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Rh oriental affairs. This proposition, however disputable it may appear, is founded on the report and evidence of the Committee on the organisation of oriental studies, published towards the close of 1909. The Committee has revealed a regrettable state of affairs. "The knowledge of the Indian languages," says the report, "and the knowledge of native thought which such knowledge implies, is less than it was twenty-five years ago." In this country, with trifling exceptions, "no instruction of any kind is provided" in the history and social customs of Eastern countries, though these have been changing fast. Even "the great majority of missionaries go to Eastern and African countries without any previous training in a vernacular." While our India Office applies only £300 a year to such purposes, Berlin assigns a headquarters staff of forty-two teachers, and devotes a princely budget of £10,000 annually to the same objects. Paris has its École des Langues Orientales Vivantes. In England, almost alone of European countries, "no oriental school exists." Yet the persons speaking such languages, and practising such customs, number 800,000,000 of the human race.

The report of that Committee should signalise, assuredly, a new activity in our Asiatic relationship. It explains so much. All this talk about the "inscrutable" East, which we do not scrutinise! And then the unexplained progress of Germany in the Orient! And then that inevitable quotation from Matthew Arnold about the East, which listens