A Century of Irritations 205
which followed. For in the sequestered valleys of Tibet the echo of British cannon was heard, a tocsin arousing every dormant suspicion against the white man.
Nor ask these startled people to narrowly dis-. tinguish between French and English and German. Do not we, pride-blind in our wisdom, fill books with level criticism of "Asiatics," mingling civilisations and barbarisms, plainsman and mountaineer, Mohammedan and Buddhist, Mongol and Aryan, in one foolish mummery of insulting classification? So it was that Ke-Shen--wiser than the kindly Tibetans, knowing better than they the fearful power of the white man, remembering Nepal, remembering Rudok, burning with shame for Canton —inflexibly demanded that the French missionary should go.
"Fear the Greeks, bearing gifts." Like so many of his predecessors, Father Huc seemed — indeed he was—an humble, devoted evangel, seeking not the glory of France, or of Europe, but of Christ. Yet he was Europe ; he will, in spite of himself, spy out the land ; he will spread knowledge of it through the peoples to whom his body and his mind belonged, and, even if he be only a lama (who knows in Lhasa what he really is?), his story will excite the gold-lust, the power-lust of the restless, the irresistible ; of the people who ride on the waters with fire, and who seize the uttermost parts of the earth with hands that run with blood.
The obvious co-operation in later years between Chinese and Tibetans in enforcing a determined policy of exclusion against all foreigners, Asiatic as
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