Every hostel would be governed by some person who would make the moral welfare of the young men his peculiar care and study. The head of the hostel might or might not be on the teaching staff of the {316} University; but whether he taught or not, his first duty would be the care of the moral and spiritual welfare of those committed to his charge. He would give all his energy to reproduce the highest moral tone of a Western University. This scheme is being tried in Chentu, where a union University is being started. And I believe it is in every way proving successful. Those who have not realised the size of China will be perhaps inclined to ask why not unite the two schemes? The simple answer to those who have travelled is that the distances are too vast. You might as well talk of uniting Oxford and Harvard, for those two Universities are about as far from one another in time as Hankow is from Chentu. Even when the railway is built the distances will be immense. The enormous distances of China are also a reason why it was impossible to amalgamate the Hong-Kong scheme and the Oxford and Cambridge scheme. Hong-Kong is now ten days to a fortnight away from Hankow, and such a different language is spoken there that the dwellers in Northern and Central China are often forced to use English to understand one another. The University of Hong-Kong will be very beneficial to the colony, and is an example of the generosity of the merchants and citizens of that town; but as a means of naturalising the higher side of our civilisation it labours under the great disadvantage of not being either in China nor under the Chinese flag, nor of speaking the prevailing language. {317} CHAPTER XXVI THE NEED OF A UNIVERSITY EXPLAINED (_continued_) The Committees at Oxford and Cambridge had not been without hope that the missionary world would accept the scheme readily once it was well understood. They had had the advantage of many interviews with missionaries and others in London at their joint meetings so as to make it a matter of some certainty that a large portion of the Western educators of China would agree with them. But they were rather doubtful whether the scheme would be welcomed by the Chinese official world.