Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

now for help in delicate matters because they know they can rely on their neutral enthusiasm for justice. If Catholicism as an international religion is identified with the prosperity of the world as a whole, each country can apply to it as a partner in the interests of true patriotism. And if this is so in each particular country, it must be so also with regard to that venerable figure who more than any other claims the attention of the world and the reverence of all good men, as being the Head of the largest of all Christian societies, and the one person who consistently and sincerely seeks to apply to the world as a whole the traditional meaning of the Christian religion. His advisers certainly are human; but if they do excel in merely human sagacity can it influence them in any way but to recommend themselves, not only to those nations where their religion is serenely established, but even more to those they still hope to win? If from the human point of view the Vatican has a bias, that bias will be in favor, not of Catholics, but of countries in which Catholicism is not dominart. It is not Catholic countries therefore who have most reason to desire official representation at the Holy See.

But at the present moment, with regard to those three great countries who have no representative there, may not their interests suffer, as the Allies feared their interest would suffer during the war? The lack of representation is more apparent than real. The intercourse between the Italian Government and the Vatican is now very close; every Papal diplomat is actually an Italian; Italy makes a great deal of money out of the Papacy and the Church, as she especially will by the huge earnings from the pilgrimages of the Holy Year; and though the Pope will never be satisfied till Italy admits his full status as a sovereign power, the

anticlericalism of the invaders of Rome is far from being the temper of the present Government in Italy. France, it is true, has spoken of withdrawing her representative; but even if he were withdrawn the French Government would send a Catholic as Ambassador to the Quirinal and even now begins to arrange for what the Pope most wished of a French Government, that it should agree to the report of Mr. Dawes. M. Herriot, in fact, in suggesting the withdrawal of M. Doucet was practising a little diplomacy on his own part. M. Doucet was a sop, and the Cerberus was the extremists. As for America, the relations of the Holy See with America are ideal: the American President visited the Pope the only time that an American President ever could; the questions to adjust are extraordinarily few; and in the Ambassador to the Quirinal and Monsignor O'Hern, the brilliant head of the American College, America has representatives in Rome who are in very close touch with the Vatican. Finally, American money is now the Vatican's chief resource.

While, therefore, the uses of the League of Nations are doubtless, in spite of its deficiencies, well worth the money spent on it; while the ideal of a World Court still remains to be realized, Papal diplomacy retains, and will always retain, its unique value both to the shrewd politician and to the Christian idealist.

V

It is now about to assume political office of greater weight and authority than anything the world has ever more than dreamed. Far back in the Middle Ages, Dante, who combined the mind of a philosopher and a Christian with keen interest in political affairs, thought out a scheme to ensure a universal peace founded upon law. His

idea was that there should be one civil authority, just as there was then in the Pope one spiritual authority. Two centuries later his native town produced a political philosopher of another order, whose counsels were more acceptable to succeeding centuries than those of him who wrote the Divine Comedy. But once again Machiavelli gives way to Dante. Once again the world sees in the principles of universal justice something more promising than those of the temporary profit of individual States. The sweeping convulsions which have been weakening the constitution of Europe since 1914, and which still menace her existence, make most people distinctly uncomfortable about orgies of nationalism; lewisite and airplanes and the ever new inventions of the chemists do not reassure them. The next war, they hear, is to be a remorseless attack on populations as a whole. Diseases and poisonous gases will destroy whole cities in a day or two.

The prospects, it is true, are not inviting. May it not be better, after all, to bring religion and morals and law up to the standard of science? May it not be better to conserve human society than to destroy it?

The Vatican is now preparing her due answer to those questions. To her they are not new. Sixty years ago she saw developing in Europe a condition that threatened not only the prosperity but the existence of society. Disraeli, after having been Prime Minister of England, suggested through the lips of the Cardinal in Lothair that the Vatican Council which met in 1869 would exhibit to the Powers of Europe the inevitable future they were then preparing for themselves. The FrancoPrussian War broadcast the warning. A later war has given it more awful significance; the results of that war still press in misery upon vast hordes of peo

ple. And it is in these circumstances that the Pope announces that the Vatican Council is to reassemble and complete its work.

It was to meet in 1925, but political events in Italy and tension in Europe have moved the Pope to wait till a later year. But whenever the Council reassembles its work will show the deep significance of Vatican diplomacy. It is, says the Pope, to find an appropriate remedy for the ills which have followed the upheaval of civil society. It will seek to apply to the political and economic situation of our times the words in which the Pope announced the object of his pontificate: The Peace of Christ in the Reign of Christ. It will seek to lay down the laws of justice which would guide a world court, and with authority over four hundred million people will lay down injunctions to prevent civilization from cutting its own throat.

And in doing so it offers safety to the whole world. For neither in Asia nor in Africa is there the same danger of mutual destruction as there is on the surging battlefield of Europe among those who profess and call themselves Christians. If the Pope can find a means to keep Catholic countries peaceful the obvious peril is removed. And there can be little doubt that if he could give a clear lead all Christian nations would follow him. It will be seen whether there is any nation so unknightly as to take advantage of another's consistent devotion to a Christian standard.

In the great task it has now essayed, the central authority of the Catholic Church gives ranges of unexplored promise to the ancient scope of her diplomacy. The Vatican will need all the resources of an inspired sagacity to vindicate the reputation she claims of beneficence, sanity, equity, and power.

IMPERIALISM AT HOME

BY LYMAN BRYSON

FROM Haiphong in China to Karachi in India, the long coast-line of southeast Asia is possessed imperially, and with a show of permanence, by West Europeans-except for one interruption of freedom. One small nation, which calls itself the 'Thais,' the 'free people,' wedged in among the imperial frontiers of the English and the French, and under the shadow of Dutch and American dominations near at hand, keeps its own sovereignty in more than

But Siam's position, at the throat of the long Malay Peninsula which runs down from lower China to Singapore, its peculiar and respectable culture, its astonishing art and architecture, even its existence, are almost unknown. It is off the main traderoutes and out of the tourist range. And its political problem and the solution which seems likely to surmount its special difficulties are ignored.

The problem was to develop a nation which encroaching imperialisms would respect. The solution now being applied is an imperialism of a domestic and home-grown variety. The hereditary rulers of the Siamese people are trying to do for themselves what West Europeans are trying to do for the more or less willing other Eastern peoples all around them. They are imposing Western culture as a modification and development of their native civilization.

The working-out of this experiment is not altogether evident in a traveler's first glimpses of Siam. The incredible

I

contrast between rare palaces and the crowded squalid dwellings of the people, which is characteristic of Asiatic cities, is especially marked in Bangkok. In fact, the ordinary Siamese citizen may be said to possess no house at all. He lives with his wife and naked babies on a boat in a canal. The capital city of Siam is a collection of villages held together by a few well-kept roads and many klongs, or wide ditches branching out from the river, and in these klongs the affairs of life and commerce are pursued in a muddy but orderly tenor by most of the population. Costumes are adapted to water living, being arrived at chiefly by elimination, and a people addicted to bathing can slip off their front porches, that is their front decks, into water more or less potable at any hour of day or night.

Along the shores are the gilded, glittering, flamelike temple-spires and even a few ugly business-buildings on a blazing-hot and dusty Main Street. Scattered about in compounds and paradises are the dwellings of princes, most of them in European style. There has been some trouble in adapting heavy Western styles to the swamps of that situation. His Majesty's throneroom palace of Italian marble, which cost millions of ticals, began to settle in the mud when it was half built. It rides now in an understructure of concrete, an ingenious boat which was put under it and supports it as long as the chugging engines keep

the water pumped out of the basement.

The marble palace of Rama V is a bad symbol, however, for the present interesting social and political condition of Siam. It is a triumph of modern science over natural difficulties. The attempt of the princely caste to conquer the swampy difficulties of modernizing an Oriental race is inspired by a nobler motive and is of tremendous importance.

In all imperialism, practised at home or abroad, there is a certain quality of precariousness that resembles riding on an elephant. The will and the intelligence of the rider are only uncertainly sufficient to keep several tons of slave from rebelling. A compromise as to benefits received for service given is always necessary. Imperialism is no longer frankly predatory. The Japanese, for example, give evidence of being honestly convinced that the Koreans are in need of Japanese guidance and culture; the Dutch exploit Java for its own sake; the English stoop to having official publicity-agents to tell the world how India gets on. The United States is even getting insensibly reconciled to being big brother (owner) to the Philippines. And it is all for their own good. We have completely forgotten the passions of twenty-five years ago when so notable a person as David Starr Jordan could print, then reprint in cooler blood, "The advances of civilization are wholly repugnant to the children of the tropics.'

The princes of Siam, although nearly all graduates of Oxford or Harvard or the Sorbonne, do not share this pessimism as they devote themselves to imposing the advances of civilization on their own tropical citizenry. The gap they have to span is enough to make any reformer dizzy. But they are conscious that what they are doing is for their own people, people of their own blood. I would not venture an opinion

VOL. 134- NO. 6

on the perplexed question of whether or not British imperialism is an activity of the British race for the benefit of other races. The difference is sufficient if one insists only on the fact that this interesting type of imperialism is imposed, not from the outside, but by natural, hereditary, and firmly entrenched rulers.

In Siam the domestic revolution began with King Mongkut. He was the beginner of modernism among the Thais in the middle of the nineteenth century, at about the time Japan emerged from seclusion. The third generation of princes is now struggling to make obstinate vision conquer the torpid fact. King Mongkut was kept from mounting his father's throne for twenty-seven years by the usurping intervention of a half brother. He sought safety and wisdom in that period in a Buddhist wat among the shaven-headed, yellow-robed monks. When he finally arrived, he had acquired a determination to modernize his kingdom. He spent his allotted time of power in building up foreign trade relations and encouraging public works. His succeeding son, King Chulalongkorn, set the present fashion by being trained carefully in Western ideas. Chulalongkorn's sons and his still more numerous grandsons have fixed and developed that policy.

Chulalongkorn faced for thirty-seven years of benign despotism a doubleedged problem. He had enemies within and without. The upper classes among his own people opposed his reforms because new laws defined new responsibilities and disturbed old prerogatives, while his frontiers, facing British expansion on one side and French on the other, were constantly endangered. But he abolished slavery, set up the first competent courts, brought the different regions of his territory closer together with better communications,

encouraged irrigation of waste lands and better methods of rice culture. He was the great political explorer and discoverer, acting on his predecessor's example and giving his ardent descendants a foundation worth building on. King Chulalongkorn's educational ideas have been recently systematized in a compulsory-education law which applies to the whole child-population, probably above two millions. Heretofore it has been chiefly in the wats, from the monks, that the boys, if ever, have learned to read. Girls and boys both are to have teachers now as fast as they can be provided. There are more than 15,000 Boy Scouts already enrolled and a Junior Red Cross organization is bringing Siamese children into touch with universal humanitarian ideas.

II

This work seems difficult in a huddle of large villages, a mixture of divine splendors and muddy squalor, like Bangkok. What can it mean outside the city, in paddy-field and jungle · even though every member of the populous royal family chooses his task in his boyhood and goes to the best school in the world for that particular profession and educates himself to do his special share? If you ride out from Bangkok on the state railway toward the North, to Ayuthia, for instance, where the rare visitor may go to see the ruins of ancient wonders, you pass through blue-and-silver swamps. The landscape looks very often as if a flood were just subsiding. In full ditches along the track float huge pink lotus flowers. The paddy-birds, all grace and pearly whiteness, fly in the yellow sunshine. Clumps of tiny thatched dwellings are lifted out of water on stilts. Under them in the ditches, and in the flooded rice-fields themselves, bulking everywhere are the clumsy, gray-black

buffaloes, domestic slaves and best friends of Siamese farmers. Banana trees grow around the huts, or anywhere they can catch hold, and their flat dark leaves, springing stemless from the ground, are like weeds in a fantastic dream. Thickets of bamboo and tall sugar-palms make a pleasant edge of green for the glistening wetness of the fields. In such entrancing scenes the peasants live, amid lotus flowers and thoughts of Buddha, water buffaloes, and muddy toil, malaria, mosquitoes, and the hookworm.

Modern West Europeans or Americans, the beings who represent the fine flower of the culture which Siamese royal reformers are trying to inculcate by ukase, are not exactly received with enthusiasm when they visit the paddyfields or the rare villages. The stranger, in order to see them as they are, must invade a village on a market day; he sees most if he ploughs up the middle of the Menam or one of its tributary streams through a river market. On both sides of him the long narrow boats are filled to the gunwales-which are almost awash in the constant movement with vegetables and fruits, pastries and sweetmeats, household utensils on which a suspiciously European trade-mark might be found, articles of clothing, straw sun-hats, and heaps of vermilion-colored paste. The paste is the preparation of lime that helps to give the betel-chewing habit its horrors of smell and expectoration.

The stranger, the representative of invading civilization, will probably receive simple grave curiosity from most of these disturbed merchants and their customers. But a modest and skeptical eye may notice more than one old woman,-her brown face wrinkled and drawn, her black hair standing up indignantly in a short pompadour above her low forehead, her shrunken shoulders and arms bare above her

« ElőzőTovább »