450
before the close of the year. New regulations for the conduct of these Schools were issued in March 1894, to amend the old regulations of 1882 with respect to certain illegal practices and particularly to make provision for the more systematic teaching of English colloquial in Anglo-Chinese Schools.
15. GRANT-IN-AID SCHOOLS.--Five new Grant-in-Aid Schools were opened at the commence- ment of the year 1894, but nine other Grant-in-Aid Schools had to be struck off the list in autumn, as they had been annihilated by the plague and by the consequent movement of the population. In the middle of the year a new district (Tsimshatsui) on Kowloon Peninsula was supplied with an English Grant-in-Aid School by the energetic public spirit which animates the British residents of Kowloon. The Committee which started this School encountered, however, extraordinary difficulties and found themselves unable to comply with all the conditions of the Code. Although recognized by the Government, this School could not be included, during the year, in the list of Schools entitled to a grant, but the Government promised to give to the Committee every assistance to enable them to succeed in their praiseworthy endeavour to make this much-needed School a self-supporting institution. In addition to the School-house at Little Hongkong, the former Harbour Office at Aberdeen was placed at the disposal of the Church Mission at a nominal rent to use these old buildings for the purposes of Grant-in-Aid Schools. A vacant room in the School-house on Caroline Hill was also leased to the London Mission for use as a Grant-in-Aid School. On 21st May, 1894, a panic spread, like wild fire, and emptied most of the Chinese Schools in town owing to the rumour that the Govern- ment had resolved, in order to stop the plague, to select a few children from each School and to excise their livers in order to provide the only remedy which would cure plague patients. This silly rumour, accredited by the fact that Chinese national custom sanctions the medical use of excised portions of the living human body, gained general credence among the mothers of children attending purely Chinese Schools and served to show how little way has been made yet by the Government of Hong- kong in the direction of making their more enlightened aims understood by the Chinese population, Chinese women in Hongkong do not seem even now to have any more confidence in the Colonial Government than they had some ten years ago when the girls' schools of the Colony were suddenly emptied by the rumour that the Government was about to select a girl from each school to bury the children alive in the Taitamtuk tunnel to ensure the success of the aqueduct. It must be said to the credit of the Managers that not only every effort was made to counteract this panic, but that every- thing possible was done by them to keep all roomy and well-ventilated Schools at work in spite of their depletion by the plague. School Managers and teachers were altogether unfortunate during the year 1894, as regards Grants-in-aid. The grants earned at the close of the year 1893 and payable in February, 1894, had to be subjected to a pro rata reduction of 8 per cent. as the amount earned under the Code ($27,432.78) exceeded the amount available under the vote of the Legislature ($25,370.00) by $2,062.78, and as at the close of the year 1894 the earning power of the Chinese Schools had, under the restrictions of the New Code and in consequence of the plague, so much decreased that the sum total earned as grants for 1894 ($20,388.75), instead of increasing as hitherto had been the case from year to year, fell short of the grant of the preceding year by $7.044.03. This first application of the new Code (1893) to the examination of Grant-in-aid Schools, which have now seven standards and a considerable list of special subjects, gave satisfactory evidence of the wholesome nature of the changes made. The regular gradation, now in force, of all the subjects from the lowest to the highest, has resulted in a greater evenness of results in each. The examinations in Elementary Science and English Etymology clearly indicated that these subjects, which have evidently been taken up con amore by both teachers and scholars, are producing a good effect towards raising the standard of general intelligence among the scholars. At the suggestion of the Honourable Dr. Ho KAI, the Board of Examiners passed, in June 1894, a stricture on the system of teaching English in local Schools for Chinese, which is virtually a repetition of the complaints which I repeatedly made during the last few years. I regret to have failed to convince Her Majesty's Government of the reality and serious nature of the defect referred to, which is painfully in evidence by the fact that the promotion of the use of the English language in the Chinese commercial and social life of this Colony makes no progress because it is not materially aided by local Schools. What I refer to, is a Resolution of the Board of examiners which has been brought by the local Government to the notice of the Schools concerned in the following words :--"Resolved, that it is desirable to solicit the attention of the Government to the fact elicited by the examination lately held with reference to vacancies under the Government of Perak, as well as by previous examinations, viz., that in the education of Chinese youths insufficient attention seems to be bestowed in Hongkong on English Colloquial, the Chinese candidates examined by the Board being generally unable to speak English idiomatically." Apart from the plague, the year 1894 has proved disastrous to the educational interests of the Colony also by the extraordinary inroads made by death among local educationists. The death of Bishop RAIMONDI deprived not merely the Roman Catholics of the Colony of their greatest and most energetic educational reformer, but all supporters of religious education of one of their foremost leaders. Ever since Dr. LEGGE established the reign of secularism in the Colony (in 1861), Bishop RAIMONDI was the principal champion in the Colony of local religious education and fought for it long before the Protestant Missionaries burst the fetters of secu- larism in 1879. To the late Mr. C. J. BATEMAN, by whose premature death the High School came to an end, the Colony owes the introduction of the Cambridge and Oxford local examinations. The late Brother PATRICK of St. Joseph's College, whose death in 1894 was by all interested in education in this Colony felt to involve an irreparable loss was, like Mr. BATEMAN, not only a born teacher but a