1. A Critique of Social Philosophy

Towards the end of the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Applied Reason, and the Critique of Judgment. The basic idea of this Critical Philosophy was to examine the methods and achievements of the human intellect between the great awakening of the Renaissance and the epoch of the French Revolution. Kant's criticism was "creative", it led to a "transvaluation of values" as deep and wide as the "ideas of 1789". On the one hand, he established the validity of the experimental methods initiated by Galileo and Torricelli; and on the other, he pointed out their limitations by postulating the "categorical imperatives" of man as a "moral agent."

If it is possible to generalize the diverse intellectual currents among the Turks, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese of the twentieth century into any suitable formula, probably it should be called the "critique of Occidental Reason." Through the political, industrial, literary, and educational institutions and activities of the Orient today there runs a common idea of "criticism." Young Asia has been making a survey of the social philosophy and the culture-anthropology which Eur-America has brought to the forefront between the "industrial revolution" (c. 1815) and the unsuccessful rising of the Chinese Boxers in 1900. Scepticism is the fundamental feature in the Aufklärung of the modern Orient. The "storm and stress" which is bringing a future Asia into being has its élan in the Mephistophelic doubt as to the validity of the Occidental pretensions.

2. The Doctrine of Superior Races.

Probably the most universally accepted postulate in the thought of Europe and America is that the Occidental races are superior to the Oriental. The burden of school lessons and university lectures and newspaper stories on history in these countries is to emphasize this notion. The whole world-culture of the previous five thousand years is assumed as but an insignificant preamble to the grand domination of the Orient by the Occident during the last few generations.

But how does the same history appear to the Oriental from his angle of vision? In his eyes it has been the historic role of Asia to be always the aggressor and of Europe to be ever on the defensive. By the test of arms the superior races of the world have been the Asians, more often than, the Europeans.

We need, not go far back into the periods covered by Egyptology and Assyriology. We may begin with the Persians. During the fifth century B. C. the "isles of Greece" were over-run by Darius and Xerxes. Their armies were recruited from every race of Western and Middle Asia including the Hindus of the Punjab in India. Alexander's raid into Asia in the fourth century B. C. was but Europe's reply to the previous Asian adventure.

During the seventh and eighth centuries A. C. the Moslem Saracens pushed their arms into Europe as far as Spain and Southern France. The Pyrenees mountains became the western boundary of Asia, and the Mediterranean Sea an Asian lake. The crusades which were first organized towards the end of the eleventh century (1099) were but attempts of the Christians at self-defence. It was against the tremendous "Asian Peril" of the time that these pseudo-religious wars were directed through pan-European alliances.

The expansion of Asia was undertaken from the north also by the Buddhists and Shamanists through the hordes of the Scythians, Mongols or Tartars of Central Asia. The Carpathian mountains, and not the Urals, remained for centuries the north-western boundary of Asia. "In Asia and Eastern Europe scarcely a dog could bark without Mongol leave from the borders of Poland and the Gulf of Scanderoon to the Amur and the Yellow Sea"¹. The whole of Russia was a "dependency" of the Mongol emperors of China during the thirteenth century. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that Peter the Great rose to militate against the Asianization of Europe and put a stop to Tartar hegemony in Eastern European politics.

But in the mean time Europe had to swallow another aggression from Asia. This began with the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Turkish empire was one of the greatest powers in Europe. The eastern boundary of Europe shrank eventually under Asian pressure as far interior as Venice on the Adriatic Sea, and Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg emperors. The Turks laid siege to that imperial city once in 1529 and a second time as late as 1682. It was not till 1699 that the Holy League of the Venetian republic, the King of Poland, the Habsburg emperor, and Peter the Great succeeded in resisting any further advance of the Crescent into the lands of the Cross.

What then is the verdict of history on the question of superior races? Did not the Asians enjoy "spheres of influence" in Europe all through the Middle Ages, down to the beginning of the eighteenth century? The period of Asian hegemony covered, in fact, fully a thousand years from a century before Charlemagne till Peter the Great and Louis XIV. Has not the number of Oriental aggressions into Europe been greater than that of Occidental into Asia? Whatever pseudo-history may be taught in the schools and colleges of Europe and America, among the Orientals themselves the memory of their own military superiority is a potent factor in their modern consciousness. It cannot easily fade away, because this was not a romance of legendary heroes in an antediluvian age. It is a fact of the "history of our own times."

The recent history of the world from the European success at Plassey in 1757 to the Asian triumph at Port Arthur in 1905 is certainly the story of European expansion. But in the first place, this, again, is only the reaction of Europe to the Asian event of 1453. And in the second place, does this series of events during 150 years entitle the sociologist to propound the jingo cult of difference between the East and the West? This is the first question in the Critical Philosophy of Young Asia.

3. The Logic of the Occident.

Once upon a time, as Greek cradle-stories tell us, a piece of painting was shown to a lion. It was the picture of a lion being trampled down by a man. The lion was asked as to how he liked that artwork. He replied: "Of course I have enjoyed it very much; but if a lion had painted this, the man would have been at the feet of the lion".

In modern times the whole Orient from Tokyo to Cairo has been a continent of subject peoples. It is the "master" races that have studied the life and institutions of their dependencies, colonies, protectorates, spheres of influence, and "mandated" regions. The mirror that has been held up to servile and semi-servile Asia by Eur-America has therefore naturally reflected this "lion in the painting" of the fable.

During the last quarter of the third century B. C. Tsin Shi Hwangti (B. C. 221-210), a Chinese Napoleon, brought China for the first time under one Imperial administration. The Confucian literati of his time seem to have been obstacles to his work of political consolidation. So, anticipating the "nation-makers" of wartime Europe and America he instituted a thorough-going censorship of thought and letters. The wholesale burning of all ancient Chinese Classics was ordered by this sârva-bhauma or dominus omnium, the lord of all. By destroying every vestige of the past he intended to inaugurate a new era of enlightenment and progress. It may be legitimately conjectured that if another Shi Hwangti were to appear in Asia today he would begin by declaring a bonfire of a considerable portion of the Occidental literature on the Orient.

The archaeological, exploratory, and translation work done in and about Asia during the nineteenth century and since under the auspices of Eur-American Governments and Research Societies is indeed marvellous. It is in the interpretation of the unearthed facts and of the data of present-day life, however, that the superstition of the "superior" race chiefly manifests itself.

We shall best understand the methodology of Occidental scholars with regard to Oriental topics if we apply it, say, to the First Book of Homer's Iliad. We should then be announcing to the world that the Occident has never known what it is to act in union. The besetting sin of the European races has always been the mutual jealousy of their leaders. This has rendered the presenting of common front against an enemy impossible even on momentous occasions. Take, for example, the scandalous altercation between King Agamemnon and General Achilles on the Field of Troy. As Nestor lamented:

"Alas, alas! what grief is this for Greece!
What joy for Priam, and for Priam's sons!
What exultation for the men of Troy,
To hear of feuds between you, of all the Greeks
The first in council, and the first in fight!"²

The leaders not only forget the great responsibility of their mission, but the vengeance of Achilles is so "deep and deadly" that he persuades his Goddess-mother Thetis to pray to Jove

"and supplicate his aid

For Troy's brave warriors, that the routed Greeks

Back to their ships with slaughter may be driven;

That all may taste the folly of their King."

And Thetis actually prays to "Jove, Olympian, Lord of counsel" to "avenge his cause",

"and give to Trojan arms

Such strength and power, that Greeks may learn how much

They need my son and give him honour due."

Out of this personal rivalry, ultimately, "to Greece unnumbered ills arose".

Now what is the cause of this feud between the Greek leaders? What leads to the treason, the anti-national and Trojanizing wrath of Achilles? A most ignoble and detestable feature of European morals, viz. concubinage, as the methodology in discussion will bring it out. A girl Briseis was captured by Achilles. But King Agamemnon ordered him to deliver her to the royal camp for his own use. These are his words:

"I heed thee not!
I care not for thy fury! Hear my threat:

I mean,
Even from thy tent, myself, to bear thy prize,
The fair Briseis; that henceforth thou know
How far I am thy master."

Following the same logic, the scientific interpreters of literature will have to declare that the rulers of Europe are licentious and that the Europeans are a polygamous³ race. For, about Chryseis, another captive girl, Agamemnon had shamelessly said to her father:

"Her I release not, till her youth be fled;
Within my walls, in Argos, far from home,
Her lot is cast, domestic cares to ply,
And share a master's bed."

Agamemnon's words to Calchas, the prophet, who points out the iniquity of the act, are also in the self-same strain:

"I rather choose herself to keep,
To me not less than Clytemnestra dear,
My virgin-wedded wife."

In the identical manner will it have to be asserted that the Occident has known but one form of government, and that is unalloyed despotism. Calchas, the prophet, "to whom were known the present, and the future, and the past", fears to speak out. For, this rishi (to use a Hindu expression) is aware that

"Terrible to men of low estate
The anger of a King; for though awhile
He veil his wrath, yet in his bosom pent
It still is nursed, until the time arrive."

And General Achilles also remarks:

"A tyrant King because thou rulest over slaves."

The Western King is not only a despot to his people but also a tyrant at home to his wife whom he compels to passive obedience. Jove's threat is thus worded:

"If this be so, it is my sov'reign will.
But, now, keep silence, and my words obey,
Lest all the Immortals fail, if I be wroth,
To rescue thee from my resistless hand."

This is a slight specimen of the logic of the Occident generally applied to the interpretation of Oriental culture. But advocates of "higher criticism" would forthwith challenge the above interpretation. It may be easily condemned on the simple ground that one must not generalize about millenniums of Occidental civilization from single verses of a single poet. But this very truism disappears from the consciousness of Eur-American "scientists" while they apply their brains to the interpretation of what they call the heart or soul or spirit of the Orient. The injustice of this method is probably the greatest of all factors that have contributed to the rupture of fellow-feeling between the East and the West. And the futurists of Young Asia have their permanent fountain of inspiration in the intellectual pain and ill-treatment they have been accustomed to get from Eur-America.

4. The Alleged Pessimism of the Orient.

Max Müller wrote India: what can it teach us? The main trend of his thesis was to indicate that India can teach nothing but "sublime" speculations of an other-worldly character, the psychology of the soul, the ethics of retreat from the struggles of life and the metaphysics of the Infinite. And Schopenhauer, himself a pessimist of the blackest dye, had brought to prominence some of the quietistic passages of the Upanishads and the Buddhist Dhammapada. Since then it has become almost a fetish in the Western world to take the Orient and pessimism as convertible terms. Especially is Buddhism known in the Occident as the cult of pacifism, annihilation, inactivity, non-resistance, monasticism, and so forth; and all other cults in the Orient are alleged to approximate this ideal more or less closely. This notion about Asian quietism is one of the greatest idolas of the modern world. It cannot stand the least historical criticism.

First, the man Shâkya-simha, called the Buddha (Enlightened), was but one of the hundreds of India's leaders in the fifth and sixth centuries B. C. They counted among them physicians, surgeons, publicists, diplomats, metaphysicians, sophists, logicians and grammarians, Shâkya did not monopolize the whole thought and activity of the time.

Secondly, Shâkya was not only the organizer of an order of monks and ascetics, like Pythagoras, but was the teacher also of duties for householders, kings, senators, and soldiers. Personally he was a firm believer in republicanism and the kingless polity of the United States of the Vajjians. Quietism was the furthest removed from his teachings. Most of his followers were energists and active propagandists. They founded charitable institutions, schools, rest-houses, hospitals both for human beings and animals. Asoka the Great (B. C. 270-230), the so-called Constantine of Buddhism, one of the stanch followers of Shâkya, was an internationalist. He brought the whole of Western Asia, Egypt, Greece and Macedon within the sphere of Hindu culture.

Thirdly, the religion called Buddhism was never a paramount religion and never had an exclusive sway in India, China, or Japan. The term "Buddhist India" is thus a misnomer, it cannot apply to any epoch of the country's history. Besides, no religion has ever dominated the policy of rulers and ruling classes in India. The State in India has never been theocratic.

Fourthly, even those who called themselves Buddhists did not make it a rule to fly away from the pains of the world. They could still be fighters, traders, presidents and kings. They took part in political intrigues and court revolutions, and could be casuists, when necessary, like the Jesuits of Europe. There are many instances of Buddhist monks organizing themselves into military orders in the mediaeval history of China, Japan, and India.

The alleged pessimism of Shâkya-simha's teachings had practically no influence on the general mass of population. The rulers of India proceeded to their work according to the principles of statecraft. These were as far removed from ahimsâ or non-killing as are Machiavelli's Prince and Treitschke's Politics from Jesus' "My Kingdom is not of this world."

The Artha-shâstra was compiled within about a century after Shâkya's death. The compiler was Kautilya, a Bismarck or Richelieu of India. The militarism of the Hindus would be evident to every reader of this book. Women with prepared food and beverage were advised to stand behind the fighting lines and utter encouraging words to the men at the front (Book X, Ch III). This is out-Spartaing Sparta. There is here indicated a system of real "universal" conscription like the one which was more or less witnessed during the recent World-War.

Physicians with surgical instruments, machines, remedial oils, and cloth in their hands were likewise advised to stand behind, uttering encouraging words to fighting men (Book X, Ch III).

The futurism of Young Asia is nurtured on such historic truths.

5. The So-called Opening of China.

In 1842, at the end of the Opium War, China is said to have been "opened" by the treaty of Nanking. Since then more than 120 treaties have been concluded between the Chinese and the "Powers". Each treaty is a document of concessions of some sort or other wrung from the "sick man" of the Far East. And yet Eur-American logic describes the treaty of Nanking "as one of the turning points in the history of mankind, involving the welfare of all nations in its wide reaching consequences".⁴ The futurists of Young Asia remember it, however, as the first term in a series of the law of the gun in China.

Between 1858 and 1885 almost the whole of the present-day French Indo-China was carved out of the Chinese empire. By 1898 Russia, Germany, England, and France were masters of "possessions" on Chinese soil. Korea and Manchuria, parts of "Greater China", were passing into Russian hands. As China had no power to resist, the resistance was offered by Japan; because her own independence would otherwise have been precarious. In 1910 Korea became Japanese territory. Since then Manchuria, Mongolia, Kashgaria (Turkestan), and Tibet have virtually passed out of China's hands. China has been opened indeed.

There is not a single harbour in all three thousand miles of coast line in which the Chinese can mobilize their own ships without the consent of the foreigners.

The consular authorities of the foreign powers rule the settlements practically as possessions. Besides, throughout Chinese territory the foreigners are immune from China's jurisdiction. With regard to this "extra-territoriality" the following remarks about Japan till 1911 will indicate the present status of the Chinese in their own territory: "A nation which had to accept some of the conditions contained in these treaties was not really autonomous. For instance, the Japanese were not allowed to impose more than a small tax upon imports ——— a limitation which deprived them of the control of their own fiscal system, and affected the building up of industries. Moreover, the treaties exempted foreigners, residing in Japan, from the operation of her own criminal laws and secured to them the privilege of being arraigned solely before tribunals of their own nationality. These provisos were disliked, not only because it sometimes happened that a foreigner was judge in a suit in which he was personally concerned, but because of the implication that Japan was unfit to exercise one of the fundamental attributes of every sovereign state —— judicial autonomy."⁵

Mining, railway, and industrial concessions are enjoyed by foreign commercial syndicates. These lead to the play of back door influence, and are the perennial sources of intrigues. The little political life that pulsates through the corpse of China is thus demoralized.

What through financial indebtedness, what through commercial and industrial wire-pullers, what through extra-territoriality, and what through sympathy and charity of professional friends, Young China has to undergo every day all the "intervention" which Austria wanted to enforce on Serbia in July 1914. Only, China has to submit to the demands of half a dozen Austrias at least. This is the meaning of the "open door" policy loudly proclaimed by all with equal vehemence for about two decades from U. S. Secretary Hay's letter in 1899 down to the so-called Disarmament Conference at Washington (November 1921).

What is the justification of this high-handed intervention in the rights of Chinese sovereignty? The sociologists, students of race-culture, and apostles of peace movements are ready with their answer. The interests of humanity, democracy, and civilization are said to require that China must be opened at the point of the bayonet. It is alleged that by nature the Chinese are averse to foreign intercourse, and that exclusiveness is their greatest national vice.

6. The Real Cycles of Cathay.

According to the Critical Philosophy of Young Asia this allegation about China's exclusiveness is perhaps the greatest untruth propagated by the "superior races" of the Occident in modern times. Can the combined intellect of Europe and America point to a single period of Chinese history in which the country was closed to foreigners? Is there any "cycle of Cathay" during which the Chinese refused to receive new arts and sciences from outsiders? Is there any epoch of Chinese culture which does not indicate assimilation and imbibing of extraneous influences?

We neglect for the present the intercourse that has been traced by La Couperie between China and Assyria on the evidence of astronomical and other notions. The legends also about Buddhist missions from India under Asoka to China in the third century B. C. need not be considered for want of incontestable evidence.

But during the second century B. C. Chang Kien, the general of the famous Han emperor Wuti penetrated into Western Asia (B. C. 135). He is known to have introduced the Persian vine into China. The opening of the route between the Far East and the "Roman Orient" was thus effected by a Chinese.

In 100 B. C, during the same reign, General Su Wu was deputed to the territory of the Huns in Central Asia. There is in Chinese poetry a touching "farewell" to his wife written by himself on the occasion, which we shall see in a subsequent essay (p. 160).

Chinese silk was well known in Persia. It was probably through Persian sources that Ptolemy and Pliny came to know of it.

During the first century A. C. the Han emperor Mingti sent a deputation to the Central Asian province of Greater India in order to import the images of Buddha and Sanskrit texts (67 A. C.). The connexion between India and China which was thus established lasted continuously for full seven hundred years. According to a Chinese record, in the reign of Hwanti (147-168), "Tienchu (India), Tatsin (Rome, Egypt, or Arabia), and other nations came by the Southern Sea with tribute, and from this time trade was carried on at Canton with foreigners".⁶

China's trade with the Byzantine empire is noticed in Cosmas' Christian Topography (530 A. C.) With the rise of Saracen Power, Chinese intercourse was established with the Mohammedans also in the seventh century.

The most active period of the "holy alliance" between India and China was between the fifth and seventh centuries. The Chinese received not only the religion and metaphysics of the Hindus, but also medicine, arithmetic, dramaturgy, folk-festivals, and musical instruments.

The greatest epoch of Chinese civilization is the age of the mighty Tangs and brilliant Sungs (618-1260). It was an era of Renaissance in poetry, painting, philosophy, pottery, and what not. This was a direct product of Hindu influences. The Chinese of this their "Augustan age" were not only open to foreigners, but were also sending out thousands of artists, missionaries, statesmen, scholars, and architects in order to civilize Japan.

Under the Tangs, the Chinese empire had more than one city which was, like the cities of modern America, the babel of tongues, and the melting-pot of races. At Singan-fu, the capital, in the North West, there lived not only thousands of Hindu families, but Zoroastrians, Mohammedans, and Nestorian Christians. In 877 an Arab trader, Abu Zaid, described the port of Canfu near Hangchau, as the city in which 120,000 Mohammedans, Jews, Christians, and Magians were engaged in traffic.

The Chinese historians were always interested in "barbarian", i. e. foreign countries and peoples. The official histories of the period from Han to Tang dynasty supply accurate information about Syria, Persia, Greece, and Parthia. The Chinese account of Constantinople is more definite and exact than any contemporary Western account of the Chinese capital.

The maritime trade of the Chinese was very brisk during the tenth century. Chinese ships visited Arabia, Ceylon, Malaya peninsula, Tongking, Siam, Java, Western Sumatra, Western Borneo, and certain of the Philippine Islands.⁷ The Chu-fanchi is a record of Chinese foreign commerce by sea during the later Sung period. Chau Jukua, the writer, was inspector of maritime trade at Tsuanchau. in the latter part of the twelfth century.

During the thirteenth century Marco Polo, the Venetian, was very well received by the Mongol emperor, Kubla Khan. According to Remusat, "many monks, Italians, French, Flemings, were charged with diplomatic missions to the Grand Khan. Mongols of distinction came to Rome, Barcelona, Valencia, Lyons, Paris, London, Northampton; and a Franciscan of the kingdom of Naples was Archbishop of Peking."⁸

During the next period, that of the Mings, the Portuguese first came to China in 1516. From that date until 1724 in the reign of Youngcheng the Manchu, the representatives of the modern Europeans were heartly welcomed into the Chinese empire. Christian missionaries were entrusted both by the Ming and the Manchu emperors with the work of reforming the Chinese calendars according to the European improvements in astronomy. The Chinese did not display any extra conservatism, but were receptive enough to be taught by foreigners.

But the Christians soon made themselves into "undesirable aliens". It was extreme political necessity, arising from the intrigues and interventions of the missionary force, that compelled the Chinese, as it had previously led the Japanese, to declare their country closed. The Chinese did not forbid the Europeans to enter China in the dehumanizing and humiliating way in which the enlightened, democratic and humanitarian America of 1917 has deliberately proclaimed herself a forbidden land to the peaceful and industrious but militarily impotent or navally weak peoples of Asia.

These aggressions, whether positive or negative, are justified, say the aggressors themselves, on scientific ethnological grounds. But the cumulative effects of such actions have led the Orient to one inevitable conviction, viz. that the pseudo-science of "open door" is really based on two arguments: (1) that nations have a right to "open" any country on earth only if they are backed by powerful guns, and (2) that a country can be "closed" to those races on earth which have virtually no right to bear arms. This belief has been a mighty feeder in the futurism of Young Asia, helpless' as it is bound to remain for some time yet.

7. The Comparative Method.

The futurists of Young Asia not only condemn this convenient perversion by jingoes of the historical truths about China's traditional foreign policy and the alleged unassimilability of the Asians in the New World but are prepared to challenge the entire scientific machinery of the Occident in the study of sociology. According to its Critical Philosophy the methods of the Eur-American students of world-culture are vitiated by certain fundamental fallacies. These errors arise from a systematic mal-application of the comparative method in estimating the values of the Eastern and Western achievements.

Christian missionaries and even scientists of research societies take a morbid delight in picking up the worst features of Oriental life and thought. Ultimately through the movies, theatres, and journals, Asia has become to their nationals a synonym for immorality, sensuousness, ignorance, and superstition.

But was it not in Europe that political philosophy and political propaganda were based on such wisdom as is apparent in the following statements?

"The sun is superior to the moon. St Peter gave two swords to Christ. The Pope is like Sinai, the source of the oracles of God, and is superior to all kings and princes because Mt. Sinai is higher than other hills. Adam was the first king, Cain the first priest. — The most perfect polity can be discovered within the pages of the Old and the New Testaments. — The actions of Samuel or Uzziah or Jehoida or Ehud could be made into a system whereby all future political methods could be judged".⁹

"Again, while expatiating on Oriental erotics, the Eur-American scholars with a safe conscience manage to forget the Greek romances of Heliodorus, Longus, and Tatius, for example, among the ancients, the Provençals and Troubadours of France, the Wacht-Lieder of the German Minnesingers, the Italian cult of Feminine Beauty such as is summarized by Burckhardt, and the "courtly love" in Chaucer and Gower.¹⁰ In fact, they are blind to the truth that from the adultery among the gods described, e. g. in the Odyssey (Book VIII) and the erotic frescoes from Pompeii in the national museum of Naples down to the sex-exciting advertisements of today founded on the principles of experimental psychology (applied to business) the erotics of an intense and direct as well as suggestive character has had a continuous sway throughout the Occidental world.

"Amongst the civilized nations of Europe", again, as Frazer writes in "Balder the Beautiful" volume of his Golden Bough: "superstitions which cluster round this mysterious aspect (menstruation) of woman's nature are not less extravagant than those which prevail among savages. In the oldest existing cyclopaedia, the Natural History of Pliny, the list of dangers apprehended from menstruation is longer than any furnished by mere barbarians. According to Pliny, the touch of a menstruous woman turned wine to vinegar, blighted crops, killed seedlings, blasted gardens, brought down the fruit from trees, dimmed mirrors, blunted razors, rusted iron and brass (especially at the waning of the moon), killed bees, or at least drove them from their hives, caused mares to miscarry, and so forth. Similarly, in various parts of Europe, it is still believed that if a woman in her courses enters a brewery the beer will turn sour, if she touches beer, wine, vinegar, or milk, it will go bad; if she makes jam, it will not keep, if she mounts a mare it will miscarry, if she touches buds, they will wither, if she climbs a cherry tree, it will die." Havelock Ellis, also, in his Man and Woman quotes reliable opinions of medical men about the survival of such notions in modern England. The psychological context to which such superstitions have been adapted for ages is not fundamentally different from that among the Hindus among whom flourishes the custom of segregating the menstruous women.

Molière's L'Etourdi (1655) furnishes us with a picture of the relations between a master and his servant. We have the following in Act III, Scene IV:

"What? May I not beat my own servants?
He is my valet to use as I please."

Such postulates of the master-psychology in seventeenth century France must not be ignored by the students of racial evolution.

Generally speaking, however, Western scholars commit three fallacies in the application of the comparative method to the study of race-questions.

In the first place, they do not take the same class of facts. They compare the superstitions of the Orient with the rationalism of the Occident, while they ignore the rationalism of the Orient and suppress the superstitions of the Occident. They compare the thoughts and activities of the higher intellectual and economic grades of the Occident with those of the illiterates and paupers and half-fed masses of the Orient. But intellectual fairness demands that mentality and morality should be compared under "the same conditions of temperature and pressure".

Secondly, the Eur-American sociologists do not apply the same method of interpretation to the data of the Orient as to those of the Occident. If infanticide,¹¹ superstition and sexuality for instance have to be explained away or justified in one group of races by "historical criticism", or by anthropological investigations, or on the strength of studies in adolescence, Freudianism, psychanalysis, and so forth, these must be treated in the same way in the other instances as well. We have seen before how the value of a Homer or a Buddha in cultural perspective depends on the method of interpretation.

In the third place, the Occidental scholars are not sufficiently well grounded in "comparative chronology". They do not proceed to the work of striking a balance between the claims of the East and the West, age by age, i. e. idea by idea and institution by institution in a time-series. They compare the old conditions of the Orient with the latest achievements of the Occident, and they ignore the fact that it is only in very recent times that the same old conditions have disappeared from the West.

8. The Age of Modernism.

The present is the age of pullman cars, electric lifts, bachelor apartments, long distance phones, Zeppelins, and the "new woman". In their Oriental studies the Eur-American scholars seem to assume that these have been the inseparable features of the Western world all through the ages. Had they been really conscious that some of these were not known to their grandfathers, and others even to their fathers, they could easily resist the temptation of finding some essential distinction between Occidental and Oriental "ideals." Most of the emphasis laid on the influence of latitude, altitude, temperature, and "general aspects of nature" on civilization and Weltanschauung could then be automatically condemned as unhistorical. Anthropology and objective history are the only antidotes to such subjective race-psychologies.

The material condition of Germany in the latter half of the eighteenth century is thus described by Lewes in his Life of Goethe:

"Chemistry did not then exist, ... alchemy maintained its place among the conflicting hypotheses of the day. ... The philosopher's stone had many seekers.

"High roads were only found in certain parts of Germany. ... Milestones were unknown ... Public conveyances were few and miserable; nothing but open carts with unstuffed seats.

"The furniture even of palaces was extremely simple. In the houses of wealthy bourgeois, chairs and tables were of common fir; ... carpets ... beginning to loom upon the national mind as possible luxury. ... Easy chairs were unknown."

It is clear that so far as economic conditions are concerned, nobody in the eighteenth century could announce the dictum: "East is East, and West is West". In spite of all the advantages of climate there was no "industrial revolution" in Europe until towards the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. The peoples of Asia from Chandragupta to Kanghi would not have found any fundamental difference in Europe from Pericles to Frederick the Great. Contemporary sociologists like Professors Huntington and Dickinson who are following in the wake of Bodin, Montesquieu, Buckle and Hegel, in the "geographical interpretation of history" should ponder over this fact.

German social life in the time of Goethe should appear to have been almost Confucian. Says Lewes:

"Filial obedience was rigidly enforced, the stick or strap not unfrequently aiding parental authority. Even the brothers exercised an almost paternal authority over their sisters."

The modern freedom of the individual was thus unknown even about a century ago. The subjection of women also was a fact

To quote Lewes again, "Indeed the position of women was by no means such as our women can hear of with patience; not only were they kept under the paternal, marital, and fraternal yoke, but society limited their actions by its prejudices still more than it does now. No woman of the better class of citizens could go out alone; the servant girl followed her to the church, to a shop, or even to the promenade." Calhoun's Social History of the American Family is full of similar facts for the New World from Colonial times on. The sociologist who seeks to find a distinctively new type of humanity in the Oriental woman can supply his own correctives if he remembers such facts from not very remote epochs of Occidental history, and of course if he gets oriented to the subject as described in Bebel's classic, Die Frau¹².

Let us look to the history of criminal law and capital punishment in England; and we shall see how late into recent times barbarity and inhumanity have reigned in modern Europe. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century there were about two hundred and fifty offences for which the sentence was death. It is only since 1861 that capital punishment has been restricted to the offences of murder, treason, and piracy. But until 1837 even smuggling and rioting were punished with death. In 1835 a street urchin of nine years of age was found guilty and executed under law. He had broken the window of a shop and stolen paint worth only two pence. Until 1832 people were condemned to death for breaking into houses, stealing sheep and horses, and for counterfeiting coins, and until 1823 for stating false facts before marriage registrars. In George I's reign sixty new offences were placed on the Statute Book as meriting death penalty; about one hundred and twenty more had been added since about the Restoration of Charles II (1660).

Education is today the birth right of every man and woman in the Occident. But such a statement could not be made before 1870. The educational advance in Eur-America during the last half-century must not be regarded as the norm of the Western world for the previous three millenniums.

Of the English people married even so late as in 1843 thirty two per cent of the men and forty nine per cent of the women could not read and write. They signed their names on the marriage register with a cross. The great Bill which universalized education was passed in 1870.

According to the findings of Guizot, the French minister of education, in 1833, "the teacher was often regarded in the community on the same footing as a mendicant, and between the herdsman and himself the preference was for the herdsman. Consequently the situation of the schoolmaster was the most often sought after by men who were crippled, unfit for any other kind of work"¹³. It was not until the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870 that education became universal in France.

Are the sociologists then justified in making a case for the historical difference in the "view of life" or outlook on the universe between the East and the West? The Critical Philosophy of Young Asia says "No" on the strength of comparative history, and condemns the "racial" interpretation of civilization as too subjective and superficial to deserve the serious attention of the pragmatic student of institutions and ideals.

9. The Event of 1905.

The story of modern Japan is a verification of this critical philosophy of Young Asia. The triumph of Japan over Russia is thus of profound significance in social science.

The fact is generally misinterpreted in the Western world. Diplomats in Eur-America see in this the nucleus of a pan-Asian crusade against the whites. But the fear is utterly unfounded. Neither religion, nor race, nor language, nor all combined are strong cementing principles in the making of alliances. No effective federation could be formed among the little Hellases of antiquity. The confederacy of Delos, the Achaean League, the Aetolian League were all failures.

The Mohammedan Caliphate broke very early into three sovereignties, subsequently into myriads. The alliances in mediaeval Europe were kaleidoscopic in character. The Christian Powers have for the last four hundred and fifty years failed to organize a common policy against the "infidel" Turks. Even the success of Japan was due to the fact that Russia was not actively assisted by her Christian brethren against the non-white pagan.

The last war also has shown that the grouping of belligerents by colour, race or religion is yet as far from being a question of practical politics as it ever was in history. Turkey was the ally of Germany against France and England (1914-1918). And today (November 1921) France has made a separate treaty with one section of Turkey—namely, the "Nationalist" Angora Government presided over by Kemal — while the other section (the old Constantinople puppet) is being supported by Great Britain. The problem of each Asian people will then have to be fought out separately against its own special enemies with the support of such Powers, Oriental and Occidental, as may for the time being happen to be interested in its fortunes.

The event of 1905 is a formative force in the futurism of Young Asia from altogether another angle. In the first place, the recognition of Japan as a first class power has purged the atmosphere of the science-world of a great part of its arrogance and superstition. It has compelled moderation in the tone of the Occident in regard to the Orient. It has demolished the "papal infallibility" which Eur-American scholars had been ascribing to their races during the nineteenth century. The logic of the "white man's burden" has thus become an anachronism except only to the blindest fanatics.

In the second place, the events at Port Arthur and on the Tsushima Sea have proved in the only manner intelligible to the world that modernization is neither the monopoly of the whites, nor a very complicated and difficult process. The time-value of the sum-total of modernism is, pragmatically speaking, not more than twenty five or thirty years. Let us note the facts.

In 1853 Commodore Perry presented Japan with the electric telegraph, steam locomotive, telescope, clocks, maps, agricultural machinery, and such other "curios". But it was not until 1870 that the first line of telegraph was set up between Yokohama and Tokyo. The first railway line of 18 miles was constructed in 1872. And it was really during the period between 1880 and 1886 that the Japanese seriously commenced novitiate in Eur-American culture. Within two decades of her "freshman" stage, however, she was master enough of the new arts and sciences to be able to browbeat a white aggressor. If there had been any difference between the East and the West in 1853, or 1867 or 1886, it was completely broken down in 1905.

It is clear that in spite of the epoch-making "industrial revolution" brought on by steam the West had not gone very far ahead of the East. It shows also that the Asian civilization with which Japan started on the race about 1870 was not essentially distinct from the Eur-American, but that it was slightly poorer and "inferior" only because it had not independently produced the steam engine. Thus, scientifically speaking, there is nothing miraculous in the phenomenal developments of new Japan.

Since 1905 Japan herself has indeed been anxious to proclaim to the world that she is different from, and superior to, the rest of Asia in her ideals, institutions, and methods. But this notion is confined within the circle of a few diplomats, professors who virtually hold diplomatic posts, and such journalists as have touch with prominent members of Parliament. It is, in fact, preached in foreign languages by a section of those intellectuals who have to come across, or make it a point to write for, Eur-American statesmen, scholars, and tourists. The masses of the Japanese, and these diplomats themselves at home are always conscious of the real truth. They all know that ever since the days of Prince Shotoku Taishi (A. C. 573-621) and the scholar-saint Kobo Daishi (774-835); i. e. ever since the very dawn of their civilization, the constitution, social hierarchy, poetry, architecture, painting, divinities, and even folklore and the superstitions of Japan have been either Chinese or Hindu.

But it is not difficult to explain the recent Japanese manifestoes and publications. These are designed to report to the Eur-American governments, universities, and libraries that Japan is radically distinct from the Asia that is under subjection to the Powers. All these are simply measures of self-defence on the part of Japan and reveal the essential weakness of the little of Asia that is left free. Without such shifts Japan cannot come in line with the other "superior races" whose logic has been dominating the market. Japan has learnt by bitter experience that the white nations would not admit her into their caste of first class powers if she were to appear to them in "native" kimono and geta, or were to offer to the foreign guests their unsugared ocha (green tea) without milk and khasi cakes. She must varnish her yellow self white in order that she may be granted the dignity of a ruling race. The Japanese bankers and officials, captains and policemen are therefore compelled to have the Eur-American paraphernalia of public life. This is abhorred by most of them in their heart of hearts. But they must swallow it because this is the price of their recognition as the only "civilized" state of Asia.

Japan must also have the logic and psychology of the whites with regard to the rest of Asia. The present Japanese view about Chinese and Hindu civilizations, so far as it is jingoistic, is merely an aspect of this compulsory Occidentalization. Unless this claim of separateness from the Asians is strongly put forward, the Occident would hesitate to treat with Japan as a peer. It was by urging such distinctions from the semi-subject Chinese and the subject Hindus and Mohammedans that she induced America to revise and modify the Immigration Bill (1917) especially in her favour. Young Asia accepts the entire situation as a natural corollary of the longstanding aggression of the Occident. It therefore does not condemn Japan, but rather pities her isolated condition. The establishment of another Japan on continental Asia is the only possible therapeutics for the current international pathology. And to this the political doctors of Young Asia are addressing themselves.

Old Asian institutions and ideas are still paramount in Japan. It is not a fact, and it cannot be psychologically conceived, that the Japanese were Eur-Americanized during the brief period under review. None of her Oriental characteristics have stood in the way of Japan's growth as a modern "industrial power".

As Uyehara tells us in Political Development of Japan, "Young people of England and America would be shocked if they were told that boys and girls are not allowed to choose their life partners for themselves."

A class of "untouchable" outcasts still exists in Japan. They are called Etta. They live in the outskirts of towns and villages. Though they have been legally enfranchized since 1872, the social prejudice against them has survived.

Shinto is generally taken as equivalent to ancestor-worship. But, according to Harada, in 901 the number of deities worshipped by the Japanese was 3132. The Japanese deities may be grouped as (1) stellar bodies, (2) the elements of earth, air, fire, and water, (3) natural phenomena, (4) prominent natural objects, as mountains, trees and caverns, (5) men, (6) animals. There is a Japanese proverb to the effect: "What god we know not, yet a god there dwells."¹⁴

In Gulick's Evolution of the Japanese we have the following passage:

"Whenever my wife took my arm as we walked the street to and from church, or elsewhere, the people looked at us in surprized displeasure. Such public manifestations of intimacy was to be expected from libertines alone, and from these only when they were more or less under the influence of drink."

In spite of these and other social features objectionable from the latest Eur-American standpoint, Japan has succeeded in making herself into the "great Far Eastern ally" of England and the phobia of the United States. Young Asia therefore legitimately asks the question: "Are not the customs and conventions of the Orient of at least the same political and military significance as are those of the Occident?" The answer has been given in the event of 1905.

10. The Demand of Young Asia.

In the name of religion the missionaries, and in the name of science the scholars, have been rousing the worst passions of Oriental humanity. They dare do this because they know that Young Asia is unarmed and disarmed. And they can afford to exasperate eight hundred million human beings as long as these peoples remain unrepresented by independent armies, independent navies and independent air-fleets.

The existence of Japan as the only free soil of the Asians is not an effective means to bring the Western world to its senses. Japan, although a first class power, is still not strong enough to command the respect of the nations. She has not really stood on her legs as yet. It was only a decade ago, in 1911, that the humiliating "extra-territoriality" clauses were withdrawn by the Powers from their treaties with Japan. She is too weak even to suppress the anti-Japanese journalism of the foreigners in the heart of her capital. And in foreign politics she is in perpetual danger of being cornered by the whites. In fact, the subjection of the rest of Asia to the non-Asians is a standing menace to her own safety. She has ever to be on the alert against another "Russian advance" of 1904.

There is one tremendous fact that weighs heavily upon the mind of Japan, both its government and its people. That fact is the domination by Eur-America of entire Asia from Manilla to Cairo. The elementary need of self-preservation thus happens to induce Japan to resist by all means any further advance of Eur-American penetration in the Orient. The nightmare of this "white peril" is the fundamental, fact of Japanese politics, internal as well as international. Through her alleged aggressions in China, the unfortunate battleground of nations, Japan is only preventing a Chinese fate for herself by strengthening her lines of defense against Western invaders through Burma, India and Indo-China. And as long as China continues to be enslaved by ever-expanding European empires and to receive nothing more solid than lip-sympathy from the American on-lookers, Japan can hardly be blamed for trying to snatch a few pieces of the Far Eastern loot for an Asian people.

Notwithstanding the solicitations of the syndicalists and international anti-militarists events are everywhere tending to the great cataclysm when the adjustment of the relations between the East and the West would have to be submitted to the final court of appeal—the arbitrament of the sword. But before that inevitable day comes the road to world's peace may be considerably smoothed through the judicious cooperation of the intellectuals of the Occident and the Orient.

Young Asia does not want sympathy or charity. The demand of Young Asia is justice—a justice that is to be interpreted by itself on the achievements of its own heroes. The militant unrest of the revolutionary Orient is born of the same desire for a "bearable life" which Czar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, backed as he was by Great Britain, demanded for Macedonia from Turkey in October 1912 with probably questionable justification.

The Orient cannot stop short of achieving the equality of treatment as between the Asians and the Eur-Americans. And this not only in ambassadorial speeches and parliamentary manifestoes, or presidential messages, but also in the discussions of learned societies, in school rooms, theatres, moving picture shows, daily journals, and monthly reviews.

The abolition or mitigation of race-prejudice existing at present is possible only under two conditions:

• First, there must be an ethical revolution in Eur-America. The Occident must learn to treat the Orient—its present day morals, manners and sentiments, its struggles and failures in the only way which would be tolerated by the dignity of man. There must not be one standard for judging human flesh in the West, and another standard for judging it in the East.
• Secondly, there must be a psychological revolution in Eur-America. The very attitude from which the scholars have approached the Orient has to be completely abandoned. The fact of nineteenth century success and overlordship must be banished from the field of scholarship: Oriental culture has to be weighed in the balance under the same conditions of study as the Occidental.

Only then, in the event of Asia recovering its natural rights from the temporary aggressors and illegitimate usurpers, will sanity prevail in the deliberations of the great Peace-Council convened by the Parliament of Man. The futurists of Young Asia are looking forward to that spiritual re-birth of the world.

Notes

1. Yule: Travels of Marco Polo. ↩
2. Derby's translation. ↩
3. cf. the custom in France; Lecky: European Morals, Vol. II, 343. ↩
4. Williams: The Middle Kingdom. ↩
5. Porter: Japan: The New World-Power. ↩
6. The Middle Kingdom. ↩
7. Hirth and Rockhill: Chau Jukua. ↩
8. Gowen: Outline History of China. ↩
9. Figgis: From Gerson to Grotius. ↩
10. Smith: The Greek Romances of Heliodorus etc., London 1855; Perkins: France under Mazarin and Richelieu, Vol. I, p. 191; Lecky: European Morals, Vol. II, p. 343; See Dodd: Courtly Love in Chaucer and Goiver, Boston 1913; Fletcher, Religion of Beauty in Woman, New York 1911; Neilson: Origin and Sources of the Court of Love, Boston 1899; Mott: System of Courtly Love, New York 1896; Caine: Love-Songs of English Poets (1500 — 1800), New York 1892; B. K. Sarkar: Love in Hindu Literature, Tokyo 1916. ↩
11. Recommended by Lykurgus, Solon, Plato and Aristotle; Lecky": European Morals. Vol. II, p. 26. ↩
12. cf. the position of women in Greece; Lecky: European Morals, Vol. II, pp. 281—288. ↩
13. Compayrê: History of Pedagogy. ↩
14. The Faith of Japan. ↩