第45章 THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN!NEED IT BE SO HEAVY?(3)
"So here you are at last!"he will explain."Why didn't you come before?We have been waiting for you."And he will send off dispatches felicitating his chief on having got that fortress off their hands,together with all the worry and expense it has been to them.When prisoners are taken you will console yourself with the reflection that the cost of feeding them for the future will have to be borne by the enemy.Captured cannon you will watch being trailed away with a sigh of relief.
"Confounded heavy things!"you will say to yourself."Thank goodness I've got rid of them.Let him have the fun of dragging them about these ghastly roads.See how he likes the job!"War is a ridiculous method of settling disputes.Anything that can tend to make its ridiculous aspect more apparent is to be welcomed.
The new school of military dispatch-writers may succeed in turning even the laughter of the mob against it.
The present trouble in the East would never have occurred but for the white man's enthusiasm for bearing other people's burdens.What we call the yellow danger is the fear that the yellow man may before long request us,so far as he is concerned,to put his particular burden down.It may occur to him that,seeing it is his property,he would just as soon carry it himself.A London policeman told me a story the other day that struck him as an example of Cockney humour under trying circumstances.But it may also serve as a fable.From a lonely street in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden,early one morning,the constable heard cries of "Stop thief!"shouted in a childish treble.He arrived on the scene just in time to collar a young hooligan,who,having snatched a basket of fruit from a small lad--a greengrocer's errand boy,as it turned out--was,with it,making tracks.The greengrocer's boy,between panting and tears,delivered his accusation.The hooligan regarded him with an expression of amazed indignation.
"What d'yer mean,stealing it?"exclaimed Mr.Hooligan."Why,I was carrying it for yer!"The white man has got into the way of "carrying"other people's burdens,and now it looks as if the yellow man were going to object to our carrying his any further.Maybe he is going to get nasty,and insist on carrying it himself.We call this "the yellow danger."A friend of mine--he is a man who in the street walks into lamp-posts,and apologises--sees rising from the East the dawn of a new day in the world's history.The yellow danger is to him a golden hope.He sees a race long stagnant,stretching its giant limbs with the first vague movements of returning life.He is a poor sort of patriot;he calls himself,I suppose,a white man,yet he shamelessly confesses he would rather see Asia's millions rise from the ruins of their ancient civilization to take their part in the future of humanity,than that half the population of the globe should remain bound in savagery for the pleasure and the profit of his own particular species.
He even goes so far as to think that the white man may have something to learn.The world has belonged to him now for some thousands of years.Has he done all with it that could have been done?Are his ideals the last word?
Not what the yellow man has absorbed from Europe,but what he is going to give Europe it is that interests my friend.He is watching the birth of a new force--an influence as yet unknown.He clings to the fond belief that new ideas,new formulae,to replace the old worn shibboleths,may,during these thousands of years,have been developing in those keen brains that behind the impressive yellow mask have been working so long in silence and in mystery.