From the PREFACE.
I have called this book The Rising Temper of the East because in it I have attempted to show not only the awakening of a billion backward peoples of the Old World but to sound a note of warning to the white Christian East. I have tried to tell the human story of the rising winds of new freedom, the coming of new ideas, the birth of new hopes, the whole renaissance of the ancient East.
The white mans domination of the billion men of the East by force must cease. No longer can our culture and our civilization be carried to backward, ancient peoples on the vehicle of force. If there is a white mans burden it must in the future be borne on other shoulders than those that carry bayonets.
Everywhere throughout the East there are danger signals flashing their warning to the conquering West. The ruling, the domineering, the looting, must cease. If the West were wise it would shift its course now while there is still time. If it blindly stumbles on, ignoring these danger signals, the day will soon come when the work and the profits of four hundred years will be swept away.
There are many men, wise to the East, who today not only feel that this will happen but that once freed from the heel of the white West, and with the adoption of the science and culture of modern warfare, these billion men will seek race revenge, and that again black, brown and yellow hordes may swoop over white Europe and its great outposts of white culture.
But they fail to take cognizance of a great new power that is abroad in the world-the power of the universal social unrest that is working within the borders of each country. Labor leaders in Calcutta are dreaming exactly the same hopes as labor leaders in Manchester; social revolutionists in Tokyo are preaching the same doctrines as the revolutionists of Rome; organizers of the cotton spinners of Shanghai are using the same arguments as organizers among the cotton workers of Fall River.
The world unrest is world-wide unrest. No Great Wall of China can exclude it: no desert is too wide for it to cross, or no ocean too deep. New winds of freedom are blowing over every country and into every corner of the globe.
For the moment these winds in the East are winds of nationalism-self-determination-political freedom. They will bring an end to the physical, political rule of the white West over the East. And then they will change to winds of social unrest-and the energies and hopes of these billion men will be turned from white hate to internal struggles. There will be no time for conquest or revenge, no heart for wars of aggression.
This is the story that I would tell in these following chapters-stories of common peoples and their leaders struggling up toward the light. I have no theories to prove-no pet ideas to advance. I would set down between covers these pages of world news-facts of progress, garnered in years of travel and investigation.
I saw a great new East being born before my very eyes. It was a new East of hope emerging from a tired, ancient, hopeless world. It was a restless, moving world that I saw. Books have been written about The Unchanging East, but that is not what I found; it was a Changing East that greeted me everywhere....