As a result of this national instinct, no teacher has ever had the hardihood to propose that there should be any alteration in the books that should be used in the instruction either of the young or of the more advanced pupils who may be planning for literary honours. This is all the more remarkable considering the wide extent of territory of the Chinese Empire, and of the varieties of languages that are used by the people. The Chinese are generally spoken of as one race, and so they are in the great outstanding features that constitute them one distinct nation, and yet they are divided off from one another in many large regions by dialects so different from each other, that the people occupying them cannot understand the languages that are spoken in those outside of their own. It would have seemed that such radical differences as those produced by what is practically a foreign language would have led to different methods and different ideals as to the management of their schools, but they have not. You pass along the great plains where the fertility of the soil has given prosperity to the people, and you examine the schools and you find one set of text books in every one. You travel over mountain ranges where the people are having a severe struggle for existence and where a language is spoken that needs an interpreter before you can enter into conversation with them. You enter into their village schools and you find the same familiar books, but the names given to the strange weird-looking little pictures are so different from those they call them on the other side of the mountains that you cannot recognize them. You pass up the great Yang-tze, the "Son of the Ocean," and you step out of your boats a few hundred miles apart from the last place you rested at, and you discover that every locality has its own dialect. You make your way to the nearest school, and still the same books meet your eye, with just the same dog-eared, uninviting appearance that they present in any latitude or longitude of the Empire in which you may meet them. You listen to see if you can catch the tones in which the lads scream out at the top of their voices the uncouth metallic tones in which they call out the names of the pictures that fill the pages of their books, but they change in every place you visit, and your mind is filled with a kind of wonder at the immense variety of tones and dialects in which the students of this vast country ring the changes on the books that for countless ages have been the only ones from which they have had to study.