But the effect upon the education of, these youths cannot fail to be deleterious. For "the last two months of last summer term, the Procession craze had told of them, and very little work if any was done in school. Since the, unusually late opening of the autumn term, quite 4 number pf ho) indulging the new hobby. Much time is necessarily spent in preparing the paper mottoes for banners, and flags and in drawing up: the pamphlets and circulars which are to be distributed. Committees, de-Putations, elections and visiting from school to school must occupy an enormous amount of time. Probably, if the truth were known, very little solid work is being done yet in any of the schools.
If statistics were needed to prove the demoralizing effect of all these goings on, these too can be given. At the end of last summer term, some 860 students from Government Middle Grade Schools in Wuchang offered themselves entrance candidates to various higher colleges and universities. Only 80 of these candidates were successful, and of this small number, the majority were received into a well-known college in Peking whose entrance requirements are notoriously low.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.