169.

(4.) Dans chaque bataillon il sera établi le jour qui leur est
fixé, 20 tickets déposés aux bureaux des sergents-majeur à raison
de 5 par compagnie. Les hommes désireux de rendre visite à
l'établissement réclamerout au bureau de leur sergent-majeur, 1
ticket qui leur donnera driot de priorité.


The value of that document derives from its having been issued as an
ordinary regulation, from its having been reproduced in a widely
circulated journal of the capital without evolving comment, and from the
strong light which it projects upon one of the darkest corners of the
civilization which has been so often and so eloquently eulogized.

Manifestly the currents of the new moral life which the Conference was
to have set flowing are as yet somewhat weak, the new ideals are still
remote and the foreshadowings of a nobler future are faint. Another
token of the change which is going forward in the world was reported
from the Far East, but passed almost unnoticed in Europe. The Chinese
Ministry of Public Instruction, by an edict of November 3, 1919,
officially introduced in all secondary schools a phonetic system of
writing in place of the ideograms theretofore employed. This is
undoubtedly an event of the highest importance in the history of
culture, little though it may interest the Western world to-day. At the
same time, as a philologist by profession, I agree with a continental
authority[42] who holds that, owing to the monosyllabic character of the
Chinese language and to the further disadvantage that it lacks wholly or
partly several consonants,[43] it will be practically impossible, as the
Japanese have already found, to apply the new alphabet to the