Ir has been often and widely remarked that of all the Chinese who have come to the front during the acute troubles of the past two years not one has displayed so much ability in an all-round way as the Governor of Shantung, He had the great advantage of a long first-hand knowledge of foreign countries, although Corea was then a suzerainty of China, and the still greaer one of being obliged to hold his own against the Corean Monarch, Japanese Ambassadors, and men from all over the West. In the matter of his age he enjoys another advantage of a pronounced sort, for he is but a little over forty, and now that both his own and his adopted mothers have died, he is not liable again to retire from office for service mourning purposes. Yuan saw through the Boxer bubble from the start, but he was not a free agent, and was obliged to bend to the storm before which he would not actually bow.. He had the courage to pronounce the extermination Edict " spurious," and forced his whole province to do the same, to their intense present indignation, and immense fature benefit. When the Court was safely self-exiled, and his hands were a little more free, Yuan began at once to devise schemes to make a repetition of the enormous fully of 1899-1900 impossible, and his main recipe, following his renowned senior Chang Chih-tung, is education. Nothing else, indeed, is available only the new must be mingled in due proportions, thus observing the "Doctrine of the Mean." Governor Yuan had already matured his scheme in an outline way, long befure there was any sign that it would be followed elsewhere, or-even tolerated in Shantung. He had telegraphically summoned Dr. Hayes from Téngichoufu at the extreme east of the province, and the details were in process of laborious elaboration when the death of the Governor's mother put a period to everything and compelled a retirement of over three months, the most extended period allowed to an_ indispensable public servant by Chinese usage. His memorial had not yet been presented, but the requisite funds—often the principle feature in Chinese reforms—nad been slowly distilled from somewhere, and all was ready.
Before the hundred days of retirement had expired, the joint memorials vf Lin K'un-yi and Chang Chih-tung had brougbé forth fruit after their kind, and the Imperial Edict ordering radical changes in civil and in military education had been issued, one chief item of which was a provincial college in every capital. The enforced delay was now more than made up for, and Yuan, with that alertness of mind and celerity' of action in which he is so much more like an average Occidental than like a Chinese, instantly seized opportunity by the horns, and his College was launched potentially complete, but really only in poser.
Instead of renting private and incommodious quarters, he was now able to occupy the venerable Shu Yuan, or Liverary Hall, into which he has turned an army of workmen, who have rehabilitated it so that it longer recognises its old dark, lamp, dingy self. This, however, is but a temporary makeshift until a new College of New Learning can be put up on some yet unselected site. The candidates thus far received, and personally examined by the Governor test their ability in Chinese, are about three hundred in number, from whom a due proportion are to be selected. Chinese and Western Learning sre put on an even footing, rot ou'y in the number of teachers and hours of study, but in the position of class-rooms, ete. At present the youthful intellect of the capital and its prefecture is in a somewhat dazed condition, not knowing into what it is adventuring itself. The old has gone, and the new has not yet come, while in the interim there period of darkness and chaos.
Out of this Dr. Hayes will be able to educe such order as the novel and interesting situation admits, and if so dificult an experiment can anywhere be carried into successful execution, this would seem to be the place and the tim". The intention 1s to follow the initial central college by an intermediate school, by prefectural.and country institutions in fu and hsien, and ultimately these would connect into primary' village schools, which will be as unlike the literally howling wilderness of learning now existing, as a train of freight cars differs from a string of Chinese ox-cans stuck in a classical mudhole of the Sung Dynasty—or earlier.
This initial experiment will be watched with interest, and on the part of our readers at Toast, with telligent sympathy. Mach' depends on the result, If successful it will introduce changes in comparison with which other incidents of contemparaneous history will appear un-, important.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.