"We still know
nothing of China," said Prothero. "Most of the stuff we have been
told about this country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle. We
send merchants from Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what
doesn't remind them of these delectable standards seems either funny
to them or wicked. I admit the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to
speak, in the ancient characters and the ancient traditions, but for
all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what all the rest of the world has
still to find and get. When they begin to speak and write in a
modern way and handle modern things and break into the soil they
have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find just how much
it is behind. . . . Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not such
fools as that, but LIFE. . . ."
Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.
He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities,
delirious religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with
loaded guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a
massive possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism.
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