I said above that the modern Chinese pronunciation is different from the ancient one. It goes without saying that the style of phraseology is much changed, even in a greater measure than the modern English writing is different from that of the Elizabethan epoch. The Chinese, which has been studied in Japan indeed very commonly, is the ancient one, _i.e._ classical Chinese, and we are familiar with classical Chinese even more than the Chinese themselves. As a system of writing, that of the pure Japanese, which consists of phonetic letters, is in its quality far superior to the other one, which is in our common use, nay, even superior to the proper Chinese system itself. Our phonetic system, however, has not made sufficient progress on account of the introduction of the Chinese system, to which we had paid too high value and devoted too much attention, the result being the mixture of Chinese ideographs in our phonetic system, that is to say, the other system just mentioned. Even in the West there is some similarity to this. Take, for instance, some modern English books. One would scarcely find a few lines in which a large number of words which are Latin or sometimes Greek in origin is not contained. Are there not even now names for new inventions coined from Greek or at least from Latin? And is not all this due to the fact that such words sound more scholastic or else more concise or accurate? If it were not so, why does one call a horseless carriage 'automobile' instead of 'self-moving carriage'? Fortunately for the Western nations, however, there is no difficulty in transcribing Greek or Latin words in their modern letters, inasmuch as those letters are similar to, in fact evolved from, the Greek and Latin letters, and therefore, when once a Greek or Latin word is employed, it is easy to get naturalised, as it were. But, unfortunately for us, the Chinese method is ideographs, and our own is phonetic, and one cannot be directly transcribed from the other, except that either it be translated or merely phonetically represented, which in truth presents much ambiguity. For this reason the original ideographs themselves have come to be interposed between the phonetic letters as I have illustrated above, and the ideographs so interposed have never become thoroughly 'naturalised,' from the very nature of the case. Thus one would see that as far as the mechanical side is concerned, the deep study of Chinese has given much drawback to Japan. On the mental side, however, I may say that it has helped us in enriching our thoughts for many centuries, inasmuch as there is rich treasure for ethical teaching in the classical Chinese, although this is not the place for me to dwell on that topic.