Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/250

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240 S. E. Baldwin that of subjectivity and objectivity. The youth bends his thoughts towards the correspondence that he is to estabHsh between him- self and the universe. He proceeds from himself outwards. He joins his life to the ideal, in hope and faith. Years pass and he has found his place. There is a round of daily duties and perhaps of pleasures, on which his attention centres. His thoughts now turn not to the ideal but to' what life in fact has brought him, and to how that shall be best accomplished. The race of man pursues the same stages. In the East, they are still in the first. Even in Japan, so largely occidentalized, they are constructing for themselves a new ideal of Christianity. Ex- cept for Japan, they are what they were. Subjectivity still holds them captive. China has recently abolished the requirement of familiarity with the Confucian classics on the part of those desiring official appoint- ment or promotion. The first examination under the new system took place this fall, and the nine receiving the highest marks were men educated in the United States or Europe — the first of them a doctor of philosophy and the next a doctor of civil law of an American university. A change like this involves, as a necessary consequence, the rise of new national ideals. The calm and restful tone of the Confucian philosophy of life will be replaced by something less smooth and more deep, more religious. The spirit of the West has burst upon the silent sea of self-satisfied seclusion on which China has been idly floating for two thousand years. It has troubled the waters. It may turn them into a river that will run far. As respects Mohammedanism, the fundamental precepts of that faith are such as necessarily to give them a strong political effect.' Its adherents stand together, like the members of a secret order. In Europe they cling to their religion as closely as in Asia. In 1900, seven thousand Mohammedan Servians suddenly left the country, because one Mohammedan had been received into a Chris- tian church.^ The strongest assurance of the power of the Sublime Porte is the general recognition by the Mohammedan world and the King of Great Britain as Emperor of India, of the Sultan of Turkey as the true Caliph or Commander of the Faithful. The strongest menace of the British Empire in the East is the utter foreignness there of 'Only by force of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 has religious toleration been anything but an empty word at Constantinople. 2 Francis H. E. Palmer, Aiislro-Hinigarian Life (New York, 1903), p. 88.