y crowned with many laurels, showing how much the viceroy's
heart was set on the education of his people.
In the interest of the educational movement, I was called to Chang's
assistance in 1902. The Imperial University was destroyed in the
Boxer War, and, seeing no prospect of its reestablishment I was
on the way to my home in America when, on reaching Vancouver, I
found a telegram from Viceroy Chang, asking me to be president
of a university which he proposed to open, and to instruct his
junior officials in international law. I engaged for three years;
and I now look back on my recent campaign in Central China as one
of the most interesting passages in a life of over half a century
in the Far East.
Besides instructing his mandarins in the law of nations, I had to
give them some notion of geography and history, the two cooerdinates
of time and place, without which they might, like some of their
writers, mistake Rhode Island for the Island of Rhodes, and Rome,
New York, for the City of the Seven Hills. A book on the Intercourse
of Nations and a translation of Dudley Field's "International Code,"
remain as tangible results of those lectures. But the university
failed to materialise.
Within a month after my arrival the viceroy was ordered to remove
to Nanking to take up a post rendered vacant by the death of his
eminent colleague, Liu. Calling at my house on the eve of embarking
he said, "I asked you to come here to be president of a university
for two provinces. If you will go with me to Nanking, I will make
you president of a university
[Page 230]
for five provinces," meaning that he would combine the educational
interests of the two viceroyalties, and showing how the university
scheme had expanded in his fertile brain.
Before he had been a month at that higher post he learned to his
intense disappointment that he was only to hold the place for another
appointee. After nearly a year at Nanking, he was summoned to Peking,
where he spent another year in complete uncertainty as to his future
destination. In the meantime the university existed only on paper.
In justice to the viceroy I ought to say that nothing could exceed
the courtesy and punctuality with which he discharged his obligations
to me. The despatch which once a month brought me my stipend was
always addressed to me as president of the Wuchang University,
though as a matter of fact I might as well have been styled president
of the University of Weissn
|