The result of these edicts is that the Chinese are buying Western books as never before. Examinations cannot be passed without them. The mission presses, though run to their full capacity, cannot keep up with the demand for their publications. Dr. Timothy Richard of Shanghai reports that a quarter of a million dollars' worth of text-books were sold in that city in 1902, a single order received by the Presbyterian Press involving a bill of $328 for postage alone, as the buyer insisted that the books should be sent by mail. Mission schools that teach the English language are thronged with students, many of them from the higher classes, and every foreigner who is willing to teach Western learning finds his services eagerly sought. China cannot be reformed by paper edicts even though they are written by an Emperor. Many reforms have been solemnly proclaimed in former years that accomplished little except to ``save face'' for the Government. We need not therefore imagine that the millennium is to come in China this year. But it is impossible to doubt that the reform decrees that have been issued since the Boxer uprising mean something more and are achieving something more than any other reform movements that China ever saw before. Dr. Arthur H. Smith, who knows China and the Chinese as thoroughly as any other living man, writes:-- ``We behold the kernel of the reforms ordered by His Majesty, Kuang Hsum in 1898, and which led to his dethronement and imprisonment, substantially adopted less than three years later by the Empress Dowager and her advisers. . . . The bare notation of the tenor of these far-reaching edicts gives to the Occidental reader but a vague notion of the tremendous intellectual revolution which they connote. Never before was there such an order from any government involving the reconstruction of the views of so many millions, by the study of the methods of government in other nations. . . . It is obvious to one who knows anything of the Chinese educational system of the past millennium that the introduction of the new methods will involve its radical reconstruction from top to bottom. Western geography, mathematics, science, history, and philosophy will be everywhere studied. The result cannot fail to be an expansion of the intellectual horizon of the Chinese race comparable to that which in Europe followed the Crusades. This will be a long process and a slow one, but it is a certain one. . . . All signs indicate that China is open as never before.''