TI 7th Oct.
LEAVING out of account the Japanese who appear to be in a transition stage, the Chinese may be regarded asa halfway house betiveen the Asiatic and the Anglo-Saxon types. They are much nearer the former than the latter, but their development along modern lines must tend te make them more like the latter than the former. This is especially true of their inordinate waste of time. It is vain to enter into needless specifications. We but name the fact to cal! attention to the slow but inevitable reformation which must set in. The whole existence ofa Chinese is laid out upon the antediluvian plan. He is years at school before he can be said to know how to read, and other years elapse before he can understand anything. By far the larger number of those who go to Chinese schools never do learn either to read or to write, much less to understand. The process. is carried on to a certain point, then abruptly terminates, never to resumed, and all that has been gained evaporates like a heavy dew on a hot summer morning. If the process is carried further, the waste is even more impressive: It is doubtful whether even the toils of the Viceroy Yeh told the late Sir Chaloner Alabaster, that he knew by heart all the books in the world that were worth reading, so why should he read anything? Could any remark add impressiveness to our view of the intellectual waste in China, which leads all its educated millions to wander for a generation or so through "the wilderness of the Chinese language, to arrive at last at the Deserts of Chinese Literature?" How much of this piteous waste will be remedied when the whole nation begins to clothe itself in the fig leaves and sheep-skins of the Occident, it would be premature to conjecture. We have spoken of China as rich mainly in its population. This is a wealth which has always been squandered with a frightful prodigality, wars and pestilence we have not yet eliminated from our own list of evils, albeit they are greatly limited, but no other modern country has seen such a spectacle as China presented during the Taiping Rebellion and the great famines. within recent years. A population equal to that of several european nations was absolutely swept away, and even yet the loss is not made good. The waste of adult and especially of infant life from causes wholly preventible, is in China simply incomputable.- Attention has of late been widely called to a small item in the ocean of China's miseries, the loss in physical pain and in disability by binding the feet of hundreds of millions.of girls. The incomparably larger waste from the compulsory mental vacuity of half the Chinese race, has not as yet attracted the attention which it will have in the immediate future.
Not all forms of waste are absolute loss. Some of them have compensa tions, and some ameliorations. Neglected resources may be brought to the light, and create wealth. Undiscovered possibilities may result in unanticipated and_ unimaginable benefits. Every virile race lives on its to-morrows. The past may be redeemed, the waste places may yet Dlossom as the rose.
But there is one species of waste which can not be recoup It is the waste of Opportunity. China has had
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.