辜鸿铭

近日读辜鸿铭先生的The Spirit of the Chinese People(《中国人的精神》又译《春秋大义》)，感慨之余找到先生发表于纽约时报的Uncivilized United States，找来和大家分享^^
An American, who was irritated because in an article I wrote lately I had said that the English were the only modern people in the world today who knew how to govern an empire, said to me, “what about us Americans?” Although the United States is called a Republic, yet do we not govern a country as big as the British Empire?” “Yes,” I said in reply, “but there is one great difference between the British people and you Americans. The British people as a nation is a nation with a civilization, whereas you Americans, living now in your plaster and concrete sky-scraping tents, are still a nomad nation without any civilization.” “oh,” said the American then to me, angrily and with a sneer, “ you say that because you have been educated in England and have never been in America!”

Indeed. I now remember how a Chinese Minister to America, the late Chang Yin-huan, who was executed during the Boxer trouble, once created great astonishment as well as amusement among the Americans in America when he told them that he found everything in America which a man wants except-religion. “what，” said an American newspaper at the time, “ we Americans have no religion—we, with a church in every street and our missionary societies! Why, we in America have so much religion that we can afford to export to China and Korea more of that article than any other country!”

Nevertheless, the Chinese Minister, I must say, was quite right in what he said. Only what he really wanted to say was not that there was no religion, but that there was no civilization in America. The real Chinese word for civilization, li-yo (literally ceremony or forms of courtesy and music), rightly translated by the early Jesuit missionaries as religion, which the Chinese Minister had in his mind, means both religion and civilization. For, not as in Europe and America today—–where religion is one thing, a something for use only on Sundays, and civilization is quite another thing, a something for use on the other six days of the week—-in China, religion is civilization and civilization is religion; they both mean one and the same thing, namely, form or expression of spiritual life which is for use not only on Sundays, but on every day of a man’s life. [阅读全文…]

Tagged as: 纽约时报, 辜鸿铭

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