This educational mill grinding for ten or more years enabled the average youth to aspire to the literary degrees which were conferred at the _Kwa-ga_ or Royal Examinations held in Seoul up to 1894, and which were regarded as the stepping-stones to official position, the great object of Korean ambition. There is nothing in this education to develop the thinking powers or to enable the student to understand the world he lives in. The effort to acquire a difficult language, the knowledge of which gives him a mastery of his own, is in itself a desirable mental discipline, and the ethical teachings of Confucius and Mencius, however defective, contain much that is valuable and true, but beyond this little that is favorable can be said. Narrowness, grooviness, conceit, superciliousness, a false pride which despises manual labor, a selfish individualism, destructive of generous public spirit and social trustfulness, a slavery in act and thought to customs and traditions 2,000 years old, a narrow intellectual view, a shallow moral sense, and an estimate of women essentially degrading, appear to be the products of the Korean educational system. With the abolition of the Royal Examinations; a change as to the methods of Government appointments; the working of the Western leaven; the increased prominence given to _En-mun_, and the slow entrance of new ideas into the country, some of the desire for this purely Chinese education has passed away, and it has been found necessary to stimulate what threatened to become a flagging interest in all education by new educational methods and forces, the influence of which should radiate from the capital. There are now (October, 1897) Government Vernacular Schools, a Government School for the study of English, Foreign Language Schools, and Mission Schools. Outside the Vernacular and Mission Schools there is the before-mentioned Royal English School, with 100 students in uniform, regularly drilled by a British Sergeant of Marines, and crazy about football! These young men, in appearance, manners, and rapid advance in knowledge of English, reflect great credit on their instructors. After this come Japanese, French, and Russian Schools, at present chiefly linguistic. Mr. Birukoff, in charge of the Russian School, was a captain of light artillery in the Russian army, and in both the Russian and French schools the students are drilled daily by Russian drill instructors.