Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 20

Later they stopped the churches from singing "Nearer My G.o.d to Thee,"

because there seemed to be an implication in that, that those who sang that hymn, were swearing allegiance to a higher power than that of j.a.pan.

"Ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!" I said in disgust.

"Yes, ridiculous, but serious," replied the missionary, "when you have to live with it year in and year out."

"Crown Him Lord of All," insisted the j.a.panese spies, when they seriously reported a certain church for singing that old hymn was "Dangerous Thought." It seemed to this ignorant spy that "Crowning Him"

was putting some other power before that of the j.a.panese Government.

"All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" has been put under the ban and when a certain missionary woman was asked to sing at the Korean Y.M.C.A. and announced that she was going to sing "Oh, Rest in the Lord" she was advised not to sing it because it was considered by the gendarmes to be "Dangerous Thought" and to suggest "Liberty," "Freedom" and such dangerous words and ideas.

When one Protestant preacher prayed about "Casting Out Devils" he was reported by j.a.panese spies, who insisted that he was talking about j.a.panese in Korea and meant that these should be cast out of the land.

"'It is to laugh!' as the French say!" I responded to this story.

"No! It is to weep!" said the American missionary.

When Dr. Frank W. Schoefield spoke against Prost.i.tution the j.a.panese papers declared that he had made a virulent attack on the Government.

One Korean preacher who preached on a theme from Luke 4:18, which reads "Setting the captives free," was arrested and kept in jail for four days.

"It is very foolish to yell 'Mansei' when you know you will be killed,"

I said to a Korean preacher. I wanted to see how he would take that suggestion.

"We Koreans would rather be under the ground than on top of it if we do not get our liberty!" he said with a thrill in his quiet voice.

One day a Korean preacher was arrested for preaching on the theme, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of G.o.d and all these things shall be added unto you," because that was, without doubt, disloyal to j.a.pan and meant rebellion.

Another day a speaker in the Y.M.C.A. said, "Arise and let us build for the new age!" He was asked to report to Police Headquarters just what he meant by that kind of "Dangerous" talk about Freedom.

CHAPTER IX

FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE

Three great Flash-lights of Failure stand out in the Far East and the Oriental world to-day; one being the failure of a race to survive, another being the failure of the world to understand that Shantung is the Holy Land and not the appendix of China; this sacred shrine of the Chinese which has so carelessly and listlessly been given over to j.a.pan; and the third being j.a.pan's failure to understand that methods of barbarism from the Dark Ages will not work in a modern civilization.

"Why are they making all this fuss over Shantung?" an acquaintance of mine said to me just before I left America. "Isn't it just a sort of an appendix of China, after all? If I were the Chinese, I'd forget Shantung and go on to centralize and develop what I had."

That was glibly said, but the fact which the statement leaves out of reckoning is that Shantung is the very heart and soul of China instead of being the appendix.

The average American has so often thought of China just as China; a great, big, indefinite, far-off nation of four hundred million people, always stated in round numbers, that Shantung doesn't mean much to us.

Yes, but it means much to China.

It means about the same as if some nation should come along and take New England from us; New England, the seat of all our most sacred history, the beginning of our national life, the oldest of our traditions, the burial-place of our early founders, the seat of our religious genesis. I don't believe that many folks in New England would desire to be called an appendix of the United States.

So one of the things that I was determined to do when I went to China was to go from one end of Shantung to the other, talking with coolies, officials, old men and young men, students, and those who can neither read nor write; missionaries and soldiers; natives and foreigners; to see just what importance Shantung is to China as a whole.

The first thing I discovered was that it has about forty million people living within the limits of the peninsula, close to half the population of the United States. Does that sound as if it might be China's appendix? You wouldn't think so if you saw the cities, roads and fields of this great stretch of land literally swarming with human beings, and every last one of them, as busy as ants.

I rode one whole day across the peninsula. I happened to be traveling with a man from Kansas. He was a man interested in farming and wheat-growing. For hundreds of miles we had been pa.s.sing through land that was absolutely level and every inch of it cultivated. I had been saying to myself over and over again, "Why, it's exactly like our Middle West Country."

Then much to my astonishment this Kansas man turned to me, and said, "Did it ever occur to you that these fields of Shantung look just like Kansas?"

"Yes, it has just occurred to me this minute," I responded.

Then the wife of the Kansas man said, "I have been shutting my eyes and trying to imagine that I was in Kansas, it's so much like home."

"And say, man, but a tractor on those fields would work wonders," added a portion of William Allen White's reading const.i.tuency.

And that is exactly how Shantung strikes an American when he has ridden all day through its great stretches of level fields. He can easily imagine himself riding through Kansas for a day.

My first visit to Shantung was at Tsingtao, the headquarters of the German concession and now of the j.a.panese concession. I spent a day there, and took photographs of the wharves and town. On the wharves were still standing hundreds of boxes marked with German names and the inevitable phrase "Made in Germany." Those boxes were mute reminders of the evacuation of one nation from a foreign soil. But standing side by side with these boxes were also other hundreds, already being shot into Shantung in a steady stream; and these boxes have a new trademark printed in every case in English and j.a.panese, "Made in j.a.pan."

I spent several days in Tsinanfu and Tientsin, two great inland cities, and more than a week in cruising about through Shantung's little towns, its villages and its sacred spots.

I heard of its mines and of its physical wealth. But the world already knows of that. The world already knows that this physical wealth of mines and raw material was what made it look good to Germany and j.a.pan.

But the thing that impressed me was its spiritual wealth.

The thing that makes Shantung attractive to the j.a.panese, of course, is not the spiritual wealth, as the world well knows. Perhaps the j.a.panese have never considered the latter any more than the Germans did; but the one thing that makes it most sacred to the Chinese, who are, after all, a race of idealists, is its treasuries of spiritual memories and shrines.

In the first place, many Chinese will tell you that it is the "cradle of the Chinese race." I am not sure that histories will confirm this statement. And I am also not sure that that makes any difference as long as the idea is buried in the heart of the Chinese people. A tradition often means as much to a race as a fact. And the tradition certainly is well established that Shantung is the birthplace of all Chinese history.

So that is one of the deeply rooted spiritual facts that makes Shantung sacred to the Chinese.

The second spiritual gold mine is that one of its cities, Chufu, is the birthplace and the last resting-place of the sage Confucius. And China is literally impregnated with Confusian philosophy and Confucian sayings.

I took a trip to this shrine in order to catch some of the spiritual atmosphere of the Shantung loss. The trip made it necessary to tramp about fifteen miles coming and going through as dusty a desert as I ever saw, but that was a trifle compared with the thrill that I had as I stood at last before the little mound about as high as a California bungalow; the mound that held the dust of this great Chinese sage.

During the war I stood before the grave of Napoleon in France. Before I went to France I visited Grant's tomb. I have also stood many times beside a little mound in West Virginia, the resting-place of my mother, and I think that I know something of the sacredness of such experiences to a human heart, but somehow the thrill that came to me on that January morning, warm with sunlight, spicy with winter cold, produced a feeling too deep for mere printed words to convey.

"If we feel as we do standing here on this sacred spot, think of how the Chinese feel toward their own sage!" said an old missionary of the party.

"Yes," added another, "and remember that the Chinese revere their ancestors and their sages and their shrines more than we ever dream of doing. Any grave is a sacred spot to them, so much so that railroads have to run their trunk lines for miles in a detour to avoid graves.

These Chinese are idealists of the first water. They live in the past, and they dream of the future."

"When you get these facts into your American heads," added a third member of the party, not without some bitterness, "then you will begin to know that the Chinese do not estimate the loss of Shantung in terms of mineral wealth."

At Chufu, the resting-place of Confucius, there is also the spot of his birth, and this too is most sacred to the Chinese nation. We visited both places. I think that I never before quite realized just what the loss of Shantung meant to these Chinese until that day, unless it was the next day, when we climbed the sacred mountain Taishan, which is also in Shantung.

"It is the oldest wors.h.i.+ping-place in the world," said the historian of the party. "There is no other spot on earth where continuous wors.h.i.+p has gone on so long. Here for more than twenty centuries before Christ was born men and women were wors.h.i.+ping. Emperors from the oldest history of China down to the present time have all visited this mountain to wors.h.i.+p. Confucius himself climbed the more than six thousand steps to wors.h.i.+p here."

"Yes," said another missionary historian, "and this mountain is referred to twelve separate times in the Chinese cla.s.sics, and great pilgrimages were made here as long ago as two centuries before Christ."

That day we climbed the mountain up more than six thousand stone steps, which are in perfect condition and which were engineered thousands of years ago by early wors.h.i.+pers.

The only climb with which I can compare that of Mt. Taishan is that of Mt. Tamalpais overlooking San Francisco. The climb is about equal to that. The mountain itself is about a mile in height, and the climb is a hard one to those who are unaccustomed to mountain-climbing, and yet thousands upon thousands climb it every year after pilgrimages from all over China.