May 8.
In the closing years of the Manchu dynasty two. British naval instructors, one a navigator the other an-engineer, were lent the old Imperial Naval College at Nanking to train young men for the Chinese Navy. Of the normal difficulties of their work, such as time taken in teaching the students things which they ought to have known, it is unnecessary to'speak. In the rivera that! time one or- two cruisers were lying and it occurred to the engineer instructor, who was a large, hopeful, breezy personality of undismayed optimism, that there was no reason why these should not be used for practical demonstration. The then Viceroy, the late Tuan Fang, was not unnecessarily eager to. provide the necessary coal.—However, a few cruises were actually made and regularly once a week there was a demonstration among the cold engines. Did the students appear grateful or eager to profit. by their instructor's efforts? They did not. While the British naval engineer crawled round about and in and out among the machinery, perspiring and oily, they stood back as eared fully avoiding whatever might soil their hands and clothes as. possible and observed with the detached condescension of the truly superior man. - They too, like the cadets of the Hwah Joh, had gone, or proposed to go, to sea, to be not sailors but captains, Very deplorable, in the midst of much laughable, is the story we publish to-day of the training-ship Hwah Joh, which awakes these recollections of the old Naval College; and much sympathy must be felt for her captain and officers, who found themselves in an undignified, not to say dangerous. position ' and have ultimately had no alternative but to resign. The Hwah Joh, it will be remembered, was despatched with some ceremony, not to say a flourish of trumpets. It was the first time in China's. history that such an experiment had been made. Yet from the outset it became clear that her outfitting had been performed in a very perfunctory way. We do not doubt that the syndicate which financed her paid for everything necessary but, in the: usual way, the work was not done. As for the cadets we may mpathize with them in their discovery that instead of going round the world they were to carry coal for a Japanese firm. Tt was a double indignity. But after all, they were sent to sea to learn' seamanship and while this could have been learnt well on one voyage as another, they showed utter inability to grasp the first duty of a seaman, which is to do the job that has to be done first and take the rough with the smooth uncomplainingly. But we were forgetting: these young gentlemen went to sea to be captains, not sailors; they must not dirty their hands; they must not exert themselves before food; and certainly they must not neglect to wear spats. One wonders if they ever paused to consider how much "rough and dirty work a captain of the British navy or mercantile marine has had to do before he reached the bridge.
Seventeen years ago an American athletic teacher, coming to Shanghai to teach Chinese boys physical culture, found that some of them literally could not jump' off the ground with both fect together. Their ancestors had never done such a thing and the necessary muscles had to be taught to obey the order of the brain from the beginning. But with the recent cultivation of football and cross-country running among Chinese, one might have hoped for " different spirit among the cadets of the Hwah Joh. Is the tradition of century ies that manual labour is derogatory, which inculcates the long fingernail habit, to show that the owner has never worked with his hands, still unbreakable? Or it China literally cannot deal in realities and that everything she docs is just a gigantic pretence, in which, if face be saved, the whole end is gained? That, it is to be feared is the root of when one considers which no one obeys, the armies which never fight and the students who appear to believe that a smattering'
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.