ating in competitive examinations for
students going back to the second century A.D. This is perhaps a
suitable place for explaining that the famous _Peking Gazette_, often
said to be the oldest newspaper in the world, is not really a newspaper
at all, in that it contains no news in our sense of the term. It is a
record only of court movements, list of promoted officials, with a
few selected memorials and edicts. It is published daily, but was not
printed until the fifteenth century.

Every Chinese boy may be said to have his chance. The slightest sign
of a capacity for book-learning is watched for, even among the poorest.
Besides the opportunity of free schools, a clever boy will soon find a
patron; and in many cases, the funds for carrying on a curriculum, and
for entering the first of the great competitions, will be subscribed in
the district, on which the candidate will confer a lasting honour by his
success. A promising young graduate, who has won his first degree with
honours, is at once an object of importance to wealthy fathers who
desire to secure him as a son-in-law, and who will see that money is not
wanting to carry him triumphantly up the official ladder. Boys without
any gifts of the kind required, remain to fill the humbler positions;
those who advance to a certain point are drafted into trade; while hosts
of others who just fall short of the highest, become tutors in private
families, schoolmasters, doctors, fortune-tellers, geomancers, and
booksellers' hacks.

Of high-class Chinese literature, it is not possible to give even the
faintest idea in the space at disposal. It must suffice to say that all
branches are adequately represented, histories, biographies, philosophy,
poetry and essays on all manner of subjects, offering a wide field even
to the most insatiate reader.

And here a remark may be interjected, which is very necessary for the
information of those who wish to form a true estimate of the Chinese
people. Throughout the Confucian Canon, a collection of ancient works on
which the moral code of the Chinese is based, there is not a single word
which could give offence, even to the most sensitive, on questions of
delicacy and decency. That is surely saying a good deal, but it is not
all; precisely the same may be affirmed of what is mentioned above as
high-class Chinese literature, which is pure enough to satisfy the most
strait-laced. Chinese poetry, of which there is in existence a huge
mass