Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/105

 Rh the realm should of all the learned men of the age be the most ignorant of essential and practical truths; that a nation which possessed the most elaborate system of civil service examinations should be served by officials at least as corrupt and as inefficient as those of any other great nation; that a government which made literary attainment a condition of office-holding was content to develop an imposing superstructure of examinations and rewards and neglected to lay the foundation for such in a system of common schools.

The method of instruction which has prevailed wherever there have been any schools at all—a method not only very ancient, but proceeding from, and at the same time in great part responsible for, those characteristics which mark the Chinese under every variety of physical condition—has been of a hard and unyielding nature, and has caused enough wasted energy during the last seven hundred years to have sufficed for more than ten thousand years of true education, and this has made China what she is to-day. While the government has fostered culture by testing attainments and granting rewards, thus affording an efficient stimulus on a large scale and constituting a regulated state patronage of letters according to which the reward of literary merit was a law of the empire and a right of the people, it is also true that up to the present time Chinese education has been entirely political in aim and has been valued merely as a means of securing the repose of the state, and, as soon as a sufficient supply of disciplined agents has been at hand, the enlightenment of the people has lacked governmental regard.

But such a state of affairs can not longer endure—the wall is breaking down; and it is the purpose of the present paper, without attempting to characterize further this old method of instruction or to point out its gradual and general renovation under the influence of Western thought and life and especially of the christian schools throughout the land, to call attention to the latest and perhaps most important step in the line of advance, viz., the practically complete abolition of the ancient system of literary examinations and degrees given to advanced students in Chinese history, philosophy and poetry.

Perhaps the most accomplished of China's long line of monarchs was Li Shi-min, second emperor of the Tang Dynasty (618-908 A.D.). 'Famed alike for his wisdom and nobleness, his conquests and good government, his temperance, cultivated tastes and patronage of literary men,' he ranks with Marcus Aurelius, or with Charlemagne, who came to his throne in the next century. Under his direction great pains were taken to preserve the records of former days and to draw up full annals of the recent dynasties. He published a complete and accurate edition of all the classics under the supervision of the most learned men of the realm, and honored the memory of Confucius with