These foolish innovations, of course, do not change the fundamental scholastic and rhetorical character of Chinese examinations, and the usual themes for the compositions remain identical. Here are two examples quoted by Mr. Henry Norman: ‘Confucius hath said, “In what majesty did Chun and Yu reign over the Empire, as though the Empire was as nothing unto them!” Confucius hath said, “Yao was verily a great sovereign. How glorious he was! Heaven alone is grand, and Yao only worthy to enter it. How exalted was his virtue! The people could find no words wherewith to qualify it.”‘[22] This was the theme that had to be developed by many a flower of rhetoric. It is only through the study of these books, written twenty centuries ago, and encumbered by parables and affected maxims, and of ancient annals crammed with fantastic legends believed in as absolute facts, that are selected the members of the class who are expected to govern China! The result of this method of education was exemplified as late as 1897, two years after a war which had brought the Celestial Empire within an inch of ruin, when a censor, one of the highest officials in the Empire, addressed a document to the Emperor, wherein he protested against the concessions made to the inventions of the Western barbarians, which he did not hesitate to qualify as calculated to disturb the peace of the dead. Instead of constructing railways, he gravely insisted, it were wiser to offer a handsome reward to the man who should recover the secret of making flying chariots to be drawn by phœnixes which certainly existed in the good old times. A little time previously a member of the Tsung-li-Yamen had lifted his voice to protest against the various railway embankments and the nails that studded the lines, which, he believed, were likely to inconvenience and wound the sacred dragons who protect the cities of the Empire, and who dwell beneath the soil. The strange superstitions of the _feng-shui_ geomancy dealing with the circulation through the air of good and evil spirits, and with the prescribed height to which buildings may be erected, and the exact positions of doors and other like grave matters, which, it seems, unless they be properly attended to, are apt to upset and offend the flying spirits in their progress through space, exercise a greater empire over the minds of Chinese officials in the very highest places than matters which we should consider of the greatest importance.