The primary process goes on for about five years, during which time he has read through most of his school-books. With one's notions that one has got from English school life it is impossible at first to realize the stupendous work that is involved in this dreary way of being educated. The boy comes to school at early dawn, and he is kept at his desk, with the exception of his meal hours, till night is throwing its shadows over the earth. There is no intermission and no racing about the playground at certain intervals to break in upon the eternal monotony of grinding study. The playground is a Western institution that has never found its way into the East. The lads have no time for such inventions that would interfere with work. Life out here is serious and life is earnest, for the school-boy at least, and no frivolous methods must be allowed to stay the studies of this gigantic language. The whole day, therefore, is spent in acquiring the sounds and the look of each particular word, without having the remotest idea what they mean. He comes the next day and the same grinding goes on. The spring passes into summer and summer into autumn, and one day is like another in its weary monotony, and the sounds in growing numbers clang and ring within his brain, and the weird little pictures are hung up in the picture gallery of his mind, but they tell him no story, neither do they suggest the poetry and romance that often lie hidden within so many of them. This fearful kind of treadmill education goes on for four or five years with boys of ordinary intelligence, but for three or four with lads of exceptional abilities and fine memories, who have the faculty of remembering both the sounds and the faces of the thousands of characters that they meet with in their school-books. During all those precious years when the intellects of the lads are just in that stage when they are open to development and expansion, they are bound and contracted by a miserable system that has kept this nation from advancing in thought and from claiming the position amongst the nations of the world that it would have been entitled to had a wider liberty been given it in the training of its youth. The cruel thing about it is that though of extreme age, having been started in the famous Han Dynasty (B.C. 296-A.D. 23), it is in no sense an outcome of the teaching of the sages. There is ample evidence from Chinese documents to show that the common schools were conducted in the time, say, of Confucius (B.C. 550) more as they are carried on in Western lands, and that even girls were instructed in the _Book of Odes_, one of the stiffest of the sacred classics, and that books were read not simply in the mechanical way that they have been for two thousand years, but because of the interest of the subjects that were discussed in them.