Page images
PDF
EPUB

concentrates still more power in still fewer hands, and knocks individuality into a cocked hat. Certainly, in either case, the change wrought in a quarter-century is unmistakable. Ideas are crated and shipped F.O.B. in cargo lots.

21

What is not shipped to-day in cargo lots?

If we stop here to sum up, and to pull together the loose threads of different changes, we shall find nothing that is not in keeping with the times.

The pace of modern living changes. In a day when motor-cars are put together on a moving belt, when all New England "listens in" on a concert broadcast from one station, when the same moving picture plays at the same moment in a thousand towns, and collars enough for the whole State of Nevada are made in a single factory in a single town, it would be idle to look about for a press that is diversified, old-style, individualistic. The moral of these changes which we have been discussing is simply that the press is keeping step with its own generation.

Thus the press has become a bigbusiness enterprise. So has the baking of bread, the weaving of cloth, the making of dish-towels, horseshoes, ash-trays, moving-picture thrillers.

Thus again the press, with its enormous circulation, has managed to give its patrons more for their money's worth, particularly in the matter of foreign news. In like manner, as a result of wider markets and mass methods of production, we have seen dollars or cents cut from the cost of pianos, mouse-traps, handkerchiefs, and limousines.

We have seen in the press a tendency toward mergers. This same tendency, as exemplified in modern food trusts, tobacco trusts, and electric power trusts, is a natural consequence of an effort to produce in mass lots, cheaply-a conspicuous economic characteristic of the times.

We have seen in the press a tendency toward chain ownership. Who is unfamiliar, meantime, with the same tendency in other industries? Who does not know, in these days, the Tydol and Veedol signs, the United Cigar Stores, the red front of the A. & P.?

But

We have seen, finally, a tremendous increase in the amount of syndicated material of which the press makes use-rubber-stamped from one end of the country to the other. in the meantime we have also seen Spokane, Washington, and Augusta, Maine, insist on having the same brand of rubber heels, breakfast food, codfish, dollar watches, rustless fly-screens.

The good points of all this are plain enough: lower prices, better goods, and more efficient service.

The bad points, as far as the press itself is concerned, are likewise plain enough: canned ideas, lack of diversity and individuality, concentration of power-through mergers, chains, and syndicates-in fewer hands.

On the contents of the newspaper page itself, meantime, these forces exert a tug and pull. Circulations increase; it is more to the interest of the publisher to keep his news unprejudiced, lest, by coloring it with a partizan point of view, he scare off readers. The Associated Press, for instance, is a non-partizan organization with both Republican and Dem

ocratic clients. It must furnish both Republican and Democratic news. There was a howl from the Republican papers, in the last presidential campaign, because the Associated Press was furnishing more Democratic news than Republican news. Mr. Davis was making speeches, Mr. Coolidge was'not. Huge circulations and syndicate methods make for nonpartizanship, as far as news itself is concerned. But huge circulations also breed timidity on editorial pages. For the theory is, why tread on anybody's toes?

Conflicting tendencies arising from the same set of forces are at work here. The press is moving toward both nonpartizanship in news and regularity in opinion, toward both efficiency and conformity, toward both accuracy and centralized control. We have yet to see what the result will be. But it is interesting, meantime, to find editors and publishers meeting to debate these issues, meeting to discuss what honesty requires, what decency requires, where impartiality leaves off and partizanship begins. Within three years we have had the adoption of no less than eleven "codes of journalistic ethics,' by such organizations as the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Southern Newspaper Publishers' Association. These are the first codes of their kind ever to be written for and by the press.

22

[ocr errors]

In the lower half of the Atlantic Ocean, midway between the coast of South America and the tip of southern Africa, and about as far as it could be from both, lies the island of Tristan da Cunha. It is a small shelf of rock with a few thousand

souls aboard. The path of no transatlantic steamship service touches it. No cable hooks it to a mainland. News of the outside world arrives casually, and at rare intervals, when some tramp steamer touches at the island. Tristan da Cunha has no press, and needs no press. If the Wall Street market is collapsing, there is no way for any one in Tristan da Cunha to overtake his broker. If a quarrel between two powers is brewing in the East, it is no concern of an island without money, trade, or man

power.

An island community living in isolation from world affairs can afford to do without a press. The rest of the world would be hard hit if the motors stopped to-morrow morning. In the closely interlocked and immensely complicated modern world of finance, politics, and social intercourse, the press furnishes eyes with which we see and ears with which we listen. It is worth while to follow this press with sufficient attention to observe at least the chief outlines of its progress.

1900-McKinley was president, the "New York Times" printed a thin paper of twelve pages, radio despatches were unheard of, Mr. Hearst had not yet bought his first paper in the Middle West, bicycles were in vogue, news by cable came in nuggets, somebody was just organizing the Associated Press.

1926-there have been changes enough for any quarter-century, and among them these: a press more centrally controlled, more informative, more machine-made, more a necessary adjunct of the business of keeping pace with life, and much stronger in its striking-power, both for good and bad.

HANDS OFF

Resentment of a People Who Make up One Fourth of the Human Race

Th

HENRY W. BUNN

HE WHOLE world is in a phase of ferment; but nowhere else, not even in Russia, are the changes comparable in importance with the profound transformationsocial, economic, and political-now in process in China. The future of Homo sapiens will be largely determined by the results of that process; for the barriers are now definitely down, and in the interplay of influences the influences of China on the rest of the planet will be found not less important than the influences of the rest of the planet on China. The Chinese are one fourth of mankind; and it is probably correct to say that in virility and intelligence they are not inferior to any other people.

The anti-foreign agitation in China so luridly "featured" summer before last by the mob attacks on the foreign police in Shanghai, on the armory of the British volunteer defense corps at Han-kau, and on the British settlement (Sha-mien) at Canton, is a striking detail of the grand process of which I spoke, and an inquiry into its significance should be interesting.

Whenever a disturbance occurs in China, our journalists rub their eyes and solemnly announce the birth of Chinese nationalism; having forgotten, apparently, the ferocious outbreak of nationalism in 1900 (the

Boxer uprising), the fact that the Chinese Revolution of 1911 was an expression of nationalism, the national demonstration of wrath in 1919 on the occasion of President Wilson's Shantung decision, the nationalist movement which ousted the pro-Japanese government in 1920, and the succession of nation-wide anti-Japanese boycotts since 1919. Chinese nationalism is no mewling brat; it is a well grown lusty youth, the offspring of resentment of the encroachments on China by the powers and of determination to recover all that has been lost by those encroachments.

Never was resentment more just nor determination more resolved. The resentment does not proceed from fanatical racial pride or religious prejudice or the like, but from a correct interpretation of the history of China's relations with the powers.

I must assume the reader of this article to be familiar with that history-which is in the main a history of utterly selfish and unjustified encroachments by the powers-seizures of territory, impairments of sovereignty, larcenies in the form of indemnities or forced concessions, and so on. and so on. The one great power to be excepted from the general indictment is the United States of America.

The cynic may remark that the generosity of our policy toward China. has coincided with our material interest; but let that pass. To be sure, it may be urged that the West has compensated for such behavior by sending the Chinese a full set of the allotropes of Christianity. But so far as the ethical teachings of Christianity are concerned, that was sending coals to Newcastle. The Chinese, with none of our intolerance or bigotry, without our devastating doctrine of sin, without fears of hell or hopes of paradise, are the most virtuous people in the world. They are a race of Stoics without the Stoic gloom. The great tragedy of the West, that of neglected old age, is unknown to them; the opportunity of legitimate motherhood is denied to no woman. In other words, they are the most humane of peoples.

But, it might still be urged, we have opened to the Chinese the ineffable blessings of our civilization. To this it may be answered that for many centuries before 1277 the Chinese enjoyed the most refined civilization the world has known, and that though that civilization has sadly deteriorated, largely in consequence of the same condition of supersaturation of population which is now brutalizing a considerable part of Europe and before long will brutalize us in America, it is to-day in many essentials superior to any Western type.

Chinese nationalism has grown steadily since the nineties of the last century; but since the Boxer uprising of 1900, except for isolated acts of violence against Japanese individuals or Japanese property incident to the perennial anti-Japanese boycott

since 1919, anti-foreign feeling had not until the summer of 1925 expressed itself violently. Indeed, many thought that such feeling, except against Japan, had virtually ceased, its remnant sweetly extinguished by the Washington Conference. Because since the Washington Conference, which ended in February, 1922, the Japanese policy toward China has been conspicuously one of conciliation. Wish, Thought's respected parent, foresaw the passing in the near future of anti-Japanese feeling. The recent development, therefore, is one to startle and perplex.

Why this sudden surge of feeling and its violent and vicious expression, not against the Japanese only, but against other foreigners also, especially the British?

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

causes of grievance; but this was the damning and decisive one. The revolution was planned and set afoot in Kwangtung Province. The Kwangtungese (let us call them Cantonese from their chief city) are a peculiar breed-Mongoloids, but differentiated from other Chinese much as the Catalonians are differentiated from other Spaniards. Kwangtung is, you might say, the Chinese Catalonia, and Canton the Chinese Barcelona. The Cantonese are enterprising, ingenious and capable, radicals by temperament, restless, and incurably factious. They have a genius,

immemorially practised, for secret combination. Their peculiar aptitudes came into full play in the organization of the revolution, which, with its far-flung secret ramifications, was one of the marvels of human ingenuity. Sun Yat-sen, the organizer-in-chief, was a Cantonese and, despite his absurdities, one of the world's great men.

The Cantonese carried out the revolution because the main aim proposed by them commended itself to most Chinese (even to hard-shelled conservatives, however averse they might be to Cantonese leadership); that is, substitution for the ineffectual Manchu régime of a government capable of making head against the foreigner.

It is, however, one thing to organize revolution, but quite another to organize a national polity on the grandest of scales. For the former the gentlemen from the Pearl River were supremely qualified; for the latter, supremely unqualified. It is a pretty question; but I conclude that it was inevitable under the conditions that the empire should go and should be replaced by a republic. But it was not necessary that the new republic should be a slavish imitation of Western models, nor was it at all desirable. Obviously, "go slow" was the wise word; tact, horse-sense, humor, a spirit of conciliation and compromise, were the qualities most necessary to the statesmanship of reconstruction. The only kind of government that could realize the grand aim of the revolution would be one that should conciliate the willing loyalty of all Chinese (and please remember, in this connection, that the Shen-si man differs from the

Cantonese as much as the Dane differs from the Greek); that should reconcile the manifold diversities of the twenty-one provinces; and that should thus be able smoothly to coördinate the elements of an immense latent strength against foreign encroachments. The ancient social, economic, and political fabric must be tenderly treated; its sound and adaptable elements preserved and adapted. Old China must not be brusquely repudiated. The new constitutional machinery must be cautiously elaborated in closest harmony with what was best in the old arrangements. The Confucian system must not be abolished; merely, it must be reformed-those excrescences, extravagances, and grotesqueries, which no doubt are a burden to the shade of Confucius, removed. The new polity must be squarely based on the immemorial substructure of family, tribal, and communal institutions.

Thus the matter must have presented itself to any political philosopher. Not thus, however, did it appear to the Cantonese leaders. They were for repudiating Old China, for chucking Confucianism, for imposing a machinery of government, Western-model complete, as the panacea for China's woes-their fatuous notion of the strong government that should regenerate China and end foreign encroachments.

Being such men, holding such views, as I have shown, the radical leaders, though representing only a small minority of the nation, because they had developed the only effective political organization, the Kuo Mintang, enjoyed the first whack at the problem of constructing that strong

« PreviousContinue »