Ly the fateful summer of 1898, when the Emperor Kuang Het took the helm of the Ship of State into his hands with great vigour and earnest purpose, one of the Decrees which excited most interest was that which ordered the Governors-General and Governors to take account of the number of temples in the Empire, aside from those used in the State worship, that the income of the lands might be used in aid of the new prefectural and county schools which it was proposed to establish, and upon which the Emperor demanded an early and thorough report, In the general chaos of the reaction which followed when the Empress Dowager showed her heavy hand, all this was forgotten, and seemed likely never to be "heard of again, Yet in the profi ted conservatism and timid radicess of the singular mixture of alist which characterises the present Government of China, we have come to witness not only the revival of the very scheme ordered nearly five years ago in the interests of reform, but its prospective adoption. One of the most striking peculiarities of the circumstances is that this has been dono so quietly as scarcely to excite comment, and without any general apprehension of the nature and content of the innovation which seems to have been finally determined upon. Preliminary warnings of the coming change have been heard for a number of months, but in such cases, until these are materialized into substantive acts, neither the Chinese nor foreigners have any occasion to take much note of them. These definite acts have now begun to be taken in we know not how many places, and it is certain that the temples of China are doomed to undergo great changes in their relations to the communities which have built them It is an almost unive real eccentricity of this land of so-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.