ects of
veneration. Even our smallest village is provided with a scrap-box into
which every bit of paper containing words or printed matter is carefully
placed, to await a suitable occasion when it may be reverently
burned.

Change is now the order of the day, educationally as well as
politically. We do not hear the children shouting their tasks at the top
of their voices, nor do they learn by heart the thirteen classics, sitting
on their hard benches within the simple rooms with earthen floor,
where the faint light comes straggling through the unglazed windows
on the boy who hopes to gain the prize that will lead him to the great
Halls of Examination at Peking. If, while there, he is favoured by the
God of Learning and passes the examination, he will come back to
his village an honour to his province, and all his world will come and
do him reverence, from the viceroy in his official chair to the meanest
worker in the fields. These old-time examinations are gone, the
degrees which were our pride have been abolished, the subjects of
study in the schools have been completely changed. The privileges
which were once given our scholars, the social and political offices
which were once open to the winner of the highest prize, have been
thrown upon the altar of modernity. They say it is a most wise move
and leads to the greater individualism, which is now the battle-cry of
China. The fault of the old examination, we are told, is the lack of
original ideas which might be expressed by a student. He must give
the usual interpretations of the classics. Now the introduction of free
thought and private opinion has produced in China an upheaval in
men's minds. The new scholars may say what they think wisest, and
they even try to show that Confucius was at heart a staunch
republican, and that Mencius only thinly veiled his sentiments of
modern philosophy.

Perhaps the memory work of the Chinese education was wrong; but it
served its purpose once, if tales are true.

It is said that many hundreds of years ago, the founder of the Chinese
dynasty, the man of pride who styled himself Emperor the First,
conceived the idea of destroying all literature which was before his
reign, so that he might be regarded by posterity as the founder of the
Chinese Empire. It is believed by many Chinese scholars that this
wicked thing was done, and that not a single perfect copy of any book
escaped destruction. He even went so far as to bury alive abov