Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/119

establishment of provincial colleges and the organization of a common-school system. Already these young men are returning, some of them with honors from the best schools of the west; and one of them, who also holds his Chinese second degree, wrote two years ago:

Every Chinese man knows that the examination system is not good, and so the government has resolved to establish schools, colleges and universities, instead of all the kinds of examinations. For the examinations of the next term, the number of Hsiu Ts'ai, Chü Jên and Chin Shih will be diminished and, several years after, all the examinations will be dismissed.

Thus the recent decree giving the last blow to the old system was not entirely unforeseen, though it was scarcely expected so soon.

H. E. Yuan Shih-kai, holder of the senior viceroyalty of the empire, that of Chihli, the most powerful subject in China, and the very man whose devotion to the empress dowager when the emperor called for his assistance in 1898 made her coup d'état possible, sent in a memorial which was approved and made operative in an imperial decree dated September 2, 1905, advocating the summary abolition of the old style literary examinations, in order to allow the expansion of modern modes of education throughout the empire. Associated with him as memorialists were H. E. Chao Erh-sên, the Tartar general of Mukden and viceroy of Fêngtien province (Lower Manchuria), H. E. Chang Shih-tung, viceroy of the Hukuang provinces, H. E. Chou Fu, acting viceroy of the Liangkiang provinces, H. E. Tsên Ch'un-hsuen, acting viceroy of the two Kuang provinces, and H. E. Tuan Fang, governor of Hunan province. This is the strongest list available throughout the whole empire, and it was but natural that the empress dowager should have been so impressed that even if she were at heart opposed to the epoch-making step, she could but tell the emperor to sanction it, in spite of the opposition which Wang Wên-shao, Lu Ch'uan-lin and others are reported to have made against the 'revolutionary' memorial. Though signed by this group of influential viceroys, the plea was really the work of H. E. Yuan Shih-kai, assisted by H. E. Chang Chih-tung. With their unfailing astuteness, they point out that what they propose is not after all a new scheme, but a return to a former usage. The literary examinations may seem to us of venerable antiquity, but these viceroys point out that they are really modern innovations on an older and much better system which they desire to recall. Theirs is not the destructive hand of the reformer, but the conservative hand of the restorer. The decree says:

Before the era of the 'Three Dynasties,' men for office were selected from the schools, and it must be confessed that the plan produced many talented men. It was indeed a most successful plan for creating a nursery for the disciplining of talents and the molding of character for our Empire of China. Indeed the examples before us of the wealth and power of Japan and the countries of the west have their foundation in no other than their own schools.