Since the Reform Edict of 1898 more articles have appeared in both the English and Chinese Press in China upon the subject of education than upon any other. To laud and to praise education has been the fashion--innumerable sticks of incense have been lit and set up to education in China. Education, however, was the means of winning the Revolution, and now the educated men are to have full sway. To them, as never before, the country is looking for right guidance: China has always looked to her scholars for guidance, but this is a new kind of scholar, with a new kind of learning. And education, as has been pointed out by a writer on Chinese affairs, is a kind of tree which bears two manners of fruit--good and evil. It is a kind of petrol which may drive the individual or the State at a spanking pace along the path of progress, or it may explode with disastrous results to the car and all on board. The general discontent which prevails in so many of the leading nations may be traced directly to the wider spread of education. The industrial classes in the present day are better paid, better fed, better clad, better housed, and work shorter hours than ever before, but through education their aspirations for still more favourable conditions have been tenfold increased, and {285} their efforts to obtain them are becoming always more and more determined. "We asked a leading Revolutionist the other day," said the writer quoted, "where the new men who are being sent to all the inland cities as magistrates came from. We supposed they were mostly men of the old magistrate class who were being reappointed, but he said 'no.' The bulk of them were young men who had received a modern education and who on examination proved themselves most fit. But for them, he said, there would have been no Revolution. Some had been educated at the expense of the Central Government, some by the provinces, and many at their own expense, but all with a view to obtaining official employment afterwards. This they failed to get, as the offices were only open to those who could afford to purchase them, so they determined to take them, and they have done it. It was not that they desired the spoils of office, but, like Napoleon, they felt that the tools should go to the workmen, and that they could serve their country better than the Manchus and Money Bags whom they wished to supersede."