It is not unusual to hear persons who have considerable acquaintance with the Chinese and their ways, especially in the aspects to which our attention has just been drawn, affirm that the Chinese are not civilised. This very superficial and erroneous judgment is due to an unphilosophical confounding of civilisation and comfort. In considering the present condition of China, which is much what it was three centuries ago, it is well to look upon the changes through which we ourselves have passed, for thus only can we arrive at a just comparison. We cannot think of the England of Milton, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth as an uncivilised country, but nothing is more certain than that to the most of us it would now prove to be intolerable.
It is superfluous to allude to the manifold and complex causes which have brought about such astonishing changes in the British Islands within the past three centuries. Yet more wonderful is the radical revolution which within the last fifty years has taken place in the standard of comfort and convenience. If we were compelled to return to the crude ways of our great-grandfathers and grandfathers, it might be a question whether life for us would be worth living. Times have changed, and we have changed with them. In China, on the contrary, times have not changed, and neither have the people. The standard of comfort and convenience is the same now as it has been for centuries. When new conditions arise, these standards will inevitably alter. That they will ever be the same as those to which we have become accustomed is, however, to be neither expected nor desired.
