This brings me to the second great difficulty in the path of Government education. They will believe that an efficient education results rather from having an expensive building than from a competent teacher. I have before had occasion to refer to the extreme simplicity of the life of the Chinese. Many of the schools were housed, and very comfortably housed, in Chinese houses. The Chinese house always looks out on a courtyard, and courtyard is joined to courtyard by passages. The rooms are only divided from the courtyard by carved wooden screens whose interstices are sometimes filled with paper and sometimes not. They are eminently sanitary--in fact, to a large extent they fulfil the requirements of the "open-air cure." In one case in the courtyard were a lot of basins and ewers, and the boys were compelled to have a wash, which if extensive must, in the winter, have been extremely unpleasant. For all this I expressed my sincere admiration to my friend the Director of Education, but he received my compliment much in the same spirit with which a mother accepts your assertion that her child is far prettier in her every-day dress with tousled hair than she is in her Sunday clothes, as with hideous tidiness and pharisaic pomp she wends her way to church. My compliment was taken almost as an insult. I was then shown the ideal of China, a huge and hideous building, modelled on the architecture which white men deem necessary to enable them to support the tropical heat, to the fatal effects of which they are {296} so sensitive; massive walls to carry the heavy roof; huge arched verandahs where white people may get the breath of air they so need. Of what use are all these to a race who cannot understand what you mean when you speak of the heat being unhealthy, who, however sensitive to cold and wet, flourish in the warmth to which they have been accustomed all their lives? The Chinese do not admire this architecture for its æsthetic effect; they care little about its heat-resisting qualities. They like it because it is Western; because Western people are educated in such buildings; because, I suppose, they expect Western learning to work in some way through those massive stone walls to the minds of the pupils; and because they fancy Western ideas would be more easily understood in these hideous surroundings.