Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/38

34 so as to hang from the telegraph wire, they would have the good luck to be as swift of foot as was the electric message in its transmission.

3. Because of its contact with the west in trade, religion and education, and chiefly under the influence of mission schools the Chinese government has altered its educational policy, and the changes in the method of instruction and the system of education are for the most part tending to develop a spirit of inquiry and an appreciation of the inductive method, which will after a while begin to yield due fruit. When the influence of returned students who have been adequately trained in western countries and that of the graduates from first-class mission and government colleges becomes more potent, we can expect to see a much more rapid development of the educational system, but here again the magnitude of the undertaking and the difficulties as to efficient teaching force and adequate resources are such, that only natives can handle the ultimate solution. We teachers from abroad can hardly expect to do more than to give the impulse and to help in the preparation of the vanguard of such an advance.

4. When special and general education has proceeded far enough to provide the trained men needed to make the various adjustments involved in the tremendously complex and many-sided renaissance of this nation and to have provided the background of an enlightened people, there will of a surety be found among Chinese students many who will desire to follow the torch of learning and of truth for its own sake, some of whom, we believe, will attain a high degree of analytical power and experimental skill, for the Chinese after all are capable of exact and careful thought under right conditions, and moreover possess unusual patience and manual skill, so that in the long run we think they may be distinguished in regard to scientific attainments pretty much as the Germans have been for the last century. There are to-day in some of the universities of America and Europe Chinese students who in laboratory work in physics and other natural sciences are distinguishing themselves even in comparison with western students. The Chinese have a power of application and patience and a capacity for detail that is destined to bring success in scientific inquiry when once they get the background, adopt the method and make the start.

5. The irresistible progress destined to be made by western science in the Chinese empire will surely undermine Chinese faith in the "Book of Changes," which is at the base of Chinese philosophy. Whatever is permanently true will remain in imperishable blocks, but the structure as a whole will fall in ruins, with Chinese ideals pitilessly and irrevocably shattered. At this critical period of the disintegration of outworn forces, what new moral and spiritual ideas are to replace the old in order that the new state of these people may not be worse than the first?