himself
dressed in woman's clothes, with his face highly rouged and powdered,
as is the custom. He was arrested at the entrance gate, and quietly sent
home to his friends.

Overwork, in the feverish desire to get into the Government service, is
certainly responsible for the mental break-down of a large proportion
of the comparatively few lunatics found in China. There being no lunatic
asylums in the empire, it is difficult to form anything like an exact
estimate of their number; it can only be said, what is equally true of
cripples or deformed persons, that it is very rare to meet them in the
streets or even to hear of their existence.

As a further measure of precaution against corrupt practices at
examinations, the papers handed in by the candidates are all copied out
in red ink, and only these copies are submitted to the examiners. The
difficulty therefore of obtaining favourable treatment, on the score of
either bribery or friendship, is very much increased. The Chinese, who
make no attempt to conceal or excuse, in fact rather exaggerate any
corruption in their public service generally, do not hesitate to declare
with striking unanimity that the conduct of their examination system is
above suspicion, and there appears to be no valid reason why we should
not accept this conclusion.

The whole system is now undergoing certain modifications, which,
if wisely introduced, should serve only to strengthen the national
character. The Confucian teachings, which are of the very highest order
of morality, and which have moulded the Chinese people for so many
centuries, helping perhaps to give them a cohesion and stability
remarkable among the nations of the world, should not be lightly cast
aside. A scientific training, enabling us to annihilate time and space,
to extend indefinitely the uses and advantages of matter in all its
forms, and to mitigate the burden of suffering which is laid upon the
greater portion of the human race, still requires to be effectively
supplemented by a moral training, to teach man his duty towards his
neighbour. From the point of view of science, the Chinese are, of
course, wholly out of date, though it is only within the past hundred
and fifty years that the West has so decisively outstripped the East. If
we go back to the fifteenth century, we shall find that the standard of
civilization, as the term is usually understood, was still much higher
in China than in Europe; while Marco Polo, the fa