The University course was to take three years, and there was to be a University installed in each province. The educational system was to be perfected by two other institutions--a post-graduate college where research was to be undertaken, and a normal college which was to be divided into an inferior and a superior one for the purpose, the one of preparing schoolmasters for the village schools, the other for higher education. A far less ambitious scheme for the education of girls has been added to this by {274} an edict of 1907. If my readers have waded through this scheme I am afraid that they will have come to the conclusion that China has nothing to learn from Western powers, but rather she ought to be able to teach them how to perfect their own incomplete system of education; but alas, this scheme is only on paper. In the province where H.E. Yuan-Shih-Kai ruled the schools approach in some degree to the level of Western efficiency. In every other province that I visited or heard about, the results of this edict were markedly disappointing; the only exception being where the Universities had been organised, not in the form or terms of the edict, but by Western teachers acting on more or less independent lines. For instance, there is a splendid University which has been founded by Dr. Timothy Richard in Shansi. That University has a curious history. After the Boxer massacres compensation was demanded by the Powers both for the buildings that were destroyed and for the missionaries that were killed. A certain number of the missionary bodies refused absolutely to take any compensation. Animated by the spirit of the early Christian Church, they would not allow that the blood that had been shed for the sacred cause could be paid for in money. At this juncture there threatened to be rather an impasse. The Western Government were insisting on compensation, and it was doubtful and uncertain how that compensation should be paid. The Chinese Government sent for the Protestant missionary in whom they had the {275} greatest confidence, Dr. Timothy Richard, and he made a suggestion which was at once acceptable to both the Chinese and to the missionary body, that the money should be devoted to the founding of a great University; for ignorance is the most common cause of fanaticism, and the terrible massacres enacted in China would never have taken place had China understood, as Chang-Chih-Tung did understand, that Western science and enlightenment were for the benefit of China; so this University was founded. It was founded under peculiar terms. It is under the government of China, and yet not completely so. Dr. Timothy Richard is for a certain number of years one of its governors, and he has for ten years at least the control of the Western side of the education. He is supported by an able staff, and the Rev. W. E. Soothill is the existing President. At the end of the ten years which are just running out, the status of the