"Of course," went on the doctor, "it all depends on the point of view. If progress is a good thing, we have the advantage of the Chinese. If it is a bad thing, they have the advantage of us. Now, they say it is a bad thing. With them 'whatever is is right.' Tradition is everything. What was good enough for their parents is good enough for them. They live entirely in the past. They cultivate the ground in the same way and with the same implements that their fathers did two thousand years ago. To change is to offend the gods. All modern inventions are devices of the devil. Every event in their whole existence is governed by cut and dried rules. From the moment of birth to that of death, life moves along one fixed groove. They don't want railroads or telephones or phonographs or machinery or anything else that to us seems a necessity of life. Whatever they have of these has been forced upon them by foreigners. A little while ago they bought up a small railroad that the French had built, paid a big advance on the original price, and then threw rails and locomotives into the sea."
"Even our 'high finance' railroad wreckers in Wall Street wouldn't go quite as far as that," laughed Tom.
"No," smiled the doctor, "they'd do it just as effectively, but in a different way."
"And yet," interposed Dick, "the Chinese don't seem to me to be a stupid race. We had one or two in our College and they were just as bright as anyone there."
"They're not stupid by any means," replied the doctor. "There was a time, thousands of years ago, when they were the very leaders of civilization. They had their inventors and their experimenters. Why, they found out all about gunpowder and printing and the mariner's compass, when Europe was sunk in the lowest depths of ignorance. At that time, the intellect of the people was active and productive. But then they seem to have had a stroke of paralysis, and they've never gotten over it."
"It always seemed to me," said Bert, "that 'Alice in Wonderland' should really have been called 'Alice in China-land.' She and her mad hatter and the March hare and the Cheshire cat would certainly have felt at home here."
"True enough," rejoined the doctor. "It isn't without reason that this has been called 'Topsy-turvy' land."