All the material lies ready to hand.  There is a written language, which for difficulty is unrivalled, polished and perfected by centuries of the minutest scholarship, until it is impossible to conceive anything more subtly artistic as a vehicle of human thought.  Those mental gymnastics, of such importance in the training of youth, which were once claimed exclusively for the languages of Greece and Rome, may be performed equally well in the Chinese language.  The educated classes in China would be recognised anywhere as men of trained minds, able to carry on sustained and complex arguments without violating any of the Aristotelian canons, although as a matter of fact they never heard of Aristotle and possess no such work in all their extensive literature as a treatise on logic.  The affairs of their huge empire are carried on, and in my opinion very successfully carried on—­with some reservations, of course—­by men who have had to get their mental gymnastics wholly and solely out of Chinese.

I am not aware that their diplomatists suffer by comparison with ours.  The Marquis Tseng and Li Hung-chang, for instance, representing opposite schools, were admitted masters of their craft, and made not a few of our own diplomatists look rather small beside them.

Speaking further of the study of the Greek and Roman classics, Sir Richard Jebb says:  “There can be no better proof that such a discipline has penetrated the mind, and has been assimilated, than if, in the crises of life, a man recurs to the great thoughts and images of the literature in which he has been trained, and finds there what braces and fortifies him, a comfort, an inspiration, an utterance for his deeper feelings.”

Sir Richard Jebb then quotes a touching story of Lord Granville, who was President of the Council in 1762, and whose last hours were rapidly approaching.  In reply to a suggestion that, considering his state of health, some important work should be postponed, he uttered the following impassioned words from the Iliad, spoken by Sarpedon to Glaucus:  “Ah, friend, if, once escaped from this battle, we were for ever to be ageless and immortal, I would not myself fight in the foremost ranks, nor would I send thee into the war that giveth men renown; but now,—­since ten thousand fates of death beset us every day, and these no mortal may escape or avoid,—­now let us go forward.”

Such was the discipline of the Greek and Roman classics upon the mind of Lord Granville at a great crisis in his life.

Let us now turn to the story of a Chinese statesman, nourished only upon what has been too hastily stigmatised as “the dry bones of Chinese literature.”

Wen T’ien-hsiang was born in A.D. 1236.  At the age of twenty-one he came out first on the list of successful candidates for the highest literary degree.  Upon the draft-list submitted to the Emperor he had been placed seventh; but his Majesty, after looking over the essays, drew the grand examiner’s attention to the originality and excellence of that of Wen T’ien-hsiang, and the examiner—­himself a great scholar and no sycophant—­saw that the Emperor was right, and altered the places accordingly.