22nd Oct.
Norstne has been more surprising to the old resident: in China durin, the last few months than the readiness with which the Imperial reforms were received throughout the country by the younger educated men. The abolition of the "eight-legged essays," as they are called, as the principal subject of the examinations on success in which the Chinese student depends for his entrance to and advancement in official life, might have been expected to cause dismay in the breasts of those students, whose whole education has been in the Classics, and in the art of writing elegant and entirely useless essays. We might well have expected that there would have been a general strike among the scholars of China against the new dispensation, amounting to tan educational rebellion; for the sacred right of rebellion is recognised lin China, where the governed have no other means of expressing their dissatisfaction with the government. Instead of the.expected manifestation, ithe scholars of China accepted the new dispensation with the most laudable docility, and everywhere the anissionaries who are the pioneers of Western learning in the interior, found a sudden and welcome change in the attitude of the Literati, who thronged to them to ¢~s books and instruction and.to acquire what they could of that
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.