id to me,
"illustrate the new tendencies. Formerly they preferred to study law
or politics; now they take up engineering or mining."

A consideration of Chinese education, however brief, would not be fair
without mention of the crushing handicap under which her people labor
and must always labor so long as the language remains as it is
to-day--without an alphabet--separate and arbitrary characters to be
learned for each and every word in the language. This means an
absolute waste of at least five years in the pupil's school life,
except in so far as memorizing the characters counts as
memory-training, and five years make up the bulk of the average
student's school days in any country. If it were not for this handicap
and the serious difficulty of finding teachers enough for present
needs, it would be impossible to set limits to the educational advance
of the next twenty years.

The school and the teacher have always been held in the highest esteem
in China. Her only aristocracy has been an aristocracy, not of wealth,
but of scholarship; her romance has been, not that of the poor boy who
became rich, but of the poor boy who found a way to get an education
and became distinguished in public service. Under the old system, if
the son of a hard-working family became noted for aptness in the {111}
village school, if the schoolmaster marked him for a boy of unusual
promise, the rest of the family, with a devotion beautiful to see,
would sacrifice their own pleasure for his advancement. He would be
put into long robes and allowed to give himself up wholly to learning,
while parents, brothers, and sisters found inspiration for their own
harder labors in the thought of the bright future that awaited him.
The difficulty is that education has been regarded as the privilege of
a gifted few, not as the right of all. In a land where scholarship has
been held in such high favor, however, once let the school doors open
to everybody and there is little doubt that China will eventually
acquire the strength more essential than armies or battleships: the
power which only an educated common people can give.

China's next great purpose is to develop an efficient army. "Might is
right" is the English proverb that I have found more often on the
tongues of the new school of Chinese than any other; and we must
confess that other nations seem to have tried hard enough to make her
accept the principle. In the old days there was a saying, "Better