More railways and better roads would give a vastly
improved market, and might greatly enrich the peasants for a generation.
But in the long run, if the birth-rate is as great as is usually
supposed, no permanent cure for their poverty is possible while their
families continue to be so large. In China, Malthus's theory of
population, according to many writers, finds full scope.[35] If so, the
good done by any improvement of methods will lead to the survival of
more children, involving a greater subdivision of the land, and in the
end, a return to the same degree of poverty. Only education and a higher
standard of life can remove the fundamental cause of these evils. And
popular education, on a large scale, is of course impossible until there
is a better Government and an adequate revenue. Apart even from these
difficulties, there does not exist, as yet, a sufficient supply of
competent Chinese teachers for a system of universal elementary
education.
Apart from war, the impact of European civilization upon the traditional
life of China takes two forms, one commercial, the other intellectual.
Both depend upon the prestige of armaments; the Chinese would never have
opened either their ports to our trade or their minds to our ideas if we
had not defeated them in war. But the military beginning of our
intercourse with the Middle Kingdom has now receded into the background;
one is not conscious, in any class, of a strong hostility to foreigners
as such.
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