The consequence of this utterly insane plan of education is that for a civilized country such as China claims to be, the people are grossly ignorant and uneducated. Taking the population at four hundred millions, and say half of these are women who may safely be said to have never been to any school when they were girls, that leaves two hundred millions of men to be considered. Sinologues who have been well qualified to deal with the subject, after serious calculations have come to the conclusion that not more than fifteen millions of readers exist throughout the length and breadth of the land. These include men who have a mere smattering of education, but who know enough to be book-keepers and accountants, and doctors who can write their own prescriptions, and shopkeepers who can make out their bills, but in such misshapen and uncouth hieroglyphics that they would make Confucius shudder with disgust were he allowed to visit the earth, and see what caricatures these men have made of the marvellous inventions of the darkest ages of China. Fifteen millions is to my mind a most liberal estimate of the readers of this country. Why writers on China should have persistently represented the people of this land as being highly educated is a mystery to those who profess to be only moderately acquainted with the subject. The country is illiterate, grossly illiterate, and as a result is festering with pride and with contempt for every other nation outside of the Middle Kingdom. There is just now going on throughout the country, however, a tremendous awakening, and the rush after education on Western lines is one in which all classes of society are united. The old obsolete system is doomed, and the youth of the future will be no more subject to the pain and the weariness and the heartbreaking that countless generations of the young manhood of the country have had to endure in the past. We now come to the school-books of the nation, for though there never has been an Educational Board in China, and none of the dynasties that have successively sat on the Dragon Throne of this Empire have ever legislated with regard to the teaching of the youth of the land, there has always existed but one set of books that are the text books in every school throughout the country, and which have been used in every scholastic institution that has ever existed in the long ages of the past. The Chinaman is thoroughgoing in his conservatism. He has never weakened on that subject. Even in his smells he is the rankest Tory that ever lived. The odours that reek through the streets, and send their aroma down the alleyways, and gently mingle in the atmosphere of the homes, have nothing modern in them, but are the lineal descendants of a long line of ancestors that vanish from sight in the mist and obscurity of a remote past.