pleas for the spiritual recognition of the Fatherhood of God as common to all races and colours. This assertion of racial supremacy Lord Willingdon, relieved from the reserve of office as Governor successively of Bombay and Madras, felt free to condemn as emphatically as Mr. Oldham, and to call upon the white races to recognise the necessity of treating all coloured men in a spirit of absolute equality and to abandon the attitude of colour superiority.

Equally significant was the stress laid by the Bishops of Bombay and of Tokyo upon the growing demand for home rule in the Christian churches of India and Japan, so that they should live their own national life, released from organic subordination to remote and alien ecclesiastical authorities, without however any breach of spiritual communion with the older Churches in England. In the same spirit, but in a more passionate form, an Indian attached to the Foreign Department of the London Y.M.C.A., adjured the white man to get rid of the belief that God had ordained that he should rule over the black man, whereas it was God's will not that one man should rule over another, but that all should serve one another.

Yet, in spite of the freedom and earnestness which marked the proceedings at the Church Congress, no one ventured to discuss what is perhaps the most serious aspect of the colour problem, though one of the speakers referred to the existence of this "ugly and ghastly " aspect. Such epithets are scarcely too strong for the social sore which has resulted from miscegenation between the white and the coloured races under the conditions that have hitherto attended it, and must attend it so long as the white man can assert and enforce his claim to racial superiority. For the assertion of that claim makes it inevitable that repugnance and disapproval should attach to unions between men and women of the white and the coloured races, whether irregular or sanctioned by civil and religious forms of marriage, and the resulting offspring will be weighed down under the burden of a damnosa hereditas.

In India, as all over the world, colour feeling in its present intensity is of relatively modern growth; it was much less pronounced in the early days of British rule. Nothing can be more pathetic than the position to-day of the Eurasian-now

officially termed Anglo-Indian-who is of mixed European and Asiatic descent. Ground between the upper and nether millstones of British and of Indian prejudice, the Eurasian clings as a rule steadfastly to the European side of his origin; but he fails to disarm the antipathy of the white man while heightening that of the Indian, with whom he vainly tries to forget his kinship. Both charge him with having developed the defects rather than the merits of the two strains of blood he has inherited. It is a charge which, like other sweeping generalisations, can be countered by many admirable exceptions; but is it a charge which should, in justice, be brought by those who are responsible for the crushing handicap which mixed marriages and their offspring have to bear from generation to generation? Is it not rather a cause for wonder that mixed marriages under such a handicap ever result, as they sometimes at any rate do, in happiness to both man and wife, and that their issue ever overcome, as they also sometimes undeniably do, the cruel disabilities imputed to them from their birth? Strong, and it may be overwhelming, biological arguments are adduced against the cross-breeding of human races, but even where races are widest apart, as in the white and the black population of the United States, the mingling of blood does not necessarily rule out the finest qualities, moral and intellectual, which the white man claims for his race. Of this fact, striking evidence is afforded by Booker Washington, himself of mixed descent, and by the work which he and his co-adjutors and disciples have done at Tuskejee.

As a solution, however, of the problem of colour, any natural fusion of races by inter-marriage belongs in the present state of the world to the realm of Utopia. But the white man can do much to mitigate the gravity of the problem by the exercise of Christian charity in deed and thought in his relations, direct or indirect, with his coloured fellow men. What the world needs is the practical recognition of the coloured man's right to absolute equality of opportunity with the white man, and a generous construction of the principle of trusteeship excluding all ideas of domination or exploitation. Happily we have now in the League of Nations a moral Court of Appeal on which coloured as well as white peoples are entitled to sit. Let us at any rate close our ears

VOL. 243. NO. 495.

C

resolutely to the many voices which, to quote Mr. Oldham once

more :

are calling us in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of circumstances to show a united white front against peoples of other colour. Let us face the facts squarely. A solid white front means certainly and inevitably a solid yellow front, and a solid brown front, and a solid black front; and that in the end of the day can have only one meaning. It means war.

And it means a war more frightful than that which has just devastated the white peoples of Europe, and one in which victors and vanquished alike would be more irremediably involved in common ruin.

VALENTINE CHIROL

THE PEKING CONFERENCES

Papers Respecting Labour Conditions in China. Blue Book, China, No. I of 1925.

IN

an article written for the EDINBURGH REVIEW eleven years ago (October, 1914), after discussing the probable effects of the war in Europe upon the future political situation and balance of power in the Far East, I ventured the prediction that, having won the war, the Allied Powers would have an opportunity of devising measures calculated to protect China from external forces of aggression and internal forces of disintegration. The conflict in Europe had afforded her an unexpected respite from the immediate danger of encroachments from without upon her territory, and given her a breathing space, in which her rulers might set about their long-deferred business of national reorganization, without fear of interference. But even the most optimistic observer of the conditions then prevailing throughout China could not fail to perceive that any satisfactory progress in this direction must depend entirely upon the ability of Yuan Shih-k’ai (then practically Dictator) to organize a system of administration strong enough to arrest the forces of disruption. Even had he lived, the odds were all against him, because of the financial and administrative chaos of the Revolution and the consequent demoralisation, already apparent, of every department of the public service. This being so, it was reasonable to anticipate the necessity for an international convention, to be concluded between the Allies after the war, with a view to devising measures for the future maintenance of China's independence under a stable form of government. I then wrote:

The claims of humanity towards the sorely-oppressed Chinese people, the interests of the world's commerce, the cause of peace and the credit of civilisation, all stand to gain so greatly from the conclusion of such an international agreement, that neither philanthropists nor statesmen can afford to let the opportunity be lost which will present itself at the conclusion of the war.

It was already manifest at that date, however, that something more than an international agreement would be required to

preserve the integrity of China. The country's security and prosperity could never be attained without a radical reform of its finances and administration; in other words, it would be necessary to induce, and possibly to assist, the Chinese Government to set its house in order. With the passing years this necessity has grown more urgent, and to-day has become so imperative, that any action by the Powers which ignores it must inevitably fail to achieve any permanently good results. It is more obviously true to-day than it was (as I wrote) eleven years ago that

The organization of a stable and well-ordered Government at Peking and the restoration of the country to solvency and prosperity, depend, not upon the education of the masses to new ideas, but upon the conversion of the mandarin class from its deep-rooted traditions of inefficiency and dishonesty. The necessity for attempting their conversion, difficult though it may be, is a matter which concerns the whole civilised world, for upon it hang the destinies of a third of the human race. It is evidently not a matter to be approached by the sole light of trade balances or bondholders' interests; its solution will call for wide statesmanship and generous instincts of humanity.

This aspect of the case, be it observed, is practically as old as Europe's direct commercial relations with China. In 1857, The Times special correspondent, Mr. George Wingrove Cook, wrote as follows:

These happy fields are over-run by extortionate mandarins, pillaging soldiers, marauders who, in small bands are called robbers, and in large bands aspire to be rebels and to be led by kings, river pirates who levy blackmail, etc. Simple folk may chatter about the injustice of coercing the Government of China, but a government which exacts and does not protect is merely organized brigandage.. Quite sure I am that the larger interests of humanity would be subserved by any train of circumstances which should bring the Chinese people to comprehend, not only our Western notions of probity and honour, but also our Western habits of working those notions into our practice.

Contrast this picture of China seventy years ago with that given in an official report, written last July, by His Majesty's Consul at Foochow :-*

is

The real and crying grievance of the Chinese working man the utter insecurity of his life. However industrious he may be, he has no assurance of keeping the earnings of his toil, or even of preserving

*Vide Blue Book No. 1 of 1925.