It also seems safe to prophesy that the powers of the parliament will be wisely used. In local affairs the Chinese practically established the rule of the people centuries before any European nation adopted the idea. Nominally, the local magistrate has had almost arbitrary power, but practically the control has been in the hands of the village elders. When they have met and decided on a policy, the magistrate has not dared run counter to it. In much the same fashion, governors and viceroys of provinces have been controlled and kept in check. Thus centuries of practical self-government in local affairs have given the Chinese excellent preparation for the new departure in national affairs. What is proposed is not a new power for the people but only an enlargement or extension of powers they already exercise.
Parliamentary government is the one great accomplishment the Chinese people are now interested in, because they propose to make it the tool with which to work out the other Herculean tasks that await them. Happy are they in that they may set about these tasks inspired by the self-confidence begotten of one of the greatest moral achievements of modern times. I refer, of course, to the almost marvellous success of their anti-opium crusade which I have already discussed.
Mr. Frederick Ward, who has just returned from a visit to many provinces, finding in all the same surprising success {109} in enforcing anti-opium regulations, declares: "It is the miracle of the Middle Kingdom and a lesson for the world."'
China's next great task is the education of her people, and the remedy for pessimism here is to compare her present condition, not with that of other nations, but with her own condition ten years ago. A reported school attendance of less than one million (780,325 to be exact) in a population of 400,000,000 does not look encouraging, but when we compare these figures with the statistics of attendance a few years ago there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metropolitan province of Chihli, for example, I find that there are now more teachers in government schools than there were pupils six years ago, and the total attendance has grown from 8000 to 214,637!
Even if China had not established a single additional school, however, or increased the school attendance by even a percentage fraction, her educational progress these last ten years would yet be monumental. For as different as the East is from the West, so different, in literal fact, are her educational ideals at the present time as compared with her educational ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of 1905) the old exclusively classical and literary system of education was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the new policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and bungling hands of the old literati; but this was a necessary stroke of policy, for without their support the new movement would have been hopelessly balked.
The old education taught nothing of science, nothing of history or geography outside of China, nothing of mathematics in its higher branches. Its main object was to enable the scholar to write a learned essay or a faultless poem, its main use to enable him by these means to get office. Under the old system the Chinese boy learned a thousand characters before he learned their meaning; after this he took up a book {110} containing a list of all the surnames in the empire, and the "Trimetrical Classics," consisting of proverbs and historical statements with each sentence in three characters. Now he is taught in much the same way as the Western boy. The old training developed the powers of memory; the new training the powers of reasoning. The old education enabled the pupil to frame exquisite sentences; the new gives him a working knowledge of the world. The old looked inward to China and backward to her past; the new looks outward to other countries and forward to China's future. The old was meant to develop a few scholarly officials; the new, to develop many useful citizens. "Even our students who go abroad," as a Peking official said to me, "illustrate the new tendencies. Formerly they preferred to study law or politics; now they take up engineering or mining."
A consideration of Chinese education, however brief, would not be fair without mention of the crushing handicap under which her people labor and must always labor so long as the language remains as it is to-day--without an alphabet--separate and arbitrary characters to be learned for each and every word in the language. This means an absolute waste of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far as memorizing the characters counts as memory-training, and five years make up the bulk of the average student's school days in any country. If it were not for this handicap and the serious difficulty of finding teachers enough for present needs, it would be impossible to set limits to the educational advance of the next twenty years.
The school and the teacher have always been held in the highest esteem in China. Her only aristocracy has been an aristocracy, not of wealth, but of scholarship; her romance has been, not that of the poor boy who became rich, but of the poor boy who found a way to get an education and became distinguished in public service. Under the old system, if the son of a hard-working family became noted for aptness in the {111} village school, if the schoolmaster marked him for a boy of unusual promise, the rest of the family, with a devotion beautiful to see, would sacrifice their own pleasure for his advancement. He would be put into long robes and allowed to give himself up wholly to learning, while parents, brothers, and sisters found inspiration for their own harder labors in the thought of the bright future that awaited him. The difficulty is that education has been regarded as the privilege of a gifted few, not as the right of all. In a land where scholarship has been held in such high favor, however, once let the school doors open to everybody and there is little doubt that China will eventually acquire the strength more essential than armies or battleships: the power which only an educated common people can give.
China's next great purpose is to develop an efficient army. "Might is right" is the English proverb that I have found more often on the tongues of the new school of Chinese than any other; and we must confess that other nations seem to have tried hard enough to make her accept the principle. In the old days there was a saying, "Better have no son than one who is a soldier." To-day its new foreign-drilled army of 150,000 to 200,000 men is the boast of the Middle Kingdom, and the army is said to be the most honestly administered department of the government. In sharp contrast to the old contempt for the soldier, I now find one of the ablest journals in the empire (the Shanghai National Review) protesting that interest in military training is now becoming too intense: "Scarce a school of any pretensions but has its military drill, extending in some instances as far as equipment with modern rifles and regular range practice, and we regret to notice that some of the mission schools have so far forgotten themselves as to pander to this militarist spirit."
It has often been said, of course, that the Chinese will not make good soldiers, but whether this has been proved is open to question. Certainly, in view of their wretchedly inferior {112} equipment, their failure to distinguish themselves in the war with Japan cannot be regarded as conclusive. Take, for example, this description by an eye-witness: