49 



tal, it was our fortune to take a train on which the young son 

 of a high ofihcial of the general government also traveled. 

 For the two clays we journeyed together, at every important 

 station on the line a company of soldiers paid their military 

 salutations to the representative of the official, and incidentally 

 thus revealed to the foreign student of education what sort 

 of education is in progress in China. I may have misinter- 

 preted, but the military display did not seem so much a matter 

 of obligation, since only the young son of an official was journey- 

 ing by, as a good chance to drill the soldiers, to create a public 

 impression, and to foster a military spirit among the people. 

 To a civilian the troops seemed well drilled and well equipped 

 with modern weapons. They were uniformed, not in Chinese 

 costume, but in western fashion, in boots, caps and khaki. Trav- 

 eling later from Peking northeastward into Manchuria, in the 

 complete absence of any special occasion, a squad of soldiers 

 was found drawn up at practically every station, soldiers of 

 good appearance and apparently well armed. These squads 

 at the station seemed to be merely the natural response of the 

 Chinese to the example of "guarding the railroad" set by the 

 Russians and Japanese farther to the east and north in Man- 

 churia, the natural Chinese response to the compulsory edu- 

 cation forced upon them by their instructors. In hunting a 

 salubrious site for a possible educational institution outside a 

 populous city in the south, we ran into a sham battle of ap- 

 proved European type. In far west China, when we called to 

 pay our respects to an official, we found a company of soldiers 

 drilling in the court of the yamen. We saw military schools 

 and military drill in the common schools. These are merely 

 incidental evidences of one phase of the education that is going 

 on in China. 



Now let us compute a bit. If one person in every hundred 

 — an approved European ratio, I believe — is kept in military 

 service in a population of four hundred millions, with rotation 

 to develop the reserves, and if an eye is kept open to work- 

 ing into the permanent service as much of the blood inherited 

 from the soldiers of Gengis Khan and Kublai Khan as practi- 



