had done this so long and so well, she had developed a quite natural pride in her resourcefulness.

There were so many good ways! Stand on a street-corner, in a swell part of the city where there were not too many passers, and hold a slip of paper in your hand with an address, oh, many blocks away, written on it. Look bewildered and scared, shrink timidly toward a lady or a gentleman and in a sad old voice, tuned to pathos, offer the slip, and will they in their kindness of heart tell you how to get there, for you've seemingly walked. the town over. Ninety-nine times. out of a hundred the lady or the