Quiet Talks with World Winners

by S. D. Gordon

May I call your attention to some of the louder of these knockings?

For years students in great numbers, thousands, have been coming from these heathen nations to our country to get our Western learning. Throughout the colleges and lower schools of the land, both East and West, in the greater universities, and in the more modest small church colleges they can be found.

I remember a sight that never failed to thrill me in my visitations among the colleges of our Central West. Almost always I saw one or more of these young men, from Japan, and less frequently from China and India and other countries, and sometimes young women, too; studying in these institutions. Quite frequently they came from the better families of their people; often from old wealthy families of position and influence. So that by blood ties and position they will be the future men of influence and leaders of their people. And it is a notable fact that many of them are to-day the leaders in Japan. Literally thousands of them have come, these thousands of miles around the world, to knock at our doors, and ask for what we have and they haven't.

Even more striking is the recent visitation to us of official commissions from the non-Christian lands. One after another, these national governmental deputations have come to us. They have been composed of the strongest men in these lands, men in leading official position. They have come by government appointment, and at government expense, to learn the secret of our marvellous Western progress.

And in addition to these official deputations others have come, men of like prominence and influence, coming on their own account, to witness our civilization and learn its secrets.

The Coming Great Leaders.

One of the most remarkable incidents of this most remarkable movement has been the great migration of young Chinese men to study in the colleges of Japan. Within a very short space of time, as though by a concerted movement, fifteen thousand Chinese young men have flocked to Tokyo. The inevitable sifting process has sent many back, but fully ten thousand remain, engaged in earnest, hard study.

Will you mark very keenly why they went to Japan? Because to them Japan, in its new life, stood for the new light and life of the West. Their little, but mighty, aggressive neighbor on their eastern shore had brought to their very door the new civilization of the Christian West.

Here was an unusual opportunity. Where hundreds had come clear around the earth to us, thousands have seized this opportunity close at hand. They come from every province of China; even that farthest away, on the border of Tibet, sending hundreds.

The travel involved thousands of miles. And if their slow means of travel be taken into account, it meant what would be to us practically hundreds of thousands of miles. Hundreds of them have been sent by the provincial and local governments. Others have come through private funds made up for the purpose. And wealthy men have sent their sons. They have gone to Japan only because Japan has opened her doors so widely to our Christian civilization. It is not to their conqueror, Japan, they have come, but to the civilization which Japan has imported from Christian lands.