ASIA 
 
 1,- LIGHTS 
 
 iTHE 
 SEAS 
 
 STIDGE^ 
 
5^r 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS 
 FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 WILLIAM L. STIDGER 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 DS 508.SS5 
 
 Flash-lights *rom„*'5S,,,S?,y|f,|I,,S«iiii^^ 
 
 3 1924 023 279 882 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023279882 
 

 MT. TAISHAN, CHIH-A, SAID TO BE THE OLDEST WORSHIPPING 
 PLACE OX EAETH. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS 
 
 FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 BY I 
 
 WILLIAM L. STIDGER 
 
 AXJTHOR OF "standing ROOM ONLY," "STAR 
 DUST FROM THE DUGOUTS," "OUTDOOR 
 MEN AND MINDS," ETC. ,, ,,: 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 ^■'i BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR 
 
 ^- 
 
 '% 
 
 
 
 T 
 
 NEW ^S/r YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 

 
 COPYRIGHT, 1921, 
 BT GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 cy 
 
DEDICATED TO 
 
 MARY I. SCOTT 
 
 A WOMAN FRIEND 
 
 WHO PUSHED BACK THE HORIZONS OF 
 
 THE WORLD AND LED ME TO THE 
 
 BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL THAT 
 
 HAS NO end: THE TRAIL OF 
 
 DREAMS AND TRAVEL 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 By bishop FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 
 
 f' I^HE Rev. William L. Stidger is one of 
 -*- the most thoroughly alive men in the min- 
 istry today. He sees quickly, reacts instan- 
 taneously, and knows how to bring others to a 
 like alertness of mental and spiritual seizure. If it 
 be said of him that he is impressionistic it must be 
 remembered that the impressions are made on 
 a mind of sound purpose and communicated to 
 others for the sake of the truth behind the im- 
 pression. His narratives of travel do not belong 
 in the g^ide-book category or in that of the scien^ 
 tific geography. But if you wish to know what 
 it would be like to visit yourself the countries 
 described, the reading of Mr. Stidger's sketches 
 will help you. If it be said that what one after 
 all is getting is the Stidger view, it must not be 
 forgotten that the Stidger view is marvellously 
 vital and enkindling. The Stidger vitality is 
 bracing and health-giving. It is a tonic for all 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 of us who are getting a little old and sluggish. 
 The contagion of youth and energy are in this 
 book : it will reach and stir all who read. 
 
 Francis J. McConnell 
 Fittsburgh, Pa. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 THAT vast stretch of opal islands ; jade con- 
 tinents; sapphire seas of strange sunsets; 
 mysterious masses of brown-skinned human- 
 ity; brown-eyed, full-breasted, full-lipped and 
 full-hipped women ; which we call the Orient, can 
 only be caught by the photographer's art in flash- 
 light pictures. 
 
 It is like a photograph taken in the night. It 
 cannot be clear cut. It cannot have clean outlines. 
 It can only be a blurred mass of humanity with 
 burdens on their shoulders ; humanity bent to the 
 ground ; creaking carts ; weary-eyed children and 
 women; moving, moving, moving; like phantom 
 shadow-shapes; in and out; one great maze 
 through the majestic ages ; one confused history 
 of the ancient past ; emerging; but not yet out into 
 the sunlight ! 
 
 Such masses of humanity ; such dim, uncertain 
 origins of unfathered races; these can only be 
 caught and seen as through a glass darkly. 
 
 Paul Hutchinson, my friend, in "The Atlantic 
 Monthly" says of China what is true of the whole 
 Orient : 
 
X FOREWORD 
 
 "In this vast stretch of country, with its poor com- 
 munications, we can only know in part. When one sets 
 out to generahze he does so at his own peril. The only 
 consolation is that it is almost impossible to disprove any 
 statement; for, however fantastical, it is probably in 
 accord with the facts in some part of the land." 
 
 The facts, fancies, and fallacies of this book 
 are gleaned from the rovings and ramblings of 
 a solid year of over fifty-five thousand miles of 
 travel; through ten separate countries: Japan, 
 Korea, China, the Philippine Islands, French 
 Indo-China, the Malay States, Borneo, Java, 
 Sumatra and the Hawaiian Islands ; across seven 
 seas: the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan, the 
 North China Sea, the Yellow Sea, the South 
 China Sea, the Malacca Straits, and the Sea of 
 Java ; after visiting five wild and primitive tribes : 
 the Ainu Indians of Japan, the Igorrotes of the 
 Philippines, the Negritos of the same islands ; the 
 Dyaks of Borneo, and the Battaks of Sumatra; 
 face to face by night and day with new races, new 
 faces, new problems, new aspirations, new ways 
 of doing things, new ways of living, new evils, 
 new sins, new cruelties, new fears, new degrada- 
 tions; new hopes, new days, new ways, new na- 
 tions arising; new gods, and a new God! 
 
 When one comes back from such a trip, having 
 fortified himself with the reading of many books 
 written about these far lands, in addition to his 
 
FOREWORD xi 
 
 travel, one still has the profound conviction that, 
 after all is said, done, and thought out, the only- 
 honest way to picture these vast stretches of land 
 and humanity is to confess that all is in motion ; 
 like a great mass of bees in a hive,, one on top of 
 the other, busy at buzzing, buying, selling, living, 
 dying, climbing, achieving; groping in the dark; 
 moving upward by an unerring instinct toward 
 the light. 
 
 At nights I cannot sleep for thinking about that 
 weird, dim, misty panorama of fleeting, flashing 
 pictures; those thousands of Javanese that I saw 
 down in Sourabaya, who have never known what 
 it means to have a home; who sleep in doorways 
 by night, and along the river banks; where 
 mothers give birth to children, who in turn live 
 and die out under the open sky. Nor can I forget 
 that animal-like beggar in Canton who dug into 
 a gutter for his food; or those hideous beggars, 
 by winter along the railway in Shantung; or the 
 naked one-year-old child covered with sores 
 which a beggar woman in the Chinese section of 
 Shanghai held to her own naked breast. Those 
 pictures and a thousand others abide. 
 
 One has the feeling that if he could go back, 
 again, and again, and again to these far shores, 
 and live with these peoples and die with them, 
 then he would begin faintly to understand what 
 it all means and where it is all headed. 
 
xii FOREWORD 
 
 And this author, for one, is honest in saying 
 that, in spite of careful investigation, in spite of 
 extensive travel and a sympathetic heart, he sees 
 but dimly. The very glory of it all, the age of it 
 all, the wonder of it all, the mysterious beauty and 
 thrill of it all; the thrill of these masses of 
 humanity, their infinite possibilities for future 
 greatness; like a great blinding flash of glory, 
 dims one's eyes for a time. 
 
 But, now, that he has, through quiet medita- 
 tion and perspective, had a chance to develop the 
 films of thought, he finds that he has brought 
 back home pictures that one ought not to keep to 
 one's self; especially in this day, when, what hap- 
 pens to Asia is so largely to determine what hap- 
 pens to America. 
 
 So, out of the dark room, where they have 
 been developing for a year, and out of the dim 
 shadows of that mysterious land whence they 
 came, they are printed and at the bottom of each 
 picture shall be written the humble words : 
 
 "Flash-Lights from the Seven Seas" 
 
 William L. Stidger. 
 Detroit, Michigan. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction by Bishop Francis J. 
 
 McCoNNELL vii 
 
 Foreword ix 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I Flash-Lights of Flame 19 
 
 II Flash-Lights Physical 33 
 
 III Flash-Lights of Faith 49 
 
 IV Flash-Lights of Fear 63 
 
 V Flash-Lights of Frightfulness . . - . 79 
 
 VI Feminine Flash-Lights loi 
 
 VII Flash-Lights of Fun 123 
 
 VIII Flash-Lights of Freedom 145 
 
 IX Flash-Lights of Failure 165 
 
 X Flash-Lights of Friendship . . . .189 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Mt. Taishan, the Oldest Worshipping Place 
 
 ON Earth Frontispiece 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Walled City of Manila 48 
 
 Beautiful Filipino Girls 48 
 
 Korean Girls with American Ideals and Train- 
 ing 49 
 
 Stepping Aside in Korea 49 
 
 Confucius Tomb at Chufu, China .... 64 
 
 Ruin of the Ming Tombs 64 
 
 Grinding Rice in China 65 
 
 A Camel Train Entering Peking 65 
 
 The Temple of Heaven, Peking 112 
 
 A Beautiful Thirteen-Story Pagoda Near 
 
 Peking iia 
 
 A Wayside Temple and Shrine 113 
 
 A Sunrise Silhouette, Java 113 
 
 Old Bromo Volcano, Java 128 
 
 A Side View of Beautiful Boroboedoer, Java . 128 
 
 Naked and Otherwise 129 
 
 A Dog Market 129 
 
 XV 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS 
 FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS 
 FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME 
 
 FIRE ! Fire ! Fire everywhere ! 
 Fire in the sky, fire on the sea,, fire on the 
 ships, fire in the flowers,, fire in the trees of the 
 forest; fire in the Poinsetta bushes which flash 
 their red flames from every yard and jungle. 
 
 In the tropical lands flowers do not burst into 
 blossom; they burst into flame. Great bushes of 
 flaming Poinsetta, as large as American lilac 
 bushes, burst into flame over night in Manila. 
 
 That great tree, as large as an Oak, which they 
 call "The Flame of the Forest," looks like a tree 
 on fire with flowers. One will roam the world 
 over and see nothing more beautiful than this 
 great tree which looks like a massive umbrella of 
 solid flame. 
 
 Every flower in the Orient seems to be a crim- 
 son flower. The tropical heat of the Philippines,, 
 Java, Borneo, Sumatra, the Malay States and 
 
 19 
 
20 FLASH-LIGKTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 India's far reaches; with beautiful Ceylon, and 
 Burma; seems to give birth to crimson child- 
 flowers. 
 
 The sunsets burst into bloom, as well as the 
 flowers. There is no region on earth where sun- 
 sets flare into birth and die in a flash-light of 
 glory and beauty like they do in the regions of 
 the South China Sea. For months at a stretch, 
 every night, without a break, the most wildly 
 gorgeous, flaming, flaring, flashing crimson sun- 
 sets crown the glory of the days. 
 
 I have been interested in catching pictures of 
 sunsets all over the world. I have caught hun- 
 dreds of sunsets with the Graflex; and other 
 hundreds have I captured with a Corona., just as 
 they occurred; and I have never seen a spot on 
 earth where the sunsets were such glorious out- 
 bursts of crimson and golden beauty as across 
 the circling shores of Manila Bay. 
 
 Night after night I have sat in that ancient 
 city and watched these tumultuous, tumbling, 
 Turner-like flashes of color. 
 
 One night the sky was flame from sea to 
 zenith across Manila Bay. It was like a great 
 Flame of the Forest tree in full bloom. Against 
 this sky of flaming sunset-clouds, hundreds of 
 ships, anchored in the bay, lit their lesser crimson 
 lights; while., now and then, a battleship which 
 was signaling to another ship, flashed its message 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME 21 
 
 of light against the fading glow of glory in the 
 crimson sunset. 
 
 "It is light talking unto light ; flash unto flash ; 
 crimson unto crimson!" said a friend who sat 
 with me looking out across that beautiful bay. 
 
 The picture of that flaming sunset, with the 
 great vessels silhouetted against it ; with the little 
 lights on the ships, running in parallel rows ; and 
 the flashing lights of signals from the masts of 
 the battleship will never die in one's memory. 
 
 It was a quiet, peaceful scene. 
 
 But suddenly, like a mighty volcano a burst 
 of flame swept into the air at the mouth of the 
 Pasig River. It leapt into the sky and lighted 
 up the entire harbor in a great conflagration. 
 The little ships stood out, silhouetted against that 
 great flaming oil tanker. 
 
 "It's a ship on fire !" Otto exclaimed. 
 
 "Let's go and see it !" I added. 
 
 Then we were off for the mouth of the Pasig 
 which was not far away. 
 
 There we saw the most spectacular fire I have 
 ever seen. A great oil tanker full of Cocoanut- 
 oil had burst into flame, trapping thirty men in its 
 awful furnace. Its gaunt masts stood out like 
 toppling tree skeletons from a forest fire against 
 the now deepening might; made vivid and livid by 
 the bursting flames that leapt higher and higher 
 
gg FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 with each successive explosion from a tank of 
 gasoline or oil. 
 
 I got out my Graflex and caught several pic- 
 tures of this flash-light of flame,, but none that 
 will be as vivid, as lurid, or as lasting as the flash- 
 light that was etched into the film of my memory. 
 
 The next flash-light of flame came bursting out 
 of midnight darkness on the island of Java. 
 
 We were bound for old Bromo., that giant vol- 
 cano of Java. We had started at midnight and it 
 would take us until daylight to reach the crater- 
 brink of this majestic mountain of fire. 
 
 White flashes of light, leapt from Bromo at 
 frequent intervals all night long as we traveled on 
 ponies through the tropical jungle trail, upward, 
 and onward to the brink of that pit of hell. 
 
 White flashes of light leapt from Bromo at 
 the narrow rail. They called them "Night- 
 Blooming Lilies," and sure enough they blanketed 
 the rugged pathway that night like so many tiny 
 white Fairies. Indeed there was something 
 beautifully weird in their white wonder against 
 the night. They looked like frail,, earth-angels 
 playing in the star-light, sending out a sweet 
 odor which mingled strangely with the odor of 
 sulphur from the volcano. 
 
 And back of all this was the background of 
 that awful, thundering, rumbling and grumbling 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME 23 
 
 volcano as somber as suicide. Strangely weird 
 flashes lighted the mountains for miles around. 
 
 "It looks like heat lightning back at home," said 
 an American, 
 
 "Only the flashes are more vivid!" said an- 
 other member of the party. 
 
 Those flashes of light from the inner fires of 
 the earth,, bursting from the fissures of restless 
 volcano Bromo shall ever remain, like some 
 strange glimpse of a new Inferno. 
 
 Volcanic Merapi, another belching furnace of 
 Java, gave me a picture of a flash-light of flame. 
 
 The night that we stayed up on the old temple 
 of Boroboedoer, Merapi was unusually active; 
 and now and then its flashes of flame lighted up 
 the whole beautiful valley between the temple and 
 the mountain. 
 
 At each flash of fire,, the tall Bamboo and 
 Cocoanut trees loomed like graceful Javanese 
 women in the midst of far-reaching, green, rice 
 paddies; while two rivers that met below us, 
 wound under that light like two silver threads in 
 the night. 
 
 Once, when an unusually heavy flash came 
 from Merapi,, we saw below us a beautiful Java- 
 nese girl clasped in the arms of her brown lover. 
 Each seemed to be stark naked as they stood 
 under a Cocoanut tree like Rodin bronzes. 
 
 It was this beautiful girl's voice that we later 
 
24 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 heard singing to her lover a Javanese love song 
 in the tropical night. 
 
 This, I take it, was the Flame of Love; a flame 
 which lights up the world forever; everywhere 
 her devotees, clothed or naked, are the same ; for- 
 ever and a day; be it on the streets of Broadway; 
 along the lanes of the Berkshire Hills of New 
 England ; up the rugged trails of the Sierras ; or 
 along the quiet, tree-lined streets of an American 
 village. It is a flame; this business of love; a 
 flame which,, flashing by day and night, lights the 
 world to a new glory. 
 
 One night the missionaries in Korea saw flames 
 bursting out against the hills. 
 
 "What is it?" they cried, filled with fear. 
 
 "The Japanese are burning the Korean vil- 
 lages!" said one who knew. 
 
 All night long the villages burned and all 
 night long the people were murdered. Runners 
 brought news to the hillsides of Seoul where 
 anxious, broken-hearted American missionaries 
 waited. 
 
 "One, two, three, four, five; ten, fifteen, twen- 
 ty; thirty, forty, fifty; a hundred, two hundred, 
 three hundred; villages are burning," so came 
 the messages. 
 
 The entire peninsula was lighted as with a 
 great holocaust. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME 25 
 
 It is said that the Hght could be seen from 
 Fusan itself, a hundred miles away. 
 
 "From our village it looked like a light over a 
 great American steel-mill city," said a missionary 
 to me. 
 
 And when the morning came, the flames were 
 still leaping high against the crimson sky of 
 dawn. 
 
 For days this burning of villages continued. 
 Belgium never saw more ruthless flame and fire; 
 set by sterner souls ; or harder hearts ! 
 
 That was two years ago. 
 
 The villages are charred ruins now. Some of 
 them have never been rebuilt. The murdered 
 people of these villages have gone back to dust. 
 
 The Japanese think that the fires are out. 
 They thought, when the flames of those burning 
 villages ceased leaping into the skies ; and at last 
 were but smouldering embers ; that the flames had 
 died. But the Japanese were wrong, for on that 
 very day, the Flames of Freedom began to burn 
 in Korean hearts and souls ! And from that day 
 to this ; those flames have been rising higher and 
 higher. These are Flash-Lights of Flame that, 
 as the years go by; mount, like bacon lights of 
 hope on Korean hills, to light the marching dawn 
 of Korean Independence. 
 
26 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 A beautiful Korean custom that used to be; 
 flashes a flame of fire across the screen of his- 
 tory. 
 
 In the old days the Korean Emperor used to 
 have signals of fire flashed from hill to hill run- 
 ning clear from the Chinese border to Seoul, the 
 Korean capital. This signal indicated that all 
 was well along the borders and that there was no 
 danger of a Chinese invasion from the north. 
 
 Korea has always been a bone of contention be- 
 tween China, Russia and Japan. Consequently 
 this little peninsula has always walked on uneasy 
 paths, which is ever the fate of a buflFer state. 
 
 Never did a Korean Emperor go to sleep in 
 peace until he looked out and saw that the signal 
 fires burned on the beautiful mountain peaks sur- 
 rounding the city of Seoul; fires indicating that 
 the borders were safe that night and that inmates 
 of the palace might rest in peace and security. 
 
 "It must have been a beautiful sight to have 
 seen the light flashing on the mountain peak there 
 to the north" I said to an eighty-year old Korean 
 patriarch. 
 
 "It meant peace for the night," he answered. 
 "It was beautiful. I often long to see those fires 
 of old burning again on yonder mountain." 
 
 He said this with a dramatic wave of his stately 
 white robed arm. 
 
 "The sunsets still flame from that western 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME 27 
 
 mountain peak,, overlooking your city beautiful !" 
 I said with a smile. 
 
 "Yes, the sunsets still flame behind that peak," 
 he responded with a far-away look in his aged 
 eyes. 
 
 "Perhaps the good Christian God is lighting 
 the fires for you?" I suggested. 
 
 "Yes, He, the good Christian God; is still light- 
 ing the fires for us ; but they are fires of freedom, 
 fires of hope,, and fires of Democracy!" the old 
 man said with a new light in his own flashing 
 eyes. 
 
 "And fires of peace," I added. 
 
 "Yes, fires of Peace when freedom comes!" 
 he responded. 
 
 But whatever the political implications are; 
 it is historically true that this old custom had 
 existed for years until the Japanese took pos- 
 session of Korea and stopped this beautiful tradi- 
 tion. 
 
 But behind that same mountain from which the 
 bonfires used to flash in the olden days ; indicating 
 that the frontiers were safe for the night; that 
 no enemy hosts were invading the peninsula ; be- 
 hind that mountain the fires of sunset still flame, 
 flash, flare, and die away in the somber purple 
 shadows of night. 
 
28 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 Nor shall one forget an evening at Wanju; a 
 hundred miles from Seoul ; sitting in the Mission 
 House looking down into that village of a hun- 
 dred thousand souls; watching the fires of eve- 
 ning lighted; watching a blanket of gray-blue 
 smoke slowly lift over that little village; watch- 
 ing the great round moon slowly rise above a jut- 
 ting peak beyond the village to smile down on 
 that quiet,, peaceful scene in mid-December. 
 
 Koreans never light their fires until evening 
 comes and then they light a fire at one end of the 
 house, under the floor and the smoke and heat 
 travel the entire length of the house warming 
 the rooms. It is a poor heat maker but it is a 
 picturesque custom. 
 
 Thousands of flames lighted up the sky that 
 night. The little thatch houses, and the children 
 in their quaint garbs moving against the flames 
 composed a strange Oriental Rembrandt picture. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 Streets ! Streets ! Streets ! 
 
 Lights ! Lights ! Lights ! 
 
 Somehow streets and lights go together. 
 
 We think of our great Broadway. We smile 
 at our superior ingenuity when we think of the 
 "Great White Way." 
 
 But for sheer beauty; fascinating, captivating, 
 alluring, beauty; give me the Ginza in Tokyo on 
 a summer evening; with its millions of twinkling 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME 29 
 
 little lights above the thousands of Oriental shops ; 
 with the sound of bells, the whistle of salesmen, 
 the laughter of beautiful Japanese girls; the 
 clacking of dainty feet in wooden shoes ; and the 
 indefinable essence of romance that hovers over a 
 street of this Oriental type at night. I'll stake the 
 romance, and beauty of the Ginza in Tokyo, 
 against any street in the world. He who has 
 looked upon the Ginza by night, has a Flash- 
 Light of Flame; of tiny, myriad little flaming 
 lights; burned into his memory; to live until he 
 sees at last the lighted streets of Paradise itself. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 Nor are the clothes of the Orient without their 
 flaming colors. 
 
 The beautiful kimonos of the Geisha girls of 
 Japan; the crimson, gold, and rose glory of the 
 Sing Song Girls of China; the flashing reds of 
 the brown-skinned Spanish belles of the Philip- 
 pines, as they glide, like wind-blown Bamboo 
 trees through the streets; and the lurid, livid, 
 robes which men and women alike wear in Borneo 
 and Java. In fact all of the clothes of the Orient, 
 are flame-clothes. There are no quiet colors 
 woven into the gown of the Oriental. The Orien- 
 tal does not know what soft browns are. Crim- 
 son is the favorite color for man or woman. They 
 even make their sails red, blue, green and yellow. 
 The beautiful colors of the sailboats in the 
 
30 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 harbor of Yokohama is one of the first flashing 
 touches of the Orient that a traveler gets. From 
 Japanese Obies, which clasp the waists of Japan- 
 ese girls,, to Javanese Sarongs, the flame and flash 
 of crimson predominates in the gowns of both 
 men and women. Where an American man 
 would blush to be caught in any sort of a gown 
 with crimson predominating save a necktie, the 
 Japanese gentlemen, the Filipino, the Malay, and 
 the Javanese all wear high colors most of the 
 time. And the women are like splendid flaming 
 bushes of fire all the time. 
 
 A Javanese bride is all flame as far as her 
 dress is concerned. Her face is powdered; her 
 eyebrows are pencilled a coal black; her arms and 
 shoulders daubed with a yellow grease. As to 
 her dress, the sarong is a flaming robe that covers 
 her body to the breasts; red being the dominant 
 color; with a crown of metal which looks like a 
 beehive on her head. Brass bracelets and orna- 
 ments on her graceful arms complete her costume. 
 
 Even the Pagodas and Temples of the Oriental 
 lands are flame. 
 
 The most beautiful Temples of Japan are the 
 Nikko Temples. 
 
 "See Nikko and you have seen Japan" is the 
 saying that is well said. 
 
 But when one has spent weeks or a week, days 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME 31 
 
 or a day at Nikko; he comes away with an im- 
 pression of beautiful, tall, terraced, red-lacquered 
 Pagodas ; beautiful, graceful red-gowned women; 
 beautiful, architectural masterpieces of Oriental 
 Temples; all finished in wonderful red lacquer; 
 beautiful red-cheeked women in the village stores ; 
 beautiful red Kimonos for sale in the Curio 
 shops ; red berries burning against the wonderful 
 green grass; and all set off, against and under, 
 and crowned by wonderful green rows of great 
 Cryptomaria trees. These red Temples and these 
 Red Pagodas — red with a red that is flaming 
 splendor of the last word in the lacquer artist's 
 skill; are like beautiful crimson jewels set in a 
 setting of emerald. 
 
 And back of all these Flash-Lights of Flame 
 one remembers the path of a single star on the 
 smooth surface of Manila Bay at night; and the 
 phosphorescent beauty of Manila Bay where 
 great ships cleave this lake of fire when the phos- 
 phorus is heavy of a Summer night; and every 
 ripple is a ripple of flame. One remembers the 
 continuous flash of heat lightning down in Borneo 
 and on Equatorial Seas ; and one remembers the 
 Southern Cross; and the flash-lights of fire in a 
 half-breed woman's eyes. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 
 
 THE red dawn of tropical Java was near. 
 The shadows of night were still playing 
 from millions of graceful Palm trees which 
 swung gently in the winds before the dawn. 
 
 Three ancient volcanos, still rumbling in 
 blatant activity, loomed like gigantic monsters of 
 the underworld, bulging their black shoulders 
 above the earth. Before us lay a valley of green 
 rice paddies. 
 
 We had roved over ancient Boroboedoer all 
 night, exploring its haunted crannies and cor- 
 ners, listening to its weird noises; dreaming 
 through its centuries of age; climbing its seven 
 terraces. But in the approaching dawn, the one 
 outstanding thrill of the night was that of a 
 half -naked Javanese girl, who stood for an hour, 
 poised in her brown beauty on the top of one of 
 the Bells of Buddha, with some weird Javanese 
 musical instrument, singing to the dawn. 
 
 Then it came. 
 
 "What? Her lover?" 
 
 33 
 
34 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 No! The dawn! The dawn was her lover! 
 Or, perhaps her lover was old Merapi. 
 
 For, there, as we too, climbed to her strategic 
 pinnacle of glory on top of the Buddha Bell to 
 watch the dawn that she had called up with her 
 weird music and her subtle brown beauty ; before 
 us,, stretched thousands of acres of green rice 
 paddies, spread out like the Emerald lawn of an 
 Emerald Springtime in Heaven. Below us two 
 silver streams of water met and wedded, to go 
 on as one. 
 
 As we stood there that morning on the top of 
 Boroboedoer's highest bell, lines of Edna St. 
 Vincent Millay swung into my soul : 
 
 "All I could see from where I stood 
 Was three tall mountains and a wood." 
 
 Only in this instance all I could see were three 
 volcanos. And the one in the center, old Merapi 
 was belching out a trail of black smoke. These 
 three volcanos, take turns through the centuries. 
 When one is working the other two rest. When 
 one ceases its activity, one of the others takes up 
 the thundering anthem and carries it on for a few 
 years or centuries and then lapses into silence, 
 having done its part. While we were there it 
 was Merapi's turn to thunder and on this par- 
 ticular morning Merapi was busy before day- 
 light. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 85 
 
 For fifty miles along the horizon, a trail of 
 black smoke swept like the trail of black smoke 
 which a train leaves in its wake on a still day. 
 There was not another cloud in the eastern skies. 
 Nothing but that trail of black smoke as we stood 
 on the top of Boroboedoer at dawn and watched. 
 
 Then something happened. It was, as if some 
 magician had waved a magic wand back of the 
 mountain. The rising sun was the magician. We 
 saw its heralds spreading out, like great golden 
 fan-ribs with the cone of the volcano, its direct 
 center of convergence. Then before our aston- 
 ished, our utterly bewildered,, and our fascinated 
 eyes,, that old volcanic cone was changed to a cone 
 of gold. Then the golden cone commenced to 
 belch forth golden smoke. And finally the trail 
 of smoke for fifty miles along the horizon be- 
 came a trail of golden smoke. 
 
 This was a Flash-Light that literally burned 
 its way into our memories to remain forever. 
 
 There is another Flash-Light Physical which 
 has to do with another volcano which I mentioned 
 in the preceding chapter. Bromo is its name. 
 It is still there, down on the extreme eastern end 
 of Java, unless in the meantime the old rascal has 
 taken it into his demoniacal head to blow himself 
 to pieces as he threatened to do the day we lay on 
 our stomachs, holding on to the earth, with the 
 sides trembling beneath us. 
 
36 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 Old Bromo was well named. It reminds one 
 of Bromo-Seltzer. I had heard of him long be- 
 fore I reached Java. I had heard of the Sand 
 Plains down into the midst of whose silver white- 
 ness he was set, like a great conical gem of dark 
 purple by day and fire by night. 
 
 Travelers said "You must see Bromo! You 
 must see Bromo! If you miss everything else 
 see Bromo! It's the most completely satisfac- 
 tory volcano in the world." 
 
 It was two o'clock in the morning when we 
 started on little rugged Javanese ponies up 
 Bromo's steep slopes. 
 
 At daybreak we reached the mile high cliff 
 which looks down into the world-famous Sand 
 Sea. It was a sea of white fog. I have seen the 
 same thing at the Grand Canyon and in Yosemite 
 looking down from the rims. I thought of these 
 great American canyons as I looked down into 
 the Bromo Sand Sea. By noon this was a great 
 ten-mile long valley of silver sand which glittered 
 in the sunlight like a great silver carpeted ball- 
 room floor. Tourists from all over the world 
 have thrilled to its strange beauty. Like the gown 
 of some great and ancient queen this silver cloth 
 lies there; or like some great silver rug of Oriental 
 weaving it carpeted that valley floor at noon. 
 
 But at daybreak it was a sea of mist into which 
 it looked as if one might plunge, naked to the skin 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 37 
 
 and wash his soul clean of its tropical sweat and 
 dirt; a fit swimming pool for the gods of Java, 
 of whom there are so many. 
 
 Then something happened as we stood looking 
 down into that smooth sea of white fog, rolling 
 in great billows below us. There was a sudden 
 roar as if an entire Hindenburg line had let loose 
 with its "Heavies." There was a sudden and 
 terrific trembling of the earth under our feet 
 which made us jump back from that precipice in 
 terror. 
 
 Then slowly, as if it were on a great mechanical 
 stage,, the perfect cone of old rumbling Bromo, 
 from which curled a thin wisp of black smoke, 
 bulged its way out of the center of that sea of 
 white fog, rising gradually higher and higher 
 as though the stage of the morning had been set, 
 the play had begun, and unseen stage hands be- 
 hind the curtain of fog, with some mighty derrick 
 and tremendous power were lifting a huge vol- 
 cano as a stage piece. 
 
 Then came the quick, burning tropical sun,, 
 shooting above the eastern horizon as suddenly 
 as the volcanic cone had been lifted above the 
 fog. This hot sun burned away the mists in a few 
 minutes and there, stretching below us, in all its 
 oriental beauty was the sinewy, voluptuous form 
 of the silver sand sea — Bromo's subtle mistress. 
 
38 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 There is another Physical Flash-light that will 
 never die. 
 
 Coming out ©f the Singapore Straits one eve- 
 ning at sunset, bound for the island of Borneo 
 across the South China Sea, I was sitting on the 
 upper deck of a small Dutch ship. The canvas 
 flapped in the winds. A cool, tropical breeze 
 fanned our faces. Back of us in our direct wake 
 a splashing, tumbling, tumultuous tropical sunset 
 flared across the sky. It was crimson glory. In 
 the direct path of the crimson sun a lighthouse 
 flashed its blinking eyes like a musical director 
 with his baton beating time. 
 
 I watched this flashing, lesser, light against the 
 crimson sunset and was becoming fascinated by 
 it. 
 
 Then great black clouds began to roll down 
 over that crimson background as if they were 
 huge curtains, rolled down from above., to change 
 the setting of the western stage for another act. 
 
 But as they rolled they formed strange and 
 beautiful Doric columns against the crimson skies 
 and before I knew it, I was looking at the ruins 
 of an old Greek temple in the sky. Then the black 
 clouds formed a perfect hour-glass reaching from 
 the sea to the sky, with its background of crimson 
 glory, and the little lighthouse seemed to be flash- 
 ing off the minutes in the arteries of that hour- 
 glass. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 39 
 
 And then it was night — a. deep, dense, tropical 
 night; heavy with darkness; rich with perfume; 
 weird with mystery. But the sunset of crimson; 
 the Doric temple in ruins; the hour-glass; and 
 the flashing lighthouse still remained. 
 
 And who shall ever forget the sunsets of gold 
 across Manila Bay night after night; with great 
 warships and majestic steamers, sleek and slender 
 cutters, white sails,, long reaching docks, and 
 graceful Filipino women, silhouetted against the 
 gold? And who shall forget the domes, towers, 
 and pinnacles of the Cathedrals ; and the old fort 
 within the city walls as they too were silhouetted 
 against the gold of the evening? 
 
 Mt. Taishan, the oldest worshiping place on 
 earth, not far from the birthplace of Confucius; 
 in Shantung; is one of the most sacred shrines of 
 the Orient. There, countless millions, for hun- 
 dreds of centuries, have climbed over six thou- 
 sand granite steps, up its mile high slope to pay 
 their vows ; to catch a view of the blue sea from 
 its imminence; to feel the sweep, wonder and 
 glory of its sublime height, knowing that Con- 
 fucius himself gloried in this climb. The exalta- 
 tion of that glorious view ; shall live., side by side, 
 with the view from the top of the Black Diamond 
 range in Korea one winter's night as we caught 
 
40 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 the full sweep of the Japan Sea by sunset. In fact 
 these all shall live as great mountain top Physical 
 Flash-Lights etched with the acid of a burning 
 wonder into one's soul! 
 
 Nor shall one ever forget a month's com- 
 munion with Fujiyama,, that solitary, great and 
 worshiped mountain of Japan; sacred as a 
 shrine; beautiful with snow; graceful as a 
 Japanese woman's curving cheek; bronzed by 
 summer; belted with crimson clouds by sunset 
 like a Japanese woman's Obie. It, too, presented 
 its unforgettable Physical Flash-Lights. 
 
 The first glimpse was one of untold spun-gold 
 glory. There it stood. 
 
 "There it is! There it is! Look!" a fellow 
 traveler cried. 
 
 "There is what?" I called. We were on top of 
 a great American College building in Tokyo. 
 
 "It's Fuji!" 
 
 I had given up hope. We had been there two 
 weeks and Fujiyama was not to be seen. The 
 mists,, fogs, and clouds of winter had kept it 
 hidden from our wistful, wondering, waiting 
 eyes. 
 
 But there it stood, like a naked man, un- 
 ashamed; proud of its white form; without a 
 single cloud; burning in the white sunlight. Its 
 huge shoulders were thrown back as with sup- 
 pressed strength. Its white chest, a Walt Whit- 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 41 
 
 man hairy with age; gray-breasted with snow; 
 bulged out like some mighty wrestler, challenging 
 the world. No wonder they worship it ! 
 
 I had gloried in Fujiyama from many a varied 
 viewpoint. I had caught this great shrine of 
 Japanese devotion in many of its numberless 
 moods. I had seen it outlined against a clear-cut 
 morning sunlight, bathed in the glory of a broad- 
 side of light fired from the open muzzle of the 
 sun. I had seen it shrouded in white clouds ; and 
 also with black clouds breeding a storm, at even- 
 time. I had seen it with a crown of white upon 
 its brow, and I had seen it with a necklace of 
 white cloud pearls about its neck. 
 
 Once I saw this great mountain looking like 
 some ominous volcano through a misty gray win- 
 ter evening. And one mid-afternoon I saw it al- 
 most circled by a misty rainbow, a sight never to 
 be forgotten on earth or in heaven by one whose 
 soul considers a banquet of beauty more worth 
 shouting over than an invitation to feast with a 
 King. 
 
 But the last sight I caught of Fuji was the last 
 night that I was in Tokyo,, as I rode up from the 
 Ginza on New Year's eve out toward Aoyama 
 Gakuin, straight into a sunset, unsung, unseen by 
 mortal eye. 
 
 Before me loomed the great mountain like a 
 
42 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 monstrous mass of mighty ebony carved by some 
 delicate and yet gigantic artist's hand. 
 
 I soon discovered where the artist got the ebony 
 from which to carve this pointed mountain of 
 ebony with its flat top; for far above this black 
 silhouetted mountain was a mass of ebony clouds 
 that seemed to spread from the western horizon 
 clear to the rim of the eastern horizon and beyond 
 into the unseen Sea of Japan in the back yard of 
 the island. It was from this mass of coal-black 
 midnight-black clouds that the giant artist carved 
 his ebony Fuji that night. 
 
 But not all was black. Pferhaps the giant 
 forged that mountain rather than carved it, for 
 there was a blazing furnace behind Fuji. And 
 this furnace was belching fire. It was not crim- 
 son. It was not gold. It was not red. It was 
 fire. 
 
 It was furnace fire. It was a Pittsburgh blast- 
 furnace ten thousand times as big as all of Pitts- 
 burgh itself, belching fire and flames of sparks. 
 These sparks were flung against the evening 
 skies. Some folks, I fancy, on that memorable 
 night called them stars ; but I know better. They 
 were giant sparks flung from that blast-furnace 
 which was booming and roaring behind Fuji. I 
 could not hear it roar; that is true; but I could 
 feel it roar. I could not hear it because even so 
 great a sound as that furnace must have been 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 43 
 
 making will not travel sixty miles, even though it 
 was as still up there in the old theological tower 
 as a country cemetery by winter down in Rhode 
 Island when the snow covers the graves. 
 
 Then suddenly a flare of fire shot up directly 
 behind the cone of Fuji, flaming into the coal- 
 bank of clouds above the mountain, as if the old 
 shaggy seer had forgotten his age and was dream- 
 ing of youth again when the earth was young and 
 he was a volcano. 
 
 Above that streak of fire and mingled with it, 
 black smoke seemed to pour until it formed a flat 
 cloud of black smoke directly above the cone, and 
 spread out like a fan across the sky to give the 
 giant artist further ebony to shape his mountain 
 monument. 
 
 Then Fuji suddenly belched its volcano of color 
 and lava ; of rose and gold, amber, salmon, prim- 
 rose,, sapphire, marigold; and in a stream these 
 poured over Fuji's sides and down along the 
 ridge-line of the lesser hills until they too were 
 covered with a layer of molten glory a mile thick. 
 
 The clouds above Fuji forgot to be black. In 
 fact, their mood of sullenness departed as by 
 magic, and a smile swept over their massive mood 
 of moroseness, and glory swept the skies. It was 
 as if that furnace behind Fuji had suddenly burst, 
 throwing its molten fire over the hills,, the moun- 
 tains, the sky, the world. 
 
44. FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 And "mine eyes" had "seen the glory of the 
 coming of the Lord." And that was enough for 
 any man for one Ufetime. 
 
 Then there is beautiful Boroboedoer down in 
 Java. It is a Physical Flash-Light that looms with 
 its huge and mysterious historical architectural 
 beauty like some remnant of the age when the 
 gods of Greece roamed the earth. A sunrise 
 from its pinnacled height I have already de- 
 scribed, but the temple itself is unforgettable. 
 There is nothing like it on the earth. 
 
 Boroboedoer is one of the wonders of the 
 world, although little known. It is in the gen- 
 eral shape of the pyramid of Egypt, but more 
 beautiful. One writer says, "Boroboedoer repre- 
 sents more human labor and artistic skill than the 
 great pyramids." Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace 
 says: "The human labor and skill expended on 
 Boroboedoer is so great that the labor expended 
 on the great pyramid sinks into significance be- 
 side it." 
 
 Boroboedoer was built in the seventh century 
 A.D., by the Javanese under Hindu culture. 
 Then came the Mohammedan invasion, destroying 
 all such works of art in its pathway. 
 
 It is said that the priests so loved this beautiful 
 Buddha temple that they covered it over with 
 earth and then planted trees and tropical vegeta- 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 45 
 
 tion on it. In six months it was so overgrown that 
 it looked Hke a hill. This is one explanation of 
 why it lay for a thousand years unknown. 
 
 The volcanic ashes undoubtedly helped in this 
 secretion, for old Merapi even now belches its 
 ashes,, rocks and dust out over the beautiful valley 
 down upon which Merapi looks. 
 
 From Djodjakarta you go to the temples. 
 
 This great temple has, instead of the plain sur- 
 faces of the great pyramid, one mile of beauti- 
 fully carved decorations, with 2141 separate 
 panels depicting the life of Buddha from the time 
 he descended from the skies until he arrived at 
 Nirvana, or perfect isolation from the world. A 
 history of more than a thousand years is told in 
 its stone tablets by the sculptor's chisel, told beau- 
 tifully, told enduringly, told magnificently. 
 
 One writer says: "This temple is the work of 
 a master-builder whose illuminated brain con- 
 ceived the idea of this temple wherein he writes 
 in sculpture the history of a religion." 
 
 And again one says architecturally speaking 
 of it: 
 
 "It is a polygonous pyramid of dark trachyte, 
 with gray cupulas on jutting walls and projecting 
 cornices, a forest of pinnacles." 
 
 There are four ledges to this hill temple and 
 above each ledge or stone path are rows of Bud- 
 dhas hidden in great 5-foot stone bells, and at the 
 
46 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 top crowning the temple a great 50-foot bell in 
 which Buddha is completely hidden from the 
 world, symbol of the desired Nirvana that all 
 Buddhists seek. 
 
 Mysterious with weird echoes of a past age it 
 stands,, silhouetted against a flaming sky to-night 
 as I see it for the first time. It is late evening 
 and all day long we have been climbing the 
 ancient ruins of that magnificent age of Hindu 
 culture on the island of Java. This temple of 
 Boroboedoer was to be the climax of the day, and 
 surely it is all of that. 
 
 The fire dies out of the sky. The seven terraces 
 of the stone temple begin to blur into one great 
 and beautiful pyramid. Only the innumerable 
 stone bells stand out against the starlit night; 
 stone bells with the little peepholes in them, 
 through which the stolid countenances and the 
 stone eyes of many Buddhas, in calm repose, 
 look out upon the four points of the compass. 
 
 Night has fallen. We have seen the great 
 Temple by crimson sunset and now we shall see 
 it by night. 
 
 The shadows seem to wrap its two thousand 
 exquisite carvings, and its Bells of Buddha in 
 loving and warm tropical embrace. But no 
 warmer, is the embrace of the shadows about the 
 Temple than the naked embrace of a score of 
 Javanese bovs who hold to their hearts naked 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 47 
 
 Javanese beauties who sit along the terraces look- 
 ing into the skies of night utterly oblivious to the 
 passing of time or of the presence of curious 
 American strangers. 
 
 Love is such a natural thing to these Javanese 
 equatorial brown brawn and beauties that un- 
 abashed they lie, on Buddha's silent bells, breast 
 to breast,, cheek to cheek, and limb to limb; as if 
 they have swooned away in the warmth of the 
 tropical night. 
 
 The Southern Cross looks down upon lover and 
 tourist as we all foregather on the topmost ter- 
 race of that gigantic shadow-pyramid of granite. 
 
 The sound of the innumerable naked footsteps 
 of all past ages seems to patter along the stone 
 terraces. Now and then the twang of the Java- 
 nese angklong and the beautiful notes of a flute 
 sweep sweetly into the shadowed air. 
 
 Then comes the dancing of a half dozen Java- 
 nese dancing girls, naked to the waist, their crim- 
 son and yellow sarongs flying in the winds of 
 night, as, in slow, graceful movements, facing one 
 of the Bells of Buddha they pay their vows and 
 offer their bodies and their souls to Buddha ; and 
 evidently, also to the Javanese youths who ac- 
 company them in their dances. 
 
 The sound of the voices of these Javanese 
 girls — ^who in the shadows look for all the world 
 like figures that Rodin might have dreamed — 
 
48 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 mingling their laughter with the weird music; 
 shall linger long in one's memory of beautiful 
 things. 
 
 Their very nakedness seemed to fit in with the 
 spirit of the night; a spirit of complete abandon- 
 ment to beauty and worship. In their attitudes 
 there seemed to be a mingling of religion and 
 earthly passion ; but it was so touched with rever- 
 ence that we felt no shock to our American sensi- 
 bilities. 
 
 All night long we wandered about the terraces 
 of the old Temple. 
 
 We wondered how long the Javanese girls 
 would remain. 
 
 At dawn when we arose to see Boroboedoer 
 by daylight they were still there as fresh as the 
 dawn itself in their brown beauty, the dew of 
 night glistening in their black hair and wetting 
 their full breasts. 
 
 And across, from Boroboedoer the sun, in its 
 dawning splendor, was transforming belching 
 and rumbling old volcanic Merapi into a cone of 
 gold. 
 
r 
 
 LOOKING OVER THE WALLED CITY OF MANILA, AMEEICAX SOL- 
 DIERS SCALED THIS WALL A FEW YEARS AGO TO STAY. 
 
 BEAUTIFUL FILIPINO GIBLS ALL OF WHOM SPEAK ENGLISH. 
 
KOBEAIl^ GIBLS WITH AMEEICAX IDEALS AND TRAIKIITG. 
 
 '•^flpt 
 
 
 ".«?'^ 
 
 STEPPING ASIDE IN KOREA TO LET THE AMERICAN DEVIL 
 WAGOIT GO BY. „ ; \, ; ■; 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH 
 
 HE was an old man; gray-haired, gray^ 
 bearded; gray-gowned; and he knew that 
 the Japanese Gendarmes would just as soon take 
 his life as light a cigarette. They do each with 
 inhumane impunity. One means as much to them 
 as the other. 
 
 He was under arrest for conspiracy in the 
 Independence Movement. 
 
 "Do you know about the Independence Move- 
 ment?" he was asked. 
 
 "Yes, I know all about it," was his fearless 
 reply; though he knew that that reply in itself 
 might mean his death; even without trial or 
 further evidence. Just the fact that he had ad- 
 mitted that he knew anything at all about the 
 movement was enough to throw him into prison. 
 He was like an old Prophet in his demeanor. 
 Something about the very dignity and sublime 
 Faith of the man awed the souls of these crude 
 barbarians from the Island Empire, 
 
 "Since when was it begun?" asked the Gen- 
 darmes. 
 
 49 
 
so FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "Since ten years ago when you Japanese first 
 came to Korea," was the dignified reply. 
 
 "From whence did it spring?" he was asked 
 next. 
 
 "From the hearts of twenty million people!" 
 
 "Did twenty millions of people all get together 
 then, and plan ?" 
 
 "Not together in body but in spirit !" 
 
 "But there must have been some men to start 
 it ?" the Japanese Gendarme said. 
 
 "They all started it !" was the old man's reply. 
 
 "Is there no one who had charge of this move- 
 ment from the beginning?" 
 
 "Yes,, there is one !" 
 
 "Do you know him?" 
 
 "I know him well !" 
 
 "What is his name?" 
 
 "His name is God !" said this seventy-year old, 
 fearless Christian Korean Patriot. 
 
 Such faith as I have indicated in the para- 
 graphs above is a common thing in Korea. Never 
 in the history of the world have Christian people 
 been subjected to the same tortures, the same 
 cruelties, the same terrors, for their Faith as 
 the early Christian martyrs; save these; the 
 Koreans. 
 
 We had thought that the world had gotten 
 past that day when men would be tortured, 
 crushed, persecuted, and killed because they were 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH 51 
 
 Christians but that day is not y«t past as almost 
 any American Missionary in Korea will testify. 
 
 The Japanese ofificials will say that there is no 
 persecution because of Christianity ; but mission- 
 aries in Korea know better. They will point to 
 countless incidents when men, women and chil- 
 dren have been hounded, and persecuted for no 
 other reason than that they were Christians. 
 
 "And when Jesus heard it. He marveled greatly 
 and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto 
 you I have not found so great faith, no, not in 
 Israel !" might well be said of the Korean Chris- 
 tians every hour, every minute,, every second. 
 They know what it means to die for their Faith. 
 
 The story of Pak Suk Han is one of the most 
 thrilling illustrations of Faith that I have ever 
 heard in Oriental lands. He had been a Chris- 
 tian since he was seven years of age. He was a 
 brilliant speaker and the Assistant Pastor of the 
 First Methodist Church at Pyeng Yang, where, 
 even the non-Christians loved him. He was 
 arrested on Independence Day and sent to prison 
 where a barbarous Japanese officer, whom the 
 natives called "The Brute" kicked him in the 
 side because he would not give up his Christ. 
 From that kick and further inhuman treatment 
 running over a period of six months; a disease 
 developed which a most reliable missionary doc- 
 tor told me ended Pak Suk Han's life. 
 
62 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 When he knew that he was about to die he said, 
 "I have been a Christian and have served the 
 church since I was seven years old. I have given 
 my Hfe to Christ, all but the last six months in 
 prison which I have given to my country. I have 
 no regrets. I might have lived had I been willing 
 to deny my nation's rights and give up my Christ. 
 I am going home to my Father's house. Good- 
 by!" No Christian martyrs in the early cen- 
 turies of the persecutions by Rome ever died 
 with greater glory in their souls ; or with deeper 
 Faith! 
 
 The temperature was zero. 
 
 The cold had swept down over night from the 
 Siberian and Manchurian plains across the city 
 of Seoul. The capital city of Korea was shiver- 
 ing with cold. But it was vibrant with something 
 else. It was vibrant with a great sense of some- 
 thing impending. 
 
 There were those who said that the restlessness 
 in the souls of the Koreans had died down with 
 the terrible days of the March Independence 
 Movement; but I knew that the faith of the people 
 was deeper than that. I knew that the flame of 
 faith was just smouldering. 
 
 I sensed this from the conversation of old-time 
 missionaries who had been in Korea from the 
 very beginning. I sensed it in the conversation 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH 53 
 
 of young Koreans who had graduated from 
 American schools. It was there; a vibrant, liv- 
 ing, pulsing, faith in God and in the justice of 
 their hopes : the Independence of Korea. 
 
 The whole thing was summed up for me in a 
 flash. It was a flash of the light of a tremendous 
 faith that blinded mine eyes for a day; but my 
 soul it lighted as with a great eternal light. 
 
 A Korean boy stepped into the home of a mis- 
 sionary friend of mine, whose name I dare not 
 use. If I did he would likely be sent home by the 
 Japanese. Men have been sent home for less. 
 
 The snow crunched under his feet as he walked 
 up across the yard and the porch. He knocked 
 at the door. 
 
 "Come in," said the missionary, kindly. 
 
 The boy stepped in. The missionary had never 
 seen him before. The boy was moved deeply as 
 with a great emotion. He seemed to have carried 
 into that quiet missionary home with him some 
 of the tenseness of the outside air and some of the 
 tenseness of the political situation. 
 
 "What do you want?" asked the missionary. 
 
 "I want to talk with you about something very 
 important," he replied in Korean. 
 
 "All right! Go ahead! Do not be afraid. I 
 am your friend !" 
 
 "So I know. All missionaries are our friends." 
 
 "Then you need not be afraid to talk." 
 
64 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "No !" said the boy. But he did not talk. His 
 agitation was growing more marked. 
 
 "Go on, my boy ! Tell me what you came for." 
 
 The Korean boy looked at the half open door 
 which led into the kitchen. The missionary, with- 
 out a word,, stepped over and closed that door, be- 
 cause he understood. 
 
 The boy himself closed a door which led into 
 the missionary's study. For in Korea in these 
 days no home; not even a missionary's home, is 
 free from spies. 
 
 The boy started to talk hurriedly. The mis- 
 sionary soon saw that he was not talking about 
 the thing that he had come for. 
 
 "Come to the point ! Come to the point ! You 
 did not come to me, in such secrecy, to talk com- 
 monplace things like that!" said the missionary 
 a bit sharply. 
 
 Then the boy suddenly dropped to his knees be- 
 hind the missionary's desk and whipped out a big 
 knife. Then he took from his white gown a long 
 piece of white cloth. This he laid out on the 
 floor. Then he opened his sharp knife with a 
 quick motion and before the missionary knew it, 
 he had ripped the index finger of his right hand, 
 from, the tip to the palm, clear to the bone,, until 
 the blood spurted all over the floor. 
 
 "What are you doing, my boy?" cried the mis- 
 sionary. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH 56 
 
 The boy smiled a sublime smile and then knelt 
 on his knees over the white cloth and before the 
 missionary's tear-misty eyes wrote across the 
 immaculate cloth in his own blood the words: 
 "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei! Korean Inde- 
 pendence Forever! Self-determination!" 
 
 Then underneath these words in a few swift 
 strokes in his own blood he drew a picture of the 
 Korean flag. And as he drew, now and then the 
 blood would not flow fast enough ; and he took his 
 knife, as one primes a fountain pen; and cut a bit 
 deeper to open new veins in order that the flag of 
 his country and the declaration of his faith might 
 be written in the deepest colors that his own 
 veins could furnish. 
 
 Finally, after what seemed hours he jumped 
 to his feet and handed the missionary that flag; 
 crying as he did so : "That is our faith ! That is 
 the way we Koreans feel ! You are going back to 
 America! We want America to know that our 
 faith in the Independence of Korea has not died? 
 The fire burns higher to-day than ever. The 
 Japanese cruelties are worse! The need is 
 greater! The oppression is more terrible! Our 
 determination is deeper than ever before ! I have 
 come here this day, knowing that you are going 
 back to America ; I came to write these words in 
 my own blood that you may know; and that 
 America may know; that our faith is a flame 
 
m FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 which burns out like the beacon lights on the 
 Korean hills, never to die!" 
 
 The most scintillating Flash-light of Faith that 
 I saw in the Orient was in the Philippine Islands. 
 We were traveling the jungle trail to visit a tribe 
 of naked Negritos. These are diminutive people 
 who look like American negroes only they are 
 much smaller; much more underfed, and who 
 live in trees very much like the Orangutans of 
 Borneo. They eat roots and nuts. They hunt 
 with bows and arrows. 
 
 They are the lowest tribe in mentality on the 
 Islands. 
 
 It was a terribly hot,, tropical day and I had a 
 sunstroke on the way up the mountainside to 
 this Negrito village. 
 
 I did not expect to get back alive. 
 
 For three solid hours under a killing tropical 
 sun, without the proper cork helmet and protec- 
 tion, a pile driver kept hammering down on my 
 head. I felt it at every step I took. Finally I 
 dropped unconscious on the trail. After several 
 hours I was able to proceed to the top of the 
 mountain, where the Negritos were camped. 
 
 We got there about two o'clock and had lunch. 
 As we ate about fifty Negritos swarmed about us. 
 
 They were a horrible looking crowd; stark 
 
-^LASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH 57 
 
 naked, filthy with dirt; starved to skin and bones; 
 and animal-like in every look and move. 
 
 I was so sick that I was not able to eat the 
 lunch which had been provided in baskets. I lay 
 on my back trying to get back my strength. 
 
 As the rest of the expedition ate,, the Negritos 
 with hungry eyes, crowded closer. 
 
 One hideous old man was in the forefront of 
 the natives. He was so hideous looking that he 
 was sickeningly repulsive to me as I looked at him 
 crouched as he was like an animal with a streak 
 of sunlight playing on his face. 
 
 This streak of sunlight, with ruthless severity, 
 made the ugly scabs of dirt stand out on his old 
 wrinkled face. That face had not felt the touch 
 of water in years. His whole body was covered 
 with dirt and sores. Wherever the sunlight 
 struck on that black body it revealed scales like 
 those on a mangy dog. His body was also cov- 
 ered with gray hairs matted into the dirt. 
 
 "That old codger represents the nearest thing 
 to an animal that the human being can reach," 
 said McLaughlin, one of the oldest missionaries 
 on the island. 
 
 "You're right!" I said. "He looks as much 
 like a Borneo Orangutan as any human being 
 I ever saw," 
 
 "And he lives like one, too; up in a tree in a 
 nest of matted limbs and grass," said another. 
 
68 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE Sti^^EN SEAS 
 
 "I've traveled among the wild tribes of the 
 world all my life and I have seen the lowest hu- 
 man beings on earth; in Africa,, South America, 
 Malaysia, Borneo, Java — Australia — every- 
 where," said a widely traveled man in the crowd, 
 "and I never saw a type as low in the scale as 
 that old fellow!" 
 
 So we discussed him as the lunch proceeded. 
 He did not know, of course,, that we had con- 
 signed him to the lowest rung on the ladder of 
 humanity, so he just sat looking at us with his 
 animal-like eyes as we ate; and at me as I lay 
 under a tree trying to recover my strength for 
 the trip back. 
 
 "He is not a human being!" added a philoso- 
 pher in the crowd. "He is lower than that stage. 
 He doesn't seem to have a single spark of human- 
 ity left in him !" 
 
 Then the meal over ; the missionaries started to 
 hand out what was left of the food to these starv- 
 ing Negritos. The old man whom we had decided 
 was the lowest type of a human being on earth 
 seemed, after all, to be the leader of the tribe; no 
 doubt because of his age; perhaps because of 
 something else which we were later to discover. 
 
 McLaughlin handed out a sandwich to the old 
 man. 
 
 "Did he eat it himself?" 
 
 "He did not ! He handed it to a child near by." 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH 69 
 
 McLaughlin handed out another sandwich 
 which was left. 
 
 "Did the old man, whom we had decided was 
 more of an animal than a human being, eat that 
 one?" 
 
 "He did not. He took it over behind a tree 
 where another old man was timidly hiding and 
 gave it to him." 
 
 McLaughlin handed out another sandwich. 
 
 "Did the old man eat that one ?" 
 
 "He did not. He took it over and gave it to an 
 old woman near by." 
 
 And so it continued, until every last piece of 
 food was disposed of. That old man ; whom we 
 had decided was an animal ; saw to it, that every 
 man, woman,, and child in that crowd was fed 
 before he took a single bite himself. 
 
 Then he suddenly disappeared. In half an 
 hour he came back with an armful of great, 
 broad, palm leaves. He spread these out on the 
 ground in the shade of a tree ; did this old man ; 
 this hideous looking monster ; and then motioned 
 for me to lie down on the bed he had made for 
 me. He saw that I was sick. 
 
 Then he disappeared once again, and when he 
 returned he was carrying a long Bamboo-tube full 
 of clear, cool water which he had gotten from a 
 mountain spring. He brought it to where I was 
 lying on the bed he had made for me and with this 
 
60 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 water he cooled my fevered, burning head; and 
 from this water he gave me to drink; he w.hom 
 we had decided was the lowest type of a human 
 being on earth. 
 
 And I am writing here to say ; that I have never 
 seen a "cup of cold water given in His name" that 
 was given with a higher, or a deeper sense of 
 the Divine spark of God in humanity than I saw 
 that tropical summer afternoon, and this water 
 was given by the naked Negrito whom we had 
 decided was the lowest human being on the earth. 
 Yet even in this animal-man; even in this naked 
 savage ; there was a spark of the Divine that made 
 us forever have a deeper and a more abiding faith 
 that God never did and never shall make a man to 
 live on this old earth that He did not have some 
 purpose in making him. 
 
 A few days before I took this trip up into the 
 jungles of Luzon to visit this Negrito tribe I had 
 received a copy of a slender volume of poems by 
 Edna St. Vincent Millay, In the cool beauty of 
 the tropical evening preceding this trip I had read 
 the last lines of its introductory poem called "In- 
 terim"; and these lines came flashing into my 
 mind, even as I lay on the hot earth on that Luzon 
 hillside. I can still remember the honey dripping 
 like rain from the Cocoanut trees, and I can still 
 hear the ceaseless and maddening cry of millions 
 of Locusts that hot day ; but suddenly came this 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH 61 
 
 beautiful outpouring of faith from, the cool 
 depths of a woman's woodland soul: 
 
 "Not Truth but Faith, it is 
 That keeps the world aUve ! If, all at once 
 Faith were to slacken, — that unconscious faith 
 Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone 
 Of all believing — ^birds now flying fearless 
 Across would drop in terror to the earth; 
 Fishes would drown ; and the all-governing reins 
 Would tangle in the frantic hands of God 
 And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!" 
 
 That day bred new faith into my soul ! 
 
 I have told this story of the naked Negrito a 
 hundred times since that eventful day and it 
 kindles new flames of faith in human hearts every 
 time it is repeated! Mr. Edmund Vance Cooke, 
 the poet,, heard it in Cleveland where I spoke in a 
 Chautauqua programme and he said to me several 
 months later in my home at Detroit, Michigan, 
 "That was the most thrilling story of the Divine 
 spark in a savage soul that I have ever heard! 
 It gave me new faith in God and in humanity !" 
 
 These, and a thousand other Flashlights of 
 Faith come flashing out of that Far Eastern back- 
 ground; the sublime faith of thousands of college 
 men and women who are giving their lives be- 
 cause they believe that savages and barbarians, 
 such as I have described in this JMegrito ; Do have 
 that spark of the Divine in their souls ; faith that 
 
62 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 Christian civilization, and Christian education; 
 and a Christian God, may awaken that spark. 
 
 And, indeed many a proof do they have of this 
 miracle! Only the other day from an American 
 School, a girl from darkest Africa graduated as a 
 Phi Beta Kappa honor scholar. Bishop William 
 A. Taylor picked up this girl as a naked child in 
 the jungles of Africa less than a quarter of a 
 century ago ! 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 
 
 OUICK, short, sharp signals shot down the 
 speaking tube from the bridge. 
 
 The Chief Engineer of the Santa Cruz yelled 
 across the boiler room. 
 
 The bell rang for reverse and the entire ship 
 shivered. 
 
 A woman on deck screamed, and there was a 
 rush to the railings., for the old boat had been 
 slowly making its way up the winding, treacher- 
 ous Saigon River out of the China Sea into 
 French Indo-China. 
 
 "Those damned Chinks again, trying to escape 
 the Devil!" 
 
 "What's the matter. Pop ?" some one asked the 
 captain. 
 
 "That sampan full of Chinks was trying to 
 get away from the River Devil, so they shot across 
 our bow to fool him and we nearly ran them 
 down." 
 
 "Do they often indulge in that little friendly 
 
 game -vvith the Devil?" I asked him, smiling at 
 
 his seriousness. 
 
 63 
 
64 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "Every time we enter one of these rivers they 
 do it. I killed six of them going up the river at 
 Shanghai a year ago. It gives me the creeps 
 every time I see them shoot across our bow. A 
 ship like this will cut 'em in two like a knife!" 
 
 We looked over the green railing of the Santa 
 Cruz. The big ship had almost come to a stop 
 for the engines were still in reverse and the shal- 
 low river mud was churned up until the other- 
 wise clear water looked like a muddy pond. The 
 little sampan, full of grinning-, naked Chinese 
 coolies was fifty feet away from us, and our 
 American sailors were swearing at them in 
 every language they knew and shaking big, 
 brawny, brown fists in their grinning direction. 
 
 It was considered a joke by the passengers but 
 it was a very real thing to these poor ignorant 
 Chinese. One sees this happen everywhere in the 
 Orient. For the Chinaman starts out every 
 morning in his sampan with the worst kind of a 
 River Devil after him. He must rid himself of 
 that Devil. So, when a big ship comes into sight, 
 he waits until its bow is very close and then darts 
 in front of its pathway. The idea is, that when a 
 sampan full of Chinamen shoots in front of a big 
 ship the Devil is supposed to follow the ship all 
 that day, and let the Chinese junk or sampan 
 alone. 
 
 It is the piest of an American seaman's life, for 
 
Confucius' tOmb at chufu, china. 
 
 RUIN OF THE MING TOMBS. 
 
 The turtle, the symbol of long life, is almost as common 
 in China as the dragon. 
 
GRINDING BICE IN CHINA. 
 
 Pft9*!«» 
 
 A CAMEL TRAIN FROM THE PLAINS OF MONGOLIA ENTERING 
 PEKING ON A winter's DAY. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 65 
 
 even a seaman hates to see a human being 
 drowned. 
 
 To an American mind this seems ridiculous. It 
 even seems humorous. I shall never forget how 
 the passengers laughed when the captain told 
 them why he had had to reverse his engines to 
 keep from crushing the frail Chinese sampan. 
 But suddenly the thought came to one of the pas- 
 sengers; that to the poor Chinaman the fear 
 which made him do that foolish thing and the 
 fear which made him take that awful risk was 
 very real. 
 
 "Under God, the poor Devils must have an 
 awful life if they have such a fear as that in 
 their souls day and night!" said an Englishman, 
 
 "They never start out for a day's work that 
 they are not haunted every minute of that day 
 by a thousand devils, ill-omens, and bad spirits 
 which are constantly hovering about to leap on 
 them and kill them!" said a missionary. "The 
 whole Orient is full of the thought of fear!" 
 
 This missionary was right, Paul Hutchinson, 
 Editor of the Chinese Christian Advocate and 
 one of the real literary men of the Americans 
 who are permanent residents of Shanghai, told me 
 of a Chinese boy who was graduating from a 
 Christian College in Nanking. The boy had been 
 for four years under the influence of Americans. 
 He could speak good English, He was about 
 
66 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 ready to go to America to school when he had 
 completed his work at Nanking. 
 
 He, with a younger brother, was at home for 
 the Christmas vacation. On the way back to 
 college the younger brother fell overboard into 
 the river. The older brother was not a coward. 
 Everybody will testify to that. In fact he was 
 unusually courageous. But in spite of the fact 
 that his puny hrother was able to swim to the side 
 of the small boat, and in spite of the fact that he 
 begged his older and stronger brother to pull him 
 back into the boat, that older brother refused to 
 do so. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 Mr. Hutchinson says that the English teacher 
 heard the tale in terror, but that the brother took 
 it as a matter of course, explaining that the River 
 Devil would most certainly have caught and 
 dragged into the water, any person who should 
 have dared to attempt a rescue of his brother. 
 
 It is an established thing in China; that if a 
 native falls into the river, he never gets out unless 
 he pulls himself out. Nobody will help him, for 
 if they do,, that will incur the wrath of the River 
 God and the rescuer also will be dragged down 
 to his death. 
 
 It is assumed that if a person falls into the 
 river that is the River God pulling him in. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 67 
 
 The constant fear of this River God is so deep- 
 ly intrenched in these poor souls that they take 
 no pleasure on the water and they carry their 
 sense of fear to such an extent that they will not 
 even attempt a rescue of their own babies or loved 
 ones if these happen to fall into the water. 
 
 Mr. Hutchinson calls attention to Dr. E. D. 
 Soper's book "The Faiths of Mankind" in which 
 there is an entire chapter called "Where Fear 
 Holds Sway." 
 
 "Where is it that fear holds sway?" the reader 
 asks. 
 
 The answer is, "In the Orient" ! 
 
 Yes,, the whole Orient is one great gallery of 
 dim, uncertain, weird, mysterious Flash-lights of 
 Fear. 
 
 Paul Hutchinson says : 
 
 "It is impossible for the Westerner to conceive such 
 an atmosphere until he has lived in it. In fact he may 
 live in it for years and never realize the hold which it has 
 upon his native neighbors. But it is no exaggeration to 
 say that, to the average Chinese, the air is peopled with 
 countless spirits, most of them malignant, all attempting 
 to do him harm. Even a catalogue of the devils, such as 
 have been named by the scholarly Jesuit, Father Dore, 
 is too long for the limits of this article. But there they 
 are, millions of them. They hover around every motion 
 of every waking hour, and they enter the sanctity of sleep. 
 An intricate system of circumnavigating them, that makes 
 the streets twist in a fashion to daze Boston's legendary 
 cow and puts walls in front of doors to belie the hos- 
 pitality within, runs through the social order." 
 
68 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 This fear is even expressed in Chinese larchi- 
 tecture. 
 
 "Why is that strange wall built in front of 
 every household door and even before the Tem- 
 ples ?" I asked a friend in China. 
 
 "It is put there to fool the devils. They will see 
 that wall and think that there is no door and then 
 will go away and not bother that house any 
 more," I was told. 
 
 The very architecture of the Chinese home is 
 to keep the devils out. The strange curves with 
 the graceful upward sweep that makes the roofs 
 so beautiful to American eyes is for the purpose 
 of throwing devils of the air off the track. They 
 will come down from the skies and start down the 
 curve of the roofs but will be turned back into 
 the skies again by the upward slant of the twisted 
 roofs. 
 
 It was this same terrible sense of fear which 
 developed the old surgical system that the Ko- 
 reans and Chinese used before the arrival of the 
 missionaries. 
 
 "Do you see these needles?" an American 
 surgeon in Korea asked me one day, as he pointed 
 to about a hundred of the most horrible looking 
 copper and brass needles lying on a stand. 
 
 "Yes," I admitted, mystified. 
 
 "I have taken every one of them out of the 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 69 
 
 bodies of human beings on whom I have operated 
 here in the hospital." 
 
 "Where did you find them?" 
 
 "In between the bowels, in the muscles, in the 
 organs of the body, and one in the heart of a man 
 who came to me because he couldn't breathe very 
 well." 
 
 "No wonder the fellow couldn't breathe. I 
 don't think I could mysfelf if I had a needle in my 
 blood-pump 1" I said with a smile. 
 
 "These fancy needles that the old Korean doc- 
 tors thought a good deal of they put a handle on," 
 he continued. 
 
 "What was that for?" 
 
 "So they wouldn't lose their needles in a body. 
 The other, or common needles, they just stuck 
 into the body wherever the wound or sore place 
 was and left them there." 
 
 "And what, may I ask, was the idea of this 
 playful Korean surgery! Was it something like 
 our 'button, button, whose got the button ?' " 
 
 "No, the idea was that there were devils in the 
 wound. If it was a swelling there was a devil in 
 that swelling. If it was typhoid fever., and there 
 was pain in the bowels, there was a devil in the 
 inward parts affected, and so, after carefully 
 sterilizing the needle by running it through his 
 long, black, greasy hair, the native doctor would 
 
70 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 run it into the affected part of the body to kill 
 the devil or let it escape from, the body." 
 
 "The old idea of a fear religion,, a fear social 
 life, a fear family life and a fear surgery pre- 
 vails in Korea as it does in China?" I said by 
 way of a question. 
 
 "It prevails everywhere in the Orient. To me 
 it is the most awful thing about working out here. 
 The awful sense of constant fear that is on the 
 people always and everjrwhere." 
 
 Pounded-up claws of a tiger ; the red horn of a 
 deer; pulverized fish bones; roots of trees, pigs' 
 eyes; and a thousand poisons and fear-remedies 
 make up the medical history of the Oriental doc- 
 tor. 
 
 "Why do they kill girl babies?" 
 
 "Fear!" 
 
 "Fear of what?" 
 
 "Fear of devils ! The devils will be displeased if 
 a girl baby is born. Therefore kill the baby. 
 
 "Throw the babies out on the ground in the 
 graveyards. Let the dogs eat the babies." 
 
 I heard the dogs howling in a cemetery one 
 night about two o'clock in the morning as I was 
 coming through the thousands of little conical 
 mounds, with here and there an unburied coffin. 
 
 "The dogs are having a baby feast to-night," 
 said an old missionary. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 71 
 
 "To appease the devils." 
 
 "My God man; you don't mean that they let 
 the dogs eat their babies because they are afraid 
 of the devil?" I cried. 
 
 "I mean just that," replied the missionary. 
 
 "Fear! Fear! Fear! Everywhere. Fear by 
 night and fear by day. They never escape it. It 
 is fear that makes them worship their ancestors. 
 It is fear that makes them, worship idols. It is 
 fear that makes them kill their girl babies. It is 
 fear that makes them build their little narrow 
 winding streets, which after a while must become 
 so filthy ; fear that if they do not, the devils will 
 find them; and if they do build their streets nar- 
 row and winding the devils will get lost searching 
 for them. Oh,, God, fear, fear, everywhere ! The 
 Orient is full of a terrible and a constant fear !" 
 
 I looked at my friend astonished. He seldom 
 went into such emotional outbursts. He was 
 judicial,, calm, poised; some said, cold. But this 
 constant sense of fear that was upon the people 
 had finally broken down his reserve of poise. 
 
 "The chimneys are beautiful. See that beauti- 
 ful upward dip in the architecture. They are like 
 the roofs,," I said. 
 
 "But that beautiful, symmetrical development 
 did not come out of a sense of beauty. It came 
 to fool the devils just as we have said of the roofs. 
 The devils will glide off into space and will never 
 
•72 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 be able to get down the chimneys." It is so in 
 other Oriental countries. 
 
 The same is true in the Philippine Islands. 
 The whole fabric of human life is permeated with 
 the black thread of fear. 
 
 It is true of China and Korea; it is true of 
 Borneo to a marked degree ; and it is true of that 
 great mass of conglomerate humanity that we 
 think of as India. 
 
 These and other flash-lights of fear remain, 
 and shall remain forever in my mind. But of a 
 fifty thousand mile trip among hundreds of mil- 
 lions of human beings ; pictures of fear stand out, 
 blurred here and there ; but clear enough in out- 
 line so that I can still see the human faces against 
 a background of midnight darkness. 
 
 Three pictures are clearer than the others. 
 Perhaps it was because the flash that focused 
 them on the plate of my mind was stronger. Per- 
 haps it was, that the plate of my soul was more 
 sensitive the days these impressions were focused. 
 But they stand out; three flash-lights of fear 
 above all : „ 
 
 One was told me by Zela Wiltsie Worley, a 
 college girl, now a missionary's wife, who has 
 known what it means to lie on the floor of her 
 home an entire morning with machine gun bullets 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 73 
 
 crashing through her home, between the fire of 
 two revolutionary armies. 
 
 "I was talking with my Amah — she is the girl 
 who cares for our children," said Mrs. Worley. 
 
 I nodded that I understood that. 
 
 "We were bathing the baby — our first wee 
 kiddie — and the Amah seemed to have an unusual 
 inclination to talk. I had been joking with her 
 and asked her if she did not want to buy Clara 
 Gene. In fun we started the characteristic 
 Chinese haggling over price, she trying to 'jew' 
 me up and I trying to 'jew' her down. 
 
 " 'Oh!' she said., 'girl babies are very expensive 
 the last two or three years. Now you have to pay 
 over ten dollars to get a nice fat one ! Before that, 
 if you did not drown them, you had an awfully 
 hard time to get rid of them. There was a man 
 in our town to whom we took the babies — the girl 
 babies I mean. He would go up and down the 
 streets with them and sell them to any one who 
 would give him a chicken and a bowl of rice in 
 return.' 
 
 " 'But do they drown the girl babies now ?' I 
 asked the Amah. 
 
 " 'Oh, yes, of course, if you already have one 
 or two boys. You know, in my village I am the 
 only Christian. My own family and the rest of 
 the village worship idols. They are afraid of 
 their gods. They do not know any better. Why 
 
74 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 my sister almost drowned my second little boy 
 by mistake. He had just arrived and she thought 
 that he was a girl, and had already stuck his head 
 down in a pail of water when I rescued him.' 
 
 " 'But who usually kills the girl babies ?' I 
 asked. 'Surely not the mother?' 
 
 " 'Yes,, she does. She is so afraid when she 
 finds it is only a girl, afraid that the gods will be 
 angry because she has brought another girl into 
 the world, that she kills it !' 
 
 '"Do they bury it then?' 
 
 "'Sometimes they wrap it up, and throw it 
 under a pile of rubbish. You know, we do not 
 have coffins made for any of our babies who die 
 before they have had their first teeth! I have 
 seen so many babies drowned, Mrs. Worley. I 
 never did like it. They cry so !' 
 
 "Then I inquired of our Chinese teacher's wife 
 if she knew of girl baby killing still going on in 
 China. 
 
 " 'Just last week,' this teacher's wife said in 
 answer to my inquiry, 'the woman next door went 
 back to her village two miles from here and she 
 saw her own sister drown a baby while she was 
 there.' 
 
 "I asked an English missionary if she knew 
 that this fearful custom was still prevalent over 
 most of China with its more than four hundred 
 million souls. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 75 
 
 "She told me that it was the custom in Ning- 
 daik for the women just to throw the girl babies 
 under their beds, and they would 'be gone in a 
 day or two.' 
 
 "And it is all because of their awful fear that 
 the gods will be displeased if they give birth to a 
 girl baby!" 
 
 The second outstanding flash-light of fear 
 comes from. Java. 
 
 In the chapter on Physical Flash-lights I have 
 described the old volcano of Bromo. It is a ter- 
 rible thing to look into. Great fissures in the 
 earth, belch thunder, sulphur, fire, and lava. 
 Great rocks as large as wagons shoot into the 
 air to the rim of the two hundred-foot crater, and 
 then drop back with a crash. 
 
 For centuries, and even in these days, clandes- 
 tinely; I am told by men whom I trust; the most 
 beautiful maiden of a certain tribe among the 
 Javanese; and some of the most beautiful women 
 I saw in the Orient were those soft-skinned, soft- 
 voiced, easy-moving, graceful-limbed, swaying- 
 bodied; brown skinned women of Java; she, the 
 fairest of the tribe is taken; and with her the 
 strongest limbed youth ; he of the fiber ed muscles ; 
 he of the iron biceps ; he of the clean skin ; and the 
 two of them are tossed into the belching fiery 
 crater of old Bromo. 
 
 "Why?" I asked. 
 
76 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "They think that in that way, they may pro- 
 pitiate the gods of the volcano. Their hearts are 
 constantly filled with fear lest the gods of the 
 volcano become angry and destroy them," said the 
 missionary. 
 
 Then he told me of a trip that they made a year 
 before to the top of one of the most inaccessible 
 volcanoes which was then in constant eruption. 
 
 "We had a hard time getting native guides. 
 Finally we succeeded. We had to travel fifty 
 miles before we reached the mountain. Then we 
 climbed five miles up its steep side, cutting our 
 own trail as we made our way through the tropi- 
 cal jungle. At last we reached the timber. But 
 before we entered the forest one of the guides 
 came to me and, with the most pitiable and trem- 
 bling fear in his voice and face, begged us white 
 people not to say anything disrespectful of the 
 mountain; not to joke and laugh, and not to 
 sing; for that would make the mountain angry, 
 and we would all be killed. 
 
 "I saw that he was in deadly earnest, and, 
 while I wanted to laugh I looked as solemn as I 
 could, for there was such terror in his face, I 
 knew that if I laughed he would turn and run 
 back to civilization. 
 
 "An hour later we reached the timber line. 
 Before we entered it the first boy fell flat on his 
 face and prayed to the god of the mountain ask- 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 77 
 
 ing that god not to hurt them. Then the next boy 
 did likewise; then the third and the fourth and 
 the fifth! 
 
 "Their faces were almost white with fear when 
 we missionaries did not pray. It filled them with 
 terror !" 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 And the last Flash-light of Fear is that of the 
 baby in Medan. The Priest lived across the way 
 in a temple. 
 
 The baby was sick with whooping-cough. It 
 was the usual, simple case of baby sickness that 
 American babies all have, and which is not taken 
 seriously here by either doctor or mother. 
 
 The mother took the baby to the priest. 
 
 The priest took a red hot iron; laid the baby 
 on the church altar and ran the iron across its 
 neck, and then across its breast and then across 
 its little stomach. Then he laid it on the front 
 steps of the temple. 
 
 The baby died after a few hours spent in ter- 
 rible pain. 
 
 Hate the Priest? 
 
 No! 
 
 Despise the mother ? 
 
 No! 
 
 Pity them ! 
 
 The priest was honest and the mother was hon- 
 est. They were doing the best thing for the baby 
 
78 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 that either of them knew. They knew that the 
 baby had a devil in its Httle body and they were 
 merely trying to drive that devil out of its body. 
 
 Fear! Fear! Fear! Fear of devils in the 
 home, lurking in the shadows of night and in the 
 light of day; lurking in the bodies of babies; 
 devils everywhere — always. 
 
 These are the Flash-lights of Fear ! 
 
 And like unto them are the pictures of Fright- 
 fulness which I have set down in the next chapter. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 
 
 THE Jap is the slant-eyed Hun of the Orient. 
 He has a slant-eyed ethics, a slant-eyed 
 morality, a slant-eyed honesty, a slant-eyed social 
 consciousness ; a slant-eyed ambition, a slant-eyed 
 military system; and a slant-eyed mind!" said 
 Peter Clarke Macfarlane, the well-known author 
 and lecturer, one day when I was interviewing 
 him on the Japanese question. 
 
 "That's pretty strong, Mr. Macfarlane, in the 
 light of your usual conservatism," I commented. 
 
 "I say it carefully and after much thought. It 
 is said to stay said so far, as I am concerned," 
 he added with finality. 
 
 This was also my own opinion, after spending 
 three months in Japan and Korea, another month 
 in China; and another month or two in Manila; 
 catching the angle of Japanese leadership from 
 every slant. 
 
 And after due consideration, and after a year 
 to think it over carefully, I am here to say, that 
 I never saw, or heard of anything worse happen- 
 ing in Belgium under German rule than that 
 
 79 
 
80 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 which I saw and heard of happening under 
 Japanese rule in Korea, Siberia and Formosa, 
 while I was in the Orient. 
 
 Suffice it is to say, at this point, that the 
 Japanese is hated by the whole Orient. I do not 
 believe that the German Hun in his worst day 
 was ever hated more unanimously for his inhu- 
 man practices than is the Jap Hun hated by the 
 whole Orient to-day. 
 
 "Is it getting better or worse?" I am asked 
 constantly. 
 
 "Worse !" I reply, and this reply is backed up 
 by interviews I have had with returned Korean 
 missionaries. 
 
 I found the Japanese scorned and hated from 
 one end of the Orient to the other. As far south 
 as Java, as far east as the Suez ; as far north as 
 the uttermost reaches of Manchuria and Siberia; 
 as far this direction as Hawaii. 
 
 For instance, after I had been away from 
 Korea for six months and had come back to 
 America I met a most conservative missionary in 
 the Romona Hotel in San Francisco. The last 
 time previous to that meeting that I had seen him 
 was in Korea itself. 
 
 I said to him "Are things better or worse in 
 Korea?" 
 
 His reply was, "Worse than they have ever 
 been; generally speaking!" I have no intention 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 81 
 
 and no desire to further augment ill feeling be- 
 tween America and Japan. In fact I do not fear 
 anything like war in that direction ; but I do have 
 an intense feeling of responsibility about telling 
 my readers the plain and simple truth that the 
 whole Far Eastern world hates Japan. 
 
 If that thought itself can get into the mind of 
 America, this country will understand, at least,, 
 that there is some fault that lies back in the 
 Japanese military policy and character itself. It 
 hardly seems possible, with ten races and five 
 different countries hating Japan ; that Japan her- 
 self is not mostly to blame. When a matter of 
 hatred is so unanimous among all races in that 
 part of the world, it is likely that the fault lies 
 with the race and nation which has the hatred of 
 so many types of people focused on its actions. 
 
 While I was in Java some high dignitaries in 
 the Japanese Navy arrived in Batavia. The 
 Chinese Coolies who live in Batavia absolutely 
 refused to carry any Japanese officers or sailors 
 in their Rickshas. It was a striking indictment of 
 the Japanese nation. 
 
 In Singapore the distrust and hatred of the 
 Japanese is unanimous. In the Philippines it is 
 the same. In Hongkong you see few Japanese. 
 They are not wanted and they are not trusted. 
 In Shanghai,, and Peking it is the same. The 
 Student Movement, one of the most powerful 
 
82 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 weapons that has ever arisen in any nation in the 
 world, has focused the Chinese sentiment against 
 selfish Japanese aggression in China. 
 
 The Japanese officials laughed at the Student 
 Boycott of Japanese goods when it first started. 
 But in a year they were trembling in the face of 
 that boycott. I was in Tientsin, and Peking dur- 
 ing the days of the Student Street Demonstra- 
 tions. They were like American demonstrations. 
 
 Keen, alert, intelligent Chinese boys addressed 
 the crowds admonishing them not to buy Japanese 
 goods in Chinese shops. The pressure became so 
 strong that all Chinese merchants from the lowest 
 shopkeeper up to the owner of the great chain 
 stores,, like our Woolworth institutions, put away 
 Japanese-made goods and refused to sell them. 
 
 I took dinner in Shanghai with one of the 
 foremost merchant princes of China and said, 
 "Are you selling any Japanese-made goods ?" 
 
 "I certainly am not. I am not powerful enough 
 with all my millions of money and all of my chain 
 of stores to take such a chance as that. I have 
 put all of my Japanese goods in the cellar." 
 
 The Boycott against Japanese goods in China 
 became so powerful that in Tientsin, while I was 
 there, the Japanese Consul complained bitterly to 
 the Governor of the Province and the Governor 
 who was said to be under the influence of Japan- 
 ese money, arrested a lot of students. There was 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 8S 
 
 one of the most determined and terrible riots that 
 I have ever seen. It was war. It was not like 
 any mild American riot. It was war to the death. 
 Several students were killed and finally the pres- 
 sure was so strong that even this Japanese Agent 
 was compelled to release the imprisoned students. 
 I shall quote from an editorial that I was asked 
 to write for the Peking Leader during mv stay 
 in China: 
 
 The weapon which most worries the Japanese 
 I should say, is the boycott that the Students 
 Movement has inaugurated. The Japanese Gov- 
 ernment never had anything that quite worried it 
 so much. It is a weapon that is worth a thousand 
 battleships, or fifty divisions of soldiers. It is a 
 weapon that will, if continuously, and consistently 
 and faithfully used, bring a money-loving nation, 
 like Japan to her knees,, and send her finally, 
 scurrying like a whipped cur, with her tail be- 
 tween her legs back home where she belongs. 
 
 I talked with a ragged Chinese boy through an 
 interpreter just to find what his reactions to the 
 Japanese were. He was a beggar. He said, "The 
 Japanese has a heart like a dog and a liver like a 
 
 wolf." 
 
 I quote again from the editorial in the Peking 
 
 Leader: 
 
 All day I have been on the streets of Peking 
 listening to groups of students discussing the all 
 
84 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 absorbing question of the Boycott. I have not 
 understood the characters printed on their ban- 
 ners, but I have understood the light in Young 
 China's eyes. I can understand that language 
 and that light, for it is the language and the light 
 of freedom, justice, liberty! I am an American. 
 I understand that light when I see it ; and I know 
 also; that it is a light that can never be snuffed 
 out. It is a light that prison walls cannot hide 
 and that the brute hand of the invader cannot 
 dim, 
 
 "And what are they protesting against?" is the 
 question asked. 
 
 Primarily against the Japanese control of 
 Shantung. Secondarily, against a type of civili- 
 zation which Japan represents ; a civilization that 
 uses the weapons of frightfulness to accomplish 
 its ends; a civilization that steals a nation like 
 Korea, compelling the abdication of a weak Em- 
 peror at the point of the bayonet ; and then using 
 the avowed method of extermination to deplete a 
 subjected nation. The whole Orient knows Japan 
 and knows the methods that Japan has used and 
 is using in conquered territory. It is a continuous 
 and continual policy of extermination, frightful- 
 ness, and assimilation. This is the underlying 
 cause of the hatred of the whole Orient and the 
 Far and Near East against Japan; and this is 
 the fundamental reason for the Students' Boy- 
 cott of Japanese goods in China. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 85 
 
 One might devote an entire book to narrations 
 of frightful cruelties perpetrated by Japanese on 
 Koreans, Siberians and Formosans; but that 
 would not be so strong as the setting forth of the 
 underlying ethical reasons for this universal 
 hatred in which Japan is held. 
 
 However it might be quite honest and fair for 
 this writer to set down here several acts of fright- 
 fulness that came under his own personal obser- 
 vation merely as casual illustrations of that which 
 is going on all the time. 
 
 One day I was walking with a missionary's wife 
 through the streets of Seoul. There was an exca- 
 vation being made and a little railroad track was 
 being run along this excavation. A Korean boy 
 had been set to guard this track to keep folks 
 from getting hurt when the dump car came down 
 its steep grade. He had been ordered by his 
 Japanese employers to stop all passage when the 
 signal was given. 
 
 We were walking along whan this Korean 
 stopped an ordinary Japanese civilian. He was 
 of the low-browed type; mentally deficient I 
 should say; but quite the average type that is 
 used by Japan to settle these conquered coun- 
 tries. 
 
 The Korean held up his hands in warning. 
 
 The Japanese stooped over, picked up a stone 
 as large as a cabbage head and,, with only a space 
 
«6 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 of two feet between himself and the Korean, 
 threw it with all his force against the cheek of 
 the Korean and smashed his jaw in, tearing his 
 ear off, breaking his jaw bone, and lacerating his 
 face fearfully. It was one of the most inhuman 
 things that I have ever seen done. 
 
 The missionary woman said to the Korean 
 when the Jap ran ; "Why do you not report this 
 to the Japanese police?" 
 
 "It would do no good. They would give no 
 justice to me, and I would be hounded to my death 
 for reporting it." 
 
 One evening with a friend I had been speaking 
 in Pyeng Yang. It was midnight one . Sunday 
 and we were waiting for a train down to Seoul. 
 As we stood on the platform waiting; a north- 
 bound train came in. It stopped. As it stopped 
 several Japanese train boys got off of the train. 
 An old white-haired Korean gentleman, about 
 seventy-five years of age, stood on the platform 
 waiting for the train. He was intelligent looking ; 
 poised; and well-dressed in the usual immacu- 
 lately white robes. 
 
 A fifteen-year old Japanese train boy, seeing 
 him standing there, deliberately ran out of his 
 way, lowered his shoulders like a football charger 
 and ran squarely into the old man, knocking him 
 down to the platform and ran on with a laugh 
 and some muttered Japanese words. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 87 
 
 The dignified Korean gentleman got up, 
 brushed the dirt from his clothes; did not even 
 deign to glance at the offending boy ; and walked 
 on as if nothing had happened. 
 
 This scene illustrates two things: First, the 
 superiority of the Korean mind and character to 
 that of the Japanese. This is one of the causes of 
 the extreme fright fulness pursued by the Jap- 
 anese. They instinctively feel the superiority of 
 their captives. It is not the first time in history 
 that a lesser nation has conquered a superior 
 people. 
 
 This superiority in soul-stuff that the Korean 
 has over that of the Japanese is recognized imme- 
 diately by all Europeans and Americans who be- 
 come, even in the least bit, familiar with the two 
 peoples. The sympathy of Christian civilizations 
 is with the Koreans immediately. 
 
 The other thing that this simple scene illus- 
 trates, is the spirit of ruthless cruelty and fright- 
 fulness that is bred in the very soul of the youth 
 of Japan toward the Koreans. Even the train- 
 boys can do a thing like that without fear of 
 punishment. 
 
 The first day that we were in Seoul, the 
 capital city of Korea,, Pat McConnell and myself 
 were walking down the main street of this inter- 
 esting city toward the depot. Parallel with us 
 marched a squad of Japanese soldiers. In front 
 
88 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 of them, going the same direction, was a poor 
 Korean workman pushing a small cart that looked 
 like our American wheelbarrow. 
 
 The Japanese soldiers were in formation and 
 marching in the middle of a wide street. But de- 
 liberately; evidently with orders from their officer 
 in charge; they edged over to that side of the 
 street where the Korean was walking and pushed 
 him into the curb stone, kicking his barrow as 
 they passed, although this meant a useless swerv- 
 ing of, at least,, fifteen feet out of their course to 
 do so. It was a case of deliberate brutality. 
 
 "Korea is a land of trails and terraces," said a 
 prominent missionary in that fair spot to me one 
 day as we were riding from Fusan to Seoul. 
 
 "And terror," added another traveler from 
 America. "It is a land of trails, terraces, and 
 terror !" 
 
 One day a friend of mine was begging Baron 
 Saito, the present Governor-General of Korea, to 
 stop the cruelties of the Japanese gendarmes in 
 villages in northern Korea. The Baron asked for 
 the names of those who had given the missionary 
 his information about the cruelties and he refused 
 to give them. 
 
 "Why should you not give them ?" asked Baron 
 Saito. 
 
 "Because they would be killed for complain- 
 ing," said the missionary. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 89 
 
 Then he told Governor-General Saito how he 
 had once complained to the police department 
 when a father and son were cruelly beaten in 
 prison. 
 
 "Give me their names/' said the gendarme. 
 
 "I will if you will give me a promise that they 
 will be protected." 
 
 "No ! I cannot do that ! The gendarmes are 
 very revengeful !" 
 
 I know personally of a Korean preacher who 
 has done no greater crime than to attend a meet- 
 ing at a dinner given for released Korean pris- 
 oners. He was arrested and kept in jail for three 
 days, just for attending that dinner. 
 
 Another preacher with whom I talked was 
 suspected of collecting money eight months after 
 the March Independence Movement. When he 
 heard that the Japanese police were coming for 
 him he fled. This angered the police. They ap- 
 peared the next morning at three o'clock at his 
 home. There were only the mother and a twelve- 
 year-old daughter left. First the gendarmes 
 burst in the frail doors with the butts of their 
 rifles,, and then from three o'clock in the morning 
 until daylight, they beat and tortured those two 
 helpless Christian Korean women ; kicking them 
 all over the house until they were unconscious. 
 These two Korean women were in bed for two 
 weeks because of that night's experience and 
 
90 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 were not able to walk for a much longer period 
 than that. 
 
 And these women were educated, cultured 
 women. They had committed no crime. It was 
 simply because they did not know where the 
 father was. 
 
 Later the father and son were arrested. They 
 were beaten cruelly in the process of arrest al- 
 though they offered no resistance. The son later 
 said to me„ "I could stand it to be beaten myself 
 and even to see my father beaten but the unbear- 
 ably cruel thing was to know that they had beaten 
 my innocent mother and sister when no man was 
 there to protect them." 
 
 I cite this instance because it happened eight 
 months after the Independence Movement, and 
 three months after the so-called reform Govern- 
 ment of Baron Saito had been in effect and after 
 the Japanese Press had said to the world that all 
 cruelties had ceased. 
 
 A case of frightfulness that was called to my 
 attention; which seemed to me to be the very 
 essence of cruelty was that of the moral terroriz- 
 ing of an educated Korean Pastor, whom the 
 police merely suspected of having had something 
 to do with the Independence Movement. They 
 had no direct evidence but submitted him to 
 months of moral terrorizing which was the worst 
 I have ever heard of. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 91 
 
 For months at a stretch they would suddenly 
 appear outside of his home and thrust their bayo- 
 nets through his doors. Then they would go 
 away without saying a word. He had absolutely 
 no redress. If he had complained, he would have 
 been thrown into prison. 
 
 One of the most reliable missionaries that I met 
 in Korea told me of how one morning the police- 
 men came to a church in northern Korea during 
 the hour of service. They broke eighty windows, 
 arrested fourteen men, smashed the little organ 
 with their gun butts,, smashed a beautiful lamp, 
 tore up the mat seats from the floors, and burned 
 them in front of the church. 
 
 At the funeral service of another young Ko- 
 rean preacher, Pak Suk Han in Pyeng Yang, hun- 
 dreds of Japanese soldiers appeared with drawn 
 bayonets just to terrorize the people. The church 
 was full of Japanese officers with drawn swords. 
 
 "What would have happened if somebody in a 
 fit of patriotism had shouted 'Mansei' ?" I asked. 
 
 "We would have been killed instantly!" said 
 the missionary soberly. "I was afraid of that !" 
 
 A prominent, educated and English-speaking 
 Korean official, told me that in a conversation 
 with a high Japanese official that that particular 
 Japanese had said "Our plan will be to assimilate 
 the Korean people 1" 
 
 "But that will be impossible. There are twenty 
 
92 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 million of us. You will find that a hard thing 
 to do !" said this Korean. 
 
 The Japanese official smiled and said signifi- 
 cantly, "We know the way !" 
 
 The Korean knew what that meant. It meant 
 extermination; extermination in every way pos- 
 sible. It meant extermination by introducing 
 prostitution in Korea. This has been done. 
 Korea never had any legalized prostitution. 
 Korea never knew what the Red Light Section 
 meant. Japan's first move was to introduce that. 
 She sent her diseased women to Korea. She 
 made prostitution ridiculously cheap; fifty sen; 
 which is twenty-five cents in American money. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 It is one of her ways of assimilation which 
 means extermination and she has already shot 
 venereal disease rates up to an alarming state 
 in Korea. 
 
 Her next step in fright fulness was to intro- 
 duce opium. Japanese Agents raise thousands of 
 acres of Opium in Korea and sell it. This is an- 
 other one of her steps in the process of assimila- 
 tion or extermination. 
 
 Japan has stolen from poor Koreans their rice 
 lands and their coal beds. The process is for a 
 Japanese company to buy the water sources of 
 the rice paddies below and then refuse to let the 
 Koreans have water for his rice fields. This is 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 93 
 
 another step in frightfulness that will finally ex- 
 terminate the Korean if it keeps up long enough. 
 
 The recent massacre of Koreans in Manchuria 
 by Japanese soldiers illustrate the Japanese spirit. 
 
 This same policy of frightfulness is carried on 
 in Formosa and in Siberia and wherever the Jap- 
 anese army and gendarme system has authority. 
 It is worse than anything that the Germans ever 
 did in France or Belgium. It has its only parallel 
 in the dark ages. 
 
 I told Baron Saito, Governor-General of Korea 
 this in an interview. He wanted to know what 
 America thought of Japan's rule in Korea. I 
 said: "America and the whole civilized world is 
 stirred with indignation at the Japanese rule in 
 Korea. There has been nothing like it since the 
 dark ages." Then I read him a quotation from 
 an editorial in Zion's Herald, a church paper 
 published in Boston, with virtually those words 
 in it. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 My friend, whom I met first in France, when 
 he came back from, France was sent to Siberia as 
 a Captain in the American Army. 
 
 I met him in Manila just after he had returned 
 from Siberia. He, in common with all Americans 
 who had seen the Japanese methods of frightful- 
 ness in Siberia, was filled with hatred. 
 
 "One night," he said, "a company of Japanese 
 
94 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 soldiers entered the little village six hundred 
 miles north of Vladivostok where we were lo- 
 cated. They announced that they were hunting 
 for Bolsheviks. 
 
 "They did not find any in the little village, al- 
 though they ruthlessly broke down every door of 
 every home in that village. Then they went out 
 to a sawmill about three miles from town and 
 brought in five boys between the ages of twelve 
 and eighteen. 
 
 "After torturing these boys in an old box car 
 for two days, hanging them up by the thumbs 
 with their arms behind their backs until they were 
 unconscious; and then forcing salt water, hot 
 water,, cold water, ^nd water with pepper in it 
 down their nostrils, alternately ; and other added 
 cruelties ; they announced to the village that they 
 would release them that night on the public 
 square." 
 
 "Did they do it?" I asked anxiously, for I was 
 stirred to my soul's depths with his narration of 
 cruelties in Siberia. 
 
 "Yes, they released them ; in this way : 
 
 "They called all the friends and families of the 
 prisoners together on the public square. Then 
 they dug five graves. Then five Japanese officers 
 came stalking across the public square, whisking 
 at the thistle-tops with swords as they came ; and 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 95 
 
 then walked up to these innocent Russian boys, 
 and whacked off their heads. 
 
 "Had they been tried?" I asked indignantly. 
 
 "They had been given no trial. They were 
 mere boys,, who, probably, didn't even know what 
 the word Bolshevik meant. It was the worst 
 illustration of frightfulness that I ever saw, al- 
 though it was a common thing for the Japanese 
 troops to go through the country upsetting the 
 barrels of honey that the poor peasants were sav- 
 ing up for the long winters; rooting up their 
 young potatoes ; cutting the throats of their colts 
 and cattle, and ravishing the land." 
 
 "How could you stand it?" 
 
 "We couldn't stand it. I had to fight to keep 
 my company of Americans from sailing into them 
 with fists and bayonets. It would have meant 
 war. So I sent word back to headquarters that 
 we were out of provisions and we were called back 
 to Vladivostok." 
 
 Can this scene be duplicated in Formosa and 
 Korea, where the Japanese hold sway ? 
 
 It can. 
 
 During the Independence Movement in Korea 
 this thing happened: All of the Korean Chris- 
 tians had been asked to assemble in a church for 
 a meeting. When they were all in the church, 
 the Japanese gendarme set fire to the church and 
 then fired into it, killing every man. 
 
96 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 A woman, big with child, came running toward 
 the church having heard the shooting and know^ 
 ing that her husband was within. 
 
 A big, burly Japanese pushed her back. 
 
 "What do you want ?" he cried in Korean. 
 
 "I want to go in there. My husband is there," 
 she cried in terror. 
 
 "But you will be killed if you go in there !" 
 
 "I don't care! I want to die if he is to die!" 
 
 "All right ! You shall have your wish 1" said 
 the Japanese, and pulling out his sword, cut off 
 her head, killing her instantly. She fell at his 
 feet with her unborn child ; and he laughed aloud 
 at the spectacle. 
 
 This is Japanese fright fulness and it can be 
 duplicated by many missionaries in Korea if they 
 dared to speak. 
 
 But the minute they speak and tell the truth 
 that minute they are! sent home from their life 
 work. They realize that this leaves the Koreans 
 to the utter and awful cruelties of the barbarous 
 Japanese, and because of this,, in spite of their 
 indignation they hold their tongues for the larger 
 good. But they eagerly give the facts to those of 
 us who are coming back to America so that 
 America in turn may know what is going on in 
 Korea. That is the only hope; that the indigna- 
 tion of a righteous world, without war, may bring 
 pressure to bear on Japan to stop these terrible 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 97 
 
 cruelties and tortures; this unutterable fright- 
 fulness. This is the hope of the missionaries ; this 
 is the only hope of the Koreans ! 
 
 I don't know whether or not it was because I 
 had been listening for so long to the most brutal 
 stories of Japanese treatment of Korean men, 
 women and children ; with murder, rapine., burn- 
 ing of homes, especially Christian homes ; beating 
 of a mother and her twelve-year-old girl from 
 three in the morning until eight to make them 
 reveal the hiding-place of their preacher daddy, 
 that the crimson, blood-red sunset I witnessed on 
 my last night in Korea seemed to me like a "sun- 
 set of crimson wounds." All I know is that it 
 happened in Korea while I was there, and that my 
 soul had been, for a solid month, stirred to the 
 depths of its righteous wrath over the things that 
 I had heard first-hand from human lips. 
 
 But there it was. The sky was blood-red. At 
 first it was black, a somber black. Not a coal- 
 black but a slate black. Then suddenly just at 
 the edge of the horizon a crack began to appear. 
 It was a slit of blood. It looked more like a 
 wound than anything else I ever saw. The slit 
 of blood grew larger and larger in the slate-black 
 clouds. 
 
 Then suddenly all over the horizon these 
 wounds began to break through the mass of black 
 
98 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 clouds. Some of these slits were horizontal slits, 
 and some of them ran in graceful curves. Some 
 of them looked as if a bayonet had been lunged 
 into the body of that somber cloud and a great 
 crimson gash was made with ragged edges as big 
 as a house. Then it looked as if some ruthless 
 Japanese gendarme had taken his sword and 
 slashed a rip in the abdomen of that sky; and 
 from side to side like a crescent moon appeared 
 this great crimson wound. 
 
 I had never seen a sunset just like it. But there 
 it was. It seemed that there was back of that 
 great black cloud a blood-red planet, pouring its 
 crimson tides like a great waterfall down back of 
 that slate-black mass until finally the curtain of 
 black began to tear, and the blood poured through 
 to run along the horizon, and splash against the 
 clouds, and slit its way like wounds through the 
 clouds of night. 
 
 And I thought of something else. I thought 
 how a Man once was crucified. I thought how 
 dark the skies were on that afternoon. I thought 
 how slate-colored and somber all life seemed, 
 especially to that little group of disciples. I 
 thought of the wounds in His hands and feet and 
 side. I thought of the wounds the thorns in His 
 crown made, and of the blood that ran over His 
 face. I could see Him there back of that cloud 
 in Korea. I could see His Christian people be- 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 9& 
 
 ing crucified again because of their religion. 
 I could see Japanese bayonets thrust into His 
 side and Japanese nails through His feet and 
 His hands. I could see a Japanese crown of 
 thorns on His head because He said, "Inasmuch 
 as ye have done it unto one of the least of these 
 my brethren ye have done it unto me." And I 
 could see the blood of his wounds breaking 
 through that nation's clouds on that wonder eve- 
 ning of the "sunset of wounds" back of the Ko- 
 rean mountains in December. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 
 
 ORIENTAL women are fascinating to Occi- 
 dental men," said a newspaper reporter in a 
 Shanghai hotel lobby, a year ago. 
 
 "All women are fascinating to Occidental men. 
 Take the French girls and the way they captured 
 our American soldiers; of course, these brown- 
 eyed, brown-skinned, graceful, mysterious " 
 
 "It's just as I said," replied the first speaker 
 interrupting the second speaker, "Oriental girls 
 are more fascinating to Occidental men than 
 white girls." 
 
 "Yes — I guess you are right., when we get 
 down to the honest to goodness truth of the 
 thing," said an American oil man. "Take that 
 Javanese girl who knocked at the door of my 
 room ; or take that half-breed Malay girl we met 
 on the ship between Singapore and Batavia; or 
 that little red-cheeked Japanese girl in Tokyo; 
 or that Spanish brunette in Manila ; or — Oh, Boy ! 
 Do you remember that Chinese half-breed, with 
 English blood in her veins and an English educa- 
 tion in her brain and Paris clothes on her back, 
 
 lOI 
 
102 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 and American pep in her eyes, and Japanese silk 
 stockings on her " 
 
 "Come on ! Come on ! We didn't call on you 
 for a lecture on Oriental girls whom you have 
 met," said the first speaker. 
 
 Then a bell boy paged me and I lost the rest of 
 the conversation. 
 
 But this dialogue set me to thinking on the 
 various types of fascinating Oriental women; the 
 standing they have in the world; and the status of 
 their living. 
 
 There were the Japanese women; beautiful, 
 graceful, red-cheeked, small of stature, wistful- 
 eyed, colorfully dressed; always smiling slaves to 
 their men. 
 
 The well-trained Geisha girl has,, for centuries, 
 because of her superior education, received the 
 confidences of Japanese men; while a Japanese 
 man would scorn to talk things over with his 
 wife. 
 
 There was the banquet we attended at the 
 Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Mr. Uchida, the Min- 
 ister of Foreign AfiEairs, and many of the high 
 ■officials of Japan were present with their wives. 
 Several members of the House of Parliament 
 were present as well as the Secretary to Mr. 
 Hara, the Prime Minister. Each of these great 
 leaders of Japan had his wife by his side at the 
 banquet table. 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS lOS 
 
 It was a small group. 
 
 One of the speakers of the evening said: "Per- 
 haps you Americans do not realize that this ban- 
 quet is an unusual occasion in Japan. I think that 
 it is the first time that I have ever attended a 
 banquet in all my life, when so many Japanese 
 gentlemen had their own wives with them at 
 that banquet. It is a very unusual thing to do,,, 
 but I hope that, in time, it will become more com- 
 mon in Japan, as it is in America." 
 
 This speech was met with amused laughter on 
 the part of the Japanese gentlemen present; but 
 laughter that was kindly ; and it was met with ap- 
 plause on the part of the Americans present. 
 
 It was typical of the attitude of even the edu- 
 cated Japanese man toward the matter of ap- 
 pearing in public with his wife at his side. 
 
 Up in Sapporo, on the island of Hokkaido, we 
 were entertained by a beautiful Japanese woman. 
 We had been away from America for several 
 months and were tired of eating Japanese food,, 
 so when we were invited to this Japanese home 
 for a dinner we groaned. 
 
 But much to our delight,, when we sat down we 
 had as fine an American dinner as any of us had 
 ever eaten. 
 
 I turned to our hostess, a most beautiful Japa- 
 nese woman ; the wife of the Dean of the College 
 
104* FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 at Sapporo ; and said : "Do you have servants who 
 know how to cook American food?" 
 
 "No, I cooked it all myself!" she said much 
 to my surprise with a bow and a smile. 
 
 And there she sat, cool and poised after having 
 cooked food enough for fifteen people that morn- 
 ing; and arranging for it to be served in the finest 
 style; with place cards, salted almonds, Turkey, 
 pudding, vegetables and everything that makes 
 an Americari dinner good ; including a fine salad. 
 There she sat; as cool, calm and collected as if 
 servants had done all of the work that morning 
 instead of she herself. 
 
 And never in all of my life have I seen a more 
 gracious hostess. She watched the wants of 
 every guest. She noted which guests liked a 
 special food, and saw to it that they had plenty 
 of that particular food; and, in addition to this 
 she kept a fascinating line of conversation going 
 constantly during the meal. 
 
 "Do you live in American fashion or Japanese 
 fashion?" I asked her, knowing that she had 
 been educated in America. 
 
 "Both!" was her reply. "We have Japanese 
 rooms for our Japanese guests and American 
 rooms for our European and American guests." 
 
 "But how do you live yourselves ; how are you 
 training your children?" I asked her. 
 
 "We are training our daughters to live in 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 105 
 
 American style; on a common ground with the 
 men. That is the better way. That is the fairer 
 way ! That is the way out of our feminine dark- 
 ness!" 
 
 She said it quietly, with poise, and with a fine 
 assurance which was thrilling. It sounded like a 
 call to battle, like a trumpet note in the new free- 
 dom for women. 
 
 A missionary friend told me at the conclusion 
 of that meal that this beautiful young Japanese 
 hostess whispered to her Mother-in-law during 
 the dinner a phrase that sounded strangely like 
 American slang, when she noted that her mother- 
 in-law was not carrying on much of a conversa- 
 tion with the man beside her, "Start something! 
 He can speak Japanese as well as English !" 
 
 At that, dear Mrs. Mother-in-law started an 
 animated conversation in Japanese with her 
 silent guest on her left. This was illustrative of 
 the care with which our hostess was watching 
 that we be kept happy at her table. It was a 
 Feminine Flash-light that I do not care to for- 
 get; an illustration of the possible efficiency, poise, 
 grace, beauty and sweetness of the Japanese 
 woman of the future when she shall have won 
 her rights of freedom from the slavery of an 
 inferior position to man, in the social scale. 
 
 To an American, the position of woman in 
 regard to prostitution in Japan is a terrible thing, 
 
106 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 but when we consider the light in which the 
 Ethical thought of Japan sees it, we do not blame 
 the women any more than Jesus blamed the 
 woman taken in adultery in his day. 
 
 The system of prostitution is run by the Gov- 
 ernment and the largest income that the Govern- 
 ment has, comes from the sale of Sake, the na- 
 tional drink, and its houses of prostitution. 
 
 A woman who becomes a Prostitute is looked 
 upon as a heroine. This is for the simple reason 
 that she is given a matter of several hundred yen, 
 it depending upon her form, beauty and qualifica- 
 tions for her position; and that money goes to 
 her poor parents. When she leaves her little 
 village to give a certain number of the years of 
 her life to the Yoshiwara in order to free her par- 
 ents from debt she is lauded and feted by the peo- 
 ple of her village and sent off as one who goes 
 on a crusade of service. 
 
 Prostitution is so much a part of the acknowl- 
 edged life of Japan that Temples for prostitutes 
 exist where they may go and pray. In one 
 Temple we saw large numbers of photographs 
 put up by certain girls of the Yoshiwara to ad- 
 vertise their wares. 
 
 Consequently there is no fine tradition of 
 ethical values established in Japan and the poor 
 girl herself is not to blame. Nor is she blamed; 
 for it is not at all an uncommon thing for a 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 107 
 
 Japanese girl to marry out of a house of prostitu- 
 tion into a fine family. 
 
 One of the terrible Feminine Flash-lights that 
 every careful traveler discovers in the Orient is 
 the presence of Japanese girls in the segregated 
 sections of Shanghai, Seoul, Peking, Nanking; 
 and even so far away as Singapore. I under- 
 stand however that a recent order from the Em- 
 peror has called all these girls back to Japan, 
 which is an upward step not only for Japan as a 
 nation; but for the womankind of Japan. 
 
 It was in a Japanese Hotel in northern China 
 that Pat McConnell and I had our experience with 
 the strange ways and customs of Japan. Pat was 
 taking the pictures and I was writing the stories. 
 
 We thought it would be an unusual experience 
 to stay all night at a regular Japanese Inn. We 
 stayed. 
 
 That night, much to the amusement, of the 
 missionaries who stayed with us,, three beautiful 
 Japanese girls came gracefully into the cold room 
 where we had started to take our clothes off. 
 
 They bowed several times as they came with 
 cups of hot tea. 
 
 They seemed to pay particular attention to me. 
 
 All three of them bowed to me first and then 
 each proceeded to select an individual man to 
 whom they served tea. 
 
108 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 I took it for granted that they had paid this 
 particular attention to me because of some spe- 
 cial characteristic of masculine beauty or intel- 
 lectual appearance; or atmosphere of greatness 
 that must have hovered about me in some un- 
 known fashion. 
 
 I made the mistake of swelling up with pride 
 and bragging about this attention that I had re- 
 ceived. 
 
 "Ah, that's because of your bald head. They 
 think that you are the old man of the party. 
 They have great respect for old age!" the mis- 
 sionary said with a roar of laughter. 
 
 The truth of the matter was that I was the 
 youngest of the party, but those girls had selected 
 me as the venerable member of the group of 
 Americans. 
 
 But the climax came when these young ladies 
 decided to stay with us "To the bitter end" as 
 Pat called it. 
 
 After filling us with tea they still remained; 
 bowing and smiling; even though they could not 
 understand a word we were saying nor we a word 
 that they were saying. 
 
 "It's one o'clock now ! I'd like to get to bed," 
 said Pat. 
 
 "How long will they stay with us?" I asked. 
 
 The missionaries only grinned in reply. 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 109 
 
 "By George, I'm going to take my shirt off and 
 see if they won't go !" said Pat. 
 
 He took it off. The young girl who was serv- 
 ing him took his shirt and after neatly folding it, 
 laid it carefully away. 
 
 "So that's what they're waiting for ; to undress 
 us?" queried Pat and the missionaries laughed 
 again, waiting to see what would happen. 
 
 "They can go as far as they like. If they can 
 stand it,, I can!" said Pat. 
 
 Then he took off his shoes. 
 
 A young lady took the shoes, carefully brushed 
 them off, and put them away. Then he took off 
 socks, followed by his trousers. 
 
 It looked as they would stay until Pat got into 
 his Pajamas. He was in a corner. 
 
 "It seems as if this young lady wants to put me 
 to bed right !" said Pat, with a grin. 
 
 "That's exactly what she is here for. It's a 
 hotel custom in Japanese hotels and we get so that 
 we don't think anything of it. They bathe in the 
 same pool; men and women alike; and think 
 nothing of it. After all, modesty is not entirely 
 a matter of clothes, as the Japanese prove." 
 
 "Anyhow, that's what I call service!" said 
 Pat with a grin. 
 
 It was a cold winter night in Seoul, Korea. I 
 had been invited to dinner at a Korean home; 
 
110 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 the home of a former Governor under the Korean 
 regime; and now, a respected official under the 
 Japanese rule. 
 
 I had looked forward to this dinner with un- 
 usual interest. 
 
 We took Rickshas to get there and nearly 
 froze on the way. 
 
 We took both our shoes and our coats off on 
 the back porch and left them to the tender mercies 
 of the zero weather which prevailed on that 
 night. 
 
 We were ushered into this beautiful home. 
 
 A room was full of men; stately sons of the 
 family; the gray-bearded, dignified father; but 
 no women, not a single woman. I wondered 
 about this, for I knew that this household was 
 noted for its beautiful daughters and a wonder- 
 ful mother. The missionaries had told me that. 
 
 I wondered why no women came to welcome 
 me. 
 
 Finally we sat down to one of those intermin- 
 able Oriental dinners, with thirty or forty 
 courses; squatted on our haunches, on the cold 
 floor ; half-frozen, cramped and uncomfortable. 
 
 Then in came a beautiful girl. She was beauti- 
 ful in every sense of the word; physically and 
 spiritually. There was a touch of refinement 
 about her which made me know that she had re- 
 ceived an English education. 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 111 
 
 But she was not there for any part of the din- 
 ner. Not at all. She was there merely to serve. 
 
 I found that she could speak English and every 
 time she came to serve me, I took the opportunity 
 of talking with her ; taking a chance on whether 
 it was diplomatic for me to do so or not. I was 
 after information. 
 
 "You speak good English?" I said. "Why do 
 you not sit down and eat with us?" 
 
 She laughed aloud. 
 
 "My father would drop over dead if I did. It 
 is not the custom in Korea for the women of the 
 family to dine with the men on an occasion like 
 this. We eat alone in the kitchen." 
 
 "Have you a mother?" 
 
 "Yes, but she is in the kitchen." 
 
 "Will I not get to meet her before I go?" 
 
 "Perhaps? Perhaps not. If you meet her at 
 all it will be just at the close, of the evening, 
 providing my father thinks to call her. It is not 
 important ; so our Korean men think." 
 
 "But you ; you know better ? You have been 
 in an American School?" I said, as she came in 
 for the fifteenth course and paused a moment to 
 talk with me. 
 
 "Yes, I know better! I know the American 
 way of treating women is the Christian way," she 
 said sadly. 
 
 "And what do you think of that way? Do 
 
112 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 you not like that way better than the Korean 
 way?" I asked. 
 
 "The American way is much better." Then 
 she paused and much to my delight used a typical 
 American girl's phrase, with an appealing touch 
 of pathos in her voice and a blush of crimson in 
 her brown cheeks, "Why, I just love the Ameri- 
 can way!" she said and then fled, blushing with 
 shame, as if she had said something immodest. 
 
 I did not see her again that evening. Nor did 
 I see any of the other women of that household. 
 Nor did I see the mother of the home at all. 
 
 It was in a Shanghai hospital. I was sitting 
 beside an American newspaper friend who was 
 at the head of the Chinese Information Bureau. 
 He was a world-vagabond. Beside his bed sat a 
 beautiful Chinese girl, who had b^en educated in 
 England and whose mother was a Scotch woman. 
 Her father was a full-blooded Chinese. 
 
 "I love her but she won't marry me!" said 
 my friend suddenly looking up toward the Chinese 
 girl. 
 
 She was a beautiful girl and could play a 
 piano as few American women I have met. She 
 would have graced any social room in America 
 with her dark beauty, her brown eyes, and her 
 Oriental fire. She was rich. Her father was 
 worth several millions ; being one of many shrewd 
 

 THE TEMPU: or HEAVEJTj PEKINO. 
 
 Long before a single cathedral had been built in Europe 
 this beautiful structure was erected. 
 
 A BEAUnrtn. THmTEElf STOKT pagoda XEAB PEKING. 
 
MILLIOirS OP TVATSIDE TEMPLES AND SHEINES ADOBIT THE 
 FIEtDS AND HIGHWAYS EVERYWHERE IN JAPAN, KOREA, AND 
 CHINA. THIS IS ONE OF THEM. A SHRINE AND A TEMPLE. 
 
 A SUNRISE SILHOUETTE PHOTOGRAPH OF SOME OF THE HUN- 
 DREDS OF BELLS OF BUDDHA ON BOROBOEDOER, JAVA. 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 113 
 
 Chinese business men. She was dressed like a 
 Parisian model, in the latest European styles. 
 She was in China for the first time in her life. 
 Her father had brought her back to marry a 
 Chinese boy. She did not love him. She did 
 love my American friend. 
 
 "Why will you not marry James?" I asked 
 her. 
 
 "My father would kill me," she said quietly. 
 
 "Does he say so?" 
 
 "He does. He went to America a week ago; 
 and the last thing he said was, 'If you marry any- 
 thing but a Chinese I will kill you !' " 
 
 "Did he really mean it?" I asked her, aston- 
 ished. 
 
 "He meant it more than anything he ever 
 meant in his life. It would be considered a dis- 
 grace to my entire family if I married anybody 
 but a Chinese boy." 
 
 "Even though your father married a Scotch 
 woman ?" I said. 
 
 "For that very reason it is imperative that I 
 marry my own blood," she said. 
 
 "That is terrible!" I replied catching my first 
 glimpse of the strange and terrible social position 
 in which a girl of mixed blood is placed in China. 
 
 "You see,," she said in a quiet, refined voice, 
 with a marked English accent, "I have an English 
 .education but I have Chinese blood. I can never 
 
114 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 »> 
 
 be happy marrying a Chinese after I have been 
 educated in England. I can never be happy with 
 Chinese clothes, Chinese customs, and Chinese 
 people. And yet if I marry the man I love, it will 
 break my father's heart. He would kill me to 
 be sure; for if he says he will, that means that 
 he will keep his word. But that would not be the 
 worst of it. To die would be easy." 
 
 "What would be the worst of it?" I asked, my 
 heart stirred with a strangely deep sympathy at 
 this beautiful Chinese girl's dilemma. 
 
 "The worst thing would be that it would break 
 my father's heart !" 
 
 Then she wept. 
 
 That was my first glimpse of the life of tragedy 
 through which a half-breed woman of the Orient 
 has to go. 
 
 I met them in the Philippines, with Spanish 
 and American blood running in their veins; I 
 met Malay girls whose fathers had been German 
 or English; I met Dyak girls whose fathers had 
 been Dutch; and Javanese girls whose fathers 
 had been either American, English or Dutch. 
 
 I stayed with such a woman in a home in 
 Borneo. She had been a Dyak girl. Yet she did 
 not look it. She had a beautiful home with beau- 
 tiful English speaking children. I met her in the 
 interior of Borneo a hundred miles from a single 
 white woman. And yet in this far interior; liv- 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 115 
 
 ing with her English husband who was the head 
 of a mining project; she was keeping intact the 
 English education of her children. There was a 
 piano and the children played beautifully while 
 the mother, in a rich contralto voice sang. 
 
 She was graceful, accomplished, beautiful, 
 poised and sweet. 
 
 One night as we walked alone under the moon- 
 light the Englishman opened his heart to me and 
 said, "You are going to visit the Head-Hunting 
 Dyaks to-morrow. You will see their abject 
 squalor and filth. You will be surprised when I 
 tell you that my wife was a Dyak girl and that 
 I took her out of a Kampong fifteen years ago 
 and took her to England." 
 
 "That's a lie!" I exclaimed. 
 
 "It is the truth !" he added. 
 
 Somehow his statement angered me. I don't 
 know why. Perhaps it was the unusual heat of 
 the tropics. We were directly on the Equator. 
 I would have fought him for that statement. 
 
 But it was true. 
 
 "And the hell of it was that when I took her to 
 England she was not happy and my people would 
 not receive her. So we have had to come back 
 to Borneo and live our lives in this fashion, far 
 from civilization." 
 
 He was silent for a few minutes. 
 
 "That is the fate of mixing bloods in these 
 
116 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 tropical lands," he said with a shudder. "And the 
 woman always suffers more than the man !" 
 
 I met another Malay-English girl on the ship 
 going from Singapore to Batavia, Java. 
 
 She too was an educated, English-speaking girl 
 of a strange beauty and fascination. She started 
 to talk with me as I sat alone on the Dutch ship. 
 We were the only English-speaking people on 
 board and we felt a certain comradeship. We sat 
 an entire evening talking about the problem of 
 a girl of mixed blood in the Malay States. 
 
 "White men always assume that we are bad 
 girls. They come into the offices where we work 
 as stenographers and insult us. It is that taint 
 of mixed blood. We have the longings and the 
 ideals of the best blood that is in our veins ; but 
 the skin and the color and the passions of the 
 worst. We try to be good; some of us; but 
 everything is against us. We can never marry 
 white men; though we frequently fall in love 
 with them for we work side by side with them in 
 the offices. But when it comes to marrying us 
 they fear the social ban. It is a terrible thing. 
 There is no way out ! It is a thing that has been 
 imposed upon us from the generations that have 
 gone. We pay !" 
 
 I shall never forget her brown eyes, her brown 
 skin, her heaving breast, as the great Dutch ship 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 117 
 
 cut the waves of the South China Sea bound for 
 Java. 
 
 "Why are you leaving a good position and 
 going to Java ?" I asked her. 
 
 "They say things are better for us girls in 
 Java; that the Dutch are not so particular. I 
 shall no doubt be homesick for Singapore but I 
 am going to try Java for a while. My sister 
 is there!" 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 A Feminine-Flash light that has its humorous 
 side was one that I experienced in Borneo. 
 
 We had gone out to a Dyak village to take 
 pictures. 
 
 It was a miserably hot morning. That night I 
 stayed in Pontianak which is bisected by the 
 Equator. It was so cold in the middle of the 
 night that I had to get up and put on a night 
 shirt! 
 
 The next day we tramped ten miles through 
 the Jungle to a Head-hunting Dyak village. 
 
 I had been taking pictures for an hour in this 
 Kampong when six of the most beautiful Dyak 
 girls came in, with great Bamboo water tubes 
 flung over their gracefully strong shoulders. 
 Their skin looked like that of a red banana from 
 toe to chin. They were stark naked save for a 
 girdle about their loins. They had been five miles 
 away for water. 
 
118 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 Their skin was flushed with exercise. There 
 they stood, mystified at seeing white men in the 
 village Kampong. 
 
 In fact they were terrified. 
 
 Their big brown eyes bulged out. 
 
 Their breasts heaved with fear. 
 
 I said to the missionary, "Dyak Madonnas! 
 What a painting they would make ?" 
 
 "Yes, there are no more beautiful women any- 
 where. They look like bronze statues. A Rodin, 
 or a St. Gaudens would go wild over their limbs 
 and bodies." 
 
 I asked the missionary to tell them that I 
 wanted to take a picture of them just as they 
 were, standing with their water vessels poised 
 on their shoulders; in their naked splendor and 
 beauty. 
 
 He told them. 
 
 They squealed for all the world like American 
 girls and ran for dear life, disappearing in the 
 flash of an eye. 
 
 He tried to coax them to come out to get a pic- 
 ture taken. The Missionary could speak their 
 language but they would only peek through the 
 doors with grinning faces. 
 
 Finally they agreed that we could take their 
 pictures if I would let them put dresses on. 
 
 I didn't want to do this ; for I wanted them just 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 119 
 
 as they were; but saw that they were adamant in 
 their souls even if their brown bodies did look 
 as soft as ripening mangos; and as beautiful and 
 brown. 
 
 I pictured all sorts of ugly dresses; discarded 
 by the white folks and given to them. But much 
 to my surprise, when they appeared all dressed 
 up for the picture, every last one of them had 
 on a white woman's discarded night gown. 
 
 I wanted to laugh. It destroyed their pictur- 
 esqueness but those gowns could not destroy their 
 symmetrical beauty of limb and body. 
 
 "That's a quick way to dress up !" I said to my 
 missionary friend. 
 
 We smiled but I got the picture. 
 
 And back of these Flash-lights Feminine ; is the 
 black page of the history of womankind in all the 
 Far East; with footbinding still rampant over 
 nine-tenths of China; baby-killing, baby-selling, 
 and baby-slavery which I saw with my own eyes 
 time and time again ; with slavery of womankind, 
 from Japan down to Ceylon the regular thing. 
 But there is still hope in the woman-heart of the 
 Far East; and the hope is the American woman 
 and her religion. That and that alone will break 
 down prejudices, break off shackles, and tear to 
 bits the traditions of the past. 
 
120 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "The women suflfer! Yes, the women always 
 suffer !" said a big fellow to me up in the northern 
 part of Luzon in the Philippines one evening. 
 
 "What do you mean ?" I asked him, scenting a 
 story. 
 
 Then the man told me of a cholera epidemic 
 that he had passed through; of how he had tried 
 to care for the sick, even though he was not a 
 physician; told me of their poor superstitious 
 methods of driving away the "evil spirits." 
 
 He told of how he had gone into homes where 
 he found seven inmates dead and four dying; of 
 how he tried to care for them with nothing 
 medicinal at hand. 
 
 Then he told me of how the poor people went 
 down to a dirty inland river and had killed a hog, 
 taken its heart ; killed a dog, taketi its heart ; and 
 then after putting them on a little raft, floated 
 them off down the river to drive the cholera away. 
 Then he told me of how the natives had, in their 
 desperation, tied tight bands about their ankles 
 to keep the evil spirits from coming up out of 
 the earth into their bodies. 
 
 "But what do you yourself do about a doctor. 
 You say that you are 400 miles from a doctor, 
 even here. What about your children, when they 
 take sick ?" I asked him, and then was sorry that 
 I had asked the question because of a terribly hurt 
 and unutterably sorrowful look in his eyes. 
 
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 121 
 
 "Mother and I don't like to talk about that or 
 to think about it!" he said simply, and I knew 
 that I had torn open an old wound which was 
 just over his heart. 
 
 His voice broke as he spoke, and he looked 
 at the woman who was his brave helpmate and 
 said again: "Mother and I don't like to think 
 about that !" The tears ran down over his cheeks 
 and "Mother's" too, and mine also. 
 
 "I am, sorry! I am sorry if I have opened an 
 old wound!" I said, quite helpless to remedy the 
 damage I had done. I felt as one who had un- 
 wittingly trodden on a flower bed and crushed 
 some violets. They bleed, even thoijigh you see 
 no blood. I saw that their hearts were bleeding. 
 But he spoke. 
 
 "We were 400 miles from a doctor. Baby took 
 sick. If we could have had a doctor she would 
 have been saved." 
 
 "Now Daddy, we do not know for certain about 
 that," said the ever-conservative woman in her. 
 
 "There was not a Filipino doctor. She died in 
 mother's arms !" 
 
 It was oppressively silent in that far-off mis- 
 sion home for a few minutes. I thought some 
 one would sob aloud. It might have been any one 
 of us, the way we all felt. I took hold of my cane 
 chair with a grip that numbed my hands for a 
 half hour afterwards. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 
 
 ALL the "Peck's Bad Boys" of the world are 
 not confined to American soil. 
 
 I found them all over the Far East ; especially 
 in China. 
 
 I was annexed by one of them who became a 
 sort of a guide de luxe when we were going 
 through the ruined Palaces of the romantic 
 regions of Peking. 
 
 He annexed himself to us in somewhat the 
 same fashion as a thistle or a burr annexes itself 
 to you as you walk through the field where thistles 
 are thick. 
 
 He was an acquired asset of questionable value. 
 With him were a lot of followers but it was 
 plain to be seen that he was the leader of the 
 gang; which was, for all the world, like a typical 
 street gang in an American city. 
 
 Who could pass up that group of a dozen little 
 
 rascals who followed us through the ruins of the 
 
 old Summer Palace? Who could resist their 
 
 imitations of everything one did? I sneezed 
 
 and the little rascals sneezed also. I counted one, 
 
 123 
 
124r FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 two, three,, four, as I adjusted my Graflex for a 
 picture and I heard a chorus of laughing "One, 
 two, three, fours." I yelled ahead to an American 
 member of the party and said "Wait!", and a 
 dozen boys yelled "Wait !" 
 
 We fell in love with the dirty- faced rascals. 
 They looked to be a nuisance when we started 
 and I wanted them driven back, but before we 
 were through they had become, the most interest- 
 ing part of the whole trip. Sure enough we 
 emptied our purses of pennies and some white 
 money. The little fellow who was in his bare 
 feet and who said, with a real touch of seven 
 year old Chinese humor,, "These are leather shoes 
 that I have on and they will last all my life," won 
 our hearts. That was humor with a vengeance. 
 
 This lad was happy. No wonder then that 
 when one of the party passed him an extra penny 
 early in the morning he winked knowingly as one 
 who had been taken into the inner councils of af- 
 fection. 
 
 And no wonder that he followed the man who 
 gave him that penny to the end of the morning, 
 and no wonder when we told him through the 
 interpreter that we liked the boys because they 
 were good boys; he said in return, "Some boys 
 would have followed you around, pulling your 
 coats and being rude and yelling at you." 
 
 The nonchalant way in which they admitted 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 125 
 
 that they were good boys won our hearts and we 
 came back penniless. 
 
 Then who can forget the little rascals who 
 smiled and winked back in the midst of the digni- 
 fied Lama ceremonies over at the Lama Temple, 
 proving that they were, after all, real human 
 boys with a laugh and the spirit of fun in their 
 little souls in spite of their having to take part 
 in this dignified chanting service. 
 
 It was fun when the service was over to see 
 them tumble out of the Temple so fast that one 
 boy fell and about six fell on top of him just as 
 American boys do pouring out of school. I even 
 saw one lad whack another one on the back of his 
 little bald head and a scufiie ensued. They 
 laughed, fought, tumbled pell-mell, got up again 
 grinning, winked and laughed back at the good 
 natured Americans for all the world like Ameri- 
 can boys. 
 
 The Chinese have a distinct sense of humor 
 and it is very much like that which is found in 
 our own America. Indeed the Chinese are like us 
 in many respects. 
 
 The Filipino enjoys a good joke but his humor 
 is more cruel than is American humor. 
 
 The Dyak of Borneo has a sense of play and 
 fun that would not exactly appeal to an American 
 mind; although there are those who claim that 
 American football is a near kin to the delightful 
 
126 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 game of Head-hunting indulged in by the Dyaks 
 of Borneo. 
 
 The Dyaks have for centuries been known as 
 the head-hunters of the Far East. They, in 
 common with the Igorotes of the PhiHppines,, 
 have had the playful custom of going out when 
 the mood took them and bringing in a few heads 
 just as our Indians used to get scalps. When a 
 Dyak youth wanted to marry a nice young Dyak 
 girl to whom he had taken a fancy (and I can as- 
 sure the reader that some of them are as beauti- 
 ful as Rodin's bronze statues), he didn't even 
 dare mention his desire for that young bronze 
 beauty until he had brought in five or six heads. 
 After that he had some standing in the lady's 
 sight. Without the heads he had no more chance 
 of winning either the girl herself or her pa or ma 
 or any of the Dyak family than the proverbial 
 snowball has of getting through Borneo without 
 melting. It just simply couldn't be done accord- 
 ing to Dyak etiquette. 
 
 Head-hunting was a game between tribes also. 
 When two tribes of Dyaks felt a playful mood 
 coming on, they would challenge each other to a 
 head-hunting game. The game would last for a 
 week or so and the tribe that took the most heads 
 won. It was nothing like "Tag you're it." If so, 
 some of the skulls .that I have seen at Dyak Com- 
 pounds would not be grinning so hideously these 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 127 
 
 days as they ornament the poles of certain vain 
 and proud Dyak hunters. 
 
 The Battaks of Sumatra also have a playful 
 custom of getting rid of their old men. When 
 a man gets so old that they think it is about time 
 for him to tell his last tale, they put him up a 
 Cocoanut tree. Then all of the young bucks of 
 the village get together and try to shake him 
 down. If he is too feeble to hold on, and comes 
 down, that is a sign of heaven that his days are 
 through and they cook him and eat him. 
 
 The Japanese claim to have a great sense of 
 humor. Japanese students speaking in America, 
 insist that this is true. But travelers in Japan do 
 not find it so. Indeed if Japan had a sense of 
 humor, it would keep her out of many an inter- 
 national tangle. She does not know how to laugh. 
 Her sense of dignity is so exaggerated that she 
 does not know the fine art of smiling and laugh- 
 ing at herself. 
 
 "What does Japan most need to learn?" a stu- 
 dent asked me. 
 
 "To laugh," I replied. 
 
 "I think that you are right! Your Lincoln 
 knew how to laugh !" was his response as he went 
 off thoughtfully. 
 
 I was advertised to speak in a northern college 
 in Japan. The Dean of the school wanted to ad- 
 
128 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 vertise me so that the students would all come out 
 to hear me. This is the way he did it : 
 
 "Dr. Stidger is a college student who played with the 
 foot ball in America. He is a man with the bigness of 
 the head! He reaches the six feet tall; the four feet 
 around ; has an ami like an ox and a head like a board !" 
 
 I was not certain as to just what he meant by 
 many of those references, but I was assured that 
 they were intended to be highly complimentary 
 to me. I am not yet sure of that but I had a 
 good laugh just the same. 
 
 The story is told of a ruthless American humor- 
 ist Hotel-keeper in Singapore who was entertain- 
 ing a group of Japanese Officers from the Japa- 
 nese Navy. This American had no love for 
 Japan. He also knew of their lack of humor ; so 
 when the Japanese Captain arrived at the hotel 
 the American Manager made quite an extended 
 speech of welcome, as his American friends list- 
 ened, greatly amused. 
 
 He said in part : "The hotel is yours ! During 
 your stay the entire force of servants is at your 
 disposal. If there is anything that you want that 
 you do not see, please ask for it." 
 
 The Japanese Captain bowed continuously and 
 smiled; sucking in his breath with a character- 
 istic national custom ; the same sound they made 
 as they eat fried eggs in a Japanese dining car; 
 a sound similar to the old-fashioned but now 
 
OLD BEOMO VOLCANO, JAVA. 
 
 "The way it effervesces Bromo is a fitting name," 
 the author when he saw it in action. 
 
 said 
 
 A SIDE VIEW OF BEAUTIFUL BOEOBOEDOER Ilf JAVA. 
 
 Said by travelers to make the Pyramids look like child's 
 play as a tremendous piece of construction; and as a work 
 of art to have no rival in the whole world. 
 
IfAKED AND UIMEBWISE. 
 
 This curious oonglomoration of Mongrel children watch- 
 ing the photographer In Borneo where Dyaks, Chinese, 
 Malay and others mix indiscriminately. 
 
 ^^^R 
 
 ■■|fc_^r^-— "'^^ 
 
 '""^^FSJJHBH 
 
 ^HB 
 
 rimf^B^^Pm^^ 
 
 A^^^^H^H 
 
 ^^^^^v 
 r- 
 
 -*"'■'* jBm w^ 
 
 HHBwn|j|^^^WL ^j^^Bj^n 
 
 ^^ 
 
 ^■Ig^^^y 
 
 P^^H| 
 
 £j 
 
 
 IrE^Sk'JhK ;^^^MHBH^HHn^^H 
 
 A DOG MARKET AMOITO THE IGGOEOTEES OF THE PHILIPPINES. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 129 
 
 obsolete method of drinking coffee from a saucer. 
 
 "There is just one request however that we will 
 have to make of you,, while you are here with us 
 in the hotel," continued the American hotel man- 
 ager. 
 
 "And what is that may I ask?" inquired the 
 Japanese Captain, still bowing and sucking in air 
 through his teeth. 
 
 "That you do not climb around in the trees!" 
 
 The Japanese officers did not see the joke and 
 did not even smile but the Americans in the Far 
 East have laughed over it for years. 
 
 Which reminds one of the night on the Sambas 
 River when a hundred little monkeys were silhou- 
 etted against a crimson sunset. 
 
 Red, brown, yellow, golden, blue orchids 
 flashed in the sunlight ; and flowers of every hue 
 under God's blue skies made brilliant the river 
 banks. At times the ship went so close that I 
 could reach out and grab a limb of a tree, much 
 to the indignation of the monkeys who chattered 
 at me as if I had stolen something. Now and 
 then a big lazy alligator slid into the water from 
 the muddy banks as the wave-wash from our 
 propellor frightened him. 
 
 Coming back down the Sambas River, along its 
 winding, beautiful way we sat one evening and 
 watched a crimson sunset from the deck of the 
 
130 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 ship. At one point in the river there was a row 
 of dead, bare trees. There were no leaves on 
 the branches — only monkeys: big red monkeys, 
 which they call "Beroks," and little gray fellows, 
 which they call "Wahwahs." These monkeys 
 were strikingly silhouetted against the crimson 
 sunset in strange tropical fashion. From the tips 
 of those dead trees down to the lowest branches 
 dozens of monkeys stood like sentinels, or romped 
 like children, or chattered like magpies. Their 
 long curling tails silhouetted below the branches 
 against the light of evening. 
 
 Most Americans who go in and out of Japan 
 get disgusted with the regulations that policemen 
 impose upon them. 
 
 This is especially true of those Americans liv- 
 ing in China who are compelled, for business 
 reasons, to go in and out of Japan, for at every 
 trip they are required to answer the same list 
 of questions. I traveled from Korea into Japan 
 with the Military Attache of the Spanish Lega- 
 tion. When we landed a Japanese officer who had 
 known hipi for many years insisted upon his 
 answering the usual questions. 
 
 "I've been in this country for ten years and 
 yet I never go out or in that they do not compel 
 me to go through the same foolish police regula- 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN ISl 
 
 tions which they have copied from Germany and 
 haven't sense enough to give up !" he said indig- 
 nantly. 
 
 I also traveled with a party in which there was 
 a Methodist Bishop's wife. This Bishop's wife 
 absolutely refused to g^ve the Japanese police- 
 man her age. Not that she had any reason to 
 be ashamed of her age. In fact she could easily 
 have passed for twenty years younger than she 
 probably was, but she just had the average Amer- 
 ican woman's spunk and refused to give it. 
 
 For a few minutes it looked as if diplomatic 
 relations between Japan and America might be 
 seriously cracked, if not broken ; for the Japanese 
 officer had no sense of humor. That is one of the 
 chief defects of the Japanese police and military 
 system. It has no sense of humor. It takes it- 
 self too seriously. It does not know how to laugh. 
 
 To the eight or ten Americans in the party 
 the whole matter was a huge joke and we ad- 
 mired the spunk of the Bishop's wife, but the poor 
 Japanese police officer was facing what he 
 thought was an international problem. 
 
 Need it be said that the whole matter was 
 finally settled to the entire satisfaction; not of the 
 Japanese officer, but to the entire satisfaction of 
 the Bishop's wife. 
 
132 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 A friend of mine who happens to be in busi- 
 ness in the Orient got so tried of being inter- 
 viewed, trailed, and made to answer innumerable 
 questions about his mother, grandmother, etc., 
 that one day on landing in Yokohama, in a spirit 
 of fun, he answered the officer's questions in this 
 manner : 
 
 "How old are you ?" 
 
 "Thirty-six." 
 
 "Have you a family ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "How many children?" 
 
 "Three." 
 
 "How old are they?" 
 
 "One is thirty-eight, one forty, and one forty- 
 five." 
 
 "What is your occupation ?" 
 
 "Commander-in-Chief of the Greenland Navy." 
 
 "What are you doing in Japan?" 
 
 "Getting a cargo of ice to take back to Green- 
 land." 
 
 After satisfying his appetite for information, 
 the Japanese police officer departed to make his 
 reports, while the young American went to his 
 hotel with a grin all over his face. 
 
 While he was eating his dinner that evening 
 suddenly the Japanese officer appeared in the din- 
 ing room with a big smile on his face and walked 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 133 
 
 over to where the American sat with a group of 
 
 friends. 
 As he approached the American's table he said 
 
 with a grin, "You American! I know! You 
 
 American !" 
 
 "How did you guess it, my friend?" 
 
 "You make me one tam fool !" he said holding 
 
 out the report. 
 
 Some of the most laughable things that one 
 sees in the Orient are the Japanese signs trans- 
 lated into English by some Japanese merchant 
 who has picked up a dash of English here and 
 there. 
 
 One such sign which caused a lot of amusement 
 was that of a tailor who was trying to cater to 
 American Tourist trade. He had, evidently, also 
 had some contact with the spiritual phraseology 
 of the missionaries. He had painted on a big 
 sign: 
 
 "BUY OUR PANCE! 
 
 THEY FIT YOU BETTER AND 
 
 THEY WARM YOUR LEGS LIKE THE 
 
 LOVE OF GOD !" 
 
 Perhaps the most exhilaratingly humorous 
 thing that the Japanese have perpetrated on the 
 Koreans was a list of advices printed and posted 
 all over Korea by the Police Departrpent as to 
 the regulation of Fords: 
 
134 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 RULES ! 
 
 1. At the rise of hand of policeman, stop rapidly. Do 
 not pass him by or otherwise disrespect him. 
 
 2. When a passenger of the foot hove in sight, tootle 
 the horn trumpet to him melodiously at first. If he 
 still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigor and 
 express by word of the mouth the warning, "hi, hi." 
 
 3. Beware of the wandering horse that he shall not take 
 fright as you pass him. Do not explode the exhaust 
 box at him. Go soothingly by, or stop by the road- 
 side till he gently pass away. 
 
 4. Give big space to the festive dog that make sport in 
 the roadway. Avoid entanglement of dog with your 
 wheel spokes. 
 
 5. Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk 
 the skid-demon. Press the brake of the foot as you 
 roll around the corners to save the collapse and tie- 
 up. 
 
 6. Number of people you put in the Ford: You put 
 two in the front house and three in the back house. 
 
 There were other rules but this list will be 
 sufficient as a Flash-light of Fun to give some 
 idea of the ridiculous way in which the average 
 Japanese twists the ideas and phraseology of 
 English in the translations, 
 
 I saw one great sign which brought a smile. It 
 was up on the island of Hokkaido. It had printed 
 in large English letters: 
 
 "GET YOUR MOTHER'S MILK HERE!" 
 
 Below that sentence there was a picture of a 
 cow which looked as much like a combination of 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 135 
 
 an Elephant and a Camel as anything I know. 
 The artist must have been a wonder. Attached 
 to each of the cow's udders were long lines of 
 hose that ran for about ten feet across a big bill- 
 board. At the end of each line of hose was a 
 nipple, like our American baby-nipples. At the 
 end of each nipple there was a man-sized baby 
 pulling away at the nipple. It was one of the 
 funniest advertising signs I ever saw. I watched 
 several Americans look up at it and every one of 
 them laughed aloud. And the funny thing about 
 it was that it was intended to be a serious adver- 
 tising sign. 
 
 • •••*• 
 
 At a banquet given in the Imperial Hotel in 
 Tokyo one of the most side-splitting incidents 
 happened unintentionally that ever happened at 
 any banquet anywhere. 
 
 One of the sons of a great Japanese business 
 man was speaking. The banquet was in honor of 
 a well-known College President from America 
 who had come to take up work in the Orient. 
 This banquet was to welcome him officially to 
 Japan. 
 
 One of the speakers, sitting beside Mr. Uchida, 
 the Foreign Minister, had been a student in Amer- 
 ica where this man was formerly the college 
 president and he was trying to make the crowd 
 see how happy he was to welcome the president 
 
136 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 to Japan. He did it in the following language as 
 nearly as I can remember it : 
 
 "I feel like a cartoon I see in your peculiar 
 paper — what you call him — Puck? Judge? No 
 — ^he bin in that peculiar paper, Life? That was 
 he. 
 
 "This picture; he shows two dogs talking to 
 each other. 
 
 "One dog — ^he a great, what you call him — 
 Coolie? Pug? Yes, he was a Scottish Coolie. 
 The other was a little wee dog; a Pugnacious 
 Dog, I think you call him. 
 
 "The little dog he have his tail all done up in 
 the bandages. 
 
 "The big dog say, 'Little dog, for why you have 
 your tail all bandaged up like that ? You have an 
 accident ?' 
 
 " 'No,' say the little dog, 'but my master, he 
 just come home from France, and I am so glad 
 to see him I bin wagging my tail all day long 
 until it get broke and I have to have him wrapped 
 up like this.' " 
 
 Then the speaker turned dramatically — ^with 
 the deepest sense of seriousness; without a trace 
 of a smile on his face, without a glimmer of con- 
 sciousness of the fact that the Americans at that 
 banquet were biting their teeth to keep from 
 bursting into laughter ; and with a grand flourish, 
 pointed to the American dignitary and said, "I 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 137 
 
 feel just like that little dog. I so glad to see 
 Dr. come to Japan that I have been wag- 
 ging my tail all day long." 
 
 But he got no further. The American crowd ; 
 full-dressed, and full of dignity as it was; ex- 
 ploded. That speech was too much, even for the 
 sake of international courtesy, to expect such a 
 crowd to hold in. Fortunately most of the edu- 
 cated Japanese there saw the joke and joined in 
 the laugh. 
 
 We had a funny experience in a dining car on 
 a Japanese train coming from northern Japan 
 down to Tokyo one evening. 
 
 A well-dressed Japanese in a rich Kimono sat 
 drinking heavily at a table a few feet from us. 
 
 Suddenly he looked up and yelled "Silence!" 
 looking directly at us. 
 
 It was so sudden and so funny that I laughed. 
 This made the Japanese gentleman angry. 
 
 Then he let forth a more extended English 
 sentence. Later we figured that it was the only 
 sentence in English that he knew, and that he 
 had learned that sentence by sitting at the feet 
 of some stern,, English teacher who had occasion 
 to reiterate that sentence frequently. 
 
 This drunken Japanese looked at me sternly 
 for laughing and said, "Silence! All gentlemen 
 must be silent \" 
 
138 ?FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 This was too much for my sense of humor and 
 I laughed again. 
 
 "Silence! All gentlemen must be silent!" he 
 yelled a third time. 
 
 "We must get away from him ; or we'll get into 
 trouble. I can't keep from laughing when he 
 repeats that," I said to Dr. Goucher. 
 
 We all moved back to another table, but Dr. 
 Goucher sat by himself at a little table. This 
 moving, insulted the drunken Japanese and he 
 came back to where Dr. Goucher sat and leered 
 into his face yelling once again, "All gentlemen 
 must be silent !" 
 
 At this one of the party jumped to the side of 
 Dr. Goucher and took the Japanese by the 
 shoulder and turned him around and said, "Go! 
 Sit down, fool !" 
 
 The train was whirling through the night. 
 There were mutterings and imprecations among 
 the Japanese and we thought that they were di- 
 rected toward us ; but a missionary who could un- 
 derstand the language,, said that the whole crowd 
 of Japanese was severely reprimanding the 
 drunken Japanese for insulting foreigners. They 
 told him in Japanese phrases that he ought to be 
 ashamed of insulting foreigners in his own 
 country. 
 
 About five minutes after this he suddenly 
 left his seat, came staggering down the aisle of 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS 'OF FUN 139 
 
 the car with a plate full of big red apples and 
 oifered an apple to each one of us as a peace 
 offering. 
 
 We got to calling him, in our party "Old Mr. 
 'AH gentlemen must be silent !' " and he 'came to 
 be a real character in our fun. 
 
 But one morning a month later as we were all 
 boarding a train in Fusan, Korea, bound for 
 Seoul, who should be sitting in the car but "Old 
 Mr. 'All gentlemen must be silent.' " 
 
 This time he was in American clothes. We had 
 a Japanese friend with us. We told this friend 
 about the incident on the train in northern Japan 
 and asked him who the man was. 
 
 "Why that is a member of the House of Lords 
 and he is going up to Korea representing the Diet 
 to make a report on the Korean outrages,," we 
 were told. 
 
 Another m,onth passed and I was coming back 
 from Seoul, Korea, to Tokio, Japan, when I 
 suddenly. ran into our old friend "All gentlemen 
 must be silent \" This time he was drunk again, 
 and sitting in a Japanese dining car with the same 
 Kimono on that he had worn the first time we 
 saw him. He saw me enter the car. 
 
 I tried to avoid him^ but he was not to let this 
 opportunity for international courtesy go by un- 
 noticed and unimproved. So, much to my de- 
 light and surprise, he arose, and made a low bow. 
 
140 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 I bowed back. He made another bow until his 
 nose almost touched the car. I made a return 
 bow. He made a third one. I followed suit. 
 He made a fourth. I made a fourth, although I 
 was beginning to feel dizzy and my insides were 
 beginning to complain. 
 
 I wondered when the thing would stop. I 
 thought of a hundred fat men I had seen on a 
 Gymnasium floor trying to do the same thing 
 and touch the floor with their hands. I knew 
 that there was a limit to my endurance in a test 
 of this kind. He bowed five, six, seven, eight, 
 nine, ten times, and I bowed back. I could see 
 things whirling around me. 
 
 "Blame it, why doesn't he stop some time!" I 
 said to myself. 
 
 I was desperate. Then suddenly I looked at 
 him and he looked at me and he said, with great 
 dignity, "All gentlemen must be silent !" and sat 
 down,, with his friends and his wines. 
 
 I don't know whether he realized how funny it 
 was or not. I don't know whether he even knew 
 what he was saying in his drunken condition, but 
 I do know that when I got out of that car into the 
 vestibule I had the laugh of my life. A Japanese 
 woman came by, smiled at me and I am sure said 
 to herself: 
 
 "Ah, these Americans they are all crazy!" 
 
PLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 141 
 
 The last Flash-light of Fun is a picture from 
 the Philippines. 
 
 I have spoken in the chapter on "Flash-lights 
 of Faith" of the trip to the Negrito tribe, but in 
 that chapter I did not speak of the desperate ad- 
 venture of the trip back down the jungle trail to 
 civilization after the experience with the old man. 
 
 For the second time on that memorable day I 
 dropped in my tracks with a sunstroke. My legs 
 refused to move. My muscles were congested 
 with waste matter and evidently my brain was 
 also. When I returned to consciousness I saw 
 lying beside me Mr. Huddleston, an old mission- 
 ary who had been in the Philippines for many 
 years. Across from him was a naked Negrito 
 who was acting as our guide. 
 
 I looked up in a tree above us and saw what I 
 thought was a group of monkeys. 
 
 "Look at the monkeys !" I said to the mission- 
 ary. 
 
 "There are no monkeys in that tree !" he said. 
 
 That made me angry. My mind was affected 
 by the sun to such an extent that I had an insane 
 desire to grab the Bolo of the Negrito guide out 
 of his belt and run it through the missionary. I 
 made a determined mental effort to do so,, but 
 my arm would not work. I strove as one strives 
 in a dream when he is trying to run away from 
 some imagined danger and his feet are tied down. 
 
142 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 If I could have gotten my hands on that bolo I 
 would have run it through the missionary without 
 a minute's hesitation. 
 
 But my mind was detracted from this thought 
 by two large elephants which I suddenly saw run- 
 ning down the path on which we were lying. I 
 yelled aloud! 
 
 "The elephants! They will trample us man! 
 Look ! There they come !" I cried pointing up the 
 trail on which we were lying. 
 
 "Why you're plumb crazy man! You've 
 missed too many boats! That sun's got you! 
 There ^re no elephants on this trail !" 
 
 "But I know elephants when I see them!" I 
 cried and tried to roll out of the trail but again 
 found it impossible to make my brain and my 
 muscles coordinate. It was a terrible moment 
 to me. 
 
 "My God man! Are you crazy! I know ele- 
 phants when I see them. They're right on us 
 now ! Help me out of here ! I can't move !" 
 
 "I tell you there are no elephants and there are 
 no monkeys in these islands. I've been here twen- 
 ty years or more !" 
 
 "But I know elephants when I see them!" 
 
 But just at that moment a much greater dan- 
 ger confronted us, for I saw three tigers leap 
 out of the jungle and start after the two ele- 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 14*3 
 
 phants ; right down the trail toward us. Then I 
 knew that we were as good as dead. 
 
 I yelled: "Tigers! Tigers! They are running 
 after the elephants I They are on top of us !" 
 
 The fool of a missionary laughed aloud, as he 
 lay on the trail and said, "Plumb crazy ! Plumb 
 crazy 1 Sun's got him ! Sun's got him !" 
 
 "Sun's got who, fool? The elephants and 
 tigers will kill us in about a minute!" 
 
 But just then something happened which upset 
 my calculations and made me have a feeling that 
 — after all — ^perhaps the old missionary was right 
 — for suddenly those two elephants; being too 
 closely pursued by the tigers; nonchalantly flew 
 into the air like two great birds, and lighted in 
 the tree over our heads where I thought the 
 monkeys were. If those elephants hadn't started 
 to fly ; I should still be arguing with the mission- 
 ary; but as it turned out; I shut my fool mouth 
 and decided that the missionary was right and 
 that I had "Missed too many boats." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 
 
 SELF-DETERMINATION!" That phrase 
 has set the whole world on fire ! 
 
 "Independence!" That word somehow has 
 awakened the Oriental world; awakened that 
 mass of humanity as it has never been awakened 
 before. 
 
 Korea perhaps has thrilled to this awakening 
 as no other section of the Orient or the Near and 
 Far East. India's millions are restless; the Fili- 
 pino is hungry for Independence although he is 
 loyal to the United States; but Korea has the 
 matter set in its heart like adamant. This deter- 
 mination will never be broken; Korea will never 
 be conquered by Japan ! 
 
 This dream of complete and full independence 
 is buried in the souls of the children, as well as in 
 the souls of the brave women, and of the old men 
 of Korea. 
 
 "It is one of the most thrilling things I have 
 ever seen in the Orient !" said a man on the Edi- 
 torial stafif of Millard's Weekly. "It is the most 
 significant outcome of the war; Korea's passion 
 
 145 
 
146 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 for independence, and the Student Movement in 
 China!" 
 
 I said to a business man of California who had 
 traveled all over the Orient and who had been 
 sent as part of the Commission that prepared the 
 way for the abandonment of the Picture Bride 
 custom, "What is the most significant thing you 
 have seen in the Orient ?" 
 
 "The determination of the Koreans for Self- 
 determination !" was his quick reply. 
 
 "Will they get it?" 
 
 "It is inevitable in time!" he responded, and 
 then he added : "Why the little rascals ; the chil- 
 dren, I mean; paint the Korean flags on their 
 brown bellies, because the Japanese gendarmes 
 will not allow them to display the Korean flag in 
 public !" and he laughed aloud at the memory. 
 
 "Have you seen Korean kiddies,' with flags 
 painted on their stomachs?" 
 
 "Dozens of them. They like to show them to 
 Americans," he said. 
 
 A week later I was walking with a Korean 
 missionary and asked him if what the business 
 man from California had told me about the chil- 
 dren was true and he said, "Wait until we find a 
 group of them." 
 
 We waited for only a few minutes when we 
 ran into a crowd coming home from school. A 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 14T 
 
 friendly smile and a low-voiced "Mansei" got at- 
 tention. 
 
 Then we pointed to our own stomachs. 
 
 In a flash they caught on to what we wanted 
 and, looking around cautiously, each little rascal 
 untied his robe and there, sure enough was the 
 flag of his country painted on his stomach. 
 
 "That is one of the most thrilling sights I have 
 seen in the Orient !" I said with tears in my eyes. 
 "If the children of the land feel that way, Korea 
 will never be conquered !" 
 
 "The American understands! The American 
 understands!" one of the little bright-eyed boys 
 said to the missionary in Korean. 
 
 • ■•••■ 
 
 A missionary was teaching a class of Koreans 
 about Heaven. 
 
 A little hand shot up. 
 
 The missionary nodded that the child could 
 speak. 
 
 "Will there be any Japs in Heaven?" 
 
 This was a baffling question; for diplomatic 
 destinies were at stake. But missionaries are 
 usually honest, so she said, "Yes, if they are good 
 Japs!" 
 
 "Then I don't want to go !" said the little eight- 
 year-old Korean with emphasis. 
 
 Another teacher was telling a class in Geogra- 
 phy to draw a map of the Orient. 
 
148 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 One Korean child said, "Do we have to put in 
 that little group of islands east of the coast of 
 China?" 
 
 I met one Korean whom I had known in 
 America. He was educated in the American uni- 
 versities. He was in every sense of the word a 
 gentleman and an intellectual. 
 
 He told me that the older children of his family 
 had taught the nine-months-old baby to raise its 
 hands in the air above its head whenever the 
 word "Mansei" was spoken. 
 
 I got an electrical shock of patriotism the day 
 I saw that tiny child lift its little arms above its 
 head when that sacred word was spoken. It was 
 like a benediction of freedom ! 
 
 "This posture of the child is more significant," 
 
 said Mr. , "when you know that the most 
 
 cruel method of torture that the Japanese use is 
 that of stretching a man, woman or child up by 
 the thumbs to the ceiling with his toes just touch- 
 ing the floor." 
 
 In that same posture of torture Koreans rise 
 to their toes when they give their national cry 
 of "Mansei" for all the world like an American 
 student giving his college yell. 
 
 "It means life and death to give that cry as 
 you know," said this intelligent Korean. 
 
 "Then what will your children do when they 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 14.9 
 
 grow a bit older and go out on the streets and 
 yell this cry?" I asked this intelligent father. 
 
 "Be killed, no doubt, by some ignorant, ruth- 
 less Japanese gendarme!" he said with finality. 
 
 "Then you should not allow them to teach its 
 tiny lips that word !" I said. 
 
 "I would rather my child were dead than to 
 have it forget that cry \" 
 
 In this same family one Sunday afternoon a 
 two-year-old child was sleeping on a mat. The 
 father and mother were reading some American 
 papers sent them by their old college friends in 
 the United States. 
 
 Suddenly that little two-year-old sat straight 
 up in its mat bed, lifted its arms in the air and 
 shouted "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!" three 
 times and then dropped back to sleep as if nothing 
 had happened. 
 
 "How did you feel?" I asked my Korean 
 friend. 
 
 "It made me cry. I said to my wife 'As long 
 as Korea has babies with that in their little souls 
 before they are two years of age, Korea will 
 never be assimilated by Japan !' " 
 
 The children of Korea look up at the ceiling 
 when a Japanese teacher enters a room. They 
 are compelled to have Japanese teachers ; even in 
 the mission schools. The children refuse to do 
 anything for a Japanese teacher. 
 
150 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 One day a Japanese teacher thought that he 
 would break that mood by telling a funny story. 
 He told it with skill. 
 
 But not a child laughed, although one of them 
 said to her father that night, "It was hard not 
 to laugh for it was a very funny story!" 
 
 "Who tells you to do these things; you stu- 
 dents ? Who teaches you to treat your Japanese 
 teachers in that manner?" my Korean friend 
 asked his six-year-old child. 
 
 "Nobody tells us ; we just do it ourselves ! All 
 the children hate the Japanese!" he replied with 
 the wisdom of a grown man. 
 
 All over Korea we saw Korean flags cut in 
 walls, carved on stones, and against excavations 
 where the sand was impressionable to little fingers 
 and sticks. I took many photographs of these un- 
 conventional flags. 
 
 There is one instance where Korean children 
 went on a strike just at Commencement time. It 
 meant that they would not get their diplomas but 
 that was just the reason they did it : to show their 
 contempt for Japanese diplomas. 
 
 Japanese authorities begged them to return to 
 school. 
 
 Finally on Commencement Day they decided to 
 return. 
 
 Something had happened. 
 
 It was a day of rejoicing among the Japanese 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 151 
 
 SO they invited a lot of Japanese officers to the 
 Commencement exercises. 
 
 The diplomas were given to each boy; the 
 Japanese teachers bowing, and smiling in their 
 peculiar way. 
 
 Then a thirteen-year-old Korean boy stepped 
 to the front to make the address of thanks. He 
 made a beautiful speech of thanks. The Japanese 
 teachers were bowing with delight. 
 
 But the boy's speech was not finished. He 
 paused toward the end, threw back his blouse, 
 lifted his proud head and said, "1 have only this 
 one thing further to add." 
 
 He knew the seriousness of what he was about 
 to do. He knew that it would possibly mean 
 death to him and his relatives. 
 
 "We want but one thing of you Japanese. 
 You have given us education, and you have given 
 us these diplomas. The teachers have been good 
 to us." 
 
 Then he reached in his blouse and pulled out a 
 Korean flag. To have one in one's possession is 
 a crime in Korea in the judgment of the Japanese. 
 
 Waving it above his little head he cried, "Give 
 us back our country ! May Korea live a thousand 
 years ! Mansei ! Mansei ! Mansei !" 
 
 At that signal every boy in that school jumped 
 to his feet, whipped out a Korean flag and fran- 
 tically waved it in the air, weeping and yelling in 
 
152 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 wild abandonment to the faith and courage of 
 freedom in their hearts! 
 
 Then they tore their diplomas up before the 
 horrified and angered Japanese teachers. 
 
 The result was a great student demonstration 
 for freedom ; which was broken up by a force of 
 Japanese gendarmes with drawn swords ; but not 
 before the shooting of many boys and girls ; and 
 not before over four hundred girls and boys were 
 thrown into prison; some of them never to 
 emerge. 
 
 In the chapter on "Flash-lights of Faith" I 
 told the story of the seventy-five-year-old Korean 
 who unflinchingly faced the Japanese gendarmes 
 and admitted that he knew the source from which 
 the Independence Movement had come ; and knew 
 the signers of the Declaration personally; every 
 one of them. This spirit burns in the heart of, 
 not only the babies of Korea but also in the souls 
 of the white haired stately patriarchs. 
 
 One old man who was dumb had his own way 
 of expressing his patriotism when "Mansei" 
 was yelled. He always lifted his arms above his 
 head. He could not speak but he could yell with 
 his arms! 
 
 This placed the Japanese authorities in the 
 ridiculous position of arresting a dumb man for 
 yelling "Mansei !" 
 
 They tortured him for months. He was told 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 163 
 
 that he would be released if he would promise 
 never to lift his hands above his head again. 
 
 He could not speak in answer to their demands. 
 They waited. 
 
 Suddenly he caught their meaning. They were 
 trying to frighten him from giving vent to his 
 only method of showing his patriotism. 
 
 His eyes flashed fire. He leapt to his feet with 
 a contemptuous look at his Japanese captors. 
 
 Then like fiashng piston rods of steel his 
 arms shot into the air above his head three times, 
 shouting in their mute patriotism, "Mansei! 
 Mansei! Mansei!" 
 
 Nor are the women void of this determination 
 for freedom. It beats in their brave hearts. It 
 is a great flame in their souls as well as in the 
 hearts of the children and men of the peninsula. 
 
 "The soul's armor is never set well to heart 
 unless a woman's hand has braced it, and it is 
 only when she braces it loosely that the honor 
 of manhood fails!" says Robert McKenna in 
 "The Adventure of Life." 
 
 If that is a true definition of the strength of 
 honor and the desire for freedom then the armor 
 of 'the Korean men is well set. 
 i Sauci, a young Korean girl was under arrest. 
 I She was just a school girl and very beautiful; 
 with dark brown eyes ; skin the color of a walnut ; 
 and a form, bred of the grace of her much walk- 
 
154 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 ing race. She had walked the innumerable trails 
 of her native land from babyhood and the 
 rhjrthmic swing of her supple body would have 
 made any race, save that of her conquerors, 
 reverent with admiration. 
 
 Sauci was too much for her Japanese captors. 
 
 The Japanese guard struck her across the 
 mouth with a whip. 
 
 "That doesn't hurt me. That is the grace of 
 God. I don't hate you for that blow!" said 
 Sauci. 
 
 This angered the Jap and he struck her again. 
 This stroke left a streak of blood across her face. 
 
 Sauci said again, "That doesn't hurt me. That 
 is the grace of God. I do not hate you for strik- 
 ing me !" 
 
 The gendarme was furious. His anger was 
 like that of a beast. He flew at her blindly, and 
 struck, struck, struck her woman's body until he 
 was exhausted. 
 
 A few days later when she was recovering from 
 that brutal beating, a high official of the Japanese 
 gendarme force came to see her. 
 
 "Sauci," said he to her,, recognizing her for an 
 intelligent Korean girl, "why do not the Koreans 
 like us?" 
 
 She replied, "I had a dream last night here in 
 the cell. That will tell you why. In my dream 
 a visitor came to our hom,e and stayed for dinner. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 155 
 
 Then instead of going home, the visitor stayed all 
 night. Then the visitor stayed two or three days. 
 Then two or three months. Then two or three 
 years. We were surprised but were too polite to 
 say anything. 
 
 "But finally the visitor got to telling us how 
 to run our house." 
 
 "How?" asked the Japanese official, "Did the 
 visitor tell you how to run your house ?" 
 
 "The visitor," replied Sauci, "told us that he 
 didn't like our wall paper. 'I think you had bet- 
 ter get new paper!' he said. T do not like your 
 clothes and your schools. Wear clothes like mine, 
 and have schools like mine. I do not like your 
 way of talking. Learn my language!' 
 
 "So finally we got tired of our visitor and said, 
 'Please go home ! WE do not like you ! We do 
 not want you ! Please go home !'" 
 
 "But what has that to do with us?" said the 
 Japanese official. 
 
 "Why in a few days the visitor in my dream 
 went home !" said Sauci simply. "And in a few 
 years the Japanese will go back home also !" Such 
 is the courageous spirit of the Korean women. 
 
 One day an American friend of mine had gone 
 to the Police Station with a young Korean girl 
 who had been summoned to appear on what was 
 called a "rearrest charge." 
 
156 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 For the Japanese feel perfectly free to rearrest 
 a person even after that person has been proven 
 innocent of a charge. A Korean may be re- 
 arrested any time. He can never feel free. 
 
 This young, educated girl had been subjected 
 to such indignities on her previous arrest as I 
 would not be able to describe in this book ; so she 
 begged the woman friend to go with her. 
 
 As she entered the station a rough, ignorant 
 Japanese officer snarled at her as she passed, 
 "Hello! Are you here again? I thought you 
 were still in prison !" 
 
 When he had gone from the room the Korean 
 girl said to the American woman, "That man 
 beat me for ten hours one day the last time I was 
 in prison!" 
 
 "Why did he beat you?" asked the missionary, 
 
 "He was trying to compel me to give him the 
 names of those girls who belonged to the 
 'Woman's League'." 
 
 "And you would not tell him their names ?" 
 
 "I would rather have been beaten to death than 
 give him their names !" 
 
 "Thank God for your courage !" said the mis- 
 sionary, for she had seen the girl's body when she 
 had gotten out of orison; the burns of cigarette 
 stumps all over her beautiful skin; the scars, the 
 whip marks; the desecrations. 
 
 When I was told this story, amid the tears of 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 157 
 
 the narrator, an American college woman, she 
 concluded with fire in her soul : "I have never seen 
 such courage on the part of women in all my life! 
 Even mere girls and children have it. Most of 
 those who are arrested come out of our American 
 Missionary schools. There isn't a one of them 
 who doesn't have in her soul the spirit of Joan 
 of Arc. If France had one Joan of Arc, Korea 
 has ten thousand!" 
 
 One young girl of whom I heard was kept in 
 prison under constant torture for six months. 
 And a cruel imprisonment it is. I visited this 
 prison myself one winter day when I was in 
 Korea. The thermometer was at zero; the snow 
 covered the ground., and there wasn't a fire in a 
 single room in that prison save where the Japa- 
 nese guards were staying, and they were huddled 
 around a roaring coal stove. 
 
 And this is the show prison of the whole Penin- 
 sula. The Japanese take visitors through it. But 
 to an American even it is fit only for the darkness 
 of the Middle Ages. 
 
 In its limited quarters I saw ten and fifteen 
 young girls, sweet faced, cultured, educated 
 school girls, huddled together in narrow rooms, 
 without a single chair, so closely packed that they 
 were seated on the floor like bees in a hive. 
 
 After six months of this awful life the girl of 
 whom I speak was about to be released. 
 
168 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 The guard questioned her. "Now what are 
 you going to do ?" 
 
 Her answer came, quick as a shot, although she 
 knew that it would send her back to the hell 
 from which she was about to be released. 
 
 "It is either liberty for Korea or we die !" she 
 said. 
 
 And in three minutes, beaten, and dragged on 
 the ground by the hair she was thrown into the 
 cell from which she had been taken; to rot and 
 die as far as the Japanese were concerned. 
 
 Another girl who had been kept in jail 135 
 days without even a charge having been preferred 
 against her was released. Her old mother came 
 to meet her and while in Seoul the mother at- 
 tended an Independence Meeting for women. 
 The whole crowd of women then went to the 
 Police Station and shouted "Mansei" ! 
 
 The mother was arrested and cruelly beaten in 
 spite of her seventy-five years of age. 
 
 When they were through beating her they said, 
 "Now will you refrain from yelling, 'Mansei !* " 
 
 "Never !" said this old woman. 
 
 Then they took a bar of iron and beat her over 
 the legs until she dropped. 
 
 "Now will you refrain from yelling 'Mansei?' " 
 
 The old woman was weak, but in a low, painful 
 whisper said, "The next time the women come to 
 yell, if I am able to walk I will be with them !" 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 1159 
 
 Another old woman was brought to prison for 
 yelling "Mansei!" When they asked her why 
 she yelled "Mansei" she answered in a sentence 
 that sums up the entire spirit that is in the woman- 
 heart of Korea. 
 
 "I have only one word in my head and that is 
 'Mansei!'" 
 
 I personally, one day in Korea, saw the Japa- 
 nese gendarmes come for a Korean girl. She was 
 one of the most popular girls in the American 
 Methodist Missionary School. 
 
 It was the common custom for Japanese offi- 
 cials to come and take Korean girls out of these 
 schools, without warning, without warrants, with- 
 out words, and carry them off to prison. 
 
 Often the girl was not even permitted to say 
 good-by to her American teachers or to write a 
 word to her parents. 
 
 "They are not even permitted to supply them- 
 selves with toilet articles," said the matron to me 
 that day. 
 
 On this day, six big, brutal, ugly faced, animal- 
 like Japanese officers came for this beautiful girl. 
 
 The missionary women wept as the girl was 
 dragged away. The girl waved good-by. 
 
 It was a sight never to be forgotten; one of 
 those Flash-lights of Freedom, which burned its 
 way into my soul with the hot acid of indigna- 
 tion. This injustice and indecency in the treat- 
 
160 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 ment of a pure girl made my blood run hot in my 
 veins. 
 
 The look on her face I shall never forget. It 
 was such a look as the martyrs of old must have 
 had when they died for their faith. 
 
 "Good-by! Good-by! Give my love to Mary 
 and Elizabeth!" she cried to the missionary 
 woman standing by, helpless to assist her. These 
 two names were children of the missionary home ; 
 children whom this Korean girl had learned to 
 love as she lived in this American home. 
 
 "And the awful thing about it all, is," said the 
 missionary to me as they took the girl away, 
 "that, as pure as that girl is, as pure as a flower, 
 she will be taken to a prison fifty miles from 
 Seoul, kept there under torture for six months, 
 and she will not be allowed to see her friends. 
 They will not even allow us to visit her. She may 
 be undressed and spat upon by men who are lower 
 than animals. She may suffer even worse than 
 that " 
 
 Then the American missionary woman fainted. 
 
 That flash-light may be duplicated a hundred 
 times in Korea. 
 
 "The woman of Korea suffers as much as the 
 man. But thank God they do not flinch !" said an 
 American missionary. 
 
 The Japanese Gendarmes have forbidden the 
 singing of several of the great church hymns in 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 161 
 
 mission churches because they insist that these 
 are hymns of Freedom ; that they foment what the 
 Japanese call "Dangerous Ideas." Japanese spies 
 have reported certain Seoul Methodist churches 
 for singing hymns that, to their way of thinking, 
 were directed against the Japanese Government. 
 This particular illustration of the peculiar work- 
 ings of the Japanese mind might have been in- 
 cluded in the chapter on Flash-lights of Fun; 
 were it not for the fact that the Japanese officers 
 themselves call these old church hymns "Hymns 
 of Freedom." 
 
 The Japanese are just as much afraid of these 
 "Dangerous Thoughts" in Japan as they are in 
 Korea. A good illustration of this fear is the 
 fact that a certain picture corporation of America 
 called "The Liberty Film Company" sent several 
 films to Japan. The Government would not allow 
 these pictures to be shown until that word "Lib- 
 erty" was cut from the film. 
 
 Certain Japanese spies reported a Mission 
 church in Seoul for singing "Rock of Ages." 
 
 "But why may we not sing 'Rock of Ages'?" 
 asked the American preacher in charge. 
 
 "Because it starts off with 'Mansei !' " replied 
 the officer. 
 
 He interpreted the thought of "Rock of Ages" 
 to be a direct imputation that the Japanese Gov- 
 ernment was not able to take care of the Koreans 
 
162 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 and that they were flying to some other protect- 
 ing power. 
 
 "It would be funny if it were not so serious !" 
 said a missionary to me one day in Seoul. 
 
 Later they stopped the churches from singing 
 "Nearer My God to Thee," because there seemed 
 to be an implication in that, that those who sang 
 that hymn, were swearing allegiance to a higher 
 power than that of Japan. 
 
 "Ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!" I said 
 in disgust. 
 
 "Yes, ridiculous, but serious," replied the mis- 
 sionary, "when you have to live with it year in 
 and year out." 
 
 "Crown Him Lord of All," insisted the Jap- 
 anese spies, when they seriously reported a certain 
 church for singing that old hymn was "Danger- 
 ous Thought." It seemed to this ignorant spy 
 that "Crowning Him" was putting some other 
 power before that of the Japanese Government. 
 
 "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" has been 
 put under the ban and when a certain missionary 
 woman was asked to sing at the Korean Y.M.C.A. 
 and announced that she was going to sing "Oh, 
 Rest in the Lord" she was advised not to sing it 
 because it was considered by the gendarmes to 
 be "Dangerous Thought" and to suggest "Lib- 
 erty," "Freedom" and such dangerous words and 
 ideas. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 16a 
 
 When one Protestant preacher prayed about 
 "Casting Out Devils" he was reported by Jap- 
 anese spies, who insisted that he was talking 
 about Japanese in Korea and meant that these 
 should be cast out of the land. 
 
 " 'It is to laugh!' as the French say!" I re- 
 sponded to this story. 
 
 "No ! It is to weep !" said the American mis- 
 sionary. 
 
 When Dr. Frank W. Schoefield spoke against 
 Prostitution the Japanese papers declared that he 
 had made a virulent attack on the Government. 
 
 One Korean preacher who preached on a theme 
 from Luke 4:18, which reads "Setting the cap- 
 tives free," was arrested and kept in jail for four 
 days. 
 
 "It is very foolish to yell 'Mansei' when you 
 know you will be killed," I said to a Korean 
 preacher. I wanted to see how he would take that 
 suggestion. 
 
 "We Koreans would rather be under the 
 ground than on top of it if we do not get our lib- 
 erty !" he said with a thrill in his quiet voice. 
 
 One day a Korean preacher was arrested for 
 preaching on the theme,, "Seek ye first the King- 
 dom of God and all these things shall be added 
 unto you," because that was, without doubt, dis- 
 loyal to Japan and meant rebellion. 
 
 Another day a speaker in the Y.M.C.A. said. 
 
164 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "Arise and let us build for the new age!" He 
 was asked to report to Police Headquarters just 
 what he meant by that kind of "Dangerous" talk 
 about Freedom. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE 
 
 THREE great Flash-lights of Failure stand 
 out in the Far East and the Oriental world 
 to-day; one being the failure of a race to survive, 
 another being the failure of the world to under- 
 stand that Shantung is the Holy Land and not 
 the appendix of China; this sacred shrine of the 
 Chinese which has so carelessly and listlessly been 
 given over to Japan ; and the third being Japan's 
 failure to understand that methods of barbarism 
 from the Dark Ages will not work in a modern 
 civilization. 
 
 "Why are they making all this fuss over Shan- 
 tung?" an acquaintance of mine said to me just 
 before I left America. "Isn't it just a sort of 
 an appendix of China,, after all? If I were the 
 Chinese, I'd forget Shantung and go on to cen- 
 tralize and develop what I had." 
 
 That was glibly said, but the fact which the 
 statement leaves out of reckoning is that Shan- 
 tung is the very heart and soul of China instead 
 of being the appendix. 
 
 The average American has so often thought of 
 
 165 
 
166 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 China just as China ; a great, big, indefinite, far- 
 off nation of four hundred million people, always 
 stated in round numbers, that Shantung doesn't 
 mean much to us. Yes, but it means much to 
 China. ' 
 
 It means about the same as if some nation 
 should come along and take New England from 
 us ; New England,, the seat of all our most sacred 
 history, the beginning of our national life, the 
 ■oldest of our traditions, the burial-place of our 
 early founders, the seat of our religious genesis. 
 I don't believe that many folks in New England 
 would desire to be called an appendix of the 
 United States. 
 
 So one of the things that I was determined to 
 do when I went to China was to go from one end 
 of Shantung to the other, talking with coolies, 
 officials, old men and young men, students, and 
 those who can neither read nor write; mission- 
 aries and soldiers; natives and foreigners; to 
 see just what importance Shantung is to China 
 as a whole. 
 
 The first thing I discovered was that it has 
 about forty million people living within the limits 
 of the peninsula, close to half the population of 
 the United States. Does that sound as if it might 
 be China's appendix? You wouldn't think so 
 if you saw the cities, roads and fields of this great 
 stretch of land literally swarming with human 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE 167 
 
 beings, and every last one of them as busy as 
 ants. 
 
 I rode one whole day across the peninsula. I 
 happened to be traveling with a man from Kan- 
 sas. He was a man interested in farming and 
 wheat-growing. For hundreds of miles we had 
 been passing through land that was absolutely 
 level and every inch of it cultivated. I had been 
 saying to myself over and over again, "Why, it's 
 exactly like our Middle West Country." 
 
 Then much to my astonishment this Kansas 
 man turned to me, and said, "Did it ever occur to 
 you that these fields of Shantung look just like 
 Kansas ?" 
 
 "Yes, it has just occurred to me this minute," I 
 responded. 
 
 Then the wife of the Kansas man said, "I have 
 been shutting my eyes and trying to imagine that 
 I was in Kansas, it's so much like home." 
 
 "And say, man, but a tractor on those fields 
 would work wonders," added a portion of Wil- 
 liam Allen White's reading constituency. 
 
 And that is exactly how Shantung strikes an 
 American when he has ridden all day through 
 its great stretches of level fields. He can easily 
 imagine himself riding through Kansas for a day. 
 
 My first visit to Shantung was at Tsingtao,, the 
 headquarters of the Geman concession and now 
 of the Japanese concession. I spent a day there. 
 
168 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 and took photographs of the wharves and town^ 
 On the wharves were still standing hundreds of 
 boxes marked with German names and the 
 inevitable phrase "Made in Germany." Those 
 boxes were mute reminders of the evacuation of 
 one nation from a foreign soil. But standing side 
 by side with these boxes were also other hun- 
 dreds, already being shot into Shantung in a 
 steady stream ; and these boxes have a new trade- 
 mark printed in every case in English and Japa- 
 nese,, "Made in Japan." 
 
 I spent several days in Tsinanfu and Tientsin, 
 two great inland cities,, and more than a week in 
 cruising about through Shantung's little towns, 
 its villages and its sacred spots. 
 
 I heard of its mines and of its physical wealth. 
 But the world already knows of that. The world 
 already knows that this physical wealth of mines 
 and raw material was what made it look good to 
 Germany and Japan. But the thing that im- 
 pressed me was its spiritual wealth. 
 
 The thing that makes Shantung attractive to 
 the Japanese, of course, is not the spiritual wealth, 
 as the world well knows. Perhaps the Japanese 
 have never considered the latter any more than 
 the Germans did ; but the one thing that makes it 
 most sacred to the Chinese,, who are, after all, a 
 race of idealists, is its treasuries of spiritual 
 memories and shrines. 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE 169 
 
 In the first place, many Chinese will tell you 
 that it is the "cradle of the Chinese race." I am 
 not sure that histories will confirm this state- 
 ment. And I am, also not sure that that makes any 
 difference as long as the idea is buried in the 
 heart of the Chinese people. A tradition often 
 means as much to a race as a fact. And the tra- 
 dition certainly is well established that Shantung 
 is the birthplace of all Chinese history. So that 
 is one of the deeply rooted spiritual facts that 
 makes Shantung sacred to the Chinese. 
 
 The second spiritual gold mine is that one of 
 its cities, Chufu, is the birthplace and the last 
 resting-place of the sage Confucius. And China 
 is literally impregnated with Confusian phi- 
 losophy and Confucian sayings. 
 
 I took a trip to this shrine in order to catch 
 some of the spiritual atmosphere of the Shantung 
 loss. The trip made it necessary to tramp about 
 fifteen miles coming and going through as dusty 
 a desert as I ever saw., but that was a trifle com- 
 pared with the thrill that I had as I stood at last 
 before the little mound about as high as a Cali- 
 fornia bungalow; the mound that held the dust 
 of this great Chinese sage. During the war I 
 stood before the grave of Napoleon in France. 
 Before I went to France I visited Grant's tomb. 
 I have also stood many times beside a little mound 
 in West Virginia, the resting-place of my mother. 
 
170 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 and I think that I know something- of the sacred- 
 ness of such experiences to a human heart, but 
 somehow the thrill that came to me on that Janu- 
 ary morning, warm with sunlight, spicy with win- 
 ter cold, produced a feeling too deep for mere 
 printed words to convey. 
 
 "If we feel as we do standing here on this 
 sacred spot, think of how the Chinese feel toward 
 their own sage !" said an old missionary of the 
 party. 
 
 "Yes," added another, "and remember that the 
 Chinese revere their ancestors and their sages 
 and their shrines more than we ever dream of 
 doing. Any grave is a sacred spot to them, so 
 much so that railroads have to run their trunk 
 lines for miles in a detour to avoid graves. These 
 Chinese are idealists of the first water. They 
 live in the past,, and they dream of the future." 
 
 "When you get these facts into your American 
 heads," added a third member of the party, not 
 without some bitterness, "then you will begin to 
 know that the Chinese do not estimate the loss of 
 Shantung in terms of mineral wealth." 
 
 At ChufUj the resting-place of Confucius., there 
 is also the spot of his birth, and this too is most 
 sacred to the Chinese nation. We visited both 
 places. I think that I never before quite realized 
 just what the loss of Shantung meant to these 
 Chinese until that day, unless it was the next day, 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAH^URE 171 
 
 when we climbed the sacred mountain Taishan^ 
 which is also in Shantung. 
 
 "It is the oldest worshiping-place in the 
 world," said the historian of the party. "There is 
 no other spot on earth where continuous worship 
 has gone on so long. Here for more than twenty 
 centuries before Christ was born men and women 
 were worshiping. Emperors from the oldest 
 history of China down to the present time have 
 all visited this mountain to worship. Confucius 
 himself climbed the more than six thousand steps 
 to worship here." 
 
 "Yes," said another missionary historian, "and 
 this mountain is referred to twelve separate times 
 in the Chinese classics, and great pilgrimages 
 were made here as long ago as two centuries be- 
 fore Christ." 
 
 That day we climbed the mountain up more 
 than six thousand stone steps, which are in perfect 
 condition and which were engineered thousands 
 of years ago by early worshipers. 
 
 The only climb with which I can compare that 
 of Mt. Taishan is that of Mt. Tamalpais over- 
 looking San Francisco. The climb is about equal 
 to that. The mountain itself is about a mile in 
 height, and the climb is a hard one to those who 
 are unaccustomed to mountain-climbing, and yet 
 thousands upon thousands climb it every year 
 after pilgrimages from all over China. 
 
172 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 We climbed to the top of Taishan, and saw the 
 "No-Character Stone" erected by Emperor Chin, 
 he who tried to drive learning out of China hun- 
 dreds of years ago. We saw the spot on which 
 Confucius stood, and glimpsed the Pacific Ocean,, 
 ninety miles away, on a clear day. It was a hard 
 climb; but, when one stood on the top of this, the 
 most sacred mountain of all China, he began to 
 understand the spiritual loss that is China's when 
 her worshiping-place is in the hands of aliens. 
 
 "And don't forget that Mencius, the first dis- 
 ciple of Confucius,, was born and died in Shan- 
 tung, too, when you are taking census of the 
 spiritual values of Shantung to the Chinese," was 
 a word of caution from the old missionary who 
 was checking up on my facts for me. He had 
 been laboring in China for a quarter of a century. 
 
 "And don't forget that the Boxer uprising orig- 
 inated in Shantung, and don't forget that it is 
 called, and has been for centuries,, 'the Sacred 
 Province' by the Chinese. It is their 'Holy 
 Land.' And don't forget that, from Shantung, 
 coolies went to South Africa in the early part 
 of this century and that the Chinese from Shan- 
 tung were the first to get in touch with the west- 
 ern world. And don't forget that nine-tenths of 
 the coolies who went to help in the war in France 
 were from Shantung!" he added with emphasis. 
 This was a thing that I well knew, for I had, only 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE 173 
 
 a few weeks before this, seen two thousand coolies 
 unloaded from the Empress of Asia at Tsingtao. 
 
 No, Shantung is not an appendix of China, as 
 many Americans suppose ; but it is the very heart 
 and soul of China. It is China's "Holy Land." 
 It is the "Cradle of China." It is the "Sacred 
 Province of China." It is the shrine of her great- 
 est sage. It is the home of "the oldest worship- 
 ing-place on earth." It is because of its spir- 
 itual values that China is unhappy about the loss 
 of Shantung, and not because of its wealth of 
 material things. 
 
 The failure of the world to understand what 
 Shantung means to China and the failure of 
 Japan to understand that they cannot for many 
 years stand out against the indignation of the 
 entire world in continuing to keep Shantung is 
 one of the great spiritual failures of the Far East 
 in our century. 
 
 The second great failure is the tragic failure of 
 an entire race of people; that of the Ainu Indians 
 of Japan. 
 
 It is a pathetic thing to see a human race dying 
 out; coming to "The End of the Trail." But I 
 was determined to see them, in spite of the fact 
 that people told me I would have to travel from 
 one end of Japan to the other; and then cross four 
 hours of sea before I got to Hokkaido, the most 
 
174 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 northern island of Japan, where lived the tattered 
 remnants of this once noble race. 
 
 The name of this dying race is pronounced as 
 if it were spelled I-new with a long I. 
 
 These are the people who inhabited Japan be- 
 fore the present Japanese' entered the land from 
 Korea and drove them, inch by inch, back and 
 north and west across Japan. It was a stubborn 
 fight, and it has lasted many centuries ; but to-day 
 they have been driven up on the island of Hok- 
 kaido, that northern frontier of Japan where the 
 overflow of Japan is pouring at the rate of four 
 thousand a year, making two million to date and 
 only about fifty thousand of them Ainus. 
 
 "Are they like our American Indians in looks, 
 since their history is so much like them ?" I asked 
 my missionary friend. 
 
 "Wait until you see them, and decide for your- 
 self. I know very little about American Indians." 
 
 So one morning at three o'clock, after travel- 
 ing for two days and nights from one end of 
 Japan to the other, and then crossing a strait be- 
 tween the Japan Sea and the Pacific Ocean to the 
 island, we climbed from our train^ and landed 
 in a little country railroad station. 
 
 It was blowing a blizzard, and the snow 
 crashed into our faces with stinging, whip-like 
 snaps. 
 
 I was appointed stoker for the small stove in 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE 176 
 
 the station while the rest of the party tried to 
 sleep on the benches arranged in a circle, huddled 
 as close as they could get to the stove. 
 
 We were the first party of foreigners of this 
 size that had ever honored the village with a 
 visit. And in addition to that we had come at 
 an unearthly hour. 
 
 Who but a group of insane foreigners would 
 drop into a town at three o'clock in the morning 
 with a blizzard blowing? Either we were insane, 
 or we had some sinister motives. Perhaps we 
 were making maps of the seacoast. 
 
 And before daylight half of the town was peek- 
 ing in through the windows at us. Then the 
 policemen came. They were Japanese policemen, 
 and did not take any chances on us. Even after 
 our interpreter had told them that we were a 
 group of scientists who had come to visit the 
 Ainus they still followed us around most of the 
 morning, keeping polite track of our movements. 
 
 About five o'clock that morning, as I was try- 
 ing to catch a cat-nap, the newsboys of the village 
 came to get the morning papers which had come 
 in on the train on which we had arrived. They 
 unbundled the papers in the cold station; their 
 breath forming clouds of vapor; laughing and 
 joking as they unrolled, folded and counted the 
 papers; and arranged their routes for morning 
 delivery. 
 
176 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 It took me back to boyhood days down in West 
 Virginia. I did the same thing as these Japanese 
 boys were doing. I, too, arose before daylight, 
 climbed out of bed, and went whistling through 
 the dark streets to the station where the early 
 morning trains dumped off the papers from the 
 city. I, too, along with several other Ameri- 
 can boys of a winter morning, breathed clouds 
 of vapor into the air, stamped my feet to keep 
 them warm, and whipped my hands against my 
 sides. I, too, unwrapped the big bundles of 
 papers, and did it in the same way in which these 
 Japanese boys did,, by smashing the tightly bound 
 wrappers on the floor until they burst. I, too, 
 counted, folded, put in inserts, arranged my 
 paper-route and darted out into the frosty air 
 with the snow crunching under my feet. How 
 universal some things are. The only difference 
 was that these boys were dressed in a sort of 
 buccaneer uniform. They had on high leather 
 boots,, and belts around their coats that made them 
 look as if they had stepped out of a Richard 
 Harding Davis novel. But otherwise they went 
 through the same processes as an American boy 
 in a small town. 
 
 When the vanguard of villagers had come to 
 inspect us, they at first tried to talk Russian to 
 us. They had never seen any other kind of for- 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAH^IIRE 17T 
 
 eigners. They had never seen Americans in this 
 far-off island. 
 
 When daylight came, we started out on a long 
 tramp to the Ainu villages. They were a mile or 
 two away on the ocean. These people always 
 build near the sea if they can. Fishing is one of 
 their main sources of food. 
 
 We spent the day in their huts. They live like 
 animals. A big, square hut covered with rice 
 straw and thatch, with a fence of the same kind 
 of straw running around the house, forms the 
 residence. The only fire is in the middle of the 
 only room,, and this consists of a pile of wood 
 burning on a flat stone or piece of metal in the 
 center. There is no chimney in the roof, and 
 not even an opening such as the American Indians 
 had in the tops of their tepees. I do not know 
 how they live. The smoke finds its way gradu- 
 ally through cracks in the walls and roofs. One 
 can hardly find a single Ainu whose eyes are not 
 ruined. The smoke has done this damage. 
 
 The only opening in their houses besides the 
 door is one north window, and it is never closed. 
 In fact, there is no window. It is only an opening. 
 
 "Why is that ? I'd think they would freeze on 
 a day like this," I said to the guide. 
 
 "They keep it that way all winter, and it gets 
 a good deal below zero here,," he said. 
 
178 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "But why do they do it?" old Shylock de- 
 manded. 
 
 "It is part of their religion. They believe that 
 the god comes in that window. They want it open, 
 so that he can come in whenever he wishes. It 
 offends them greatly when you stick your head 
 through that window." 
 
 Pat tried it just to see what would happen, 
 just like a man who looks into the barrel of a 
 gun, or a man who takes a watch apart, or wants 
 to hit a "dud" with a hammer just to see whether 
 it is a dud. The result was bad. There was a 
 sudden series of outlandish yells from the house- 
 hold. I think that every man, woman and child, 
 including the dogs, of which there were many, 
 started at once. I wonder now how Pat escaped 
 alive, and only under the assumption that "the 
 good die young" can I explain his escape. 
 
 I wanted some arrows to take to America as 
 souvenirs; and, when an old Indian pulled out a 
 lot of metal arrows on long bows with which he 
 had killed more than a hundred bears,, I was not 
 satisfied. They were not the kind of arrows I 
 wanted. 
 
 "What kind are you looking for ?" I was asked. 
 
 "Flint arrow-heads," I responded. 
 
 "Why, man, these Indians have known the use 
 di metals for five hundred years. The stone 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAH^URE 179 
 
 age with them is half a thousand years in the 
 past." 
 
 "Have they a history ?" I wanted to know. 
 
 My interpreter, who has much knowledge of 
 these things, having worked among them for 
 years, said, "All of the Japanese mythology is 
 centered about the battles that took place when 
 these Indians were driven out of Japan proper 
 step by step." 
 
 I was surprised to find that they were white 
 people compared with the Japanese who were 
 their conquerors. There are other marked dif- 
 ferences. The Ainus are broad between the eyes 
 instead of narrow as are the Japanese. They are 
 rather square-headed like Americans as com- 
 pared with the oval of the Japanese face. They 
 do not have markedly slant eyes, and they are 
 white-skinned. They might feel at home in any 
 place in America. I have seen many old men at 
 home who look like them, old men with beards. 
 This came as a distinct surprise to me. 
 
 At each house, just in front of the ever-open 
 window of which I have spoken, there is a little 
 crude shrine. It is more like a small fence than 
 anything that I know, a most crude affair made 
 ' of broken bamboo poles. Flowers and vines are 
 planted here to beautify this shrine,, and every 
 ' pole has a bear-skull on it. The more bear-skulls 
 
180 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 you have,, the safer you are and the more religious 
 you have become. 
 
 Pat was sacrilegious enough to steal a skull 
 in order to get the teeth, which he wanted as 
 souvenirs. I was chagrined and shocked at Pat's 
 lack of religious propriety. However, I was en- 
 ticed into accepting one of the teeth after Pat 
 had knocked them out and stolen them,. 
 
 "How do they worship bears and kill them at 
 the same time ?" I queried the guide. 
 
 "That's a part of the worship. They kill the 
 bear, slowly singing and chanting as they kill 
 him. They think that the spirit of every bear 
 that they kill comes into their own souls. That's 
 why they kill so many. That seventy-year-old 
 rascal over there has killed a hundred. He is a 
 great man in his tribe." 
 
 "If I was a bear," commented Pat,, "I'd rather 
 they wouldn't worship me. That's a funny way 
 to show reverence to a god. I'd rather be their 
 devil and live than be their god and die." Pat 
 is sometimes loquacious. "They dance about the 
 poor old bear as they kill him. One fellow will 
 hurl an arrow into his side, and then cry out, 'O 
 spirit of the great bear-god, come enter into me, 
 and make me strong and brave like you ! Come, 
 take up thine abode in my house! Come, be a 
 part of me! Let thy strength and thy courage 
 be my strength and my courage !' " 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE 181 
 
 "Then," said the interpreter, "he hurls another 
 arrow, into him." 
 
 "And what is Mr. Bear doing all that time?" 
 
 "Mr. Bear is helpless. He is captured first 
 in a trap, and then kept and fattened for the 
 killing. He is tied to a tree during the killing 
 ceremony." 
 
 "All I gotta say is that they're darned poor 
 sports," said Flintlock with indignation. "They're 
 poor sports not to give Mr. Bear a fighting 
 chance." 
 
 And old Flintlock has voiced the sentiments of 
 the entire party. 
 
 Everybody that was at the Panama Pacific 
 International Exposition will remember the mag- 
 nificent statue of an Indian there. This Indian 
 was riding a horse,, and both were worn out and 
 drooping. A spear which dragged on the ground 
 in front of the pony was further evidence of the 
 weariness of the horse and rider. The title of 
 this Eraser bronze was "The End of the Trail," 
 and it was intended to tell the story of a vanishing 
 race, the American Indians. But even more could 
 that picture tell the story of the Ainus of Japan. 
 
 "They will be entirely extinct in a quarter of a 
 century," our guide said. "They are going fast. 
 They used to be vigorous and militant, as Jap- 
 anese mythology shows. They were a fighting 
 race. They built their houses by the sea. They 
 
182 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 used to go out for miles to fish, but now they are 
 so petered out that they go only to the mouths of 
 the rivers to fish. They used to hunt in the moun- 
 tains,, but they do not take hunting-trips any 
 more. Venereal diseases and rum (saki) have 
 depleted them year by year, just as in the case 
 of our American Indians. They are largely sterile 
 now. They used to build their own boats, but 
 they build no more. It is a biological old age. 
 Their day is through." 
 
 "It is a sad thing to see a race dying out," said 
 Pat. 
 
 "Especially a white race, as these Ainus seem 
 to be," said another member of the party. 
 
 And back to the village we went silently, plod- 
 ding through a driving blizzard that bore in upon 
 us with terrific force. As we fought our way 
 through this blizzard, I could not help feeling a 
 great sense of depression. It is a fearful thing 
 to see anything die, especially a race of human 
 beings. That is a great epic tragedy worthy of 
 a Shakespeare. That is enough to wring the soul 
 of the gods. That a race has played the game, 
 has been powerful and conquering and trium— ■ 
 phant, and then step by step has petered out and 
 become weak and senile until biological decay has 
 set in — that is fearful. 
 
 Another illustration of the ignominious failure 
 of a lower type of mind to understand a higher 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE 183 
 
 type of mind is set forth in the following letter 
 which was written at my request by a missionary 
 whom I met in San Francisco just as the final 
 chapters of this book were being written. 
 
 The first time I met this missionary was in 
 Seoul, Korea. 
 
 I have been told so many times that the cruel- 
 ties in Korea have been stopped. Certain men 
 said that they had been stopped immediately after 
 the Independence Movement, but they were not 
 stopped. At frequent intervals the American 
 press is flooded with statements which come from 
 Japanese press sources that the outrages in Korea 
 have ceased. 
 
 I said to this missionary, who had just arrived 
 from Korea, "Is it true that the cruelties have 
 stopped in Korea?" 
 
 "No ! They have not stopped ! They have not 
 even diminished ! They are getting worse, rather 
 than better !" 
 
 "Would you be willing to write out, in your 
 own handwriting, a few things that you know 
 yourself which have occurred since I was in Korea 
 so that the book which I am writing may be ac- 
 curate and up to date in its facts?" 
 
 "I will be glad to do that for you! We who 
 are missionaries dare not speak the truth !" 
 
 "Why?" 
 
184 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "If we did the Japanese Government would 
 never let us get back to ouif people !" 
 
 "Then you may talk through me, if you are 
 willing to do it. I want the truth to get to the 
 American people!" 
 
 "I am not only willing but I am eager to talk !" 
 said this missionary and wrote out the following 
 story of cruelty against an educated and cultured 
 Korear^, who was the Religious and Educational 
 Director in the Seoul Y.M.C.A. This story of 
 the latest Japanese barbarisms I pass on to the 
 reader in this chapter to illustrate another ig- 
 nominious Hun failure to understand that the 
 practites of the Dark Ages will not work in this 
 century : 
 
 "On May 26th, 1920, just as Mr. Choi was coining out 
 of his class room he was met by two detectives, one 
 Korean and one Japanese, who informed him that he was 
 wanted at the Central Police Station. Here he was 
 turned over to the Chief of Police and thrown into a room 
 and kept all day. Mr. Brockman and Cynn both made 
 several attempts to find out why he was arrested. Each 
 time they were given an evasive answer. Finally Mr. 
 Cynn insisted that they tell him the cause of the arrest. 
 It was finally discovered that he was wanted in Pyengyang 
 on certain charges. He was to leave Seoul that evening 
 on the II p.m. train. Anxious to see how Mr. Choi was 
 being treated, Mr. Cynn and several of the Y.M.C.A. 
 men went down to the station. Mr. Choi with the other 
 six students were standing on the platform. Apparently 
 Mr. Choi was not bound as is the usual custom. Closer 
 observation, however, revealed the fact that his hands 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAH^URE 185 
 
 were bound with cords, but in his case the ropes were 
 placed on the inside instead of the outside, of the clothes. 
 He arrived in Pyengyang the next day. May 27, at 5 p.m. 
 Instead of taking Mr. Choi first they called in one of the 
 students whose name is Chai Pony Am. After the usual 
 preliminary questions these inquisitors of the Dark Ages 
 said, 'We know all about you — everything you have done. 
 There is no use for you to deny anything. You make a 
 clean confession of everything.' Mr. Choi replied, 'I 
 have done nothing. If I knew what you wanted, I would 
 tell you.' More pressure was urged in the way of bom- 
 bastic speech. Finally the police said, 'If you won't tell 
 of your own free will we will make you tell !' Then the 
 tortures, which the Government published broadcast had 
 been done away with, began. They brought out a round 
 stool with four legs and laid it down on its side with the 
 sharp legs up and made him strip naked. Then they took 
 the silken bands (about 2 in. wide) and placing his hands 
 behind his back until the shoulder blades touched begun 
 bending the arm from the wrist very tight. This com- 
 pleted, they made him kneel upon the sharp edge of the 
 legs of the stool with his shins. Then they took the 
 bamboo paddle (this is made of two strips of bamboo 
 about 2 in. wide and 2 ft. long wound with cord) and 
 begun beating him on the head, face, back, feet and thighs. 
 Every time they struck him his body would move and the 
 movement cause the shins to rub on the sharp edges of 
 the stool. To further increase the pain they took lighted 
 cigarettes and burnt his flesh. This was continued until 
 the student fainted and fell off. They then would restore 
 the patient, by artificial respiration and when he refused 
 to confess, continued the torture. This process was con- 
 tinued for 45 minutes and then the student was put into 
 a dark cell and kept for three days. Upon the third day 
 he was again brought before these just policemen and 
 asked if he were ready to confess. Said they, 'If you do 
 not tell us this time we will kill you. You see how the 
 waters of the Tai Pong (the river at Pyengyang) wear 
 smooth these stones. That is what we do with those who 
 come in here. Many have been killed in here. Your life 
 
186 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 is not worth as much as a fly.' He was tortured in the 
 same manner as before and then put back into the cell 
 for another three days. This process was continued every 
 three days for two weeks. 
 
 "When Mr. Choi, the educational director of the 
 Y.M.C.A. was called in the police said, 'You are an 
 educated gentleman and we propose to give you the gen- 
 tleman's treatment. We do not want to treat you like 
 ordinary men. Now we want you to tell us what your 
 thoughts have been and are. Make a confession of any- 
 thing you have done since March ist, 1919.' Mr. Choi 
 said, 'What do you want me to confess? If you will 
 give me a little time I will write you out something.' This 
 they refused to do and said, 'Since you refuse to tell us 
 we will make you tell. We will treat you like all other 
 dogs.' Then they forcibly took off his clothes, and pro- 
 ceeded to bind him in the same manner as the previous 
 student. After being bound he was placed on tihe stool 
 and beaten. He did not lose his consciousness but fell off 
 the stool, and then was placed back and the same process 
 continued. When Mr. Choi fell off the stool the bands 
 on his arms were loosened and they proceeded to unloosen 
 and rewind his arms. This time they wound them tighter 
 than before. At the ends of these bands are brass rings 
 which are placed next to the flesh and made to press upon 
 the nerves. This time Mr. Choi said as they wound his 
 right arm he felt a ;sharp pain and at once noticed that he 
 had lost the use of his arm. It was paralyzed. Mr. Choi 
 was tortured five times in all — one every three days. The 
 first torture lasted one hour and the succeeding ones were 
 less severe than the first. At the end of two weeks, June 
 loth, Mr. Choi and the six students with him were called 
 before a police captain who said to the students, 'There is 
 nothing against you. Some bad Korean has testified falsely 
 against you. We are sorry you have suffered but you can 
 now go free.' However to Mr. Choi he said, 'You must 
 remain here a week yet. You are still under police super- 
 vision. Go to hotel and stay.' On June i6th the 
 
 police came to the hotel where he was staying and said, 
 'You may go down to Seoul tonight.' Mr. Choi arrived 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAHuUIlE 187 
 
 in Seoul on the 17th and gave this testimony. His arm 
 is still paralyzed." 
 
 And so it is that these great failures stand 
 out; the failure of a race of people to survive; 
 the failure of the American people to estimate the 
 loss of Shantung at its proper valuation spir- 
 itually, and the failure of Japan to understand 
 that Korea is still and ever shall be Korea the 
 Unconquered; this Korea which I call "The Wild 
 Boar at Bay." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 
 
 WE were running down the Samabs River 
 in a small Dutch ship, the Merkeus. 
 This river, running almost parallel to the 
 Equator, and not more than fifty miles away from 
 that well-known institution, cuts the western end 
 of Borneo in two^ and lends phenomenal fertility 
 to its soil. 
 
 Shooting around a bend in the river, suddenly 
 there loomed on the western shores, so close that 
 we could throw a stone and hit it, a tree that was 
 leafless, dead as a volcanic dump; but its dead 
 branches literally swarmed with monkeys. The 
 light in the west had so far gone that they ap- 
 peared as silent silhouettes against the sunset. 
 Their tails, which seemed to be about three feet 
 long, and were curled at the ends, hung below the 
 dead branches. One big fellow had perched him- 
 self on the tiptop of the tree, and in the dim light 
 he looked like a human sentinel as his black out- 
 line appeared against the evening light. 
 
 Then came Missionary Worthington's story 
 about Kin Thung, the boy who, with character- 
 
190 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 istic Oriental spirit, had quick murder in his 
 heart : 
 
 "It was while I was the head of the Boys' 
 School down in Batavia, Java^ that it happened. 
 One has experiences out here in dealing with 
 youth that he does not get at home, for it is in- 
 flammable material, explosive to the highest de- 
 gree." 
 
 I waited for his story to continue as the Dutch 
 ship glided swiftly down the river toward the 
 South China Sea,, and night settled over us as 
 we sat there on the upper deck, watching the 
 crimson glory change into sudden purple. 
 
 "I heard a noise and I knew there was a fight 
 on in the dormitory. I had seen the aftermath 
 of such Malay and Chinese feuds in our schools 
 before,, and I knew that it was no trivial matter, 
 as it often is with boy fights at home, so I hurried 
 up. 
 
 "When I got there I saw Kin Thung wiping 
 his knife, and the boy he had been fighting lying 
 on the floor, bleeding from a long wound." 
 
 "What had happened?" 
 
 "Kin Thung was a quick-tempered boy. In 
 addition to that, he was of a sullen make-up, 
 with, what I call, a criminal tendency in him. 
 That, added to his already volatile spirit, made 
 him a real problem in the school. For instance, 
 he was the kind of a boy who, if a teacher called 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 191 
 
 on him without warning to recite, he would get 
 uncontrollably angry, turn sullen and refuse to 
 answer." 
 
 "Why didn't you fire him?" I said. 
 
 "That would have been the easy thing to do. 
 I preferred to win him rather than to fire him !" 
 
 I felt ashamed of myself for my suggestion, 
 and looked out into the night skies wljere the 
 beautiful form of the southern cross loomed in 
 the zenith. 
 
 "No, I didn't fire him." 
 
 "What did you do?" 
 
 "As I was dressing the boy's wound Kin Thung 
 stood looking on, utterly expressionless and un- 
 repentant, even sullen. 
 
 "I didn't say anything to Kin that night, save 
 to ask him to come to the office the next day. 
 
 "The other boys were calling out to him as he 
 entered, and I could hear them through the win- 
 dow, 'I wonder how many strokes of the rattan 
 he will get?' for that is one of our forms of 
 punishment. 
 
 "He was no doubt wondering himself when 
 he entered, still sullen. 
 
 "I said to him, 'Kin, I could give you as punish- 
 ment a hundred strokes of the rattan. I could 
 put you on rice and water for a month, or I could 
 put you to a room for a week in solitary con- 
 
193 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 finement. But I am not going to do either or 
 any of them. I am going to pray for you !" 
 
 " 'I don't want you to, sir !' he cried in alarm. 
 
 " 'Kneel down !' I said to him. 
 
 " 'I don't want to.' 
 
 " 'Kneel down, I say !' 
 
 '"I won't!' 
 
 '"But this is your punishment. You would 
 submit to the rattan if I imposed that. You must 
 submit to this !' I said. 
 
 " 'I hate prayer !' 
 
 " 'Kneel down, boy !' 
 
 "He knelt. I prayed. He wept." 
 
 This was the cryptic way the missionary came 
 to the climax of his story. Again the Southern 
 Cross shot into view as we turned a curve in the 
 rivei*. 
 
 "The fountain broke. A boy's heart was won ! 
 I didn't have to fire him. I won him !" 
 
 "That lad came to me two years later as he 
 started out from our school in Batavia, and said, 
 'Mr. Worthington, that moment when you called 
 me into your office was the crucial moment of my 
 life. If you had been unkind to me then ; if you 
 had punished me, even as much as I deserved it ; 
 if you had not been Christ-like, I should have 
 killed you. I had my knife ready. There was a 
 demon in me! Your kindness, your praying for 
 me, broke something inside of me. I guess it was 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 193 
 
 my heart. I cried. I prayed. That morning 
 saved my soul !' " 
 
 "That was a marvelous experience, Mr. Mis- 
 sionary! It was a marvelous way to meet the 
 situation," I said in a low tone, looking up at the 
 white outline of the Southern Cross, and remem- 
 bering two thieves. 
 
 "It was Christ's way !" said the missionary. 
 
 But perhaps the outstanding Flash-light of na- 
 tional Friendship is that of America for the 
 Philippines. I shall never forget the day we 
 started southward from winter-bound China for 
 sun-warmed Manila. 
 
 As the great ship swung about in the muddy 
 waters of the Yangsti and turned southward, 
 the bitter winds of winter were blowing across 
 her deserted decks. But in two days one felt 
 not only a breath of warm tropical winds on his 
 face but he also felt a breath of warmer friend- 
 ship blowing into his soul as he thought of the 
 Philippines and America. 
 
 The first breath of warm winds from southern 
 tropical seas gently kissed one's cheeks that after- 
 noon. It was a soothing breath of romance, 
 freighted with the scent of tropical trees. It was 
 much of a contrast with the bitter winter winds 
 that had blown the day before at Shanghai. There 
 the snow was flying, and woolen suits were 
 greatly needed. 
 
194 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 But to-night men and women alike walk the 
 decks of this Manila-bound ship. They are all 
 in white. One stands at the bow of the ship, glad 
 to catch the salt spray on tanned cheeks, glad to 
 feel the sea-touched winds playing with his hair, 
 glad to see fair women of the Orient tanned with 
 summer suns ; for it is summer in the Philippines, 
 while winter reigns in China and the rest of the 
 Oriental lands further north. 
 
 Last night we passed the narrow straits lead- 
 ing out of Shanghai harbor directly south. Two 
 lighthouses blinked through the dusk of evening, 
 the one to the north in short sharp notes, like a 
 musician of the sea singing coasts,, rapidly beat- 
 ing time. The light to the south seemed to count 
 four in blinks and then hold its last count like a 
 note of music. In between the two lighthouses 
 vague, dim, mist-belted mountains of the China 
 coast loomed through the dusk. 
 
 This morning and all day long we have been 
 sailing past the huge outlines of mountainous 
 Formosa, that rich island off the coast of China, 
 between Shanghai and Manila. It looks like 
 some fairly island with its coves and caves^ into 
 which pours the purple sea, visible through the 
 faint mists of morning and noontime. Its pre- 
 cipitous sides shoot down to the sea in great bare 
 cliffs, save where, here and there, a beauti- 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 195 
 
 ful bay runs in from the southern sea to kiss the 
 green lips of the land. 
 
 But now the sun is setting. I am watching it 
 from my stateroom window. 
 
 And now it is the rainy season in the Philip- 
 pines. 
 
 It doesn't rain in Luzon; it opens up clouds, 
 and oceans suddenly drop to the land. Lakes and 
 rivers form overnight. Bridges wash out, fields 
 are inundated, houses by thousands are swept 
 away, and railroad tracks twisted and played 
 with, as if they were grappled by gigantic fists. 
 
 Men will tell you of the great Typhoon that 
 suddenly dropped out of the mountains at Baguio, 
 sliced off a few sections of the mountains, rushed 
 down through the great gorge, and left in its 
 trail the iron ruins of eight or ten bridges, put in 
 by American engineers,, founded on solid granite ; 
 but swept away like playthings of wood, in an 
 hour. 
 
 • ••••« 
 
 One night we were driving from Baguio to 
 Manila. 
 
 A storm dropped suddenly out of the nowhere. 
 We had no side curtains on, and in just three 
 minutes we were soaked to the skin, and dripping 
 streams of water. Jhe artesian wells along the 
 
196 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 way were but dribbling springs compared with 
 us. 
 
 The storm came out of a clear, star-lit sky. 
 Storms come that way in the Philippines. Only 
 a few minutes before I had been looking up at 
 the Southern Cross admiring its beauty. I looked 
 again and there was no Southern Cross. A few 
 great drops of rain fell and then came the deluge. 
 
 Candle lights flickered in innumerable thatched 
 houses where brown and naked women fluttered 
 about dodging the rain,, looking strangely like 
 great paintings in the night. At the edge of each 
 side porch a Bamboo ladder reached up from the 
 ground. A fire burned against the rain. This fire 
 leapt up for two feet. 
 
 One could easily imagine on this stormy night, 
 with every road a river, every field a flood,, and 
 every vacant space a sea, that the thatched houses 
 raised on Bamboo poles were boats, afloat in a 
 great ocean. The fires on the back porches looked 
 for all the world like the fires that I have seen 
 flaring against the night from Japanese fishing 
 boats. 
 
 We had been warm, personal friends since col- 
 lege days, this driver and I. He had chosen the 
 harder way of the mission fields to spend his life. 
 
 "After all," said he, "that was a dream worth 
 dreaming!" 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 197 
 
 "What do you mean?" I asked him, a bit 
 startled. 
 
 "Why the American occupation of these 
 islands ; the dream that McKinley had, of teach- 
 ing them to govern themselves; and then giving 
 them their independence; an Imperial Dream 
 such as the world never heard of before ; a dream 
 that, if it has done nothing else, has won for 
 America the undying friendship of the intelligent 
 Filipino." 
 
 "Right you are, man ! But why such a thought 
 at this ungodly hour ? I should think rather that 
 you would be sending out an S. O. S." 
 
 "Dunno ! Just flashed over me that that was a 
 dream worth dreaming; and, by gad, boy, we're 
 seeing it come to pass. Look at those contented 
 people living in peace and security; their home 
 fires lighted; their children in school; plenty to 
 eat; not afraid that to-morrow morning some 
 Friar will sell their home from under them. No 
 wonder they have given their undying friendship 
 to America !" 
 
 He continued as we sped through the rain. 
 
 "England and Germany sneered at America's 
 dream. Such a dream of friendship through 
 serving its colony had never been born in any 
 other national soul from the Genesis of coloniza- 
 tion up to this day, save in the soul of America 
 in the Philippines, We have set the ideals of the 
 
198 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 world in many ways but never in a more marked 
 way than this. 
 
 "The Phoenicians were the first colonizers and 
 they swept the Mediterranean with a policy of 
 exploitation and slavery which was selfish and 
 sordid. Then came Greece which had some such 
 ideal of colonization as America. Her ideal was, 
 that colonies, like fruit from a tree, when ripe, 
 should fall off of the mother tree. Or the ideal 
 of Greece was that colonizing should come about 
 like the swarming of bees." 
 
 I nodded my head. He went on as we slashed 
 through the muddy ways, "Rome with her Im- 
 perial dream, her army to back it up, failed as 
 have failed both Germany and Japan; three na- 
 tions with kindred ideals as to colonization. 
 
 "Venice was cruel, adventurous and rapacious 
 in her colonizing policy on the Black Sea and she 
 left a record of exploitations which makes a black 
 blotch on the world's pages. 
 
 "Modern colonization began with Spain in 
 South America, Mexico and the Philippines. 
 Spain has nothing over which to boast in that 
 record. The Dutch in Java, the record of Bel- 
 gium in the Congo ; that of the Portuguese in the 
 Far East; the French in Africa; the English in 
 India ; Germany in China and Africa, and Japan 
 in Korea, have not been entirely for the service of 
 the subjected people, for all of these Governments 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 199 
 
 have gone on the fundamental theory that the 
 colony exists for the Mother States." 
 
 He paused a moment as we made a cautious 
 way around a big caribou. "Then came the great 
 dream of America that the Mother State exists 
 for the benefit of the colony. 
 
 "Elihu Root said, 'We have declared a trust 
 for the benefit of the people of the Philippine 
 Islands !' 
 
 "President William McKinley said : 'The gov- 
 ernment is designed not for exploitation nor for 
 our own satisfaction, or for the expression of our 
 theoretical views,, but for the happiness, peace 
 and prosperity of the people of the Philippine 
 Islands.' 
 
 "Ex-President Taft said when he was Gov- 
 ernor-General of the Islands: 'The chief differ- 
 ence betwe.en the English policy and treatment 
 of tropical peoples and ours, arises from the fact 
 that we are seeking to prepare them under our 
 guidance for popular self-government. We are 
 attempting to do this, first by primary and secon- 
 dary education offered freely to the Filipino 
 people.' 
 
 "This spirit has won the undying friendship of 
 the Filipino people. True enough, they will finally 
 want their independence. That is natural, but 
 there is a deep love for America buried in their 
 hearts because America has been square with 
 
200 .FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 them; has fulfilled her promises; has not ex- 
 ploited them, but has served them. That is why 
 I call the colonization policy of America here in 
 the Philippines a dream worth dreaming." My 
 friend was right. 
 
 "We love America,, because America is our 
 friend!" said a humble fisherman to me one day 
 on the banks of the Pasig. 
 
 "Yes, the United States; it is our own! You 
 are our brothers!" said a Filipino boy who had 
 been educated in a Mission school. 
 
 "We are no longer our own. We belong to 
 America. You have bought us with a price ! It 
 cost the blood of American soldiers to buy us !" 
 said an old Filipino, gray with years, but high in 
 the councils of the Government. 
 
 One night on the Lunetta the Filipino Band 
 was playing. It was a beautiful evening with a 
 sunset that lifted one into the very skies with 
 its bewildering glory and ecstasy. I had been 
 sitting there, drinking in the beautiful music 
 made by the world-famous Constabulary Band, 
 and watching the quicksilver-like changing colors 
 of the sunset. Then the band started to play 
 "The Star Spangled Banner." I was so lost in 
 the sunset and the music that I did not notice. 
 
 I heard a sudden stirring. Brown bodies, half- 
 naked Filipinos all about me, had leapt to their 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 201 
 
 feet at the playing of our national hymn. Beauti- 
 ful Filipino women in their dainty and delicately 
 winged gowns, bare brown shoulders heaving 
 with pride and friendship, stood reverently. Fili- 
 pino soldiers all over the Lunetta stood at atten- 
 tion facing the flag, the Stars and Stripes wav- 
 ing in the winds from the old walled city. Side 
 by side with American soldiers who had just re- 
 turned from Siberia stood Filipino Constabulary 
 soldiers. Side by side with well-dressed Ameri- 
 can children stood half-naked Filipino children 
 at reverent attention,, paying a wholesome respect 
 to the Stars and Stripes as the old hymn swept 
 across the Lunetta. 
 
 "That is a thrilling thing to see!" I said to a 
 friend. 
 
 "It could not have happened ten years ago!" 
 he replied. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "They did not trust us, and they did not love 
 us. They had seen too much of the selfish coloni- 
 zation policies of Spain. They expected the same 
 things from America. It did not come. They 
 have been won to us!" 
 
 This warm-hearted friendship is not true either 
 of England's colonies anywhere in the Orient or 
 of Japan's in Formosa or Korea. It is true alone 
 in the Philippines. 
 
202 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 While I was in the Philippines, down in San 
 Fernando, a statue was erected to a well-known 
 rebel. He was a man who had refused to take 
 the oath of allegiance to America when we cap- 
 tured the islands. He escaped and carried on a 
 propaganda against us. But when he died and 
 a request was made that a statue be erected to his 
 memory, the United States granted this permis- 
 sion. 
 
 At the dedication of this statue the Governor 
 of this Province said that he doubted if any na- 
 tion on the face of the earth,, save the United 
 States, would have permitted the erection of such 
 a statue to a rebel against that government. "That 
 act will bind our hearts closer to the heart of 
 the United States!" he said in closing his ad- 
 dress. The thrilling thing about it all was, that 
 his address was met with prolonged cheering on 
 the part of the thousands of Filipinos who had 
 gathered for the dedication. 
 
 Another evidence of this beautiful friendship 
 for America is the painting which adorns the 
 walls of one of the Government buildings in 
 Manila. It is called "The Welcome to America." 
 It was purchased, paid for and erected by Fili- 
 pinos ; erected in good will, with laughter in their 
 souls, and joy in their hearts. 
 
 It was painted by Hidalgo in Paris in 1904. 
 
 High colors; reds, browns, yellows, golds, 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 203 
 
 blues, purples, tell its story. It adorns the panel 
 at the end of the Senate Chamber of the Filipino 
 Government. 
 
 It has spirit in it and a great, deep sincerity. 
 ■ The central figure is a beautiful woman, sym- 
 bolic of America. She comes across the Pacific 
 carrying the gifts of peace, prosperity, security 
 and love to her colony, the Philippines. 
 
 She carries in one hand the American flag. 
 At her side is Youth bearing a Harp, symbol 
 of the music that America brings into the souls 
 of the people whom she comes to serve. Singing 
 angels hover about the scene. 
 
 Above the central figure of America, on angel 
 wings, is a Youth carrying a lighted torch. To 
 the left is a beautiful brown-skinned Filipino 
 woman with eyes uplifted to this torch. She 
 bears within her ample bosom the children of the 
 islands. The torch is symbol of the fact that we 
 are handing on the light of our Christian civiliza- 
 tion to the children of our colonies. 
 
 I visited this painting many times,, but I never 
 visited it that I did not see many Filipinos, both 
 young and old, standing before it, with reverent 
 eyes. 
 
 I said to a high official of the Government, 
 "Does that painting represent the way you Fili- 
 pinos feel to-day?" 
 
«04. FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 "Hidalgo has spoken for us. He has voiced 
 our feelings well !" was the reply. 
 
 This friendship for the United States is a 
 thrilling thing found all over the Far East. One 
 finds it in Korea, as well as in the Philippines., 
 like a burning light of glory. Korea says, 
 "America is our only hope! We have always 
 trusted and loved America !" 
 
 One finds it like a silver stream running 
 through the life of China. Dr. Sun Yat Sen 
 said to me in Shanghai: "America has always 
 been China's staunch friend ! America we trust ! 
 America we love ! America is our hope ! America 
 is our model !" 
 
 Mr, Tang Shao-yi said, "America's hands and 
 those of America alone are clean in her relations 
 with China, This cannot be said of the other 
 nations," 
 
 Then he told me a thrilling story of the Boxer 
 Rebellion. He, with two thousand Chinese, who 
 were Grovernment officials, were barricaded in a 
 compound behind the usual Chinese walls. The 
 Boxers were firing on them every day. They had 
 run out of food. In fact, they were starving. 
 
 But one morning a bright- faced American boy 
 appeared at the gates of the wall. He was ad- 
 mitted because he was an American. He asked 
 to be taken to Mr, Tang Shao-yi, 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 206 
 
 "What do you most need?" this young Ameri- 
 can asked the rich Chinese merchant. 
 
 "We most need food," was the reply. 
 
 "All right, I'll get enough for you to-day!" 
 said the young American. 
 
 "That night," said Mr. Tang Shao-yi, "that 
 American boy returned with five hundred hams 
 which the Boxers had thrown away, in addition 
 to a thousand sacks of flour which he had gotten 
 from the English legation." 
 
 f Wonderful !" I exclaimed. 
 
 "And that boyish American was " 
 
 "Who?" I asked with tense interest, for the 
 old man was smiling with a suggestive Oriental 
 smile, as if he had a climax up his commodious 
 sleeves. 
 
 "That man was Herbert Hoover!", 
 
 And from that interview henceforth and for- 
 ever no human being need tell me that the Chinese 
 have no sense of the dramatic. 
 
 "That's why we love and trust America," said 
 this great Chinese statesman. "It is because 
 America has always been our friend in time of 
 need!" 
 
 I found this friendship for the United States 
 true all over the Oriental world. It was to me a 
 great miracle of national friendship. The peoples 
 of the Orient trust us. They are not suspicious 
 of our intentions in spite of what jingo papers 
 
206 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 say. We have won their hearts. We have 
 claimed their friendship. 
 
 The name "America," which stands in the Ori- 
 ental mind for the United States, is a sacred pass- 
 port and password. It is a magical word. It 
 opens doors that are locked to all the rest of the 
 world; it tears down barriers,, century-old, that 
 have been barricading certain places for ages 
 past. That simple word opens hearts that would 
 open with none other. 
 
 The eyes of the brown men of the Far East 
 open wide at that word, and a new light appears 
 in them. This is particularly true in Korea, in 
 China, in the Malacca Straits, and in the Philip- 
 pines. 
 
 It is enough to bring a flood of tears to the 
 heart of an American, lonely for a sight of his 
 own flag, homesicE for his native shores,, to see 
 and feel and hear and know the pulse of this 
 friendship for our country among millions of 
 brown men. 
 
 "It is because we are like you, we Chinese," 
 said Tang Shao-yi. "It is because we are both 
 Democrats at heart !" 
 
 "It is because you have been our true friends !" 
 said Dr. Sun Yat Sen. 
 
 "It is because your ideals are our ideals ; your 
 dreams our dreams and your friends our 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 207 
 
 friends,," said Wu Ting-fang, one of China's 
 greatest leaders, to me. 
 
 "It is because so many of our young men have 
 been trained in your American schools, and be- 
 cause so many of us feel that the United States 
 is our second home. It is because you have sent 
 so many good men and women to China to help 
 . us ; to teach us ; to live with us ; to love us ; to 
 serve us ! It is because your missionaries from 
 America have shown the real heart of the United 
 States to us!" said Mr. Walter Busch, a Chinese 
 American student who is now editor of the Peking 
 Leader. 
 
 But whatever the cause, the glorious fact is 
 enough to : 
 
 "Send a thrill of rapture through the framework of the 
 
 heart 
 And warm the inner bein' till the tear drops want to 
 
 start!" 
 
 But perhaps the highest and holiest Flash- 
 lights of Friendship that one finds in the Far 
 East is that of the friendship formed by the 
 American missionaries for the people among 
 whom they are working, and the friendship that 
 these people give in return. These are holy 
 things. 
 
 The average missionary comes home on his 
 furlough, but before he is home three months 
 he is homesick to go back to his people. So they 
 
208 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 come and go across the seas of the world through 
 the years, weaving like a great Shuttle of Service 
 the fabric of frietidship for themselves and for 
 the United States. 
 
 This shuttle of service is being woven night 
 and day across the Atlantic and across the Pa- 
 cific by great ships bearing missionaries going 
 and coming; furlough following furlough, after 
 six years of service; term after term; leaving 
 native land, children,, memories; time after time 
 until death ends that particular thread, crimson, 
 gold, brown or white. The great Shuttle of Love 
 weaves the fabric of friendship across the seas 
 as the ships come and go, bearing outbound and 
 homebound missionaries to foreign fields. 
 
 I am thinking particularly of the Pacific as I 
 write this sketch sitting in a room overlooking 
 the great harbor of Yokohama where three Jap- 
 anese warship lie anchored and two great Pacific 
 liners,, one on its way to San Francisco and 
 another bound for Vancouver. They come and 
 go, these great ships. A few days ago the Em- 
 press of Asia made its twenty-eighth trip across 
 and it soon will start on its twenty-eighth trip 
 back to Vancouver again. Some of the ships out 
 of San Francisco have made more than a hundred 
 trips. So they weave the shuttle back and for- 
 ward across this great sea. And never a ship 
 sails this sea that it does not carry its passenger 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 809 
 
 list of missionaries. Our list was more than half 
 a hundred. 
 
 As Mr. Forman, in a sympathetic and appre- 
 ciative article that he has written for the Ladies' 
 Home Journal, says, the common phrase on a 
 Pacific liner is^ "There are two hundred and fifty 
 passengers and forty-five missionaries on board." 
 Every Pacific passenger list immediately divides 
 itself into two groups, the missionaries and the 
 other passengers. 
 
 Then Mr. Forman proceeds to slay those shal- 
 low, narrow-minded, often ignorant and unedu- 
 cated tourists and business men who dare to speak 
 of this traveling missionary with derision. Mr. 
 Forman has no particular interest in missions 
 and he has no particular interest in the Church, 
 but he started out to investigate this derogatory 
 phrase^ "and forty-five missionaries." 
 
 Mr. Forman starts his article with these strik- 
 ing paragraphs 
 
 "If ever you cross the Pacific you will find the passen- 
 gers on the steamer quietly and automatically dividing 
 Siemselves into two groups. 
 
 " 'How many passengers have we on board ?' you may 
 lightly ask your neighbor. 
 
 "And your neighbor, traveled man no doubt (his twelfth 
 crossing, he will mention), will smartly reply, with a 
 suave, man-of-the-world smile : 'A hundred and two pas- 
 sengers and forty-five missionaries.* 
 
 "After that you will be initiated and you will be men- 
 tioning with an easy grace to some one else that there are 
 
810 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 on board so many passengers and so many missionaries. 
 It becomes a part of the jargon of Pacific crossing." 
 
 But Mr. Forman sees working that Shuttle of 
 Service of which I am speaking. He sees, as 
 any thinking man sees, as Roosevelt saw, as 
 Bryan saw, and as Taft saw,, that the greatest 
 single influence for good in the Orient is the 
 missionary. Mr. Forman was incensed at this 
 careless phrase on the Pacific liners, and he in- 
 vestigated the work of our missionaries when he 
 was in the Orient, and he came to the decision 
 that they are worth more to America, even from 
 that selfish standpoint, than all the ambassadors 
 that we have sent over, because they are, in their 
 crossing and recrossing, weaving a Fabric of 
 Friendship between the Orient and the Occident; 
 between the nations of the East and those of the 
 West; between the white peoples and the brown 
 peoples ; in spite of the diplomatic differences and 
 yellow newspapers in the United States and 
 Japan. 
 
 Mr. Forman says about his conclusions : 
 
 "I concluded that any one of the large missions in those 
 Oriental countries accomplished, so far as concerns Ameri- 
 can standing and prestige, more than all our diplomatic 
 representation there put together. I do not believe it to 
 be an exaggeration to say that for the Orient the mis- 
 sionaries are perhaps the only useful form of what is 
 called diplomatic represei^ation." 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 211 
 
 And again in the same article he says: 
 
 "One good missionary in the right place, it seemed to 
 me, can accomplish more than quite a number of am- 
 bassadors." 
 
 And again he wonderfully sums up that mis- 
 sion of love in a paragraph which I think ought 
 to be passed on : 
 
 "But when a missionary establishes a clinic or a hos- 
 pital, healing sores and diseases that their own medicine 
 men have abandoned as hopeless ; when he educates boys 
 and girls that otherwise would have remained in dark- 
 ness; when, with a whole-souled enthusiasm, he gives 
 them counsd, aid and service — ^and he asks nothing in 
 return — ^then the stolid and passive Chinese or Korean. is 
 genuinely impressed. Then America really becomes in 
 his mind the synonym for kindness and service, and from 
 mouth to mouth goes abroad the fame of the land that 
 is aiming to do him good, without any menacing back- 
 ground of exploitation." 
 
 I talked with one bright- faced, twinkling-eyed, 
 red-blooded, big-framed missionary who was 
 crossing with his family of a wife and four chil- 
 dren. He had spent fifteen years in the Orient 
 as a missionary, and then because of illness he 
 had been compelled to go to America. There he 
 had taken a church and had preached for five 
 years. His health came back, and as he told me, 
 "The lure of the East got me and I had to come 
 back. I never was so happy in my life as I am on 
 this trip and the whole family feels the same way. 
 
212 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 We are going back to our people!" And the way 
 he pronounced those italicized words made me 
 know that he, too, was weaving a thread in the 
 Fabric of Friendship. 
 
 We met a woman who was traveling back to 
 China with her three darling little tots. I made 
 love to all three of them, and it wasn't long before 
 I asked one where her Daddy was. I assumed, 
 of course, that they had been home on a furlough 
 and that Daddy was back there in China waiting 
 anxiously for them to return to him. I pictured 
 that meeting, for I have seen many such during 
 war days, both on this side and in France. 
 
 "My Daddy is dead," the child said simply 
 with a quiver of her little lips. 
 
 "All right, dear baby, we won't talk about it 
 then," for I was afraid that those little trembling 
 lips couldn't hold in much longer. But she wanted 
 to tell me about it, I soon saw that. She liked 
 to talk about her "dear dead Daddy." 
 
 "He Went to France," she said simply. 
 
 "Ah, he was a soldier?" I questioned. 
 
 "No, he was better than a soldier, my Mamma 
 says. He did not go to kill; he went to help." 
 And back of that sentiment and that statement 
 I saw a world of struggle and ideals in a mission- 
 ary home where the man felt called across the 
 seas to be "in it" with his country and at last the 
 
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP «13 
 
 refuge of the man who could go "not to kill but 
 to help." 
 
 "He went to work with the coolies and he got 
 the influenza and died last winter. We won't 
 have any Daddy any more," and her little blue 
 eyes were misty with tears. And so were mine, 
 more misty than I dared let her see. And they 
 are misty now as I write about it. And yours 
 will be misty if you read about it, as they should 
 be. That is something fine in you being called 
 out. 
 
 Later I met the mother. She told me over 
 again the story that little Doris had told me of 
 the big Daddy who had felt the call to go to 
 France in the Y.M.C.A. to help the poor 
 "coolies," several hundred of whom were, by 
 strange coincidence, going back to China on the 
 same boat with us, and with that brave mother 
 and those dear children. These "coolies" were 
 going back alive, but he who went to serve them 
 died, "Others he saved; Himself he could not 
 save," echoed in my soul as that mother and I 
 talked. 
 
 "I am going back to the Chinese to spend the 
 rest of my life finishing Will's work. It is better 
 so. I shall be happier." 
 
 "But the association there — everything — every 
 turn you make — every place you go — will remind 
 you of him," I protested. 
 
214 FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS 
 
 V "It would be what Will would want most of 
 , all, that I go on with his work. I go gladly. It 
 , will be the best balm for my sorrow." 
 
 And far above national friendships there loom 
 these snow-white peaks of the sacrificial friend- 
 ship the missionaries bear in their hearts for the 
 people with whom they live, and serve, and die. 
 
 THE END