Persuasion has accomplished nothing. Nothing, for the reason that for every convert it has made, more than a thousand pagans have been born to fill up his place. If the missionary trade had been a commercial enterprise, its sane and practical board of directors would have seen, two centuries ago, that there was no profit in it and no profit possible to it on this side of eternity, and they would have gone into liquidation, paid ha’pence in the pound, and taken in their sign; reporting to the stockholders that “the balance of trade being 1,000 to 1 against us we have considered it wise to retire from the enterprise and apply our energies to something worth while.” But mission-propagators are apparently not open to (business) logic. They have paid out millions upon millions of pounds to add an almost invisible Christian fringe around the globe’s massed heathen billions; they are aware that the body of the fabric increases in bulk a thousand times faster than the fringe; they know that a convert is by far the most expensive bric-a-brac in commerce; they know that if he is a grown-up convert he is as a rule a poor thing and always a traitor, and was not worth harvesting at any figure. And yet they are quite well satisfied with the triumphs they are achieving. That is the name they usually call it by.

Still, if it amuses the missionary and his backer, should the man in the street object? Is it any of his affair? Is he in any way affected by it? Does it do him any harm? It is a question worth considering. Let him put himself in the pagan’s place, and examine some of the facts by that light. Wherever the missionary goes he not only proclaims that his religion is the best one, but that it is a true one while his hearer’s religion is a false one; that the pagan’s gods are inventions of the imagination; that the things and the names which are sacred to him are not worthy of his reverence; that his fathers are all in hell, and the dead darlings of his nursery also, because the word which saves had not been brought to them; that he must now desert his ancient religion and give allegiance to the new one or he will follow his fathers and his lost darlings to the eternal fires. The missionary must teach these things, for he has his orders; and there is no trick of language, there is no art of words, that can so phrase them that they are not an insult. In Fiji the old pagan said, “And all I loved are in hell? I am not a dog; I will follow them.” That a missionary ever survives his first exhibition of his samples shows that there is something very fine and patient and noble about the pagan. It seems a pity to ever missionary it out of him. When a French nun in Hong Kong proposed to send to France for money wherewith to establish an asylum for fatherless little foundlings where they might be fatted up physically and spiritually, the authorities said, “How kind of you to think of us—are you out of foundlings at home?” The missionary has no wish to be an insulter, but how is he to help it? All his propositions are insults, word them as he may. In an ignorant and bigoted Chinese village the mere sight of him is an insult—particularly when he is there by grace of foreign force. Two hundred years ago the Chinese hated him, ordered him away, and slaughtered him when he tarried. They have hated him ever since, and henceforth they will hate him more than ever.

And have they not reason for it? When a white man there kills a Chinaman is he dealt with more severely than he would be in Europe? No. When a missionary is killed by a Chinaman, are the Chinese blind to the difference in results? When an English missionary was lately killed there in a village, a British official visited the place and arranged the punishments himself—exacted them and secured them: a couple of beheadings; several sentences to prison, one of them for ten years; a heavy fine; and the village had to put up a monument and also build a Christian chapel to remember the missionary by. If we added fines and monuments and memorial churches to murder-penalties at home—but we don’t; and we do not add them in China except when it is a missionary that is killed. And then they are insults, and they rankle in the Chinese breast, and bring us no advantage, moral, political, or commercial. But they move the Chinaman to ponder dubiously upon the meek and forgiving religion and its pet child the gilded and feathered “civilization” which the Christian Governments are so anxious to confer upon him.

Two years ago the Chinese killed a German missionary. The German Government sent in its bill promptly, and it was paid: £40,000 cash; a new Christian church; and a “lease” of sea-bordered territory twelve miles deep. Would Germany have ventured to charge so much if the missionary had been killed in Russia or England? And does not this question rise in the Chinaman’s mind and move him to anger? Would the charge have been made for any German but a missionary? If there had been no missionaries in China would there be any trouble there to-day? I believe not. Commercial foreigners get along well enough with the Chinese. But the missionary has always been a danger, and has made trouble more than once. He was Germany’s happy opportunity: when he is not making trouble himself we perceive that he can be a calamitous pretext for it. He must be held responsible for the present condition of things in China and for the massacre of the Ministers. We are told that Germany’s act was the thing which finally broke down the Chinaman’s patience and started the present upheaval. If that missionary had only been a German sailor he would have been settled for on terms which would have added no affronting memorial churches to China and bred no bad blood.

He has surpassed all his former mischiefs this time. He has loaded vast China onto the Concert of Christian Birds of Prey; and they were glad, smelling carrion; but they have lit and are astonished, finding the carcase alive. And it may remain alive—Europe cannot tell, yet. If the Concert cannot agree, they cannot appoint a Generalissimo; without a Generalissimo they can have plenty of scattered picnics, but no general holiday excursion in China.