town. We motored to Fort McKinley
also, where our soldiers still command the situation. But our main
interest was in the mission schools and in the interdenominational
theological seminary. In these educational institutions all the
instruction is in the English language. They are Americanizing as well
as evangelizing the population. The establishment of universal and
compulsory school attendance will in a few years turn a Spanish-speaking
into an English-speaking people, and will unify the education and the
civilization of the islands. Nothing indeed is more remarkable in the
Orient than the gradual superseding of the native dialects by the
printed and spoken English. In the great country of India, it is to be
remembered, English is the required language in school and court, as
well as in every government office. Even the Romanizing of written
Chinese and Japanese will make vastly easier the political unity and the
religious evangelization of China and Japan.

When we reached Singapore, we found ourselves in one of the world's
greatest ports of entry. It is also one of the keys to the Orient, as
Sir Thomas Raffles perceived more than a century ago. Its splendid
government buildings and its strong fortifications show that the British
propose to hold it to the end. The recent incipient revolt, which was
fortunately nipped in the bud when it seemed to the conspirators on the
verge of success, and which was punished by the summary execution of
thirty or forty rebels without the news of it getting into the papers,
showed that Germany had much to hope for and Britain much to fear from
the unrest of these heterogeneous populations. I had a vivid reminder of
all this at the Methodist Episcopal Mission, where I found over sixteen
hundred scholars in attendance, and where I addressed five hundred of
them at their morning prayers. One of the chief difficulties of
Christian work in Singapore is the aggregation and mixture of races.
Seven different nationalities are represented in the schools. The
Tamil, the Malay, and the Chinese are the most numerous, and of these
the Chinese take the lead. Fifty thousand Chinese immigrants enter the
port of Singapore every year, mainly because there is employment for
them in the rubber plantations of the Straits Settlements. The
congestion of population in China drives them southward to Singapore,
and from Singapore they swarm northward to Burma, southward to Java, and
westward to India.

This