ent almost without firing a shot.

The same influence of public opinion was decisive in the teachers'
strike, which was on the point of being settled when I left Peking. The
Government, which is always impecunious, owing to corruption, had left
its teachers unpaid for many months. At last they struck to enforce
payment, and went on a peaceful deputation to the Government,
accompanied by many students. There was a clash with the soldiers and
police, and many teachers and students were more or less severely
wounded. This led to a terrific outcry, because the love of education in
China is profound and widespread. The newspapers clamoured for
revolution. The Government had just spent nine million dollars in
corrupt payments to three Tuchuns who had descended upon the capital to
extort blackmail. It could not find any colourable pretext for refusing
the few hundred thousands required by the teachers, and it capitulated
in panic. I do not think there is any Anglo-Saxon country where the
interests of teachers would have roused the same degree of public
feeling.

Nothing astonishes a European more in the Chinese than their patience.
The educated Chinese are well aware of the foreign menace. They realize
acutely what the Japanese have done in Manchuria and Shantung. They are
aware that the English in Hong-Kong are doing their utmost to bring to
naught the Canton attempt to introduce good government in the South.
They know that all the Great Powers, without exception, look with greedy
eyes upon the undeveloped resources of their country, especially its
coal and iron. They have before them the example of Japan, which, by
developing a brutal militarism, a cast-iron discipline, and a new
reactionary religion, has succeeded in holding at bay the fierce lusts
of "civilized" industrialists. Yet they neither copy Japan nor submit
tamely to foreign domination. They think not in decades, but in
centuries. They have been conquered before, first by the Tartars and
then by the Manchus; but in both cases they absorbed their conquerors.
Chinese civilization persisted, unchanged; and after a few generations
the invaders became more Chinese than their subjects.

Manchuria is a rather empty country, with abundant room for
colonization. The Japanese assert that they need colonies for their
surplus population, yet the Chinese immigrants into Manchuria exceed the
Japanese a hundredfold. Whatever may be the temporary political status
of Manchuria,