Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/404

398 of the empire. Although the active response of the provincial officials has been somewhat tardy and inadequate in many instances, there are abundant signs that, without doubt, the renovation of the worn-out system of education is at hand. Just what the efforts of the government have been and the results they are producing will be noticed in more detail in a later paper; suffice it* now to point out that whereas at first it was a problem of how to educate a people who did not desire enlightenment because they fondly thought they already possessed all useful knowledge, the present problem is how to pass from old ways to radically new ones with the least friction among a people still in great part thoroughly conservative, but embracing numerous individuals thirsting for the newer learning. For realizing that the complete refutation of the age-long methods of the past is China herself, the most progressive officials and many of the young men are becoming sensible not only of the precarious position of their nation, but of their individual poverty and need of education.

During 1903 the new publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese amounted to 11,434,600 pages, while The Review of the Times, a Chinese monthly, edited by Dr. Young J. Allen, published 54,400 copies. The corresponding figures for 1904 are 19,256,800 pages of new publications, 45,500 copies of The Review of the Times and 80,000 copies of The Chinese Weekly, edited by W. A. Cornaby. The total of reprints and new publications has grown from 25,353,880 pages in 1903 to 30,681,800 pages in 1904. Moreover, a conservative estimate puts the piracy of all the best books of this society by various native presses at five times the direct output of the society! During 1903 the Diffusion Society sold 35 complete sets and four supplements of the 'Encyclopædia Britannica' in English, while hundreds applied for it in Chinese. Several legitimate native publishing houses have recently sprung up, the chief of which, the Commercial Press of Shanghai, is literally sending forth volume after volume of new literature, mostly translations of works that have proved their usefulness among other nations. That the high officials are being influenced by the translations of the Diffusion Society is clear from the remarkable changes in the questions set throughout the empire for the literary examinations for the second degree, samples of which will be fully treated in a later article.