There are various grades of people in China, among which the scholar has always come first, because mind is superior to wealth, and it is the intellect that distinguishes man above the lower order of beings, and enables him to provide food and raiment and shelter for himself and for others.  At the time when Europe was thrilled and cut to the quick with news of the massacres of her compatriots in the Boxer revolts, the scholar was a dull, stupid fellow—­day in day out, week in week out, month in month out, and year after year he ground at his classics.  His classics were the Alpha and Omega; he worshipped them.  This era has now passed away.

At the present moment there are upwards of twenty thousand Chinese students in Tokyo[H]—­whither they went because Japan is the most convenient country wherein to acquire Western knowledge.  The new learning, the new learning—­they must have the new learning!  No high office is ever again likely to be given but to him who has more of Western knowledge than Chinese knowledge.  And mere striplings, nursed in the lap of the mission schools, and there given a good grounding in Western education, these are the men far more likely to pass the new examinations.  In Yuen-nan, where little chance exists for the scholars to advance, the new learning has brought with it a revolutionary element, which would soon become dangerous were it by any means common.  I have seen an English-speaking fellow, anxious to get on and under the impression that the laws of his country were responsible for keeping him back, write in the back of his exercise book a phrase against the imperial ruler that would have cost him his head had it come to the notice of the high authorities.

One will learn much if he travels across the Empire—­facts and figures quite irreconcilable will arise, but even the man of dullest perception will be convinced that much of the reforming spirit in the people is only skin-deep, going no farther than the externals of life.  It is at present, perhaps, merely a mad fermentation in the western provinces, wherefrom the fiercer it is the clearer the product will one day evolve itself.  Such transitions are full of bewilderment to the European—­bewildering to any writer who endeavors to tackle the Empire as a whole.  Each province or couple of provinces should be dealt with separately, so diverse are the conditions.

But if China, from the highest to the lowest, will only embrace truth and love her for her own sake, so that she will not abate one jot of allegiance to her; if China will let truth run down through the arteries of everyday commercial, social, and political life as do the waterways through her marvelous country; if China will kill her retardative conservatism, and in its place erect honesty and conscience; if China will let her moral life be quickened—­then her transition period, from end to end of the Empire, will soon end.  Mineral, agricultural, industrial wealth are hers to a degree which is not true of any other land.  Her people have an enduring and expansive power that has stood the test of more than four thousand years of honorable history, and their activity and efficiency outside China make them more to be dreaded, as competitors, than any race or any dozen races of to-day.