ll; for the wise men who are chosen to
instruct the young at your places of learning, are not always wise. I
visited a professor of Oriental languages. His servant asked me to wait,
and after I had waited three quarters of an hour, he sent word to say
that he had tried everywhere to find the professor in the University who
spoke French, but that he had not been able to find him. And so he asked
me to call another day. I had dinner in a college hall. I found that the
professors talked of many things in such a way as would be impossible to
children of five and six in our country. They are quite ignorant of
the manners and customs of the people of other European countries. They
pronounce Greek and Latin and even French in the same way as English. I
mentioned to one of them that I had been employed for some time in the
Chinese Legation; he asked me if I had had much work to do. I said yes,
the work had been heavy. 'But,' he observed, 'I suppose a great deal of
the work is carried on directly between the Governments and not through
the Ambassadors.' I cannot conceive what he meant or how such a thing
could be possible, or what he considered the use and function of
Embassies and Legations to be. They most of them seemed to take for
granted that I could not speak English: some of them addressed me in a
kind of baby language; one of them spoke French. The professor who spoke
to me in this language told me that the French possessed no poetical
literature, and he said the reason of this was that the French language
was a bastard language; that it was, in fact, a kind of pidgin Latin.
He said when a Frenchman says a girl is 'beaucoup belle,' he is using
pidgin Latin. The courtesy due to a host prevented me from suggesting
that if a Frenchman said 'beaucoup belle' he would be talking pidgin
French.

"Another professor said to me that China would soon develop if she
adopted a large Imperial ideal, and that in time the Chinese might
attain to a great position in the world, such as the English now held.
He said the best means of bringing this about would be to introduce
cricket and football into China. I told him that I thought this was
improbable, because if the Chinese play games, they do not care who
is the winner; the fun of the game is to us the improvisation of it as
opposed to the organisation which appeals to the people here. Upon which
he said that cricket was like a symphony of music. In a symphony every
instrument plays its