One night they invited a young professor, Henry Meekins, to dine with them. He had just returned from a lengthy visit to China and had had the extraordinary good sense to go to the Orient without very many preconceived notions regarding unquestioned perfectness of everything Western and particularly all things American. At dinner he ventured to express the opinion that China, though unblessed with modern plumbing, was more interesting, more filled with beauty and romance, than New York, which he found to be clean and with excellent plumbing but dull and blatant and ugly. Mimi, remembering the first quarrel she and Jimmie had had, and on this same point, looked somewhat doubtfully at Jimmie. But he was silently eating.
“Take one of the workmen in Ford’s factory,” Meekins was saying. “He stands or sits at a bench for eight hours a day doing one small job, tightening a bolt or inserting a plug over and over again, thousands of times a day. He knows nothing and cares less what part that bolt or that screw plays in the finished car—it’s a dulling, deadening thing which saps every bit of individualism from him. But a Chinese coolie who hasn’t one-tenth or one-hundredth the advantages of the Ford workman, is still a craftsman and not a mere tender of a dehumanizing machine.”
Jimmie grunted contemptuously but Meekins was so absorbed in his subject he did not notice the unmistakable comment.
“And they’re on to us, too,” he cheerfully went on. “Before the war we had them fooled—they believed everything we did or said was right because we said it, we who have built up this great industrial machine. But the war opened their eyes. They see us now for what we are an army waving banners of Christianity but with guns in our hands, the folds of the banner hiding traders and industrialists who see that missionaries are sent where there are rich resources to be found.”
Jimmie could restrain himself no longer, he had to put this visionary young whippersnapper in his place.
“But look what we do for them—we clean up their filthy towns for them, teach them how to live like decent human beings, and bring them a real religion instead of the pagan, heathenish doctrines they’ve got!”
“Granted that we teach them sanitation, build them roads and railway lines,” Meekins cheerfully agreed. “But do we teach them or, better, prove to them that our religion is better than theirs? As I said, before the war we had them fooled—they saw the advances we had made and there was reasonable ground for attributing that advance to our religion. But what did they see during the war? They saw white nations murdering white nations with all the hellish devices—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Forrester—that industrialism could devise. They began then to wake up and ask themselves: ‘What is this Christianity they’ve been forcing down our throats at the point of a gun?’ Now they’re realizing that we ourselves don’t know what Christianity is—we’re divided up into different faiths and each one of those faiths is divided in turn into a thousand different denominations, Baptists and Methodists and Episcopalians and Holy Rollers, modernists and fundamentalists who spend most of their time arguing over what they believe and what the other fellow does not believe. Yet we go to the so-called heathens with guns in our hands and say, virtually: “Take our creeds and our civilization! Don’t ask us to prove they’re superior—we know they are and if you dare question or refuse them we’ll shoot!’ ”
“I suppose next you’ll be saying there’s nothing good in the white man’s civilization—that we all ought to start living in straw huts and growing rice and nice, fat mice for our food?” Jimmie challenged him, almost surlily.
But Meekins, young, eager, enthusiastic, was thoroughly aroused. His eyes shone behind his horn-rimmed spectacles and his blonde hair rose belligerently above his flushed fair face.
“No, I don’t mean anything of the kind,” he said, leaning towards Jimmie. “Our civilization has undoubted advantages—we have developed the sciences and we have developed machinery and invention to a point the world’s never reached before. Our gods are steam and electricity and steel—we have combated plagues and disease, we have greater material comfort, we can travel farther and faster than ever before. But when that’s granted—”
“Seems to me,” Jimmie interrupted triumphantly, “you’ve granted about everything that’s worth considering.”
“No—no, Mr. Forrester, I haven’t though. We’ve developed the printing-press and the telephone and telegraph and the radio, but what has been the result? We’ve made it possible to spread faster and more easily bigotry and hatred and intolerance and give more power to the mob, whether represented by the crowd that beats up a crowd of Jews or Germans or Russians or Negroes or whether it’s represented by nations fighting each other for spoils in some part of the world. And we call ourselves free men, boast of it. Such a notion is silly—we are all of us petty little creatures who are slaves to the newspaper and the radio, to politicians and mouthy preachers, to our employers and the movies, to the telephone and every other regimented idea or thing.”
“But you forget our art, our literature, all the other things we’ve created beside the machine you hate so,” Jimmie, now thoroughly aroused and interested in spite of himself, challenged.
“Our art? Our literature? As if other civilizations didn’t have art and literature, ethics and philosophies of life and codes of conduct many of them much better than anything we, busy as we are with material things, have created. Through luck and abundant natural resources we’ve become immensely wealthy—not through any particular
