educators in China, which I think must be somewhat misleading for China in the future. To learn nothing but Western law, and to imagine that that Western law can be applied directly to the Chinese people, is to make the same mistake that Macaulay so eloquently condemned in the old East India Company. Such a system of teaching can only make unreasonable revolutionaries. These two examples of teaching institutions carried on under the Chinese Government by Western teachers are wholly exceptional, and though excellent in their way are unimportant, and having regard to the vast mass of the population of China are inconsiderable. What are five or six {278} hundred students to a population of four hundred millions. I must reserve the account of what I saw of the schools under Chinese management, including the Peking University, to another chapter. {279} CHAPTER XXIII THE SAME IN PRACTICE Any one who has read the preceding account of the intentions of the Chinese Government might be pardoned if he supposed that after four or five years those intentions had borne fruit in an efficient system of public education. But one who has resided any time in China would only smile at the suggestion that there should be an intimate relation between what the Chinese Government professes to do and what the Chinese Government does. A Manchu Professor whose European education had enabled him to appreciate rightly the weaknesses of the Chinese race, said with great candour, "In China we begin things, but we never finish them." I had the privilege of seeing over some twenty Government schools in China, and the truth of these words was very obvious.