n view. In another issue he expresses a regret that the Western
usage of personal courtship cannot safely be introduced. Those who
are to be companions for life cannot as yet be allowed to see each
other, as disorders might result from excess of freedom. Such liberty
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in social relations is impracticable "except in a highly refined
and well-ordered state of society." The same or another writer
proposes, by way of enlarging woman's world, that she shall not
be confined to the house, but be allowed to circulate as freely
as Western women but she must hide her charms behind a veil.

Reporting an altercation between a policeman and the driver of
one of Prince Ching's carts, who insisted on driving on tracks
forbidden to common people, an editor suggests with mild sarcasm
that a notice be posted in such cases stating that only "noblemen's
carts are allowed to pass." Do not these specimens show a laudable
attempt to simulate a free press? Free it is by sufferance, though
not by law.

Reading-rooms are a new institution full of promise. They are not
libraries, but places for reading and expounding newspapers for the
benefit of those who are unable to read for themselves. Numerous
rooms may be seen at the street corners, where men are reciting
the contents of a paper to an eager crowd. They have the air of
wayside chapels; and this mode of enlightening the ignorant was
confessedly borrowed from the missionary. How urgent the need,
where among the men only one in twenty can read; and among women
not one in a hundred!

Reform in writing is a genuine novelty, Chinese writing being a
development of hieroglyphics, in which the sound is no index to
the sense, and in which each pictorial form must be separately made
familiar to the eye. Dr. Medhurst wittily calls it "an occulage,
not a language." Without the introduction of alphabetic
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writing, the art of reading can never become general. To meet this
want a new alphabet of fifty letters has been invented, and a society
organised to push the system, so that the common people, also women,
may soon be able to read the papers for themselves. The author of
the system is Wang Chao, mentioned above as having given occasion
for the _coup d'etat_ by which the Dowager Empress was restored
to power in 1898.

I close this formidable list of reforms with a few words on a society
for the abolition of a usage which makes Chinese women the
laughing-stock of the world, nam