the old Mandarins or in
those of the young Republicans.

The essential virtue of personal integrity [he says], the capacity
to handle public funds with common honesty, has been conspicuously
lacking in Young China. The leopard has not changed his spots; the
sons and brothers of the classical Mandarin remain, in spite of
Western learning, Mandarins by instinct and in practice.

A very close observer of Eastern affairs--Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole--has
said that the East has an extraordinary facility for assimilating all
the worst features of any new civilisation with which it is brought in
contact. This is what has happened in India, in Turkey, in Egypt, and in
Persia. Even in Japan it has yet to be seen whether the old national
virtues will survive prolonged contact with the West. Hear now what Mr.
Bland has to say of China:

Where Young China has cast off the ethical restraints and patriotic
morality of Confucianism, it has failed to assimilate, or even to
understand, the moral foundations of Europe's civilisation. It has
exchanged its old lamp for a new, but it has not found the oil,
which the new vessel needs, to lighten the darkness withal.

In the opinion of so highly qualified an authority as Prince Ito, "the
sentiments of foreign educated Young China are hopelessly out of touch
with the masses." But while there has been alienation from the ideals of
the East, there has been no real approach to the ideals of the West.

Education at Harvard or Oxford may imbue the Chinese student with
ideas and social tendencies, apparently antagonistic to those of
the patriarchal system of his native land; but they do not, and
cannot, create in him (as some would have us believe) the
Anglo-Saxon outlook on life, the standards of conduct and the
beliefs which are the results of centuries of our process of
civilisation and structural character. Under his top dressing of
Western learning, the Chinese remains true to type, instinctively
detached from the practical and scientific attitude,
contemplatively philosophical, with the fatalistic philosophy of
the prophet Job, concerned rather with the causes than the results
of things. Your barrister at Lincoln's Inn, after ten years of
cosmopolitan experience in London or Washington, will revert in six
months to the ancestral type of morals and manners; the spectacle