that designation. It became at an early age, and remained for many
centuries, a rote-learning of the elementary text-books, followed by
a similar acquisition by heart of the texts of the works of Confucius
and other classical writers. And so it remained until the abolition, in
1905, of the old competitive examination system, and the substitution
of all that is included in the term 'modern education' at schools,
colleges, and universities all over the country, in which there is
rapidly growing up a force that is regenerating the Chinese people,
and will make itself felt throughout the whole world.

It is this keen and shrewd appreciation of the learned, and this lust
for knowledge, which, barring the tragedy of foreign domination, will
make China, in the truest and best sense of the word, a great nation,
where, as in the United States of America, the rigid class status and
undervaluation, if not disdaining, of knowledge which are proving so
disastrous in England and other European countries will be avoided,
and the aristocracy of learning established in its place.

Besides educational institutions, we find institutions for poor relief,
hospitals, foundling hospitals, orphan asylums, banking, insurance,
and loan associations, travellers' clubs, mercantile corporations,
anti-opium societies, co-operative burial societies, as well as many
others, some imitated from Western models.


Bodily Mutilations

Compared with the practices found to exist among most primitive races,
the mutilations the Chinese were in the habit of inflicting were but
few. They flattened the skulls of their babies by means of stones, so