ABSTRACT
As a result of this survey of the present condition of the principal countries of the Far East, I find myself face to face with one of the fundamental issues of modern civilisation. The East, it is clear to me, has developed types of life having beauties and advantages which we have lost in the modern West. The great mass of the people live, as they always have lived, on the soil. They have a hard life, a life exposed to great physical disasters, a life at the mercy of nature. But also, it is a life in nature; and though the people may not be consciously alive to the beauties and sublimities of the natural world, I cannot doubt that they are aware of them and derive from them, if not happiness, at least a certain dignity and breadth of outlook. We ought not, on this point, to generalise from our own agricultural labourers, and infer a necessary degradation as the consequence of life on the soil. It is the peasants we have destroyed, those who lived on the land when England was “merry England,” in whom we ought to seek an analogy for the life of Oriental peasants; and these, I suspect, have a solidity, a sense of the fundamental realities, and the possibility of a really religious outlook on the world which it will be hard to parallel among city dwellers.
