Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/110

 106 whose very position is an outcome of the system they are commanded to aid in abolishing. An edict after all is only an edict, and it may be too early yet to say just how it will be received when its measures begin actually to operate. It seems scarcely credible that it will go into full effect without some opposition in some quarters. Nevertheless, it is sure that, be the opposition what it may, the new regime is bound to triumph and produce mighty results at no far distant date. 'Out of the shadows of night an empire rolls into light. It is daybreak everywhere.'

In order to understand the 'ins and outs' of educational reform, as well as of reform in general, during the last decade in China, it is necessary to review a bit of Chinese court history.

In 1875, Prince Tsai Tien, then four years old, was selected by his aunt, the empress dowager, to succeed on the dragon throne her son, the Emperor Tung Chih, who had just died at the age of eighteen. In so doing she was led by motives of policy. There were two distinctly more eligible princes whom she ignored in order to hold the reins of government more completely in her own hands, for they were young men likely to desire to have their own way. All the conspiracies to oust the empress dowager and her partisans resulting from the choice of the infant Kuang Hsü, which was the reigning title conferred on him, were promptly crushed by the late Marquis Li Hung-chang, then viceroy of Chihli, who occupied the 'Forbidden City' with his foreign-drilled troops. In 1889 his majesty was permitted by the empress dowager nominally to assume the reins of government, with herself, of course, as principal adviser and director of affairs. For nearly ten years nothing worthy of note can be recorded, except that his actions were dominated by the influence and policy of his aunt. But the psychological moment, though utterly unforeseen, was fast approaching.

Through the continued influence of the mission schools and colleges throughout the land and the increasing contact in trade and diplomacy with western nations, western learning in all its departments assumed an increasing value, and ideas of change began to ferment in the Chinese mind. Prince Kung of the imperial family addressed the throne prior to the Japanese War, declaring that the progress of the empire demanded the casting aside of their superficial learning and the acquisition of the arts and sciences which are the foundation of the prosperity of western nations. Encouraged by the governmental approval of certain modern schools established in Shanghai and Tientsin, other men having the ear of the emperor, who was profoundly moved by the result of the war with Japan and clearly saw that there must be something wrong with his country and its mode of government, advocated the new education, and their pleas, aided by the