The awakening of Asia

Preface

This book has been held up by the Censor for more than two years. From my own standpoint, this has turned out to be an advantage, so far as its prospect of usefulness goes. Now, more than ever before, Europeans and Americans are prepared to consider the relations of the white races to Asiatics as demanding very careful study. That Japan should be fully represented at the Peace Conference, as one of the Great Powers of the world, and that China and India, with their joint population of some 700,000,000 people, should claim the right to make themselves heard at the same gathering of the nations, are events which cannot be overlooked. Asia, indeed, seems destined to play a still greater part in the future than she has played in the past. It is important, therefore, for the English-speaking peoples, to whom I primarily address myself, that they should recognise this at once. Self-determination and justice for all races cannot be confined to Europe or America.

When first I began my serious studies of the influence of the white man on the Far East, I was of the opinion that this influence had been almost wholly beneficial. The fact that close relations of my own had been connected with Eastern affairs for several generations naturally strengthened me in this view. It was only by degrees that I was forced to the conviction that European interference, European trade interests, European religious propaganda, European administration and European domination had been almost wholly harmful. Such reforms, that is to say, as we had introduced in the early days of our intercourse with the great civilised peoples of Asia counted for little or

vii

Preface nothing in comparison with the mischief we have wrought.

This is still a most unpopular idea of what the white man has achieved in the vast continent from which, in days gone by, Europe has learnt so much.

H. M. Hyndman.

13, Well Walk,

Hampstead,

London, N. W. 3.

February, ipip.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

1. Asia and Europe in the Past i

2. The Portuguese Pioneers 17

Chapter I

The purely arbitrary border-line, which is supposed to separate the continent of Europe from the continent of Asia, at times leads to the misapprehension that there is really such a break in territorial continuity. There is, of course, no recognised division between the two continents, either in the matter of geography or of race. The vast land areas distinguished by the names of Europe and Asia blend imperceptibly into one another : it is practically impossible to say where the one ends and the other begins.

Similarly with the numerous and widely-differing inhabitants. The dominant races of Europe are nearly all of Asiatic descent, deriving their blood from more or less recent waves of invasion and colonisation from the East. The Aryans of Great Britain and the Aryans of India, for example, much as they differ to-day, came originally from the same stock. This is but one instance of remote Asiatic origin. Europe, in fact, is a great conterminous Colony of Asia, which, in the course of thousands of years, has set up for itself. If Europe were deprived of all her peoples of ancient Asiatic origin, by some inconceivable process of unnatural selection, the greater part of Western civilisation would disappear.

We are indebted, however, for far more than our racial descent to our Eastern progenitors of the remote past.

Leave their descendants where they are to-day, but withdraw from them the basic discoveries and inventions which we owe to Asia, and the entire fabric of our existing social arrangements would collapse. Cotton, silk, porcelain, the mariner’s compass, gunpowder, algebra, geometry and astronomy, as well as much of our architecture and agriculture, with many of our fruits and flowers, came first into our daily lives from that continent. Every one of the great religions of the world, to say nothing of its philosophy, was vouchsafed to humanity from east of the Mediterranean Sea. Our own Asiatic religion, Christianity, is overlaid with so much of Greek metaphysic and Pagan ceremonial that the unlearned are apt to think of it as a purely European creed. Our most ardent and self-sacrificing missionaries of Christianity are often so little versed in the history of their own faith that they altogether fail to accommodate its tenets to the conceptions of the Asiatic peoples whom they strive to convert. The great efforts made from Europe to persuade Asiatics to embrace the creed accepted and adopted by the West have generally proved abortive, because the methods used to propagate this religion are entirely unsuited to the social conditions of the people among whom it has been preached.

For in spite of the lack of definite frontier, or clear racial distinctions, it is certain that the long severance of the two continents in thought, custom and social arrangements has so ordered matters that Asia has perhaps never been deeply affected by Europe in thought, custom or religion for any considerable length of time.

We are inclined nowadays to take more account of the European invasion of Asia than of the Asian invasion of Europe. Yet the influence of the East upon the West and the far less powerful influence of the West upon the East have been going on for many, many centuries. The successive waves of invasion and counter-invasion from Europe to Asia and from Asia to Europe are not easy to record accurately and intelligibly. Some of the Asiatic attacks upon Europe were no better than mere temporary raids giving no permanent results, and the same may be said of the greater portion of the European advances upon Asia. At some periods both attacks were going on simultaneously, and the direct military influence of Asia upon Europe has been much more recent and more powerful than we generally recognise. Even in the Great War, while tens of thousands of Asiatic Turks were fighting on the side of Germany, Japan threw in her lot with the Allies and has been fighting on their side against Germans in the East, while large forces from India have been engaged with the enemy in the West. But, in any survey of the mutual aggressions from the one side or other, there is nothing in the European attempts upon Asia, until the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, which can be compared for vigour, continuity and effect to the pressure exerted for a far longer period by Asiatics upon Europe.

i. Taking the European advances into Asia first, and dealing with them only, in order of date, there have been within historic times four great European invasions of Asia. The first was the wonderful campaign of Alexander of Macedon and his Greek armies. His forces marched unbeaten to the Indus and defeated Porus on the borders of Hindustan. As a military feat the whole expedition was a marvellous success. But, great as were his victories in the field and far-reaching his projects for founding an Eastern Empire, the fact remains that Alexander’s exploits and those of his lieutenants produced no permanent effect whatever upon the important countries over which they and their immediate descendants ruled. There is nothing to show, either in arms or in arts, in philosophy or in religion, that the Asiatics, who were compelled to submit for the time being, adopted Greek methods or absorbed Greek

The Awakening of Alsia

ideas. It was conquest without colonisation : victory without continuous influence. The wave of invasion receded and matters went on below the surface much as they did before.

2. Even the Roman mastery of a large portion of Asia scarcely influenced Eastern thought or Eastern customs at all. Yet this second great European invasion lasted for many centuries, and was maintained, alike when Rome was at the height of her power, and when her magnificent system of civil and military organisation was slowly tottering to its fall. Those long, long years of peaceful and successful rule failed to impress European conceptions, or European methods, upon the mass of the subject population, or even upon the educated classes as a whole. They remained essentially Asiatic, in all important respects, below the surface. The Pax Romana passed away and the Asiatics of centuries before became Asiatics again for centuries after. This was so, first and foremost and all through, from the days when the Parthians on the frontier routed Crassus and his army, to the period when the Byzantine Emperors were vainly struggling against the Arabs and the Turks.

The East bowed low before the blast In patient deep disdain ;

She heard the legions thunder past.

Then plunged in thought again.

The great legacy of administration, laws and jurisprudence which Rome bequeathed to Europe proved of little virtue or permanence in Asia. The splendid roads, harbours, water-conduits and other public works, -of which the ruins still bear witness to the genius and foresight of her Emperors and engineers, conduced to great material prosperity, as the wealth and luxury of the principal cities testified. But the whole elaborate system left the psychology, habits and beliefs of the people untouched. The Asiatic mind remained impervious to European thought. Asiatic customs, Asiatic tribal and family relations, Asiatic religions long survived Greek and Latin teaching and Greek and Latin cults. Nay, in all these departments of human activity, as in some others, Asia, even under Roman supremacy, had a continuous and peaceful influence upon her conquerors, at a period when all hope of shaking off the Roman yoke had been practically abandoned. In Rome itself and in other great cities of the Western Empire, Asiatic philosophy and Asiatic superstitions made way long before the Asiatic religion of Christianity spread its network from Palestine over the European provinces. At Constantinople imitations of Asiatic forms and ceremonies pervaded the whole Imperial Court.

3. Where the powerful organisation and efficiency of the Roman Empire had failed after hundreds of years of successful domination to produce a permanent effect, it was little likely that other disorderly and spasmodic efforts from the West would prevail. There seems, indeed, in spite of the continuity of territory and ancient community of race already referred to, an inscrutable difference between the whole conception of life and thought, customs and ideals which pervade Asia and that which is rooted in Europe. Except in rare instances of remarkable men, gifted with the highest powers of sympathy and imagination, it is doubtful whether the inhabitants of the two continents have ever understood one another.

The motley hosts who went forth under the banners of the Crusaders formed the third important invasion of Asia by Europe. Whatever may have been the hopes and intentions of the more capable statesmen and warriors of Europe we can now see that they were doomed to disappointment, even if the attacks upon “the infidel’’ had been far better organised and disciplined than in fact they were. At first, at any rate, the Crusades were nothing more than spasmodic religious raids, bred of hysteria and inspired by fanaticism. Later they may have had some conscious, or unconscious, economic motive; and unquestionably racial antagonism developed as a result of the long series of encounters with the Moslem armies. These freebooters of Christianity and marauders of feudalism, however, were as little animated by any great scheme of polity as were their opponents. Here and there the leaders carved out short-lived kingdoms for themselves and their followers, chiefly at the expense of the decadent Christian Empire of the East, whose outposts in Asia Minor and Palestine they went forth to defend.

But the Crusades, taken together, were no more than a fierce religious and warlike offensive against Mahound, with the hope of happiness hereafter and loot here, in the long-drawn defensive struggle against the steadily-advancing flood of Asiatic aggression. They made no lasting impression whatever upon “the East.” The Holy City of Christianity, Jerusalem, remained for centuries afterwards and continued till yesterday in the custody of those rival monotheists, the followers of Mohammed. Thus the third assault of Europe upon Asia produced even less effect than its two predecessors.

On the other hand, the permanent influence of Asiatic attacks upon and settlements in Europe may still be easily discerned. Even in Vienna, which for many a century was the bulwark of the West against Asiatic incursions, people say to-day : “Cross the Wien and you find yourself in Asia.” The Western limit of certain flora of the Asiatic steppes is drawn at a little hill on the outskirts of the Austrian capital.

4. The fourth European invasion of Asia has taken place in modern times. It is a much wider, more continuous and far more formidable assault than any of its predecessors. This great movement is still in progress, and we are by no means as yet in a position to judge of its final effect. French, English and Russians, following upon the early religious and commercial efforts of the Portuguese and Dutch, have carried on for three centuries a steady pressure of, first, religious propaganda, then mercantile persuasion, and lastly armed conquest at the expense of the inhabitants. The result is that Europeans have now seized and dominate more than half of the area and little less than half of the population of the great Eastern Continent, with its adjacent islands. I shall try later on to estimate the real significance and possible consequences of this the last great counter-stroke against the Asiatics. The fact that the country we speak of as Russia in Europe, which suffered most in old times from the inroads of barbarous hordes from Central Asia, to-day holds sway over the territories whence these tribes swept in succession to the West on their missions of massacre, is a strange instance of historic revenge for the horrors of the past.

Let us now turn back to the successive Asiatic invasions of Europe, so far as they are known to history. By the great inroads of the Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries Asia first penetrated in organised force into Central and Southern Europe. There were no armies then available capable of resisting their advance. From the first, these barbarians, in spite of their love for destruction and rapine, showed a disposition to settle in the territories they conquered. Attila himself established permanent camps in more than one country, and the Magyars of Hungary to-day owe their descent for the most part to the savage tribes who terrorised the decadent Roman Empire from Constantinople to Rome. These Asiatic Colonies, carved out of Roman Europe in its process of disintegration, tempted other Finno-Tatar tribes to follow their example. Successive waves of Avars, of the same great stock as the

Huns, came over in the sixth century and grew formidable not only to the Romans but to the Goths, who had been engaged in appropriating their share of the Empire, now fair booty for courageous invaders. But the Avars, after their complete defeat by another combination of Asiatic tribes, disappeared as a separate horde and were probably absorbed into the armies of their conquerors. They left no permanent mark on the map of Europe, though at one period they dominated, under their own name, the whole great district from the Don to the middle Danube, coming into contact with the armies of Charlemagne on their frontier.

From the fourth to the end of the seventh century Asiatic invasions went on almost without cessation, and it is matter of wonder that the Byzantine Empire, with all its dexterity, and fitful military prowess under great generals, was able to survive these attacks. At the end of the seventh century the ancestors of the present Bulgars, who formed part of one of the raids, settled in the region now occupied by their descendants. About the same time Finn- Ugrian tribes overran North-Western Russia and settled in Finland, perhaps dispossessing a Caucasian race. Thus, by the beginning of the ninth century, three Mongolian races, the Finns, the Huns and the Bulgars, numerically unimportant, but ethnologically valuable, had taken firm root in Europe.

But by far the most dangerous and continuous Asian assault upon European countries and their independence came with the rise of Mohammedanism. After three hundred years of almost perpetual suffering at the hands of uncivilised tribes, whose numbers appeared incalculable, the Byzantine Empire might have anticipated an ebb in the tide of Asiatic aggression, when the invaders from Persia were driven back. This was not to be. The success of the warlike creed of the great Arabian prophet led to another series of conquests and colonisations, which more than once threatened to subdue, or depopulate, the entire West. Yet Europe was now settling down to the establishment of a new system, and the organised armies which it developed were formidable enough to have made head against Moslem attack, had there been any community of aim among the European populations. As it was, the danger of overwhelming Asiatic success became very great. Time after time Christian chivalry of the finest quality, supported by men of courage and vigour fighting for their homes, were routed by monotheistic sons of the desert, or ruthless savages from the great steppes, who brought into the field a still fiercer fanaticism than that of the Catholics.

Even to-day, with all the details of his early life and subsequent career laid bare by men of our own race, who have studied the whole extraordinary story of the noble Arabian, it is no easy matter to comprehend the character, or to account for the marvellous success of Mohammed in the early part of the seventh century. Never claiming divine powers at any period of his mission, without a single miracle to his name, this very human prophet of God made his first converts in his own family, was able, after almost hopeless failure, to obtain control in his own aristocratic gens , and had such remarkable personal influence over all with whom he was brought into contact that, neither when a poverty-stricken and hunted fugitive, nor at the height of his prosperity, did he ever have to complain of treachery from those who had once embraced his faith. His confidence in himself, and in his inspiration from on high, was even greater when he was suffering under disappointment and defeat than when he was able to dictate his own terms to his conquered enemies. Mohammed died as he had lived, surrounded by his early followers, friends and votaries : his death as devoid of mystery as his life of disguise.

What followed upon his decease was in a sense as miraculous as the original triumph of his creed among his own kith and kin. For centuries before the coming of Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah, the Arabs had been the poor, proud, cruel, hard-living and hard-fighting men of the desert and its oases that they are to-day. If economic causes and desire for material domination had been their main incentives to war and conquest there was as much reason for their outbreak, and apparently many better chances of their success, before than after the advent of Mohammed.

Unlike their successors, the Mongols and Turks, who butchered their defeated enemies wholesale, the early followers of Mohammed spared the lives of all who accepted the new faith — a much more reasonable policy. Even now it is very difficult to explain how the Arabs achieved their remarkable conquests. At the time of Mohammed’s rise to fame and power they numbered, all told, barely 3,000,000 families. Thus they comprised no more than 15,000,000 persons, including women and children, and taking account of the entire population of the trading cities and seaports on the coast, as well as of the inhabitants of the fruitful oases. The population of the countries they invaded was not only far greater than this, but, in the first instance, much better organised for resistance than the Arabs wTere for attack. Yet they rose so far above their historic record in border warfare that they were able to defeat in fair fight the armies of Constantinople, which a few years before, under the command of the Emperor Heraclius himself, had utterly routed the Persians. Whatever may have been the actual causes of the Arab success, the results were amazing. The Caliphs who succeeded Mohammed were so well served by their generals and their troops, in spite of all internecine differences, that, within a century of the Hegira in a.d. 622, Europe was successfully attacked by the Arabs

Asia and Europe in the Past II

from tKe West as well as from the East. It was indeed a marvellous procession of victory.

Beginning with the conquest of Asia Minor and proceeding almost without a check to Egypt, which the Mohammedans have held and controlled till the present century, the victorious Arabs swept along the African shores of the Mediterranean, and mastered them so completely that they used them as a base to attack Spain; and Spain was not only conquered but colonised even more thoroughly than their other territories. In southern Spain, indeed, the Saracens proved that they had learned much from their defeated enemies, by introducing arts, science and medicine, which had fallen into disuse and even into contempt in Western Europe. The immediate descendants of the very same rough, ignorant soldiers, who had inflicted an irreparable loss upon humanity by burning what remained of the great library of Alexandria, were so changed in character that as the Moors of Spain they became celebrated alike for their civilisation and their learning. They were superior in every respect to the Europeans around them, and their capital, Cordoba, was long the most enlightened, best governed and most tolerant city in Europe. The ruins of their splendid architecture, decoration and irrigation works are the admiration of the West to-day.

The advance of the Saracens into France also was no chance raid. It was another deliberate attempt to conquer and dominate beyond the Pyrenees. But for a local rising of the subdued tribes in Africa, it is more than possible that the battle of Tours might have failed to head back the advance of the Asiatic armies. Even as it was, the victory of Charles Martel over the Emir Abdorrahman seemed by no means conclusive at the time ; since the Saracen armies pushed still farther forward into France in the following year. Nevertheless, the date of a.d. 722, the centenary of the flight of Mohammed from Mecca, may be taken as the time when the Arab conquerors had exhausted the full vigour of their attack on that side. But, within their own borders in Spain, the Asiatic invaders remained for generations a capable and cultured folk, who preserved for Europe in their writings not a little Greek knowledge and culture.

From a.d. 722 onwards for a thousand years Asia was steadily pressing upon Europe. With short intervals of repose, these invasions constitute one long record of rapine and slaughter. Tartars, Mongols, Turks spread death and desolation all round them for century after century. Russia, the Balkan Provinces, Hungary, Germany, Greece, Italy, Sicily, even the south of Ireland, all suffered from their incursions by land and by sea. The terror of them spread from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, and even countries far remote from their ravages felt unsafe from their attacks. Some of the devastated areas were occupied and colonised : more were again and again subjected to murder, rapine and desolation out of sheer love of bloodshed and horror. Robbery and greed of gain seem to have been secondary impulses. In the majority of cases even religious fervour played little part. The successive inroads were carried out by savage hordes, nominally Mohammedans, who treated the great Empires of India and China with the same ferocious barbarity that they inflicted upon Eastern Europe, and were really inspired by no creed more elevated than that of the North-American Indians.

The total numbers of these victorious assailants seem to have been small in comparison with the campaigns they undertook and the populations they crushed. As the wounded of their armies had little chance of recovery, owing to lack of medical aid, their constant victories seem the more surprising. So revolting is the whole long story of such human beasts of prey that we are apt to overlook the astonishing prowess they displayed in their long career of destruction.

Yet a careful survey of events may show that in Batu (a.d. 1235) the Mongols produced a general who was quite equal to Alexander, Hannibal, Marlborough or Napoleon, alike in the scope of his enterprises, the difficulties he surmounted and the success he achieved. The son of one of Genghis Khan’s captains, he was sent out to conquer everything within the reach of his arms by that stupendous marauder’s immediate successor. And he did it in the course of a few short years. Nothing arrested his conquering career. He swept right away from Central Asia to the very heart of Germany, with an army which, though large for those days, was certainly insufficient to account for the victories he won over a succession of brave enemies, who knew that defeat meant for them torture and death. He and his men made light of distance, and paid no attention either to climate or seasons of the year. There were no winter quarters for them. Natural obstacles, which, both before and since, have arrested the operations of great armies, equipped with all the appliances of modern science, were speedily overcome by this extraordinary commander. He made no more account of the descendants of the Scourge of God, who had long settled in Hungary, than he did of the Teutonic Knights who came to their rescue. Wholesale butchery befell them both.

Tradition recounts that Batu used cannon and gunpowder, and that he had highly-skilled Chinese engineers in his train, during this series of campaigns. Whether that was so or not, it is indisputable that he and his forces were so uniformly successful, and won victories on such a vast scale against opponents who might claim superior training, education and discipline, that the Tartars seemed more formidable foes of the growing European civilisation than were the Arabs five hundred years before, or the Turks at the same time and two and three hundred years later. Batu and his invincible Mongols constituted, in fact, only one important incident in that long succession of ferocious Tartar assaults which threw back the development of Eastern Europe for generations, if not for centuries. Batu’s wonderful strategy and tactics have not received as much attention from historians or students of military affairs as might have been expected. This is probably because he was an Asiatic barbarian, and played no obvious part in Western European affairs. Unlike his remote kinsmen, Kublai Khan in China and Baber in India, he did not combine statesmanship with military powers of the first order, and bequeathed no organised empire to his descendants. Batu indeed was not nearly so successful in this respect as the Saracens of Spain, or the Turks of Adrianople and Constantinople. Yet that an Asiatic commander, not possessed of overwhelming numbers, should have carried all before him in Eastern Europe during the thirteenth century is worth consideration in this twentieth century, when, within twenty years, another Asiatic power, of much the same race and of very recent growth, defeated one of the great military Empires of the West.

For many generations after Batu and his Mongols were gathered to their fathers and fellow-butchers, the Tartar tribes who succeeded them carried on the like depredations. In 1382 the cities of the Ukraine and Northern Russia were sacked and burned by them one after the other. In 1389 another rush forward occurred under the great Timour the Tartar. In 1558 again Moscow, Kiev and other towns were given over to fire and sword, while every sort of cruelty and horror was inflicted upon their ruined inhabitants. The invaders still seemed to have no idea of using the subjugated population to produce wealth for themselves. Massacre and torture for the sake of massacre and torture seemed sufficient incentive for them. And these oncoming tidal waves of human conquest and desolation had all the appearance of irresistible natural phenomena. If the marauders lacked great captains in the later raids, smaller leaders readily filled their place, and the hordes themselves made up by their persistence and daring for their lack of ability. Even so late as 1650, a great Tartar irruption laid waste Eastern Europe. If the remembrance of such events, which went far to destroy an entire civilisation among the Ruthenians and Little Russians, has faded in the West, which suffered only from the Tartar terror at a distance, this is not so in Eastern Europe, where the constant presence of the Turks to the South has served to remind the inhabitants of what their forefathers underwent at the hands of still more ferocious enemies than these.

The success of the Turks, though much slower, was far more enduring in its results than that of their cousins the Tartars and Mongols in the North. Though their first serious European campaign only began in 1341, they were soon firmly settled at Adrianople, and “the crowning mercy” of Kossovo for the Moslem, which the descendants of the unfortunate Serbs were of late sadly recalling, was fought in 1389. Then the Slavs were remorselessly crushed, and remained for centuries under Turkish rule, while their country was subject to Turkish colonisation. We English may talk of the high qualities which the Turks as soldiers unquestionably possess, but we have never undergone their rule. Turks and goats together, say Eastern Europeans, will reduce the richest country to ruin. However this may be, their domination of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Egypt helped to divert the route of European commerce, as their conquest of the African littoral threatened to give them permanent control of the Mediterranean.

After the capture of Constantinople in 1453 Asiatics in Europe became for centuries a dreaded factor in European politics. With the Turk in Sicily and a conquering army within a few days’ march of Rome, while Greece was completely overwhelmed and Austria and Hungary successfully invaded, the liberties of the West seemed once more imperilled by Asiatic greed and ferocity. Yet even the near approach of danger and ruin failed to convince European States of the necessity for combination against their common enemy.