Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/96

weapons than their bows and spears. Yet not once did these badly armed and ignorant men evince cowardice. The English commanders always testified to their gallantry, even when hopeless, and to their devotion to duty when most other people would have thought only of their personal safety. Their defeat under all the circumstances was inevitable, but they knew how to save their reputation for courage and to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that men who would fight so manfully when victory was practically impossible could never be permanently conquered, and only needed the proper arms and knowledge to hold their own against Europeans."

Corruption and nepotism had prevailed among the Chinese during tens of cycles preceding the above events just as widely and forcibly as they prevailed during the few decades that separated those events from the wars of 1894-1895 and 1900. No evil or paralysing inferences operative now were inoperative then, and to attribute to innate defects of the race the military incompetence shown in recent wars is to forget the high qualities displayed in earlier fights. It must be assumed that the Chinese are just as capable of making good soldiers to-day as they were sixty years ago, and that the reasons of their latest failures are to be sought in accidents of their system or in altered methods of warfare rather than in the nature of the men.

Two other factors of demoralisation are cited, and if they are correct, each of them acting alone would account for much of the trouble,