The children of the well-to-do merchant class, before they can receive any appointment or start on a foreign tour of study, generally finish their education at one of these establishments, which, especially in the harbour towns, are of a very high standard. Their usefulness and superiority are also universally acknowledged. All classes of society, regardless of creed, contribute to the maintenance of these schools. The "Christian Brothers" at Pekin have quite lately erected a large college on entirely modern principles, which supplies a long-felt want in the capital. In spite of all these reforms, it will be long before China acknowledges the superiority of the West. Although public opinion is slowly and gradually changing, this is not entirely because the people recognize the superiority of Western culture, but rather because they are in self-defence obliged to make reforms in order to ward off the dangers which threaten on all sides. To a Chinaman the ideal of happiness was quietness and peace; the object of his civilization to conquer and subdue the brutishness of human nature, and to combat all desire for violence. As a result of this education and such a turn of mind which have been in force for more than ten thousand years, militarism has not only been banished from their social code of law, but died out of the upper social classes. From generation to generation the Chinese are taught that the greatest of all virtues is equanimity; can we therefore wonder that they do not yet appreciate European civilization, which appears to teach the reverse? If the Chinese have been at last compelled to relinquish their ancient views of life and to accept ours, can we blame them if they do it grudgingly? After all, it is only a question of time: how long the Chinese can hold out, and stick to their old civilization. It may be decades, it may be hundreds of years. Time is a factor of only secondary importance where it concerns the transformation of a whole race. But the day is coming, must come, when not only China's four hundred millions, but the milliard of the whole Tartar races shall, without exception, adopt the European civilization, and all the advantages of it. And if in that remote future the question of the Yellow Peril should arise, the consequences may indeed be serious. For China would naturally remain hostile to the West, and, in conjunction with Japan, be its most formidable foe, so long as the two cultures of the West and the East do not learn to understand each other. Little as we really know of the peoples of the East, still less do they know of us. To remove the mutual misunderstanding should be our earnest endeavour. And this, though not an easy task, considering the prominence which has been given to the existing differences, is not an impossible one; for does not the burden of it fall alike on both the white and the yellow race?