< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu
This page has been validated.
105
THE PASSING OF CHINA'S ANCIENT SYSTEM

who underwent preliminary tests at some 1,705 matriculation centers before they could enter the lists for the first degree. (In the United States the enrolment in public high schools and private academies and seminaries for 1902 was 735,000). Nor does it count the candidates for the third degree, Literary Degree Poles, erected in the native village of the graduates. triennially conferred at the capital. The stone lists at Peking show the award of 60,000 third degrees in the last 600 years. This system, operating at the 271 degree-giving halls throughout the empire, has produced every two years about 29,000 'bachelors' and every three years over 1,500 'masters' and some 300 'doctors' or a total of 123,000 successful graduates in the three grades every six years. (In all the universities of Europe the enrolment is less than 110,000.) With regard then to mere numbers the recent changes in the examination system affect some two million men, the flower of the nation. Of supreme significance is the part which they have played and are still playing in the national life. As Mr. E. E. Lewis has so well expressed it, the competitive civil service examinations of China have resulted in:

First: A literary caste, which fills practically all the offices of the empire, and which is, therefore, the ruling force in the affairs of China, influencing the throne, and providing the administrators of the government. Second: The literati are the guardians of letters, and the examplars of the 'orthodox' religion. With them, letters and religion are not distinct, but the inseparable parts of a whole. Third: Not only are they the practical rulers of the empire, but in all matters pertaining to western civilization or progress, commercial and educational, they were up to 1898 the most absolutely conservative. Fourth: Not only have they been the rulers and the conservatives of China, but the student class was in the nineteenth century christianity's strongest opponent. Besides blocking the wheels of what all western nations consider progress, they, as a class, for years stood athwart the pathway of Christianity with sullen defiance.

Now, by a recent imperial edict practically the whole scheme of literary civil service examinations is abolished, and no better indication of the depth to which new ideas have permeated the empire could be given than the fact that as yet, at least, scarcely a word of protest or remonstrance has been raised, even by this class of influential men

    This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.