" The news was a surprise to me for I had never surmised that what few relations we had with China were otherwise than friendly. I was inclined to be alarmed at it also, but Edith and the Berrians were so calm, and so confident that our rulers at Washington would take all necessary measures of offense and defense, that I was almost assured that my alarm was groundless. The news, however, served as a topic of conversation during dinner and afterward, and I was obliged to recall what little I knew about our relations with China in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately this was not a subject to which I had given attention, and I was astonished at my ignorance of it.
" As we went home we took occasion to pass by one of the public bulletin boards on which the news is printed by the government; but the announcement there simply stated that war had been declared, that the President was in consultation with the Generals of the several great guilds, and that further information would be furnished to-morrow. This was not very satisfactory to me, and I so expressed myself to Edith as we walked homeward, telling her also, as well as I was able, how the news would have been promulgated and received in my day; how the news-boys would have been crying extra editions of the newspapers through the streets; how the city would have been awake all the night; how the regular army would be hurrying east and west to man the coast defenses, and every navy yard hard at work. She listened with apparent interest to my descriptions and advised me to embody them in a lecture; but she was so confident that it was the duty of the officials at Washington to attend to all affairs of national defense, that I could not get her to show the slightest interest in anticipating what their action would be. Her reliance upon these officials and her confidence in their wisdom seemed to be shared by the Bostonians generally, for, though it was not midnight when we were returning, the city was as quiet and the streets as deserted as on a Sunday night.
" Leete6 was sitting up for us on our return. We naturally expressed surprise that he was not in bed, whereupon he said that he had waited for us in order to announce to his mother and myself his engagement to Margaretta Nesmyth. The news evidently did not take his mother entirely by surprise; women are quicker than men in discerning affairs of the heart; but to me it was altogether unexpected. We congratulated him, of course, and wished him joy, and he went happily to bed to dream blissfully of his lady love.
" The first engagement in a family is an affair of decided importance, and for the rest of the night Leete's announcement quite drove from my mind all thoughts of the declaration of war. Upon questioning Edith I found that she had long had her suspicions that the two young folks were in love with one another, and that it would be merely a question of time before their engagement would be publicly announced. She spoke very highly of the young woman whose character she had evidently studied, and assured me that there was no doubt but that she would make our son an excellent wife. And then we fell to talking of our own courtship — a courtship that had more romance, in it than could be expected of any later lovemaking.
" This morning, however," Professor West continues, "the bulletin boards contained longer notices. A special session of Congress was called to meet in twenty days. All citizens were ordered to report at once to the Superintendents of their guilds the number of arms and amount of ammunition in their possession. The municipal authorities of the several sea-ports on the coast were authorized to take measures to protejet their harbors until such time as the authorities at Washington could formulate a plan of national defense. On the bulletins were also announcements that the heads of the local guilds would meet at noon to devise means of defense."
Constantly, in his diary, Professor West expresses his astonishment at the little excitement created by the declaration of war. To us in China, the calmness with which the United States received the news was unexpected and almost inexplicable. We knew of course that the whole tendency of Nationalism was to wipe out individualism and to train the individual to rely in all matters upon his rulers ; but we had not expected that this loss of individualism would be so complete as to prevent our declaration of war from being considered as a matter of personal moment to each individual. That such was the case,, however, is the unanimous testimony of all the survivors of the late invasion.
But while the people were in a state of blissful unconcern, what were the rulers doing? We know, now, that they were in a state of great perplexity. As I have said before, they had been most unaccountably blind to the lessons which they should have learned from the events in France. Fatuously blind, they had taken no measures of national defense. They had lived and acted as if war was no longer a possible thing.7 The government possessed not one single vessel of war, its marine was wholly mercantile or scientific. There was not one establishment among the thousands of manufactories in your country that could turn out a cannon ; there were only two that could turn out small firearms, and these were of trifling capacity, as the only demand for such weapons had been for sporting purposes. Your coast defenses had for a century been turned into public parks; your forts, into buildings for public recreation. There were few men among you who knew any thing of military science, and they had no practical training but had studied it only for amusement. You were absolutely defenseless, and it was no wonder that your rulers were perplexed.
As we look backward we may well ask, who was responsible for this state of affairs ? The responsibility rests on no one man or set of men. Your condition was the natural resultant of your form of government. Under the Nationalistic theory, a standing army in time of peace was a collection of idlers who added nothing to the resources of the State, but were none the less consumers. The same false process of reasoning forbade the existence of a navy. To have manufactured guns and to have stored up munitions of war would have seemed to the Nationalist theorist a waste of the resources of the nation. To have maintained military schools and to have required military service of each able-bodied citizen would have been to deplete the ranks of the workers. And when there came a time when you would have willingly mortgaged all your workshops and factories, all your material prosperity, thrice over, to have possessed the means of defense, you found too late that armies and navies do not spring up, full-armed and disciplined, at the biddings of Legislatures, and that munitions of war do not exist merely because they are wished for.
Had your ancestors heeded the lessons pf the French Revolution — had you learned your own weakness from the disasters that befell the Nationalist government of France — had you built ships capable of resisting any enemy and forts capable of defending your coasts; had you organized a standing army that might serve as a nucleus in time of war; had you required all citizens to know something, at least, of the profession of arms; had you even established military foundries and machine-shops — had you done all these, or only one of these things, it is probable that China would never have declared war with you; never have invaded your land; never have subjugated your ancestors; and, finally, never have imposed upon you the blessings of that civilization which has made the Celestial Kingdom ot China the greatest nation that the world has ever known.
You must remember that we in China were not ignorant of your defenseless condition. We knew all about it. Nationalism had subjugated all the nations of the world except the Flowery Kingdom. We recognized its merits, while at the same time we saw its defects. To us it seemed, at first, the attempt of barbarians to graft upon their social system a policy that had been in vogue in China for many years. Perhaps, had it been promulgated only by men of English descent, it would have retained the element of practicability — for the English, in all previous reforms, had been practical; but owing to the short-sightedness of your remote ancestors you had permitted your country to be over-run with emigrants from the slums of other nations; they had been given equal rights, socially and politically, and they had intermarried with your native stock until it became so debased that, one hundred years ago, your ancestors were as ready as the Frenchmen of the eighteenth century to abandon every thing for the sake of an idea.
At first, then, we in China thought that Nationalism was simply a barbarian attempt to imitate our own system of government. The grading system, which the Nationalists were so enthusiastic over, bore a remarkable likeness to our system of examinations ; and there were other points