useless
for aspirants to office--who constituted practically the whole of the
literary class--to acquire any other knowledge. So obsessed was the
national mind by this literary mania that even infants' spines were
made to bend so as to produce when adult the 'scholarly stoop.' And
from the fact that besides the scholar class the rest of the community
consisted of agriculturists, artisans, and merchants, whose knowledge
was that of their fathers and grandfathers, inculcated in the sons
and grandsons as it had been in them, showing them how to carry on
in the same groove the calling to which Fate had assigned them, a
departure from which would have been considered 'unfilial'--unless,
of course (as it very rarely did), it went the length of attaining
through study of the classics a place in the official class, and thus
shedding eternal lustre on the family--it will readily be seen that
there was nothing to cause education to be concerned with any but one
or two of the subjects which are included by Western peoples under
that designation. It became at an early age, and remained for many
centuries, a rote-learning of the elementary text-books, followed by
a similar acquisition by heart of the texts of the works of Confucius
and other classical writers. And so it remained until the abolition, in
1905, of the old competitive examination system, and the substitution
of all that is included in the term 'modern education' at schools,
colleges, and universities all over the country, in which there is
rapidly growing up a force that is regenerating the Chinese people,
and will make itself felt throughout the whole world.

It is this keen and shrewd appreciation of the learned, and this lust
for knowledge, which, barring the tragedy of foreign domination, will
make China, in the truest and best sense of the word, a great nation,
where, as in the United States of America, the rigid class status and
undervaluation, if not disdaining, of knowledge which are proving so
disastrous in England and other European countries will be avoided,
and the aristocracy of learning established in its place.

Besides educational institutions, we find institutions for poor relief,
hospitals, foundling hospitals, orphan asylums, banking, insurance,
and loan associations, travellers' clubs, mercantile corporations,
anti-opium societies, co-operative burial societies, as well as many
others, some imitated from Western models.

Bodily Mutilations

C