Tue result of western education is to teach a man how little he knows. The more he learns the grenter he realises his ignorance to be, and the man who has learnt most is therefore the most modest. Every new door opened to him, every fresh step along a familiar leer reveals wider expanses, which one man brain with its limited capacity, and its limited term of existence, can never hope to conquer. Buckle of the History of Civilisation was the last man who knew everything and he died young, and most of his learning went to the grave with him. Of his projected great work he had only time to give out a fragment; a fragment which astonished the world when it was produced, and which no one now ever looks at. So vast has become the scope of western knowledge, that no one can carry more than a small section of it in his brain; and the best-informed man now is he whose brain is not a library, but the index to his library. He cannot possibly know everything nowadays he is fortunate if he knows where to find all about the things that he wants to know. Fortunately western peoples still have energy and ambition, and they go on learning, undaunted by the fact that they can after all acquire so little of the riches of knowledge round them.
If Orientals had any idea how enormous the world of knowledge is, they would simply sit down and fold their hands, stupefied by the prospect, and convinced that it was hopeless to begin what no one could ever finish. Fortunately, perhaps, for the Chinese, the knowable was settled for them hundreds of years ago, and has received no additions. Ihe diligent Chinese student can know everything if he works hard enough; everything, that is, that custom has settled that an educated man ought know, Once knowing it, and having proved his knowledge by passing the prescribed series of examinations, there is no walk in life for which he is not fitted. With no knowledge of law and very little of human nature, he is made a magistrate; then after some minor promotions, a prefect; then, if he has interest and money, an intendant of} circuit, or'Taotai. Once he has become a taotai, if only an expectant one, he is equally open to any employment, to command a fleet or an army, to take charge of an arsenal, a mine, or the control of an errant river; and no doubt the State is right in believing that can do any of these things, including the representation of his Emperor at a European Court, with equal success. From managing a coal mine he may be sent to be Chief Jiadge m a province as large as a European State; from the Chief! Tudgeship, in which his decisions must accepted, there is still no profit on the too often' opend on the liberality shown by the suitors to his underlings, he becomes a Provincial 'I'reasurer,! the use of entertaining them if there is passing his time in scheming to get! as much as possible out of his subor-the Board of Revenue at Peking. Then, if he has kept on good terms "with the high authorities, he becomes the Governor of a Province, and finally one of the eight Viceroys who with the aid of sixteen Governors sway China's three hundred millions. By this time he is exhausted, and he dies in harness, the Emperor finally rewarding him with a grant of a posthumous title and the erasure of all the black marks that have been recorded against him in the course of his varied career. It was said of the first Earl Russell—or perhaps it was the present Duke of Argyll—that he felt himself competent at a moment's notice to cut for the stone or command the Chunnel Fleet. This of course was vanity or conceit, while the Chinaman's belief in his capacity for any post is sheer ignorance; and this ignorance the local Society for the Diffusion, etc., should be supported in dispelling, We have been led to this discussion by the perusal of the article from the Shénpao on the desirability of the extension of Cotton Mills in China, which appears in another column, It is an able and fearless article, and justly attacks the dog-in-the-manger policy of HE. Li Hung-chang, who cannot make the mill of which he is the patron pay, and will not allow avy one else to start mills, It is preposterous that the cotton of China should be sent to Japan to be spun, and should then come back to compete with the Chinese home-spun yarn, of that its place should be supplied Indian yarn. With freedom mills would spring up wherever cotton is grown in China, for there is cheap coal here and cheap labour and an inexhaustible market. But the high officials think there is money in cotton mills, and it would not be so bad if they could make the mills they have started remunerative. 'This they never will be, as long as it is part of the officials' creed, that any man who has passed a literary examination is ipso facto competent to take charge of a great industrial enterprise. This, of course, he cannot do, but there is one thing he can do, and'to which the custom of the country compels him, unless he is an exceptionally strong man, He can find places for all his brothers and cousin-brothers, and the sons and brothers and cousin-brothers of his sisters and his cousins and his aunts... All of these who have no other more lucrative employment flock to him, and have to be provided for; and naturally there is, no profit left. If a foreign manager is appointed, he has a Chinese colleague, and he has either to give way to this colleague of retire. General MeMahon's celebrated alternatives are peremptorily presented to him; but whichever is working of the mill. This confirms the opposition to fresh enterprises; what is no money to be made by them? If the Viceroy Li were to withdraw his opposidinates, and send as little as possible to tion to the construction of cotton mills etc., with European capital and management, the growth of Shanghai would be phenomenal; work would be found for thousands of the people, and much of the Chinese money that now goes to Bombay would be spent in China. But the first step in making a way for these improvements is to dispel the gross ignorance of the Chinese literary class that believes itself to be knowledge, to make. them feel how much behind the world they are, and how many thousand-fold wider the horizon of know-~ ledge is, than that comprehended in the guze of the educated men of the Central Empire.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.