Canada's Relations With China

PRESIDENT: Gentlemen, this is the Chinese New Year and I think it is fitting and proper that the Empire Club of Canada should extend to the Chinese Empire New Year Greetings.

Modern progress has really made this world we Eve in smaller. We have so advanced in methods of transportation, and communication, through wireless, telegraph, and long distance telephone that nations which were far distant yesterday are our neighbours today. Canada's geographical position makes China one of our neighbours today. China is the West to Canada, it is the East to the Old World. It is obvious that the relations existing and to exist between Canada and China should be a subject of great importance to us all, particularly those of us who believe in the British Empire.

Our guest-speaker today, Dr. Currelly, by intensive study and research and by personal contact has made himself so acquainted with conditions 'in the East and with the character of the conditions in China that he is well qualified to address us on this subject. Dr. Currelly needs no introduction from me. You all know his position in this community and I' know you will listen to him with interest on this most important subject. I have much pleasure in introducing Dr. Currelly who will address us on "Canada's Relations with China."

DR. CHARLES T. CURRELLY: Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: When we try to look at our affairs from a fairly wide standpoint there comes always a peculiar temptation to say that history repeats itself. I have given a good deal of attention to the general history of the world arid I do not feel that we can really say that history repeats itself, but we can say that many things come very close to repetition. We are now within a very difficult period of affairs, one that is very hard to understand, but something very similar happened before and perhaps it might help us a little bit to understand. You know that the century before Christ was singularly like the 19th century. The world was opened up. Roads, and good roads, were established nearly everywhere. Safety had come. Pompey had put down the pirates, the seas were safe. Mass production was getting well under way.

In one week, I may say, we received two objects, one which Dr. White sent from Honan and one which a friend of mine sent from London. They were made in the same factory in Alexandria, just about the time of Christ. One was traded west to London, and one was traded east to Honan in China.

There was this great opening up of mass production--a tremendous development of the world's trade, seemingly a great classification of the world, and all of a sudden, almost as it were overnight, there was a swing over to an arbitrary form of government, a dictatorship, perhaps as severe and violent as could be imagined. In the great democracy of Rome, ruling the world as a democracy, there suddenly was a tryanny that would be fairly hard to excel. Now, what caused that? Why, moreover, were the people satisfied with it for so long? Because, in spite of the terrible tyranny that was a result, things did go once and they went on very well; and we have to acknowledge that those countries that have thrown themselves under a very highly organized committee of people to dominate them have, as far as one can see, got along very well. The development of Italy is spectacular. I don't think anybody who has been there has not come away tremendously impressed with the extraordinary development. The same thing is true in Germany.

Now, is it impossible for a democracy to have a thought out and reasoned plan of action? That, it seems to me, is what is given to the people of Italy and Germany and what was given to the Romans who went under this very definite, limited form of government. Things were brought out and things were worked out and the government was not just pulling this way and that way in the good old muddling process that we seemingly brag about so much in our own affairs.

Even before the War, Germany was very much given, indeed, to a general conceived plan. May I give you an example? In the first decade of this century, the museum of Berlin sent an expedition down the west coast of Africa. Everything was planned. The members of the expedition paid no fares. People high enough in the government asked that these museum men might have free transportation on the ships and that they might also be picked up if there was no harbour. They went down quite carefully visiting tribe after tribe and making a very special study of the weavings, either in fabrics, cotton and so forth, or in basketry, and particularly making a careful study of the designs because, as you know, all primitive design is prayer, prayer for help for something or other. One design will protect you in one way, another design in another way. The expedition took home a marvellous collection of primitive work. The museum put some of the young men to work at it and the general designs of the textiles were grouped into areas, keeping as many as possible of the designs in one general group, that is, to cover as large an area as possible. The designs were taken to the cotton printers and within about a year and a half to two years, two-thirds of the British cotton trade was knocked right out of the West African coast. The Lancashire mills were idle and the Germans were reaping an enormous harvest of profit; and it was some years, after the War came on, that the English cotton people had to work out a similar thing to get back their trade; bat Germany had it for years. It was just on that team play of drawing the different agencies of the country in together and saying, "Now, what do we want and how are we going to get it?" I think it is rather sad, as I said before, that we should tend rather to brag, "O, well, we will muddle through somehow."

Now, remember, Gentlemen, that the 19th century belonged to Britain. She had the ships, she had the men, she had the peace. Do you realize that? The peace that allowed the people to wander, and British ships were pushing their noses up every creek of the newly discovered lands. The explorer was ahead of the commercial traveller. England had it all her own way so it was easy to muddle through. That's over with. You may say today that there are practically no new markets. We have to look toward the development of those things which will be most profitable on both sides. We cannot go out and discover new lands.

Some years ago a friend's son told me that wishing to leave East Africa, he thought he would have a little trip through the Congo. He got an old Ford car and went through, and when he told me that there were plenty of gasoline stations through the Congo, it came to me as a very definite shock.

Now, may I offer for your consideration for a very short time, the idea that we might very well, as Canadians, look to China as one of the countries that it behooves us to study and with which we might look forward to having long and continued, successful trade? To begin with, China is our next door neighbour. We are not divided by a sea but linked by a sea. Some time ago I had a very definite illustration of that. My old home is down in Durham County, near Port Hope. Way freight was $9.00 a ton, which was what I paid from Toronto to Port Hope, about 62 miles. I was also paying $9.00 a ton from Tientsin, China to Vancouver. Perhaps one doesn't think of that. The sea is our best link, not our division. Sea travel is extraordinarily cheap. From Tientsin, China, around to Montreal is the same price as a comparatively short land trip. We are linked to China by the cheapest carrier that is possible.

Now, when we have to look forward to our own development of trade, it seems to me there are two considerations. First of all, we must ask, "What do our climate and our general land and rock, timber, and other conditions give us?" And second, "What do they not give us?" In picking out nations with whom we would like to develop trade, not just a spluttery trade of a few years but a long and permanent and, if possible, a happy condition of trade, we want to pick out countries where the transport is easy and where there is a very great deal of difference between their conditions and ours. It seems to me that our next door neighbour to the west, China, offers an almost perfect balance to us in this question of trade. We will never grow silk. We can grow the mulberries, but our whole disposition makes silk-worm culture impossible. We haven't that continuous patience which will let us feed the silk-worms five times a day and, do that dainty work of keeping them clean. It seems to require that Oriental patience that we haven't in any sense in our make-ups We will always have to buy our silk. We will always have to, buy our tea because our climate will not grow it, and I quite agree with the tea merchants that we are going to use more and more tea-as you may have seen from some of the advertising. Again, we cannot grow cotton because our climate will not let us do it. And we are going to use more and more cotton. We cannot grow rice. Our climate will not let us do it, and I doubt if our people would do it if we tried to develop our wild rice. We don't seem to be fond of working in semi-liquid mud. Then, again, our climate will not let us grow cane sugar. Also, our climate will not let us grow the masses of cheap peanuts that go into that immense amount of peanut oil that is being imported, and also the tung oil we probably could not grow, although that has not yet been tried.

Now, here are a few things we will have to import, probably for all time. These are essentially the products of China.

What does China want, on the other side? It just seems to want the very things we are made to produce. Here we are, whether we take this southern Ontario or our West, a country among the very richest in the whole world, a land so rich; that as I said here not long ago to another group, every nation whose people have ever come here has gone down because the land has been too rich and they have been driven out by another group coming in. Let us hope we are not in that succession of people who, enervated by too rich a country, will be driven out in turn. We have the power of growing unlimited quantities of food. I have lived in many countries, and I have never seen any country that has the power of food production that we have. We don't need to go out of this Ontario of ours to put up our land against practically any in the world, except perhaps a few valleys here and there, but those have only small areas. We can grow food. We can grow the grains in great quantities. The Chinese will always have to import grain.

Dr. White was telling me just recently that the best figures that can be obtained show the population of China to be increasing, roughly, twenty millions a year. That is, twice the number of people we have in Canada are being added, that many mouths are being added, to China every year. There will be an ever-increasing demand for just the things that we want to sell: food, powdered milk, butter, cereals, and also an ever increasing demand for woollen goods.

Now, there are two things that you would say would just naturally come together. I always like O. Henry's expression-"There are some things that just seem naturally to go together, like ham and eggs, Irish and trouble, and things of that kind." What are we doing? Are we going to let other nations who have things to place, slip in ahead of us? That seems to me to be the question. Are we doing anything other than just--well--letting things drift along, to develop that very trade Which is, to begin with, as I said, at our doors and, secondly, which is just that type of trade that fits in with what we want and what we have to sell in the largest quantities?

Also, there isn't any doubt that Canada is going to become a very great manufacturing nation, and we may have to look to that. That we may be able to sell our products of one kind, we will have to rather cut down on certain manufactures and import them in order that we may thereby produce a market for our goods.

I think if you were to look around and ask what we are doing to develop that trade consciously, you would have to say we are doing very little, very little indeed.

Other people are doing a very good deal. Our neighbours to the south, with their usual shrewdness, have been drawing over hundreds and hundreds of young Chinese students to their universities, so they may go back with the local knowledge that is so useful. Some years ago the Canadian Bank of Commerce was asked by a Chinese banking family to train one of their young men. Sir Ermund Walker, at that time head of the Bank, was enthusiastic about it. The young man was brought over here and given a pretty good grilling. I asked Sir Edmund some time after how it was working out. He said, "He is just tumbling all over himself to bring business to the Bank." Now, you can understand that such a young man returned home, having had so many of the great advantages of western education, if asked by somebody, "Where can, I get certain thing?" would say, "O, I am sure So-and-So in Toronto would be able to tell you." He wouldn't say, "So-and-So in New York," because he wouldn't happen to know about New York. In that way, just that they may show their own knowledge and their own helpfulness to their people, such young people 'do bring in an enormous amount of business to the place where they have received their education. We are doing nothing. The fact is we are pretty nearly putting stumbling blocks in the way of Chinese students coming here. A movement was brought forward some years ago to see if it were not possible to have at least twenty brought to the Province of Ontario every four years, so that we might have at least twenty men going back to act as our interpreters and our agents in China. We are not doing it. Some time ago a very large deal was about to go through, but the Chinese bankers wouldn't back it. A prominent lawyer here told me that the thing was just about settled when the bankers said, "What has Canada ever done for us?"--and we lost a very large deal.

Our position regarding China is one that I think we should consider also from another side, and that is this we owe about one-half of our civilization to them. Very few of us would be here today if it were not for what has been received from China. We simply wouldn't have been alive. May I, at the risk of boring you, run over a few of the outstanding things that we owe to the Chinese, in order that you may get the idea, if you haven't it already, that when we are trying to work up the closest possible relations in our trade with China, we are dealing with one of the peoples that have given the most to the civilization of the world.

Beginning away back as far as I know, the first machine came from China--a crossbow. The early Greeks got it. They immediately saw its possibilities. They enlarged it in principle, altered it, and made the great engines of destruction that forced the building of very strong walls, forced the very careful cutting of stones and the laying of them so that when the mortar had been shattered they would still hold in their place. In one sense you may trace from that the building of the great cathedrals, where accurate workmanship was learned, and then the building of defences, and that gradually developed into the building of those things to which we point with our greatest pride in our mechanical work.

The next thing that came was silk, with a strange effect. It was brought across to Europe as heavy cloth, unwoven and unspun, and respun as silk gauze. The Romans paid for it at the rate of pound for pound, a pound of gold for a pound of silk, and with that and the spice trade, a million pounds of gold a year disappeared into the East, till gradually Rome went under so that she could not even float her copper currency.

This was a big thing, the coming of silk goods. Thousands of people lived who would otherwise have died, and consequently men were willing to .pay enormous sums for this material. In a very, very hot climate where women were cooped up indoors, they could live if they could go naked, but the flies drove them wild. Silk gauze let them keep the flies off and still let the air get to the body, so along the North African Coast, up the Nile and along the Red Sea and so forth, the demand was simply enormous.

When Rome went down, anarchy followed, and in that anarchy came a wild crowd from the east who were riding here and there and everywhere. A village was burned and before the European mere collected, another village was in flames. A hundred Huns were riding through here, three hundred there, and so forth, and the terror of the Hun has come down to us as something to shudder at to this day. These men had a wonderful invention that Europe had never developed--the stirrup. For fourteen hundred years people had been riding horses as one of the main methods of getting along, but no one in Europe had thought of throwing a strap across the horse's back and sticking his toes in the loops. We are not so very inventive. Germanic tribes breaking through the Roman barrier saw the immense advantages of the stirrup, and the northern chieftans became the barons, wearing heavier armour because they could get on their horses and do something after they got on: and we have the feudal system developing as a direct result of the stirrup. I cannot see any possibility of the feudal system without the Chinese stirrup that came in with the Huns. It was a form of government that worked. It worked because the very essence of it was that it changed from the leader to the lord, from the duke to the lord, and the lord is the loaf-ward who must feed his people. He had to develop strong men and strong girls that they might defend their own community, and sometimes, of course, raid their neighbours.

So we have a government; but in time, instead of being the lord he became the robber baron, and Europe was in considerable chaos when a new thing arrived from China -gunpowder. A wonderful substance. It made the best possible enjoyment for ail the small Chinese boys ins the neighbourhood. Wonderful fire works, wonderful fire crackers--all kinds of things--marvellous! Of course, the moment we got it we tried to hurt somebody with it, so we put it in a tube and developed a cannon; and that brought about centralized government because the baron's castle could be blown up. The King, being the richest, had the biggest park of artillery, and so we obtained centralized government.

Just a little earlier than gunpowder came paper, another Chinese invention. That altered the whole of our educational affairs, the whole of our civilization. It altered, as you know, the whole of our trade; and perhaps a good many of us wish it weren't quite so cheap today, so that there wouldn't be so much of it dumped in front of us every morning.

Printing came next. The Chinese had used printing for a very, very long time indeed, but the wars of Persia had acted as a barrier to the natural course of trade and had kept it from coming across to Europe. Later on, some Chinese who were fighting with their cousins, the Turks, against the Arabs, were captured up in the Oxus region and were sold as slaves. They were paper-makers, and very rapidly indeed the whole story of paper developed through the Mahommedan world. The development of Mahommedanism meant the development of the Koran, and thousands and tens of thousands of copies of the Koran had to be written. That developed a well paid set of scribes, but when printing came to the knowledge of the scribes, they saw that their job was over with if the miserable printing press ever got into the Mahommedan world. They therefore explained to the Caliph that the end of the world or something closely connected with it would come if printing were ever allowed within the Mahommedan Empire, because the name of God would be wiped over with the hog's hair brush, so the name of God would be mixed up with the despised pig. As a bit of special pleading you cars see that it was very good: Anyway, printing was prohibited and remained prohibited, century after century. But, whereas you can stop the rich man, you can never stop the poor man. The merchant princes had their baggage opened and everything was searched, but the greasy coat of the camel-man got through with whatever was in its pockets, and so the pack of playing cards got through. Slowly they got across to the Mediterranean world, and also the description of how the cards were made-that they were printed. Cards had been drawn and painted, which was expensive, and cheap playing cards were the beginning of our printing. Very soon the Church took it up when they wanted to send out numbers of bulls and, as you know, about 1450 A.D. we had the printing of the Bible. That is another thing that completely changed our civilization.

Just at this time there came trickling in from the East a marvellous substance called porcelain. If you hit it, it would ring. It was semi-translucent. It was a strange, uncanny stuff, and people told each other wonderful tales about it. It was mysterious, it was secret, it was a 21 kinds of remarkable things, according to the imagination of the person who happened to be telling about it. It began to trickle in a little more, and people had it set in silver and made a great fuss over it. It came in more and more with the opening up of the East Indies by the Dutch and the trade with China and Japan. The Dutch copied the designs in old majolica ware, but it was too soft, and a knife used on it would cut through the glaze. So people still ate off their wooden trenchers, and as a wooden trencher is about the best substance I know for holding germs and ferments, people died. In the British Isles in Elizabeth's time when porcelain started to come in, the average length of life was eight years. In the 500 years following 1066, the population had doubled. Families were very large but they died young. As time went on, certain conditions improved. The coming of the Chinese rat, for instance, killed the black rats and did away with plagues in England which used to come every 25 years. So we owe the Chinese a little there.

People began to notice that, those who used silver did not die. The children who ate their porridge out of a silver bowl did not die, while the other children who ate out of a wooden bowl did die; in such numbers that it began to make people feel that they wanted something different. Due to a few men, Dr. Dwight, the Eilers Brothers and a few others, we have in England the hard glaze copying the glaze of the Chinese porcelain. Within sixty years after glaze became common, the population of England doubled--and that made the British Empire. That is why we are here today. That is why there were enough people in England to go to the different Dominions, to settle in Australia New Zealand, Canada and the other places. If it had not been for the coming of porcelain, it would have been a very very different world.

Now there is one thing more-tea. In the time of Charles II, tea began to come into use. The people of England knew if they drank water they died. That was just a case of trial and error. If you tried the water you committed the error of dying. Typhoid must 'have been simply rampant. People drank beer, therefore, which was a boiled drink. They didn't know it was because it was boiled, but they knew if they drank beer they didn't die. Now, tea is also a boiled drink, and people found they could drink tea and drink all they liked of it and not die. So, you have the introduction into the life of England of a non-intoxicating drink that began to take the place of the everlasting drinking of intoxicating beverages. I wish somebody could make a serious study of how terrible was the effect on England's general affairs of the unlimited drinking. There are some things I cannot account for. Why could England in the 18th century not keep up her currency? Why were Spanish dollars in common circulation in London? Why all these troubles that caused America to break loose? The only way I cane interpret it is that the men in charge were so sodden with drink that simply nothing was happening. So we have to welcome tea as one of the great things that came into our civilization.

Well, I have gone through only the high points of what we owe to China. They have been a wonderful people. Take only those things I have mentioned out of our civilization and where are we? Yet, there was no sign in any one case of there being a likelihood of its development in Europe, had it not come in from China.

I put forward this appeal that we, as a people, should do our level best to study the whole Chinese situation, that we should approach the Chinese with that humility which their predominant position in the development of our civilization demands, that we should 'in every way leave no stone unturned to bring about the most ultra friendly relationship with that great people, and that we should join with them in that very trade which it seems to me nature has made so easily possible for us.

I thank you very much, indeed. (Loud applause.)

PRESIDENT: Dr. Currelly, may I express on behalf of this meeting and those who were fortunate enough to hear you on the air, thanks for your address today.

I believe Mr. Augustus Bridle has referred to you as the "David Harum of the Orient." I understand from you today that you doubt just what he meant, and you even doubt that he knew himself just what he meant, when he so referred to you. Might I suggest, as David Harum was a philosopher of domestic life on this continent, so you are the philosopher of the Orient. Might I even go further and suggest you are the philosopher of international political economy. We have learned a great deal about what we owe China today and we shall be better equipped to face the future and our relations with that vast Empire.

We thank you very much, Sir.